Lessons of Darkness

Friday Five

Two solid new releases hit theaters this weekend, and I'm not referring to any sequels featuring animated critters or Sharon Stone's cooch. Also out today is a front-runner for the worst film of the year (hint: it's named after a state).

And for those interested in some seriously bizarre Russian filmmaking, check out my enthusiastic thoughts on the upcoming 4, which seems destined for a love-it-or-hate-it reception when it hits screens in a couple of weeks.

Opening Today:
Slither (Slant magazine)
ATL (Slant magazine)
Iowa (Slant magazine)

Opening Later:
4 (Slant magazine)
Akeelah and the Bee (Slant magazine)

Finally, though I didn't participate in this past week's Abel Ferrara Blog-a-thon (check out girish for links to all the articles), I did - through sheer coincidence - begin watching the NYC-centric director's films last week. Keep an eye out for reviews of The Driller Killer and Ms. 45 sometime this weekend...

Rocky, R.I.P.

My two-year run contributing reviews to alt-weekly The Rocky Mountain Bullhorn is over, as the newspaper went out of business in early February. Since I only learned about the paper going belly-up by checking out their site, I don't have any insider info about the publication's sudden demise. But it's nonetheless depressing to know that my reign as Northern Colorado's most beloved film critic is finally at an end.

(And if you're out there, Mr. Johnson, feel free to drop me a line - I'd love to hear how things are going)

The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (2005): B+

A neorealist coming-of-age story infused with the pulse-pounding anxieties and excitement of first love, The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros focuses its tender gaze on the titular twelve-year old Filipino (Nathan Lopez), an effervescent, effeminate boy whose loyalty to his criminal father and two brothers wavers after he falls for adult police officer Victor (JR Valentin). Depicting the amorous affections of its pre-teen protagonist with no trace of deviant sensationalism, Auraeus Solito’s debut begins as a vibrant, hilarious celebration of all things Maximo, capturing – especially in a makeshift fashion show sequence characterized by outlandish outfits – the young diva in all his prancing, strutting glory. Once Victor appears on the scene, though, the film morphs from being an amusing portrait of its vivacious hero to a more somber, noir-inflected tale of honor, faith and conflicting allegiances to kin and self. Shot in digital video that gives its lushly colorful locale a tangible juiciness, Maximo Oliveros eventually partakes in some overwrought religious symbolism that, in self-consciously striving for allegorical profundity, dissonantly clashes with its initial air of joyful breeziness. Such minor shortcomings, however, never come close to obscuring the magnificence of Lopez’s buoyant, flamboyant, star-making turn as the fabulously fey Maximo.

(2006 New Directors/New Films Series)

Iron Island (2005): B+

Mohammad Rasoulof’s Iron Island details the day-to-day dramas aboard an immobile oil tanker in the Persian Gulf that functions as home to a disparate collection of Iranian outcasts. Their shipboard community offering a microcosmic glance at Iran’s social and political strains, the film might have functioned as an unbearably obvious metaphor-writ-large were it not for Rasoulof’s underselling his allegorical concerns in favor of sharp, detailed characters and conflicts. The ragtag group of marginalized squatters is led by Captain Nemat (the wonderfully vibrant Ali Nasirian), a concerned but somewhat dictatorial gentleman who diligently attends to both the ship and its inhabitants. Mediator and father figure, Nemat has his smooth-running operation disrupted when his young charge Ahmad (Hossein Farzi-Zadeh) falls in love with a girl whose parents do not approve, and then subsequently when he learns that local authorities will confiscate the ship, meaning everyone will have to find a new residence. Full of symbolic gestures, Iron Island poetically evokes a spirit of community in a slow-motion shot of young boys jumping overboard with buoyant oil drums – a harmonious image that works as a counterpoint to the film’s eventual bittersweet portrait of the toll wrought by isolation, marginalization, and autocratic rule.

(2006 New Directors/New Films Series)

Aw, Change

As David Lee Roth once opined, nothing stays the same. It's a sentiment that certainly holds true for this blog, which is once again undergoing some cosmetic changes. I should have the new design finished in the next day or so, but in the meantime, feel free to send along any suggestions...

Con Job

Don't believe the (surprisingly overwhelming) hype - Spike Lee's latest, Inside Man, is not great. It's not, in fact, even good. Unfortunately, the same holds true for everything I've seen recently, as you can find out by following the below review links.

However, for those in NY or LA, be sure to check out Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's L'Enfant (review link on the right), which will undoubtedly be at the top of many Best of 2006 lists.

Out Now:
Inside Man (Slant magazine)
Stay Alive (Slant magazine)

Out Later:
Hard Candy (Slant magazine)
The Promise (Slant magazine)

One more ND/NF:
Things That Hang From Trees (Slant magazine)

In Bed (2006): C

A man and a woman meet at a party, retire to a motel, and spend the night alternating between screwing their brains out and sharing their innermost thoughts on relationships, movies, and other potentially revealing topics. A sluggish rehash of Before Sunrise minus the romance and philosophical insightfulness, Matías Bize’s In Bed (En La Cama) nonetheless works so long as Bruno (hunky Gonzalo Valenzuela) and Daniela (sultry Blanca Lewin) are working up a sweat, the director’s up-close-and-personal cinematographic depiction of writhing, slapping naked flesh successfully maintaining the film’s temperature at a near-boil. Once the sex stops and the squawking begins, however, all is lost. Bruno pontificates about how everyone can be categorized according to the kinds of films they like (i.e. some are Reservoir Dogs types, others are Almodovar folk), Daniela recounts prior anonymous one-night motel trysts, and as the two stop getting physical and start getting cerebral, both begin to realize that maybe getting to know one another on more than a superficially sensual level wasn’t such a good thing. Even with In Bed running a brisk 85 minutes, it’s a revelation that’s hard to disagree with.

(2006 New Directors/New Films Series)

Signs of Life (1968): B+

In Werner Herzog’s feature-length debut Signs of Life, injured German paratrooper Stroszek (Peter Brogle) – no relation to the lost-in-America protagonist of the filmmaker's 1977 tour de force – finds himself stationed with his wife and two fellow soldiers on the Greek isle of Kos, where he’s tasked with protecting a fortress’ cache of ammunition from (seemingly non-existent) rebels. With little to do but watch one companion decipher ancient stone tablets and another concoct elaborate traps for roaches, Stroszek slowly begins to lose his mind, a mysterious and ultimately lethal disintegration for which Herzog – unlike Kubrick with his subsequent, similar The Shining – offers no apparent explanation. Produced for a meager $20k, Signs of Life utilizes an ambient soundscape and quasi-mystical cinematography of its ruins-littered locale to create a sense of otherworldly dissonance between man and nature. Especially in its Bergman-esque shot of Stroszek crazily flailing about on a hilltop overlooking a sea of spinning windmills, Herzog’s tale of deadly ennui is stunningly haunting and somber. And yet the film nonetheless also exhibits the director’s off-kilter sense of the absurd, whether it be in a quite amusing climactic image of its antihero jumping around his empty stronghold, or in Wolfgang Reichmann’s insect-hating Meinhard articulating heartfelt disgust at learning that a tiny toy owl’s moving eyes and ears are powered by flies trapped inside its wooden frame.

Junebug (2005): B+

Phil Morrison’s Junebug so thoroughly immerses itself in down-home Southern culture (or must I now refer to it as Blue State culture?) that it manages to delicately avoid Hollywood’s typical condescending caricatures of those who dwell below the Mason-Dixon line. Chicago art gallery owner Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) travels to North Carolina to woo a half-crazed painter obsessed with the Civil War, in the process making a pit-stop at husband George’s (Alessandro Nivola) family home, where his cold, conservative parents (Frank Hoyt Taylor and Celia Weston) and surly brother (The O.C.’s Benjamin McKenzie) do their damndest to make her feel like an outsider, and his pregnant sister-in-law Ashley (Amy Adams) welcomes her with enthusiastically open arms. Despite its familiar culture-clash skeleton and one moralizing third-act misstep, writer Angus MacLachlan’s story is less about the divide between urbanites and rural folk and more about the uneasily mended schisms that plague all families. A melancholic mood of disconnection permeates the film like the frost of a cool Autumn morning, its tone perfectly attuned to the sadness that hangs in the air of empty homes, landscapes and spaces between people. And yet Junebug ultimately exudes a bittersweet hope that reconciliation and harmony are, despite the sometimes-daunting odds, achievable – a reserved optimism channeled most forcefully by the magnificently expressive Adams as ditzy, needy, vibrant Ashley.

Farewell My Concubine (1993): B-

The epitome of Miramax’s early ‘90s foreign imports, Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine combines lush period detail, thriving melodrama, and a hint of the risqué (i.e. gayness!) to form something simultaneously sweeping, self-important and only moderately stirring. Winner of the Palm d’Or at Cannes, Kaige’s debut is a decades-spanning affair charting the relationship between two Peking Opera actors – hotheaded Shitou (Zhang Fengyi) and effeminate Douzi (Leslie Cheung) – as they achieve fame and fortune starring in the titular opera (about a king’s sacrificially suicidal concubine) during WWII, the Communist takeover and the Cultural Revolution. Weighty issues like homosexuality (a controversial subject for Beijing at the time of the film’s release), creative freedom, and the catharsis achievable through public performance permeate the proceedings, all of which Kaige shoots with an attention to grandiose period specifics and manipulative three-hanky emotions. That the film never feels totally organic – mainly because its history-lesson-via-microcosm narrative feels a bit too contrived – ultimately keeps it from achieving epic status. Still, Kaige’s cast is uniformly excellent (including Gong Li as the Yoko Ono to Fengyi’s John and Cheung’s Paul), and his episodic story’s theatrical set pieces are technically agile. And in light of the downward trajectory Kaige’s career has subsequently taken, Farewell My Concubine’s classical ambitions, though not always successful, nonetheless serve to remind one of the director’s once-promising potential.