Gateway Cinephiles

Quick Review: I’ve Loved You So Long

November 13, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign No Comments

I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a Longtemps Que Je T’aime)
2008 (France)
Director: Philippe Claudel
Viewed: November 11, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Kristin Scott Thomas is the skin, flesh, and bone of I’ve Loved You So Long. Director Philippe Claudel, in his first feature film, is keenly aware of how central his lead actress is to the potency of this studious, intimate drama of forgiveness, forgetting, and starting over. Thomas’ presence hovers over every moment of the film. Claudel spends long minutes waiting with a cinematic exhale caught in his throat, savoring the way Thomas glances, sighs, smokes, and stands. The entire story–of a woman’s entry into her younger sister’s family life following a prison sentence—seems to lie in the veteran actress’ eyes, so dense, luminous, and haloed with middle-aged wear and beauty. Never mind the hackneyed bits and dramatic missteps. (Wine-lubricated confession at a French dinner party? Check! Tear-smudged, slightly underwhelming revelation? Check!) Marvelous to watch, are Laurent Grévill and Frédéric Pierrot, who charm Thomas’ Juliette in scenes scripted with distinctly Gallic confidence and deep currents of hope. I’ve Loved You So Long just might be the film of Thomas’ career. It succeeds despite an unsatisfying final act and too much narrative thumb-twiddling. It succeeds because Thomas is just that damn good, and Claudel bottles every spark she generates.

Manic Pixie Dream-Girl

November 13, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign, Comedies No Comments

2008 (UK)
Director: Mike Leigh
Viewed: November 11, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a slippery little film, a work that appears–at first glance–to rest on the spritely shoulders of one Poppy Cross, as portrayed with rabbit-punch wit and astonishing texture by Sally Hawkins. Indeed, Hawkins is undeniably the blazing celestial orb of positivity of this slice-of-life dramatic comedy. Making Sally Hawkins charming is an amateur’s trick, demanding nothing more than attiring her in “crazy” outfits and letting her goggle and guffaw through a flurry of sitcom scenarios. (Driving lessons! Visiting her sister! Flamenco class!) However, Leigh’s magic lies in the way he shifts our attention from Poppy to the world around her, never mind how enchanting a heroine she might be. Quite improbably–and in spite of her saccharine eccentricities–Poppy emerges as a rounded character, one who permits us a bit of projection for our own everyday tribulations. Shock of shocks, before long we realize that Happy-Go-Lucky is not merely touting the power of optimism, but calling our attention to the ley-lines of misery that flow between annoyances, social ugliness, and outright tragedies.

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To Everything, Turn, Turn, Turn

November 3, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign, Action No Comments

Ashes of Time Redux (Dung Che Sai Duk Redux)
2008 (Hong Kong / China)
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Viewed: November 2, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

(Sad to say, Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar-wai is not a director with whom I have any previous experience. I have not seen the original edit of his 1994 feature, Ashes of Time. Accordingly, I will be reviewing the new edit of that film, Ashes of Time Redux, without reference to the original.)

Excess suffuses Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux, but not the bombastic sort one might expect in a film that owes most of its narrative elements and a slice of style to the wuxia tradition. No, Ashes is an elliptical meditation first and foremost, a serious-minded discourse on love and loss, replete with swelling strings (just in case you forget for a moment how serious). Wong puts a glowing burnish on this tangled tale of swordsmanship and longing set against impossibly bright desert sands, relying on a lyrical four-part structure that admittedly gets its talons into you. The director’s preference for lingering shots and meandering dialogue, while not objectionable on its face, lends Ashes a musty odor of pretension, if only because it highlights the unevenness of his storytelling technique. One wonders at Wong’s choices: on the one hand he offers several minutes of a woman caressing a horse–an exquisitely poetic sequence–while elsewhere his transitions are so ambiguous and edits so jarring that the story becomes baffling.

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3-Minute Intro: Cannibal Holocaust

October 22, 2008 Andrew 3-Minute Intros, Foreign, Horror No Comments

Screened: October 17, 2008
Format: DVD - Grindhouse Releasing (2005)
HorrorFest 2008

Depending on who you ask, Italian director Ruggero Deodato’s 1980 exploitation magnum opus, Cannibal Holocaust, is either a masterpiece of ruthless social commentary and over-the-top gore, or unrepentantly amoral, racist, sadistic garbage that could only originate from a supremely sick mind. One of a handful of self-proclaimed “most controversial” horror films of all time, Holocaust has served as a sort of twisted gold standard in fringe movie-making since its release, representing the most depraved excesses of the European film industry.

Director Deodato had previously created numerous exploitation films, including other cannibal features, but Cannibal Holocaust would become his most ambitious and renowned work. Holocaust unabashedly mimics the style of the notorious mondo documentaries, initially produced in Italy, which depict gruesome accidents and deaths, bizarre aboriginal customs, and other sensational subjects. Indeed, Deodato allegedly conceived of the film as a statement on the sensationalism and lack of integrity he observed in Italian journalists, particularly with respect to violence. Critics have railed against Holocaust’s hypocrisy in the respect, pointing to the film’s lurid promotion and treatment of is subject matter.

Cannibal Holocaust seemingly offers something for everyone to loathe: child murder, gang-rape, abortion, torture, beheadings, impalements, shameless racism, the on-screen slaughter of animals, and, yes, cannibalism. Although promoters now boast of Holocaust’s numerous censorings and bannings as badges of honor, the controversy and confusion over its initial release were problematic. At one point, Deodato had to produce his actors alive and well in an Italian court to prove that he had not made a genuine snuff film.

Despite the notoriety of its content, Cannibal Holocaust’s most significant cinematic legacy is likely its structure and technique. Its conceit of the allegedly “found footage” of a documentary film crew and its cunning promotion that tricked audiences into believing they were witnessing nonfiction would inspire later films such as The Last Broadcast and particularly The Blair Witch Project. Deodato’s reliance on location shooting in a rugged, naturalistic style heightened the film’s illusion. This led no less a figure than Sergio Leone to declare that the Deodato had created a “masterpiece of cinematographic realism,” although the legendary Italian director added, “I think you will get in trouble with all the world.”

3-Minute Intro: The Orphanage (El Orfanato)

October 22, 2008 Andrew 3-Minute Intros, Foreign, Horror 2 Comments

Screened: October 17, 2008
Format: Blu-Ray - Picturehouse (2008)
HorrorFest 2008

It’s probably overstatement to suggest that Juan Anontio Bayona’s 2007 directorial debut, The Orphanage, would not have been possible without the box-office and critical triumph of Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006, but the latter film’s success certainly didn’t hurt. Not only did Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy film enhance the receptiveness of audiences to Spanish-language gothic cinema, but the director’s role as a producer for The Orphanage was prominently featured in the film’s promotion. Fortunately for Bayona, his film successfully escapes from del Toro’s shadow, delivering a chilling and harrowing update on reliable horror conventions now mostly absent from American films.

Bayona and screenwriter Sergio Sánchez provide us with a landscape that is familiar, but also realized with efficiency and a pitch-perfect gothic sensibility. The essential elements for a conventional ghost story are all present: a creepy old house, a sensitive little child, buried secrets, a séance, and a protagonist driven to the brink of desperation and madness. What makes The Orphanage an adept piece of horror film-making is Bayona’s assumption that we understand and appreciate the traditions of the genre. He stacks the film with dense layers of mystery, and packs in crucial details that reward viewers willing to pay attention and able to keep up.

The Orphanage was the first feature film for Bayona, who established himself directing music videos for Spanish pop groups. The director’s flair for evoking a classically gothic atmosphere abounds, as does his talent for absorbing and revisiting iconic ghost story devices in a refreshing manner. For the critical leading role of Laura, Bayona turned to Spanish actor Belén Rueda, who won a Goya award for her performance in director Alejandro Amenábar’s 2004 Oscar-winner The Sea Inside. Despite The Orphanage’s admittedly moody and gorgeous trappings, it is undeniably Rueda’s engaging performance as Laura that holds the film together. Rueda’s convoluted portrayal—compassionate, arrogant, fearful, resolute, neurotic—creates an absorbing study of parenting and grief that dwells within a sharply executed haunted house tale for the twenty-first century. In addition to Bayona’s skill in handling a story laden with twists and sleight-of-hand, it is the strength of Rueda’s performance that lends such anguish and horror to The Orphanage’s final revelations.

3-Minute Intro: Deep Red (Profondo Rosso)

October 22, 2008 Andrew 3-Minute Intros, Foreign, Horror 2 Comments

Screened: October 16, 2008
Format: DVD - Blue Underground (2007)
HorrorFest 2008

Dario Argento’s brutal 1975 thriller, Deep Red, also known as The Hatchet Murders, is a film balanced on the threshold between the acclaimed director’s work in the lurid Italian genre known as giallo and his more surreal, supernatural films. Often considered the finest giallo ever made, and allegedly Argento’s favorite among all the works in his filmography, Deep Red features a bloody excess in its violence that few films dare to exhibit. After achieving significant fame in Italy with his “animal trilogy” of more traditional giallo films–The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o’Nine Tails, and Four Flies on Grey Velvet–Argento crafted Deep Red as a gruesome serial killer tale, replete with his trademark sequences of shocking death.

For his lead perfromer, Agento deferred from his usual fondness for unknowns and genre fixtures and selected 1960s English cinema icon David Hemmings. Introduced to the stage as a boy soprano, Hemmings worked in opera and the British theater, before he was eventually discovered by Michelangelo Antonioni. The famed Italian auteur cast Hemmings opposite Vanessa Redgrave in his art film / murder mystery masterwork, Blowup. Hemmings went on to star in a succession of prestigious 1960s British features such as Camelot, Charge of the Light Bridge, and Alfred the Great, while also dabbling in cult films such as Barberella and a pop music career. Deep Red captures Hemmings at the trailing edge of his career before the camera, prior to his transformation into a prolific director of American television in the 1980s, on action series such as The A-Team, Magnum P.I., and Airwolf.

In keeping with Agento’s signature style, Deep Red favors elaborate, often surreal production design and unconventional camera work. The plot, such as it is, is secondary to the director’s fussiness over scenes of elaborate murder and his thematic obsession with memory and secret knowledge. Deep Red highlights Argento’s preference for visceral violence to which his audience could relate. Rather than gunshots, his characters suffer bludgeonings, slashings, burns, falls, and similar grisly dooms. The film also contains numerous literary and artistic allusions, which Argento constructs with an emerging eye for bold lighting design and unusual camera placement.

3-Minute Intro: Don’t Look Now

October 22, 2008 Andrew 3-Minute Intros, Foreign, Horror 2 Comments

Screened: October 15, 2008
Format: DVD - Paramount (2002)
HorrorFest 2008

Since its 1973 premiere, Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now has acquired a reputation as one of the finest, most artful British thrillers ever made. At the time of the film’s production, the English Roeg had moved from a career as an accomplished cinematographer to securing a Palm d’Or nomination at the Cannes Film Festival for his 1971 Outback drama, Walkabout. Don’t Look Now paired Roeg with New Hollywood icons Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie for a chilling, often surreal tale of grief and madness amid the canals and crumbling churches of Venice. By 1973, the Canadian Sutherland had transitioned from a prestigious television career to leading roles in films such as MASH and Klute. English native Christie had achieved a glamorous celebrity after her appearance in Doctor Zhivago, followed by a string of acclaimed features, including Fahrenheit 451 and McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

With Don’t Look Now, Roeg transforms a relatively straightforward story of mystery and perhaps supernatural terror into a slow-burn experiment in pure mood. Sutherland and Christie portray an architect and his wife, who have moved to Venice to escape the grief over their recently deceased young daughter. Strange things begin to happen—coincidences, accidents, visits from menacing strangers—but they don’t seem to add up. All the while the Venice police are searching for a remorseless killer. Much like Sutherland, we find ourselves asking, “What am I really afraid of? Am I losing it?”

The film is justifiably famous for its atmosphere, and also for its torrid love scene between Sutherland and Christie. Roeg allegedly added this sequence as an ad hoc modification to the script, editing it in his signature cross-cutting style. The scene’s notoriety was enhanced by rumors that the actors eventually became entwined in a real romance. However, the film uses this scene not for titillation, but as a powerful counterpoint to the disintegrating relationship between Sutherland and Christie’s characters. Throughout its slowly unfolding events, Don’t Look Now gradually evokes an atmosphere of doom. This aura culminates when the film reaches its bizarre, shocking conclusion, one still hotly debated among critics.

Dirty Pretty Thing

October 14, 2008 admin Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Dramas, Foreign 5 Comments

A Girl Cut in Two (La Fille Coupée en Deux)
2007 (Germany / France)
Director: Claude Chabrol
Viewed: October 13, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

A Girl Cut in Two is a film that can only loosely be termed entertainment, unless you delight in the sight of self-absorbed twits driving one another to ruin. Admittedly, there is a certain fascination inherent in such a thing, and veteran French director Claude Chabrol manages to at least render his characters as engaging trifles. They are little more than wind-up figurines that jostle one another while bumbling through their crippling neuroses, and yet one can’t help but smirk a little at the tragic silliness of it. A Girl Cut in Two could have been an ugly, joyless film about ugly, joyless people, and it’s to Chabrol’s modest credit that it finds the space to provoke and ponder. The film’s character-poles—Charles the arrogant, graying, libertine intellectual and Paul the demented, anxious, foppish playboy—are deeply rotten men. Between these two cads ricochets Gabrielle, a gorgeous weather girl whose place in the film’s moral order is perpetually uncertain. Is she naïve or cunning? An ambitious manipulator or a pitiable victim? A liberated modern woman or a childish dimwit? The film’s sweeping ambiguity with respect to Gabrielle contrasts with its one certainty: she is the least loathsome vertex of the love triangle, and therefore our window into the dire and ludicrous events that unfold.

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Service With Distraction

September 24, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Foreign, Comedies 3 Comments

I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval Jsem Anglického Krále)
2006 (Czech Republic / Slovakia)
Director: Jirí Menzel
Viewed: September 23, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Jirí Menzel’s I Served the King of England boasts an undeniably mischievous, gloriously giddy tone. Flashes of the grotesque and wearisome melodrama lurk in its corners, but on the whole it is a winsome film, and eagerly so. Its genre-tripping acrobatic feats–twists and twirls of fable, slapstick, satire, tragedy, and World War II epic–certainly set it apart from any other film I’ve seen this year. What elevates Served above bemused novelty for its own sake is Menzel’s ambition to craft both an engaging character study of lingering adolescence and a penetrating allegory about twentieth-century Europe (and you don’t need to be a critic or a historian to discern how these are related.) This ambition lurks just beneath the film’s pleasurable, often schizophrenic surface, defying the instinct to dismiss Served as a quirky diversion. To be sure, the film holds shortcomings that cannot be dismissed, particularly the trite, manipulative turns in the story and some woefully dull patches in a work otherwise so filled with motion and delight. However, these are small potatoes alongside the film’s sensual joys, its unexpected thoughtfulness, and the lead performance by Ivan Barnev, who guides us on a rapturous and insightful comic journey.