tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43423699105965814032024-03-16T11:53:21.752-07:00Coleman's Corner in Cinema......Stimulating analysis of "classic" and "contemporary" cinema.Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.comBlogger146125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-12876026933494995852018-07-12T04:00:00.000-07:002018-07-12T04:00:06.871-07:00Ghost Stories (2017)<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Just watched </span><i style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Ghost Stories</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> written and directed by the team of Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, and starring Nyman, Martin Freeman, Paul Whitehouse and Alex Lawther. This was a bit of a surprise insomuch as it mainly succeeds as a kind of 2010s take on 1940s British horror pictures, perhaps most incisively the spooky 1945 ghost-themed anthology film </span><i style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Dead of Night</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">, after which </span><i style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Ghost Stories</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> tends to play as almost wholly postmodern but at least, when truly necessary, earnest--and yet, by turns almost bombastically humorous and deeply-but-fleetingly sad--tribute after a sort. Numerous other horror pictures, not all of them British, are lovingly recalled, too, but this is not mere pastiche. The screenplay by Dyson and Nyman is a sturdily-constructed piece; even if a certain final act shifting of meaning does not fly for particular viewers, the point that it seemed readily apparent that this was where the entire 98-minute skein was destined all along mitigates from the sensation that at least some people may have in believing the film has played some cruel trick on them.</span><br style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">No, if anything the final movement of </span><i style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Ghost Stories</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> is almost too pat, too pedestrian. That the film features a visual schema that keeps the viewer guessing at all, even if there is nothing especially singularly shocking in the way certain antagonistic supernatural specters and apparitions are depicted or the meaning behind their appearances is brought to overarching meaning, is commendable. Fortunately, the almost soothing nature of the picture's murky and shadowy </span><i style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">mise-en-scene</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> wins us over in spite of whatever limitations the film's trajectory become apparent. </span><br style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">It is in that atmospheric minutiae, in the sweeping vistas such as a wind-burnt knoll dotted by a pair of caliginous silhouettes, that the hard-earned lucubration of the horror genre falls away from us, almost akin to suspending disbelief entire, and the film makes the most out of that audience participation in allowing the magicians to do their work. An extended sequence with the claustrophobic setting of a condemned women's mental asylum playing its own character is altogether predictable but almost surprisingly effective, heightening tension through tricks involving sight and sound. A much-later set-piece in a large house is perhaps the film at its strongest, following Freeman's snorting, ostensibly insouciant character as he discovers a terrible secret.</span><br style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The film boasts plenty of calling cards, from the aforementioned </span><i style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Dead of Night</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> to </span><i style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Haunting</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> (Robert Wise's classic), from David Lynch's </span><i style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Eraserhead</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> to a host of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century horror pictures. </span><i style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Ghost Stories</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">, to reiterate a point, is quite funny in places and reminiscent, too, of Hammer Horror features, particularly ones marinated in a sense of tongue-in-cheek British humor. </span><i style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Monster Club</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> by Roy Ward Baker with its three tales of ghosts and paranormal entities is another signpost as </span><i style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Ghost Stories</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> mixes the funny with the ghoulish, the offbeat British wisecrack with the macabre. </span><br style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">While the film exhibits plenty of surprising elements, what lingers most, even after a final credits serenaded by an inspired, rather shocking popular tune, is the psychological ramifications for the protagonist and the orbit of sinister and wicked forces about him. And, especially, one horrifically motionless shot, of a man in bed and some sort of specter quite deliberately haunting him, lights flickering on and off like some rock concert stage. Sometimes a good "B-movie" gives one a great deal to chew on, as it were, with one lasting image. </span><i style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Ghost Stories</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> fits the bill.</span></span>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-75090007224891509622018-06-17T04:22:00.000-07:002018-06-17T04:22:15.155-07:00Hereditary (2018)<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">This is a troubling but also troubled film. It will sound like a cop-out but this is an instance in which the term "mixed bag" is judiciously applied. Firstly, the tale itself: nearly as bleak as it gets, this is a film unafraid to visit some caliginous corners of the mind, heart and soul. Much has been made out of the listless, almost languid pace. First words overheard in the cinema as a couple were leaving, from the man: "I kind of liked it, I guess, but it was <i>sooo sloooow</i>..." Yes, this is a film willing to test the patience of a population largely only interested in instant gratification. So kudos. Likewise, while the writer-director Ari Aster does deliver some requisite-for-the-genre "jump scares," that is not what <i>Hereditary </i>is largely trading in; most of the film is built, as though Aster is his lead protagonist Annie--played with a commendable sense of visceral, unkempt despair by Toni Collette--and he is, as she does with so many small models of houses and strange, unnerving scenes, constructing this tale piece by piece. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">A sublimer variation of <i>Hereditary </i>would have correctly drawn comparisons to the Led Zeppelin classic rock skein "Stairway to Heaven," as Aster assiduously builds this cathedral to the macabre and hopelessness, working it toward a culmination that sees a twenty-minute or so stretch of the film in its third act play out in almost transcendentally discomfiting fashion. An agonizingly glacial sequence in which a character wanders about a possibly empty house after awaking, migrating from one pitilessly black room to another, is a genuine showstopper of earned existential horror, and, for a little while, the casual, matter-of-fact revelation of a chilling actuality that catapults the motion picture into its denouement--a swath of the film, which, it must be said, is far less convincing--is one of the most simply, consummately realized pieces of horror filmmaking this century. Let it be said that when <i>Hereditary </i>hits its peaks, it grazes against unconditional greatness. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Unfortunately, the film is, for all of its ubiquity of the same general mood of unrelenting despair and misery, rather surprisingly uneven. One third act twist is almost laughably telegraphed from the moment a particularly helpful character showed up. Consequently the sense of shock Aster was doubtless going for is a gigantic, wheezing misfire. Moreover, though the film is largely impeccably cast--Collette is terrific, Gabriel Byrne, playing a passive husband and father, nevertheless displays exquisite artistry in how he simply listens to other thespians speaking through their characters--some characters have such a minimum of agency and the screenplay is so repetitive in making <i>Hereditary </i>a bruised and blistering saga of familial heartache and trauma, that the process of crawling over the broken glass Aster has sprinkled about for the audience to traverse over is not particularly rewarding from either a rote, narrative perspective or from the macro-thematic vantage point. It is here where the film stumbles most thoroughly, falling well short of films such as <i>Rosemary's Baby </i>and <i>The Exorcist, </i>horror epics representing a sort of unabashed flexing of genre muscles while deftly, deeply surveying a litany of sociological, religious, familial and perhaps fleetingly even political considerations. <i>Hereditary, </i>were it a dish, would be cooked turkey with turkey dressing, served after the completion of a set of cold-cut turkey <i>hors d'ouevre. </i>While the film's quality waxes and wanes like the mountains serving as foreboding background to a critical funeral about a third of the way through, Aster is, to a fault, as it turns out, committed to the same dismal tone, visual gloominess, disorienting close-ups of faces as though this were an early and unembarrassed Steven Spielberg-, Brian De Palma- or John Carpenter-authored late '70s, early '80s fright-fest by way of an especially claustrophobic Ingmar Bergman chamber piece such as <i>Cries and Whispers. </i>It's all of one taste, even when the picture takes a misstep and loses its way, either by endeavoring to downright shock and disturb--one grisly close-up is admittedly almost unshakable as visual touchstone--or by having a lack of more fluid characterization, which comes to harm it as <i>Hereditary </i>attempts to raise the stakes, even when it does, however briefly, succeed in becoming a legitimately scary film. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">As one who adores Roman Polanski's horror films such as <i>Repulsion </i>and <i>The Tenant</i>, this film's slow-burn approach generally works best. However, it is the sameness of the film--until things truly spiral out of control once and for all--that is wearing audiences down and compelling any to complain about the film's running time, not the picture's length, not in the era where most Marvel movies are well over two hours.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">From the beheading of a bird that recalls Michael Haneke's <i>The White Ribbon</i> to a sequence involving fire that was more arresting as part of the film's trailer than it is as part of the actual film, Aster's <i>Hereditary, </i>in simultaneously extending its reach and being dreadfully deterministic about it, finds too many pitfalls to altogether work, ironically succumbing to the very genre trappings the film seems to want to keep at proverbial arm's length. The conclusion in particular strikes one as distinctly familiar territory for this sort of film, and the mechanics of the contrivances and possible conspiracy, leading toward the inevitable horizon line remain, in unison, both distinctly predictable--especially when brought to the fore in the personage of that aforementioned helpful character--and almost obtusely impenetrable. While the film's dark despair feels like genuine heartache and self-examination by Aster, the mounting of paranormal ornamentation is at its best when it obscured, behind creaking walls or hovering over a teenager's bed, abstract and only defined so much as it must be the approximation of entering hell for a parent to lose a child. Conversely it is at its worst when Aster attempts to shoehorn the investigative tropes of, say, <i>The Conjuring, </i>spoon-feeding the audience in the final minutes when for the better part of two intentionally painful hours he had kept said audience on a strict diet of spartan rations. That's a considerable problem for <i>Hereditary, </i>which only moments beforehand seemed to be on to something unmistakable and terrifyingly true, not just of ghosts or demons or entities, or other supernatural entities... But the more bluntly and perhaps importantly how vital it is that families do not fall apart just when seemingly everything in heaven, hell and earth want them broken up and perhaps sold as spare parts. </span>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-41862887894887482832018-06-17T03:52:00.000-07:002018-06-17T03:52:26.129-07:00First Reformed (2018)<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3; font-size: 14px;">The film features a multitudinous array of parallels with Ingmar Bergman's <i>Winter Light. </i>This is one of Paul Schrader's mountains, and feels like a summation to his art. The aspect ratio, the stinging, biting cinematographic unease conjured by the picture's stark cinematography, Ethan Hawke's sensational, mesmerizing performance.. Everything <i>First Reform </i>presents haunts, bewitches, chills. This effort is latter day Schrader's mightiest swing for the fences. Achingly well-written with empathy for all characters but next to no reachable solace for any, the film is about how people address the gaping gulf, the merciless, vexing void which exists in their lives and must be addressed. Hawke's pastor eloquently contending that wisdom rests in comprehending the duality of hope and despair and accepting that paradigm is as lucid as it is captivating. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3; font-size: 14px;">Channeling Robert Bresson yet again, as he did so many times before in his career, most pointedly with the endings to both <i>American Gigolo </i>(where the appropriation admittedly failed for the most part) and <i>Light Sleeper </i>(where it worked perfectly), borrowing from the final visual and audial note of Bresson's <i>Pickpocket </i>each time, here Schrader adopts and adapts a loose rearranging of the set-up and protagonist from <i>Diary of a Country Priest</i>. Here, much as with Bresson's 1951 drama, Schrader doggedly follows the internal battle within the "country priest" or pastor as he passionately posits that in a world atomized beyond the point of pervasive loneliness, the act of loving someone or nurturing one's own troubled faith or finding solace in expansive political causes, even when adopting deeply flawed methods, find in their common root the bitter, suffocating void. </span></span></div>
Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-77251373707933852102010-07-15T13:16:00.000-07:002010-07-15T21:58:34.399-07:00Iron Man 2<p><em>Iron Man 2</em> is the anti-superhero superhero movie with a genuine antihero (not the Dirty Harry-like ruffian typically associated with the term but the Camusian definition of such), a quarter-lazy, quarter-crazy, quarter-bored and quarter-decent guy in Tony Stark played by a nearly sheepish Robert Downey, Jr. The <em>Iron Man</em> movies have taken a curious, if not entirely surprising course due to their protagonist's singular station (he is naturally the one man who could privatize world peace, as he declares to an overbearing Senator at a committee hearing)—they tend to play out like in-the-moment snapshots at the dull underpinnings of being at the top of the world. Stark's world is that of fast-moving sojourns to the latest cocktail party, decorated by wandering champaign glasses and fetching women who appear to adore him. When confronted by a rival arms manufacturer with the crushingly obvious name of Hammer (a slumming Sam Rockwell who endeavors to craft a personification of obnoxiousness and just about succeeds in his single-minded quest), Downey's Stark verbally slaps him away like a feckless gnat. He undermines Hammer's interview with a pretty young female reporter. He upstages him whenever given the opportunity. Before long the battle of pettiness and no-bid contracts seems to approximate a schoolyard rivalry between a couple of bratty children. The 2008 <em>Iron Man</em> at least attempted to embroider a slightly credulous human relationship between Downey's Stark and the evil father figure honcho played by a cagey Jeff Bridges in lieu of Stark's own long-gone distant father. The sequel, however, lacks the delicate subtlety of narrative that made the first <em>Iron Man</em> accessibly fugacious junk food that tasted well enough in the moment only to be forgotten about momentarily afterwards.</p><p>The<em> Iron Man </em>movies represent a franchise-specific coloration that recall the “white telephone” movies of the 1930s. In the mire of financial crisis and an unending recession wedded to a “jobless recovery,” Americans can approach Stark and his band of over-the-top friends, associates and enemies as a quick-fix dose of escapism. And like the “white telephone” pictures that today play in remastered clarity on Turner Classic Movies, the <em>Iron Man</em> movies present the rich and famous (in this franchise largely made up of arms manufacturers and variegated “masters of the universe”) in a way that undercuts the glamor with the creeping sensations of banality and tedium. The way Stark orders up one computerized hologram after another in his spacious, empty workshop only to toss them aside paints a portrait of a man battling the one feature of his life that outlasts the otherwise impermanent day-to-day meet-and-greet deluge of nothingness, sheer listlessness and boredom dragging down a man characterized by almost extreme pococurantism. Like the “white telephone” films of yesteryear that simultaneously glorified and scrupulously scrutinized the rich elite, <em>Iron Man 2</em> at its most ambitious strives to be some kind of engaging balancing act between offering hagiography and harsh critique of its protagonist. </p><p>While it is refreshing to see at least one superhero who is not crippled by angst, nor woefully embarrassed by his superpowers or capabilities, the commendable yields to the wrongheaded as the exasperatingly tired narrative overtakes anything else. To make amends for the lack of moral considerations on the part of the franchise's hero, the film is bogged down in the quicksand that is Tony's great malady that is quickly killing him. He's dying because of his own powers. The core of his chest—symbolically representing the coolly unrevealing Stark's open heart—is poisoning him. And thus the picture spends an interminable period during which Stark conducts one of the most monotonous and boring science projects ever recorded by the cinema. Watching the picture unfurl, it becomes apparent that the average child would rightly be driven to madness by the film's lack of drive and dynamism. What is left is Stark toying around with his gadgets and formulations, his narcissism redeemed by his unerring ability to become better and more fulfilled by his father leaving a reel of film for him telling him that he really did love him after all. And so the symbolic cuteness of the circular “heart” finds replacement in a triangle, probably for no greater motive than to create a new line of Iron Man action figures at Toys R Us. </p><p>There is a Russian named Ivan Vanko out for revenge against the Stark name in the franchise's umpteenth enactment of “the sins of the father revisiting the son” played by Mickey Rourke, who just so happens to have the four or so lines of dialogue that are actually sharp from Justin Theroux's rambling screenplay. Rourke is an actor who finds a way to persevere through the most pedestrian material and here he speaks in a gloriously heavy Russian accent while mumbling on about the Starks being a “family of thieves and butchers” who “rewrite [their] own history.” What would possibly be insurmountable for others, Rourke finds merely <em>tant mieux</em> and he keeps running with the ball. It turns out that Cold War sins still haunt a couple decades later as Rourke's malevolent Muscovite seeks simple retribution against the exemplar of American grandiosity and eminence, the Stark family, as one son vows to destroy another for the lives their fathers led. </p><p>What honestly lingers, however, is the almost smothering hipness of this sequel. Each of the big three cable news networks is shown at separate times and with each visit, Stark grabs that trustiest of domestic weapons, the remote control, and mutes the motor-mouthed talking heads with the assured ruthlessness of a billionaire eccentric. Stark, in his visit to the Senate, informs the panel of imperious wannabe autocrats that the rogue nations and terrorist groups who threaten civilization are “years away” from acquiring the technology of his own Iron Man suit (with or without gorgeous custom paint job, he does not reveal) in a perspicuous nod to current events involving Iran and critics of a heightened posture against the Tehran regime arguing in identical language. The painting of Stark to mimic the “Hope” picture of Obama is the icing on the cake. The movie is, weakly, anemically and yet somehow relentlessly, pointing to its own relevance as some kind of barely-cloaked political satire. </p><p>All other characters seem lost in this movie. <em>Iron Man</em> two years ago told a feminist-leaning tale of an under-appreciated executive assistant Pepper Potts played by Gwyneth Paltrow; took some time out for a buddy portion with Rhodey (an enthusiastic Terrence Howard here replaced by an excessively modulated and sober Don Cheadle); scaled a poor man's Oedipal conflict as the central story arc that at least registered as important to Stark; and most essentially wrapped these threads together around the central character to create the Aristotelian and rewarding spectacle of a faux-solitary man directly affected and altered by his orbit of personages. Compared to this sequel, that film was an accomplished tale of the intimate and the epic. Visually, too, there is nothing that lingers about this effort. When Stark, adorned by a poor man's prototype for the Iron Man suit, a sterling-colored, unwieldy body suit, burned the pan-generational work of the Stark name, father and son alike, it represented a pop-cultural appreciation of the ancient, and gave mainstream voice to concerns older than the Homeric relating of Priam and Hector juxtaposed with Odysseus and Telemachus. This is almost ironically where <em>Iron Man 2</em> bites off far more than it can possibly chew with its sidestepping into prosaic tangents and general lack of narrative potency. What came off as effortless once, appears impossible now. Something is not right when the consumer tries to piece together what the junk food was supposed to taste like.</p>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com206tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-6257505649598724962010-06-15T16:08:00.000-07:002010-06-15T22:02:01.029-07:00Shutter Island (2010)<p>Like all Martin Scorsese pictures, his newest, <em>Shutter Island</em>, is chiefly about sin. How it helps to define the human condition, how it affects the protagonist in life and the detrimental value it has to the eternal soul. Catholic filmmakers have varying ways of addressing sin and most pointedly guilt—but Scorsese's pictures are laced with it like a poisonous substance hidden in a cinematic tonic. As he has aged, Scorsese's films have become increasingly somber in tone. No longer is the rabidly gnawing theme allowed to remain a largely unspoken undercurrent beneath the characterizations and their journeys but it has emerged, front and center, as the monstrous entity meriting its own blunt manifestation. Consequently, Scorsese's films have become ostensibly more garish, brassy and intentionally meretricious. Whether it be an aging Scorsese's shift into the darkest underbelly of city life juxtaposed with deeply religious iconography and sacrificial angst (<em>Bringing Out the Dead</em>); his personifications of brutish, unforgiving violence (Bill the Butcher in <em>Gangs of New York</em>); or Satanic depravity and unyielding narcissism (Frank Costello in <em>The Departed</em>)—the latter of whom are each allowed to be viewed as seductive demons with Jack Nicholson's gangster explicitly uttering, <em>Non Serviam</em>, a quote directly from James Joyce's own embodiment of Satan; or the despairing madness of Howard Hughes partly viewed through the prism of masculine dominance over the female (<em>The Aviator</em>). </p><p>Scorsese characters have tended to mature with him. From the perplexing sexual frustration of <em>Who's That Knocking at My Door?</em> to the feral screaming and yelling of <em>Mean Streets</em> serving as backdrop to prayerful hope to the inchoate, raving ramblings of Travis Bickle in <em>Taxi Driver</em>, Scorsese's principal characters now speak of the decay and rot of civilization (<em>Gangs of New York</em>), are once-in-a-lifetime inventive eccentrics (<em>The Aviator</em>) and judiciously quote Joyce and Nathaniel Hawthorne (<em>The Departed</em>). To take on two of Scorsese's mobster odysseys, <em>Goodfellas</em> and <em>Casino</em>, part of the fun is recognizing the punchline about two hours before the characters do: what they are engaged in cannot last forever, and they will, to quote Scorsese himself concerning the former, “pay and pay and pay.” <em>Goodfellas</em> remains a compelling gangland tale not because any character voices his innermost unease—here Scorsese's characters remain frustratingly standoffish and deeply insecure with themselves, telling (through voice-over) the details of their myriad crimes and underworld schemes but never letting on that they wish they had changed something about themselves rather than the simple, unfortunate details. (This is probably because the characters are sincere. Henry Hill's final address to the audience is unconcerned with forgiveness or genuine remorse. It's actually a pathetic cry of self-pity.) <em>Casino</em>, openly more grand and operatic as early on as its opening credits (again, not coincidentally Bach's "Passion According to St. Matthew") before which the protagonist is engulfed in hellish flame, operates similarly, though the visual and musical motifs are more robustly signposting ruin and damnation. The 1995 picture's tagline, “No one stays at the top forever,” is quite the understatement.</p><p>Just as Jewish artists become more concerned with Jewish questions as they age (for two current American examples, the Coen brothers and Steven Spielberg), Scorsese's admitted fixation on religion and his Catholic faith has found itself increasingly naked within his films. <em>The Last Temptation of Christ</em> posited the question of Christ's divinity as a kind of test. And that is most fitting: Scorsese's films are tests, and he is most comfortable in letting his characters fail because Catholic teaching demonstrates that we all fail. That is a most sobering realization, demanding stringent acceptance, and it is unsurprising that Scorsese's films have only become more consumed by this as the consummate filmmaking artist becomes an older man. With <em>Shutter Island</em>, Scorsese approximates the late Catholic, Alfred Hitchcock, as well as the horror “B movies” produced by Val Lewton. Scorsese produced and acted in the 2007 documentary, <em>Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton—The Man in the Shadows</em> and his appreciation for the films shepherded by Lewton and directed by such noted stylists as <a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2008/08/out-of-past-1947.html">Jacques Tourneur</a> and Robert Wise is heralded by <em>Shutter Island</em>. The film is a kind of melange of eerie horror, suspenseful film noir and psychological drama with Scorsese's own fascinations embedded throughout. Based on a Dennis Lehane novel of the same name, Scorsese stays only too faithful the the original source material (much more on this later), but provides the visual palette with a richly-defined atmospheric dread that seems all his own. Imitating the stark black and white cinematography of such noted directors of photography as Nicholos Musuraca in numerous “grade-B” cult classics, Scorsese and his cinematographer Robert Richardson etch a color scheme that is riddled with sinister shadows, unsettling silhouettes and the disorienting contrast between characters' flesh-colored faces and the gray, nubilous backgrounds. Almost jarringly, this aesthetic is bracingly layered under an epical emulation of the works of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the skyward fantasias: in particular, a cliff sequence recalls <em>Black Narcissus</em> almost impeccably. </p><p><em>Shutter Island</em> is said to be, at its heart, a genre piece, but that term becomes more of a self-contained statement of compromise than anything else. Scorsese is not so timid as to avoid linking his “genre piece” to Hitchcock, Lewton, Merian C. Cooper (<em>Shutter Island</em>'s opening involving a fog-shrouded ship approaching an eerily beckoning island cannot help but remind the viewer of another favorite classic of the director's), Scorsese favorite Samuel Fuller and Robert Aldrich (the picture's specific plot points to Fuller's <em>Shock Corridor</em> and the comments concerning red-baiting and fear of hydrogen bombs from insane patients echoes similar concerns as Fuller and Aldrich's <em>Kiss Me Deadly</em>). If films by those and other helmers can be more rigorously appraised than merely labeling them a “genre piece,” surely Scorsese's imitation of same can be surveyed in similar fashion. Scorsese is something of a cinematic extremist, which can yield diverse reactions in an audience when he is approaching an ostensibly more traditional canvas of content (all that has to be read is the basic plot synopsis and suddenly every imaginable suspense/mystery- and horror-tinged Hollywood trope presents itself: spooky island, hurricane, mental asylum, a missing woman, a possible neo-noir conspiracy). <em>Shutter Island</em>'s opening is so deliciously old-fashioned—hardly a better term exists for it—with the terse, hardboiled dialogue with deliberate, hair-raising beats (Mark Ruffalo's Chuck: “All I know is it's [the complex on the island they are approaching by ferry] a mental institution...” Leonardo DiCaprio's Teddy lets the words soak in, squints as he wrestles with his cigarette and chimes in for sheer effect: “For the criminally insane....”). This is linked to the most shamelessly ominous, drumming thriller score for a major Hollywood picture made by an A-list filmmaker this side of a Spielberg-John Williams collaboration—here, Scorsese and famed songwriter and singer for The Band, first documented by Scorsese's 1978 rock show documentary <em>The Last Waltz</em>, Robbie Robertson, go all out, complementing the foghorn of the vessel in the opening seconds of the film with ascending French horns adorning Ingram Marshall's marvelously piquant and frightening “Fog Tropes.” The picture is bursting at the seams with ingenius musical inclusions of such noteworthy artists as John Adams, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Gyorgy Ligeti, Lou Harrison, Alfred Schnittke, Max Richter, Nam June Paik and Giacinto Scelsi, as well as Brian Eno, Mahler and Dinah Washington (for the end credits). Though scoffed at as being excessively melodramatic, the score and soundtrack of <em>Shutter Island</em> are no more inappropriate or distancing than the Penderecki-influenced Jonny Greenwood score for <em>There Will Be Blood</em>. Some critics have perhaps misjudged the extent to which Scorsese and his collaborators (Robertson, Richardson and longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker) have gone in attempting to not merely imitate but recreate the pounding psychological barrage of sight and sound filmmakers of the era depicted (mid-1950s) sought to create in their time.</p><p>Scorsese has long named Orson Welles and <a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2008/06/shadows-1959.html">John Cassavetes</a> as two directors who inspired him the most. This paradoxical appreciation of the respectively robustly theatrical and the sincerely quotidian means of presentation has long found itself deep within Scorsese's canon. What makes Scorsese's more propulsive pictures rather outstanding is the way in which he celebrates the artifice of filmmaking itself. This most increasingly rare celebration of filmmaking finds itself compactly molded into each sequence and sometimes each frame of a Scorsese picture. This Hitchcockian adulation of artifice and artificial cinema creates an immediately more <em>meta </em>reading of Scorsese's films. The viewer may not be gasping when a police captain falls to his death in <em>The Departed</em>—he may be counting the X's and chuckling at the connection to the Howard Hawks gangster saga<em> Scarface</em>, which, with its sheer animalistic ferocity, can be seen as a clear precursor to Scorsese's own mob chronicles. Likewise, when <em>Shutter Island</em>'s psychologically and sensorially wracked protagonist hurriedly ascends a lighthouse's spiral staircase, the viewer may not be entirely wrapped up in the moment of the plot's winding down, but rather note how the lighthouse serves as firstly ominous location, secondly as a tangible goal for the hero's journey narrative, thirdly as a thematic pun, particularly in how the mysteries locked away inside are to shed light on the protagonist's sacred quest and fourthly as the venue in which Scorsese recreates the final climax of Hitchcock's <em>Vertigo</em>, also about a deeply troubled man haunted by guilt and subconscious yearning to spiritually self-immolate while apparently searching for all of the answers of his own entrapping conspiracy; meanwhile, the spiral staircase itself is a reminder of director Robert Siodmak and his atmospherically gothic mystery <em>The</em> <em>Spiral Staircase</em> while creating the same physical and spiritual ascension to answers that Hitchcock engendered for <a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2008/05/vertigo-1958.html"><em>Vertigo</a></em>'s conclusive movement.</p><p><em>Shutter Island</em>'s underlying theme resonates as a Scorsese motif unto itself. DiCaprio's Federal Marshall, Teddy Daniels, is, according to one of the more sinisterly-depicted doctors of the institution, Doctor Naehring (Max von Sydow, once again playing a German immigrant), a “m[a]n of violence.” This common Scorsese archetype wedded to the director's obsession with guilt finds itself at the center of <em>Shutter Island</em>, but in the case of the actual plot, serves as a kind of running joke (of the dark-humored variety) tying in with the realities of the picture's climax. Though some of the connections may be overtly artificial, it is not invalid to pursue what certain details mean in Scorsese's oeuvre. Teddy, like Travis Bickle, is a veteran of war. The wartime experiences of Teddy are narratively drawn out by the inclusion of a Mahler record. Scorsese's own flourishes are vivid and reminders for later on when the viewer attempts to appreciate the picture a second time, of how subjective memories truly operate. (For two examinations for how vitally subjective sensorial memory plays out when beautifully rendered through recent cinema, <a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2009/02/eternal-sunshine-of-spotless-mind-2004.html"><em>Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind</em></a> and <a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2009/07/tetro-2009.html"><em>Tetro</em></a> are suitable excursions into not entirely dissimilar territory.) What Scorsese recognizes is that the mind thinks and remembers in cinematic fashion (and to accommodate the haphazardness of the mind, Scorsese fractures the backstory flashback narrative, since, unlike film, memory does not unspool from beginning to end in perfect linear fashion). A row of Germans is mowed down at the Dachau concentration camp, and Scorsese's camera follows in one of his usual tracking shots, as each guard is killed in nearly flawless right-to-left order (for the American soldiers). Is this an artistic flurry or commentary on the lack of realism? One of the admittedly enjoyable aspects of Shutter Island is that its plot, characterizations, usage of flashbacks and even the memorable final sequence stir debate and questions as to what is real (in the context of the film, since none of it is actually real, to paraphrase Brian De Palma's editorial on cinema) and most importantly what is intended. How much of the picture's facade is directly tied to the mechanics of the plot—sometimes rewarding (such as a couple of cute cutaways to a character who's “in on it” all along while being spoken of by a mental patient questioned by another character), sometimes dubious at best (the entire premise, without being too liberal in how Lehane's narrative resolves itself, is ultimately a less convincing and vastly more earnest variation on William Peter Blatty's <em>The Ninth Configuration</em>)—and how much of it is simply part and parcel of Scorsese's filmic auto-critique on film? </p><p>Lehane's novel is honestly one of his better offerings, and it is not difficult to see why Scorsese would be attracted to the material. The novel is intrinsically cinematic, with many potentially juicy visuals for the big screen, and it more than dabbles in Scorsese's aforementioned concerns of masculine violence and exhausting guilt. Scorsese gifts Lehane's clumsier bits and pieces with a gracefulness, and condenses much of what needs to be condensed: Michelle Williams as DiCaprio's deceased wife haunting him dreams is probably the most pointed example of both improvements, and the way in which Scorsese shoots her, from her demise into ash that blows away in Teddy's longing arms to mimicking the famed <a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2008/05/vertigo-1958.html"><em>Vertigo</em></a> sequence by panning the camera around DiCaprio and Williams ala James Stewart and Kim Novack. The beautifully-rendered interweaving of Teddy's concentration camp experiences with his long destroyed domestic life to the case he is working on at the institution in an extended dream sequence is disconcertingly jarring and authentic to the way in which the mind constructs epic settings for symbolic chimeras to sometimes run amok. One character has himself created a monster responsible for a most heinous crime. The figure is a grievously scarred, terribly ugly embodiment of all that represents wrongdoing to the character who has created him. The screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis includes cutting comments by at least two inmates whose insanity may make them perversely more sane than others: they are horrified by the reality of the hydrogen bomb. And the unnamed warden of the mental institution, played by Ted Levine, is given a chilling speech about Teddy's violent tendencies and the violence of God (exemplified by a devastating hurricane storm on the island). The warden's comment that he and Teddy have “known each other for centuries” posits the picture's weightier delineation between violent men on possibly opposing sides. The warden's remarks that the only moral order is, “Can my violence overcome your violence?” ties in with Teddy's earlier statement that the warden looked like an “ex-military prick,” reestablishing the correlation between the role of the military in conditioning men of different times in different wars like Teddy and Travis, to countless late '40s and early '50s film noir protagonists, into creatures of violence. (Max von Sydow's Dr. Naehring offers the difference between referring to Teddy and Chuck as “men of violence” and calling them plainly “violent men.”) </p><p><em>Shutter Island</em> is home to numerous solid performances. DiCaprio is a pleasure to watch for most of the film, in part because his patina of innocence serves as a suitable contrast to the picture's generally gloomy mood and environs. Mark Ruffalo is perfectly cast as Chuck, and he is as adapt as any current Hollywood actor at playing roles in a straightforwardly naturalistic way. Here, Ruffalo reminds of an early 1950s Dana Andrews. Perhaps more importantly, in the case of Chuck in <em>Shutter Island</em>, a novel and motion picture leave a character underdeveloped for an important reason. A certain early scene in which DiCaprio eyes Ruffalo's handing of his sidearm provides the groundwork for their chemistry as actors and characters throughout the rest of the picture while touching upon Scorsese's more blunt approximation of the gun as masculine phallic symbol. Ben Kingsley as Doctor Cawley is a case of an actor being almost too well-cast in a certain role. Patricia Clarkson acts up a storm as a red herring character whose primary function is to provide a fairly provocative retelling of Plato's Allegory of the Cave while cranking up the viewer's senses of paranoia. Emily Mortimer has a standout scene that plays out quite differently depending on the context of the quantity of the viewer's acquired information (several performances, including a brief visit by Jackie Earle Haley, fall under this classification in <em>Shutter Island</em>). </p><p>Most troublesome is predictably the picture's protracted explanation-laden denouement. The voluminous, tiring expository feels decidedly mechanical, as though Scorsese himself is almost gritting his teeth at the alleged necessity of it. That the film struggles in aping the novel at this juncture comes as no surprise at first, though Scorsese does rebound with reasserting a visually rewarding aftertaste involving the final flashback's staging, and optically rendering the stinging reality of Teddy's identity. Scorsese's most disconsolate films always end on one last, final, excellent statement, and here Scorsese finds his best, most natural and memorable coda since <em>The Age of Innocence</em> saw Daniel Day-Lewis's Newland Archer found himself utterly forceless and feckless, unable to muster the slightest measure of resistance to his fate. Ruffalo initially steals the scene with a powerful head movement that resonates long after the final credits. Yet DiCaprio's best line of the entire picture is saved for last, and its evident duality plays to the ambiguousness of his condition as the film's running time expires. Is he, like Jake La Motta in <em>Raging Bull</em>, beyond all hope, wounding himself as surely over and over as the boxer piteously did in one of Scorsese's most iconic scenes? Or is he following an epiphany and pursuing it through a zealous martyr's conviction? </p><p>Whether or not <em>Shutter Island</em> succeeds in its key goals is up for the viewer to decide, as with any film, but at least the Scorsese picture feels like new ground for the filmmaker. <em>The Departed</em> was understandably chided by some as a kind of “leftovers” picture for Scorsese, and his previous two films were deemed by many as vaguely empty lunges at Oscar's approval for decades of great filmmaking (ironically, it was the “leftovers” movie-movie that gifted Scorsese with his long-elusive Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture). All of those films, however well-crafted, did not seem to boast much in the way of artistic progression for their creator. While <em>Shutter Island</em> is itself a contradiction of sorts—a movie-movie on the surface that is actually a formal genre exercise, an outwardly “minor” work that nevertheless recalls some of Scorsese's most personal works such as the ethereal parable <em>Bringing Out the Dead</em>—there is an unmistakable joyfulness to watching it, even if it comes with the knowledge that it is flawed. Whether one wishes to see the institution's various wards as Scorsese's meditations on Giovanni Boccaccio's <em>The Decameron</em> with its almost bitingly caustic manner in which each level of the asylum's heirarchy is depicted like medieval avatars of the church (which would follow with the film's essaying of science—psychiatric as well as physical, in the overpowering of mind and population with psychopharmacy and hydrogen bombs—as the twentieth century's religion); the fetishization of Scorsese's leading man for the umpteenth time (Scorsese's specifically Catholic linkage between the spirit and the flesh finds expression in both the ritualized disrobing of the male protagonist and also, as in the 1991 remake, <em>Cape Fear</em>, iconic Christian tattoos reappear in one of <em>Shutter Island</em>'s more disturbing sequences upon the back of a Ward C “patient”); to Scorsese's establishing of Teddy's images of his deceased wife to correlate with the “Scorsesean” trope of the whitely “virginal” femme prototype (arguably complemented by the wife's pallid, almost ghostly complexion); to simply creating a film his long-ago cinematic shepherd, Roger Corman, would admire and be proud of, <em>Shutter Island</em> is at least indicative of a director taking a step forward and reaching back to his roots, all at once. </p>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com203tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-43626722020432130232009-10-28T04:24:00.000-07:002009-12-17T01:37:03.224-08:00Sleepless SoliloquyHis fists clenched the now recreant blanket, its frigid facade sending merciless tingles of despair and discomfort. Cold, caliginous environ seals him off from the whole world, the voluminous blackness of which could only be surmised from this most desolate posts. As the pitiless night consumes this seemingly forsaken earth, the minutes tick. The incandescent digital lines configurated into numbers tick by, the glowing green splashing against the ponderous gulf of the dark which separates all corners of the clammy, nearly gelid bedroom. Eyes briefly closed, a terrible white flash compels them to reawaken. Troublemakers equipped with flashlights, traveling on the nearby sidewalk, busily exploiting this most dreadful of nights? A most disquieting sensation caresses the forehead; cool air, as though it were breathed from a malevolent, hovering demon, funnels downward. Eyes dart about in directionless frenzy. A finger nervously twitches. The heart begins to race.<br /><br />Time stands still. Minutes drone on and on, until the barren vastness of this humble room consumes whole hours. Eyes struggle to shut, only to reopen at the slightest peculiar noise. Each aural disquisition of the little, merciless devils who run amok at the unholy witching hour attracts immediate attention. If only the ears could be closed with the effortlessness of the eyes; yet infernal imagery flashes regardless. The unknown of the grimly dismal room is less awful than the sights of the mind. Hands and arms will themselves downward under the covers. The crisp, chilled air resumes its mockery of what should be a plaintively soothing zephyr.<br /><br />Neck muscles tighten; the skin contracts against the crucial bone structure. Long hair curls back against the tip of the left ear. Or is that what the spirits want him to believe? A crashing boom jars the chronological descent into paralyzing madness. The dryer has bellowed in the middle of an ominous night once more. Gasps provide a pulsating, nerve-wracking agitato to the incongruous proceedings. The window, a sliver of which is visible beyond the frighteningly insouciant white drapes, appears to become opaque, sinister fog and dew smothering it with inexorable, mephitic gleefulness.<br /><br />Trapped. Retracting and tucking in the legs and feet to rest beneath the covers. The ceiling slowly, ceaselessly, drops downward. Inexhaustibly descending, its gradually increasing proximity to his torso resembling the crushing weight of the specter that taunts and menaces him with utmost jubilance. Eyes rapidly close and reopen. A clanging sound emanates from somewhere in the pivotal hallway that lay beyond the room. Eyes dart in a vain hope of seeing what lurks behind the corner of the door frame.<br /><br />Resolute rejection of the tormentors and unusually brave determination to close the eyes and disregard the angagic onslaught follow. Prayer remains a most viable option: cast out the malignant sons of Belial. The enveloping spiritual darkness moved about the fallen earth like a forever voracious marauding army. These evil beasts were vulnerable. They had been too clever for their own sake in creating such an outlandish ruckus.<br /><br />The once-piercing fear dissipated, quickly fading. Eyes open. Close again. Sleep beckons. It must be near.<br /><br />And, just as security seemed to be at hand, and the battle over, the most horrifying, petrifying visceral, guttural growl. To the right! Just outside the wall adjacent to the bed. The ferocious, monstrous growl lay only a foot or two away from him, just outside his home. The gnawing, rumbling, snarling guttural growl tortuously shifted into the most bloodcurdling, hair-raising, and unnerving howl and roar. He jumped out of his bed and backed away. Backed into the numinous nothingness of the black blanket that was the hallway. Finding himself move about in a parallel course with the beast that lay behind the wall, moving about as it did from one section of the front porch to the next, evidently locked in deadly combat with one of its wretched rivals.<br /><br />Sleep remains beyond his grasp.Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-77920303659837302352009-10-03T14:44:00.000-07:002009-10-03T18:04:51.461-07:00The Horse Boy (2009)(<em>The Horse Boy </em>was one of four films screened on Poterero Avenue on the evenings of September 23rd and 24th. Reviews of the other three films will be published here soon.)<br /><br /><em>The Horse Boy</em> is a ninety-three minute documentary by Austin, Texas-based filmmaker Michel O. Scott which unfortunately feels much longer. Its story is an intriguing one, ostensibly brimming with love and hope. <em>The Horse Boy</em> is produced and narrated by the film's star, Austin journalist, writer and father, Rupert Isaacson, and the tale is based on his book, “The Horse Boy: A Father's Quest to Heal His Son.” The book and now film chronicle Isaacson's journey to Mongolia with his wife and young autistic son Rowan in the effort to find shamans who, the father hopes, may heal him.<br /><br />The genesis of the trip was the son's usually dyspeptic demeanor, punctuated by seemingly endless tantrums, one day becoming singularly serene whenever he rode a neighbor's horse named Betsy. Whenever the child rode atop Betsy, he seemed remarkably peaceful. Isaacson considered this and coupled his own experience with the Bushmen of Africa, related in his 2004 book, “The Healing Land: The Bushmen and the Kalahari Desert.” Isaacson's research pointed to the Mongolians as having the longest history of using horses, so he coupled the knowledge he gained from his sojourn to see the Bushmen with the Mongolian shamans who, like the Bushmen, spiritually healed those addled by disease. Isaacson convinced his comparatively skeptical wife to take the journey to Mongolia to see the shamans based on these points. The documentary unfortunately does not address why this seemingly radical alternative to the western medication the Isaacsons use on a daily basis must be taken. The correlation between the African Bushmen and the Mongolian shamans remains tenuous. Could, for instance, the child have been escorted to an American Indian tribal medicine man closer to the Isaacsons' home of Austin? Rowan's reaction to the horse, which spurred Isaacson to take this action, may be explainable as simply a child's innate affection for the animal, and for something new. If Rowan's reaction is indeed quite significant, it would be helpful for the documentary to more greatly illuminate, on autism in general and Rowan's case in particular.<br /><br />The film makes no clear comparisons between Rowan and other autistic children. Autism itself is very briefly covered, with gradations momentarily discussed, but Rowan's case is never directly scientifically scrutinized in relation to other cases of autism. <em>The Horse Boy</em> uses a multi-person panel of apparent experts in the field of autism including Austin psychotherapist Dale Rudin to expound various thoughts and postulations concerning the disease. The soundbites from the rotating doctors often contradict one another. The specifics of autism as a disease, even in relation to Rowan himself, are left frustratingly muddled. This is not entirely unreasonable unto itself yet the myriad comments are often vague or cliché-ridden. Those with a genuine interest in autism, such as beleaguered parents with autistic children of their own, will probably be rather disappointed by <em>The Horse Boy</em>'s regrettably shallow pseudo-intellectualism.<br /><br /><em>The Horse Boy</em>, as a documentary, sadly lacks much in the way of documentation—aside from the trip the Isaacsons take, it documents little. Evidence, examples, basic factual support are all conspicuously missing. This damages the cinematic missive; while it is obvious Rowan has been diagnosed as autistic, what does this truly entail? The lack of answers leaves <em>The Horse Boy</em> appearing woefully incondite at times. The film, through the patriarchal Isaacson, does relate that Rowan suffers from interminable and inconsolable tantrums, an inability to relate to or play with other children, and severe bowel incontinence. (The documentary pushes the audience's patience and embarrassment with at least one too many sequence detailing the latter symptom.) One overwhelming problem with the film, however, is that Rowan's autism is displayed in disparate contexts. In one scene, Isaacson expresses wonderment and happiness when his son throws a tantrum apparently because he was being separated from the shamans. Isaacson notes that this is a good sign; he believed his son would probably throw a tantrum when he was placed near the shamans. Does this comport with average autistic children? Are their symptoms chiefly brought about by emotional reactions?<br /><br />This gleeful shedding of concrete, rational science as part of the potential equation extends to the Isaacsons readily accepting the shamans' belief, upon examining the family, that a “dark spirit” entered the womb of Isaacson's wife, Kristin Neff. Neff, with an earned Ph.D. in Human Development from Berkeley, rarely receives the focus of <em>The Horse Boy</em>; the picture either occludes or limits all other voices but Isaacson's own. Neff does briefly relate that her deceased, mentally unstable grandmother, the “dark spirit” of whom the shamans speak, suffered from manic depression and this “spirit”/genetic history has directly led to her son's autism. Rowan's parents subject themselves to ritualistic whippings by the shamans, compelled to not scream lest the ceremony be for naught. While the shamans' rituals are displayed visually for the film, the reasoning behind them are left vague. Likewise, Isaacson endeavors to lunge at various other possibilities of healing, including recuperative springs and visiting the “Reindeer People” of Mongolia. Isaacson's open faith may or may not be laudatory, but these developments in the documentary's narrative make the picture rather arduous with only the vistas of beautiful, wondrously open and commodious Mongolian terrain providing steady relief.<br /><br />Almost humorously, or simply embarrassingly, Isaacson is depicted as hopelessly naïve in his own inexperienced impression of Mongolia, and especially of the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, a desolate, chalky city packed with impoverished slums. After landing in the benighted city, Isaacson confesses that this reality is not what he was remotely expecting in his apparent fantasy of Mongolia. In one of the rare piercing comments made by Neff, she confirms this. <em>The Horse Boy</em>, as composed by filmmaker Scott, seems to relish the thoroughly “open-minded” Isaacson's lack of basic prudence—partly as romanticization, but perhaps more calculatedly as celebrating the prime mover of the “plot”—at the expense of greater insights into the more intriguing subject matter that is largely unexplored. While personalizing the film is necessary when dealing with such inherently intimate subject matter, the film never quite becomes more than validation for Isaacson. Consequently, best intentions notwithstanding, it never presents itself with the compelling, involving urgency that best suits the cinema. <em></em>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-412808035974784802009-09-11T12:05:00.000-07:002009-09-14T10:46:39.160-07:00Inglourious Basterds (2009)Quentin Tarantino's<em> Inglourious Basterds</em> represents something of a commencement for its maker. Tarantino, now in his mid-forties, has found himself in that nearly mind-boggling predicament every major populist artist endures. Reduced to mere generalities, Tarantino's reign as American film's biggest, brainiest bad boy and correspondent of cinematic delectations has followed a fairly predictable path: amazement and adulation, followed not so slowly by backlash, resentment and cynical incertitude—and, depending on the individuals (each, for argument's sake, belonging to a certain cinematic-consumption stratum: critics, audience members, “cinephiles”), this has been repeated in the past twelve years. For some, Tarantino had definitively lost his way, or was at least adrift—the <em>Kill Bill</em> movies are so obscenely overloaded with richness and deliriousness of the genre-picking sort that they are readily divisive endeavors. Tarantino's partnership with Robert Rodriguez in creating <em>Grindhouse</em>, with Tarantino's <em>Death Proof</em> the picture endlessly argued about, defended and loathed by many who viewed the entire experience, caused a significant portion of film connoisseurs to begin to write him off for good. Here was a man who was, to liberally paraphrase from one noted, dissatisfied film blogger, crawling up his own ass and losing all bearing of reality.<br /><br />Tarantino, however, knows that reality and film are two radically divergent worlds. Like one of his immediate ancestors, De Palma, he sees cinema as a fundamental lie, but like the noted Hitchcock-devotee, he interprets it as a benign lie, one as necessary as nighttime fairytales. You were either on board with this outlook or not—with Tarantino or not—and this dramatically influenced one's opinion of Tarantino's post-<em>Jackie Brown</em> work. Was he simply playing around or was there more behind the facade? For the critics, however, the mere question necessitated a correction of course; Tarantino, it was said, had to now put or shut up, almost like he was beginning all over again.<br /><br />Let it be said that with <em>Inglourious Basterds</em> Tarantino puts up. Most immediately resembling his most universally acclaimed film, <em>Pulp Fiction</em>, in its multi-chapter structure with parallel, rotating stories, this cine—superficially World War II men-on-a-mission adventure, naturally it is first and foremost a Tarantino picture and everything that entails—is so headily unaware of its own grandiosity that it manages to be oddly intimate and downright recondite in its shadings of its cornucopia of distinguished gallery of Tarantino characters. That may be viewed as a kind of backhanded compliment, but it is not: Tarantino is so assured and inspired here, whatever quibbles or questions arise are almost instantly discarded. From the first frame to the last, this feels like the film Tarantino wanted to make after <em>Jackie Brown</em> but held off on—and, according to him, it was the screenplay he began working on after <em>Brown</em>, but the work became too massive and sprawling for its own good, and Tarantino redirected his energy behind <em>Kill Bill</em>—an unmistakable new, bold chapter to the Tarantino saga behind Tarantino's filmic journeys.<br /><br />There is a moment early on in <em>Inglourious Basterds</em> that is in its own way a microcosmic description of the film entire: Colonel Hans Landa, with a honeyed, bright demeanor and grin, is coyly interrogating a Frenchman depicted as a virile, physical worker in the first of many comments on national and ethnic stereotypes <em>Basterds</em> makes. (The French dairy farmer with three daughters hiding a family of refugees may come from Tarantino's much-beloved <em>Tonight We Raid Calais</em>, a noted favorite of the director, from 1943 by John Brahm, about a British intelligence officer plotting to destroy a German munitions plant in France, hiding out with a French farmer and his daughters who—not unreasonably—blame the British for the fall of France.) The Frenchman reaches for his corn pipe and begins to smoke, and Landa quickly reaches for a pipe of his own—naturally, this Colonel known in France as the “Jew-Hunter,” a keen detective who is the distilled personification of a man who loves to play cat-and-mouse, has one that recalls Sherlock Holmes. The absurdly oversized pipe will make many a viewer of the film want to chuckle, but the chuckle is fleeting. As with other Tarantino creations, Landa is stunningly three-dimensional; whatever excesses and peculiarities he may possess are sadly all too human and strangely plausible. That pipe is a signpost: <em>Basterds</em> plays with people the way Tarantino films do, but the writer-director never ceases to insist that his characters are people. What follows is most crucial, for it reveals that Landa, an ostensible non-smoker, already knows that the French farmer smokes, and came prepared. Tarantino cuts away from the sight gag of the pipe to Landa's steely eyes, and the laughter dies down. Landa may be funny but he's no joke. No Tarantino character truly is, even the jokers. And like many a Tarantino character, Landa—like Mr. Pink arguing against automatic tipping in <em>Reservoir Dogs</em> or Bill discussing the subtextual meanings of the character of Superman in<em> Kill Bill 2</em>—patiently, coolly relates why he can think like a Jew by discussing the characteristics of a hawk, a rat, and, circuitously, a squirrel, in an early demonstration that the film has a provocative outlook on the issue of hunters attacking prey, most emphatically embodied by Landa himself.<br /><br />Tarantino's opening is as rapturously mounted as anything in his oeuvre; he shoots the Frenchman working with his three beautiful daughters, and visions of Leone's <em>Once Upon a Time in the Wes</em>t and myriad spaghetti westerns unfurl within the cinematically-trained mind. Tarantino follows suit with repeated excursions into filmic convention: like his seedy crime yarns that play with gangster movie conventions or <em>Death Proof</em> that seemed to exist as a kind of instrumental covering of many of Tarantino's favorite kinds of movie—cheap, tawdry horror movies, exploitation flicks of all kinds, road trip movies of sundry incarnations—Tarantino's multiple chapters in <em>Basterds</em> take on vibrant cinematic attributes found in spaghetti westerns, countless men-on-a-mission war films, romantic spy melodramas, of which there were plenty in the 1930s and '40s, and even a possible melding of horror-tinged religious cinema (a French heroine becomes Tarantino's approximation of Joan of Arc, devoured by flame before her tormentors) which feel at one with <em>giallo</em> and Catholic filmmakers' representations of their fear and guilt. This may mislead many who partake in <em>Basterds</em>' multitudinous delights of sight and sound—<em>Basterds</em> is admittedly enormously informed by Tarantino's love of cinema, including German expressionism, the brilliance of G.W. Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl's work and Henri-Georges Clouzot's <em>Le Corbeau</em>, the latter of which may signify Tarantino's acknowledgment of a “bad boy” of another era, in which one was not rewarded for the sharp attitudinal edge of one's film but rather punished for it as Clouzot was for <em>Le Corbeau</em>—but a pastiche it is not. Tarantino has reached a higher plane insofar as his recollections—part personal (the titular Inglourious Basterds stalk their German victims with knives like the psychopaths who terrified a young Tarantino in <em>The Last House on the Left</em>), part historical (Tarantino affords much banter about popular culture, once again, but it is confined strictly to figures of the time period such as Max Linder and the film character King Kong) but these gropings at cinema are heartfelt and genuine, as well as seamlessly stitched into the fabric of <em>Basterds</em>' very filmic identity.<br /><br />What<em> Inglourious Basterds</em> proves is that Tarantino is still obsessed with human beings rather than a more accessible instigator of movement—his films are made up of a few, long, extraordinarily detailed scenes, as though they are visual, character-based novels. Those who harshly critique Tarantino's <em>modus operandi</em> appear foolhardy. Do they wish him to no longer invest such passion and care into his characters? Would they be happier if, for instance, <em>Basterds </em>were more cosmetically satisfying? It surely would have been easier to create a knockoff of <em>The Dirty Dozen</em> and leave it at that, but Tarantino's tapestry demands altogether greater scrutiny. Almost ironically, Tarantino's very artistic behavior—to lovingly dwell on the minutest of details, to bathe in the minds and hearts of the people he, like any significant writer, simply follows—is what has helped to make him so durably popular. If he were to abandon it, he would be sacrificing that which makes him a unique voice.<br /><br />That voice helps to shape the aforementioned Colonel Hans Landa (a sensational Christoph Waltz), whose thrill of the chase and hunt (predominantly cerebral) is fetishistic and unnerving. He asks for a glass of the farmer's milk from his cows. Like Anton Chigurh's grabbing of a bottle of cold milk in <em>No Country for Old Men</em>, the villain's commandeering of the satisfying cream appears shameless and even saturnalian. Landa is an apt avatar for the Third Reich; his rapacity is on open display as he hurriedly swallows an entire glassful of the milk belonging to the French. Landa is undeniably acute and fully commanding but he lacks the patience to savor that which he ingests. A later scene in which he almost mechanically rips apart a piece of strudel with requested cream, taking turns between munching on a bite and asking a probing question, reinforces this amusingly sad characteristic. Waltz is at one moment quite humorous, and in the next downright chilling. Like Samuel L. Jackson's Ordell in <em>Jackie Brown</em>, Landa is self-protective to a fault, with an air of melancholy. Just before he violently snuffs out a fellow German's life—one of Tarantino's most uncomfortable and ugliest scenes, far more devastating than any scalping or baseball bat-beating by the Basterds—he has a look of sadness that reminds of Ordell's final, quiet warning to Max Cherry, before resuming his role as natural predator. The long, opening act establishes Landa's genius, as well as Tarantino's: a request to swap French for English in conversation between German and Frenchman first appears to be a bow to the commercial, so that Americans need not read anymore subtitles for a while. However, Landa's language-switch has a deep, sinister purpose. Late in the film, Landa kisses a handkerchief with a woman's lipstick and signature, and soon thereafter confronts the woman in a revoltingly warped recalling of Cinderella while indulging in Tarantino's much-discussed foot fetish. <em>Basterds</em>' men are, like other Tarantino guys—Vincent Vega, Max Cherry, even Bill—largely astonished and aroused by women because they recognize that they know so little about them. Such is the case with two Germans, Landa and particularly German war hero Fredrick Zoller.<br /><br />Zoller's crush on a young French woman who runs her own cinema develops Tarantino's incendiary depiction of cinema itself, as a moral reckoning, distorter and demigod. The French woman is Shosanna Dreyfus, renamed Emanuelle Mimieux (Melanie Laurent)—Shosanna was the last surviving member of the Dreyfus family, sheltered by the French farmer before Landa and his men killed all but one. Tarantino's framing of Shosanna against the silhouetted front door frame of her father's farm, running away into the wilderness from the ruthless Nazis, exhibits a borrowing from John Ford's <em>The Searchers.</em> As the leader of the Basterds, Lieutenant Aldo Raine played by Brad Pitt (an obvious homage to American tough-guy actor Aldo Ray, complete with throat scar substituting for fatal throat cancer) informs his men, he is part “Injun,” and the Basterds will conduct themselves in the fashion of Apache warriors, scalping and mutilating Germans wherever they find them. The American Indian theme blossoms: Tarantino is himself part-“Injun,” drawing comparisons between his and Raine's own ancestry and respective<em> raison d'êtres</em>. Raine tells his men that the Germans will come to know this special secret squad of men and fear them—a kind of yearning for fame, or infamy, based on thuggery and shock, perhaps representing either an auto-critique by Tarantino or augmentation of argument that Tarantino's cinema is only at first glance about such mainly unimportant matters. At the beginning of the final chapter, the vengeful Shosanna applies her makeup as though she is meditatively donning warpaint. Never before has Tarantino's fixation on film been more irrepressible, as Shosanna's scheme to exact revenge on the Nazis responsible for murdering her family involves her sacrificing cinema—her own theatre as well as many reels of nitrate film she has in storage. Shosanna's final act of the film—one of both compassion and distraction—prove Tarantino's point, and establish just how frightening the efficacy of the cinema truly is. As with another woman—Dietrich-like German film star Bridget van Hammersmark (an entirely pleasant and surprisingly strong Diane Kruger)—Tarantino brings about the fates of his feminine forces to an anguished height, finally reaching the crushingly realistic conclusion of his long-fascinating depiction of “girl power” in manifold forms.<br /><br />Bruhl's Zoller exists at once as Tarantino's twist on the American Audie Murphy story, reversing the mirror shot, so to speak, following other such reversals as the American soldiers being depicted as butchers juxtaposed with a decorated German, Sergeant Werner Rachtman—who honorably, judiciously and with great dignity informs his baseball bat-wielding executioner he earned his medal “for bravery,”—and exploring the inner-workings of the Third Reich's film industry through the perspective of Joseph Goebbels as overarching filmic auteur/movie executive. (Winston Churchill, played by Rod Taylor, asks a British expert on German cinema whether Goebbels considers himself the German Louis B. Mayer.) Zoller, however, is generously expanded upon by Tarantino. As a construct, Zoller could have been just a Tarantino meta-comment—the character says Goebbels wants him to become “the German Van Johnson,” terrifically editorializing on the cinematic image of toughness against that of the tangible world (the strapping, 6'2” Van Johnson versus the 5'5”-½ Audie Murphy). Zoller is a German war hero who, all alone, killed literally hundreds of enemy soldiers in Italy and now his story has been told in a propaganda film starring none other than himself. (Zoller excitedly tells one character that he has been hailed as the German “Sergeant York,” another example of people of one country discovering the story of another nation's hero through cinema.) Zoller is an intriguing character, made all the more abundantly arresting by the picture's remarkable climax. Viewing his own “heroics” on the giant screen, Zoller is in actuality disgusted; he cannot continue to watch, and leaves to “annoy” the owner of the cinema. Zoller represents the mature filmgoer who can at least empathize with if not truly live the violence glorified by Goebbels' picture, merging the previously disparate themes of the violence enacted by the Basterds, often cheered by Tarantino's moviegoer. Like Jules in <em>Pulp Fiction</em>, he has seen a terrible, unshakable visage—and it is of himself, in another materialization—and can finally look back on the killing he has committed with a comprehensibly enhanced perspective.<br /><br />Tarantino indulges himself with British Lieutenant Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender, last seen starving himself in <em>Hunger</em>), expert in German film, writer of two published books and published film critic. Tarantino's anointing of the cinephile as conduit and guiding force of Tarantino's own, phrenic world is here even more robust than in <em>Death Proof</em>, which saw a group of female film buffs and film crew members fight back against Stuntman Mike. Shosanna, Hicox, Zoller, Goebbels, von Hammersmark, the numerous German enlisted men and officers who are bedazzled by von Hammersmark, Shosanna's black film projectionist and clandestine lover, Marcel (Jacky Ido, an African in a cast heavily populated by Europeans and Americans), and others are all either directly or indirectly endowed with a special, durable connection to and appreciation for the art form of the motion picture. Yet while von Hammersmark's presence connotes the renowned fashion, glamor and elan of movie icons (a stereotype to which Tarantino gives plentiful twists); Zoller is, one could contend, the “exploited” person, the individual whose real-life escapades provide fodder for the insatiable beast; and Shosanna is the practically sanctified Tarantino demigoddess who readily sacrifices cinema for her own personal vengeful victory; it is, with disturbing and cutting clarity Lieutenant Hicox whose knowledge of cinema informs his decisions. Confronted by an overbearing Nazi Major Dieter Hellstrom (a superb August Diehl) in a pivotal tavern, Hicox resorts to his encyclopedic knowledge base to throw the inquisitive major off the scent that the undercover Englishman is indeed not a German. Hicox is briefly saved by his fondness for a Leni Riefenstahl film, <em>The White Hell of Pitz Palu</em>. Moments later, however, he gives himself away in a manner that reveals Tarantino finally confronting himself and perhaps his critics who deride him for being so hopelessly stuck in movies. Hicox's fate points to the admission that film, though especially indispensable to a cinephile, ultimately cannot teach one about everything, about every group of people, no matter how well-informed one may be. The brutal irony that Hicox was especially an expert of German cinema makes the point all the sharper and clearer.<br /><br />Tarantino's World War II epic is conspicuously skewed, both surprisingly and not surprisingly, in almost being a weird, “proto-black man's view” of the war. Samuel L. Jackson lends his voice to two brief narrations. As though this were not enough, the one character who is viewed with wholly uncomplicated sympathy is Shosanna's lover, Marcel, who is obedient to his woman, kind, tender and evidently fearless. This is not alarming coming from Tarantino, whose occasionally ostentatious affinity for and relationship with black-oriented features has flowed into these filmmaking decisions. Most penetrative, however, are a pair of speeches delivered by Nazis—first by Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) and later by Hellstrom—respectively commenting on the unique place blacks have had in America, as athletic competitors and previously as slaves. This threading connects World War II to the black experience in America, and suggests Tarantino's contention that “America,” as an abstraction, or reduced to specific characters (“Basterds”), was not the uncomplicated hero of the war. This is never distracting; only a source of moral bemusement.<br /><br />Tarantino's essaying of the Basterds themselves will doubtless bring about divergent reactions. One may interpret the American “Basterds” as ridiculous, over-the-top cartoon characters—although Tarantino does not afford most of them much time or weight, beyond Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine, Eli Roth's “Bear Jew” Donny Donowitz and Til Schweiger's Sergeant Hugo Stiglitz—so the cartoon quality of the characters is perhaps actually softened. Pitt is fine in his role and repeatedly quite funny. Pitt's presence lends balance to the film's air of the star-studded international cast, even if he is less obvious for Raine than former Tarantino hombres like Bruce Willis or Michael Madsen. Roth is solid as the “Bear Jew.” The Basterds are in truth defined by their comparative absence from the world of cinema in relation to the film's other characters. As Raine tells a doomed German, watching Donny Donowitz split open German heads with his baseball bat “ is the closest we get to goin' to the movies.” Tarantino's sly comment about the possible, cathartic need for filmic violence as a substitute to real-world bloodletting cannot go unnoticed. Beyond this, in a typically Tarantino-esque, twisted manner, the Basterds may represent some form of pitiless conscience, and more than simply existing as a group of Jewish soldiers slaughtering Nazis about France, the point made by Raine on two highly memorable occasions is worth pondering, particularly for Jews victimized by the Nazi terror. Will these Nazis abandon their uniforms once the war concludes and go about their lives without consequence? Though the Basterds are sadistic and fiendishly violent, the question resonates in the final chapter as Landa himself, who, in the prologue, relished the title given to him—“The Jew Hunter” (early in the film, Landa says he believes Heydrich in Prague should be proud of his nickname, “The Hangman,” perhaps a reference by Tarantino to one of Lang's wartime propaganda pictures, <em>Hangmen Also Die</em> about Heydrich)—feigns recoiled horror at the label when he is negotiating a cunning deal. The Basterds, then, could be sincerely deciphered as unforgiving avenging angels before the fact. This does not, however, remotely excuse the barbaric bloodthirst of the Basterds, nor the hideous oversimplification of viewing every Germanic soldier as a demonic Nazi. This is a thorny extension of Tarantino's obsession with revenge, which has seemingly become more explicit with each release. As with the <em>Kill Bill</em> movies and <em>Death Proof</em>, when the revenge is finally meted out, Tarantino does not glorify or romanticize the violence—this is in fact only truer with <em>Inglourious Basterds</em>, which features violence as a swift reckoning—all too fast, ghastly and terrible, the outbursts explode at the end of long set-pieces of dialogue.<br /><br />What perhaps makes <em>Inglourious Basterds</em> so intoxicating and enthralling is the opaquely ambagious, unpredictable route it so gleefully travails. Tarantino, for all of his homages and love letters to cinema, has never shied away from happily departing from the trusted formula. <em>Inglourious Basterds</em> actually delivers the usual Tarantino multilayered, two-for-one special: on one basic narrative level, his pictures conclude precisely where they must (Mr. White discovering Mr. Orange's secret in <em>Reservoir Dogs</em> or The Bride confronting Bill in the <em>Kill Bill</em> movies being especially straightforward destinations) and so does <em>Inglourious Basterds</em> (which two male characters do<em> you</em> believe will finally meet before the picture concludes?) but the circumstances, emotions and emphases are always stunningly different in their laminations and most importantly their meanings from what most audience members are anticipating.<br /><br />Tarantino's characters, it must be said here, are always meeting ends unforeseen by all including themselves (even an important character who has elected a kind of grandiose, operatic martyrdom does not meet the exact fate they had envisioned).<em> Basterds</em> displays once more the circuitous manner in which Tarantino characters finally get what is coming to them. Characters receive tragic ends that have little or nothing directly to do with their past sins.<em> Basterds</em> augments this entrenched trait by playing things firmly “down the middle,” so to speak, like an umpire, Tarantino dispassionately surveys all of the characters, with an impartiality and probity that takes the lackadaisical, conventional triteness that even suffocates supposed “satire” (<em>Starship Troopers</em> and the recent <em>District 9</em> both suffer inordinately from this laziness) out of the way, throwing the audience's wanton desire for mayhem and death back into their collective lap. Whereas Tarantino's first batch of films were based to one degree or another in a criminal underworld, which usually feature more ambiguously-defined roles of “hero” and “villain,” <em>Inglourious Basterds</em> takes on the static mythology of World War II, with its elephantine and nearly preconceived “heroes and villains.” This is chiefly played with by Tarantino with regards to Zoller, who even explicitly tells the French beauty to whom he is attracted that he is more than a uniform, coupled with a humanizing comment that all German soldiers are “somebody's son.”<br /><br />Beyond Zoller's plea that he is more than a uniform—a direct thematic rebuttal to the Basterds' campaign—Tarantino's film is bustling with not only textual and subtextual reversals (and even textual reversals during which the subtext remains the same, including a late-inning gambit by one particularly unscrupulous but brilliant figure), but also simple reversals of identity. As with other “men-on-a-mission” pictures, some of the Basterds along with the aforementioned Lieutenant Hicox must pose as Germans. Throughout the long, intentionally languorous visitation of the tavern, the parlor game played serves as a shockingly direct substitution for the very serious game being played; that Tarantino's device runs exactly parallel to his suspense-driven plot situation and very few find it excessive proves he has become only more successful at partially veiling his intentions with a layer of apparent frivolity that is in actuality part and parcel of the critical narrative conditions. The scene itself plays like a combination of Tarantino sequences in which people look like they are letting their proverbial hair down while only masquerading or belatedly revealing their true selves. The tavern exists with a thoroughly detailed environment and, like other Tarantino set-pieces, feels like that from a novel or play with its purposeful limitations (one reason Tarantino is never called “stagy” is because people tend to enjoy the long, winding monologues and repartees he produces)—the intersecting of characters feels as though it belongs to the spirit of such locales as <em>Reservoir Dogs</em>' hood hideout, <em>Pulp Fiction</em>'s diner, <em>Jackie Brown</em>'s dark bars and Ordell's chief homestead, <em>Kill Bill</em>'s several sequences of predator finding prey and the Tarantino character's bar in <em>Death Proof</em>. The playing with identities in <em>Basterds</em> is not unheard of for Tarantino; his first film, borrowing liberally from the original <em>The Taking of Pelham 123</em>, followed criminals with unknown identities with one another beyond their color names, and indeed his subsequent films all tend to fall in that line, to be partly about characters discovering others' true, or truer, identities. Tarantino's playfulness has been known to extend to the brutal, and <em>Basterds</em> is no exception: the last German man standing, weeping and frantically distressed, the most ostensibly “cowardly” of his squadron, is rewarded first by the Basterds for giving information Sergeant Rachtman refused to bequeath and then by Adolf Hitler himself, who makes the (physically and spiritually disgraced) German soldier the veritable hero of the cover story that has now become “official” reality. In one of the film's most piquant visual mirrored reversals, one character strangles another; the character being murdered helplessly grabs a hold of anything, such as the carpeting of the floor, and later the strangler is himself mounted, and, like the character he terminated, can only grip and pull at grass in unspeakable pain.<br /><br /><em>Inglourious Basterds</em> places Tarantino above one of his closer antecedents, Brian De Palma, and probably places him on roughly equal footing with his most nakedly revered idol from the past, Jean-Luc Godard. Tarantino's much-denied moralistic streak is akin to De Palma's; their inversions of normalcy are startling but very much related to one another. <em>Basterds</em> concludes on a note of female anguish and annihilation—a redux of<em> Carrie</em> and possibly <em>The Fury</em> (with Bruhl's Zoller approximating John Cassavetes in his final, distasteful speech)—that feels completely earned and directly corresponding with Tarantino's long-documented half-guileless, half-goofy relating of “girl power,” which he himself utilizes as fragmentary stand-in for his piqued curiosity of the fairer sex (like most Tarantino male avatars). Tarantino has proven he is no cinematic or cultural revolutionary—he is nearly the anti-Godard in the sense that Godard posited his homages as necessary conditional trappings to create something of a new cinema, while Tarantino's love of anterior cinema overwhelms most other impulses. Countering this, however, is that Tarantino's love of cinema almost circularly takes him into a realm not dissimilar from Godard at all—especially as the young Godard sought a degree in Ethnology at the Sorbonne, Tarantino's undying infatuation with cinema has given him a dramatically different but equivalent studying of disparate cultures and their origins. Comparisons to Hitchcock become perilous, but <em>Basterds</em> is teeming with references to the man who jubilantly placed the moral responsibility of his World War II spy films' carnage on the audience, as in a pivotal movie theatre scene in <em>Saboteur</em>, wherein violence takes place against the backdrop of the silver screen's applauded and cheered violence. Tarantino's sense of morality is persuasive insofar as the filmmaker refuses to confess that it exists; by simply “following” his invented tale, he can live by the conceit that he is not judging the proceedings, gavel in hand, as he crafts his screenplays and films. Pungently, Tarantino openly assaults history, and therefore saves millions of lives in his alternate world by concluding World War II much earlier than it did in fact end (possibly averting the Russian overtaking of Central Europe as well). The film asks a pointed question: if the war's final year could have been averted, would the story's destructive massacring, and furious, merciless climactic conflagration, been seen as justified?<br /><br />Another inspiration of Tarantino's—Leone—is easily discovered in the relation between a known war and a complete, beautifully unfurled fictive fantasia, as in <em>The Good, the Bad and the Ugly</em>. The sequence in the tavern likewise recalls spaghetti westerns in its careful attenuation of competing characters. There is even a new father, a German soldier, whose appearance along with several of his compatriots is a classic, painful example of the wrong people being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Both like, and more quotidian than, the iconic Confederate soldier being given a “smoke,” Tarantino's Germans are fully flesh-and-blood—something one may not expect in a film so divergent from standard historical fidelity—as well as being endowed with sheer, cunning smarts. Landa, Hellstrom and others are all viewed as intelligent, almost insidiously astute adversaries. (Humorously, Landa is offended late in the picture when a noted enemy does not appear to afford him the kind of respect he believes he demands.) Like other Tarantino film scores, the music recalls Ennio Morricone's larger-than-life melodies in its euphonious depiction of various individuals as archetypes.<br /><br />Lastly, and possibly most importantly, <em>Inglourious Basterds</em> is a paean to propaganda. For the first time, Tarantino has scaled the mountain of the propaganda film. Tarantino has mentioned in interviews that he reads the propaganda films of the United States, Great Britain and Germany with great, unbridled engrossment. Expectedly, Tarantino pays tribute to the very national stereotypes bolstered by the respective countries' own propaganda—the heedless voracity, brashly indomitable spirit and brutish instincts of the Americans, the stiff upper lip propriety, earnest self-challenging derring-do and remote chilliness of the English, and the shrewd, wily and skillfully manipulative Germans, all double-edged swords—while discussing the correlation between German film exec Goebbels with the American film execs who immediately pushed for propaganda pictures after Pearl Harbor and the morale-boosting English pictures of the same time. Riefenstahl may have a most dubious position in history, but her films shed voluminous light on the character of the people she tirelessly observed through her film work. Tarantino certainly admires the role of the propaganda film—it is, perhaps, the ultimate (and government-sanctioned) exploitation picture, after all—and his treatment of the much-hyped Nazi propaganda film at the heart of <em>Basterds</em> is curiously unaffected, with a definite ambivalence that over the course of his picture covers highly contrasting emotions stemming from pride, affection, passion, mockery, ridicule and disgust.<br /><br />At a recent Marin Shakespeare Company presentation of “Julius Caesar” in San Rafael, California, this writer overheard one patron discussing <em>Inglourious Basterds</em> with his family and friends. “It's a World War II <em>Pulp Fiction</em>,” he roared. At a presentation of a play written by the Bard a millennium and a half after the events took place, in which a kind of historical, Roman propaganda takes shape on each side of the play's expansive argument—Cassius cajoling and soothing Brutus that his name shares the weight of Caesar, followed by the emotional, powerful demagoguery of Mark Antony—this was a most intriguing venue to consider <em>Inglourious Basterds</em>. The dualistic nature of <em>Basterds</em> suggests Tarantino's meta-contextualizing of the propaganda film, matching his previous forays in digesting all of the properties of his variegated subjects. To compare Tarantino with the Bard in any fashion may be correctly considered disturbing—yet their respective analyses of historical propaganda reveals a commonly sober, balanced reading. That level of maturity is not easily quantified, nor is it usually appropriately appreciated. Perhaps Tarantino, speaking through Pitt's Aldo Raine in the picture's final pre-end credits moment, is indeed correct—<em>Inglourious Basterds</em> “just might be [his] masterpiece.”Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com147tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-86422764051746168022009-07-31T11:44:00.000-07:002009-08-04T19:41:48.793-07:00Tetro (2009)In 1972, a film about a family swept the world by storm. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, <em>The Godfather</em> was an epic retelling of King Lear in the wardrobe of the Sicilian Mafia in post-war America. <em>The Godfather</em> was a tale of brothers loving one another but chafing under sibling rivalry, partly born from the influence of a wise father. Coppola allowed the firmament to be the limit to his tale, and the picture was an instant classic which helped to alter the face of American cinema in the 1970s. Coppola's endearing, occasionally maddening fixation on the ties between brothers—brimming with trials and tribulations—continued in earnest with <em>The Godfather: Part II</em> as well as his essaying of adolescent brotherhood in <em>The Outsiders</em> and<em> Rumble Fish</em>. And so now it continues with Coppola's latest, <em>Tetro</em>.<br /><br />Coppola's <em>Tetro</em> is a film that seeps into and out of the viewer like moisture. Iridescent and pellucid, fragmentary and oblique, all at once, it feels like a living organism that is ferociously but quietly seething, like an animal recently injured. Coppola veils this dyspeptic, tempestuous undercurrent with a luscious layer of visual serenity. It is like squeezing and spreading sweet frosting over a rough, nutty and tart apple coffeecake. Most of the film takes place in the ambiguously defined “present,” shot in an exquisitely sharp 2:35:1 with High Definition digital cameras employed by cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr. to utter perfection. Few films shot in this format have so abundantly showcased the rationale for adopting the technology as <em>Tetro</em>, which creates nearly glittery palettes of richly-textured and -detailed tranquility. Coppola's <em>Youth Without Youth</em> was ponderous but inviting; cinematographically refined and polished, that picture was unfortunately too prepossessed with itself to completely, haphazardly present itself to the viewer the way two people first meet one another. <em>Tetro</em> is formal but with an unruly, brusque side, befitting its protagonist, the titular Tetro (a brooding, sullenly countenanced and erratically arbitrary yet entirely natural Vincent Gallo in one of the great performances of the decade); Coppola has resumed his dream to create bracing, personal art like a young, impulsive filmmaker with both everything and nothing to prove.<br /><br />Coppola's <em>Tetro </em>is such an incredibly wounded film it could be just as ponderous and remote as Coppola's last film before it, but the director and screenwriter has allowed himself the room to navigate his personable tale of familial heartache and nearly-ensanguined tragedy. Periodically Coppola will intrude upon his own gloriously realized visage with pounding, startling excursions into the past, captured in comparatively grainy (shot on film), hand-held 1:85:1 color photography, looking like bumptious family video-camera shooting. These bubble up to the once-harmonious surface the way troubling, painful memories always do: the figures viewed as harmful, such as an imperious, egomaniacal and corrupt father figure (Klaus Maria Brandauer) are distorted, their faces always belying their spoken words. Vivid and eerily haunting, these episodic color sequences never disrupt <em>Tetro</em>'s heedless momentum, and that has to do with Coppola's steady, almost omnipresent command—his <em>Tetro </em>feels like a film which, from the first frame onwards, is overlooked in its progression by its creator but never thwarted nor tripped up by ruinous excessive dabbling. That these episodes are also highly important in uncovering the shrouded truths of Tetro only increase their durability and import without ever diminishing the linear narrative's potency.<br /><br />Everything about <em>Tetro</em> feels positively naïve in a most exuberantly beautiful way. Coppola has metamorphosed, it seems, and he follows through with the ostensible promise of his last film, which featured the word “Youth” not once but twice. Coppola's vernal sensibility is dazzlingly, deliciously refreshing. As too many truly young filmmakers exercise their craft under the umbrella of rampant, sometimes trendily poseur cynicism, Coppola at seventy years old is rediscovering youthfulness in its myriad sources of energy and genuineness. <em>Tetro</em> establishes that Coppola is not simply a votary—he has been quite truthful in his interviews: he has effectively gone back in time, and the results are exhilarating. Likewise, Coppola's insistence that he would think of Elia Kazan while shooting <em>Tetro</em> rings true as the film lingers within the mind. The performances seem to fit the black-and-white photography with a preternatural precision. Images of <em>A Streetcar Named Desire</em>, another classically-framed black-and-white drama with a nebulously humid and tropical environment (here Buenos Aires doubling for New Orleans), with characters revealing their true selves to the audience, one another and to themselves, flash as <em>Tetro</em> continues onward. Coppola nurtures these performances the way a gardener chaperons his beloved greenery. Coppola, it may be said, plays the sage father to the young performers, particularly the unknown Alden Ehrenreich as Bennie, whose limited on-screen dynamism may be chalked up to an inexperienced actor, or may be one of Coppola's ways to present the questioning character as a figure of comparative blankness. Since Bennie is the audience's surrogate—knowing as little about the enigmatic Tetro as the viewer—Coppola's drama begins with many a viewer perhaps holding onto Bennie the way a tired swimmer may grab a buoy in the ocean.<br /><br />Quite gradually, however, Coppola and Gallo peel away the outer shell of Tetro, and this complex portrait is presented with an unapologetic, phlegmatic propinquity, displaying a fully formed being as a living, breathing perplexity. As the tale continues, it may be Tetro whose initially bizarre and perhaps outrageous behavior threatens to alienate some viewers, who is the more principled of the two brothers. Bennie's curiosity leads to breaking Tetro's trust—not an uncommon problem between family members, much less one in which the relationships are this strained. Tetro's live-in girlfriend, an angelically beautiful Argentinian named Miranda (a poignant Maribel Verdú), understands the titular figure in a way no other person on the world can. The back-story to their bond is afforded much needed time by Coppola and his legendary editing partner, Walter Murch, and so when that bond is tested by the imposition of Bennie, the breaking of Miranda's remarkable endurance in the face of Tetro's often overwhelming inability to display himself in all honesty to even her, much less to anyone else.<br /><br />Coppola's indefatigable presence as an authentically Italian-American voice helps to shed light on the meanings of <em>Tetro</em>. Naturally, the picture is not “legitimately” autobiographical, but the truths the tale uncovers are so specific, they must at the very least touch a palpable chord with all who have felt the exhausting, desolating pain of a family compelled to lie to itself, or the ugliness of being hurt by those one loves. Like the adopted Tom Hagen in <em>The Godfather: Part II</em>, Bennie's near-idolization of Tetro only helps to make the bitter, salt-in-the-wounds lashing he receives from him sting all the more. (“Why do you hurt me, Michael?” Tom once asked.) Like a kaleidoscopic trip through Fellini's cinema, <em>Tetro</em> is at once burningly personal to its creator and doubtless deceptive in its myriad details. This mirrors the cryptic, only partially revelatory comments of the man behind the film. “Nothing in it happened, but it's all true,” Coppola has said of his latest opus. As the picture mirrors known aspects of Coppola's life—his father, like Tetro's, was a musical composer, and he has said that he has had a somewhat tumultuous relationship with his brother—<em>Tetro</em> is his most nakedly, vulnerably personal film.<br /><br />It is parlous to delve too deeply into <em>Tetro</em>'s filmic treasures. This is finally the consummation of Coppola's marriage between art and commercial demands, but now Coppola's artistically-minded focus—always operatic, here played out like a composition of Bellini or Verdi meshed with vaudevillian three-ring circuses that emit a rambunctious, anything-can-happen vibe and jubilantly hedonistic sexual discoveries (the latter both extending the kinship with Fellini)—is brighter, his instincts more pleasurably unrestrained. Many critics have failed <em>Tetro</em> because they have not caught on to Coppola's piquantly rediscovered virtuosity. <em>The Godfather</em> staged the death of a man's soul against the Catholic backdrop of baptism. In <em>Tetro</em>, the truths of family (“Every Family Has A Secret,” the film's tag-line promises) are so awful they make one recoil, and gaze, like a pitiful deer into ineffably, brilliantly blinding headlights. Yet Coppola does not relinquish his newfound youthful confidence—<em>Tetro</em> finally concludes on a note of resigned reconciliation. Thirty years ago, Coppola released <em>Apocalypse Now</em>, the film conventionally referred to as his final operatic masterpiece. In 2009, he has gifted filmgoers with another composition, and one of the best films of the year.Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com94tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-73380052272174618592009-07-30T11:59:00.000-07:002009-08-04T11:22:05.737-07:00The Hurt Locker (2009)WARNING: MAJOR “PLOT POINTS” OF THIS FILM ARE DISCUSSED AND ANALYZED<br /><br />“...[Kathryn] Bigelow is—most fittingly for a female director rightly celebrated for her breathtaking command of action—an expert fabulist of unlikely male bonding.”<br /><br />So concluded this writer's review of <em><a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2009/03/point-break-1991.html">Point Break</a></em>. As <em>The Hurt Locker</em> opens with an unnecessary, wrongly mollifying quote by Chris Hedges—whose antiwar speech to a graduating class at a university in Rockford, Illinois was booed and heckled in 2003—which emphasizes that “<strong><em>war is a drug</em></strong>,” it became evident that Kathryn Bigelow was not only endeavoring to explore men growing closer to one another through attachment and proximity, but the peculiar hold adrenaline plays on the male psyche. As in her 1991 action thriller, Bigelow's new film finds itself propelled by a man who perhaps does not himself “get off” on the thrill, excitement and adrenaline rush—Patrick Swayze's Bodhi was closer to this mold, though he continually spouted off philosophical and spiritual rationales as reasons for throwing caution to the wind—but is certainly wholly comfortable with the relentless presence of sure death if he fails in his mission. That man is Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), whose task it is to diffuse seemingly countless Iraqi “IEDs”(Improvised Explosive Device just for clarification). James is assigned to a company of men after its “EOD” (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) master of bomb- and trap-disarming Sergeant Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce) is killed. Soon, two of those men—Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and a guilt-ridden Specialist Owen Eldridge played by Brian Geraghty (he believes he should have dropped the insurgent responsible for detonating the device that took out Thompson)—will find themselves wondering whether or not Renner's staff sergeant is uncommonly courageous and unorthodox or simply insane.<br /><br />If James is like Bodhi or Bill Paxton's Severen from <em>Near Dark</em> or in a frightening way, Tom Sizemore's Max Peltier from <em>Strange Days</em>, then Mackie's Sanborn is the reserved, judicious flip side who, like other Bigelow men of reason, sees the wild man (a CO played by David Morse actually calls James a “wild man” in awesome reverence) as something resembling a monster that has to be put down. In one disconcertingly quiet and unsettling scene, Sanborn talks to Eldridge about killing James. Seeing the wild man as a threat to the unit, Sanborn's initial distaste for James is palpable; as he shaves in the mirror one morning he tells James in no uncertain terms exactly what he thinks of him. In perhaps the film's finest sequence, however, as James attacks a wildly complicated booby-trap set in a car, and Sanborn and Eldridge nervously wait for him to finish, finally almost begging him to give up on the apparatus and vacate the scene—young Iraqi men stand about rooftops looking onward at the Americans and any one of them may be an insurgent—the audience may find itself siding with James, who, like an artisan entirely absorbed in his work, loses track of time, space and location as he assiduously applies himself. James grabs his headset, into which Sanborn has been yelling that there is limited time and they should probably leave, and throws it to the ground the way a writer may finally unplug their telephone after they have received one too many disruptive calls for the fourth consecutive time.<br /><br />Bigelow's direction and mastery of <em>mise-en-scene</em> has never been fiercer or more appropriately utilized. There is an epical integument to her work; it is difficult to consider any of her pictures remotely “small”—her characters are titans representative of philosophies and dispositions, the confrontations between whom are staged as grand battles of demigods dueling with one another over righteous quarrels. Bigelow's men are wounded—figuratively as well as literally, like Ralph Fiennes' unlikely hero of <em>Strange Days</em> who will not allow himself to recover from a broken love affair. <em>The Hurt Locker</em>'s James is a man who has blanketed himself in the adrenaline of “not knowing”: what terrifies the average man exhilarates him because his job is the most immediate and unadulterated metaphor for placing oneself in the tempestuous food blender of fate while defying its whims by being so consummately <em>au courant</em> in all things. At a certain undecipherable point, James' acceptance grows into something more—it is here unfortunate that the opening salvo and, in this context, judgmental, quote appears at all, because <em>The Hurt Locker</em> explains away James' obsessiveness and derring-do as addiction. Whenever the film does take a needed breather from the heart-racing suspense, the screenplay—written by journalist Mark Boal, whose real-life experiences with an EOD squad in Iraq inspired <em>The Hurt Locker</em>—carefully sheds layers of James' distancing, protective tissue (visually represented by his specialized suit that he elects to peel off in the aforementioned rigged-car scene due to wanting to “die comfortable”). It is revealed, not surprisingly, that James' home life is bizarre: he believes he and his wife are divorced but his wife will not leave him. He vocally questions what that means.<br /><br />Bigelow follows her own instincts in many disparate avenues of the film's mostly unpredictable narrative. <em>The Hurt Locker</em>'s tension does not “escalate” in a manner befitting the average “action movie,” but rather it does continuously augment the stakes of the mortal game until, finally, James must choose between literally—and crazily—sacrificing his life for another for whom nothing can be done or preserving himself to continue on. What makes this rewardingly unique is the cinematic convection of import as each scene follows the other. Already similar to Robert Aldrich's <em>Ten Seconds to Hell</em> in its tale of a squad of bomb-disposers, Bigelow's film likewise focuses with greater, intimate and crystalline clarity on the circumference of ethical dilemmas that arise, but does so through the exploration of its own building blocks. <em>The Hurt Locker</em> begins with three men—Thompson, Sanborn and Eldridge—joking around and teasing one another like good chums on guy's night. They might be playing pool or driving to a football game. The casualness underscores the tension and the danger. Bigelow, armed with Boal's screenplay, immediately assaults the testosterone-fueled climate of her war movie, commenting on the masculine domination by overtly addressing the instrument the men are utilizing as a facsimile for their penises. The sudden connection between the men and their phallic symbol voluminously lays a sound foundation for the entire film. This baldly vociferous commentary on the film through characters—and the staging thereof—only continues until <em>The Hurt Locker</em> almost inverts itself wholly as a meta-textual distillation of war film tropes for more seemingly enlightened purposes. By reducing the men as guys playing with their specifically male organs, Bigelow ostentatiously alters the context, and this helps to suggest that if James were not in Iraq defusing and disposing bombs, he would be elsewhere.<br /><br />Being the first Iraq war film to not bother to question the wisdom or morality of the war itself, Bigelow's picture asserts an environment in which some young men thrive under the sweltering heat and chaos while others simply endure it. By engendering an unblinking, incendiary milieu—never tarnished by the kind of cinematic prolix many of her contemporaries would thrust against the film, nor the whirling, fast-cutting machinations that tend to decrease genuine suspense in favor of the insipid <em>faux</em> suspense that alienates the viewer—Bigelow and her cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, frequently utilizing four rolling cameras, leave an indelible impression without resorting to lecturing. <em>Pace </em>Francois Truffaut, who believed war action carnage always glamorized combat, Bigelow's film presents grisly imagery without desensitization. The intensity of vision lent to the defusing of the bombs says all that must be said—in her usually extraordinary cinematic shorthand, Bigelow has stated a great deal about the American invasion of Iraq, and the ensuing responsibility to bring a country back from the brink of immolation without accidentally setting the bomb off. <em>The Hurt Locker</em>'s insistence to remain aloofly apolitical takes the Iraq war's existence for granted, leaving the accurate history lessons of the Athenian Empire for Chris Hedges.<br /><br />Bigelow's <em>mise-en-scene</em> is gut-wrenching; often simply staging action in long, merciless takes, she allows her characters to drift about like balloons caught by gusts of wind. As the three characters unify, dissipate, and unify once more, Bigelow's camera follows them about, nonchalantly noting how they drift apart only to resume as a complete whole. The Jordanian soil serves as a convincing substitute for Iraq. Ackroyd's compositions aid Bigelow in creating conflicting realities: the three men may as well be all alone in the world, and yet their story is in many ways a microcosmic study. Bigelow's suspense-building maneuvers are downright primal. She exploits the harshness of the sound of a knife cutting through a car seat. The distorted eyes of a man looking like wicked pools of hatred caught in a rear-view mirror. The blurry, mirage-like shapes of rifle-wielding insurgents. The terrifyingly endless narrow walkways between buildings at night. Bigelow once again resorts to her famed point-of-view shots, which help to place the viewer in the cuplable, perverse position of finding the adrenaline rush in the action, as with Keanu Reeves in <em>Point Break </em>or the criminals at the beginning of <em>Strange Days</em>. Bigelow does repeatedly succumb to the “shaky cam” approach to action that has dominated action cinema since she largely moved away from the genre. Perhaps emulating YouTube videos from Iraq, this visual tendency does not distract from her work, though it does mark a change in her style.<br /><br /><em>The Hurt Locker</em>'s performances are galvanic, suitable for the titans Bigelow must survey, but never threaten to break the spell of a plausible reality. Renner, Mackie and Geraghty are all as well-honed in their roles as they must be; the former two pitted as strong rivals, the latter playing a character only sure that death resides nearby, and the farther down the road they go, the less possible it is to retreat from sliding over the precipice. Renner's performance suggests Chris Pine's Captain Kirk halfway burnt-out, still a daredevil hotshot, maybe no longer convinced he is immortal, nevertheless only more cocksure and stubborn than he once was. Mackie has a difficult part because he is in essence Renner's straight man—fortunately for him, Bigelow and Boal's screenplay are less inclined to cheer on James' fearlessness and appetite for adrenaline than merely observe, so when he goes face-to-face with Renner, the deck is not stacked against him. Geraghty is fine in his damaged, scared role; his Eldridge oscillates—he is not actively hostile towards James but he is fairly sure that James has placed a fifty-pound weight on the accelerator to the car headed to ruin.<br /><br /><em>The Hurt Locker</em> is many things; perfect is not one of them. The picture's denouement is troubled—a return to the United States feels more inauthentic in one minute than anything in “Iraq”—and the screenplay mistakenly becomes a mouthpiece for soldiers who have failed to reinstate themselves in America since “coming home.” The dialogue says too much, and in the wrong way, but once Bigelow commits to it, there is at least some poetry behind the performance. Seeing a connection between his child's jack-in-the-box toy and the devices he has miraculously survived in disposing, James notes that he is a different person than he once was—a revelation which threatens to be absurdly, crushingly vapid—and Bigelow almost immediately gears up a new, closing montage that could be the only conclusion for a film about a war still ongoing.<br /><br /><em>Point Break</em>, it was written, was about unlikely male bonding. Bigelow has taken another major step in analyzing this phenomenon. With <em>The Hurt Locker</em>, she once again scrutinizes and essays male bonding, but it no longer seems unlikely. Under these conditions, Bigelow seems to ask with each hair-raising scene following the last: How could they not grow closer, how could they<em> not</em> bond?Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-9162432513225437992009-07-28T10:00:00.000-07:002009-07-29T13:51:26.790-07:00Star Trek (2009)The 2009 reinvention of Star Trek found both its perfect and most obvious filmmaking “captain,” J.J. Abrams, of <em>Felicity</em>, <em>Fringe</em>,<em> Alias</em> and <em>Lost</em> fame, who seems like the natural ambassador for the world—and exponent of the merits—of television in the world of cinema. Abrams' work has that glossy, slick patina of high-budgeted television; he certainly has a mind in which screenwriting class lessons have long marinated, and his grasp of basic storytelling probably means he can maximize his keen talents in television in a way that film cannot afford. Television is a visual experience—compared to the radio—but its primary function has consisted in telling the viewer stories, week and after week, and in the last decade, the serialized drama has dominated. The public has voted: <em>Law and Order</em> and <em>CSI</em> in their sundry manifestations are pleasing in their refusal to hold an audience hostage for over an hour—the story is self-isolated and wholly accessible like an old Perry Mason yarn—but sprawling, expansive “arcs” and multitudinous forms of cliffhangers leading into the next telecast make for the spiciest, most riveting recipe. With that kind of repetitious application of his talent for ornamented-with-sexy-stars-and-puzzling-plot-points storytelling, it is little wonder television is Abrams' natural habitat.<br /><br />Now that he has broken through to the other side, and worked his streamlining magic in cinema, Abrams allows his undying embrace of his first love to be seen by all. His first directorial work was a sequel to a Tom Cruise franchise of movies based on a 1960s television show. His second, a “relaunching” of a dormant movie franchise inspired by a 1960s television show. Abrams' terminological mastery of televisized potboiler storytelling—every episodes' Act I leads into Act II, at the end of which Act III is afforded greater importance until each hour-long piece leads into the next hour-long piece—both serves him well and arguably diminishes his filmic screenwriting. <em>Mission: Impossible 3</em> featured a fierce Cruise performance, and it was entertaining in the moment, but the picture was too burdened by its enslavement to formula and genre to stand out, something the film itself seemed to know in its concluding moments, openly making fun of its own plot “set-up” which was naturally the “Macguffin.” Abrams' work behind the camera was never less than acceptable, though some of his choices—a shaky camera to convey chaos being one of the more bluntly perspicuous—were often mundane and appeared outdated.<br /><br />Visually, Abrams has progressed. His <em>Star Trek</em> may not be a riveting optical specimen, but it is not a slouch in its consistency of leitmotifs, providing an agreeable ocular descant of sorts for much of the action one would expect from such a film. Tony Scott and others love angularly pushing and pulling their camera about in order to stimulate tension; Abrams, however, aided by cinematographer Daniel Mindel and composer Michael Giacchino, appears to have watched several submarine thrillers such as Scott's own <em>Crimson Tide</em> and possibly <em>Das Boot</em> among others. Abrams realizes he is crafting a naval war picture, and the film's visual schema aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise confirms it. Before there was dazzle for dazzle sake; in <em>Star Trek</em>, iterations of submarine tropes are plentiful in their abundance (from a mutinous sequence to naturally the suffocating sensation of feeling as though one is being hunted) and Abrams' handling of such are noteworthy for their effectiveness. As the camera slices downward against James Tiberius Kirk's countenance, the imagery buttresses Abrams' origins tale with resonant credibility as a film which seems to actually be informed by cinema.<br /><br /><em>Star Trek</em>, 2009 is populated by a cast of young, “hip” actors. The actor who stands out is Chris Pine. As a brash, rebellious Kirk, he is more Harrison Ford's Han Solo than the comparatively timid William Shatner. There is an energy to Pine's performance that simply burns—because it seems like a star is born, which fits Abrams' story like a glove, so the turn has an interesting dual existence all by itself, displaying that a hungry, confident actor is usually best-suited to play a hungry, confident character. Pine's eyes radiate cocksure conceit and insolence. Finally a <em>Star Trek</em> film treats its audience to the young, ill-tempered Kirk who one could certainly picture outmaneuvering the much-vaunted Kobayashi Maru test by “thinking outside the box.”<br /><br />Kirk's machismo has always played well in <em>Star Trek</em> and the occasional intellectual paralysis of Spock has aided in underscoring the need for a man of action. Yet Spock's mind was extremely sharp and focused on the matters at hand. If President Obama is Spock in the White House, at least with Spock cable news television did not broadcast hour-long, mind-numbing press conferences from the Enterprise. Here Spock is played by Zachary Quinto. Quinto tries his best to emulate Leonard Nimoy, and it is a valiant effort, but Quinto's performance is at times a little forced in its subservience to the past. Quinto, bless him, was simply not gifted with the kind of mellifluous voice of Nimoy's, the kind of voice one would not mind hearing read from a phone book or teleprompter. At least Obama has that. Quinto, however, does rally in several tender scenes, particularly when teamed with Zoe Saldana's Uhura.<br /><br />Nimoy is given a supporting part in the film, but he is reduced to a loudspeaker for the screenplay's most cumbersome, illogical and far-fetched exposition. This sabotages what could have been the film's dramatic peak. There is a great deal of banter about “red matter” and time travel, and as with other incarnations of <em>Star Trek</em>, the screenplay (by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) seems determined to look as though it is only over-thinking its sci-fi-inspired conundrums, but it is a taxing experience. Some of this must be laid at the doorstep of Abrams, whose plot-driven focus has a way of smothering the very characters being followed throughout the course of said plot. When the focus finally shifts back to the picture's villain, intriguingly named Nero (a one-dimensional Eric Bana), Orci and Kurtzman supply their rapacious Romulan with the motivations of past mass-murdering, butchering lunatics, a feature stemming from Gene Roddenberry's series which began before man truly landed on the moon through the films. The first half of the twentieth century was playtime for the nascent bullies whose existence was born out of legitimate grudges, and Bana's Nero is an extension of that theme. His people were casualties to the failings of the Federation, and most directly Spock himself, and so now he will destroy whole planets to blow off some steam.<br /><br />Abrams' <em>Star Trek</em> is not what would be classified as “great cinema.” Many “Trekkies” despise it; others adore it. This writer's lack of connection to the charged, aforementioned group neither detracts nor adds to the picture's charms and flaws for him. Abrams has made some fairly impressive strides as a director with only his second picture—his economical manner of unfurling engaging, one-two-three linear tales is sure to make him a permanent feature of television and popular film for as long as he wishes to remain in the fields. <em>Star Trek</em> as a film is appealing because it fits comfortably. Unlike the preposterously bloated <em>Pirates of the Caribbean</em> sequels, <em>Star Trek</em> is just long enough to feel “epic” but not grueling; unlike superhero movies of various merits such as <em>Superman Returns</em> and <em><a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2008/07/dark-knight-2008.html">The Dark Knight</a></em>, it only takes itself seriously enough to matter to its audience; unlike <em>Iron Man</em>, the film is actually dabbling in some important themes without shirking away, and unlike that and so many other summer extravaganzas, one can remember the film in its entire form over two and a half months after seeing it. It has its problems, and certainly is less for its limitations. <em>Star Trek</em> is like one large slice of chocolate cake; it is sweet, velvety and leaves one feeling strangely empty from lack of nutrition and protein. But it tastes good.Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-80658572707255683692009-07-22T14:00:00.000-07:002009-07-24T17:17:47.689-07:00Public Enemies (2009)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNTqTHFqQX1GhiBn2weO5DLRa9ALISp9NYe3GbbdwHk6r6yNqgfdXAQzKqYqmNN6D7dis5EilNblTvXZktMgRsOzPF5kzqDB5_n6hRL8MI0BAc2u2Cd8kaquVA9AKCochca8Oe9-FHTACk/s400/johnny_depp_public_enemies.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 372px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNTqTHFqQX1GhiBn2weO5DLRa9ALISp9NYe3GbbdwHk6r6yNqgfdXAQzKqYqmNN6D7dis5EilNblTvXZktMgRsOzPF5kzqDB5_n6hRL8MI0BAc2u2Cd8kaquVA9AKCochca8Oe9-FHTACk/s400/johnny_depp_public_enemies.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div>“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.”<br /></div><div></div><div></div><div>—Pablo Picasso<br /></div><div></div><div>Michael Mann's <em>Public Enemies</em> dramatizes the criminal escapades of an individualistic, veteran and expert criminal. This man is a devout loner who lives by his own ethical code, which is heavily informed by the associations and few friendships he has forged throughout his life. Most especially, the man's mindset has been significantly molded by a sage older criminal whose borderline philosophical musings and extrapolations of particular quandaries have left an indelible imprint on the entire being of Mann's protagonist. This protagonist gradually loses his insularly-ensured bearings when he finally falls for a lovely, irresistibly alluring woman. The woman's new presence in the criminal's life threatens to compromise his previously secured moorings. Meanwhile, a dogged man of the law relentlessly tracks the criminal down, either wittingly or inadvertently using the woman as the bait the criminal cannot resist pursuing. Extravagant firefights punctuate the action, with one particularly momentous exchange representing the picture's climax from which everything else hurtles throughout the film's remaining running time.<br /></div><div></div><div></div><div>Unfortunately, Mann has told this same basic story before, and he has done so with a more confident bravado. If the above outline serves as the substratum in which Mann may judiciously service his own thematic obsessions, it is regrettable that <em>Public Enemies</em> comes across as something approximating an artist's “leftovers.” There is a nearly humorous irony to this predicament, as well: in finally creating a sprawling crime drama based on historical figures, and most infamously John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), Mann is repeating himself with an historical drama after plying his trade to sheer fiction. (Mann has essayed historical narratives before—with <em>The Last of the Mohicans</em>, <em>The Insider</em> and <em>Ali</em>—but those films did not follow the trademark Mann crime template of such films as <em>Thief</em>, <em>Heat</em> and to far lesser extents <em>Collateral</em> and <em>Miami Vice</em>.) In essence, Mann has already told the story of Dillinger—and in <em>Heat </em>he definitively channeled the 1930s bank-robber's tenacity and wiliness when creating Robert De Niro's adroit criminal. So now, when <em>Public Enemies</em> unspools, moments associated with Heat or even Mann's other cops-and-robbers tales, repeat themselves: Depp's Dillinger coolly but almost lethally assaults a foolish criminal whose actions led to completely unnecessary tragedy in a scene which cannot not recall De Niro's punishment for a roguish thug his crew ill-advisedly picked up; Dillinger is thwarted by the self-serving mob which had provided safe harbor for his gang; Dillinger must choose whether or not to simply walk away from the love of his life, Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard); a climactic denouement is afforded the weightiness of Greek tragedy and is apparently even given the same musical theme from Mann's 1995 opus (always stay until the lights come up and watch the credits carefully).<br /></div><div></div><div>So much of <em>Public Enemies</em> is finely tuned and tautly-mounted. Repeatedly, Mann stages elaborate set-pieces of suspense, movement and action—and then repeats the repetition. For the filmmaker behind the bank-robbery apogee of <em>Heat</em> or the LA Koreatown nightclub sequence in <em>Collateral</em>, several of these scenes must resemble an accomplished bodybuilder exercising with light free weights as warm-ups. When Mann finally closes the picture's Act II with a sprawling, protracted nighttime gun battle—easily the film's most rivetingly commoving stretch—it appears the veteran has begun the more challenging portion of his routine. Finally, Mann's choices such as shooting in digital with a grittier, hand-held camera perspective, seem to pay off. Earlier, these decisions seemed to conjure a dusty, seemingly incongruous 1930s home movie. Camera bumps and shakes contrast sharply with the more traditional crystallized, tinctorial palette Mann had previously employed. <em>Public Enemies</em> strives to be the scabrous <em>Saving Private Ryan</em> alternative to the picturesque gracefulness of its 1930s crime saga antecedents of the modern era such as <em>Bonnie and Clyde</em>, <em>Miller's Crossing</em> and <em>Road to Perdition</em>. By opting for an admittedly more potently sui generis texture in which to tell their story, Mann and his cinematographer Dante Spinotti craft an immediately controversial film. Whether or not the decisions aid Mann and Spinotti in forging a piece both rooted in past excursions into the 1930s crime-laden tales of Americana such as the aforementioned pictures or other efforts to tell the Dillinger story in the 1940s <em>Dillinger</em> or the John Milius action picture of the same title and simultaneously reaching for a kind of abstractly-defined orphism of being remains questionable.<br /></div><div></div><div></div><div>In other areas, Mann's trademark excesses, weaknesses and undeniable dexterity all mix with one another to create a film of frustrating but engaging dynamism. Mann, who collaborated on the screenplay with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman—based on Bryan Burrough's recent book, “Public Enemies”—is occasionally guilty of mistaking mood for meaning, and shortchanges the characters for whom he perspicuously cares in favor of following the exhilarating swings in momentum between cops and robbers in one gun battle after another. Depp's Dillinger is the picture's most thoroughly detailed and excavated character, yet even he remains mysteriously divorced from much of the film's subtextual focuses. He tells one man to keep his money—like Clyde in the 1967 Arthur Penn picture, Dillinger and his crew are only after the bank's money—but when he tells another criminal that the public matters, it remains unresolved whether Dillinger thinks so because it is simply advantageous or because he has some burning vestiges of principles. At a time in which banks are found liable and in some instances once again blamed for a financial crisis, Mann's film delivers the typical staging of the big banks against the little people with Dillinger and his cohorts representing an approximation of a necessary evil. Dillinger's cohorts, however, almost all remain astoundingly remote—the one exception being Jason Clarke's beautifully rendered John 'Red' Hamilton. On the legal side of things, Christian Bale's Melvin Purvis and Billy Crudup's J. Edgar Hoover are afforded just enough screentime to be presented as full, flesh-and-blood characters, but Bale in particular is—yet again—hamstrung by an underwritten role with which he must work.<br /></div><br /><div>Somewhat surprisingly, it is Cotillard who stands out. Her dialogue is uneven at times, but she and Depp create some dazzling chemistry with one another. Mann recycles pieces of previous romances in his films, fitting Dillinger-Frechette into his paradigm. This does not inflict any damage to the couple's verisimilitude; since Mann has fundamentally told Dillinger's story before in <em>Thief</em> and <em>Heat</em>, to obviously varying degrees, this similar rendering of love fits, and would appear to be largely historically correct. It may indeed be an instance in which Mann—as with the rest of the film—has simply found the real-life, historical story that aligns with his passionate interests and obsessions.<br /></div><br /><div>There is a limitation to that, and naturally history is massaged by Hollywood once more to bend to Mann's vision. Purvis is presented as a consummate professional so as to stand as a palatable Mann “cop protagonist” to pursue the criminal mastermind. Babyface Nelson is gunned down before history informs he was. Yet Hollywood deserves immense credit in certain venues of personal cognizance, something Mann outright acknowledges in the film's denouement. Depp and Mann finally seem to reach the height to which they were so long before striving earlier in the film. As Dillinger sits in a hot theatre watching W.S. Van Dyke's <em>Manhattan Melodrama</em> (George Cukor worked on the film in an uncredited capacity as well), Depp's slight facial expressions tell the tale. It is a beautiful, superbly realized cinematic moment: cinema commenting on itself, and its virtues and powers. Depp—who here delivers the best part of his performance, and probably the single best stretch of acting in years—quietly, amusedly, watches the picture, and Mann's timing with cutting to<em> Manhattan Melodrama</em>'s figures is expert. Dillinger sees himself in Clark Gable's strangely heroic gangster and naturally he, like so many male lovers of film, sees in Myrna Loy's lovely countenance, enshrouded by her gleaming hair, the woman he loves. He also peers into his future and it is a coup de grace of visual storytelling. <em>Public Enemies</em> may not go anywhere Mann has not gone to before, but for that moment, it certainly caught its reflection and tipped its hat to the audience in a manner which speaks volumes about the place of cinema in every moviegoer's life. </div></div>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com115tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-30309046414833597762009-07-20T15:30:00.000-07:002009-07-20T15:54:10.653-07:00Shemariah (May 1990--March 2, 2009)The allure of your marbled fur, the way you leaped and stirred<br />Your demurs were playful but firm, always ill-timed and assured<br />Contours of your agile frame routinely stroked as you purred<br />Eyes clear then blurred, but fierce, messages conveyed without words<br /><br />Through long, empty still nights, you would scamper and saunter<br />Every path and hall held delights, you were friend, and haunter<br />Transfixed on your <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">diamantine</span> eyes, they sparkled with eerie <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">iridescence</span><br />Two baby blue gems, made glowing lights, a pair of fiery crescents<br /><br />About the patio, love requited, your contentment was marvelously warm<br />Predictably with you fresh steak excited, you remained carnivorously in form<br />We wrestled and amused ourselves, you always emerged victoriously transformed<br /><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Himalayan</span> coat shed on the carpet and shelves, a veritable, <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">deliriously</span> unkempt storm<br /><br />I look past the time of woe, in the bay it will stew for now the revelry is left<br />That will last long after the pains of sorrow, the way in which you drew every breath<br />Your feline grace would befit Desdemona at her sweetest, your cunning, Lady Macbeth<br />Before the tree-line, most dangerous at your discreetest, you fought against the long night of deathColeman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-15036789706907123382009-06-26T04:31:00.000-07:002009-12-09T23:32:36.993-08:00Up (2009)<div>Pixar singlehandedly embodies the very paradoxes of the flowering of imaginations, a notion which is commonly linked to the steady maturation of children. Simultaneously challenging itself with the stimulating, increasingly hungry idiosyncrasy tied to the best qualities of a budding abecedarian and indulging in the whimsical fantasy-land, storybook logic, and linear narratives, bustling and humming with the fervent determination of a child unwilling to retire for the evening when he or she could continue playing, Pixar is an intriguing macrocosmic extrapolation of children. Since children are the predominant target group for Pixar animation, perpetually yanking on the apparel of mothers and fathers to see the latest animated treat of the cinema, Pixar would be unwise to limit its appeal by pursuing a strictly unconventional course. Yet because Pixar promises parents an enjoyably engaging, often meaningful excursion into the luminous dreamworld of its filmmakers, those mothers and fathers are more inclined to relinquish a little of their money to attend the film than they likely are for other studios' animated fare.<br /></div><br /><div><em>Up</em> is the latest Pixar picture, co-directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, and written by Peterson based on a short story by Peterson and Tom McCarthy, and it too holds its contradictions steadfastly. Firstly, the film is based on a short story, and at ninety-six minutes long, probably wrings and rinses as much material from that yarn as possible. Which, incidentally, helps to expose the film's most obvious flaw. Secondly, the picture is imbalanced in its morphology. The first fifteen minutes or so are sublime and practically flawless. It may almost be rightly desired that a short animated film had been made from this stitched embroidery. The opening passage of <em>Up</em> recalls the recent Academy Award-winning animated short film <em>La Maison des Petits Cubes</em>, a quietly, evocatively stirring account of a man's life, and his innate, palpable connection to his home. <em>Up</em>'s montage of image and sound here is breathtaking; Michael Giacchino's melodious score conveys the joyfulness, sweetness and heartache which roam and rotate around one another like cars through the boulevards of life.<br /></div><br /><div>This haunting poignancy stalks the remainder of the picture, lurking deceptively about through the more plainly robust, temerarious convolutions of most of the film's plot. Carl Fredericksen (voiced with gusto and curmudgeonly geniality by Ed Asner) is a weary, widowed, seventy-eight year old man by the time the film's proper narrative proceeds. His dignity is stripped away from him by a callous cabal of developers—the kind of largely faceless, unstoppable force of a Madusa-headed hydra villain that usually stands in as Pixar's butter to its bread. As he watches his mailbox—with which he associates memories of his dearly departed wife—be violently pried from the ground and run over by the developers' machinery, Carl loses his composure and strikes out, resulting in his banishment to an “old folks' home,” called “Shady Oaks,” where it is unlikely that the oaks are the only things which are shady. Consequently, Carl finds himself placed in an unenviable predicament, and rather than meekly surrender to the authorities, he launches his home by allowing thousands of balloons tied to his home to take him <em>Up</em>. </div><br /><div><em>Up</em> eases itself into a vastly more comfortable routine at approximately this juncture, however. Tediousness creeps into the film; bland, uninteresting and poorly-motivated characters intrude upon Carl's journey to South America to fulfill a lifelong promise to his wife. Droplets of jejune frivolity would have been not only tolerable but encouraged—Pixar's filmmakers may receive almost unanimous encomiums from professional film critics, but they are probably not to be burdened with delving into Bergmanesque awakenings and reawakenings of the soul, consciousness and yearnings of the metaphysical. <em>Up</em> in the hands of artistic puritans would probably be a failed, 3D re-imagining of <em>Wild Strawberries</em>. Yet <em>Up</em> nearly represents base cynicism in its most forgettable moments, like the staging of an armada of carnivorous, talking dogs approximating the reward for sitting through the comparatively emotionally dire realities of life's shockingly mundane fragility.<br /></div><br /><div>Nevertheless, <em>Up</em> succeeds when it is fluently communicating through the crisp, irrefutable language of cinema, placing the viewer amidst its abundant riches with a warmth and wit of uncommon depth. Worth noting: the banal, “adult” perspective of monogamous, wedded bliss would be to linger on the Fredericksens' bed. <em>Up </em>establishes marriage through childlike glee and innocence, connecting the armchairs of the respective seats in which Carl and his wife so interminably sat, speaking to one another, or not speaking at all because it was unnecessary, to the resilience of lasting human relationships. The wife's childhood scrapbook. A picture of the wife. The aforementioned mailbox. An almost worthless soda bottle cap inspires selfless fealty from one spouse to another in an immeasurably beautiful, unspoken form of curiology. It is in the rapid, dazzling concatenation of images that <em>Up</em> periodically rebounds, finally fully lifting again as the consequences and points to the excessively busy plot finally play out.<br /></div><br /><div>The 3D is a pleasurable ornamentation, and works fairly well with the brilliantly colorful palette with which the Pixar filmmakers work. Giacchino's score is a standout invention, spinning untold layers of pathos to Carl's fundamentally heartwarming world. And those first fifteen minutes are worth the price of admission, beckoning beyond the final credits as an indelible cinematic montage worthy of a silent era genius. The cuts triggering humor such as child Carl having a broken arm after a dangerous fall, or despondency such as a panning shot from a hospital hallway, or simply the passage of time through a dizzying compilation of ties for adult Carl, are nothing short of exemplary. It may be a reasonable theory that even the most troubled, unattractive films have within them mini-films—moments of genuine greatness, tucked away underneath a comparative blizzard of misshapenness. There need be no exhaustive search for <em>Up</em>'s ineffably piercing stretch of filmic harmony. However it is viewed—as a perfect short film which precedes an acceptably diverting family movie or the ideal prologue—<em>Up</em>'s great claim to fame is its gorgeous crown jewel and mellifluously beating heart. </div>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-38503968732331070602009-06-25T13:30:00.000-07:002009-06-25T13:57:30.709-07:00Moon (2009)<a href="http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2009/06/12/alg_moon.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 450px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 300px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2009/06/12/alg_moon.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><br /><div>The conceptual richness of the lone figure stranded by himself has caught the imaginations of innumerable individuals. This is a particularly post-Enlightenment differentia of the west's general complexion—from Byron's Manfred to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, to the cinematic self-ostracized and stranded creations such as Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle in <em>Taxi Driver</em> and Tom Hanks' Chuck Noland in <em>Cast Away</em>—marking a noteworthy separation from antiquity. Greek and Roman societies predominantly viewed the threat of exile as a suitable alternative to capital punishment: the possibility of complete divorcement from civilization and community was an incomprehensibly awful fate. Asian readers of Byron's poetry and Defoe's novel would evidently recoil at the subject matter. The Aristotelian aphorism from his <em>Politics</em>, Book One, “Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature and that man is by his nature a social animal,” is tested by these aforementioned works in the most literal manner.<br /></div><br /><div>Duncan Jones, son of rock star David Bowie, has set out to mount an eerily similar tale. Like previous science-fiction space opuses like Kubrick's <em>2001: A Space Odyssey</em> and Tarkovsky's <em>Solaris</em>, the physically infinitesimal human being, or human beings, set against the boundlessly illimitable backdrop of space, is at the forefront of Jones's essaying of the solitary man. How much of an impact Jones' father had on the idea behind his feature debut—Bowie's sci-fi-tinged music and his starring part in Nicolas Roeg's <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth</em> seem to preternaturally prophesize <em>Moon</em>. Fittingly for this moment, Jones swaps the components of the narrative insofar as he posits not the importance of the earth's properties—Roeg's film sprung from the realization that the earth was singular in its harboring of water—but in its possible deficiencies. Jones, who wrote and directed, begins his picture informing the viewer of a future in which earthlings are searching for sources of energy beyond their planet's atmosphere. Ergo, one man is sent to the moon on a mission whose time is determined by his signing a three-year contract with the energy/space travel company. (Almost humorously, NASA is conspicuous by its absence; apparently, in the future the United States federal government's multiple ongoing wars, and purchasing of car companies, banks and previously-governmentally-chartered mortgage behemoths has made the overseeing of a space program too exorbitant in cost to continue.) Astronaut Sam Bell is tasked with excavating the moon for Helium 3, the light isotope first hypothesized by Australian nuclear physicist Mark Oliphant in 1934. In Jones' lightly sketched future, solar-soaked Helium 3 will become a panacea for mankind, solving the quandaries of finite energy supplies on earth.<br /></div><br /><div>Sam Rockwell plays Bell, and contributes to Jones' vision a performance of nearly startling emotional complexity and breadth. The words “nearly startling” should not take away from Rockwell's turn; it is only nearly startling because for those who have experienced Rockwell's performances, his starring tour de force performance in <em>Moon</em> will not be seen as altogether surprising. There is already a doomed existentialism to Rockwell, which at its fiercest is unshakable. Especially desperate moments in films such as <em>The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford</em> and <em>Snow Angels</em> are punctuated by Rockwell's fidgety earnestness and convincing verisimilitude. Here is an actor who always possesses an air of doom and attrition. Rockwell's isolated self is an amazing performance, worth seeking out. </div><div></div><br /><div>The film brushes up against and in actuality embraces many cliches of science-fiction. A resourceful robot named “Gerty” (voiced quite well by Kevin Spacey) aids astronaut Bell. “Gerty” is an intriguing creation. Much of the creepiness of <em>2001</em>'s HAL remains, but “Gerty” is not the boringly hackneyed malicious computer that HAL enormously helped to usher into the genre or from other recent computer-dominated pictures like <em><a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2008/10/eagle-eye-2008.html">Eagle Eye</a></em>. “Gerty” is doctor, chef, friend and almost paternal figure, a multitasking entity which may both beautifully and frighteningly describe the end of the rainbow for human beings increasingly relying on technology for convenience. The blending of sci-fi and religious allegory is posited through the names Bell assigns his robots, rovers and antennas. One is named Luke, and another is Judas. Bell seems to mark time by drawing a simple face on the metallic wall. The faces appear to represent his daily moods—sadness, happiness, ambivalence, imperfectly represented through Bell's little black-marker avatars. The happy-face image is flashed back from machine to man as well, with “Gerty” smiling and frowning depending on the emotional situation for Sam Bell. </div><div><br /><em>Moon</em>'s production design is quite dazzling in its chromatic, partially sterilized environment. (Though plant life is lovingly depicted as surviving on Bell's otherwise inorganic base of operations.) The use of models is the film's most lasting and memorable effect, creating a visage of recurring potency. The mobile rover of Bell's moving about the surface of the moon, mining and harvesting the Helium 3 for the “Lunar” company, is a repeated, visual soughing, the philter between man, device and the action of movement. Jones' reliance on the models pays off in a meta-commentary on filmmaking without it being too ostentatious: Bell nervously works on a sprawling model of “Fairfield,” (Fairfield, California?) Bell's hometown at a workstation table. </div><div></div><em></em><br /><div>Unfortunately, <em>Moon</em>, ironically, seems to run out of energy in its sagging denouement. Once Bell has discovered some painful, shattering truths about his own existence, the film seems to lack a cogent philosophical destination—or even a basic narrative one. Rockwell is given less and less to do at this point, but he remains strong. It is the screenplay which slackens. <em>Moon</em> partly tells the tale of Plato's shadows on the cave wall, though through the anomalistic mirroring between self and id. Here, <em>Moon </em>brings about questions of alter-egos and projections of such. Having done this, however—from an eye-catching “flash-forward” of a female specter aboard the base to Sam recognizing himself in one being only to consider the attitudinal and psychological gulf between the two—<em>Moon </em>is almost too reticent for its own good. Raising many questions and points about these matters, <em>Moon</em> finally disintegrates, its conclusion dissatisfying in its uncharacteristic conventionality. A last-second voice-over, doubtless intended to be piquant and acidic in its black humor, seems to help the film merely wrap things up too neatly, avoiding a large number of the issues it had earlier broached. Nevertheless, <em>Moon</em> is too engrossing for much of its existentialist odyssey to dismiss or ignore. </div>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com54tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-67586641677776656992009-06-20T14:45:00.000-07:002009-06-20T18:46:45.386-07:00Departures (2008)<a href="http://rthktheworks.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/departures.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 580px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 326px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://rthktheworks.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/departures.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><br /><div>As Asian moviegoers heartily laughed at moments and situations which seemed unhumorous to this frequent denizen of the cinema, the thought crystallized with utmost exactitude, swiftly appearing like a person who had been interminably sitting alongside you for so long that they had gradually dissolved for an inestimable period of time. With exponential fierceness, the voluminous gamut the mind so meticulously runs through was conquered. <em>Departures</em>, directed by Yojiro Takita from a screenplay by Kundo Kayama, is a firmly Nipponese dramatic journal detailing the wistful hope of compromise between a culture's deeply ingrained stigmas of death and its own duteous veneration of those who pass on with euphonious humanism. The picture is at times tonally wandering and disordered, its episodic construct sometimes giving way to ostensible incoherence and overwhelmingly instinctive and facile manipulation. Yet as time passes its greater, more perdurable qualities tend to partly supersede and diminish its blemishes and deviances.<br /></div><br /><div><em>Departures</em> is, intriguingly, however, itself a departure from popular Japanese cinematic perceptions. This disconsonantly diametric stance—antipodal and complementary all at once, steeped in Japanese traditions and simultaneously tottering about in search of a highly significant rapprochement with occidentally treasured modernism—nearly necessitates such drastic modifications and alterations to <em>Departures</em>' inflection. Determining how much of this vacillation is more mundanely tied to the demands of Takita's filmmaking—<em>Departures</em>' morbid subject matter and attendant heartache arguably call for audience-softening badinage, jocoseness and even some limited forays into near-slapstick—remains literally recondite. The story is of Daigo Kobayashi, fledgling cellist, turned encoffinner apprentice. (It should be noted that the film's most robust humor is intrinsically tied to the Japanese fear of uncleanliness, chiefly derived in this picture from the corpses with which the protagonist must routinely deal.) Insofar as <em>Departures</em> evidences social impediments, it does not follow through with the strenuous strictures which laced Akira Kurosawa's own socially conscious explorations of bodily and spiritual decrepitude leading to gradational putrefaction of the noumenal (pace Kant) and rectification of the discarnate. In that it too deals with the moribund certainty that follows infirmity and senectitude, <em>Departures</em> most immediately calls to mind <em>Ikiru</em>, though the catholic mien of the picture shrouds the subtextually grimy and complex sociological realism of Kurosawa's oeuvre—but perhaps more apropos would be <em>Drunken Angel</em> with a paternal older man overlooking the addling progression of a young, unsure man.<br /></div><br /><div>It is in this regard where <em>Departures</em> makes its most pointed claim as being a film worth seeking out on Father's Day weekend. The film's hero, Daigo (a fairly sensitive, but occasionally quite overbearing Masahiro Motoki), suffers from continual Oedipal longing and disquietude due to his father abandoning him when he was at a tender age. Daigo's employer, a stereotypically crusty, amusingly soft-spoken old man named Ikuei Sasaki (a warmly tender Tsutomo Yamazaki) oversees Diago's budding maturation as a man. In one memorable scene, Diago, after having been humiliated by those for whom he cares once they have learned what he does, and now wishing to quit his job, goes upstairs from the front office of the encoffining establishment, to where Ikuei lives, only to be unwittingly persuaded to not leave by the old man's tale of how he became an encoffiner and embalmer—his dearly departed wife was the first person for whom he plied his newfound trade.<br /></div><br /><div>Daigo's peregrination from cellist to encoffiner finds greater artistic resonance through director Takita's compassionate staging of Daigo's physical manipulation of the corpses which are so stigmatized by the salubriously hygienic parameters of Shinto as unclean. As Daigo and Ikuei enact one ritualized passing after another for the deceased, however, it becomes apparent that they are in their own, loving way, appeasing and honoring <em>Kami</em>. Takita's compositional focus, aided greatly by cinematographer Takeshi Hamada, finds Daigo and Ikuei's respective journeys—one ebbing, the other still rising—as parables, not so much demystifying the “casketeering” process, but impeccably detailing it. Avoiding prosaic linkings between the phenomena and the process, Takita and Hamada conspire to create a honeyed placidness out of colors like Japanese water painting. The oriental-occidental cross-cultural conversation has been ongoing for a long time now: each side has commented on each other's redoubtable attributes, whether they be artistic, political or otherwise. Monet's inspiration from Japanese water prints leading to his creation of the water garden, with weeping willows, water lilies, wisteria and bamboo, which further inspired him to create some of his most gorgeous paintings such as the Japanese Bridge and Water Lilies. Viewing<em> Departures</em>, it may be said that Takita has been inspired by Monet, particularly in the transcendental light that accompanies so many of the rooms in which Daigo works. The pictorial communication between European and Asian artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continues, and cinema has helped to make it only more comprehensive. </div><br /><div>The beams of sunlight that slice through rooms and people, the hot, smoking grills and pans on which food is promptly cooked, the golden kerosene lamps, all equally dulcify and anticipate the fiery cremation which awaits those in whom Daigo invests so much time, patience and care. Daigo's musically trained, and expertly dexterous fingers and hands, caress the dead with singular circumspection. The act of beautification is not solely intended to satiate the <em>Kami</em> or the departed, but those who in life held the deceased dear to their heart. Ministerial considerations can only go so far; with a deeply empathizing credulity, one man informs Daigo and his employer that his wife never looked so beautiful in life as she did after they had finished transforming her from a sallow corpse to a ravishing alter-avatar of herself, readying her for the transmigration about which characters repeatedly speak.<br /></div><br /><div>Unfortunately,<em> Departures</em> is not satisfied to be a touching tale of acceptance of an ostracized vocation, and excavation of Japan's complicated, tiered social stratas, but by the endmost chapter, Daigo's throes of Oedipal dejection and bitterness are purified in an unnecessary and maudlinly lachrymose denouement. Takita's direction finally slackens in discipline; the score by Joe Hisaishi, often swelling at dramatic points, becomes too distracting for the sake of the imagery it is intended to support. At this point, <em>Departures</em> has departed the track on which it had succeeded, depicting Daigo's debilitating troubles stemming from his father's abandonment as the firing table from which the remainder of the tale emanated. The risk of unwarranted manipulation seems to not deter Takita, however, as he at the very least finds the encircling ardency of feeling to convey something meaningful, if not especially fruitful. <em>Departures</em> is fittingly organic in that way, as it chronicles the nearly agestral-like naturalness of the decomposition of the human body, touched up afterwards. <em>Departures</em> becomes overripe in its concluding passage, but that does not take everything away from its lovelier properties. </div>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com51tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-8765333218952476172009-06-19T04:30:00.000-07:002009-06-19T11:33:42.546-07:00The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)<a href="http://seattletransitblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/taking_pelham_123-336x500.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 336px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 500px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://seattletransitblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/taking_pelham_123-336x500.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><br /><div>Tony Scott's corybantic, incendiary approbation of rampant nimiety, <em>The Taking of Pelham 123</em>, is at odds with itself and not only because it purports to be, in the words of its TV-ad-cum-action movie conductor, a “re-imagining” of the 1974 Walter Matthau-starring crime drama. Scott's movie is another familiarly skin-deep excursion into human-inspired chaos: a theme-park ride rather than a tense thriller—a feigned supercharged, restless roller coaster, but in actuality one prolonged exercise in cinematic onanism. Tony Scott is in many ways more frustrating than his brother Ridley; the latter lacks an even inchoate panorama of ethnological comprehension, fumbling about in interviews with nonsensical remarks like morally equating the murderous drug kingpin and outstandingly clean policeman who share the stage of <em>American Gangster</em>. Tony—and this is crucial—is by contrast the aspiring painter who lacks the prerequisite patience and poise to fulfill the promise of the canvas. There is, at least, an urgency of vision to Tony's work, and that nearly satisfies, the way an undercooked brownie or refrigerated slice of cheesecake stave off hunger. The nutrients are lacking, and the fear of eating too much of<em> that</em> impels the hand to reach for the fish and vegetables.<br /></div><br /><div>There are moments—shots, actually—which taunt the viewer with the periodic flash of fleeting perspicacity. These, alas, are all too little, too insignificant to finally matter. In the hands of the hyper-kinetic, ridiculously fast-cutting Scott, these worthwhile amendments to the portrait are rendered nearly meaningless. Scott's 2004 revenge action thriller <em>Man on Fire</em> occasionally touched upon the spiritual component which should underlay any such saga. As Denzel Washington's violent American almost literally raises hell in Mexico to save a little girl played by Dakota Fanning, Scott sparsely injects shots of Washington's character slowly, irrevocably drowning in an all-consuming pool of water. It is a startling image—and perhaps the only one which remains over five years after seeing that film. The incongruity of the physical is only an infinitesimally-sized component to the image's power: the deeper <em>congruity</em> of <em>Man on Fire</em>'s solely resonant theme is what renders the ocular intriguingly impressive. Scott wants to make an occasional comment on his characters—but the shallowness of the enterprise (for which he is chiefly culpable through his mind-numbing visual techniques, though he does tend to work with either uneven or abominable screenplays) undoes him. Almost humorously, Scott pours only more fuel to the fire of his pictures' corroding emptiness, until whatever dramatic purpose was originally afoot has been replaced by Scott's incessant need to call attention to himself. For every sequence which may actually call for whirling, disorienting editing flourishes—such as Brad Pitt's wooing of a complete stranger in mere seconds to allow his boss (Robert Redford) to evaluate him in <em>Spy Game</em>—there are an unknown number which are given the treatment regardless of genuine need.<br /></div><br /><div><em>The Taking of Pelham 123</em> in Scott's hands features some insightful visual cues, but they are buried under repetitious waves of excessively busy camera movements—often ostensibly manufactured from tying a diminutive camera to the tail of a kitten, human head or hummingbird depending on Scott's whims—as well as needlessly ostentatious lighting, a droning soundtrack and bursts of laughable dialogue. Many routine and static camera pans highlight Denzel Washington's subway command center, which creates the affect of making over half of the film look and feel like a submarine thriller. (J.J. Abrams utilized a similar technique with <em>Star Trek</em>, albeit with greater discipline, and, since that <em>was </em>a naval war film, it worked. That, however, is for a future review.) The entirety of the film almost crushes the few moments of visual wit to be gleaned from the picture, but those few moments are worth detailing.<br />John Travolta's subway hijacker, “Ryder,” is a demented, loathsome individual who inveighs against the political corruption of America's largest city. Ryder lets Washington's Garber know that he is a Catholic man, and he admonishes Garber for seeing the hostages as innocent—Ryder's Catholicism informs him that no one of this earth is truly innocent. Scott frames Travolta's countenance through the back panel window of the subway, making the small compartment appear like a confessional. This is wholly appropriate considering this is where Ryder gradually, and most reluctantly, begins to confess his sins to the listening Garber. <em>The Taking of Pelham 123</em> is briefly made into a richly textured ecclesiastical battle between the fallen Catholic and the modern staple of public service, the practical do-gooder. That has almost nothing to do with Brian Helgeland's fundamentally flawed screenplay—which almost always takes natural conversations and quickly makes them yelling matches, in direct, transparent contrast to the icily attenuated battle of wits between Matthau and Robert Shaw from the original film—and almost everything to do with Scott's temporarily arresting motif coupled with the best portion of Travolta's performance, in which he suggests unmitigated self-loathing and black nihilism.<br /></div><br /><div>Scott, however, cannot wait to get to the scenes of mayhem; an impertinent, compendious system of title cards flashes before the viewer nearly like electronically-constituted destinations at a terminal, informing of just how much more time exists for the city to abide by Ryder's deadline. Whether it is a high-concept action blockbuster or the latest Austrian art-house cine, too many filmmakers place process over the quintessential core of their films. In the case of supposed artsy “hyperlink” films, too many filmmakers strain to make the construct matter in the richness of irony and little else, and that may be due to today's excessive devotion to irony for irony's sake. With <em>The Taking of Pelham 123</em>, Scott misses the forest for the trees. His interpretation is predictably noise, noise, noise, all becoming faint—sound and fury, signifying nothing.<br /></div><br /><div>Tobias A. Schliessler's almost literally nauseating lighting schema tells the tale; like a Spike Lee film, Scott's picture accentuates the horridness of urban life in New York City. Yet while Lee's pictures personally transfer the worst and best elemental matters of the complicated social organism he dissects, Scott's take is muted by sheer exploitation. This is the filmmaker who, in <em>Man on Fire</em>, made Mexico City look like the eighth circle of hell, only to attach one last title card to thank the city, calling it a “special place.” The milieu may differ but New York City is given a shockingly similar faux-medicinal regimen in <em>The Taking of Pelham 123</em>. Throughout the messy narrative, the city is besmirched and ridiculed, only to be held up by the final moments as a kind of insuperable but benign beacon of clout and culture. The pairing of a taxi cab ad and the mayor played by James Gandolfini (the deliciousness of Tony Soprano moving next door to New York City and becoming mayor all too obvious) sticking up for public servant Garber in the final reel leaves a bitter aftertaste of cheap manipulation to ensure that no unsafe dramatic destination is remotely touched. </div><br /><div>And how do the performers fare? The perfection of Matthau as the lanky, plain and unlikely hero has been replaced by utter artifice. The connective tissue bridging the fictive and actual worlds in 1974 brightened Joseph Sargent's solid thriller. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Matthau's public servant was a bold stand-in for the paradoxes which animated American life. When meeting a hotshot police inspector, Matthau's Garber is taken aback because the man is black. Matthau's Garber was imperfect and crude; he scoffs at Japanese men and finds them to be a waste of his time. Matthau's close physical approximation of Richard Nixon subconsciously seals the deal: an evidently inadvertent collision between Sargent's finespun world and that of the pained reality of 1974 creates a lasting and worthy meta-comment. Washington, who seems to have mortgaged a portion of his soul to Scott, by contrast, is a poor reflector; adding a paunch to his midsection with loose-fitting pants always threatening to slide downward is insufficient in its meager conviction. When Washington spills a liquid all over himself, the scene screeches and squeals under the strain imposed by Helgeland's cliched game plan. Washington himself seems in on the joke, as is the entire audience: look, it's Denzel, playing this role. The man is too much of a thespian, crying at just the right moment, frowning with determination at his imperious boss, to be taken seriously here. Travolta dials in another villain: he at least is having fun, but aside from a presumptuousness which is intermittently endearing in that twisted way that makes everyone wish they were so crazed, he brings little to the picture that piquantly stings. Robert Shaw's creation surpassed such pedantic movie thuggery.<br /></div><br /><div>Scott's <em>Pelham 123</em> arrives in the aftermath of more national trauma, war and debilitation of the figure of public service, just as Sargent's did. The differences, however, are noteworthy. Sargent's film sought to deeply examine societal stratas, class and racial tensions—without resorting to absurdly over-the-top maneuvering such as having the villain confirm that an Irishman is Irish and an Italian is Italian as in Scott's picture—through the prism of overqualified criminals against public servants working inside a corrupt system. Scott and Helgeland's public servant is himself corrupt, so <em>Pelham</em>, 2009's message seems to be, what goes around is money, what comes around is payback. That, and something that everyone should follow right about now: invest in gold. </div>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com73tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-1336218967866967312009-06-17T17:16:00.000-07:002009-06-17T18:54:13.173-07:00Drag Me to Hell (2009)<a href="http://blog.80millionmoviesfree.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/drag-me-to-hell.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 432px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 641px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://blog.80millionmoviesfree.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/drag-me-to-hell.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>How much better is Sam Raimi's <em>Drag Me to Hell</em> for having Alison Lohman as its lead actress rather than the early choice, Ellen Page? Lohman—who lent the impersonal Ridley Scott a lovely pathos in the otherwise mediocre <em>Matchstick Men</em> (2003)—was born in 1979 but she looks not a day over twenty-five and imports a vibrant youthfulness and little-girl giddiness and magnetism of a high school student. Page, by contrast, was born in 1987, yet she pollinates her work with an ever so slightly brash cynicism and despondency. Lohman radiates a welcoming patina to the men who share the screen with her; Page's subtle attitudinal negativism would suit a young woman with a worldview tinged by misandry. Page would probably have succeeded in the role of ascendant loan officer Christine Brown but she would have had an uphill climb—for Lohman, however, the role is ostensibly like playing a variation of herself. </div><br /><div>Raimi's long absence from the unadulterated horror of his <em>Evil Dead</em> pictures has made the wait for <em>Drag Me to Hell</em> nearly unbearable. The payoff, however, is so grandiose that there is no fear of disappointment or letdown. <em>Drag Me to Hell</em>—as the title itself vociferously declares—is no halfbreed excursion into the mundane passing for direly rampaging terror: it is the real deal. Like Raimi's grin-inducing cult films, <em>Drag Me to Hell</em> is wacky and warped. Reprieves from the assaulting horror—most conspicuously whipped about on the big screen and in the cinema by the exuberantly impressive and Academy Award-worthy sound-editing and -mixing—are short and exist not to banally contrast with the thrills and chills as in all too many films belonging to the loosely-defined genre, but to inform it. Raimi's newest picture is a smashing, exhausting triumph because he and his screenwriting collaborator brother Ivan so consummately embed the everyday quotidian world of Christine's with the oncoming gypsy curse which threatens her at every turn.<br /></div><br /><div>Lohman's performance never <em>drives</em> the film, because Christine as a construct is intended to make pivotal choices and continually react. Some critics have perhaps docked Raimi points for this—they may raise their thumb in approval but quibble with some of the particulars. They have it backwards. As a horror film, <em>Drag Me to Hell</em>, while featuring a dazzling facade, is not truly unique. As a complete film, however, it is an enticingly intimate composition. Raimi's art, even when anchored and occasionally buried by cheesiness (<em>The Quick and the Dead</em>) or apathetic bloat (<em>Spider-Man 3</em>), beams through. It is academic to suggest that all of drama comes down to choices made by characters, but Raimi's particular—sometimes feverish—interest in the consequences of choices endows his films with an unusual heft for such a populist-minded filmmaker. Raimi's multifarious interpretations of morality and choice is an articulate, somewhat astral stand against rampant positivism. Raimi's characters are burdened by the inestimable accountability out of which their metaphorical bed is made.<br /></div><br /><div>Whether it be Peyton Westlake/Darkman or Peter Parker/Spider-Man, or the poor Mitchells of the melodramatically charged, deathly ashen <em>A Simple Plan</em>, Raimi's characters are in command of their own destinies, subjects to their own administration. They are infused with the culpability and original sin with which Catholics ceaselessly wrestle. Some critics may chide Raimi's “moralistic” approach—they are mistaken. As in the under-appreciated <em>The Gift</em> and the amiable but quite uneven <em>For Love of the Game, Drag Me to Hell</em> echoes beyond its running time because of the repercussions against which Christine, like Raimi protagonists before her, so tirelessly chafes. As rudimentary as <em>Spider-Man</em>'s outstanding line of dialogue may in truth be (“With great power comes great responsibility...”) it remains potent—and in a vein deeper than materialistic or paternal noblesse oblige, which were the oversimplified readings of that film's tonal substance—in no small measure because Raimi is not a pedestrian journeyman ensuring the line readings were recorded; he believes the words.<br /></div><br /><div>Now opting for more visceral representations of that implication, Raimi allows the conveyed statement to reverberate with action. Christine's position at her bank is uncertain: she is desirous of a promotion but she must overcome the daunting obstacles of a weasely rival and the all too easily discerned air of sexism and buddy-buddy networking which plagues her professional life. On numerous planes, Christine is a symptomatic creature of modern American society. Gradually pushed to the brink of myriad possibilities such as taking shortcuts, fulfilling vengeance-laden gratification and aiming to please her fickle boss, Christine's journey is an enriching etching of feminine vim and dynamism set against the backdrop of a largely insensitive and hard-featured world. Lohman's sweetly angelic and innocent features italicize the Raimi brothers' point: the darkness of the world is always seeking out the beautiful for retribution, whether deserving of its presence or not.<br /></div><br /><div>The meshing of the most base elements of the corporeal and the unthinkable devastation of the otherworldly has rarely been this rivetingly staged. In <em>Drag Me to Hell</em>, bodily fluids, insects and varied repulsive creatures and pests ground the presence of inconceivable evil like the “pea soup” of <em>The Exorcist</em>. While the visages of the picture sometimes play out like grotesque freak show acts strung along together, they cumulatively inspire a level of fright that surpasses mere sensorial reaction. Raimi's manipulative tricks taken by themselves are not breathtaking; the final, haunting tableau they engender is. This is a major accomplishment for Raimi, who proves that his prolonged stint with elephantine budgets has not irreversibly diminished his keen cinematic senses.<br /></div><br /><div>Everything aforementioned handsomely buttresses <em>Drag Me to Hell</em>'s delirious banquet of Raimi's self-proclaimed “spook-a-blast”; and at his best Raimi communicates to the viewer with wordless irony. Many scenes begin with a scare and conclude with a laugh, but there is a sensation of knowing attached to that laugh, which hurts. Pretty girls having nosebleeds has become a periodical staple of horror and science-fiction (any fan of <em>The X-Files</em> will attest to that) but Raimi pushes the accelerator all the way down to the floor (and in doing so proves that PG-13 need not be synonymous with toothless)—partly for the gasps and chuckles the more robustly animated <em>mise-en-scene</em> inspire but also because it is through the excellently explored absurd that reality finds itself most nakedly revealed. In this instance, a nosebleed becomes a Biblical flood, and a sight gag segues into primal, human fear. “Did any get in my mouth?” Christine's boss frantically asks. The fear itself is futile, as Raimi continually evidences: evil is already lodged within us, perpetually fighting to get out.</div>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-74313466667062188472009-06-15T18:45:00.000-07:002009-06-17T15:08:35.024-07:00Terminator: Salvation (2009), aka Contextualizing "The Terminator" Franchise<a href="http://boxoffice.com/blogs/steve/terminator-salvation-Christian-Bale.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 300px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://boxoffice.com/blogs/steve/terminator-salvation-Christian-Bale.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div></div><div>When James Cameron made <em>The Terminator</em> (1984), he successfully coupled low-budget gravel with high-concept gravy. Within literally seconds, he established an alternate universe in which an entire (admittedly downbeat) mythology would play itself out. This was slightly unlike any other science-fiction film insofar as it succinctly detailed the players—both present and future—as well as the stakes of its epical tale by transplanting all of the combatants to the contemporary universe the audience readily recognized. Cameron may not be widely considered a high cinematic artist but this was the baptismal instance in which his interests in storytelling, with the aid of prudently utilized practical special effects, proved too excellent and refreshing a commixture to ignore. </div><br /><div>The religious undertones to Cameron's first labor of love (<em>Piranha 2</em> is frequently dismissed as “director-for-hire” work) helped to establish the gravitas of his nascent mythology. The connection between “John Connor” and “Jesus Christ” is obvious (is there a relation of some sort between “James Cameron” and “John Connor” as well?). Then there is Sarah Connor, named after the Biblical Sarah, foremother of the Israelites. The previously barren Sarah was gifted through a divine miracle to conceive and give birth to the providential, foretold son named Isaac. Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor is impregnated through time travel: the man sent by a burnt-out veteran warrior, hero and resistance fighter John Connor proves to be Connor's father. (The less time spent debating the scientific merits of time travel, the better. Also: one may view the conclusion of <em>Terminator 2: Judgment Day</em> as the inversion of the story of Abraham and Issac, as the father figure—future California Governator Ahnuld—lays down his... life?... for the chosen son.)<br /></div><br /><div>For the first three <em>Terminator</em> pictures, this mythology was largely held intact in its basic configuration. For three straight films, poor John Connor—first, to be terminated before conception, then as a rebellious adolescent listening to Guns 'N' Roses (a trait he still possesses in the 2009 release) and finally as a nearly nihilistic, disillusioned twenty-something—was the target. With <em>Terminator: Salvation</em>, Connor is propped up as a man of action, finally resembling in the most perspicuous manner the “freedom fighter” the audience has been repeatedly told he will one day become. What <em>Terminator: Salvation</em> promises with its trailer (vastly superior to the film) is to finally delve deeply into the war between the humans and the machines first alluded to in the opening seconds of Cameron's 1984 modern classic. What all of the studio executives seem to have forgotten, however, is that not a single viewer of the original picture considered the idea of seeing the future apocalyptic war as necessary, or entertaining or even a good idea in the least. Cameron allows Kyle Reese and his combat trauma-induced flashbacks to be the portal through which the viewer sees the hellish carnage and destruction of the future: it's not particularly appetizing or pretty, and there is just enough of it to drive the point home.<br /></div><br /><div>This is not to even broach the subject of this series' thematic schizophrenia. <em>The Terminator</em> posited that human beings could fight for their ideals, for their humanity, as it were, against seemingly insurmountable odds, in the face of known horror. The film's release in the 1980s suggests latent Cold War paranoia of nuclear annihilation coupled with uncomfortable acceptance, which makes the picture surprisingly relevant and subversive in the post-9/11 era, too. <em>Terminator 2</em> was far more upbeat—the future may be grim but “Judgment Day” can be averted with the coupling of humanity and machine as one force for good. “No fate but what we make,” was the 1991 picture's enormously appropriate declaration, seeing as the Cold War was melting away like so many ice cubes on a June porch and people of varied nationalities, ethnicities and histories were, in essence, rising up against a long-feared oppressor.<br /></div><br /><div>Unfortunately, the allure of money was too potent for the aforementioned studio executives to resist: <em>Terminator 3</em>, released less than two years after 9/11, seemed to consign humanity to the dustbin for good: there is no stopping “Judgment Day”; as the politically ambitious star remarked with mechanic chilliness, “You only postponed [the future nuclear holocaust]. Judgment Day is inevitable.” And with that, studio avarice blatantly rejected the entire pulsing message of the first two films as crafted by Cameron. <em>Terminator 3</em>'s tagline should have read, “No fate but what we make—What a joke.” And thus, with the end of the world, and end of that picture, Nick Stahl self-importantly intoned that the future still lay ahead. In other words, prepare to sacrifice more money to see a franchise go in an entirely unnecessary direction and nullify the purpose and meaning of the first two films, which so many today still love and quote as nineteenth century American politicians recited Biblical verses in their speeches.<br /></div><br /><div>The basic skeleton of the first three <em>Terminator</em> films remained the same, despite the thematic muddling and inconsistency. Each film presented a dystopian future dictated by merciless machines. Cameron's vision entailed faith in humanity against the encroaching supremacy of a mechanized future. It is no coincidence that the greatest objective of all three earlier films was to leave Los Angeles as soon as possible. In each case, at least one Connor was tormented by an ostensibly unstoppable and unyielding force. The formula was enticing in the relaxed, almost innate way that recalls simple fairytales or traditional professional wrestling “booking”: the villain is seemingly invincible, but the hero is equally determined to triumph and save the day. As the series progressed, the assassin terminators had to be increasingly deadly, until, with the third film, a Scandinavian supermodel Terminatrix could just about literally do anything it set its electronic mind on accomplishing. A viewer may have asked, as JC did with <em>T2</em>, “Why doesn't it just become a bomb or something and get me?” <em>Terminator 3, </em>however, was a film consciously bathed in self-parody—and, in a way, how could it not be, considering how pervasive the first two films became in the realm of popular culture? At least the film was brisk, if not memorable, and its longest car chase was excitingly mounted in a way all too few action sequences are today.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><br />Which takes this look at the <em>Terminator </em>franchise to the newest release. It is difficult to remember a film so wantonly self-destructive and wasteful. The most fertile substance from <em>T3</em> was the emotional chemistry between Stahl and Claire Danes as Catherine Brewster, John Connor's future wife and mother of his children. So the terminally confused <em>Terminator: Salvation</em> elects to spend approximately three minutes of its running time on the relationship between man and wife, savior and maiden. Christian Bale and Bryce Dallas Howard make the 2003 pairing of Stahl and Danes look like Bogey and Bacall in comparison. Bale is wholly lost in his role, grunting and fuming, screaming and yelling, behaving more like an impotent teenager confronted by his parents than the bravely insubordinate trooper defying catastrophic orders the film apparently wishes to present. Howard is an empty vessel. The only performer who escapes unscathed from the film is Sam Worthington, whose most accomplished episodes almost convince that there is an entirely functioning brain behind this enterprise. As this film's Frankenstein's monster, he literally howls at the moon, his naked body covered in mud evidently symbolizing man's evolutionary emergence from the muck and mire of the earth, with the wet soil representing a mother's amniotic fluid.<br /><br /><div><em>Terminator: Salvation</em> is reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s James Bond movies of the frequently lamented “Roger Moore era,” as an old, aging and tired franchise begins to steal from newer, flashier populist cinema entries. <em>The Matrix</em>, Steven Spielberg's 2005 <em>War of the Worlds</em> and Michael Bay's <em>Transformers</em>, to name but three, are liberally borrowed from for action spectacles; <em>Apocalypse Now</em>, first poked in the ribs by <em><a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2009/03/watchmen-2009.html">Watchmen</a></em>, is once again trotted out by director McG for yet another parading exercise in film geek pandering. Whereas <em>The Terminator</em> was a concisely paced, tersely eloquent exploration of dread, <em>Terminator 2: Judgment Day</em> a glossy action-packed marathon of mythological peregrination and a work of a man wanting to satisfyingly wrap up every loose end presented by his first opus, <em>Terminator 3</em> an agile if nearly completely mindless compilation of action genre outbursts and obeisance to the superficialities of the two earlier pictures and simultaneously an utter rejection of their respective theses, <em>Terminator: Salvation</em> is a film adrift, with a character built up for three straight films who proves to be nothing less than boring in the flesh. Cameron had it right; the viewer did not need to see the much-ballyhooed war between the humans and the machines. Subtlety is not even the issue—<em>T3</em> featured Danes' Brewster squeal, “I <em>hate</em> machines!” as one of her first lines. What <em>Terminator: Salvation</em> needs is the very hope of salvation once embraced, and later discarded, like so many long-forgotten cynical campaign promises. </div>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-90537945471207188102009-06-15T18:15:00.000-07:002009-06-15T18:21:55.610-07:00China Moon (1994)<a href="http://www.beniciodeltoro.ca/ChinaMoon.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 323px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 475px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://www.beniciodeltoro.ca/ChinaMoon.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div></div><div>The 1991 (finally released theatrically by Orion Pictures in 1994) romantic neo-noir thriller <em>China Moon</em> establishes early its central character's most palpable traits and attributes, which deceptively foretell his eventual unraveling and undoing. Ed Harris plays cagey, intuitive (fictional) Brayton, Florida (filmed in Lakeland, Florida and the surrounding area) detective Kyle Bodine, whose observant attention to detail allows him to read murder scenes like road signs, knowing within minutes who the perpetrator is. Because he is good at his job, he rarely considers why he is doing it; when questioned by his somewhat green, and in Bodine's words, “okay,” partner, Lamar Dickey (Benicio Del Toro) why he is a cop, Bodine replies that he knew there was a reason. He will think about it sometime. </div><br /><div>Bodine's intelligence and awareness prove to be indirect vulnerabilities when placed alongside his ostensible lack of greater motivation. When he discovers a beautiful, mysterious woman named Rachel Munro—played with almost vampiric luminescence by Madeleine Stowe—he falls head over heels for her. Unfortunately she happens to be married to an equally powerful and abusive local banking kingpin, Rupert Munro (a one-note Charles Dance). Gradually, the film's tone shifts from the fairly sumptuous tale of passion between Bodine and Rachel to a serpentine murder mystery.<br /></div><em></em><br /><div><em>China Moon</em> is longtime cinematographer John Bailey's (whose credits include American Gigolo, <em>The Pope of Greenwich Village</em> and <em>Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters</em>) directorial debut. The lighting the seasoned director of photography utilizes allows for some mesmerizing visualizations which enhance what is fundamentally a routine potboiler. The screenplay, by Roy Carlson, is sufficiently serviceable when it must be, providing just enough in the way of narrative glue for the picture's subtly dyspeptic yarn to give impetus to the ocular pleasures <em>China Moon</em> offers to the viewer. Bailey and Belgian cinematographer Willy Kurant ably conspire to create a visually rich canvas of coolly colored nighttime vistas and interiors. One particularly memorable setting is the lushly romantic setting of a lake. The reflection of the “china moon”—Bodine tells Rachel that his mother used the term for a full moon, under which people would “do strange things,” he states—is captured against the smooth, seemingly tranquil surface of the body of water in delicately composed shots.<br /></div><br /><div>When finding himself in the unenviable position of covering up a murder, Bodine's mercurial gifts are turned against him, and as the cliché goes, the hunter becomes the hunted. Bailey and Kurant's occasionally delicious visages figuratively brighten and literally dim the picture as Harris' detective becomes not only wholly entangled in the mystery but the most suspected figure in the film by his fellow officers, including his partner. Following the time-honored noir template, the protagonist's apparent strengths prove to be strangely debilitating, as Bodine's certainty and sharpness leave hints of hubris. Those seeds are indeed immediately sown in the film's prologue, during which Bodine surveys the scene of a homicide with all of the clinical precision of a genuine expert. “Sooner or later,” he says derisively of murderers, “they all fuck up.” Little does he know his tumultuous future when he makes this comment to his colleagues.<br /></div><em></em><br /><div><em>China Moon</em>'s most sound component of all, however, is the lead performance by Ed Harris. Harris is dynamic and subtle, forceful and equable all at once. He gives a compelling, convincing performance that keeps the film humming even when too many coincidences and plot holes needlessly distract from the vastly more important emotional through-line with which Harris endows the humble film. Harris' eyes are especially captivating in a film peopled with indelible pools of light as eyes, most notably his costar, Stowe's, which accurately belie her truer nature. Harris makes every little movement of his eyes matter, and it fits wonderfully with his character's chief gift of observation. There is a doom in his eyes, and it is matched, if not with straightforward and engrossing presence, then with a complementary sense of intrigue by Stowe, working off of the guilelessness and fierceness Harris supplies.<br /></div><br /><div>Where Stowe comes up short is in the range of her performance; the screenplay and Bailey's uneven handling of his actors contrive to limit her. Whereas many noirs allow for the female presence to display greater shades of character, <em>China Moon</em> is actually the opposite. Stowe's Rachel is if anything too nebulous and murky a figure, and the fact that the very ending hinges on her true motivations leaves a peculiar aftertaste as there has been minimal buttressing of her emotional state beyond common, hoary and hackneyed abused-wife syndrome scenes. As with other conventional neo-noirs that follow similar storylines, the husband, here played by Dance, is completely one-dimensional and totally unsympathetic; if and when such a character meets a violent end, the ramifications of his demise are almost always only of interest insomuch as they relate to the other characters' fates.<br /></div><br /><div>Nevertheless, Harris' carefully calibrated turn excellently draws the viewer in with great, meticulous thoughtfulness. When Bodine finally reaches his breaking point and lashes out, the viewer is caught up with him; it's not an entirely different sensation than relishing the confused, furious righteousness of James Stewart's John “Scottie” Ferguson confronting the inscrutable Kim Novak in the closing moments of <em><a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2008/05/vertigo-1958.html">Vertigo</a></em> when Harris' Bodine points the finger of indignation at the untrustworthy Rachel. The sophistication that is missing in other parts of the film is evident whenever Harris makes his presence profoundly felt. In a landscape of noir, marked by countless dupes, sometimes what matters is simply trying to get the last word in. Bodine tries his best, and this flawed film is better for it. </div>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-63798213282124415432009-04-03T17:30:00.000-07:002009-04-03T17:40:41.182-07:00Murmur of the Heart (1971)<a href="http://inmattsopinion.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/2005_12_08_criterion_328_murmur_of_the_heart.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 348px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 490px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://inmattsopinion.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/2005_12_08_criterion_328_murmur_of_the_heart.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><br /><div>There is an almost inescapable infectiousness beaming from and residing in Louis Malle's best films. His vibrancy and effervescence, when judiciously meshed with a compelling, mythic anecdote—both of which he himself crafted with singular delicacy—is simply irresistible. It has doubtless often been said that <em>Murmur of the Heart</em>, like other Malle pictures, is a filmic essaying of innocence lost, but that is itself a faux pas. Malle's work, not irregularly maligned by critics who soured on Malle's admittedly tartly acidulous aromatic palette, is best consumed with a suspicion—not of his intentions but of his art, which seems to serve as a rejoinder to the oft-repeated phrase, <em>trust the art, not the artist</em> (which naturally remains true in Malle's case as well). Malle's films are about innocence, period, even when it is politically, sociologically or culturally skewed, benighted and spiritually subjugated to the banalities of polity, as in the mesmeric tarry through callow fascism that is <em>Lacombe, Lucien</em>. Malle's cinema—imbued with an innate plausibility, but purified by a tinting of phantasmagoria—is arrestingly deceptive without resorting to duplicity.<br /></div><br /><div><em>Murmur of the Heart</em> stars Lea Massari and Benoit Ferreux (in his first film) as Clara Chevalier and her adolescent son, Laurent, in 1954 France. As in other Malle pictures, the main pubescent-to-young adult character's insouciance is juxtaposed with the geopolitical tumult that either directly or circuitously informs his peregrination into variegated definitions of manhood, most commonly finding sexual awakening, arousal and action as the definitive fulcrum against which all else pivots. The aforementioned <em>Lacombe, Lucien</em> made Malle's most trenchant points concerning wartime collaboration as seen through ambling indifference—ascetically apolitical in its painterly construction but highly, almost obdurately uncompromising in its most sweeping aspects of efficaciously rendered prevarication (Lacombe's chief imperious/sexual conquest and annexation is of the pulchritudinous girl named France Horn)—but with the earlier <em>Murmur of the Heart</em>, Malle's edifice remained with the entanglements of the familial. As reports stream into the consciousness of Frenchmen from the losing contest in Indochina, Laurent—who, in the film's prologue is found with a friend soliciting random people for aid for wounded veterans of the colonial strife—blossoms in both expected and unexpected ways. This is a most particularly oedipal telling of the nuanced love between a son and mother.<br /></div><br /><div>Like Francois Truffaut's <em>The 400 Blows</em>, the son, here Laurent, catches his mother engaging in extramarital love affairs. The love that once deeply marked the Italian-born mother's marriage to her gynecologist French husband, for whom she produced three sons—Laurent being the youngest—has been replaced by gentle but occasionally uncomfortable silences and arguments recurrently about Laurent's nature, with the nearly overprotective mother protesting that the misbehaving child is sensitive as her husband merely throws up his hands and refers to him as a pain in the neck. “He used to be so jealous,” Clara Chevalier tells her son late in the picture. At this time, however, Clara finds herself searching for excitement and warmth of feeling from other men. Laurent's sexual confusion and deep, abiding affection for his mother collide as he catches glimpses of her running off with other men. Clara will tease him late in the film: “You're my little, jealous French husband!” The relationship between Clara and her son doubtless inspires interest from receptive Freudians.<br /></div><br /><div>What partly separates Malle's pictures from many others is their curious, salient repetition of movement and form. Like the heartbroken, lonely solitary figure walking seemingly aimlessly about the arid night in <em>Elevator to the Gallows</em>, <em>Murmur of the Heart</em>'s cohesion—seen from Laurent's point-of-view, but legitimately adjoined to his equally cogent and misaligned multi-peopled portraitures orbiting his mother—is made up of confident visual enactments that prop up Malle's thematic touchstones. In <em>Murmur of the Heart</em>, these are repeatedly quite funny. One especially rewarding sequence follows Laurent's delirious older brothers playing “spinach tennis” with one another, flinging globs of spinach to one another's plate from across the dinner table. Much later in the film, the actual sport of tennis will become a metaphorical simile for the battle of the sexes, and how the entire war is a stupendously childish game of a different sort, one of Malle's most propitiously important revisited themes.<br /></div><br /><div>What ultimately enriches <em>Murmur of the Heart</em>, however, is its densely literate subtexts. In one subtle scene, a brother of Laurent's hands him reading material: “Proust to entertain you and <em>Tintin</em> to instruct you.” As Laurent chastises a shallow suitor for Clara's affections at a health spa, he points to the intelligence of Proust. “But you don't read Jewish writers,” Laurent notes of the apparently nationalistic, colonialist-leaning young man. “A country is nothing without colonies. Look at the English,” Clara's suitor remarks. The allusions to Proust are important to examine, as they hint at Malle's narrative structure. <em>Murmur of the Heart</em> is fundamentally a retelling of Proust's “Within a Budding Grove, Volume 2” from “In Search of Lost Time.” The connective tissue is myriad in its configurations. Malle's health spa—which Laurent, like the story's narrator, is a sick child, attends for the sake of his heart which suffers from murmurs—appears to be a stand-in for Proust's Balbec; the pretty blonde girl Helene seems to be inspired by Proust's Albertine, who in both the story and Malle's film is suspected to be a lesbian; like the narrator, Laurent seeks to sexualize his relationship with Helene/Albertine—Proust's delineation followed the narrator's quest to kiss Albertine whereas the sexually fixated Laurent attempts to bed Helen; and like the narrator, Laurent professes a consummate love for his mother (which again, in Malle's tale, is more acutely sexualized).<br /></div><br /><div>As in <em>Lacombe, Lucien</em> and other Malle films, from the mutedly despairing, futuristic parable of the war between the sexes, <em>Black Moon</em> to another rendering of maladjusted childhood fantasia and tragic malignity, <em>Au revoir les enfants</em>, male dream-manufacturing, like spools from which airy cotton candy are proliferated, finds both reward and dejection, elation and despondence, in the ecstatic reverie of dazed abstraction. Where <em>Murmur of the Heart</em> differentiates itself from both Malle's earlier and later work is that its playfulness is more earnest—and therefore brighter and truer all at once—because the child is truly enraptured with not only a conception but a real-world visage of nearly ineffable familiarity and closeness. Oedipal or not, the relationship—superbly brought to life by the effortlessly charming child actor Ferreux and the window of the mortal divine that the impossibly endearing Massari most palpably represents—somehow resides beyond all of his other explications of humans in all of their confounding complexities. Profundity of a peculiarly alien, ethereal kind presents itself in Malle's exquisite denouement. After everything, all the Chevalier brood can do is laugh together, giggling and chuckling, chortling and cackling, in a fit of sustained cachinnation, surveying not so much the world—which for all of national and intimate changes, in immeasurable and decipherable ways alike, coupling the political with the sexual, has not been irreparably altered after all—but themselves. As with almost anyone with any hint of modesty, self-awareness and humility, they have burst together, as in the most reasonable reaction to a sustained episode of looking into a mirror.</div>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-66891710382207491582009-04-02T11:20:00.000-07:002009-06-15T15:53:25.326-07:00Hunger (2008)<a href="http://www.rowthree.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/hungermoviestill.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 199px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 300px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://www.rowthree.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/hungermoviestill.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><br /><div>Steve McQueen's feature film debut, <em>Hunger</em>, is an uneven but viscerally forceful picture. Where it fails in comprehensiveness and even filmic movement—McQueen's vignettes almost all stand apart, disparately creating momentary displeasure and disgust, never quite gelling into a substantive narrative, or at least only belatedly finding one to pursue—it succeeds in sensational conviction befitting its subject matter. Not unlike Mel Gibson's <em>The Passion of the Christ</em>, McQueen's film is fervent and nearly maniacal in its unblinking stare; unlike Gibson's film, McQueen's attempt to chronicle the sixty-six day hunger strike spearheaded by Irish Republican Army leader Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) is secular in its devotionally obsessive focus. Drawing a parallel between both the cruelty visited upon the defiant and disruptive prisoners of the Northern Ireland Maze Prison by the guards and Sands' self-inflicted choice to starve himself to Christ's passion on several occasions, McQueen and collaborator (and playwright) Enda Walsh seem to nevertheless yearn to unfurl their drama with a level of detachment.<br /></div><br /><div>That detachment, however, is occasionally made questionable, and McQueen's actual beliefs are ostensibly betrayed by his insistence of layering stylistic flourishes atop the occurrences his film essays. One repetitive touchstone is the usage of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher verbally condemning the Irish Republican Army members as violent terrorists unworthy of the political prisoner status for which they protested. McQueen creates significant sympathy for the Irish prisoners, demonstrating with an unalloyed minimalism, as they communicate through tiny wads of paper passed along through their mouths to one another during mass. However, McQueen and Walsh exhibit empathy for the guards as well; indeed, the film opens with an extended sequence during which the camera follows along a guard who is washing and soothing his scarred-over knuckles in water. In one scene of vicious brutality, one guard appears almost traumatized, weeping as he recognizes the levels of de-humanization to which he and his peers have descended.<br /></div><br /><div>While examining <em>Hunger</em> it is advantageous to consider the chiefest qualities of cinema; its immediate fluency, and proficiency when optimally used to convey information. For example, in many of the better unironic, under-appreciated “genre” films, it is almost always the acuity of the filmmaking that enhances the narratively prosaic. It is in these films where the visual craftsmanship and aesthetic stylishness benefits the films' unalloyed machinations. When appropriately meshed, visualization supersedes what is commonly called “plot.” From <em><a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2009/02/taken-2008.html">Taken</a></em> to <em><a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2009/03/point-break-1991.html">Point Break</a></em>, and many other examples, it is the artful accession of<em> élan</em> that endows the familiar.<br /></div><div>So it is with a slightly confounded mien that it is realized that McQueen's <em>Hunger</em> is almost arriving at the opposite spectrum of cinema—the “story” is at the service of his craftsmanship. McQueen is trained as a fine artist, and his debut film is delineated by ostentatiousness and precociousness. The entire ninety-six minute film plays out like an exercise in quaffing precious artfulness. With the proverbial tips of the hat to Robert Bresson (the meticulously detailed manner in which the prisoners communicate with one another cannot <em>not</em> remind of <em>A Man Escaped</em>) and Stanley Kubrick (the entire film accounts de-humanization—of prisoner and guard alike—and a sequence in which a group of jackbooted thugs stand in a long hallway cannot not bring images of <em>Full Metal Jacket</em> to most filmgoers who will actually watch <em>Hunger</em>), McQueen's confidence, at least bordering on arrogance, is doubtless.<br /></div><br /><div>Not that there is anything wrong with a stubborn, uncompromising artistic initiative—with <em>Hunger</em>, it is the imagery that stays, long after the final credits have unspooled, after all, but for its second and most impressive act. Nonetheless, McQueen's picture plays like numerous sketches aligned together for the purpose of making a film. Coherence is not an issue—<em>Hunger</em> is rigorously minimalistic and quite slowly paced, which contributes to the pervasive feeling of crushing, listless boredom that is as poisonous to the souls of the prisoners (and guards) as the ordeals to which they are subjected as a price of their disobedience. Ocular recording of the tellurian plays heavily into the visceral potency that is <em>Hunger</em>'s most certain attribute. As a guard sedates himself with a quiet sojourn to the yard, smoking a cigarette in the wintry weather, snowflakes fall upon him. McQueen and director of photography Sean Bobbitt capture the subsequent moment on film with fine delicacy. The guard who had earlier soothed his beaten, battered and bloodied knuckles in water finds little snowflakes weep from the sky and landing on his scars and marks of self-inflection against the heads of many prisoners. McQueen's fine artist eye catches many more undisguised flourishes. Prisoners smear their own excrement upon the walls of their cells, and McQueen's camera seems particularly attuned to the spiral patterns one prisoner creates with feces-wall painting.<br /></div><br /><div>The best portion of the film, however, is a bravura, unbroken sequence in which McQueen's camera remains still and there are no interruptions of cutting. For over fifteen minutes, two men, Sands, and Father Moran (an extremely stirring and profound Liam Cunningham: his performance alone makes <em>Hunger</em> worth the investment) speak to one another in ostensible “real time,” volleying points to one another. The steadied duration of this puissant portion creates uneasy astriction and tautness, deftly providing an atmospheric contextual support for the final act of the film that details Sands' self-imposed bodily disintegration, wherein the film finally does become soporose in its hazily blurred perspective. When the camera finally does break the hypnotic spell, it is to emphasize Sands' words as he tells an allegorical story from his childhood about doing what was right and accepting the consequences with the peace, dignity and knowledge that he had the courage to do what was right. The conversation between Sands and Father Moran is utterly bewitching and fascinating, and an instance of actors correctly taking over a film and the director allowing them the freedom, space and time with which to tell a story.<br /></div><br /><div>It is, then, almost humorously appropriate to consider the inherent artifice of the entire riveting conversation. By all accounts, Sands and Father Moran never spoke to one another, whereas it is clear that such events as IRA members being beaten, refusing to wear certain prison uniforms and going on hunger strikes are part of recorded history. In <em>Hunger</em>'s major and outstanding concession to filmic progress and peregrination, it actually extols the virtues of the cinematically schematic derived by storytelling strategies and considerations of scenario. Unlike <em><a href="http://colemancornerincinema.blogspot.com/2009/03/class-2008.html">The Class</a></em>, which was made intentionally visually unappealing by its director, <em>Hunger</em> is a film with several toes dipped in the waters of <em>vérité</em> filmmaking and <em>mise-en-scene</em> construction but with other toes hanging on to almost wheezing exhalations of exhilaratingly intense abstract artistry. That the most dazzling set-piece of <em>Hunger</em> almost perversely proves the efficacy of what may be loosely defined as “make-believe” is deeply paradoxical. </div><br /><div>In the film's foggy, more asomatously focused, denouement, Sands allows his body to waste away. McQueen follows the process with a serviceable melange of the dispassionate and the assertive, engendering a cumulative tableau of a man gradually drifting away. Misty flashbacks to his childhood, the personal history from which he told the emotional story to Father Moran, abut the film's apparent moroseness in its consideration of a young man's life concluding long before it should have. The correlation to Jesus Christ becomes less distancing than it was earlier in the film—a manufactured line of dialogue from Sands in which he says that Christ's disciples were merely jumping on a bandwagon after Christ laid it all on the line himself diminishes their own respectively harsh fates and credentials for martyrdom—as McQueen visualizes Sands' earthly demise. Long, uninterrupted takes with sepia-toned dissolves overlapping atop them punctuates Sands' sixty-six days of deprivation. A flock of birds flying off represents Sands' soul taking flight in a sequence that at least borders on the clichéd, but, like so much of the film, makes itself at least stand apart through sheer force of will. </div>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com38tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-83872740250435986002009-04-01T13:00:00.000-07:002009-04-01T13:06:31.789-07:00The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968)<a href="http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/images/2610raid.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 369px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 500px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/images/2610raid.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><em>The Night They Raided Minsky's</em> is an appropriate film to look over on April Fools' Day, as its narrative hinges on one large “trick” to be played on certain characters. William Friedkin's second feature film is an uneven but sweet and charming ode to the 1920s theaters of burlesque. As the film today exists in current form, it routinely cuts away from his own narrative and splices in many apparent pieces of footage from the time period itself, thick with grain and washed-out images. The screenplay, based on a book by Rowland Barber and written by Arnold Schulman, Sidney Michaels and Norman Lear, supplies a dangerously thin storyline, but the film is at its most fun when the mechanics of the picture are almost invisible, and mere gags and burlesque performances take the center stage.<br /></div><div> </div><div>Jason Robards, who plays central figure Raymond Paine, received mixed notices for <em>The Night They Raided Minsky's</em>, but today his performance seems stronger than it may have at the time of the film's release. Robards was never too much of a “leading man movie star” to diminish his own self-effacing and auto-critiquing tendencies; even in the testosterone-laden westerns in which he appeared, he often played characters either physically or psychologically wounded, such as the contemporaneous <em>Once Upon a Time in the West</em>, <em>Hour of the Gun</em> or <em>The Ballad of Cable Hogue</em>. With Minsky's, Robards allows his most winning attributes to mesh with his nearly continual semblance of debilitation—ever so slightly suave, his persona is crushed when confronted with hostility or projected dubiousness by others. It helps that Robards is given many of the film's best lines. When his longtime partner and friend, Chick Williams (an energetic Norman Wisdom), falls for the pulchritudinous Amish ingénue, Rachel Elizabeth Schpitendavel (a wide-eyed Britt Ekland), Robards' roguish huckster comedian undermines Chick's propriety. )(Which ties into their joined rendition of “Perfect Gentleman,” in which Robards' character sings along with Wisdom's about just how much of a gentleman he is. “You suffer from the three D's,” Raymond tells Chick, “you're decent, devoted and dependable. Good qualities in a dog—disastrous in a man.” He goes on: “Women love bastards. I am a BFC: Bastard First Class.” Robards likewise shines in a long scene in which he approaches a woman at the local deli—where a significant portion of the film's events take place—only to be surprised when her husband returns from the restroom. So Raymond smooth-talks the husband and is as smooth as the skin of a newborn. The humor is obvious but Robards is too excellent when at his best in this film to dismiss, balancing his motor-mouthed shtick with the fearfulness behind it. </div><br /><div>Ekland is fine as the young runaway Amish woman who is blinded by the dazzling marquee. As Raymond and Chick contest one another over her affections, Ekland's debatable one-note performance never feels particularly calculated, which is key in making it fit with the long line of young ingénues who were transfixed on the idea of becoming a star of show-business. Considered unqualified for burlesque, Ekland's Rachel is manipulated by the scheming Raymond; his bright idea is to have her perform one night after being billed as “Mademoiselle Fifi,” the French starlet and heroine of pornographic literature, who is, it is constantly noted in her billing, “The Girl Who Drove a Thousand Frenchmen Wild.” Raymond figures Rachel will do what she has done in her Pennsylvania Amish community—perform a Biblical dance rather than a bawdy number. Thus, Secretary for the Suppression of Vice Vance Fowler (Denholm Elliott), determined to raid Minsky's in the event of Mademoiselle Fifi's appearance, will have no reason to shut the establishment down and Raymond's job will be safe.<br /></div><div> </div><div>Two other welcome performers are Joseph Wiseman and Elliot Gould as the father and son (Louis and Billy Minsky), who repeatedly enliven the picture. Wiseman and Gould play their parts as Jewish businessmen with significant emphasis on their ethnicity. <em>The Night They Raided Minsky's</em> pokes some fun at religion in general, as Rachel's stern and unforgiving Amish father, Jacob Schpitendavel (Harry Andrews), hunt her down and finally finds himself confronted with Wiseman's Louis Minsky. Louis educating two other religious men about the identities of each finger's meaning in religious terminology evokes laughter. The picture may satirize stoically religious individuals, but at this late point in the film, it does so with a genial warmth. </div><br /><div><em>The Night They Raided Minsky's</em> was released just as Hollywood films had largely been let loose; censorship in American cinema was coming to an end. So it is particularly amusing to view Minsky's as the film examines a different kind of show-biz thriving under the threatening thumb of censorship. As Elliott's Fowler chastises the men who run Minsky's, he is asked what he finds so objectionable. “Well, the women... They <em>jiggle</em>,” he remarks. The film is hilariously accurate in its depiction of the censoring force having to attend every show and write down in explicit detail what is to be considered lewd and improper.<br /></div><br /><div>Reportedly, Friedkin's cut of <em>The Night They Raided Minsky's</em> was a considerably different film from the eventually released 1968 picture—Friedkin's first cut was, it was almost universally agreed, a complete disaster. Editor Ralph Rosenblum worked on the film in postproduction for over a year, finding a coherent film through his assiduousness. Some may assume the concept of cutting to old footage was Friedkin's idea—perhaps an homage to Jean-Luc Godard's stylistics—but it was indeed Rosenblum who came up with the idea himself. Rosenblum, in effect, re-directed the film himself and made an alternative version of Minsky's which is today the one actually seen.<br /></div><br /><div>Some of the film's finest moments are simply of Robards and Wisdom engaging in song and dance with one another. The soundtrack is stuffed with modern classics as well as some songs by Lee Adams (the score was provided by Charles Strouse). The agreeable combination Robards' wise-guy next to Wisdom's naïve optimist makes <em>The Night They Raided Minsky's </em>seem so effortlessly mounted, though it actually was one of Hollywood's most painful births; likewise, Robards' history as a great stage actor and Wisdom's history as a great British comedian and music-hall star must have paid dividends as they excel at projecting an immediacy that draws in a live audience. <em>Minsky's</em> isn't a grand time at the movies, but it is fast, fun and frank—a valentine to all things just vaguely fulsome. </div>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com40tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-75730253677543990442009-03-31T14:00:00.000-07:002009-03-31T15:15:19.941-07:00Point Break (1991)<a href="http://sirjorge.com/blogx/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/pointbreakposter.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 351px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 500px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://sirjorge.com/blogx/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/pointbreakposter.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>Kathryn Bigelow's <em>Point Break</em> has been labeled many things. Frequently dismissed as a crassly commercial big-budgeted actioner, a rather silly, shallow over-the-top, action thriller with generous helpings of comedy, New Age philosophizing and romance, with protracted focus on surfing in the Los Angeles area, starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, many critics seem to have either missed or perhaps scoffed at the contributions of the film's helmer, Kathryn Bigelow. <em>Point Break</em>'s screenplay—by Rick King and Peter Iliff—is bursting at the seams with clichés and stereotypes, but Bigelow's direction allows for the characters to be predominantly expressed through cinematic shorthand. Some sections of the script—no, many sections of the script—are too talky, but whenever Bigelow has the opportunity, she cuts down the excess of words by supplying a rich palette of a marvelously packed 2:35 'Scope widescreen frame, ceaselessly offering a supremely confident brand of action-filmmaking. Rarely has an action filmmaker utilized this aspect ratio with as much gusto; Bigelow makes the 'Scope letterbox format a necessity, squeezing in as much geographical information as possible. Today's speed-freak fast-cutting action directors could take many pointers from Bigelow on how to sustain tension through genuinely comprehensible shooting of action sequences, not to mention merely allowing the audience to understand what is occurring and to whom it is occurring. The 'Scope aspect ratio gives her, and director of photography Donald Peterman, free rein. In one early exquisite shot, for instance, Bigelow and Peterman frame a group of bank robbers wearing masks (of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan) as one unified group, separating and dispersing away from one another as they briefly seize a bank. Bigelow utilizes the spatial gulfs between characters to connote geography. </div><br /><div>Considered the most famous alum of the San Francisco Art Institute, Bigelow matriculated as a painter. With her motion pictures, she displays the visual adroitness that flaunts her conception of the screen as a canvas. Action for her is not to be used to engender a whirling, disorienting blur for the viewer; in <em>Point Break</em>, for instance, her framing of surfing sequences is perfectly symmetrical, capturing Reeves' FBI agent Johnny Utah's development as a surfer with logical consistency. Shooting the horizon from beaches, Bigelow's painting talents must have helped significantly in mirthfully playing with the amplitude of space, locational margins and the breadth of artistic panels. Whether surfing seems like a fun hobby or not, Bigelow renders it with an air of excitement and awe.<br /></div><br /><div>Critics who mistake plot for meaning and theme tirelessly go about thrashing <em>Point Break</em>'s borderline mindless lack of logic. Agent Utah, it is said, finished second in his class at Quantico, yet seems like a remarkably ineffective and unintelligent individual. Repeatedly certain events transpire with very little to buttress them with rational motivation and purpose but for the desire to keep moving the story along. A veteran, comically burnt-out agent (Gary Busey, who wisely enjoys himself in his part) behaves quite inappropriately with great regularity in almost every manner conceivable. The film indulges itself in myriad tropes of the crime thriller, with an overbearing FBI boss played by John McGinley periodically chewing out his subordinates' <em>derrieres</em>.<br /></div><br /><div>What makes <em>Point Break</em>.... <em>break</em> free from becoming just another derivative action extravaganza is Bigelow's virtuosity. As in the vampire cult film <em>Near Dark</em>, Bigelow laces her action with impressive flurries of technique. The most distinguishing trademark she applies to the dyspeptic proceedings is a bracing, breathless point-of-view perspective—mainly Utah's—as in a frenzied chase on foot through a Los Angeles neighborhood. By placing the viewer in the action, Bigelow emphatically connects the vista (typified by the many surfing scenes of the film's first stretch) to the individual (from which more and more of the film is seen).<br /></div><br /><div>The most wondrously exhilarating marrying of these respective elements is a tremendous sky-diving scene, in which Reeves' Utah descends from an airplane, joining the group of bank robbers with whom he has been undercover for some time. It is here where <em>Point Break</em> achieves something approximating sublimeness: like Enoch, the extraordinary mortal elevated to the status of the angelic, Utah joins his newfound friends/technical enemies in heaven, looking down upon the earth. Bigelow shifts perspectives with a fluid ease, once again placing the spectator perfectly into the heart of the action while completely detailing the entire panorama that encompasses the viewpoint (of a painter, an artist, an FBI agent...). This is bravura, accomplished and dazzlingly crafted filmmaking, lent to a deliriously preposterous high concept.<br /></div><br /><div>Bigelow's <em>mise-en-scene</em> accentuates the “small scenes” as well. One of the best sequences of <em>Point Break</em> is actually a nighttime beach football game. The camera finds itself arranged amidst the ongoing struggle as one player passes the ball to another. Hurriedly, Bigelow complements the topographic mastery with which she gifts the film with a kaleidoscopic recording of every physical ruction. What finally makes Bigelow's artfully composed helming of human movement come alive is the thematic weight that lurks beneath the superficies of the action. Reeves' FBI agent is drawn to the enigmatic, Zen-like leader of the bank-robbing surfers, Swayze's enigmatically self-named Bodhi. Swayze's charismatic performance is the film's most successful addition to Bigelow's propulsive filmic <em>appliqué</em>, with his surfer looks and steely cerulean eyes, he practically begs both Utah and the audience to join him in his rambunctious daredevil shenanigans. When Utah tackles the running Bodhi in the surf of the ocean, those who love Bodhi express anger with Utah, but Bodhi tells them who he is—a former college football quarterback star. In a confrontation with a group of beach-terrorizing brutes, Utah has to be rescued by Bodhi, who admires the undercover agent's fearlessness. Little by little, scene by the scene, Bigelow manages to sustain a fastidious telling of literally fabulous friendship between men. Bigelow's concerns suggest a woman truly, almost heedlessly, interested in the ties and connections between cosmetically adversarial men. As in <em>Near Dark</em> and <em>Blue Steel</em>, and later in the forgettable <em>K-19: The Widowmaker</em>, Bigelow is—most fittingly for a female director rightly celebrated for her breathtaking command of action—an expert fabulist of unlikely male bonding.</div>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342369910596581403.post-46280384850542891192009-03-30T16:00:00.000-07:002009-06-16T17:50:31.391-07:00Coraline (2009)<a href="http://fabricfamilyfun.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/coraline.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 600px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 334px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://fabricfamilyfun.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/coraline.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>At a time when too many animated family films needlessly coddle children at the expense of educating them through the mythical art of storytelling, along comes <em>Coraline</em>, which seems to stand athwart so many of the easy, uncomplicated children films routinely pumped out—a kind of cinematic over-medication of immediately attractive sights that are time-tested. A crushingly obvious example would be the recent <em>Monsters vs. Aliens</em>, which does nothing less (and certainly nothing more) than promise every child lots and lots of monsters and aliens on the screen. The story and characters do not matter in all too many instances; the pablum tacked on to make the experience at least nominally cohesive is rarely meaningful. <em>Coraline</em>, however, is a veritable one-film renaissance of family movie-making: Henry Selick's more intense, yet subtly transcribed, treatment of fairytale touches upon something more peculiar and universal all at once, because it seems legitimately childlike. </div><br /><div>Selick's film is based on Neil Gaiman's book, and as in Selick's adaptation of the eccentric children's writer Roald Dahl's <em>James and the Giant Peach</em> (1996), Selick preserves the spirit of the source material by giving it literally moving, cinematic life without robbing it of its quintessence. <em>Coraline</em> is a rather unnervingly eerie story about a pre-teen girl (voiced here by Dakota Fanning) who finds her parents unpalatable to her wishes and desires. Her mother (a terrific Teri Hatcher) ignores her and the food she makes for her is uninspired; her father (John Hodgman) is too busy at his computer for his work to spend much time with her. Coraline sees herself as a child alone, in a gray, downcast world. If only she could escape.<br /></div><br /><div>It could be said that<em> Coraline</em> is perfect children's nightmare fodder because Selick makes the film follow nearly flawless nightmare-logic. In an impressive credits sequence that opens the film, a pair of menacing metallic hands hurriedly de-construct a doll, pulling out its button eyes and in an act that may linger in the minds of children, rip the innards of the doll out, after which the doll is re-fashioned, unmistakably looking like the film's heroine. <em>Coraline</em> as a narrative incisively comments on the remaking of children—through sundry forms of medication, for instance—as “happy.” Gaiman's story supersedes the potentially banal conclusion to be reached from his own tale (which can admittedly be useful as the film's tag-line—“Be careful what you wish for”); <em>Coraline</em> is in part about systematic perfecting of the corporeal at the expense of the spirit's obliteration. When little Coraline discovers a secret passageway to an alternate world, she initially believes she has found a panacea; her “Other Mother” (again voiced by Hatcher) cooks lavishly spectacular meals for her, and her “Other Father” (Hodgman, again) helps oversee a breathtaking garden that plays into the worst, most narcissistic impulses of children.<br /></div><br /><div>The blue-haired Coraline is put through the emotional wringer that hurts the most. <em>Acceptance</em> may be the story's most pointed “message”: at last, Coraline must begrudgingly accept her parents, as well as the strange and bizarre cast of neighborhood characters (two washed-up, has-been burlesque queens, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible and a hilarious Russian acrobat and trapeze artist named Mr. Bobinsky voiced by Ian McShane) who inhabit her world. The “Other World” characters are more superficially arresting, with more colorful personalities, but the superannuated qualities of the “real world” characters is gradually viewed in a new, radicalized light once Coraline realizes that the “Other World” is one horrifying snare run by the “Other Mother.” Only a talking black cat (perfectly voiced by Keith David) can move about each world along with Coraline, bringing childhood imagery full circle through gentle subversion: that which appears evil, such as a notorious haunter of bad luck like the black cat, proves indispensable to fighting against what looks like a heaven-sent paradise. </div><br /><div>Dreadful menace permeates <em>Coraline</em>, and even the way in which Coraline moves about the <em>Narnia</em>- or <em>Secret Garden</em>-like entranceway connotes trepidation and tumult. To make this precisely, cinematically tangible, Selick utilizes stop-motion animation, which was an enriching choice. Like Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion animation, or perhaps the late Stan Winston's effects work, Selick's undertaking here bridges the human with the inhuman, bringing out an indelible cumulative effect that lends an uncommon verisimilitude to the fantastical. In one of the film's most bravura sequences, Coraline's “Other Father” leads her out to their garden, inviting the flowers to entrance the girl with their dancing. The scene, as well as a long, wonderful sequence in which the two show-business women—made younger and physically beautiful—in the fantasy world enthrall Coraline with a stunning number. Everything about Coraline's fantasy world seems so enticing, but the edifice of the entire facade proves to be one dishonest lure. </div><br /><div>Like the merciless metallic hands at the film's opening, Selick brocades a textured, nuanced film. Informed by Gaiman's story, <em>Coraline</em> extrapolates what its imagery suggests: the “Other Mother” and her ilk are not only inhabitants of a child's fantasy world but also those who eagerly blind their progeny and others of the next generation, and therefore themselves. They exist in this world, and the blindness they inflict is just as painful in its many consequences as Hatcher's demonic alter-ego's obsession with replacing Coraline's eyes with buttons. As one ostensibly doomed character tells the blue-haired protagonist, “Find our eyes, and our souls will be free.” Thus, Selick, and Gaiman before him, provides the most elemental property of children's storytelling, wisely transmitting overwhelming concepts into perfectly accessible and understandable visual allegory, without reducing the potency of the amusing skein. The film powerfully stitches the truism that nothing is more pathetic than those who are so determined to enjoy themselves that they either help to create very industries based on such concepts or supply the demand for them. From Doctor Phil to the latest pill, to the “Other Mother,” faux contentment and happiness is not to be cherished or desired. If little Coraline can learn that, perhaps everyone can. </div>Coleman's Corner in Cinema...http://www.blogger.com/profile/04761319284479513957noreply@blogger.com20