Gateway Cinephiles

Film Diary: Terror’s Advocate

Andrew — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:04:41 +0000

2007 (France)
Director: Barbet Schroeder
Viewed: September 6, 2008
Format: DVD - Magnolia Home Entertainment (2008)

Northeast Passage

Andrew — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:47:08 +0000

Frozen River
2008 (USA)
Director: Courtney Hunt
Screened: September 2, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Frozen River is a tale of dreams, or at least what passes for dreams in the bitter winters of far-upstate New York. The film presents us with two women, each a quintessential American survivor in their way. Ray (Melissa Leo) is a white, middle-aged single mom, scraping together a life for her two boys in a cramped manufactured home. Lila (Misty Upham) is a younger Mohawk woman, and also a mother, although her infant son has been wrested from her with the tacit consent of her tribe. When fate brings these two women together, their antagonism seethes, but eventually they embark on a perilous criminal collaboration. First-time director Courtney Hunt’s naturalistic story of slush-and-mud desperation on the margins of the American dream is an affecting and uncommonly sensitive depiction of foolish risks taken for all the right reasons.

When Frozen River opens, Ray’s husband has recently vanished with the funds that were supposed to secure their new double-wide. Eventually we learn that he is a gambling addict who has pulled such disappearing acts before. This might be the final act. Ray repeatedly checks her phone messages in search of some sign from him. The absent man of the house is often the subject of arguments between Ray and her teenage son T.J. (Charlie McDermott), their quarrels masking a shared understanding that he was a lousy husband and father. With Ray’s job in a sad little retail store as the only source of income, the family is teetering on the edge of poverty. The dream of the double-wide is evaporating, the repo men are coming for the television, and meals before paydays consist of popcorn and Tang.

Ray eventually finds her husband’s car; the husband is gone, but Lila is behind the wheel. The Mohawk woman is reticent, unwilling to explain herself: “I found it,” she shrugs, “The keys were in it.” A widow who works in the tribe’s dingy bingo parlor, Lila has bad eyesight, a freezing little trailer–Ray’s house is extravagant by comparison–and a son who seems to have been kidnapped by her mother-in-law. (”Tribal police don’t get involved in that stuff,” she explains.) She is also an aspiring smuggler of human cargo: Asian immigrants who seek to enter the U.S. from Canada. The Mohawk reservation straddles the border, rendering it an ideal conduit for trafficking when the river freezes. Unfortunately, Lila lacks a car with a spacious trunk, as well as the skin color that would permit her to pass the state troopers unmolested. As it happens, Ray needs cash for a down payment on the new house, a tantalizing prize that represents a better life for her family. The two work out an arrangement; Ray provides the transportation, Lila the connection. From the beginning, however it’s an alliance fraught with tension and calamity. More than that I won’t say.

Frozen River possesses a suffocating realism, a sensation partly established by its dismal landscape of white snow, slate sky, and rusting metal. Mostly, however, it emerges from Hunt’s deep adoration for Leo and Upham’s faces, which she frequently shoots in tight close-ups. Leo’s outstanding performance resides deep in her eyes, lined with crow’s feet and dollar-store mascara. They glint with the same contradictory hues that were in evidence in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: despair, warmth, exhaustion, bitterness, and strutting decisiveness. It’s such an authentic performance, it almost feel voyeuristic to watch her doing mundane things like preparing for work or broodingly smoking a cigarette.

Upham’s smooth, cherubic face is more inscrutable, but her eyes have a squinting moistness that hints at her painful past and frayed sense of self. She doesn’t make excuses for her misdeeds, and yet she seems acutely aware of how shabby and sad her life must seem. Many in the tribe treat her with contempt, as though she were some sort of untouchable, and not merely because her illicit side business is an open secret. (A native used car dealer refuses to sell her a vehicle with a trunk; he knows what use she has for it.) There seems to be ugly history there that is never revealed. Lila appears prepared to turn her back on the reservation, but her son keeps her there. She watches him from a distance and sneaks him money in potato chip cans.

Both Lila and Ray exhibit different kinds of defiance: the native woman a quiet apathy and intensely lonely longing; the white woman a scrabbling desperation and sarcastic tongue. Both of these people flare to life when out on smuggling runs. They become bolder and tougher, crackling with wariness. Both are in denial about what they are up to. Ray insists that she is “no criminal.” Lila declares that their little enterprise isn’t a crime at all, just “free trade between free people.” And we believe them, in a way. Smuggling isn’t a lifestyle or a thrill for these women, but a means to realize their dreams, no matter how small or simple they might seem to an outsider.

Implausibilities are scattered through Frozen River, mostly in the form of character reversals that don’t ring quite true. While the film boasts an icy, anguished sense of lurking doom, it also suffers from a kind of lazy tidiness. Ray emphatically warns T.J. not to tinker with a propane torch, so of course he disobeys–for all the right reasons–and ignites a near-catastrophe. Of course the state trooper that sets Ray on edge at the store turns up later to question her, and of course this is the same trooper that pursues her during a botched smuggling run. Hunt’s tone suggests that something momentous, even disastrous, will happen before the credits roll, but her storytelling style leaves little doubt that all will be resolved, one way or another. The suspicious smoothness in its narrative cogs notwithstanding, Frozen River’s conclusion is touched with grace and fragile promise. The film’s final scene involves a carousel, a family, and a glimmer of hope. Or at least what passes for such things in America.

Film Diary: [•Rec]

Teresa — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:24:01 +0000

2007 (Spain)
Director: Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plazavan
Viewed: September 3, 2008
Format: DVD - Filmax (Spanish Import)

I’ll never feel the same about roaming around filthy, Catholic-saint-plastered, infected-test-tube-littered attic apartments with night-vision…

They Caught a Bad, Bad Train

Andrew — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:33:32 +0000

Transsiberian
2008 (UK / Germany / Spain / Lithuania)
Director: Brad Anderson
Viewed: August 31, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Allow me to clear up one thing that the marketing of Transsiberian has unforgivably muddled: Woody Harrelson might have first billing, but Emily Mortimer is the clear protagonist and the star of this serviceable–albeit raw-nerved–thriller. Director Brad Anderson begins with a meaty premise: two guileless Americans find themselves enmeshed in a heroin trafficking plot during their journey aboard the titular train. This is not a Locked Room mystery in the tradition of Murder of the Orient Express. Jessie (Mortimer) and Roy (Harrelson) spend as much time off the train as on it, and the film clearly owes a debt to Hitchcock’s more harried, dashing thrillers in its action set pieces and its fascination with Jessie’s responses to desperate, often uncanny, circumstances. Unfortunately, Anderson lends barely any thematic heft to the tale. While Jessie’s plight often has us sweating bullets in the moment, Transsiberian’s themes are confused, when the film-makers bother to articulate them at all. The result is a film that offers excitement and opportunities for “What Would You Do?” speculation, but little else.

In a era when thrillers so often rely on characters that are not what they seem, Transsiberian is bracingly straightforward in setting up its conflicts and twists. If you’ve seen the trailer, you already know the nickel version. Roy and Jessie are making an adventure of their return from a missionary trip in China by taking a train to Moscow. Roy is a good-natured but clueless schmuck, a variation on the bartender that established Harrelson’s career, only without the sheepish humor. Jessie is the anxious dreamer, but with a wild past and a schizophrenic demeanor that permits Mortimer–who was all rural Minnesota sweetness in Lars and the Real Girl–to play against type a little. Sharing the couple’s sleeping car is a pair far more acclimated to the perils of third-class world travel. Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) is a smooth Spanish bullshitter with an unseemly eye for Jessie, while Abby (Kate Mara) is an American girl from the wrong side of the tracks, all heavy eyeliner and furtive glances. The wild card is Grinko (Ben Kingsley), a dour Russian narcotics officer who is both maddeningly cunning and blatantly corrupt.

The plot is Transsiberian’s raison d’être, so I won’t say much more about it. There are harrowing acts of violence, a suitcase full of heroin that doesn’t look like heroin, and lots and lots of deception and track-covering, particularly on Mortimer’s part. Anderson’s story and construction aren’t stunningly original, but neither are they distractingly clichéd. The film borrows snippets from familiar thriller scenarios, cobbling them together into an contraption engineered to evoke cold-sweat tension. Guilt and suspicion are the currency of the script by Anderson and Will Conroy, and also the cornerstones of the film’s most effective scenes. One of the more chilling moments involves a character browsing through pictures on a digital camera, where one particular image lurks like a tell-tale heart.

Harrelson is utterly and deliberately off-putting as Roy, an aw-shucks dimwit whose determination to do the right thing doesn’t mitigate his jerk streak or his obliviousness to his spouse. (More than once, Mortimer pops in, panting and tearful, and Harrelson wonders, “Is something wrong?”) Harrelson is actually a comfortable fit for the character, and does a passable job with the portrayal. However, the film has no use for him other than as ballast and to provide manly decisiveness at a couple of key moments. (Sexism much?) It’s Mortimer’s burden to hold our attention, and that she does quite well. She presents Jessie as a woman mired in a furrowed adolescent aimlessness after years of risky living. Her actions seem a little bewildering at times, but they’re ultimately reconcilable with her twinned personality, part reckless ferocity and part impotent despair. The duller examples of the thriller genre depend on characters that behave in a relentlessly stupid manner. In contrast, Transsiberian’s events tighten with exhausting tension around Mortimer due to to a couple of stupid mistakes. No honest person would deny suffering similar (or worse) lapses in judgment. Kingsley’s Detective Grinko echoes the sly, relentless qualities of an older stripe of American gumshoe, even as he embodies a distinct post-Soviet gangster-cop archetype. It’s a performance delivered from a hammy, eminently watchable stance, which serves Transsiberian’s need for a menacing villain nicely.

Which brings us to the film’s primary flaw: the sheer functionality of the whole enterprise. The film is exactly what it appears to be, no more, no less. Dark, violent, and ultimately forgettable, it’s the stuff of enjoyable entertainment, but not necessarily stirring cinema. That’s not to say that Transsiberian feels tossed-off, at least as a thriller. Its hunger for squirming viewers is palpable, and Anderson realizes the genre’s components with a enviable skill and ruthlessness. In contrast, the director tends to lose his way when he gestures hazily towards themes such as the persistence of personal demons and the limits of compassion. These currents are presented with a kind of dreary half-heartedness. Furthermore, there’s a muddled quality to the film’s moral conception of Jessie: Is her subsumed assertiveness responsible for her plight, or is it the only thing that saves her hash? With one hand Anderson despairs over the unforeseen costs of deception, and with the other he promotes the virtues of noble lies. Transsiberian would have been better if it eschewed the awkward, mushy moral lessons and maintained a sharp focus on its principal strength. Namely, its visceral portrayal of a woman’s grueling crawl through a waking nightmare.

3-Minute Intro: The Cannonball Run

Andrew — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:28:00 +0000

Screened: September 1, 2008
Format: DVD - HBO (2001)
Selected By: Grant

When Korean War veteran Hal Needham came to Hollywood in the 1950s to work as a stuntman, he had no intention of transforming action filmmaking. Needham quickly developed a strong reputation for his stunt work in television Westerns, parlaying his success into film. Eventually progressing to stunt coordination and second unit direction, Needham was regarded as one of the industry’s chief innovators by 1976, when he approached friend Burt Reynolds with a script called Smokey and the Bandit. The film was an enormous hit for both the director and star, a feat they replicated in 1981 with The Cannonball Run, a camp ensemble comedy celebration of auto racing and Hollywood excess.

Back in 1976, there had been two films—the action feature Cannonball! and the comedy The Gumball Rally—based on a real-life outlaw cross-country auto race, the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. Run five times between 1971 and 1979, the Dash was legendary in Needham’s racing and stunt circles for having no rules save the specified starting and end point. With The Cannonball Run, the director undeniably created the race’s most widespread cultural legacy, going so far as to integrate notorious events from past Dashes into the film’s plot.

Cannonball was a part of Reynolds’ unparalleled 1978-1982 domination of the American box office, although his collaborations with Needham and other B-movie fare had by 1981 somewhat diminished his reputation in the eyes of audiences and directors. However, dismissing Cannonball, or any Needham film, as shallow misses the point. The director always intended his films to be joyful tributes to his heroes and the things he loved, particularly fast cars. Despite its broad, engaging cast of comedy fixtures, rising stars, and Hollywood has-beens—including Roger Moore parodying his contemporary James Bond role—Needham’s focus is on the vehicles, which he films with the devoted attention that only an enthusiast can bring. Ultimately, the film’s frisky character ensures The Cannonball Run’s status, not merely as a 1981 cultural artifact, but also one of the great Hollywood chase films. It’s a character embodied in its roguish disdain for law enforcement and its enthusiasm for a competition where nothing is at stake but bragging rights.

3-Minute Intro: Deliverance

Andrew — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:20:46 +0000

Screened: September 1, 2008
Format: DVD - Warner Brothers (2004)
Selected By: Grant

Burt Reynolds began his acting career on the stage and in television, but in the 1960s he transitioned to film, where he would eventually establish his role as a leading man sex symbol and Hollywood institution. Reynolds’ early renown as a reliable and popular performer, often in Spaghetti Westerns, gradually grew until he was offered his breakout starring role in John Boorman’s landmark 1972 drama, Deliverance. The film was also a pivotal success for its three other principals: John Voight, following his acclaimed debut in 1969’s Midnight Cowboy; relatively unknown actor and guitarist Ronny Cox; and newcomer Ned Beatty in his own acting debut.

Based on the lauded 1970 work by American poet and novelist James Dickey, whose popularity exploded following the film, Deliverance is arguably the most revered work from Boorman. The English director began his career as a documentary filmmaker for the BBC, before breaking out in 1967 with the brutal Lee Marvin crime drama Point Blank, now regarded as a neo-noir classic. Boorman’s modest success with feature films eventually paved the way for Deliverance, his first box-office triumph and most enduring feature, alongside his 1981 fantasy epic, Excalibur. Despite his British background, the director brought an unexpected sensitivity to the film’s disturbing, notorious depiction of American folly and endurance.

Dickey’s novel and the film address these themes with a relatively simple story: four Atlanta businessmen set off into the Georgian wilderness for a weekend canoe adventure that becomes a terrifying nightmare. The film’s renowned, eerie banjo sequence and the actors’ grueling stunt work provide a visceral edge to its commentary. Unremittingly dark in tone, the film features a now archetypal depiction of Appalachian hillbillies as monstrous, violent deviants. The protagonists, however, are also shown to be ultimately foolish, arrogant, and morally bankrupt. The film is ambiguous as to whether the brutality of the wilderness and their ordeal bestows the four suburbanites with these qualities, or merely brings them to the surface. In crafting this harrowing depiction of middle class hubris and the fragility of decency, Boorman and the performers created what might be regarded as one of the great American horror films of the late twentieth century.

Film Diary: Ghostbusters

Teresa — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:53:19 +0000

1984 (USA)
Director: Ivan Reitman
Viewed: August 31, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Film Diary: Tropic Thunder

Teresa — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:52:38 +0000

2008 (USA / Germany)
Director: Ben Stiller
Viewed: August 30, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

The Greatest of These Is Love

Andrew — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:06:37 +0000

The Edge of Heaven (Auf der Anderen Seite)
2007 (Germany / Turkey / Italy)
Director: Fatih Akin
Viewed: August 30, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

With The Edge of Heaven, Turkish-German director Fatih Akin offers a mournful, penetrating exhale of affecting cinema, a Shakespearean tragedy for a modern, multi-cultural Europe. Two violent deaths haunt this film, looming calamities that Akin bluntly telegraphs with title cards. (There Will Be Blood, indeed.) Catastrophe awaits us, not to mention the poor souls that populate Akin’s Bremen and Istanbul, gritty landscapes of crumbling buildings and fragile love. In more ways than the survivors will comprehend, these deaths will emerge as transforming phenomena, their bright and black ripples reaching far-flung shores and lives. With six gently compelling characters and an exultant soundtrack, Akin has crafted a meditation on human connection more profound and emotionally persuasive than any recent convoluted ensemble behemoth. Despite its grim–at times bitterly bemused–sensibility, The Edge of Heaven is far from a morbid work. This is awestruck human spectacle at its most unexpected and redemptive, and one of the best films of 2008.

Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) is a Turkish widower dwelling in Germany, where he spends his days watering his tomato plants in between drinking too much, gambling too much, and visiting Yeter (Nursel Köse), a prostitute of the same Anatolian origin. Ali and his adult son, Nejat (Baki Davrak), who teaches German at the local university, have an affectionate but taciturn relationship. They enjoy each other’s company, but have little to discuss and less in common. Yeter, meanwhile, has a daughter in Turkey that she supports, a student who does not know her mother’s real profession. Perhaps wishing to hold the loneliness of his remaining years at bay, Ali offers to pay Yeter the same rate as her brothel if she will live with him as a kept whore. For pragmatic yet proud Yeter, it’s a more temping proposition than it sounds, partly due to the menacing Muslim fanatics that have been harassing her of late. Naturally, there are complications and crises, the nature of which you will need to experience for yourself.

After a time, the film departs Ali’s tale to rendezvous with Yeter’s daughter, Ayten (the gorgeous Nurgül Yesilçay). Pursued by the Turkish police for her participation in a radical communist street protest that turned violent, Ayten travels to Germany with false papers. She has a fiery temper and a longing to see her mother, which contribute to her falling out with her revolutionary comrades. She crashes on a university campus, with its cheap food and abundant spots for a homeless fugitive to sleep. When she begs linguistics student Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska) for money, the German woman offers a meal and a kind ear. Intrigued and touched by Ayten’s plight, Lotte brings her home to stay in her mother’s tidy bungalow. The mother, Susanne (Hanna Schygulla), is a quiet, conservative divorcée whose patience is sorely tested by the arrival of this brash, radical foreigner. Roughly when it becomes apparent that political idealism is not the only thing that attracts Lotte to Ayten, their sketchy ambitions begin to unravel and relationships of all kinds are put to the test.

Three sets of parents and children: two mothers, two daughters, one father, one son. Each set is afflicted with tribulations that rend them apart, some deeply personal and some agonizingly beyond their power to control. How The Edge of Heaven approaches these characters, and the places it eventually takes them, is what makes the film such a marvelously humane achievement. Each of the six principals is conventional in their way, even tiresome. Yet each brims with unexpected and obscured qualities, some deeply touching and others disturbing. Akin’s storytelling has a determined gradualism, one that eschews sudden revelatory jolts for an intensifying awareness of each character’s motives and essence. This graceful approach ensures that the plot’s abundant reversals and serendipities rarely appear dubious. Akin’s aims are denser and more sobering than facile “We Are All Connected” platitudes. In a lesser film, the threads that link the film’s German and Turkish locales would merely be the components of a gaudy cat’s-cradle, a magic trick sans purpose. Here they serve as a means to tenderly convey the echoes and contrasts in the film’s entwined storylines.

There are films where the criss-crossing paths of the characters eventually meet in a rush of revelations. This is not that sort of film. Revealingly, Akin denies the viewer the satisfaction of narrative release as well as a sense of cosmic mercy. He offers moments of tingling anticipation capped only with deflating disappointment. He also plays with cruel, agonizing turns of fate. If only Ayten hadn’t dropped her cell phone; if only Nejat had left the sign on the bulletin board; if only Lotte had turned left instead of right. If only, if only, if only… Akin warmly but firmly urges us to let go of our instinct to game the past or second-guess what is beyond our control. The thematic currents that coarse through The Edge of Heaven are multitude, but the film-maker’s essential message is unambiguous: forgiveness and compassion are the paths to liberation, whether from shame, hatred, or grief.

The actors all deliver captivating portrayals, particularly Yesilçay and Schygulla, who coax tremendous pathos from characters that are fundamentally unpleasant in some respects. Schygulla, a frequent collaborator with the late German director Werner Fassbinder, claims the film’s most stunningly memorable role. Her plump hausfrau journeys through comfort, bitterness, agony, and eventually to a kind of peace, leading us every step of the way. Equally triumphant is the film’s music, an energetic score featuring DJ Shantel’s Balkan gypsy beats and the late Turkish folk-rock singer Kâzım Koyuncu. The lush vocals and rhythms splendidly evoke the film’s aura of Old World heartache and hope. That same mood is embodied in the film’s final, iconic image. Nejat sits passively on a Black Sea beach, waiting for his father to return from a fishing trip, savoring the expectation of a reunion that rage and stubbornness have averted for too long. Human drama simply doesn’t come much better than this.