Gateway Cinephiles

Publish or Perish

The Ghost Writer
2010 (France / Germany / UK)
Director: Roman Polanski
Viewed: March 14, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza Cinema)

Roman Polanski’s thrillers pulse with their own curious rhythms, conveying a sense that everything—conversations, knowledge, even physical space—is ever so slightly out of sync.  Few directors possess his uncanny facility for pulling together all the elements of cinema, especially the selection of shots and music, to evoke a veiled, relentlessly sinister reality.   Whether he succeeds (Chinatown) or fails (The Ninth Gate), the result is unfailingly sumptuous and moody.  So it is with The Ghost Writer, a potboiler set in the rotten twin worlds of politics and publishing, executed with the auteur’s customary dramatic dexterity and passion for generic trappings.  Polanski makes no effort to conceal his personal fingerprints on the film: its politics are acidly suspicious of American power and yet also vaguely sympathetic to (ahem) public figures hounded by public outrage and the courts.  Yet the film remains relentlessly engaged with the noir-tinged plight of its nameless protagonist (Ewan McGregor), a man who, like Jake Gittes, considers himself a savvy mercenary, and whose pursuit of the truth is rooted not in airy ideals but in his resentment at being played for a fool.

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Uffish, But Not Frumious

Alice in Wonderland
2010 (USA)
Director: Tim Burton
Viewed: March 5, 2010
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (AMC West Olive)

Any film treatment of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books must overcome a conspicuous stumbling block: How does one adapt a pair of Victorian nursery stories, consisting mainly of a succession of absurdist dialogues, into engaging cinema?  A literalist, scene-by-scene recreation of the Alice tales would make for an unconventional film, but also a wearisome and distinctly un-cinematic experience.  Given his gothic fairy-tale sensibilities and enduring fascination with outcasts defined by their hyperbolic physical and emotional qualities, Tim Burton would seem a comfortable fit for Carroll’s brand of amusing dementia. However, the director’s track record with big-budget adaptations has been woefully mixed, with Exhibit A in the negative column being his misguided, excruciating Planet of the Apes remake.  Happily, Alice in Wonderland, while hardly the rich, cerebral adaptation that Carroll’s works deserve, proves to be a solid little adventure tale that traipses through a deliciously gratifying Burton-esque landscape. In Wonderland, the director discovers an expansive sandbox for the funhouse impulses he favors in his most inventive works. Unfortunately, Alice never remotely achieves the madcap vigor of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetle Juice, or Batman Returns (all exemplars of Burton’s vision at its most fiendish and uninhibited).  The story is little more than a boilerplate Hero’s Journey, but coiled within are both the sensory splendors we expect from Burton the Fabulist, as well as some welcome jottings of subversion.

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Film Diary: In The Loop

2009 (UK)
Director: Armando Iannucci
Viewed: March 7, 2010
Format: Blu-ray - MPI Home Video (2010)

Film Diary: Wonderful Town

2007 (Thailand)
Director: Aditya Assarat
Viewed: February 23, 2010
Format: DVD – Kino (2009)

Revisiting this superb Thai romantic tragedy for the first time since I caught it at StLIFF in 2008, I was struck by how closely it hews to the rhythms and style of an American indie film.  There’s something about the relaxed but deliberate pace, the delicate soundtrack with the odd foray into pop sentiment, and the aura of small town menace that pushes into the film’s final sequences that lend it the tone of a Sundance feature (in the best possible way).  Yet it also possesses the unperturbed gaze and absorption with places—their sights, sounds, and, above all, textures—that have emerged as hallmarks of contemporary East Asian film.  Unlike many cinephiles, the appeal of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s obscurantist works eludes me, so it’s refreshing to see director Assarat (in his feature film debut, no less) offer an alternative entry point into Thai cinema.  I appreciate the shattering third act U-turn in the narrative, and the themes of calamity and recovery that it underlines, but the primary joy I take from the film is how exquisitely it conveys its romantic elements.  When was the last time a film-maker so closely followed the process by which two lonely adults fall fitfully, hopelessly in love?  Assarat’s achievement rests on an uncluttered, engaging portrayal of how unexpected and irresistible the heart’s beckonings can be.

Experimental Treatment

Shutter Island
2010 (USA)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Viewed: February 21, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

Eternally the Catholic kid from the Garment District, Martin Scorsese has long used his narrative features to explore the relationship between violence and guilt.  Granted, the stultifying, deforming influence of societies on the individual frequently figures prominently into his films, with the societies in question ranging from blinkered, hierarchical subcultures to the vast, alienating melting pot of over-stimulated contemporary America.  Even Scorsese’s most unambitious feature in the past two decades, his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, took pains to develop the original film’s anemic foundations into a more substantive commentary on the absurdities of the criminal justice system and the allure of masculine mythology. However, cultural settings only seem to hold the director’s attention inasmuch as they relate to searingly personal concerns; at the center of most Scorsese films is a battered man squeezed between others’ rules and his own sins.  Given these tendencies, I suppose I should have expected that Shutter Island would prove to be something more elaborate and bruised than the “mere” creepshow thriller that is being presented in the film’s promotion.  Not that there’s anything wrong with a creepshow thriller done exceptionally well (q.v., Drag Me to Hell), but Scorsese, despite his profile, isn’t the film-maker that leaps to mind when one hears the phrase “Master of Horror.”  Shutter Island feels for all the world like a florid imitation of a Wes Craven delve, and it’s only in the final twenty minutes that the curtain is pulled back to reveal that Scorsese tell, the strand of private Christian torment that stretches all the way back to Mean Streets.

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Film Diary: Black Mama, White Mama

1973 (USA / Philippines)
Director: Eddie Romero
Viewed: February 19, 2010
Format: DVD - MGM (2001)

The hallmarks of a sexy, scuzzy Women-in-Prison feature–including a gratuitous shower scene complete with frolicking, and hard-assed lesbian guards in ridiculously short shorts–are pretty much dispensed with in the first fifteen minutes of Black Mama, White Mama.  What remains is an exploitation The Defiant Ones, as Pam Grier and Margaret Makov (the former a working girl, the latter a freedom fighter of some sort) scurry from one ludicrous set piece to another.  This is a straight-up Z-movie guilty pleasure, just the sort thing one can imagine a teenage Quentin Tarantino devouring.  It’s a shame director Romero was so enamored with tedious gunfights, as it gives him less time to indulge in the loathsome weirdness that is the film’s real appeal.  The torch-bearer of BMWM’s oddities is undoubtedly genre fixture Sig Haig, as a creepy, strangely high-spirited bounty hunter in a Jim Croce ’stache, whose choice of wardrobe and automobile are best described as “Roy Rogers on LSD.”  That’s him above.  Just take a moment to savor that shirt.  Truth be told, I spent the better part of this film trying to puzzle out where the hell it’s supposed to take place.  The vague “island” setting seems, at different times, to be somewhere in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Vietnam.  Between the Spanish-speaking Asian gangsters and the stray police uniform patch with the word “Manila” stitched onto it, I eventually tumbled to the fact that we are, indeed, in the Philippines.  Such is the way of cheap, sleazy films bound for grindhouses the world over.

Play It Loud Enough to Keep the Demons at Bay

Crazy Heart
2009 (USA)
Director: Scott Cooper
Viewed: February 3, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

When you strip Scott Cooper’s directorial debut, Crazy Heart, down to its skeleton, there’s not much that’s original about it from a story standpoint.  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a broken-down musician must come to terms with his personal demons before he can rise from the ashes and regain some of his former fame and fortune. Alas, Cooper doesn’t bring anything especially cinematic to these deeply rutted roads.  Sure, Crazy Heart was filmed on location in the American Southwest, and that lends it an agreeable sun-beaten texture, but Cooper’s direction is undistinguished.  Based purely on the look of the thing, Crazy Heart could pass for a television movie-of-the-week rather than a limited theatrical release boasting high-profile actors.  Fortunately, those actors are all in fine form, especially Jeff Bridges, who portrays the aforementioned broken-down musician, a grizzled country veteran named Bad Blake.  The glib cynic in me would like to believe that someone observed, “You know, put the Dude from The Big Lebowski in a cowboy hat and he could pass for the lost brother of Kris Kristofferson,” and then—bam!—there’s your movie.  Blessedly, Bridges’ performance amounts to much more than canny casting.  He and Cooper turn a familiar story, executed with rote efficiency, into something haunted and ultimately worth watching.

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Film Diary: Vanishing Point

1971 (USA / UK)
Director: Richard C. Sarafian
Viewed: January 31, 2009
Format: Netflix Instant Queue (via Playstation 3)

Vanishing Point definitely plays like a work from another era, in the worst and best sense.   The “Can’t Drive 55″ spirit that the film seizes upon–which it shares with the much zanier The Cannonball Run–unfortunately dates the film as an artifact from an era when a national speed limit was a hot political button.  That said, what’s most appealing about Vanishing Point is how eagerly and even joyously it strives to present a generous, oddball-ridden slice of early 1970s America.  The on-location shooting lends it a documentary look and texture, but the characters are so deliberately out-there, it never feels remotely like realism.  I mean, c’mon: the naked biker girl; the faith healers; the blind, black DJ in a shitheel desert town; the old rattlesnake catcher who turns up out of nowhere?  Delicious stuff, if you can stand it.  And for all the hurtling cars, this strangely-placed, slow-motion shot of a basket of snakes flying through the air is what most caught my eye.

I took a bit of a breather on the posting during January, but more reviews and other items will be coming soon.

Smoke and Mirrors

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
2009 (UK / Canada / France)
Director: Terry Gilliam
Viewed: January 17, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

When it comes to Terry Gilliam films, I wouldn’t say that the only attraction is their design, but I’d be kidding myself if I denied that the essential allure of a new Gilliam feature is the look of the thing.  Those occasions when Gilliam has mated his distinctive mode of fantasy—part Victorian / Edwardian stagecraft, part comic strip zaniness—to a compelling set of characters, the result is tongue-in-cheek gold, as in Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.  (His two dystopian science-fiction films, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, are equally great, but vibrate to an entirely different frequency.)  Gilliam’s new feature, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is a weird bauble that fits snugly into oeuvre, yet like all of the director’s weaker efforts, it’s also a mess from a storytelling perspective.  It’s debatable how much of that can be blamed on the regrettable death of his leading man, Heath Ledger, and how much on Gilliam’s own hand, but it’s also telling that Imaginarium is disjointed tonally and narratively.  At its worst, Imaginarium plays out less like a film and more like a book of concept art that has been inelegantly cobbled together into a film.  There’s something more than a little perverse about a film-maker with such palpable thematic interest in myth-making but who nonetheless has a hard time finding a foothold in his own tale.

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Plenty of Memberships, Few Privileges

Up in the Air
2009 (USA)
Director: Jason Reitman
Viewed: January 16, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

Back in May 2008, I observed after a second viewing of the backlash-savaged Juno that Jason Reitman’s crisp, understated direction plays a crucial role the film’s success, and that it in fact called to mind the comedic work of Sydney Pollack.  I still stand by that statement, and by the film’s place as one of the most perfectly realized ensemble comedies of the decade, which I will readily defend with knife clutched firmly in teeth.  However, Reitman’s latest film, Up in the Air, serves primarily to highlight the bottled lightning quality of Juno, solidifying its status as a fortuitous confluence of direction, writing, and performance that may never again be approached by the parties involved.  Up in the Air boasts none of the focused, superbly paced comedic storytelling that characterized Reitman’s previous effort.  In fact, the characteristics that most define his direction here are a distressing lack of understanding regarding his audience’s sympathies, and a clumsy attempt to fuse two or three stories that do not function together as well as he imagines.  To be sure, George Clooney’s unfailingly magnetic presence renders the proceedings more tolerable than they would otherwise be, and the central romantic drama of the film is compelling stuff.  Yet these caveats only highlight the ill-advised and even insulting aspects of Up in the Air.

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