2002 (USA)
Director: Alexander Payne
Viewed: August 2, 2010
Format: DVD - New Line (2003)
2009 (USA)
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Viewed: June 13, 2010
Format: Blu-ray – Warner Brothers (2009)
[SPOILERS] Steadfastly ridiculous from its opening moments to its unnecessarily prolonged conclusion, and yet still a rather fun, ghastly ride, Jaume Collet-Serra’s odd little thriller gets lots of mileage out of the Evil Kid archetype. We know from the outset that Isabelle Fuhrman’s Esther–all chestnut curls, lacey ribbon, and icepick glares—is Bad News (even if her dimwit adopted father doesn’t), but the exact nature of her schemes is a revelation left for the final scenes. Evil Kid thrillers have long been a favorite haunt for creaky nature-versus-nurture questions, going all the way back to Mervyn LeRoy’s The Bad Seed. If Orphan were merely a weary retread of such paths, it would be entirely forgettable. However, this murderous nine-year-old girl is, in fact, a murderous 33-year-old Estonian dwarf. That changes things, no? On the one hand, this twist turns Orphan into just another Homicidal Maniac film, robbing it of the Evil Kid sub-sub-genre’s unsettling appeal. On the other hand, Esther’s adulthood spikes the film with Freudian voodoo, giving Collet-Serra space to engage with twisted themes that most horror films can’t tackle, especially the notion of child as spousal replacement. Orphan has its spatters of brutally graphic violence (I’ll never look at a workbench vice the same way again), but its most memorable moments are those the revel in their emotional and visual perversity. Chief among these is Esther’s vampish seduction of her adopted father, which is, frankly, about nine levels of Fucked Up. Nonetheless, an audacious high concept can’t entirely atone for over two hours of ludicrous implausibles, foolish character behavior, and dreary narrative predictability.
2010 (USA)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Viewed: June 11, 2010
Format: Blu-ray - Paramount (2010)
[SPOILERS] Grading on a curve is a tricky and sometimes ill-advised endeavor, but now that I find myself at the halfway point in an apparently dismal year for cinema, Martin Scorsese’s relentlessly moody labyrinth seems to merit a bit more affection than I afforded it back in February. Granted, the flaws that were in evidence on a first viewing are still present: the dearth of gratifying horror rhythms; the relative aimlessness of the middle act; the fragility of Dr. Crawley’s outlandish scheme. However, the whiff of disposability that emanates from any film reliant on a concluding twist proves to be phantasmal here, for a second visit to Shutter Island provides bountiful avenues for engagement. Foreknowledge of “Teddy’s” situation reveals a marvelously scrupulous aspect to the film’s assembly, especially vis-à-vis its performances. One could dedicate a screening solely to observing Mark Ruffalo or Ben Kingsley, each of whom delivers a stunningly modulated portrayal that operates on two planes simultaneously. Even the reaction shots from the bit players offer a peculiar kind of amusement, with each actor discovering their own way to convey, “I can’t believe we’re going along with this…” In the end, however, the film succeeds on the strength of DiCaprio’s throbbing performance, unquestionably his best in years, which arrives brimming with sweaty, anxious hostility and descends to place where oblivion seems a sweet release. What might have been a garish carnival hoax is synthesized into a searing portrait of a man hollowed-out by unsettled guilt and rage. While the film’s ruminations on aggression are of a piece with Scorsese’s absorption with “men of violence,” as Dr. Naehring describes Andrew, the film is far more compelling (and vigorous) when it is occupied with memory’s double-edged sword. In this, Andrew shares with Lost Highway’s Fred Madison a preference for “remembering things in his own way,” as opposed to confronting the horrors that he has witnessed and wrought.
2007 (USA)
Director: Oren Peli
Viewed: June 13, 2010
Format: Blu-ray – Paramount (2009)
2006 (Japan / UK / USA)
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Viewed: May 7, 2010
Format: Blu-ray – Universal (2009)
This was my first occasion to revisit Cuarón’s despairing-then-hopeful thrill ride since its fumbled theatrical release and more recent best-of-the-decade accolades (the film appeared at #76 in Slant’s countdown and claimed Reverse Shot’s #19 slot). In retrospect, it’s clear why Children of Men—and not the hot-and-bothered arthouse amble Y tu mamá también, or the auteurist blockbuster Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—is the feature that secured the director’s status as the most disciplined and effortlessly engaging of Mexico’s big-name film-makers. Four years later, it’s not Children’s dense science-fiction world-building that most impresses, nor the technical bravado of those one-take action set pieces (especially given that the visceral, immersive impact of a first-time viewing can never be recreated). No, what’s astonishing is the simplicity of the thing, despite the stable of screenwriters and the mammoth, textured character of Cuarón’s near-future landscape. Compared to the other science-fiction achievements of the past decade, Children of Men is a tightly plotted thing, lacking any of the extraneous elements that so often bog down other entries in the genre. While it may be less thematically ambitious than either WALL•E or Moon, Cuarón film doesn’t seem to have a single narrative fumble or pinch of flab. Everything serves its propulsive, harrowing observation of Theo’s journey from apathy to heroism, an evolution that Cuarón and leading man Clive Owen make all the more potent by rendering it with perfect naturalism. If Children of Men’s Abu Ghraib imagery now seems stale, consider that Arizona’s recent enactment of a “Papers, Please” law lends the film’s police-state treatment of illegal immigrants—excuse me, “fugees”—a new-found weight. It just goes to prove that a pitch-perfect dystopian fable never loses its relevance.
1993 (USA)
Director: Brian De Palma
Viewed: April 9, 2010
Format: Laserdisc – MCA / Universal
While Carlito’s Way bears that telltale De Palma touch of the Grand Guignol, it’s positively staid compared to the excesses of the director’s earlier Latino crime epic, Scarface. And therein lies the root of the former film’s most conspicuous faults, for in tossing out the operatic lunacy while clinging to the shameless melodrama, De Palma neuters Carlito, rendering it essentially indistinguishable from any other gangster flick. That said, there’s plenty to admire here. Presenting only the final chapter of an underworld titan’s fall is an admittedly novel approach, and it’s fairly remarkable how De Palma sketches in so much back-story with so little exposition. While the film’s violence often seems dispiritingly obligatory, it’s also presented as a nasty, messy business. Tellingly, Carlito often bests his enemies through bravado and trickery rather than brute force, and the film privileges the competing criminal virtues of preparation and adaptability. Pacino, with a laughably protean Puerto Rican accent, is fully in his post-Sea of Love self-parody phase here, but Sean Penn, behind child-molester glasses and beneath a Larry Fine ‘fro, is deliciously loathsome as criminal defense attorney David Kleinfeld. Unfortunately, Carlito feels like a middling gangster drama from an aging stylist who is capable of much more. (see: Ridley Scott.) Most exasperating is De Palma’s affinity for torpedoing the film’s most appealing moments. This unfortunate tendency is epitomized in a scene where Carlito’s ex-flame Gail (Penelope Ann Miller) enticingly suggests that he could break down her chained apartment door if he really wanted to ravage her. What song does De Palma use to cap this searingly erotic sequence? Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful.” Yeesh.
2008 (UK / USA)
Director: Andrew Adamson
Viewed: March 30, 2010
Format: Netflix Instant Queue (via Playstation 3)
It was probably a foregone conclusion that the dreariest of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books would make for a much more schematic, lifeless film than director Adamson’s reverential but suitably vigorous The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This tale of a royal youth deprived of his rightful throne by a scheming nobleman is pure fantasy paint-by-numbers. Without the series’ talking animals—who remain its most charming trait, especially when placed alongside the dour mythological critters—and the parallel-world plot wrinkles, there wouldn’t be much to distinguish Prince Caspian from countless other epic sword-and-destiny outings. Adamson is doing his level best to give Disney their own Lord of the Rings, but neither he nor the source material is up to the task. The Pevensie kids, who seemed so perfectly actualized in the previous film, now feel static and far less compelling. The most conspicuous problem is that neither the medium nor Adamson’s crude Jackson-cribbing approach provide much room for Lewis’ curious cosmology to unspool, and so we’re left a mildly entertaining and largely anonymous adventure… and not much else.
2009 (USA)
Director: Jordan Downey
Viewed: March 30, 2010
Format: Netflix Instant Queue (via Playstation 3)
There’s something to be said for a slasher picture so ineptly made and thoroughly cracked in its sensibilities that it resembles one of those public access fever-dreams on Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!. I just don’t know what that something is. I suppose it’s a given that a direct-to-video “film” that looks like it was made for about $5,000 and features a sentient, demonic turkey would be odious and mind-shatteringly stupid. I just didn’t expect it to be dribbled with such batshit-crazy weirdness. ThanksKilling feels like the brainchild of a thirteen-year-old delinquent with a hard-on for glue-sniffing and girl-murder fantasies, or, in its best (worst?) moments, like a live-action, R-rated Bugs Bunny cartoon. I could point to one character’s gossamer reverie about his slain best friend (complete with skipping, hand-holding, ice cream-sharing, and swing-pushing), or the killer turkey’s scheme to impersonate a victim by wearing his face (a successful scheme, I might add). However, the scene that takes the pumpkin pie, as it were, is a short sequence where the Groucho-bespectacled turkey and the dressed-as-a-turkey sheriff amicably share a cup of coffee. The sheer dada WTF?-factor of it almost makes it worth the brain cells and hour of my life that I lost forever.
2009 (USA)
Director: Don Argott
Viewed: March 25, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)
Narrowness of scope serves The Art of the Steal well. While the film boasts the righteous outrage of a more sweeping polemic such as Food, Inc., director Don Argott approaches his subject–the legal looting of the priceless Albert Barnes art collection by Philadelphia’s political and cultural elite–as an act of slow-motion theft. Accordingly, the film has the feel of a heist documentary stood on its head, detailing how one man’s bequest to the world was systematically dismantled by those who object to his unconventional views on art. The film’s uneven pacing and undistinguished style aren’t especially bothersome when the story is this intrinsically compelling and passionately told. Argott frames his story as part Lear-like tragedy about the reaving of a legacy, and part exposé on the dastardly deeds of rapacious Philly blue-noses. It’s fairly stunning that several of Argott’s villains–a former head of the Barnes Foundation, former governor, and former attorney-general–were willing to appear in his film and smugly characterize the looting of the collection as a proud moment. These confessions only heighten the film’s potent sense of loss, as does the reverential footage of Barnes’ museum in both its early and final days.
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.
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