Gateway Cinephiles

Quick Review: Life During Wartime

2009 (USA)
Director: Todd Solondz
Viewed: August 29, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Memory, culpability, and above all forgiveness snake with python-scale brazenness through Todd Solondz’ Life During Wartime, a sequel (of sorts) to Happiness, his 1998 pitch-black slice of middle-class disillusionment (and, memorably, pedophilia).  Recasting all of the characters from that film, Solondz revisits the frayed, stymied lives of middle-aged sisters Joy, Trish, and Helen Jordan (here played by Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney, and Ally Sheedy) as they attempt to forget, move on, and start over.  Building upon its predecessor’s single-minded theme—You Hardly Ever Get What You Want—Life During Wartime gazes on the tangled, habitually dysfunctional lives of the Jordan clan and pointedly asks who we should blame for our miseries, and whether our offenders should (or can be) forgiven.  Solondz’s approach is his customary swirl of jarring frankness with comical anguish.  The forthrightness of the film’s aims lend it the aura of a morality play, as does its curious structure, which forgoes conventional narrative for a succession of linked set pieces, each one amusing and aching in its way, and each something of a self-contained short film.  Solondz’ despairing yet earnest sensibility remains an acquired taste.  Yet while Life During Wartime is unmistakably slighter and less bracing than its forebears, it also reveals a more disciplined and adroit filmmaker.

Quick Review: Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinksy

2009 (France)
Director: Jan Kounen
Viewed: April 14, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

Jan Kounen’s speculative (and frequently downright fictional) film about an affair between two artistic titans sumptuously affirms that not every tale of erotic craving need address romantic love.  Years after witnessing the notorious 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring, Coco Chanel (Anna Mouglalis) invites a hard-luck Igor Stravinksy (Mads Mikkelsen) to her chalet, with his wife and kids in tow.  The designer desires to give the composer the freedom to create, but before you can say “kindred spirits,” the pair are engaged in a sweaty, desperate, but oddly chilly affair.  British writer Chris Greenhalgh adapted his own novel for the film, and both he and Kounen emphasize the white-hot obsessive knots–and inevitable implosion–that can occur when two like-minded souls collide.  Both the Rite, which serves as a recurring musical motif, and the dramatization of Chanel No. 5’s creation underline the film’s fascination with mystery, whether that of the artistic mind itself or the process of inspiration.  These themes prove far more compelling than a flimsy notion of fumbled True Love.  In Kounen’s expressive hands, what might have been a slight (albeit sexy) slice of biopic achieves something finer, a more cerebral cousin to Jane Campion’s poetic ruminations on emotional states.

Quick Review: The Kids Are All Right

2010 (USA)
Director: Lisa Cholodenko
Viewed: August 11, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print

It’s too much to assert that Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules’ (Julianne Moore) lesbianism is incidental to the emotional vigor of The Kids Are All Right, given that sexual and gender anxiety undergird many of the story’s conflicts, not to mention that the plot depends on it.  However, writer-director Cholodenko uses the upheaval generated when Nice and Jules’ teenaged kids seek out their biological father Paul (Mark Ruffalo) for the purposes of highlighting the universal qualities of middle-class, middle-aged families. The message seems to be, contra Anna Karenina (which the film alludes to), unhappy families all share the same gremlins: resentment, frustration, shame, jealousy, and emotional befuddlement.  There’s nothing especially cinematic about Cholodenko’s approach here, aside from one long, devastating close-up of Benning during a moment of traumatic revelation.  Fortunately, the nuanced performances carry the film, elevating dialogue that sometime strays into clumsy satire.  It is Cholodenko’s talent for finding the wry humor in the strangest places that is most endearing, particularly when it comes to human sexuality, which the film acknowledges is rarely explicable or neat.  It’s enough to make one forgive the faintly schematic character to the film’s narrative arc, or its mean-spirited racial digs and hippie-bashing.

Dream a Little Dream a Little Dream a Little Dream

Inception
2010 (USA)
Director: Christopher Nolan
Viewed: July 22, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

“Ambitious” is a term frequently affixed to films solely due to the scale or complexity of their production, whether the work in question is one of the opulent, magisterial epics of old or a contemporary blockbuster that recruits battalions of computer wizards for its virtual world-building.  One could say that Christopher Nolan’s Batman films warrant the label, if only because of their fulsome design and dizzying scope.  However, Nolan’s taste for the ambitious is focused foremost on narrative, as epitomized in the disorienting, reversed chronology of his breakout art-house noir, Memento.  Two years after The Dark Knight trampled everything in its path, that film’s sprawling, relentless, and often preposterous plot nonetheless endures as a grueling feat of sustained anxiety and twenty-first century terror.  Now we come to Inception, the first feature written solely by Nolan since his 1998 debut Following, and it is, if anything, a doubling down on the director’s fascination with convoluted storytelling.  Who else but Nolan could weave a tale that unfolds simultaneously in four linked dream worlds, where time dilates to varying degrees but always ticks inexorably forward?  Who else would have the heedless ambition to even attempt such a thing, to convey such an elaborate scenario through the language of film? Who else but Christopher Nolan would even want to try?

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What’s It Like to Be the Bad Man?

The Killer Inside Me
2010 (USA)
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Viewed: July 12, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 noir novel The Killer Inside Me is not an enjoyable film, at least as one usually applies the term to a movie-going experience.  Nor is it without vexing structural flaws.  And yet it is an undeniably fascinating work, an absorbing and unnervingly insistent portrayal of a murderous mind that joins the ranks of cult notables such as Mary Harron’s American Psycho and John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.   However, the gaze of Winterbottom’s film reaches back to a more distant point.  Specifically, to Psycho, whose particular cinematic genius the film cannibalizes and assimilates into its own strange approach.  Working from a screenplay by director John Curran, Winterbottom maintains a literate awareness of Hitchcock’s seminal thriller throughout his film, without resorting to shameless appropriation or self-conscious homage.  Thompson’s novel has made the jump to the screen before, in a 1976 Stacy Keach vehicle directed by Burt Kennedy.  However, the new film does not carry the telltale odor of a flimsy remake, nor that of an adaptation overly beholden to its source material.  This new take on The Killer Inside Me is insolent and distinctly cinematic.  It ambles along a lurid, eccentric path on an unsettling mission: to convey both the hideous normalcy and incomprehensible disconnection of the psychopathic mind.

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Late to the Game: Sherlock Holmes

2009 (USA)
Director: Guy Ritchie
Viewed: July 11, 2010
Format: Blu-ray - Warner Brothers (2010)

Guy Ritchie purges the Victorian starch (and elegance) from Doyle’s sleuth, while preserving Holmes’ spooky powers of deduction and highlighting forgotten character details, such as the Great Detective’s talent for bare-knuckle boxing and his penchant for narcotics.  Purists will doubtlessly blanch at the director’s approach, which paints Holmes as a superhero for a steampunk-tinged nineteenth century London.  However, Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal possesses sufficient odd-duck touches to render this Sherlock a credible (if multiplex-friendly) variation on the iconic character.  Witty and rollicking, the film focuses on a Holmesian mainstay—banal evil dressed up in mystical garb—and generally succeeds, despite a story stuffed with baffling plot holes. The gaggle of writers (surprise!) are too eager to sacrifice consistency for the sake of action, and leave far too much unexplained, despite a coda where Holmes sweeps away a plethora of seemingly supernatural events with his vaunted reason.  Still, there’s plenty of glint to admire on this bauble, whether in Ritchie’s flamboyant style, Hans Zimmer’s lively score (his most flat-out stimulating in years), or the consistently rich art direction, which relies heavily on conspicuous computer effects, but still manages to delight.  Sherlock Holmes suggests that anachronistic Victorian adventure can be guilty good fun, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen be damned.

Quick Review: Winter’s Bone

2010 (USA)
Director: Debra Granik
Viewed: June 28, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

The chilly Ozark landscape of Winter’s Bone is a skuzzy nightmare version of backwoods Middle America, where every family is linked through tangled blood relations and everyone cooks crystal meth.  This city boy can’t attest to the authenticity of the rural Missouri portrayed in Debra Granik’s film, but the tone of her direction is such that realism takes a back seat to the mythic resonance of seventeen-year-old Ree’s (Jennifer Lawrence) journey.  The film’s depiction of Ree’s materially urgent yet emotionally ambivalent search for her bail-bond-skipping father owes much to noir conventions and the chthonic forays of Greek legend.  In this tale, however, the Hero wanders in despairing circles, and her dragons are an empty fridge, a corrupt sheriff, and rotten-toothed relations who value secrecy more than kinship.  Lawrence shines, and the estimable John Hawkes’ turn as Ree’s reckless uncle provides jolts of wiry menace and righteous wrath.  The script is both frank and admirably subtle, and Granick’s bracingly confident hand relies on expressive touches that lend this regional melodrama the feel of real cinema.  Certainly, the ending is garish and absurdly tidy, but there is also unease there, as well as a quiet lamentation for a fallen world.

Little House on the Shoulder

Home
2008 (Switzerland / France / Belgium)
Director: Ursula Meier
Viewed: May 19, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Home was featured in a limited engagement on May 14-19, 2010 at the Webster University Film Series.]

Suffused with both balmy affection and a mounting aura of calamity, Ursula Meier’s Home presents an unnerving portrait of a family floundering on the shoals of modernity.  The director has described her film as a “road movie in reverse,” and that seems as apt a description as any.  While the archetypal road movie entails a journey outward to discover something of value, Home concerns itself with a family that has already found everything it needs, only to have its idyllic state disturbed, fractured, and ultimately pulverized by the movements of others.  The film’s clan—never graced with a surname—dwells in a modest house in the countryside, where an old, unfinished highway runs right through their front yard and has been re-purposed as the family’s personal parking lot and street hockey rink.  One night, asphalt trucks rumble down the road, and steel barriers spring up along the shoulder and the median.  The metaphor is stark: the highway’s abrupt completion sends cracks through the family’s contented existence, disrupting their physical environment, their well-worn routines, and their interpersonal dynamics.  However, Meier steers clear of tussles with central planning bureaucrats, or other Kafkaesque ordeals.  Instead, she vividly explores the results of the family’s perhaps blinkered determination to stick it out and carry on with their lives.  And therein she discovers compelling insights into the fragile nature of domestic happiness and the anxious, bewildering character of contemporary life.

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Quick Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor)

2009 (Sweden)
Director: Niels Arden Oplev
Viewed: May 1, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

The film adaptation of the late Stieg Larsson’s phenomenally popular novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is a nearly flawless Swedish replica of a lurid Hollywood thriller.  Whether that statement represents high praise or a backhand compliment depends on one’s regard for lurid Hollywood thrillers, but director Niels Arden Oplev has created, at minimum, a fierce little whodunit that is unwavering in its crackling regard for its heroine.  That would be Lisbeth Salander, a misfit hacker with anemic social skills and an eidetic memory, embodied with spooky precision by Noomi Rapace.  Oddly alluring and as tightly wound as a feral cat, Rapace is far more compelling than Michael Nyqvist’s doughy journalist or the film’s convoluted story of a vanished teen.  Oplev, to his credit, preserves the novel’s righteous anger at misogynistic violence, and also its flair for lending thrilling significance to the tiniest of clues.  However, the film’s gloomy aesthetic and faux-provocative shocks don’t conceal its fundamentally disposable nature.  Salander may add some texture to the ranks of fictional female sleuths, but Girl is still just crime, peril, and conspiracy recast as entertainment, a movie-of-the-week seen through a Scandinavian, post-Thomas Harris lens.

A World Stinking on the Bone and Pecked By Sparrows

Red Riding: 1974, Red Riding: 1980, Red Riding: 1983
2009 (UK)
Directors: Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker
Viewed: April 15, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Yorkshire.  Is there a more evocative landscape in all of England?  The word conjures visions of Wuthering Heights and its doomed lovers, of green dales and simple, working-class folk.  Such visions, nurtured on robust helpings of classist romanticism, are nowhere to be found in the Yorkshire of Red Riding.  Turn off the M-1, peer out the rain-spotted windows.  What do you see? Sad, ragged flats and shops; cruel buildings of steel, concrete, and linoleum, seemingly designed to engender malaise; the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant, pumping God-knows-what into the air, water, and bowels; vacant lots inflamed with rubble, weeds, and grubby children, who aren’t so much playing as they are biding their time.  And out there, beyond the drone of Leeds, Sheffield, and Hull and the countless, wretched towns, are the moors.  There are no trees, just the pitched and rolling Pennines (what passes for mountains in England), clad in heather and huddled under eternally gray skies.  The sense of exposure and remoteness is suffocating.  England’s sun-kissed Isle of Wight might as well be in Monaco, or Timbuktu.  The Red Riding film trilogy spends nine years in this miserable dream of Yorkshire, from 1974 to 1983, as the Left’s dreams of a bright British future comes crashing down amid economic stagnation and ruin.  The tale crosses paths with one of the most notorious serial killers in British history, but the film is not really about him.  It’s about the sort of place that could give birth to such a creature.

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