Lessons of Darkness

The White Diamond (2004): A

A superb portrait of the dangers as well as euphoria that can come from chasing one’s most treasured dreams, Werner Herzog’s The White Diamond vividly encapsulates nearly all of the director’s recurring thematic obsessions: adventurers plagued by past tragedies; the beguiling beauty of the untamed wilderness; the sacredness of the world’s age-old mysteries; and contemporary man’s simultaneously harmonious and dissonant connection to nature. Herzog’s doc follows Dr. Graham Dorrington, a University of London professor and scientist, into the depths of the Guyana jungle, where he’s committed to recording the Amazon canopy around the towering Kaieteur Falls from on high in a self-designed, balloon-suspended airship described by a local Rastafarian named Mark Anthony as a “white diamond.” The moniker is apt considering the area’s local diamond mining industry, though as Herzog’s journey develops, what results isn’t simply a vision of modernity coming into close contact with the ancient Earth but also a tale of spiritual desolation and attempted atonement involving Dr. Dorrington’s all-consuming guilt over the death of nature cinematographer (and admired friend) Dieter Plage during a similar expedition in 1992.

Dorrington’s unbridled fascination with flight, as well as his dogged desire to lay his traumatic past to rest, intimately link him with Dieter Dengler of Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly. And in the same way, both men’s relentless daredevil spirits are in tune with that of Herzog himself, a brash cinematic explorer whose embroidered narration (both touching and comically affected), intrusion into Dorrington’s story (such as when he demands to be part of an early flight test) and canny ability to effortlessly tie seemingly disparate narrative asides (such as Anthony’s loving relationship with a pet rooster) to his larger thematic preoccupations are alternately amusing and mesmerizing. Like Fitzcarraldo, the brash, occasionally irresponsible Dorrington storms the uninhibited jungle with a team of natives tasked with toiling on a seemingly foolhardy vehicular endeavor. Yet rather than seeking dominion over the cruel, unpredictable environment, Dorrington – recognizing the futility of trying to impose order on an inherently chaotic world – instead looks to achieve accord with his surroundings, an enterprise visualized by Herzog via the floating airship’s serene reflection in a river’s surface and the sight of Dorrington and Anthony lying face-down on a precarious cliff, their relaxed bodies seeming to commune with the rocky soil below.

Herzog’s ethereal and reverential cinematography is awash in gorgeous imagery, from a vision of the Kaieteur Falls reflected in a drop of water to that of Dorrington’s airship gently grazing a river before resuming its levitating journey. Yet the tale’s overwhelming majesty is derived not only from these stunning compositions but also from Herzog’s curiosity about the way in which daring ambitions such as Dorrington’s lifelong affinity for flight – which cost him two fingers during a rocket accident as a teenager – hold the promise for both irreparable catastrophe as well as exhilarating joy. The film conveys the romantic allure of intrepid investigation of the world’s entrancing unknowns – such as the contents of a fabled cave behind the Falls that Herzog films with the help of a rock climber, only to refuse us access to the footage as a means of perpetuating the power of myth – while capturing the blend of courageousness, recklessness and desperation that fuels Dorrington’s airborne quest for salvation from his inescapable torment. Rapturous and haunting, The White Diamond finds Herzog once again journeying into a geographical and emotional heart of darkness, and returning with a quasi-mystical masterpiece.

Wheel of Time (2003): B+

Werner Herzog’s interest in the complementary relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds forms the bedrock of Wheel of Time, his sterling documentary about a 2002 gathering of 500,000+ Tibetan Buddhists in Bodh Gaya, India (as well as a later, smaller assembly in Austria) for the sacred Kalachakra ritual presided over by the Dalai Lama. Allowed seemingly unfettered access to this holy ceremony – in which an intricate sand painting called the mandala (a.k.a. the wheel of time) is created one colored grain of sand at a time – Herzog sets about crafting a respectful depiction of religious zealotry through his typical brand of extravagantly exaggerated narration, interviews with the Dalai Lama (who opines that the center of the universe is every man) and hypnotic shots of the vast natural world and Buddhists prostrating themselves in worship (including a Mongolian who traveled 3 ½ years on foot to attend the event, bowing, kneeling and lying down every other step of the way). In these images of robed men and women obsessively genuflecting in rhythmic prayer, as well as those of workers painstakingly constructing the mandala, mechanically preparing food for the mass congregation, or making a pilgrimage to Mt. Kailash in Tibet for a flag-raising ceremony, Herzog conveys a sense of how repetitive ritual and corporeal endurance are the Buddhists’ means of achieving harmony between their external and internal selves. And via penetrating handheld camerawork that – as in a scene of Buddhists madly scrambling for gifts – often comes into intimately close contact with the devout, one also senses the maverick director’s own subtle attempts to achieve personal unity with the fervent faithful, whom he likely views as kindred spirits.

Mysterious Skin (2005): A-

Free of the stylistic show-offery of his prior work, Gregg Araki’s magnificent Mysterious Skin charts the divergent paths of two teenagers – emotionally remote, unbearably cool gay street hustler Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and nerdy, reclusive mama’s boy Brian (Brady Corbet) – as they attempt to cope with the lingering effects of childhood sexual abuse perpetrated by their Little League coach (Bill Sage). Years after their traumas, Neil remains certain that the coach’s actions were born of love while Brian, having almost fully blocked memories of the event, becomes convinced that he was abducted by aliens and falls into a relationship with a supposed abductee (Mary Lynn Rajskub). The boys exist as two sides of the same tarnished coin, one meek and the other self-assured, but both deliberately mired in a state of denial in which carefully constructed fantasies function as their primary means of expressing pain, embarrassment and anger over their pasts. Araki utilizes womb imagery, a healthy dose of signifiers regarding childhood and innocence, and his usual array of pop culture references for his fractured flashback-saturated story (adapted from Scott Heim’s novel), creating a real-and-yet-also-unreal sense of psychological dislocation. And Gordon-Levitt’s performance is nothing short of astonishing, exuding equal measures of hungry sexuality and destructive alienation in crafting an unsettling vision of teenage confusion and longing.

Back to the Future

After spending the past two weeks working on a forthcoming feature for the January/February issue of The Independent, I'm back, rested and ready for the final month or so of Academy Award-hopeful releases. To kick things off, here are my takes on Harold Ramis' very good noir, and James Mangold's disappointing Johnny Cash biopic.

The Ice Harvest (Slant magazine)
Walk the Line (Slant magazine)

And though I'm a week late in posting these, here are my thoughts on the Clive Owen-Jennifer Aniston thriller Derailed and the kid-friendly Zathura.

Derailed (Slant magazine)
Zathura (Slant magazine)

A 50-50 Wednesday

Today's two mid-week releases couldn't be more different, with 50 Cent's semi-autobiographical fairy tale Get Rich or Die Tryin' spelling everything out for its audience, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's superb Pulse providing little explanation for its confounding action. If you have to pick one, go with the Japanese import.

Pulse (filmcritic.com)
Get Rich or Die Tryin' (Slant magazine)

Of these three upcoming films, the first two are good. The third, well, let's just say that Tom Arnold should quit writing movies.

little man (Slant magazine)
The Syrian Bride (Slant magazine)
The Kid & I (Slant magazine)

For anyone craving '70s-era sexploitation horror films, I've also checked out the new DVD for Joe Sarno's The Devil's Plaything.

The Devil's Plaything - DVD (Slant magazine)

On Friday, I'll have reviews of Derailed and Zathura. And it goes without saying that new site reviews can be found below, including my takes on Mad Hot Ballroom, The Howling and an earlier Kurosawa effort, Séance.

Dinner at Eight (1933): B

Based on George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s stage play, Dinner at Eight never transcends its theatrical roots, but that’s not such a bad thing considering how many delectable performances director George Cukor extracts from his illustrious cast. Focused on the events surrounding a hoity-toity dinner party being organized by Millicent Jordan (a shrill Billie Burke), the wife of nearly ruined businessman Oliver (Lionel Barrymore), Cukor’s film is a series of intertwined episodes designed to showcase the comedic capabilities of stars Marie Dressler (as aged stage actress Carolotta Vance), Jean Harlow (as calculating, two-timing trophy wife Kitty Packard) and Wallace Beery (as Kitty’s no-good political crook husband Dan). Despite its wealth of witty repartee, the film’s stilted pacing is compounded by Cukor’s flat direction, with momentum all-too-often grinding to a halt thanks to the story’s imprudent interest in unfunny characters (I’m talking about you, Dr. Wayne Talbot). Yet if Dinner at Eight is merely a pleasant trifle, it does provide yet another platform for the magnificent John Barrymore, whose turn as sloshed, suicidal has-been actor Larry Renault imbues this comedy with both biting wit and touching tragedy.

Séance (2000): A-

Though utilizing many of the aesthetic conventions that define J-horror thrillers, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films are, at heart, psychological meditations on dislocation and alienation in which the chasm between life and death narrows as modern man’s isolation increases. In Séance (loosely based on Mark McShane’s novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon, also the basis for a 1964 film), psychic Junko (Jun Fubuki) and sound engineer husband Sato (Kôji Yakusho) find their already strained marriage pushed to the breaking point after a kidnapped young girl turns up, by chance, in their custody. With a psychology professor and a detective enlisting Junko to help search for the missing kid, the couple – who, it’s subtly implied, have grown distant following the loss of their own child – concoct an ill-advised scheme to return the girl to safety in a manner that’ll also aid Junko’s paranormal professional reputation. With a pace that’s measured to the point of near-stasis, Séance is enveloped in bone-chilling dourness, its cool gray color palette and steady (yet barely perceptible) soundtrack buzzing resulting in an atmosphere of muted terror. And ultimately, its portrait of spiritual estrangement generates profound unease less from the face-smudged specters who haunt Junko than from the combustible mixture of arrogance, desperation and guilt fueling the married duo’s foolhardy plot.

The Howling (1981): B

With reverential wink-wink allusions to its classic horror film predecessors and director Joe Dante’s trademark cartoony vibe coloring the ominous action’s edges, The Howling may not be as polished or effective as John Landis’ 1981 An American Werewolf in London, but it’s still a perverse, satirical contribution to the oft-maligned werewolf genre. Beginning with a masterful scene in an adult video store’s seedy viewing room that cannily plays up lycanthropy’s inherently sexual undertones, Dante’s thriller (written by John Sayles) primarily takes place at a therapeutic rural retreat where TV newswoman Karen White (E.T. matriarch Dee Wallace-Stone) finds herself surrounded by a band of anti-establishment werewolves. With her vegetarian husband transformed into a carnivorous monster and the serial killer she helped vanquish in NYC seemingly roaming the woods as a hairy meat-eating beast, Karen’s curative getaway quickly devolves into a nightmare, and Dante – as would become his penchant, infusing this genre exercise with subtle (and not-so-subtle) socio-political criticism – finds plenty of targets to rip into it, including modern television news (think Network, but with more flesh-mutating special effects) and the culture of self-help quackology.

Mad Hot Ballroom (2005): B+

Whereas the kids in Jeff Blitz’s Spellbound measured their self-worth via their final place in the National Spelling Bee’s standings, the dancing fifth-graders of Marilyn Agrelo’s Mad Hot Ballroom – while nonetheless fixated on an upcoming city-wide competition at the World Financial Center – primarily find a sense of collective community and inter-gender understanding through their merengue, rumba and swing lessons. Following three socio-economically diverse NYC schools’ dance programs, Agrelo’s compassionate documentary focuses on disadvantaged kids who, stuck in neighborhoods overrun with drug dealers but lacking suitable role models, come to look at their tangoing teachers as supportive, determined parental figures. As the film makes clear (and, by its conclusion, slightly too clear), what’s really at stake is not a trophy or even students’ dancing proficiency but, rather, the vigilant monitoring of, and caring for, still-malleable boys and girls. And thus despite the illuminating classroom training sequences, much of Mad Hot Ballroom’s heart shines through during conversational scenes with the candid children, whose thoughts on school, home and the icky (but also strangely alluring) opposite sex paint a vivid portrait of impressionable, irrepressible youth.

Krull (1983): C

If The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars had an ugly baby, it would look a lot like Krull, a cheesy fantasy/sci-fi hybrid that, as a young kid, I wasn’t able to tolerate beyond the first excruciatingly lame fifteen minutes. Twenty years later, I wish I’d followed my younger self’s example. Helmed by Peter Yates – who also made Bullitt, though you wouldn’t know if from this adventure’s narrative and directorial sluggishness – the film follows the save-the-princess quest of Prince Colwyn (a stupendously goofy Ken Marshall), whose planet Krull has been overrun by the minions of the malevolent Beast. Journeying through a variety of stock swords-and-sorcery locales (the shrouded forest, the misty swamp, the open plains), Colwyn endeavors to rescue his love and stave off his world’s destruction with the help of a misfit crew comprised of criminals (including a young Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane), a wise-cracking magician (David Battley), a Cyclops (Bernard Bresslaw), an old sage with the hilarious name of Ynyr (Freddie Jackson), and – most goofily – a five-bladed boomerang known as the Glaive. A few striking images keep Krull from completely falling apart – most notably a shot involving the evil black-eyed doppelganger of an elderly Seer (John Welsh) – but the film is ultimately so brazen about its palagiarism that the only real fun comes from guessing which cinematic predecessor it’ll rip off next.