Lessons of Darkness

Head-On (2005): B

Sitcom farce, sexual violence and cross-cultural clashes all collide in Fatih Akin’s Head-On, an unconventional romance that’s ultimately more provocative than insightful. After deliberately running his car into a wall (to the sounds of Depeche Mode’s “I Feel You”), German Turk – and Bukowski-style bum – Cahit (Birol Ünel) finds himself in a psychiatric clinic, where he meets a suicidal woman named Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) who so desperately wants to escape her conservative Turkish family that she convinces Cahit to marry her. A union of convenience that eventually develops into something more meaningful, Cahit and Sibel’s relationship has a fiery self-destructiveness that climaxes during a bedroom rendezvous in which sexual consummation poses a dire threat to the mismatched couple’s platonic detachment. Throughout, Akin deftly manages his story’s severe fluctuations between humor and hostility, giving his film a gritty gravity that’s only slightly sullied by a few too many pop cultural signifiers (such as the Siouxsie and the Banshees poster that’s constantly in view). More problematical, however, is that although Cahit and Sibel’s predicament is meant to comment upon German-Turkish tensions, the film finds itself so preoccupied with wrist-slashing, voracious screwing, and musical interludes (featuring a folk band on a river bank) that, unlike the similar, far superior Late Marriage, it eventually winds up only superficially examining its narrative conflicts between love and sex, modernity and tradition.

Grinding It Out

It was one of those weeks - lots of movies watched, lost of reviews written, and almost nothing worth recommending. But if I've done my job, at least my negative reviews will provide you, loyal reader, with some Friday entertainment.

In Theaters:
Lucky Number Slevin (Slant magazine)
The Benchwarmers (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:
Herbie Hancock: Possibilities (Slant magazine)
Sir! No Sir! (Slant magazine)
Nathalie... (Slant magazine)

For some seriously unabashed enthusiasm, check out my site review of Neil Young: Heart of Gold (below). And for more negativity, scroll down a bit further to read my skewering of V for Vendetta.

Neil Young: Heart of Gold (2006): A

An elegant companion piece to Jim Jarmusch’s scraggly Year of the Horse, Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young: Heart of Gold documents the rocker’s August 2005 performance at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium during his tour for last year’s Prairie Wind (an album written while he awaited surgery to remedy a brain aneurysm). Split somewhat evenly between new tracks (during its first half) and classics (during its latter portion), Young’s show features a preponderance of songs that deal with mortality, a theme that resonates even more forcefully thanks to Demme’s breathtaking combination of tight close-ups (which, during tunes such as “God Made Me” and “It’s a Dream,” convey a sense of weighty isolation) and panoramic wide shots of the crowded stage (which express a counterbalancing optimism and sense of community). Unlike Dave Chappelle’s Block Party or Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!, Heart of Gold refuses to slice-and-dice Young’s country-tinged numbers with interview clips or aggressively gimmicky edits, the director’s beautifully composed mise-en-scène – aided by Ellen Kuras’ golden cinematography and Andy Keir’s supple editing – expertly, expressively attuned to both the melancholic wistfulness and sly mirth of tracks like “Old King.” What shines through Young’s sterling set is the intrinsically autobiographical nature of his work, with something like “Old Man” – which the artist admits was penned, while he was a still-spry 24, about his elderly ranch foreman – now reverberating with the wisdom gained from a different, more seasoned perspective on life. Old and new, dark and light, sorrow and joy – all are inextricably united in Demme’s wonderful Heart of Gold, which vividly captures Young’s greatness by simply letting him do his thing. It may be the finest concert film I’ve ever seen.

V for Vendetta (2006): D

Alan Moore made quite a stink earlier this year by publicly disassociating himself from the cinematic adaptation of his 1982 graphic novel V for Vendetta, which he assumed – after unpleasant experiences with From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – would be bastardized in its translation to the screen. It turns out, however, that the acclaimed author had nothing to fear: Christopher McTeigue’s film is wholly faithful to its anti-Thatcherite source material’s juvenility. Written by those masters of pretentious verbosity, The Wachowski Brothers, McTeigue’s would-be blockbuster is an unbearably talkative affair with virtually nothing sane to say – unless, of course, you think that a thinly veiled allegory which posits America/Britain as a fascist, genocidal Christian dictatorship, the Koran as a symbol of beauty and enlightenment, and terrorists who like to blow up national monuments as intellectual, freedom-loving heroes is in any way, shape or form rational. Worse than its inane political pontifications – or the fact that McTeigue and the Wachowskis seem to believe the claptrap they’re peddling – is that V for Vendetta isn’t even an energetic dystopian nightmare, its two-plus hours little more than a turgid morass of conspiracy theory exposition, concentration camp imagery, and anti-clergy (they’re all pedophiles!) and anti-media (it’s a tool of tyranny!) blather that somehow manages to celebrate the replacement of conformity with more conformity. Oh yes, and it’s also another May-December celluloid romance (after The Professional, Beautiful Girls and Closer) between Natalie Portman (as blossoming radical Evey) and an older, withdrawn gentleman (here Hugo Weaving’s ludicrous V, a Batman-Joker hybrid who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and advocates terror as the solution to terror). One could spend hours dissecting the myriad ways in which this piece of pseudo-insurgent pop art fails – how its visual compositions are lackluster, its pacing is slack, its verbiage is embarrassingly silly, its obligatory bullet-time action sequences are both lame and out-of-place, and its revolutionary worldview is tailor-made for tenth-graders who wear Che Guevara t-shirts – but that would imply that the film is worthy of such close scrutiny. Call it V for Vapid.

Ms. 45 (1981): A-

Contradictions abound in Ms. 45, the most prominent of which is director Abel Ferrara’s ambiguous stance toward his pistol-packing female avenger. A mute seamstress working in NYC’s garment district, Thana (the incomparable Zoë Lund), after being raped twice in one afternoon, goes on a murderous rampage against the city’s entire male population. That the first, masked attacker is played by Ferrara himself speaks to the director’s own complicated role in Thana’s transformation into an angel of death – does his presence indicate his vindictive feelings toward his anti-heroine? Or does it reveal his guilt over contributing, as a heterosexual man, to her feminine fury? And further confusing Ferrara’s ostensibly empowering “woman scorned” story is that Thana’s killings are frequently unwarranted (especially with a sidewalk catcaller and the climactic scene’s disguised partygoers), thereby exposing her to be less interested in justified vengeance than sadistic carnage. His taut mise-en-scène light years beyond that of The Driller Killer, Ferrara casts his Manhattan locale as a grungy coliseum in which aggressive chauvinists and bitchy broads engage in full-scale gender warfare (scored to the punctuating blares of nerve-jangling horns). Given the filmmaker’s intense Catholicism, it’s no surprise that Thana eventually finds herself going bloody bonkers in a nun’s costume. But it’s the myriad compositions layered with undercurrents of divisive male-female relations – such as the close-up sight of Thana’s icy cold countenance set against a men’s room door – that eventually give Ms. 45 its sexy, squalid dynamism.

The Driller Killer (1979): B-

Abel Ferrara may have gone on to make some great movies, but The Driller Killer – his “respectable” first feature following a few shorts and the skin flick Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy – only sporadically exhibits the skill and wit of his scintillatingly skuzzy subsequent efforts. Using Repulsion as its template, Ferrara’s rote slasher flick focuses on Reno Miller (Ferrara), a painter who loses his mind while working on a large-scale buffalo canvas, dealing with his two female roommates/lovers, putting up with his rock band neighbors, and struggling to pay his mounting bills. Though Reno’s descent into murderous madness is visualized through some semi-freaky dream sequences, the eventual abundance of religious and psychosexual signifiers never coalesce into something cohesive and, as a result, mainly function as little more than a handy compendium of the director’s future thematic preoccupations. The film’s most transfixing facet is its setting, a simultaneously enticing/repugnant late ‘70s Manhattan (all graffiti-decorated walls, filthy streets and bum-lined sidewalks) on which the director lavishes the majority of his attention and affection. Yet aside from its nasty NYC – as well as its somewhat charmingly low-fi aesthetic (think punk rock cinema vérité with a dash of arty affectation), and a few choice bon mots delivered by the magnetically maniacal Ferrara – The Driller Killer is mostly just a momentum-challenged, partially successful attempt to piggyback on the success of the era’s gory exploitation films.