Lessons of Darkness

Overboard

No surprise that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End will be this Memorial Day weekend's movie to see. And for those who suffered through last year's Dead Man's Chest, it'll also be no surprise to learn that the final entry in this theme park ride-inspired franchise is a big, noisy, convoluted mess.

I'm now officially sick of this summer's festival-of-threequels.

Now:
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Slant magazine)
Steel City (Slant magazine)

Later:
Four Lane Highway (Slant magazine)
Fido (Slant magazine)

Rescue Dawn (2006): A-

Remaking Little Dieter Needs to Fly as a fictional feature always seemed a project doomed to unflattering comparisons, as Werner Herzog’s 1997 documentary about the titular German-American fighter pilot and his escape from a Vietnam POW camp remains one of the purest and most moving evocations of the director’s belief in man’s violent relationship to the natural world, and the difficulty in rising above one’s past. And yet here is Rescue Dawn, a stunning film that – despite criticisms that it’s an example of Herzog succumbing to easy, uncomplicated convention – radiates with the same haunting unreality and quirky poetry that marked Little Dieter’s non-fiction footage of American planes bombing Vietnamese forests, images which commence this fictionalized version of Dieter Dengler’s lengthy saga inside (and then in the jungles surrounding) a Laos prisoner-of-war facility. Herzog’s decision to tell his tale in linear fashion certainly gives the impression that he’s after something straightforward. However, peeking around the corners of his latest are moments of such subtle, wondrous artistry that the project quickly feels less a concession to marketplace demands than a highly personal restatement of his career’s most pressing concerns.

The fraught-with-tension rapport between humanity and its environment is Rescue Dawn’s foremost topic, introduced during an aircraft carrier-set debriefing session in which an instructional video about using the wildlife to one’s advantage – employing foliage as cover, wielding big leaves to drink rainwater – is mocked by a wiseass pilot. Far from a laughing matter, such lessons become vital once Dengler, during an entrancing aerial dogfight that’s often shot from directly behind his cockpit, is gunned down in enemy territory and left to fend for himself. Given that his lifelong desire had been to fly (instigated by a childhood experience seeing a WWII bomber up-close and in-action), the fact that Dengler (Christian Bale) screams “I’m not gonna bail out!” as his plane spirals out of control speaks to the borderline-obsessiveness of his dream. It’s a dream that maintains its grip on his heart even after his attempts to evade capture prove unsuccessful and he’s taken by local militiamen to a middle-of-nowhere camp populated by a few Vietnamese and American detainees, including Jeremy Davies’ emaciated, loony tunes Gene and Steve Zahn’s soft-spoken, frazzled Duane.

The lush, mountainous Vietnam landscape is initially depicted by Herzog as a prehistoric land of the lost (replete with animal noises and primordial moans and hums) in which Dengler is a modern alien, and Bale’s performance – marked by facial tics, anxious giggles, and an increasingly starved physique – is fittingly structured as a reversion to a more primal state of being. As his Dengler steels himself for an escape, Bale ably embodies the character’s progressive kinship with his surroundings, maniacally stuffing his face with worms once the food supply runs dry, crawling under his cabin like a scurrying crab during his eventual breakout, and pulling blood-sucking leeches off his body after a dip in a river. Throughout, Herzog remains fascinated with his narrative’s various dichotomies (modern-primitive, man-nature, first world-third world, American-Vietnamese), of which Dengler’s adaptability and yet steadfast loyalty to his convictions – the latter exhibited by his refusal to sign a letter decrying the U.S. – is the one which truly captures the director’s imagination. And thus when the pilot flees into the seemingly impenetrable forest without shoes (in what is likely a suicide mission), Herzog’s respect for Dengler’s bravery is so great that – in an act of spiritual empathy – he literally immerses his camera in the thick brush and roaring rapids that Dengler navigates.

The conflict between Dengler and Davies’ Gene (the latter intent on waiting for a heroic U.S. armed forces rescue) is cast as one between courage and cowardice, and remains the story’s most unadventurous element, in part because Davies’ stir-crazy pain-in-the-ass distracts attention away from Herzog’s more inspired flights of fancy. Rescue Dawn’s baseline narrative is stirring but its offhand touches are what elevate it to near-greatness, amplifying the already somewhat surreal atmosphere with lyrical punctuations. A boy dangling a giant rhino beetle tied to a string above Dengler’s face, a close-up of Dengler eating kernels of rice off a table with his finger while a machine gun fires haphazardly, Duane touching a plant’s leaves like piano keys (twinkling music included) – Herzog’s tangential details lend the film an expressionistic, ethereal quality that nicely mingles with the action’s otherwise dynamic grittiness. Moreover, they also ultimately help temper the conclusion’s melodramatic elation, with the rescued Dengler’s boisterous welcome-home celebrations providing uplift that never quite outweighs the sense (conveyed more fully by Little Dieter Needs to Fly) that while he may have physically escaped the jungle, part of Dengler nonetheless remains in the mud and the muck, hallucinating about giving his fallen friend Duane a rubber shoe sole to wear.

Knockout

Only a few reviews to offer today, but one of them is (gasp!) quite positive - for Judd Apatow's Knocked Up. Rarely do populist comedies prove to be consistently funny, understatedly sweet, and reasonably sharp as well, but I'm happy to report this one achieves the trifecta.

And when it hits theaters in early June, it'll certainly be a welcome respite from May's barrage of threequels, of which Shrek the Third (unseen by yours truly due to schedule conflicts) opens today and Pirates of the Caribbean: At Wit's End premieres next Friday (my review arriving mid-week).

Today:
The Wendell Baker Story (Slant magazine)

After Today:
Knocked Up (Slant magazine)
Day Watch (Slant magazine)
I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal (Slant magazine)
9 Star Hotel (Slant magazine)

28 Weeks Later (2007): B+

As swift and ferocious as its virus-infected undead cannibals, 28 Weeks Later – the follow-up to Danny Boyle’s gritty 2002 zombies-in-London hit – confirms that a Fox Atomic-produced horror sequel need not be technically clumsy, stupid, crass and fright-free. Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Intacto), the film picks up its predecessor’s story twenty-eight weeks after the outbreak, finding all of London seemingly free of zombies (who’ve starved) and one portion of it, dubbed the Green Zone, transformed into a safe haven under strict U.S.-NATO military control. Security, however, is a fleeting concept in 28 Weeks Later, which subscribes to a take-no-prisoners ethos in which every character, no matter how sympathetic or apparently integral to the plot, is a potential fatality. As did Boyle, Fresnadillo employs shaky DV camerawork to unsettling effect, especially in a bravura opening sequence in which a husband and father (Robert Carlyle) saves himself and leaves his wife to perish during a zombie ambush. The disconcertingly hazy image quality proves a suitable aesthetic both for a constantly volatile narrative (focused on a besieged family unit), as well as a specific centerpiece sequence in which the military – attempting to deal with the virus’ reemergence, but unable to discern the zombies from the healthy humans – implements a kill-them-all policy. That frenzied zombie attacks are routinely shot in borderline-incoherent close-up somewhat detracts from the terror of said incidents (which are incessantly layered with crashing guitars), and pale in comparison to the hauntingly calm eye-of-the-maelstrom moments involving American snipers and Carlyle’s two (frustratingly underwritten) kids. In its portrait of an occupying U.S. military force that’s not only incapable of safekeeping, but actually a threat to innocents, 28 Weeks Later proves a damning allegory for America’s deteriorating handle on the situation in Iraq. Yet if such parallels are to be drawn, then equally chilling is the film’s complementary depiction of radical Islam as a rampaging virus that no amount of military or diplomatic might can properly contain.

Ridiculosity

Awful sickness + lots of screenings + two crazy children + myriad family-related projects + lack of restful sleep = pure, exhausted loopiness.

Nonetheless, here's two weeks' worth of new review links (thirteen in all). For those only interested in reading my positive thoughts, feel free to skip ahead to the reviews of Waitress and Casting About. For those more inclined to read nastiness, well, there's a lot for you in today's post...

Today:
Georgia Rule (Slant magazine)
The Ex (Slant magazine)
Day Night Day Night (Cinematical)
Casting About (Slant magazine)
Disappearances (Slant magazine)
Provoked (Slant magazine)

Last Week:
Waitress (Cinematical)

Future Weeks:
Even Money (Slant magazine)
Death at a Funeral (Slant magazine)
Brooklyn Rules (Slant magazine)
The Signal (Slant magazine)
My Best Friend (Slant magazine)
I'm Reed Fish (Slant magazine)

Spider-Man 3 (2007): C

Spider-Man 3 opens with Peter Parker (Toby Maguire) drunk on the adoration showered upon his web-slinging alter ego Spider-Man, a cockiness that unfortunately also seems to have consumed director Sam Raimi, who –with this third installment in the lucrative Marvel Comics-based franchise – seems convinced that he can chew whatever he chooses to bite off. Unfortunately, as with Peter, the filmmaker’s hubris is ultimately a one-way ticket to disappointment, as this latest go-round with the friendly neighborhood wall-crawler is so bloated with villains, love interests and peripheral dramas that it almost never manages to get off the ground, much less into the euphoric stratosphere of its wholly superior predecessor. Inelegant, superficial and – worst of all – acutely unexciting, it’s a preordained box office blockbuster unwisely guided by a more-is-more mentality, a surprisingly jumbled creation that weeps, roars, swings, screams and explodes with Dolby-enhanced bombast yet, for the most part, proves to be a hollow shell of a saga devoid of both thrilling action and rousing passion.

Written by Raimi with his brother Ivan and Alvin Sargent, Spider-Man 3 has enough material for two films, a bounty that proves to be its undoing. Peter’s self-infatuation threatens to destroy his romance with Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), whose flameout on Broadway is callously ignored by her beau, just as his egomania leads him to believe that he has the right to play superheroic judge, jury and executioner. This latter attitude is magnified by a mysterious extraterrestrial symbiote (read: gooey, parasitic life form) which shapes itself into a sleek, all-black (and thus all-evil) Spider-suit that gives Peter increased strength as well as amplifies his anger. As it turns out, he’s got plenty to be angry about, as Raimi and company pit their masked crime-fighter against not only friend-turned-enemy Harry Osborne (James Franco) – still convinced that Spidey murdered his Green Goblin father (Willem Dafoe) – but also two additional adversaries: ex-con Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), aka Sandman, who happens to be the real killer of Peter’s Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson), and Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), a competing Daily Bugle photographer who in due course merges with the symbiote to become the ferocious arachnid-monster Venom.

Throw in a love triangle involving Peter, MJ and Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) – punctuated by Peter heartlessly duplicating his and MJ’s seminal kiss with Gwen – and what you get is a distended superhero version of The Young and the Restless. Of course, comics are, at heart, serial melodramas, but the film’s plot pile-up results only in diffusing the potential depth of its various narrative strands – of which Marko’s internal struggle between noble aims and criminal impulses holds the most (squandered) promise. In keeping with Marvel tradition, Raimi remains dedicated to fleshing out his bad guys’ motivations, and in his scant non-CG’ed screen time, Church imbues his malleable, physically impermanent baddie with a soulful desperation and self-loathing. Yet despite the director’s best intentions, virtually every other aspect of this lumbering threequel is given woefully short shrift, from Brock’s skimpy impetus for wanting Peter dead, to the role of cantankerous Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), to Peter’s fury and desire for vengeance, to Harry’s temporary amnesia (a device which proves the height of corniness) and decision to let bygones be bygones during a discussion with his butler that reeks of screenwriting laziness.

Whereas its predecessor struck a near-perfect balance between razzle-dazzle pyrotechnics and pulpy emotion, culminating in a quasi-religious battle against Doc Ock on top of a runaway train, Spider-Man 3 is a didactic sermon about free will color-coded for young tykes. Red, white and blue are good (hammered home by Spidey’s climactic run past the billowing Stars and Stripes) and black is very bad, though Venom’s evil is so carelessly defined that any substantial impressions of the character must inevitably center around his frighteningly elongated tongue. A sterling cameo from Raimi favorite Bruce Campbell proves to be the rare successfully jovial moment, offering temporary relief from the barrage of leaden speeches about revenge’s ability to corrupt, clunky song-and-dance numbers, and pedestrian showcase sequences peppered with too many cutaways to kids saying the darndest things. In Peter’s use of church bells to exorcise himself from his alien garb, Spider-Man 3 achieves its sole, subtle symbolic touch, but it’s not nearly enough to resuscitate this depressingly moribund film, which gracelessly lurches between thinly conceived storylines to the point that any rooting interest in their resolutions is eventually negated.

Lynchian Meditations

One week after speaking with Laura Dern for SOMA's April issue, I had the great fortune to be able to interview her Blue Velvet and Inland Empire director David Lynch for the magazine's current May issue. Speaking to me via cell phone from a Manhattan-traversing car, the soft-spoken Lynch discussed his 30-year practice of transcendental meditation (the subject of his new book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity), his recent 3-hour masterpiece, his creative process, and his budding love affair with DV. For the full story from one of American cinema's true visionaries, check out the feature, entitled "The Blissful Idea Man."

As always, because of how the magazine's site is designed, the below link will simply get you to the main content page. From there, select the article.

The Blissful Idea Man (SOMA magazine)

And for those who pick up a print copy of the magazine, you'll also find another profile - of Six Feet Under and Civic Duty star Peter Krause - written by yours truly.

New Name, New Look, Same Great Taste

As anyone reading this will have noticed by now, the blog formerly known as The Nick Schager Film Project has been transformed into Lessons of Darkness. The reasons for the switch are quite simple: After 3 1/2 years of mounting unhappiness with the site's former, unimaginative name (which I came up with while killing time during a Columbia J-School class), I've finally had enough. Thus, the new site - whose moniker comes from Werner Herzog's masterful 1992 documentary - is born.

A few minor things have been tweaked, but as you'll see, this change is primarily cosmetic rather than content-related. Remaining unaltered are all permalinks, as well as the blog's primary function: to serve as a clearing house for my professional work, as well as a place where I can rant and rave about whatever topics (cinematic or otherwise) I choose. I'd appreciate it if those kind enough to link to my site will change their link names accordingly.

Let me know what you think. Unless, of course, you hate the new look. In which case, don't.

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994): C

A real news report about a Vienna bank shooting that left three people dead and ended with the shooter’s suicide opens 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, which then proceeds to flash back to the events leading up to the senseless crime via de-contextualized splinters of fictional scenes concerning the victims. What drove young 19-year-old student Maximillian B. (Lukas Miko) – his name a wink-wink to Fassbinder’s Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? – to commit such a heinous act? Anyone with a passing knowledge of director Michael Haneke’s work will know that, according to his 1994 film (the final installment in his “Trilogy of Emotional Glaciation”), the answer is a combination of social alienation and noxious media saturation. TV coverage of Bosnian atrocities and Michael Jackson’s 1993 sex scandal pepper this puzzle-like tale, which concerns a couple looking to adopt a grumpy girl, a mother and father dealing with their sick infant, a young illegal immigrant trying to survive on the streets, a lonely elderly man at odds with his daughter, and Maximillian himself, who dutifully calls home to mom but exhibits a dangerously short fuse while playing games with friends. The story’s fragmentation is meant to emphasize its characters’ unhappy remoteness, but as Haneke (in typical fashion) refuses to show us anything but his protagonists’ misery, this divisive structure instead merely underlines the director’s active, mean-spirited role in isolating these people from themselves and those around them. A precursor to 2000’s Code Unknown, the formally adept 71 Fragments segues between its various pawns before coldly, cruelly sending them to their execution. It’s a Haneke modus operandi that, like his penchant for prolonged, static shots of repetitive ritual (here: a table tennis professional-in-training) was already, after only three films, decidedly musty.