Lessons of Darkness

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006): B

In many respects the Southern sibling of 2004’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell’s latest act of comedic absurdity Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is also, beneath its product placement-pockmarked façade and heavy layer of ludicrousness, a loving send-up of 21st century American pop and political culture. Delivering a barrage of random surreality as it recounts the rise and fall (and eventual rise) of professional NASCAR driver and all-around reckless idiot Ricky Bobby, Ferrell and director/co-writer Adam McKay’s film isn’t as consistently funny as Anchorman, a situation largely attributable to the fact that its realistic NASCAR milieu is – when compared with its predecessor’s fancifully inauthentic recreation of the ‘70s TV news environment – not quite as ideal a setting for bizarre flights of fancy. Still, there’s plenty to savor in Ferrell’s aggressively egotistical knucklehead routine (including his dogged persistence during an extended early bit involving Ricky saying grace to the baby Jesus), and his stupid-silly shenanigans are greatly enlivened by the equally goofy presence of John C. Reilly as Ricky’s best friend and loyal right-hand man Cal Naughton, Jr. Talladega Nights thrives on the strength of its out-of-left-field utterances and incidents, the best of which occur before and after the overly long middle section featuring a disgraced Ricky living with his mom and learning a lesson in humility. However, even when it strains to keep itself uproarious, the film is bolstered by its underlying portrait of the U.S.’s bitter national tensions, with Ferrell and McKay’s script gently, but shrewdly, skewering both ignorant, intolerant good ol’ boy conservatism as well as insistent in-your-face ultra-liberalism (embodied by Sacha Baron Cohen’s gay French F-1 champ) as culprits responsible for current red-state, blue-state rifts. Critical of the country’s bitter schisms yet affectionately accepting of our most embarrassing lowbrow excesses and ill-advised attitudes, Talladega Nights is an astute cultural satire masquerading as an infectiously stupid-silly lark – or, perhaps, it’s the other way around. Regardless, the often-hilarious movie’s a uniter, not a divider.

Tidal Wave of Positivity

I can't remember the last time I wrote so many positive reviews in a week - and I'm not simply referring to these three new ones, but also the two (for Battle in Heaven and Pedro Almodóvar's latest Volver) located directly below this post.

Of course, after the largely disappointing summer that just was, I'm not complaining.


This Weekend:
Beerfest (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (Slant magazine)
So Much So Fast (Slant magazine)

And check back next week for my thoughts on, among others, Hollywoodland, Crossover, Mutual Appreciation and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Volver (2006): B+

Without much kink or florid hysteria to enliven its narrative complications, Volver proves to be one of Pedro Almodóvar’s most temperamentally restrained efforts, though such a muted tone doesn’t detract from its emotional power. The Spanish maestro’s latest is, as its title (translation: “To Return”) implies, a revisitation of many familiar Almodóvar fixations (if not his gaudy, transgressive inclinations), with its roots firmly planted in classical Hollywood melodrama, film noir, and his most abiding interest: the contentious but indissoluble bond shared between mothers and daughters. Freely referencing Mildred Pierce, this tale of murder, long-suppressed secrets and familial unity focuses on single mother Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) who, along with daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) and sister Sole (Lola Dueñas), finds her life turned upside-down by a series of unexpected events including the sudden death of senile Aunt Paula (What Have I Done to Deserve This?’s Chus Lampreave), the cancer diagnosis handed to friend Agustina (Blanca Portillo), the death of Raimunda’s good-for-nothing husband Paco (Antonio de la Torre), and – most shockingly – the ghostly reappearance of their dead mother (Carmen Maura).

Surreptitiously taking over an acquaintance’s restaurant business while sister Sole continues to run an illegal hair salon operation from her apartment, Raimunda navigates a cozy Madrid largely devoid of men, a situation that allows the filmmaker to keenly focus his gaze on the intimate and idiosyncratic interactions of his independent urban women. Still, while his story’s potentially overheated convolutions seem primed for some typical Almodóvarian flamboyance, the director repeatedly eschews outrageousness in favor of relaxed poignancy, from a wind-swept credit sequence featuring widows obsessively cleaning the graves of their dearly departed, to a final, bittersweet depiction of compassionate altruism. Such dedication to subdued sentimentality is ably assisted by the gorgeous Cruz, who as Raimunda conveys a full spectrum of nuanced emotions – from sorrow and fierce protectiveness to bitchiness, kindness and desperate longing – and, in doing so, crafts a magnificent portrait of strong, self-sufficient womanhood that stands as the performance of her career. However, as with most of his oeuvre, the ultimate star of Volver is Almodóvar himself, here subtly employing noir-ish horn-and-piano tunes, supple editing, and discreet use of symbolic color (for instance, a bright red bus passing across the screen immediately before Raimunda hears treacherous news) to bestow his low-key saga of maternal-sibling reconciliation and female solidarity with assured grace and just a hint of moody, devilish wit.

(The 44th New York Film Festival)

Battle in Heaven (2006): B+

With its interest in ritual as a dehumanizing/transcendent force, its unaffected performances, and its methodical, meditative widescreen cinematography, Battle in Heaven naturally elicits comparisons to the work of Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky. And at times, director Carlos Reygadas’s follow-up to 2002’s Jápon seems a tad too convinced that it belongs in such rarified company, an air of borderline-pretentious import coloring its carefully orchestrated ‘scope arrangements and camera pans away from characters and toward its sprawling Mexico City landscape (and the expansive soil and sky that sandwich it). Yet as with his astonishingly primal, potent debut, Reygadas here again assuredly walks the fine line between self-importance and self-assuredness, his film a portrait of individual and national crises that, at nearly every turn, seeks greater truth through startling provocation – the most obvious, and notorious, example of which is the graphic sex scenes (replete with close-ups of wilting erections and razor-burned pubic regions) that punctuate his ruminative narrative.

Beginning and ending with an overweight man named Marcos (Marcos Hernández) receiving a blowjob from a pretty young girl named Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), Battle in Heaven utilizes its unattractive, explicit sexual encounters not simply for gratuitous titillation but, rather, as mirrors designed to reflect the story’s underlying social/political/religious tensions. Those strains constantly bubble beneath the surface of the nominal plot, which involves Marcos and his portly wife’s (Bertha Ruiz) struggles to deal with the death of a baby they had kidnapped and planned to ransom. In this desperate stab at financial gain, as in both an extended shot of a BMW driver interacting with his servants, and in the socio-economically disparate relationship between Marcos (who works at an army base helping to raise and lower the national flag, and as a general’s chauffeur) and Ana (the general’s daughter, who secretly works as a whore), Reygadas subtly touches upon his tale’s larger concerns regarding the inequality – and consequent moral decay – plaguing his home country.

Such dilemmas take on a spiritual dimension courtesy of Reygadas’ Christian symbolism, with Marcos’ efforts to cope with his guilt, resentment and disaffection presented as a search for salvation. That this wayward protagonist remains, up until the shocking (and somewhat forced and artificial) finale, a relatively cold and impenetrable figure hampers Battle in Heaven’s desire to cast his plight as representative of the nation’s apparently dire state of affairs. Yet Reygadas’ formal acuity helps gloss over some of his film’s more pressing thematic shortcomings. And in his head-on depiction of the way communal rites (flag-raising, Catholic pilgrimages, soccer games) help foster alienation rather than unity, as well as in his fierce exploration of issues of intimacy and inequality via Marcos’ diametrically dissimilar sexual trysts with Ana and his wife (respectively impersonal on the one hand and affectionate on the other), Reygadas proves that rare filmmaker interested in tackling both the personal and the political through expressly confrontational means.

Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (2005): C

Tony Jaa knows how to jump over, around and through environmental objects. He knows how to punch, kick and spin with both power and speed. And he definitely knows how to deliver airborne knees to the head and crushing elbows to the cranium. What eludes the agile martial artist, however, is how to act, a shortcoming compounded, in the case of Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior, by the fact that Prachya Pinkaew’s replay-heavy direction is generally as inept as his star’s emotive skills. Boasting the flimsiest of narratives – Jaa’s country boy heads to Bangkok to retrieve the head of a deity statue stolen by underworld criminals – the film is really just a showcase for Jaa’s athletic abilities, and to be fair, they’re quite impressive, whether he’s leaping between golf cart-style taxis or felling larger opponents in Lionheart-type battles to the death. Unfortunately, much of Ong-Bak’s action – despite its lack of computer or wire-aided effects – feels over-choreographed, even during the entertainingly hectic middle section during which most plot-related concerns take a back seat to remarkable physical acrobatics. Book-ending such adrenalized excitement is a thoroughly creaky intro and a finale that fails to match the preceding mayhem, with Jaa’s Muay Thai fighting skills regularly showing more personality than his blank face, and much-needed humor coming only via a villain who, during the climactic showdown, doesn’t know when to say when regarding steroid use.

Snakes. On a Plane.

Many films hit theaters today, but for most moviegoers, only one is of serious interest: Snakes on a Plane. So without further ado, here's my hot-off-the-presses review.

Snakes on a Plane (Slant magazine)

For those who could care less about Sam Jackson's reptile troubles, however, here are some other new/recent reviews, including one for Outkast's long-delayed musical.

Idlewild (Slant magazine)
This Film Is Not Yet Rated (Slant magazine)
Surviving Eden (Slant magazine)
Kicking and Screaming (1995) - DVD (Slant magazine)

Finally, my thoughts on the weekend's other big release - The Illusionist - can be found directly below this post.

The Illusionist (2006): C+

To reference The Illusionist’s most obvious cinematic forerunner would be to ruin its central revelation, but suffice it to say that Neil Burger’s period piece (based on Steven Millhauser's short story “Eisenheim The Illusionist”) – about a mysterious magician named Eisenheim (Edward Norton) who causes much consternation for Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell) in turn-of-the-century Vienna – has at least one giant trick up its sleeve. A peasant whose low social status prevented him, as a young boy, from being with the countess he loved, Eisenheim is reunited with his former paramour (Jessica Biel’s Sophie) when she, at the bequest of Leopold (whom she’s intended to marry), participates in one of the illusionist’s astonishing performances. The political and the personal soon intersect in treacherous ways, as Eisenheim begins planning to abscond with Sophie, Leopold (who aims to overthrow his father and assume the throne) tries to do away with the seemingly supernatural-powered artist threatening to undermine his rule, and Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) strives to remain loyal to Leopold while also keeping Eisenheim, whom he admires, from imprisonment. Burger stages his misdirection-laden story with stately reserve, employing a sepia-tinted cinematographic color palette and Philip Glass’ often-baroque score to establish a lush, velvety tone that’s only disrupted by the appearance of the lovely but miscast Biel. Alas, despite Giamatti’s richly shaded turn as the conflicted Uhl and Norton’s focused, intense portrayal of the titular conjurer, The Illusionist’s romantic heart is feeble and its attempts at historical contextualization (as well as addressing of secular-vs.-spiritual issues) are depressingly underdeveloped, making the film little more than a handsomely constructed but decidedly minor sleight of hand.

Gabrielle (2005): B+

The marriage at the center of Gabrielle dissolves as a result of apathy, but there’s nothing lethargic about Patrice Chéreau’s period piece, an emotionally explosive adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s short story "The Return" that simmers with anger, resentment and long-suppressed desire. Walking from the train to his Paris home in what appears to be the early 20th-century, pompous bourgeois prig Jean (Pascal Greggory) ruminates on his life, career and spouse like a man monotonously ticking items off of a checklist. His mansion as cold and sterile as a sarcophagus and filled with marble busts and statues that speak to his primary interest in the acquisition and display of material goods, Jean admits that he lost interest in romance or sex after he’d secured Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert) as his wife. When Gabrielle leaves a Dear John note indicating that she’s running off with another man, only to then return home after reconsidering, the sparks fly, with Greggory effectively conveying his character’s epiphany regarding both the limits of his authority and the price of indifference, and the regal Huppert – whose role has been expanded from Conrad’s male-perspective source material, and whose roused passions are matched by the sight of her veins glowing underneath her pale skin – radiating icy antipathy that comes to a head in her scathing confession to Jean that “The thought of your sperm inside me is unbearable.” Chéreau’s sumptuously immediate cinematography visualizes the increasingly vitriolic tête-à-tête’s shifts in mood and temperament by alternating between black-and-white and color, though it’s his intimate camerawork that, by assuming the position of an unseen spectator and, thus, placing us directly in the middle of this catastrophically crumbling relationship, gives the film a vivid, pulsating heat.

On Dangerous Ground (1952): A

One of noir’s most soulful and poetic expressions of hope and redemption – two commodities usually in short supply in the fatalistic genre – Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground begins hard and bitter, only to slowly transform into something gentle and poignant. Detective Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is so repulsed by the seedy urban underworld he’s forced to inhabit that, his face frozen in a disgusted grimace, he seems ready to explode – until, that is, he does, using clenched fists to beat a confession out of an uncooperative crook. Sent north to help investigate the murder of a local man’s (Ward Bond) son, Wilson instead finds therapeutic help himself, which comes in the compassionate guise of the suspect’s blind sister Mary (the always radiant Ida Lupino). It’s an exceedingly melodramatic turn of events, and yet Ray’s graceful handling of the material turns potential schmaltz into blissful sentimentality, the director beautifully juxtaposing the dark, gritty shadows of his opening’s metropolitan streets with the soft white snow of the countryside. Vividly visualizing inner torment is Ray’s specialty, and the early encounters between Wilson and Mary, as well as a series of climactic close-ups, prove so moving that, even when the plotting eventually becomes a tad creaky, the outpouring of pained, plaintive emotion is nothing short of overpowering.

Friday Night Link Dump

Since checking out World Trade Center on Monday, I've been busy seeing less high-profile releases, none of which are likely to incite a ton of excitement. Nonetheless, of these five new reviews, two of them - for Princesas and Pulse - are moderately positive.

Out Now:
Pulse (2006) (Slant magazine)

Out Later:
Princesas (Slant magazine)
10th & Wolf (Slant magazine)
Haven (Slant magazine)
Keeping Mum (Slant magazine)

Check back next week for more review fun, including reviews of Edward Norton's magician movie The Illusionist, Outkast's musical Idlewild, and a relatively obscure film involving Samuel L. Jackson, some snakes, and a plane.