Lessons of Darkness

Sleepless in Stamford

With my regular workload compounded by NYFF press screenings (which began last week), I'm quickly learning to operate on 4-5 hours of sleep. Not, I have to admit, an ideal situation. But hey, if I didn't sacrifice my mind and body in the name of cinema criticism, how else would I be able to get you all these brand-spankin' new reviews?


This Past Weekend:
Jackass Number Two (Slant magazine)
Jet Li's Fearless (Slant magazine)
Feast (Slant magazine)

This Coming Weekend:
School for Scoundrels (Slant magazine)

New York Film Festival:
Syndromes and a Century (Slant magazine)

DVD:
The Proposition - DVD (Slant magazine)

Check back in a few days for more NYFF reviews, including ones for Todd Field's Little Children and Stephen Frears' The Queen.

And check below for my thoughts on Brian De Palma's underwhelming The Black Dahlia and Sophia Coppola's sumptuous Marie Antoinette.

Marie Antoinette (2006): B+

To the synth-enhanced post-punk sounds of The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and New Order, Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette reconceptualizes its titular French queen as a child of the ‘80s, positing her as a young, rich, powerful and fabulous material girl more interested in ornate wigs, outrageous diamonds and designer shoes than the tumultuous political affairs of her late eighteen-century era. As with The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, mood is everything for Coppola here, her sumptuously light, delicate mise-en-scène capturing the opulence of life in Versailles as well as the overriding sense of indulgence adopted by the supremely wealthy. It’s a lifestyle to which 14-year-old Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) enters somewhat reluctantly via an amusingly staged de-clothing ceremony but then, after a few carousing gambling parties and exorbitant spending binges, comes to eagerly embrace. Marie Antoinette is at its best when unabashedly celebrating its milieu’s decadence, with Coppola ignoring most History Channel-worthy specifics (save for Marie’s dismissal of her infamous retort to starving Parisians: “Let them eat cake”) in favor of capturing the atmosphere of a superficial royal life which – as conveyed by Coppola’s superimposition of gossipy, sex-related chit-chat over shots of a serene Marie, the revelry of her booze, coke and opium-fueled all-nighters, and the parental expectations that weigh heavily on Marie’s soul – closely resembles modern, cliquish high school society.

Dunst aids in this contemporary characterization by always maintaining a devilishly girlish smile and impertinent attitude, and her poised performance is most effective during predominantly visual, dialogue-free sequences (such as her heavily attended galas and early morning waking routines overseen by a frightening Judy Davis) in which Marie’s breezy, charming confidence shines through. Amidst the period-specific costumes and lavish architecture lurks a portrait of teenage vibrancy unnaturally restrained by civilized ritual and propriety. Yet the more the film attempts to be about something more than an intoxicatingly (and, at times, somewhat repellently) extravagant ambiance, the more it reveals its regrettably threadbare narrative and thematic foundation. In Coppola’s assured hands, however, any minor third-act missteps into heavy plotting (involving the crown’s ill-advised funding of the American Revolution and the subsequent fall of Versailles) aren’t enough to sully the preceding joy elicited by the interplay between a cagey Rip Torn (as King Louis XV) and bitchy Asia Argento (as his mistress Madame du Barry), a quixotically composed affair between Marie and a Swedish soldier, Jason Schwartzman’s humorously introverted turn as Louis XVI, and a footwear shopping spree set to Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” that – like the film itself – is as delectably frothy as a dollop of whip cream on one of Marie’s beloved puff pastries.

(The 44th New York Film Festival)

The Black Dahlia (2006): C+

The excessive narrative convolutions of James Ellroy’s 1987 novel The Black Dahlia were compensated for by the hardboiled author’s prose – as brutally concise and muscular as a punch to the face – and its ability to convey fanatically obsessive, out-of-control passions. For his big-screen adaptation, Brian De Palma attempts the same trick via cinematic means, employing his unparalleled directorial talents to both mask his story’s over-complications and generate an air of frenzied compulsion, but the endeavor, alas, is a futile one. In theory a marriage made in heaven, De Palma’s version of Ellroy’s work is a similarly fictionalized take on the infamous 1947 Hollywood murder of wannabe starlet Elizabeth Short (Mira Kirschner). Centering on officer Bucky Bleichert’s (Josh Hartnett) attempts to solve the case while navigating a romantic triangle between himself, partner Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and Lee’s girl Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson), it’s a triumph of formalistic technique and expressionistic style, delivering a barrage of perspective shifts, loaded signifiers, and sumptuous camerawork. Whether it’s the extended shot that reveals Short’s desecrated body (severed in half, her mouth cut into a The Man Who Laughed smile), a Vertigo-ish murder sequence full of dizzying spiral imagery (which speaks to the film’s theme of no-progress circularity), or the POV tracking shot that introduces the hideous Linscott clan, De Palma’s technical artistry is in full bloom, drenching – with the aid of Vilmos Zsigmond’s desaturated cinematography – the noir proceedings in a coat of menacing luxuriousness.

Yet while this visual and compositional beauty imbues specific moments with dark, malevolent flair – and while Ellroy’s fiction provides De Palma with plenty of opportunities to revisit his trademark interests in doppelgangers and romantic/carnal infatuations – The Black Dahlia is, surprisingly, a rather lifeless affair. Much of the blame can be attributed to screenwriter Josh Friedman, who in attempting to retain most of Ellroy’s plot twists and turns, leaves almost no room for the fiery feelings that defined the book. Heedlessly cramming in characters, storylines and period details, his script becomes so overstuffed that it fails to spend time properly establishing any of its most vital elements, with Bucky’s (and, to a lesser extent, Lee’s) consuming fixation with Short under-dramatized, the central three-way relationship between Bucky, Lee and Kay left thin and undeveloped, and the climactic revelations mostly drained of their impact thanks to the film’s prior inability to generate an emotional response toward its elaborate set-up. Faced with such structural shortcomings, De Palma’s inventiveness comes off as impressive but largely in vain, incapable of delivering the zealous heat or sweaty mania demanded by his romantically hopeless noir material. Splendid in instances but listless as a whole, it’s a schematic literary translation that – when compounded by performances either affected (Johansson), phony (Hilary Swank, laughably un-sexy as Bucky’s slumming high-class lover), or just blank (Hartnett) – nails the tale’s particulars but not its soul.

I Have Come Here to Chew Bubblegum...

...and redesign my blog. And I'm all out of bubblegum.

New threads, custom made for protracted bouts of fisticuffs.

Obey.

Return of the Round-Up

Even though The Protector is technically a hold-over from last week, I've got seven new reviews for this Friday night, including ones for The Rock's football melodrama, a British wedding industry mockumentary, an upcoming Argentinean noir, and Bobcat Goldthwait's bestiality-related rom-com.

Yet the most interesting criticism-related news of my week was that, on Tuesday afternoon, I saw the film that will, in all likelihood, top my Worst of the Year list - a thoroughly incompetent, incoherent, and awful low-budget effort called They're Just My Friends. It's my first-ever ZERO-star review for Slant.

This Weekend:
Gridiron Gang (Slant magazine)
Confetti (Slant magazine)

Next Weekend and Beyond:
They're Just My Friends (Slant magazine)
Sleeping Dogs Lie (Slant magazine)
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (Slant magazine)
The Aura (Slant magazine)

Last Weekend:
The Protector (Slant magazine)

As many of you have probably noticed, I've also been really busy posting blog reviews, of which the most recent are The Last King of Scotland, Shortbus, and the sterling Memories of Murder. All can be found below.

And keep an eye out for the beginning of my New York Film Festival coverage, coming next week.

Memories of Murder (2005): A-

A policier beset by melancholy and infused with turbulent social-political shadings, Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder almost single-handedly resuscitates the moribund serial killer genre. Based on a notorious 1986 South Korean case in which the tortured and mutilated corpses of young women were found strewn throughout the rural countryside, Bong’s superbly wrought film traces two cops – Park (Song Kang-ho), an abusive local meathead with a penchant for framing witnesses and having his partner beat confessions out of innocent suspects, and Seo (Kim Sang-kyung), a by-the-books Seoul detective – as they attempt to comprehend the method behind their murderous culprit’s madness. Despite keenly rendering investigatory procedure, the film has interests that run far deeper than an average CSI or Law & Order episode, with the story’s 1986 timeframe (during which Seoul was still governed by the ruthless Chun dictatorship) contributing to a sense that Park’s coercive techniques, his police chief’s equally vicious punishment of misbehaving cops, and the killer’s activities are all larger symptoms of the institutionalized violence grafted onto the nation’s DNA by authoritarian rule. In such a corrupted environment, Park’s brutality and Seo’s logic are both rendered impotent, a fact most strikingly visualized during a masterfully sustained tracking shot of a frustrated Park attempting to preserve a crime scene that speaks to the tale’s encompassing atmosphere of futility (as well as exhibits its frequently sly humor). Protests rage in the streets, tests of national security air-sirens blare through the night sky, and an enigmatic figure continues his methodical slaughter, with Memories of Murder’s cops left to spin their wheels in pursuit of a violent truth at once subconsciously familiar to every one of their countrymen (per the film’s title), and yet ultimately knowable.

Shortbus (2006): C+

Humdrum explicit sex, patchy humor and crude melodrama converge in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, a graphic rom-com in which the bedroom dilemmas of alterna-lifestyling New Yorkers serve as reflections of both their deep-seated emotional problems and the city’s general post-9/11, Iraq war-fostered discontent. At the titular outcast-courting club (named after the derogatory designation for the school buses that transport special needs students), a sex therapist (Sook-Yin Lee) who’s never had an orgasm, a long-term couple (Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy) who’ve never been physically intimate, and a dominatrix (Lindsay Beamish) unable to have a demonstrative relationship all congregate to share in their outsider dysfunction, listening to Yo La Tengo while gay and straight orgies occur and a closeted Ed Koch stand-in wistfully ruminates on Manhattan as the last libertine enclave. The search for home – in the increasingly disconnected metropolis, in coitus, in one’s own skin – is the predominant undercurrent of Mitchell’s follow-up to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, with Dawson and DeBoy’s attempt to bring a third partner (Jay Brannan) into their union, or Beamish’s desire to form a meaningful, non-S&M connection, all symptoms of a larger need for shelter and self-acceptance. After an amusingly provocative opening montage, however, what the film could really use is a consistent tone – the action lurching between frothy humorousness and Afterschool Special seriousness, with animated shots of a paper-mache-like model Manhattan contributing a wisp of fairy tale ambiance – characters drawn in more than two-dimensions, and X-rated sequences with at least something of an erotic charge. For the serious-minded, exploitation-eschewing Mitchell, a three-way oral circle jerk isn’t just a three-way oral circle jerk: it’s a liberating act of sexual expression as well as a vision of the inclusive circularity of authentic intimacy – the latter point in accordance with the overriding portrait of community. But with little steam to its carnal centerpieces, scant galvanizing fury to its anti-conservative rebelliousness, and no effective means of visualizing its characters’ sexual issues (female self-gratification = running water and a cascade of city lights? Please.), the film never amounts to more than a case of hardcore triviality.

The Last King of Scotland (2006): B

Having previously helmed the non-fictional One Day in September and semi-documentary Touching the Void, director Kevin MacDonald now makes the leap into full-fledged dramatic filmmaking – while nonetheless retaining his interest in historical subject matter – with The Last King of Scotland, an “inspired by true events” tale of young Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), who travels to Uganda in the early ‘70s and inadvertently becomes the physician of, and “closest advisor” to, genocidal maniac Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker). As scripted by Jeremy Brock (based on Giles Foden’s novel), it’s a story of arrogant, egotistical naiveté shattered, tracing Garrigan’s transformation from devil-may-care Scottish boy – who, in an effort to flee the dreary life mapped out for him by his parents, decides to visit Uganda by spinning a globe and blindly choosing a country at random – to disenchanted man hardened by his horrifying experiences with the country’s ruthless dictator. Creaky as this narrative arc often proves (especially considering Amin and Garrigan’s surrogate father-son bond), and as squandered as Gillian Anderson and Kerry Washington are as Garrigan’s love interests, the film profits immensely from Whitaker’s force-of-nature performance, the actor embodying the notorious Amin as a charmingly garrulous giant whose friendliness masked consuming paranoia and homicidal madness. Yet what chiefly elevates The Last King of Scotland above its modest plot construction and bestows on it a manic, sweaty intensity is MacDonald’s consistently canny direction, with his pseudo-verité cinematography imparting an intimate sense of the beautiful-but-treacherous Uganda and his electric zooms into close-up capturing Amin’s imposing presence. Best of all, however, is the final juxtaposition of an overly quixotic (and clichéd) image of young smiling Africans running alongside a plane with McAvoy’s bruised and disillusioned countenance, a poignant point-counterpoint that functions as a stinging rebuke to both do-gooder white-man’s-burden fantasies and the disingenuous, Africa-exoticizing movies (The Constant Gardener, this means you) that promote them.

The Last Kiss (2001): C-

Utilizing an intertwined multi-character narrative so laughably contrived it borders on self-parody, The Last Kiss (L’Ultimo Bacio) repackages messy human dilemmas into something neat, tidy and oh-so-manipulatively inspiring. Gabriele Muccino’s knotted tale follows four close friends, their wives/lovers/one-night stands, and one older married couple as they struggle to navigate various romantic predicaments, all of which stem from a fear of monogamous (adult) commitment as stultifying and constricting, and a burning desire for the supposedly happy (youthful) freedom of non-attachment. Predictably, this scenario involves lots of screaming arguments concluded by people storming out of rooms, ill-advised bouts of infidelity, and heart-to-hearts about the nature of romance, passion and love. What’s surprising about Muccino’s turgid melodrama, however, is that it earnestly believes its central lesson – amorous commitment is nice; a solitary life is not – is somehow revelatory. Since every character is really just a one-dimensional device meant to impart some variation on the film’s primary theme, and because it’s clear that Muccino will eventually wrap up his various storylines with a dose of big, joyous uplift, there’s no way to feel emotionally drawn into the characters’ plights – or, in fact, to become overly frustrated with their selfish, narrow-minded, idiotic immaturity. In fact, there’s little reason to even endure The Last Kiss, an exercise in sub-Altman screenwriting gimmickry, self-consciously fanciful widescreen cinematography, and trite moralizing that pushes buttons and pulls heartstrings with all the grace and subtlety of a stampeding elephant.

The Ground Truth (2006): B-

For much of its first half, The Ground Truth is a documentary in search of a theme, with director Patricia Foulkrod leveling cursory criticisms against the Iraq war’s execution, the armed forces’ marketing campaigns and xenophobia-laced basic training procedures, and the media’s soft-peddling coverage of non-combatant fatalities, all in the hope that one will stick. Midway through, one does, as Foulkrod focuses her gaze on the neglectful mistreatment of returning GIs – many now severely handicapped and/or suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – by the military that asked for and accepted their service. Through interviews with former soldiers struggling to reintegrate into mainstream society because of either physical or psychological traumas, the director paints a portrait of abandonment in which the powers-that-be seem to have deliberately ignored the far-from-inconsequential problems (depression, violent and suicidal tendencies) of their discharged comrades. That Foulkrod’s primary thesis is often undercut by semi-related tangents and a standard-issue ugly non-fiction aesthetic leaves The Ground Truth feeling frustratingly uneven and far from cinematically inspired. But as a document of our military’s shameful disregard for its own, it’s nonetheless a vital reminder of the monumental, lingering toll war takes on its participants, and the moral obligation a country has to care for them once they’ve come home.