Lessons of Darkness

More Good Than Bad

It's a rare post that has more positive than negative reviews. But surprisingly enough, most of these films are worth your time and money.

This remake of 1978's Fingers is one of the best films of the still-young year:
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Slant magazine)

A well-done documentary on Enron:
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Slant magazine)

A decent crime pic from the producer of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels:
Layer Cake (Slant magazine)

Two new Errol Flynn DVDs:
Captain Blood - DVD (Slant magazine)
They Died With Their Boots On - DVD (Slant magazine)

And for those looking for some nastiness, my write-ups of a new "urban" comedy catastrophe and an upcoming dramedy disaster:
King's Ransom (Slant magazine)
Happy Endings (Slant magazine)

Finally, I've also got three new reviews posted below - for Fingers, Read My Lips, and Birth.

Birth (2004): D+

Ten years after her husband Sean’s death, Anna (Nicole Kidman) – who still hasn’t fully recovered from the loss – is preparing to remarry when a creepy, expressionless ten-year-old (Cameron Bright) appears on her doorstep claiming to be Sean. Anna is initially skeptical, but after mulling the idea over, she concludes that the kid (whose name is Sean, and who knows intimate details about her life), must be telling the truth, and thus decides to throw away her Manhattan life of wealth and privilege to be with the prepubescent boy. Sound reasonable? Of course not, and in the hands of Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) – who channels Stanely Kubrick in virtually every one of Birth’s measured zooms, close-ups and medium-shots – such nonsensical behavior comes across as infuriatingly idiotic. Anna’s infatuation with Sean is meant to be a touching portrait of enduring love, yet her decision to have the kid sleep over, join her in the bathtub, and sensually kiss her are clear signs of mentally instability. She’s a lunatic who can’t see that Sean is pulling a fast one – a fact made obvious by his childlike conduct (if he were really a reincarnated adult, he would act like a grown-up) and his robotic lack of emotion (wouldn’t her husband seem, you know, happy to see her?) – and thus the film’s meditation on faithfulness, obsession, and desire is frustratingly stillborn. Kidman brings a distraught vulnerability to the wholly unbelievable Anna, but the absurd Birth is a project that should have been aborted.

Read My Lips (2001): A-

Despite an annoyingly dispensable subplot involving a parole officer and his missing wife, Jacques Audiard’s Read My Lips may be the finest thriller/romance hybrid of the new century. Carla (Emmanuelle Devos) is a partially deaf secretary detached – and who (via the removal of her hearing aid) willingly detaches herself from – the cruel social and professional world around her. Her quiet, stifling life, however, is disrupted by Paul (Vincent Cassel), a recently paroled thief she hires as her office assistant and who, in short order, embroils her in – and motivates her to undertake – criminal endeavors. The two form a symbiotic relationship in which Carla gains emotional and sexual liberation from her illegal exploits, and Paul finds a friend and a partner willing to help him rob a nightclub owner. Yet though it has elements of Rear Window – since Carla, who can read lips, is employed to spy on an apartment and decipher its residents’ conversations – Audiard’s character study never truly commits to a particular genre. The director’s beautifully composed close-ups and dreamy, soft-focus interludes (including Carla standing naked, and seemingly disembodied, in front of a mirror, as well as a final iris shot of embracing hands and interlocking mouths) impart a sense of perilous sensuality. But the stunning Read My Lips is ultimately about the unlikely, alluring pairing of the superbly menacing Cassel and (in a performance that nabbed Best Actress honors at that year’s Cannes festival) the wily, unpredictable Devos.

Fingers (1978): A-

James Tobak’s Fingers has an only-in-the-movies premise – a debt collector for his small-time mobster father aspires to be a classical pianist – yet through sheer force of filmmaking will, the director and star Harvey Keitel turn this somewhat ridiculous plot into a penetrating portrait of tortured, impotent masculinity and the foolishness of attempting to be something you’re not. Jimmy (Keitel) is a two-bit thug who roughs up lazy debtors by day and passionately tickles the ivories at night (or does he?), and just like his conflicted protagonist, Tobak’s mise-en-scène – defined by an interplay between light and dark, interiors and exteriors, and the Bach and ‘50s-era Bebop and R&B blasting from Jimmy’s portable radio – is defined by contrast. Jimmy yearns to leave behind crime for art, and thinks he discovers an opportunity to transcend his dingy, immoral life via a piano audition with his professional musician mother’s former manager. Unfortunately, his romantic pursuit of a woman named Carol (Tisa Farrow) ends only in disaster (during a tension-wracked scene in which Jim Brown teaches Jimmy a thing or two about virile machismo), and his piano dreams are, in typical noir fascination, shown to be nothing more than the dangerous illusions of a man who doesn’t know his rightful (lowly) place in life. It may have been forgotten amongst the era’s more notable NYC crime sagas (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver), but Tobak’s underappreciated 1978 neo-noir boasts a gritty splendor, and Keitel’s simmering volatility is a sight to behold – especially in the film’s mesmerizing final shot, which encapsulates all the dashed hopes and misery of its socially and emotionally trapped protagonist.

The Horror!

I'm an advocate of remaking movies that stunk, since they - rather than films that were successful the first time around - are the ones most in need of reworking. Thus, I had high hopes for an updated version of 1979's The Amityville Horror, which I found disappointingly mediocre.

Oh well. I should have known better.

The Amityville Horror (2005) (Slant magazine)

Time of the Wolf (2003): B+

In Time of the Wolf, an unspecified apocalyptic catastrophe has plunged rural France (and, presumably, the rest of the world) into chaos and darkness, though Michael Haneke’s film begins not with exposition about this disaster but, rather, with squatters murdering a family man in his vacation cottage. This shocking crime propels his widow Anna (Isabelle Huppert) and children Eva (Anais Demoustier) and Ben (Lucas Biscombe) into the vast unknown of the empty, fog-shrouded countryside, where the distraught trio vainly attempts to hold onto societal customs (such as during Ben’s funeral for his dead bird) and their sanity. Eventually the three nomads join a train station commune where stragglers wait (with seemingly misguided hope) for a locomotive that’ll bring them back to civilization, and through the various mini-dramas that play out at the crowded refugee camp, Haneke implies that these (and all) people – as a result of their selfishness, brutality and inability to empathetically communicate with each other – are responsible for the current crisis. Time of the Wolf’s second half doesn't quite live up to the film’s ominous, terrifying early moments (including a farmhouse scene lit only by a cigarette lighter and burning hay), and the director/writer’s dialogue (especially with regards to two religious-themed conversations about salvation) can occasionally be clumsy. Yet as an austere vision of society’s tenuousness and man’s potential for self-destruction, Haneke’s film has a feral intensity.

East of Eden (1955): B+

Elia Kazan’s East of Eden introduced the world to James Dean, and the young heartthrob’s magnetic brooding – his body, and emotions, veering to and fro like an off-kilter see-saw – is the most arresting facet of this Bible-infused drama (based on John Steinbeck’s novel) about two sons’ strained relationship with their religious lettuce farmer father. Juxtaposed with his upstanding, responsible brother Aron (Richard Davalos, also in his screen debut), Cal (Dean) is the Trask family’s bad seed, a fact his moralizing father Adam (Raymond Massey) never allows him to forget. Desperate for dad’s love but resentful of the old man’s disapproval, Cal acts alternately rebellious and repentant, yet things come to a head when – after discovering that his similarly wicked mother Kate (Jo Van Fleet) is alive and living in another part of town – he attempts to buy his father’s love, only to receive more acidic paternal condemnation. A variation on the Old Testament’s Cain and Abel saga, Kazan’s film achieves an unpredictable urgency via the director’s naturalistic aesthetic, which combines tranquil pacing and an affection for his sunny Salinas Valley, California setting with unaffected dialogue (save for a couple of unnecessarily long-winded moments). But more than anything, this landmark 1955 classic is a showcase for Dean’s searing, gargantuan, force-of-nature performance.

Code 46 (2003): C+

A sci-fi mood piece about memory, passion, and pseudo-Oedipal longing, Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 – akin to THX 1138-via-Gattaca – is long on atmosphere but short on substance. In the near-future, national and racial differences have melted away in a sea of multicultural sterility, civilization has been divided into desirable urban areas and the barren “outside,” and the government closely regulates sexual intercourse so as to prevent violations of Code 46, a law forbidding people with similar genetic make-ups to procreate. In this Big Brother environment, a married detective named William (Tim Robbins) – bestowed with psychic abilities thanks to an “empathy virus” (the film’s symbolic means of equating emotion and illness) – is sent to Shanghai to investigate the theft of coveted temporary passports called “papelles.” William quickly deduces that the culprit is Maria Gonzales (Samantha Morton), a doe-eyed woman who he immediately falls in love with and allows to go free, but their ensuing one-night stand becomes complicated by a shared DNA history. Winterbottom’s film is a luxurious sight to behold, a sleek, electric vision of glittering metropolis skylines and expansive desert vistas, and the ennui-infected ambiance of these locales is infused with a touching melancholy by the Free Association’s score. Unfortunately, while Code 46 elegantly conveys the comforts of ignorance and the pain of memory, its central romance – doomed, in part, by Robbins and Morton’s lack of chemistry – rarely generates a spark. “Tell me something about yourself,” is what William requests before reading people’s minds. Yet the ultimate problem with this allegory of encroaching government control – peppered with hot-topic buzzwords about corporations, checkpoints, and terrorism – is that it never says anything enlightening about our current heightened-security society.

Vera Drake (2004): B+

Mike Leigh’s films habitually focus on the misery of downtrodden Brits struggling to cope with unfavorable socio-economic situations, and the director’s latest dreary drama, Vera Drake, may be his finest work in years. Vera (Imelda Staunton) is a cheery “domestic” who cleans wealthy homes for a living and, on the side and for no pay, performs abortions for young women-in-need. An altruistic mother, wife and friend, her kindness extends to everyone she meets – including lonely Reg (Eddie Marsan), who she invites into her home and, eventually, her family after he gets engaged to Vera’s frumpy daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly) – and thus when her secret profession is revealed, a familial crisis ensues. Leigh’s narrative, split into two equal halves, can be overly schematic, and his patient pacing can sometimes be frustratingly lethargic, yet the director brilliantly evokes the complexity of the abortion issue without passing judgment or resorting to didacticism. Vera’s benevolence is offset by the danger her deeds pose for her clients and the price her family must pay for her behavior, and Vera Drake makes clear that what’s at stake isn’t simply the fate of one kindhearted woman but, rather, society’s ability to delineate between crimes of hate and acts of compassion. Leigh brings his upsetting narrative to authentic life thanks in large part to his cast’s naturalism, but it is ultimately Staunton’s indelible performance as Vera – especially during a prolonged, heartbreaking close-up when she realizes why the cops have interrupted her daughter’s engagement party – that puts a tender human face on this explosive subject.

Slacker (1991): C-

Richard Linklater may have made a splash with his 1991 debut Slacker, but fourteen years later, it remains an exercise in meandering self-importance. A series of barely-connected vignettes in which Austin, Texas 20-somethings discuss alternate realities, then-prez George Bush, JFK’s assassination, and the symbolic nature of the Smurfs, Linklater’s film captures the nonchalant lack of purpose that supposedly characterized college-age “Gen X” hipsters. The problem is that his characters – if narcissistic, one-dimensional talking heads can be labeled as such – are uniformly grating, and their supposedly quirky conversations about Scooby-Doo and Madonna’s pap smear create an atmosphere of unbearable pretentiousness. Unlike his animated 2001 mind-bender Waking Life, Slacker has neither any overriding thematic preoccupations nor a cohesive narrative thread tying its random scenes together, and the film’s cinematographic blandness merely augments its monotony. As a result, this early indie hit becomes a test of one’s tolerance for not-very-colorful individuals blathering on about whatever random nonsense pops into their heads. If I wanted to listen to coffeehouse-type intellectuals shallowly pontificating on uninteresting socio-political subjects, however, I’d just head to the nearest Starbucks.