Lessons of Darkness

Busiest. Week. Ever.

Tons of reviews for you, my favorite readers, on this fine Sunday afternoon. Below, you'll find three new Rocky Mountain Bullhorn reviews of The Bourne Supremacy, Bus 174 and the 1950 John Huston classic The Asphalt Jungle.

But wait, there's more! I've also got four new online reviews. They are:

Slant magazine:
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (From the director of Dude, Where's My Car?)
Festival Express (A documentary on the 1970 rock tour featuring, among others, The Grateful Dead, Buddy Guy, and Janis Joplin)

filmcritic.com
Open Water (A horror film about scuba divers stranded in shark-infested water)
She Hate Me (Spike Lee's newest mess)

As always, Enjoy!

Bus 174 (2003)

(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn)

On June 12th, 2000, a young, frazzled man took a bus and its eleven passengers hostage in Rio de Janeiro, sparking a standoff that became the focus of Felipe Lacerda and José Padilha’s masterful documentary Bus 174. The gunman, Sandro do Nascimento, was one of Brazil’s “street kids” – a teeming population of homeless children – and Lacerda and Padilha’s film makes a stunning case against a crumbling Brazilian society in which abusive cops, a cruel criminal justice system, and widespread prejudice helps foster a youthful underclass driven to violence, theft and murder. Bolstered by extensive news footage of the tense situation and candid interviews with many of those who had crossed Sandro’s path, this outstanding documentary never absolves Sandro of culpability in the hostage situation, but its lasting, heartbreaking power comes from its blistering indictment of a police force that helped give birth to a monster, and then tragically failed to destroy him.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn)

Welcome to The Asphalt Jungle, watch it bring men to their knees. In John Huston’s seminal crime flick, a crew of experienced hoods organized by a crafty German mastermind (Sam Jaffe), funded by a duplicitous businessman (Louis Calhern), and led by a bruising goliath (a mesmerizing Sterling Hayden) steals half a million in jewels, only to watch their carefully executed job undone by greed, vice, foolishness, and the harsh, unpredictable hand of fate. Aided by Harold Rosson’s plush black-and-white cinematography and a gravel-throated script by Ben Maddow and Huston, this rousing, foot-to-the-pedal cinematic caper is rich with brisk suspense, pretty dames (including a then-unknown blonde looker named Marilyn Monroe), and unsentimental macho attitude. It may not be the finest noir ever made, but it created the mold by which all other heist films are modeled, and still stands – 44 years later – as a preeminent example of tough-guy cinema.

The Flower of My Secret (1995): B

Leo (Marisa Parides) writes popular romance novels under a pseudonym, but, mired in a loveless marriage to an adulterous military man in Bosnia, she no longer has the desire to write her profitable melodramatic stories. When writer’s block strikes, she gets a job working as a literary critic for a newspaper, and she promptly trashes her novels as sensational and simplistic while her editor – a pudgy romantic named Angel (Juan Echanove) who quotes Casablanca and references The Apartment – writes a counterpoint article championing the florid books. In Pedro Almodóvar’s 1995 The Flower of My Secret, the director dramatizes the contentious relationship between fiction and reality via Leo, who, despite despising the unreality of her work, eventually accepts (after writing a zany Almodóvar-ish novel) that although fiction is inherently false, it nonetheless conveys, at its best, fundamental truths about the human soul. There’s the usual gaggle of Almodóvar zaniness strewn throughout this messy, colorful romp – a maid who wants to be a dancer, Leo’s cranky mother and her “horse face” sister, pills and suicide attempts galore – and the director’s affecting use of teary-eyed close-ups imbues the film with more passion and frivolous humor than was found in the dreadful High Heels or somber Kika. Although Leo hates romance novels, the always-mischievous Almodóvar ironically provides a cheerful ending in which Leo and Angel find happiness in each other’s arms. Yet since this cinematic satirist is as deeply suspicious of sentimentality as he is a hopeless romantic, Almodóvar makes sure that the optimistic conclusion isn’t simply preordained but, rather, hard earned.

The Triplets of Belleville (2003): B+

Surrealist adult animation without all the Disney treacle, The Triplets of Belleville is a unique and playful Parisian fairytale about a club-footed mother’s valiant mission – aided by her trusty dog and the titular trio – to rescue her kidnapped Tour de France-competing bicyclist son from square-bodied mobsters. Written and directed by Sylvain Chomet, the film is a bustling cornucopia of delights, from its opening nostalgic newsreel footage of the triplets – a cabaret group from the ‘50s decked out in matching furs – that comments on the West’s racist exploitation of Africans, to a cinema-loving finale involving bicyclists operating stationary bikes in front of a movie screen. Chomet’s fabulous animation is a swirl of the bulbous and the elongated, and his characters’ sinewy, animalistic physicality – modeled after Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot (a favorite of the triplets) and the distinctive styles of Al Hirschfeld and R. Crumb – gives the film a rubbery vivacity. Chomet’s film features no dialogue, and the director’s mastery of silent-movie storytelling (aided by Benoît Charest and Mathieu Chedid’s bouncy post-war score) is enchanting, even though said charm is slightly marred by the film’s inclusion of gratuitous negative American stereotypes (no shock that the French think we’re fat slobs who love hamburgers). Nonetheless, it’s still last year’s finest animated film not named Finding Nemo.

High Heels (1991): C-

With 1991’s High Heels, Pedro Almodóvar hit a new career low, producing a florid riff on ‘40s and ‘50s women’s pictures that’s not funny, suspenseful, or original. The Byzantine plot – about a caddish man who’s two-timing TV news anchor Rebeca Del Paramo (Victoria Abril) with her pop star mother Becky (Marisa Paredes), as well as a transvestite (and cop!) who impersonates Becky and is both having a child with Rebeca and investigating her for the murder of her first husband (got that?) – is a laundry list of Almodóvar fixations. There’s a lightness to the early scenes that’s bolstered by the director’s typical penchant for bright color schemes and pulsating, extravagant music, and I couldn’t resist laughing during a scene involving the daughter confessing that she killed her hubby on TV while the sign-language newscaster disbelievingly communicates the news to hard-of-hearing viewers. Shortly thereafter, however, the film’s pacing goes limp and Almodóvar resorts to dull stabs at humor such as a random dance sequence with female prison inmates that seems based on John Waters’ equally tepid set piece in Cry-Baby. As the title suggests, the film’s melodramatic females are all dressed stylishly, and there’s the requisite nod to Buñuel’s legendary foot fetish. Yet despite attempting to tackle the intricacies of mother-daughter relationships, religion, identity and sacrifice, it’s tough to care about anything going on in a film as dry, stilted, and lifeless as High Heels.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990): C+

Pedro Almodóvar’s controversial 1990 Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! was originally rated NC-17 before being released unrated, but, ironically, it was one of the director’s least risqué films to date. A black comedy about the (literal and figurative) bonds of love, it’s an off-kilter – and off-putting – mix of humor, sex, and Stockholm Syndrome obsession that never quite gels into something believable or appealing. Nutjob Ricky (Antonio Banderas, sporting a Norman Bates haircut that goes with Ennio Morricone’s Pyscho-esque stalker theme) escapes from a mental ward and kidnaps B-movie actress (and former porn star and smack addict) Marina (Victoria Abril) because he believes – on the basis of an anonymous one-night fling with her years earlier – that she’ll fall in love with him once she gets to know him. Love does blossom, largely via both of them caring for each other (he cooks her breakfast, she nurses his wounds after he’s beaten up stealing drugs for her), and Almodóvar expertly frames shots with doorways and bedposts to visually convey the couple’s constrictive passion. Still, given Marina’s eventual voluntary submission and the sub-plot about her current acting job (she’s filming a horror film – or is it a romance?), Marina and Ricky’s relationship comes across as some sort of tedious role-playing exercise. There are reasonable gripes to be made about Marina’s degradation and the implication that women like to be controlled and mistreated by men because, you know, the abuse comes from a loving place. But since the film is so preposterous, the whole thing really just feels like a long-winded joke without a punch line.

The Hunted (2002): C+

William Friedkin’s The Hunted is lame on so many counts (its underdeveloped hunter-becomes-the-hunted story, its uneven pacing, its shoddy peripheral characters, perhaps the worst single-scene performance by Benicio Del Toro ever, in which he teaches a girl about the sacredness of animals) that it’s hard to believe there’s actually some worthwhile meat on its bruised and bloody carcass. Tommy Lee Jones plays a tracker (and once-special ops trainer) who comes out of retirement to stop a renegade former pupil (Del Toro). Johnny Cash’s august intro narration about Abraham killing his son lays out the story’s biblical underpinnings, and Friedkin’s visceral hand-to-hand combat scenes (shot with gritty beauty by Caleb Deschanel) vigorously express the nastiness of unhinged masculinity. The Hunted’s portrait of the murderous bestiality lurking beneath man’s civilized façade – and the responsibility fathers have for giving birth to such monstrousness – makes the film more than just another entry in the “Tommy Lee Jones chases a criminal” genre. But be prepared to endure pounds of painful preposterousness in return for the film’s pint-sized pleasures.

Thirteen (2003): B-

Big girls, they don’t cry…but they do, according to Catherine Hardwicke’s sensational Thirteen, begin stealing, doing drugs and getting homemade piercings shortly after they become teenagers. A rather basic tale about the perils of going along with the in-crowd and the extremes to which teenagers will act out for attention, the film details former straight-arrow Tracy’s (Evan Rachel Wood) radical rebellion against her hippie mom (Holly Hunter), her well-behaved brother (Jeremy Sisto), and her absentee father (Brady Corbet). Supposedly authentic because it was co-written by its young co-star Nikki Reed (who pulls double duty as horrible whorish influence Evie Zamora), it’s an after-school special made bracingly gritty by fearsome performances by Wood, Zamora and Hunter and a welcome disdain for melodrama. It’s also, however, far from a tell-all expose of out-of-control youth. Clinging too tightly to its rote storyline, and too desperate to shock us into submission by piling on Tracy’s vices, Thirteen tries to scare us into accepting a commonly held fact – that angry and resentful teenagers frequently defy authority by behaving recklessly. On behalf of the world’s former teenagers, let me simply say: Well, duh.

Back in the saddle

As regular readers have probably noticed, I haven't posted any reviews of films I've seen for pleasure (as opposed to for work) in the past month or so. The reason is, I've been too busy dealing with our move to CT, doctor's appointments for the impending baby (December 4), and writing lots of freelance reviews for Rocky Mountain Bullhorn, Slant magazine and filmcritic.com.

It's now time to reverse this trend. Starting today, I'll begin posting short capsule reviews (i.e. no more than 200 words) of films I see in theaters and on DVD. Since this blog should function not only as a compilation of my published work, but also as a log of everything I see, throwing up brief reviews will give you - my faithful (five) readers - a window into my extensive, and frequently strange, viewing habits.

So enjoy. And, as always, feel free to disagree and make fun of me as often as you like.