Lessons of Darkness

Cannibal Holocaust (1979): D

Cannibal Holocaust’s title is something of a misnomer, as a more appropriate name for Roggero Deodato’s stomach-churning, banned-across-the-globe exploitation “classic” – what with all the authentic wildlife murder mixed in amongst the staged bouts of rape, mutilation and mayhem – would have been Animal Holocaust. A strong constitution is certainly required for watching this early Blair Witch precursor, which purports to tell the real-life tale of a professor (Debbie Does Dallas porn legend Robert Kerman) who goes in search of missing documentarians in cannibal-infested Amazonia, discovers their celluloid last will and testament, and then watches their filmed demise at the hands (and mouths) of organ-eating tribesman. From multiple sexual assaults and scenes of gratuitous animal slaughter (don’t watch if you want to remain ignorant about what’s under a turtle’s shell) to a healthy pound of gory, make-believe flesh (including an image of a woman impaled through her throat and genitals on a wooden spike), the film truly goes for the repulsive jugular, couching all of its nastiness in a cinema verité aesthetic that heightens the narrative’s escalating ugliness. Riz Ortolani's serene score nicely counterbalances the hideous action, and the film, to its credit, at least attempts a crude satire of the violence-obsessed media (and its status as an unbiased witness to events). Any subtext, however, is painfully facile, such as director Deodato pathetically justifying the unrepentant carnage by posthumously damning his eaten filmmaker protagonists with a “who are the real monsters – the cannibals or us?” anti-imperialism morale. As clearly elucidated by its shocking gruesomeness – as well as its unabashedly racist portrait of indigenous folks it purports to sympathize with – the actual savages involved with Cannibal Holocaust are the ones behind the camera.

Dear Wendy (2005): D+

There’s a scene in Full Metal Jacket in which Matthew Modine’s Private Joker and his fellow soldiers-in-training are ordered to bestow their rifles with female names, a symbolic intertwining of violence and sex that spoke to the inherent carnality of war. If you can imagine that scene expanded to feature-length, performed by goofy young adults dressed in sub-Gangs of New York frippery, shot with staged theatricality, and possessed by a ludicrously asinine and illogical vision of America, you’d still only be half way toward truly understanding the dreadful, pedantic Dear Wendy. Thomas Vinterberg’s unintentionally hilarious misfire – scored, for reasons I don’t understand, to tunes by mid-‘60s rock group The Zombies – follows Dick (an abysmal Jamie Bell), a pacifist loser in an anonymous, parent-less town who falls in love with an archaic revolver he dubs Wendy. Made to feel confident and powerful by his new sidearm, he forms a secret gun club for similar pacifist outcasts called (I kid you not) The Dandies which stipulates that members study, respect and “marry” their firearms while prancing about their derelict clubhouse in costume like third-rate community theater actors.

Unsurprisingly given the didactic tone of this “critique,” the peace-loving Dandies soon find the lure of trigger-happy, Western-style violence too tempting to suppress. And as the film was written by Lars von Trier – who, having never visited the country, continues to imagine it as a place easily understood through schematically diagrammed locales mapped out via blueprint drawings – it’s no revelation to discover a daft portrait of the U.S. (and its racism and gun-worship) that’s wide of the mark. Still, von Trier’s ignorance can’t fully explain the sheer awfulness of Dear Wendy, which features Dick reading a love letter to Wendy as its god-awful narration, a caring African-American maid (Novella Nelson) who inexplicably transforms into a shotgun-wielding Alzheimer’s-inflicted psycho, a small-town sheriff (Bill Pullman) making Dick the unofficial parole officer for convicted murderer Sebastian (Danso Gordon), and the absurd audacity to depict, with a completely straight face, Sebastian’s use of Dick’s Wendy as a latent act of ammunition-tinged adultery. If it weren’t so consistently comical, Vinterberg’s latest would be one of the front-runners for worst film of the year.

Dog Days

August hasn't been particularly kind to moviegoers, and this latest batch of reviews likely won't make anyone feel better about the start of September. Nonetheless, it's my civic duty to provide you with these, my newest critiques:

This weekend:
The Cave (Slant magazine)
The Memory of a Killer (Slant magazine)

The not-too-distant future:
An Unfinished Life (Slant magazine)
Thumbsucker (Slant magazine)
Before the Fall (Slant magazine)

New reviews of 2046, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Skeleton Key and Rivers and Tides are also posted below.

Rivers and Tides (2001): B+

Overlook Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy’s occasional dips into vague New Age abstraction, and Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time is an absorbing portrait of a unique artist’s professional and personal communion with nature. Goldsworthy’s medium is the earth itself, and Riedelsheimer’s documentary follows the gray-bearded 46-year-old husband and father as he produces circuitous, serpentine structures (which he calls “earthworks”) out of indigenous elements (sticks, leaves, branches, dirt, dust, ice and rock) on beaches, in forests and in rivers. As his compositions are both fashioned from, and situated amidst, the environment, Goldsworthy’s work actively engages in a dialogue with its surroundings, a discourse with the soil and sea that Goldworthy also undertakes during the protracted – and, as many collapsing sculptures indicate, not always successful – hand-crafting of his materials into art. Regular references to “the line” and “the flow” of his pieces reveal the artist’s desire to understand the fundamental energy that governs all of nature’s elements, and when Goldsworthy crushes rock into red powder, the link between the stone’s crimson color and that of human blood marks his handiwork as an attempt at self-comprehension. Since his constructions are made from organic elements and often strategically positioned to be erased by the rising tide or swallowed up by the ever-growing flora, Goldsworthy’s work is transient, a condition that deliberately speaks to his fascination with nature’s cyclical creative (i.e. his seed-shaped edifices) and destructive forces. Because these earthworks are so fragile and fleeting, Goldsworthy uses still photographs as a further means of study and preservation. And Riedelsheimer’s mesmerizing cinematic case study – which beautifully depicts Goldsworthy creating a rock wall in upstate New York, a slithering ice structure built on a protruding Nova Scotia boulder, and a chain of brightly colored leaves floating along a river’s current – in effect functions as yet another step in the Scotsman’s approach to studying, communicating with, and immortalizing both his artistic outdoor endeavors and, in the process, the wondrous, mysterious world around him.

The Skeleton Key (2005): C

“Who do you hoodoo?” would have been a fitting tagline for The Skeleton Key, a blundering New Orleans-set thriller under the spell of archaic stereotypes about Southern Bayou blacks. Disgusted by the medical establishment’s impersonal treatment of the elderly, Caroline (Kate Hudson, with straight hair impervious to humidity frizz) takes a job working as an in-home hospice caregiver for the stroke-afflicted husband (John Hurt) of a crotchety Southern dame (the hammy Gena Rowlands). Caroline is disturbed by the house’s lack of wall mirrors and the secret attic room filled with black magic knickknacks that belonged to the prior owners’ African-American servants, a duo strung up for practicing un-Christian enchantments on their employers’ white-as-snow children. Until the rather effective and creepy Twilight Zone-ish denouement, Iain Softley’s sub-Angel Heart gothic mystery proves unpleasantly infatuated with the image of Southern blacks as wholly superstitious simpletons or nefarious witch doctors (a fact unaltered by its supposedly subversive ending). When compared to such hoary, ugly characterizations, a few satanic symbols and dolls with their eyes and mouths sewn shut don’t seem half as frightening.

The Dukes of Hazzard (2005): C+

A Southern-fried surprise that’s as stupid as Enis but as goofy-cool as the General Lee, The Dukes of Hazzard proves that every big-screen remake of a ‘70s-era TV show need not be a disgrace to both its source material and the art of moviemaking. Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar (a member of the Broken Lizard comedy troupe), this turbo-charged adaptation crashes and burns whenever it wastes time on its worthless plot about strip-mining, NASCAR racing, and other unimportant nonsense. Yet it frequently hits a boisterous and sexy groove via the interplay between roughhousing cousins Bo (Seann William Scott) and Luke (Johnny Knoxville), the sensual shenanigans of their blonde bombshell cousin Daisy (Jessica Simpson), and a particularly amusing detour to Atlanta in which the film references Super Troopers, imagines big-city college sororities as pot smoke-filled havens for hotties, and addresses the General Lee’s controversial Confederate Flag hood decal. That the story is empty-headed and frequently boring as dirt can’t be ignored. But Knoxville, Scott, Simpson, Willie Nelson (as Uncle Jessie) and Burt Reynolds (as Boss Hogg) thankfully treat the project as a ludicrous lark, and their good-natured silliness – when coupled with outstanding car chase footage in which the camera gets right up against the grill, bumper and tires of the bouncing, skidding and leaping General Lee – comes reasonably close to making The Dukes of Hazzard finger-licking good.

2046 (2005): B

Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love was an erotic masterpiece of desperately suppressed romantic longing, making his schizoid-remix-follow-up 2046 – an often chilly, remote and repetitive rumination on similar themes – such a letdown. Wai’s bifurcated tone poem charts playboy writer Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) – seemingly a doppelganger of In the Mood for Love’s protagonist – as he rents unit 2047 in a 1967 apartment building, spending his days and nights either watching and wooing the various goddesses (Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li) staying in the titular room next door, or writing a sci-fi novel (titled “2046”) about a futuristic version of himself, his android lover (Faye Wong), and a mystifying place (again, called “2046”) where the past can be relived. A kaleidoscopic swirl of luxurious colors, atmospheric lighting and dreamy slow-motion, the movie strives for a seductive melody but instead achieves only a beautifully stuporous drone, again and again mishmashing history, the present and the future (2046 is also the 50th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China) without ever saying – or making us feel – anything significantly different than he did with his previous masterpiece. Referencing In the Mood for Love’s finale, Chow and his mistresses repeatedly discuss whispering secrets into a hole in a tree. Yet the problem with 2046 is that Wai’s abstract film hints less at tantalizing emotional mysteries than at an apparent vacuity lurking beneath its gorgeous mise-en-scène.

New Design, New Reviews

While I wouldn't exactly call chasing an 8 month-old girl around the beach for two weeks "relaxing," I've returned from the Jersey Shore eager to resume my film-criticizing ways. Thus, here are reviews for three of this weekend's new releases, one of which (hint: it's the one with the awesome movie poster I'm using for this post) is actually worth seeing.

The 40 Year-Old Virgin (Slant magazine)
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (filmcritic.com)
Valiant (Slant magazine)

I've also got site-specific reviews of two very good new films - Red Eye and Broken Flowers - below.

And yes, I've once again resdesigned the site. Nothing drastic, but hopefully it's a bit more stylish. As always, your feedback is encouraged.

Red Eye (2005): B+

An efficient thriller that alludes to both the war on terror and female abuse without allowing either issue to interfere with its consistently taut action, Wes Craven’s Red Eye takes its place alongside last year’s Cellular as that all-too-rare Hollywood creation: a tightly wound, intelligent, and gimmick-free suspense film. Upscale hotel manager Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) flirts with stranger Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy) before and during their long-delayed red eye to Miami, only to discover mid-flight that her new male acquaintance is a shadowy terrorist-for-hire threatening to kill her father (Brian Cox) unless she assists in his plot to assassinate the Director of Homeland Security (Jack Scalia) who’s staying at her hotel the following day. At a speedy 85 minutes, Craven’s brisk film has a muscular leanness that’s been sorely lacking in his recent output (Cursed, anyone? Thought not). But what makes his latest such a surprising delight is the way in which the director also cannily links Lisa’s predicament with post-9/11 security anxiety and rape. Rippner’s kidnapping of Lisa is a metaphor for both our current terrorism-sparked fears of border infiltration as well as sexual cruelty, and thus when the tough-as-nails heroine, refusing to be a victim, fights back against her would-be captor, Red Eye transforms from simply a rollicking (though somewhat slight) B-movie into a stirring portrait of personal and national retaliation against violent violation.

Broken Flowers (2005): B+

In criticism, as in life itself, sometimes a slightly detached perspective is preferable to an immediate knee-jerk reaction. That’s certainly the case with regards to Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, a road-trippin’ saga charting an aging lothario’s reunion with past lovers that initially struck me as a wee bit lethargic but which – after spending time reflecting on the pensive film’s nuanced portrait of yearning and regret – now strikes me as a small gem about people’s inherent, inescapable, and sometimes painful need for human connection. A Don Juan mired in a midlife crisis, sad sack Don (Bill Murray), after being dumped by his most recent paramour (Julie Delpy), receives a mysterious letter that informs him of a heretofore-unknown 19-year old son who, the missive indicates, may be in search of his father. At the urging of his mystery novel-loving amateur sleuth neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), Don embarks on a preemptive search for his offspring via a multi-state visit to four former flames, carrying with him pink flowers (the color of the letter’s stationary), trepidation over reopening old wounds, and a fear that his love-‘em-and-leave-him life will be revealed as having been an empty, meaningless waste.

As with many of Jarmusch’s films (Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law), Broken Flowers’ cross-country narrative has a loose, ambulatory ambiance that perfectly matches the casual, slackerish charm of its protagonist (as well as Winton’s jazzy-funk burned CDs). And Murray – subtly using his creased, sorrowful face to express a highway mile-long range of depressive emotions – is near-brilliant as the lovelorn Don, instilling the character not only with a droll sarcasm (“That was quite a lovely outfit you weren’t wearing earlier” he dryly tells a young, nude Lolita) but also a bone-deep misery wrought from the dawning realization that his life has been merely a series of lost opportunities. Murray has always been a master of the deadpan, capable of eliciting both humor and pathos from his staid, bemused countenance, and through simple eye movements (during an awkward dinner in an antiseptic pre-fab home’s dining room) or in extended silences (such as when confronted by his alternately loving, flummoxed, and angry exes), the actor not only wrings hilarity from misery, but also skillfully captures his melancholic Romeo’s physical, emotional, and psychological dislocation.

From the bouncy opening montage of the letter’s postal journey (from mailbox through sorting machinery through ground and air transport to Don’s doorstep) to Don’s comfortably cantankerous rapport with Winton and his liaisons with various girlfriends-gone-by (Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange and a stunningly volatile Tilda Swinton), Jarmusch’s film exhibits a confident delicacy and palpable, mature sadness. And while the director’s dream sequences lack a requisite sense of either heart-pounding panic or overwhelming glumness, and though the film sometimes veers into cutesy obviousness – such as having Don watch Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Don Juan on TV while morosely slouching sideways on the couch – Broken Flowers for the most part maintains an exquisitely sardonic, somber wistfulness. “All there is is this. The present,” is what Don eventually understands at trip’s conclusion, but the misery seen in his eyes during the film’s final moments speaks volumes about the inexorable lesson learned throughout his odyssey: that, no matter what, no one ever gets the opportunity to relive the past.