Lessons of Darkness

A Big Red Classic

Samuel Fuller's last great achievement - 1980's WWII epic The Big Red One - is a humorous, gut-wrenching and poignant (though never sentimental) portrait of soldiers on the front lines. Recently restored with 40 minutes of never-before-seen footage, the newly-expanded film makes its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival later this week. I provide the advance low-down on this unsung masterpiece over at Slant magazine.

The Big Red One (Slant magazine)

New Season, New Criticism

It's officially Fall (or Autumn, if you like), and I've got three new reviews to kick off this, the best season of the year. Two are for moronic mainstream misfires, one is for a jazzy documentary appearing at this year's New York Film Festival. All currently appear in Slant magazine.

The Forgotten (Slant magazine)
Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue (Slant magazine)
Shark Tale (Slant magazine)

Plus, I forgot to post two reviews from the Rocky Mountain Bullhorn last week - for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Wimbledon. They can now both be found below.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn)

As modern filmmakers continually prove, computer-generated images (CGI) can be a double-edged keystroke. On the positive side, technological advances in cinematic special effects grant directors the freedom of limitless imagination, allowing inventive artists to create the impossible and ingenious at the click of a button. The flipside, however, is that the boundless potential and gee-whiz coolness of big-budget effects-work frequently detracts from (if not wholly obliterates) the presence of an engaging dramatic foundation comprised of richly drawn characters and spellbinding storytelling. CGI spectaculars offer plenty of bang but – as the summer movie season annually illustrates – often far too little brains for your moviegoing buck.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Kerry Conran’s stylistically unique blend of the authentic and artificial, is the epitome of CGI’s best and worst attributes. Utilizing expressionistic art deco environments which were painstakingly created entirely by digital artists, Conran’s adventure is a visually electric homage to Fritz Lang, H.G. Wells, Max Fleischer’s Superman cartoons, and pulp serials and comics from the ‘30s and ‘40s. Swathed in midnight blacks and silvery whites, the film tracks plucky reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) and her former fighter pilot sweetheart Joe “Sky Captain” Sullivan (Jude Law) in 1930s Manhattan as they investigate an invasion of giant robots and bird-like warplanes linked to a Doomsday plot orchestrated by the enigmatic Dr. Totenkopf (Laurence Olivier, resurrected via clever use of archival footage). As Sky Captain and Polly navigate a hyper-real Radio City Music Hall, the snow-bound utopia of Shangri-La, and a Dr. Moreau-style island of prehistoric wonders, the film – bolstered by Edward Shearmur’s rousing Indiana Jones-ish score – supplies a continuous string of dazzling action sequences. On a purely aesthetic level, Conran’s gorgeous debut is nothing short of remarkable.

If only such scrupulous attention to detail had been bestowed upon the film’s human element. Law and Paltrow’s bickering heroes strive to generate a Cary Grant-Rosalind Russell romantic contentiousness, but Sky Captain’s archetypal characters (which also includes Angelina Jolie’s eye-patched British air force commander and Giovanni Ribisi’s good-natured techie sidekick) never develop more than a single monotonous character trait. While this simplicity – also apparent in the script’s corny stilted dialogue – is a deliberate attempt to replicate the anachronistic hokeyness of its influences, the end result is that the swashbuckling narrative becomes inconsequential except as a means of propelling the derring-do Polly and Sky Captain from one astonishing locale to another. Law and Paltrow’s argumentative chemistry eventually gets off the ground during the finale, and there’s an amusing recurring joke about Polly’s inability to record her amazing exploits due to a shortage of camera film. However, with a dearth of compelling drama to complement its “wow factor,” Sky Captain’s feast for the eyes ultimately leaves one feeling famished.

Wimbledon (2004)

(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn)

At his last Wimbledon hurrah before retiring for a cushy job as a club tennis pro (where randy old ladies eagerly await his instruction), underachieving has-been Peter Colt (Paul Bettany) discovers his killer instinct after falling in love with feisty American player Lizzie Bradbury (Kirsten Dunst). In Wimbledon, all-night sexual volleys make Bettany’s wishy-washy Peter regain his confidence and become an on-the-court tiger, while Dunst’s female McEnroe is so flummoxed by her attraction to Peter that her first serve goes mushy. I’m not sure love generates ferocious determination, rather than lack of focus, in sports stars (just ask Tiger Woods), but perhaps director Richard Loncraine knows something I don’t about the relationship between athletics and amour.

What he clearly does not know, however, is how to bring novelty to the decomposing romantic Brit-comedy genre. Adam Brooks, Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin’s script lobs nothing but clichés throughout this five-set bore, so slavishly conforming to audience expectations that, from its opening moments, one can calculate the precise instant Lizzie’s overprotective father (Sam Neill) will decree that she stop dilly-dallying with her new hunk until she’s triumphed on center court. Will Peter stop choking and win both Wimbledon and Lizzie’s heart? Point, Set, Match, Predictable Fairy Tale Ending. Yet despite its routine game – tiresome wacky sideline characters; jokes about parents having sex; a ball boy who, ugh, believes in the underdog Peter – Wimbledon’s ace is the chemistry shared by its blonde leads and, in particular, Bettany, whose raffish, self-deprecating magnetism proves he’s primed for the Hollywood pro tour.

Two for Now, One for Later

Here are two new reviews of films coming out this weekend - Walter Salles' respectable The Motorcycle Diaries and John Waters' hilariously vulgar A Dirty Shame - and one for David Gordon Green's Undertow, which comes out in late October but will first be screened at this year's New York Film Festival.

The Motorcycle Diaries (filmcritic.com)
A Dirty Shame (filmcritic.com)
Undertow (Slant magazine)

I'll have more from the NYFF, as well as the usual batch of new release reviews, in the coming weeks. You won't want to miss it!

Zombies, Quantum Physics, Cell Phones, and More Zombies

Four new published reviews for this sunny September morning:

Shaun of the Dead (filmcritic.com)
What the Bleep Do We Know? (Slant magazine)
Cellular (Slant magazine)
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (Slant magazine)

And to top things off, I've got new reviews of John Waters' Cecil B. Demented and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers posted below.

The Dreamers (2003): B-

Though many focused on its racy, NC-17-rated sexual explicitness, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers is surprisingly lacking in pulse-pounding passion. Admittedly, there’s a modicum of sensuality in the relationship shared by Matthew (Matthew Pitt), a student studying abroad (and perhaps fleeing his overbearing father?) in 1968 Paris, and Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel), twin siblings who take Matthew into their home and include him in their carnal pastimes. But their youthful shenanigans, though striving for Last Tango in Paris intensity, never fully ignite. Matthew and his two adventurous new friends share a common love of the cinema, and Bertolucci links their infatuation with the budding New Wave (and the American genre films that inspired it) to their growing political activism – Isabelle and Theo, the children of a famous poet, worship Mao and support the ongoing ’68 Paris student riots – and their emotional and sexual awakenings. The film’s numerous cinematic allusions can grow a bit wearisome – the central trio are modeled on Jules and Jim’s love triangle, and the director regularly employs match cuts to show us which films he’s referencing – and the erotic games the trio enjoy in their claustrophobic apartment (not to mention the pseudo-incestuous longings shared by the stunning Isabelle and conniving Theo) are thematic devices rather than believable presentations of counterculture rebellion. Yet if Bertolucci can’t generate the heat his film’s hype promises, he does provide the venue for Pitt’s marvelous coming-out performance, a mixture of eager experimentation, wide-eyed excitement, and sensitive maturity that grounds the frequently implausible The Dreamers firmly in reality.

Cecil B. Demented (2000): B

“Demented forever!” is the rallying cry of Cecil B. Demented’s renegade cinematic terrorists, and while director John Waters’ latest film doesn’t totally make up for the disappointingly stale Pecker, it does prove that the director hasn’t completely forsaken his own deranged moviemaking urges. Cecil B. Demented (a hilariously over-the-top Stephen Dorff) is an independent filmmaker who, along with his militant gang of oddball cohorts – including Maggie Gyllenhaal, Adrian Grenier and Alicia Witt, all tattooed with the name of an iconic indie or old Hollywood filmmaker – is determined to crush modern cinema with a potent combo of firebombs and a fiery low-budget film starring kidnapped starlet Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith). Waters’ equal-opportunity critique slams modern Hollywood for its mawkish simplicity and unchallenging idiocy while simultaneously lampooning the fanatical lunacy of those who blindly champion independent film. The campy narrative is modeled on the Patty Hearst saga (as in many of his films, Hearst herself cameos), and though the filmmaking itself is somewhat flat and bland – despite the colorful set design and punk-metal soundtrack, there’s a genericness to the film’s mise-en-scène – Waters’ incisive deconstruction of hideous Hollywood blockbusters and egomaniacal, illogical fringe cinema fans is more than enough to sustain this mildly scabrous comedy.

Pecker (1998): D+

Shockingly obvious filmmaking from a usually eccentric and unpredictable iconoclast, Pecker is arguably director John Waters’ worst film. A transparent, laugh-free parable about Waters’ own rise to fame, the film charts the unlikely superstardom of Edward Furlong’s titular schlub, an aspiring Baltimore photographer whose life becomes front-page news after his photos of his family, friends, and the city’s weirdoes and degenerates are made famous by New York art snobs. Pecker’s loving portraits of the city’s misfit population are usurped by big-city intellectuals who condescendingly embrace his snapshots and declare him a genius, and Waters means to critique those who have patronizingly embraced his own freak-filled films for the wrong reasons. Yet this comedy’s attempts at gross-out zaniness and bourgeoisie-bashing barbs (a shot of two rats humping; male strippers tea-bagging eager club customers; jokes about the Virgin Mary; Pecker’s wink-wink name) are mostly tame and desperate; the cast – including Christina Ricci, Lilli Taylor and cameos from Mink Stole and Patty Hearst – is generally awful (especially Furlong, who belts out his lines like an overeager five-year-old); and the lifeless plot’s pervasive irony and camp is more exhausting than energizing. Pecker’s art-world reprimand feels like a tepid scolding rather than an inspired rant, and amidst all the second-rate gags and go-nowhere scenes, it was depressing to discover not a single flash of Waters’ classic, uninhibited mischievousness.

The Girl Next Door (2004): C-

The Girl Next Door is essentially Risky Business for the 21st century, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. The story of a dorky high school class president (Emile Hirsch’s Matthew) who finds love, happiness and self-confidence by dating the porn star (Elisha Cuthbert’s Danielle) who’s housesitting next door, it’s a mixed-up fantasy in which pornography is incongruously presented as the mainstream and as a degrading outsider profession from which one yearns to escape. Danielle is an adult film starlet who falls in love with Matthew because – as a nerd with a severe lack of sexual experience – he’s a safe, white-bread do-gooder who sees the compassionate person underneath her raunchy, sex-biz exterior. Director Luke Greenfield unimaginatively tries to have it both ways by having the audience revel in the thought of wooing a porn star while simultaneously assuming that any sensible woman working in porn would desperately want to settle down in suburbia with a bland boy-toy (countless real-world examples to the contrary). Meanwhile, the film fails to even acknowledge the fact that a straight-laced, Georgetown-bound geek might think hard (pun intended) about the health risks – not to mention potential moral implications – of sleeping with someone who’d spent years having nasty, kinky sex on camera. Timothy Olyphant (this film’s version of Joe Pantoliano’s Guido) is amusingly sinister as Danielle’s skeevy manager/film producer Kelly, but once it hits the mid-point and preposterous narrative devices begin piling on top of one another, The Girl Next Door goes flaccid.