2010 (USA)
Director: John Cameron Mitchell
Viewed: January 26, 2011
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Frontenac Cinema)
B- - Everything that occurs within Rabbit Hole revolves around a personal cataclysm that is only hinted at for the first twenty minutes or so of the film, a stratagem that proves wholly consistent with the work’s interest in the phenomena of emotional evasion and suppression. The young son of polished upper-middle-class strivers Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) perished eight months ago in a car accident, and although their life is not necessarily in tatters, the couple’s unresolved grief crouches in the room, mocking their hollow gestures towards normalcy. John Cameron Mitchell–creator of brash and bratty indie gambits like Hedwig and Angry Inch and Shortbus–isn’t the obvious choice to helm David Lindsay-Abaire’s adaptation of his own play. While Mitchell’s direction is assured and sensitive to the nuances and diversity of human emotion, Rabbit Hole too often feels like a grimly dutiful exploration of a character blueprint, rather than an authentic tale of sorrow. For a story about unthinkable loss, it exhibits a curious lack of poignancy, one that cannot be explained entirely by Becca’s ruthless shuttering of her emotional landscape. It’s a distinguished film, but frigidly so, and rarely distinctive, apart from its embrace of a curious, scientific sort of solace befitting a faithless world.
B+ - True Grit finds the Coen Brothers, those mischievous delvers of American genre, working for the first time within the parameters of the classical Western, a form that they pursue in a curiously straightforward manner, by and large without their customary cocked eye. The Coens have never been deconstructionists, preferring to employ genre as a valid tool to explore their perennial thematic preoccupations. These, of course, include the random preposterousness of the cosmos, the failure of carefully constructed worldviews, the fundamental venality of humanity, and–when relief from such dire considerations is warranted–the glimmers of comfort that are nonetheless attainable from time to time, usually by means of a simple adjustment in outlook. One might expect these typical concerns to be highlighted in the Brothers’ adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel about a precocious fourteen-year-old girl searching for her father’s murderer in mid-nineteenth-century Indian Territory. However, the source material seems to have compelled to Coens to venture into fresh thematic terrain. While their trademark absurdism still rears its head in places, the film is foremost fixated on the problem of moral systems, and how they are developed, hardened, and revealed. True Grit is also, not coincidentally, the Coens’ most intently psychological film in years. While it never attains the searing cinematic greatness of their recent existential pictures (No Country For Old Men and A Serious Man), it possesses the undeniable appeal of a work made by two masters operating slightly outside their comfort zone.
B- - The film adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s staggeringly popular fantasy novels have perfected a remarkable, distinctive formula. Once the banal hand of Chris Columbus was pried from the franchise following Chamber of Secrets, every chapter in the saga has exhibited the same characteristics: an ever-burgeoning cast of wizards, monsters, and other sundry characters seemingly destined to encompass every British thespian of note; maddeningly convoluted plots, conveyed so sketchily that only devoted fans of the books can hope to comprehend what the hell is going on; stunning, inspired production design overseen by the invaluable Stuart Craig; and exceedingly game, unfailingly charming performances from series principals Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson. The seventh film in the series, the first of a two-part finale, sticks closely to this template, a thoroughly unadventurous and (at this late date) sensible approach. Having shepherded the saga through its previous two chapters, director David Yates has learned that such a formula reliably bestows a patina of epic artistry on the franchise, inoculates it against conventional criticism, and just happens to reap billions of dollars. The films cannot be dismissed as trifling—they represent, for better or worse, the most ambitious work of long-form fantasy cinema in history—but as the series reaches its end, their significance as entertainment to viewers not already hooked on Harry’s adventures is doubtful. Which leads to the most essential question regarding Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1: How good is it, when approached strictly as the penultimate entry in the broader saga? The answer: Exactly as good as it needs to be to bring loyal Potterheads (including yours truly) back for one more outing.
B - 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.
B+ - For over a decade now, Dreamworks Animation has been churning out Shreks, Madagascars, and various other talking animal mediocrities (anyone remember Shark Tale?), jousting with Blue Sky Studios for a distant second-place slot behind American animation’s reigning champion, Pixar. In 2008, Dreamworks managed its first genuinely good film, Kung-Fu Panda, a charming, marvelously designed bit of fluff in the underdog sports movie mold. Lacking contemporary kiddie animation’s characteristic risible pop culture references and cheap scatological humor, Panda hinted at better things to come from the studio in terms of feature animation. And, lo and behold, here we are, two years later, and Dreamworks has delivered the exhilarating, dazzling How to Train Your Dragon, a film that should by all rights be nothing more than disposable entertainment, but attains something much finer. No doubt this is at least partly due to the men at the helm, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, who were the minds behind that oddball late Disney Renaissance marvel Lilo & Sitch. However, it’s undeniable that Dragon feels like the progeny of a studio that has finally found its stride and resolved to aim high. The story is simple, the design breathtaking, the action rousing, and the humor mostly warm and sweet. While Dragon lacks the grace and thematic sophistication of a Pixar film, it is by any measure a damn splendid animated feature.
A- - 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.