Lessons of Darkness

Wawaweewa!

Everyone's favorite Kazakhstan reporter arrives in theaters next week, but my review of Borat is here now. High five!

Borat (Slant magazine)

As for the rest of this week's stuff, Werner Herzog's crazy new effort The Wild Blue Yonder, and next January's God Grew Tired of Us, are the ones to highlight.

Today:
Saw III (Slant magazine)
The Wild Blue Yonder (Slant magazine)
Death of a President (Slant magazine)

After Today:
God Grew Tired of Us (Slant magazine)
Harsh Times (Slant magazine)
10 Items or Less (Slant magazine)
Fuck (Slant magazine)

And also note that reviews of Babel and Pan's Labyrinth can be found below.

Babel (2006): C

Everyone’s emotionally disconnected from everyone else in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, but like the director’s prior two efforts (Amores Perros and 21 Grams), every storyline and every incident is also inextricably interconnected. Screenwriting gimmickry increasingly seems to be Iñarritu’s primary stock and trade, his desire to link apparently unrelated narratives so contrived and so tired that it overshadows both his heartfelt depictions of human suffering and his cinematographic skill at capturing misery through stark, unsteady close-ups. In his latest attempt at coincidence-laden storytelling, strained American couple Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) find themselves in crisis when, while traveling in Morocco, Susan is hit by a stray bullet, an act of violence perpetrated by the two young boys of a sheep-herding family. Meanwhile, their Mexican nanny (Adriana Barraza), intent on attending her son’s wedding, surreptitiously takes the two young children in her care over the border with the help of an untrustworthy nephew (Gael García Bernal), and in Tokyo, a deaf-mute schoolgirl (Rinko Kikuchi) and her estranged father (Koji Yakusho) find their own distraught lives affected by Richard and Susan’s predicament. Superficially disparate, these three tales – all fraught with socio-economic tensions – are each eventually revealed to be just like the other, with most every character burdened by detachment and/or distress. Yet there isn’t a second when Iñárritu’s film feels as if it’s replicating life’s coincidental nature; rather, it just comes off as another of his beautifully shot, evocatively scored multi-character ventures in which his sincere interest in probing grief and tragedy – an interest which, admittedly, is explored via wrenching but dramatically artificial and/or histrionic scenarios – takes a back seat to his pseudo-profound, oh-so-convenient plot manipulations.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006): B

As with 2001’s The Devil’s Backbone, director Guillermo del Toro confronts fascism in WWII-era Spain through the filter of the fantastical with Pan’s Labyrinth, a lush gothic fable whose exquisite production design masks a rather stiff, schematic narrative skeleton. After her widowed, pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil) agrees to marry boot-stomping Captain Vidal (Sergi López), young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) finds herself living in a forest-encased military outpost. Confronted by her new stepfather’s repressive worldview, the girl retreats into a magical fairy tale in which a sly fawn (Doug Jones) convinces her that she’s a long-lost queen and must perform a series of dangerous tasks to reclaim her rightful throne. Thus the director posits a dichotomy between the real and the unreal that’s meant to convey the transcendent power of the imagination, as well as to illuminate the fact that life’s actual monsters are not those with eyes in their hands (as is the case with the film’s most marvelous creature) but rather the two-legged ones intent on dictatorially imposing their unjust will on others. I say “meant to” because, while del Toro’s film has a sumptuous visual creepiness that contributes to its affecting portrait of shattered childhood innocence, its story nonetheless often feels too diagrammed, its juxtapositions and paternal/political symbolism as tidily laid out as its characterizations – specifically, the one-dimensionally evil Vidal – are cookie-cutter caricatures. Whereas Vidal’s black-and-white ethos should be contrasted to the wild unruliness of Pan’s netherworld, instead, unfortunately, it eventually comes to typify Pan’s Labyrinth’s clear-cut distinctions between reality and fantasy.

(The 44th New York Film Festival)

October Onslaught

October's wave of big-ticket releases reaches a crescendo today, with the arrival of both Christopher Nolan's star-studded magician movie The Prestige and Clint Eastwood's WWII epic Flags of Our Fathers. If you're heading to the theater this weekend, your money will be better spent on the former - or, if you're up for some IMAX fun, the re-released The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Today:
The Prestige (Slant magazine)
Flags of Our Fathers (Slant magazine)
The Nightmare Before Christmas (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:
Shut Up & Sing (Slant magazine)
Candy (Slant magazine)

And be sure to check out the new reviews posted below - for David Lynch's Inland Empire, Lucky McKee's The Woods, and Robert De Niro's A Bronx Tale.

Inland Empire (2006): A-

Hollywood actress Nikki (Laura Dern) nabs the lead role of Sue in director Kingsley’s (Jeremy Irons) next project – a remake of a supposedly Gypsy-cursed Polish film called “On High in Blue Tomorrows” – only to find herself stalked by a mysterious murderer as the barriers separating waking and dreaming life, reality and art, disintegrate in a swirl of euphoria and terror. Such a plot synopsis barely scratches the surface of Inland Empire, a perplexing and astonishing three-hour journey into the depths of Nikki’s cinema-filtered subconscious, a locale that director David Lynch envisions as a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-nightmare-within-a-hallucination full of doppelgangers, space-time continuum rifts, and clips from his short film Rabbits in which Mulholland Drive’s Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring and Scott Coffey wear giant rabbit heads while starring in an eerie sitcom from an apparently alternate dimension. Make sense? Of course not, and that’s without mention of Nikki and co-star Devon’s (Justin Theroux) affair, Harry Dean Stanton’s scene-stealing turn as Kingsley’s pauper assistant, the hookers doing “The Locomotion,” the homeless people who tend to an injured Nikki/Sue on L.A.’s Walk of Fame, the subtitled scenes set in Poland, or Dern’s magnificently extended monologue about murder and betrayal, all of which blend together with such beautiful, seamless illogicality that Lynch’s epic about the movie biz and identity seems less a depiction of the dark recesses of the human mind than an actual product of it.

Surrealistic to its core, Inland Empire – its title a reference not to LaLa Land, I think, but to the interior landscape of the self – is a bizarre creation that, with every shift in “chronology” (if such a concept even applies) and continuity, confounds rational interpretation, the story’s winding route a string of asides, associations, and random sights and sounds that aren’t so much lucidly understood as simply experienced. Lynch’s gorgeously composed, grainy DV cinematography skillfully mirrors the action’s skuzzy, hazy nature, just as his masterful sound design – a surprisingly harmonious mixture of, among other things, horrifying roars and wails and Nina Simone’s “Sinner Man” – amplifies the film’s menacing, lurching tone. Even when her character(s) seem as indistinct and insubstantial as a plume of cigarette smoke, Dern’s wide-ranging performance is a thing of captivating brilliance, consistently rooting the film in tortured, desperate emotion even as it begins fragmenting into avant-garde abstraction. What ultimately gives Inland Empire its dark enchantment, however, is Lynch’s combination and reconfiguration of aesthetic and narrative components until what remains – from its opening scene featuring a prophesizing Grace Zabriskie to its subsequent imagery of Nikki/Sue gazing through burned holes in silk – is a sense of hidden, inextricable connections intertwined in ways both clear and obscure – an impression that lends this, the director’s most challenging and rich work, a through-the-rabbit-hole mystery saturated with endless interpretive possibilities.

(The 44th New York Film Festival)

The Woods (2006): B+

Unceremoniously given the direct-to-DVD treatment while countless sub-par studio thrillers glut multiplexes nationwide, Lucky McKee’s The Woods nonetheless proves to be one of the most polished and inventive horror flicks of the still-ongoing year, a synthesis of classical supernatural and sexualized imagery that expands upon, rather than simply regurgitates, its celebrated predecessors. Carrie, Suspiria, The Wicker Man, and 1980’s teen high school dramas are all part of the film’s ominous fabric, but the means by which McKee (working from David Ross’ sharp script) references and borrows from these many influences is neither plagiaristic nor stale. Crafting a malevolently sensual atmosphere via keen compositional framing, low-key special effects, and a torrent of menstrual and genital symbolism, McKee casts his tale – about an unruly teenager named Heather (Agnes Bruckner) who’s forced by her callous mother (Emma Campbell) to attend a boarding school run by frosty Ms. Traverse (Patricia Clarkson) in 1965 – as a terrifying portrait of puberty. Such an allegorical aim isn’t, in and of itself, groundbreaking, and yet the director’s unsettling mise-en-scène, full of hovering tracking shots and expertly spliced-together montages of penetration/nature visuals, gives the material a freshness that’s aided by Bruckner’s controlled performance as the perpetually harassed, potentially psychic Heather. Amidst the jittery witches, poison milk, bloody nightgowns, vaginal-shaped wounds, and phallic tree branches lurks McKee’s increasingly trademark proto-feminism, which once again comes tinged with lesbian undercurrents. Yet for a film as indebted to genre as this one, it’s only fitting that the eventual hero charged with leading the school’s young girls to a brighter tomorrow is tree-fighting Ash himself, Bruce Campbell.

A Bronx Tale (1993): C

A soporific 1960’s coming-of-age saga in which the protagonist is a twit and the mobster is an only-in-the-movies sage prone to wisely pontificating when not whacking guys in broad daylight, Robert De Niro’s directorial debut A Bronx Tale promises a conflict between competing paternal role models but winds up reveling in a fantasy vision of gallant Mafioso. Calogero (Francis Capra as a boy, Lillo Brancato as a teen) idolizes local mobster Sonny (Chazz Palminteri) and resents his working-class bus driver father Lorenzo (De Niro), mimicking the former’s distinctive hand gestures and body language while ignoring the latter’s conviction that a real man supports his family with hard work. Lorenzo’s helpless inability to compete with Sonny’s power and wealth is the film’s gut-wrenching center, and yet Palminteri’s stagy script (based on his play) lacks the balance necessary for such discord to flourish, as it often relegates Lorenzo to the sidelines while elevating the sympathetic Sonny to principal player status. Palminteri and De Niro are compelling apart but rather lackluster together, given only a few brief encounters that each play out the same way: Lorenzo refuses Sonny’s generous (but untrustworthy) business offers, vehemently demands that the crook stay away from his son, and is then escorted from the premises. The narration is creaky, Brancato’s performance is wooden, and De Niro’s direction – despite conveying an intimate sense of time and place – is largely lackluster. Yet it’s the moralistic tenor of A Bronx Tale that’s ultimately most off-putting, a mood most acutely felt in the earnest-but-didactic civil rights subplot involving Calogero’s thoroughly improbable relationship with Taral Hicks’ African-American beauty.

Nine for the 13th

Nine new reviews for this most spooky of Fridays, and unfortunately, the one for today's new horror release (The Grudge 2) will likely only scare people away from theaters. The rest is a mixed-bag, but at least the good - The Host, Deliver Us From Evil, Cocaine Cowboys, These Girls - almost balances out the bad (namely, everything else).

Present:
The Grudge 2 (Slant magazine)
Man of the Year (Slant magazine)
Tideland (Slant magazine)
Deliver Us From Evil (Slant magazine)

NYFF:
The Host (Slant magazine)
These Girls (Slant magazine)
Falling (Slant magazine)

Future:
Cocaine Cowboys (Slant magazine)
Come Early Morning (Slant magazine)

Though I've already seen The Prestige and Flags of Our Fathers, neither review will likely be done until next week. Before then, keep an eye out for my almost-completed Inland Empire review, as well as my thoughts on Pan's Labyrinth and Robert DeNiro's 1993 directorial debut A Bronx Tale.

(And note: My new Slant magazine review of Tideland is an expanded version of the one that had previously been published on - and has now been removed from - this blog)

Paprika (2006): A-

Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress auteur Satoshi Kon’s interest in the flimsy boundary between dreams and reality manifests itself once again in Paprika, a techno-organic fantasia best enjoyed without any preconceived demands for narrative lucidity. An animé filmmaker whose lushly fluid visuals glide, swagger and throttle about with amazing dexterity, Kon’s latest is an aesthetically breathtaking future-noir-via-philosophical-head-trip in which – thanks to a cortex-stimulating device called the DC Mini that records dreams on hard discs, and is stolen by a mysterious villain – a metropolis population’s subconscious thoughts are made real and then merged into a monstrous parade of malevolent sights. Comprised of ambulatory appliances, talking dolls, whirring toys, towering robots, staggering samurai suits of armor, and countless other incongruous items, the procession (accompanied by off-kilter upbeat music) may be the most singularly haunting image in Kon’s esteemed oeuvre, though there are plenty of other unsettling visions of man-machine symbiosis strewn throughout to help bolster the film’s perplexingly convoluted, socio-politically attuned plot. A tormented detective named Konakawa teams with scientist and psychotherapist Dr. Chiba to catch the fiend orchestrating the apocalyptic plot, with Konakawa’s teenage moviemaking past and Chiba’s relationship to her virtual-reality alter ego Paprika two of the film’s many components that speak to the discrepancies between the lives we lead and those we secretly pine for. But literal interpretations aren’t the way to approach Paprika, which becomes far more enthralling the more one abandons hope of logically interpreting the story’s coded mysteries and references, and simply surrenders to the awe-inspiring beauty of Kon’s images of flesh, metal and unhinged mental delusions.

(The 44th New York Film Festival)

Offside (2006): B+

With Offside, director Jafar Panahi (The Circle) once again tackles systemic inequality in his native Iran, charting the ordeal of a group of young girls who are detained after dressing like boys in an attempt to sneak into Tehran’s men-only soccer stadium for the country’s 2004 World Cup-qualifying match. Using a subtly complex verité aesthetic, Panahi beautifully reveals the discriminatory bedrock of Iranian society, though unlike his previous Crimson Gold, the filmmaker substitutes mounting tension and anxiety for lighthearted humor, revealing a surprisingly deft, gentle comedic touch that serves him well as his tale’s spunky female protagonists, determined to break out of their makeshift prison and see the game, badger their captors for release. Sequestered behind a gate, the girls reveal a resilience with which their wardens are ill-equipped to contend. Rather than a straightforward battle of the sexes, however, Offside proves a powerful depiction of rebellion, as well as a portrait of communication as a force capable of eradicating personal and cultural barriers. Assuming his heroines’ point of view throughout, Panahi offers muted tragedy tinged with heartfelt compassion, and with his touching (if overly optimistic) finale – wherein escape comes equipped with exuberant revelry and exploding firecrackers – his film also offers a stirring alternate vision of Iran in which egalitarianism is allowed to flourish without the hindrance of illogical and corrosive prejudices.

(The 44th New York Film Festival)