Lessons of Darkness

Nacho Libre (2006): C+

Less mean-spirited but just as racist and unfunny as Napoleon Dynamite, Jared Hess’ Nacho Libre proves to be a modest step up from the director’s prior cult hit thanks to Jack Black, whose quirky, compassionate humanism gives this culturally insensitive, farcically flat film its empathetic heart. Working from a screenplay co-written with wife Jerusha and School of Rock scribe Mike White, Hess continues his fascination with deriding Hispanics, here the primary target being Esqueleto (Héctor Jiménez), a skeletal Mexican thief who – as the peculiar sidekick to monk-turned-professional wrestler Nacho (Black) – serves as the punchline for visual jokes about his big butter-smeared lips and emaciated frame. It’s a line of blinkered humor also seen in verbal gags in which words such as “puppies” are transformed into “poopies” by actors’ caricatured Mexican accents, as well as Hess’ sub-Wes Anderson symmetrical compositions which, in their studied meticulousness, appear to mock everyone (save for some cute kids) contained within. Laughs are wrung from neither the masked Nacho’s incompetent in-ring attempts to win food money for the orphans he tends, nor from his budding romance with the beautiful but devout (and anti-wrestling) Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguera), with Nacho Libre’s every ridiculous scenario (including one involving Peter Stormare and a magical eagle egg) more amusing in theory than in practice. Still, the director mercifully avoids acting as cruelly to Nacho as he did to Napoleon, in large part because the superb Black refuses to allow his portly character to be merely an object of easy ridicule. His idiosyncratic out-there antics tempered by a measure of sincere altruism and benevolence, Black once again confirms his deft ability to balance ludicrous flailing and flopping with affecting emotional earnestness. In doing so, he proves to be the choice sirloin steak center of Hess’ otherwise crass chips-and-salsa comedy.

White Chicks (2004): C-

You’d think the creepy masks worn by Shawn and Marlon Wayans – which look like Michael Myers with blond hair – would be the worst element of White Chicks. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong, since this undercover brothers comedy complements the awfulness of its protagonists’ Caucasian camouflage with putrid bathroom humor, pitiable romance and brainless racial/social commentary. It’s the last of these that’s most disappointing, since the film’s Soul Man-in-reverse premise – about two dark-skinned FBI agents (the Wayanses) who pose as the light-skinned Wilson heiresses in order to thwart a kidnapping scheme – seems tailor-made for a ribald critique of either black/white, or rich/poor, relations. Instead, however, the only thing the duo learns while encased in pasty female costumes is that women prefer their boyfriends to be sensitive listeners. The sole lesson viewers can take away from White Chicks – besides the fact that director Keenen Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka satiric edge has completely disappeared – is that even suspensions of disbelief have limits, the insurmountable implausibility in this case being that no characters realize that the super-fashionable Wilson sisters have turned up in Hamptons high society with inhuman faces straight out of Rick Baker’s creature shop.

An Inconvenient Truth (2006): B

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is cinematic brussel sprouts – a brand of good-for-you documentary that’s far from alluring but undeniably intellectually nutritious. Largely a filmed version of Gore’s oft-given speech on global warming, Davis Guggenheim’s movie deftly alternates its visual attention between the surprisingly charismatic former V.P. and his easily digested, graphics-heavy PowerPoint presentation, keeping things just lively enough to prevent the proceedings from devolving into a tedious schoolroom lecture. But it’s the facts themselves that really prop up this latest act of big-screen activism, with Gore clearly and compellingly laying out the alarming evidence regarding the Earth’s escalating temperatures and CO2 levels (and the environmental disasters such developments will continue to cause). Despite the credible scientific – and, it should be noted, non-partisan – contentions about planetary climate changes put forth by An Inconvenient Truth, Guggenheim can’t resist trying to use the film as a p.r. defibrillator for Gore’s political career, the regular interludes about its headliner’s personal tragedies (involving his young son’s almost-fatal accident and the lung cancer death of his sister) seemingly aimed less at explicating his motives for wanting to better the world than at reshaping his image for a potential 2008 presidential run. Such distracting machinations, however, can’t obscure the urgency of the problem Guggenheim’s doc distressingly lays out, nor the comprehensiveness and persuasiveness of its lucid arguments.

Regressive Click Shtick

Adam Sandler can't leave the '80s alone, as his latest stinker Click tediously reconfirms. Unfortunately, the weekend's other new releases aren't much better, although unlike the former SNL star's comedy, at least the "urban"-oriented Waist Deep offers some (unintentional) laughs.

Today:
Click (Slant magazine)
Waist Deep (Slant magazine)
The Great New Wonderful (Slant magazine)

September:
American Hardcore (Slant magazine)

For those interested in reading about good movies, take a look below, where my thoughts on the still-in-theaters District B13 as well as Abel Ferrara's last two films can be found. Also keep an eye out for reviews of Al Gore's global warming doc An Inconvenient Truth and Nacho Libre, both of which will hopefully be up in the next few days.

And of course next week, I'll be back with an opinion on Superman Returns, as well as an early look at the summer's other big upcoming pic, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.

District B13 (2006): B+

The purest adrenaline rush of the summer, Pierre Morel’s District B13 (co-written by Luc Besson) is the type of enthusiastically frenzied, go-for-broke action flick that Michael Bay only dreams he could make. Self-consciously shallow with regards to its political subtext (about the haves’ fascistically nasty treatment of the have-nots), Morel’s whirling dervish directorial debut is primarily a breathtaking showcase for “parkour,” a balletic, martial arts-inspired sport (pioneered by star David Belle) in which enormous environmental obstacles are navigated via aggressive pogo-stick leaps. Considering the abundance of kinetic jumping, sliding and hand-to-hand-combat, the story – concerning an undercover super-cop (Cyril Raffaelli) and an ex-con (Belle) barreling through a walled-off, crime-infested section of 2010 Paris to stop a drug kingpin (Bibi Naceri) from detonating a bomb – turns out to be a mere afterthought, which is completely fine considering the sheer awesomeness of the propulsive physical pandemonium on display. In fact, the cartoonishness of both the film’s social commentary as well as its broad, vigorous performances (especially Naceri, who gets one fantastic Scarface-style face plunge into a desktop mound of cocaine) is perfectly in keeping with Morel’s whiplash mise-en-scène, which zips, zooms and zigzags in madcap sync with his exhilaratingly hyper-animated athletic combatants.

‘R Xmas (2002): B+

Analogizing the commercialization of illegal drugs and the December holidays is Abel Ferrara’s nominal aim with ‘R Xmas, but such parallels between upper-class materialism (embodied by two women fighting over the season’s coveted Party Girl doll) and lower-class cocaine dealing ultimately feel less inspired than the film’s authentic depiction of ritual as the substance that binds together couples, families and communities. Thus, while the director spends copious amounts of time depicting the narcotics trade as merely another capitalist avenue for enrichment, his most recent effort thrives when it’s least busy trying to make a big, overt point, its social commentary – beginning and ending with text crawls about NYC mayors David Dinkins and Rudolph Giuliani, who transformed Manhattan from Ferrara’s beloved gutter into a Disney-fied tourist attraction – nowhere near as compelling as laid-back scenes involving Hispanic protagonists “The Husband” (Lillo Brancato Jr.) and “The Wife” (Drea de Matteo) cruising around nighttime city streets in their BMW or preparing coke baggies in the living room while their daughter sleeps. Ferrara’s snapshots of his characters’ everyday routines radiate realism partly due to the script’s bilingual dialogue (the Spanish presented without subtitles) and partly because of the director’s refusal to juice up his film’s casual tempo with gangster-action plot developments (save for the kidnapping of The Husband by Ice-T’s dual-identity Kidnapper). ‘R Xmas’ flesh-and-blood soul, however, comes straight from de Matteo, whose protective mother boasts enough intelligence, attitude and ferocity to ignite even the most mundane of moments.

New Rose Hotel (1998): B

Christopher Walken’s idiosyncratic mannerisms and strangely articulated turns of phrase are in full bloom throughout Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel, though the uneven film’s real center of gravity is Asia Argento, whose sensual presence haunts this William Gibson-based tale of futuristic corporate espionage and romantic delusion. One of the most fully realized female characters in Ferrara’s oeuvre (along with Zoë Lund’s avenging Ms. 45 and Drea de Matteo’s ‘R Xmas mommy), Argento’s prostitute Sandii is the sultry vehicle via which wheeler-dealers Fox (Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe) plan to make millions, the voluptuous hooker functioning as the lure in their plan to steal a Japanese geneticist away from one conglomerate and deliver him to a rival outfit. With the trio’s imbalanced dynamic as electrified as a buzzing neon sign, Ferrara surprisingly – at least in light of his occasionally less-than-flattering portraits of womanhood – bestows Sandii with the preponderance of power, her initial functionary, passive role in Fox’s scheme reversed by her magnetic, sexually empowered domination of the foolhardy X. Ferrara’s editing has a ruminative rhythm that nicely clashes with Walken’s scene-stealing overacting (if not Dafoe’s somewhat lifeless supporting turn). But it’s the prolonged finale that truly defines the inconsistent New Rose Hotel, with X’s devastatingly revealing flashbacks proving to be masterfully constructed and yet eventually rather wearisome.

The Blackout (1997): C

Released theatrically abroad and direct-to-video here in the States, Abel Ferrara’s The Blackout shares some of Dangerous Game’s ideas about art, commerce, and the tangled relationship between filmmaking and real life but never manages to control its turgid chaos. A movie star with a cocaine vacuum for a nose (Matthew Modine’s Matty) is traumatized by the discovery that girlfriend Annie (Béatrice Dalle) has aborted their child, having forgotten (due to drug excesses) that he’d previously ordered her – in the most callous way imaginable – to get rid of the unborn fetus. After visiting an experimental video filmmaker (Dennis Hopper) who’s in the midst of remaking Emile Zola’s Nana as a lesbian smut show, Matty has the titular memory lapse and, a sober year later, tries to relocate the missing Annie whose disappearance has left him a psychological wreck (despite the fact that he’s now shacked up with Claudia Schiffer). Character doubling, disorienting transitions, Modine’s overcooked histrionics, and issues of guilt, sin and salvation all characterize the haphazard film, which progresses with such bumpy, awkward momentum that it feels as if Ferrara didn’t decide upon a narrative structure until he reached the editing room. “I don’t even know the difference between life and acting anymore,” explains Matty for those scant few incapable of picking up on The Blackout’s evident themes, but it’s Ferrara who, with this muddled misfire, proves incapable of making distinctions between his inspired and indulgent impulses.

Controlled Chaos

The past two weeks have been akin to one prolonged, unpleasant rollercoaster ride, but somewhere amidst the madness I've found time to write about a few upcoming releases (though not Nacho Libre or The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, both of which will be reviewed on this blog in the near future). Of the following, Heading South - despite the awful European poster image used for this post - is the one to keep an eye out for when it hits theaters later this summer.

Last Weekend:
Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (Slant magazine)

Tomorrow:
Wordplay (Slant magazine)
Land of the Blind (Slant magazine)

Sometime After This Weekend:
Heading South (Slant magazine)
Once in a Lifetime (Slant magazine)
Who Killed the Electric Car? (Slant magazine)
The Blood of My Brother (Slant magazine)
Jailbait (Slant magazine)

Maniac Cop (1988): B

A tag-team made in B-movie heaven, director William Lustig (Maniac) and writer/director Larry Cohen (It’s Alive, Q: The Winged Serpent) joined forces in 1988 for Maniac Cop, a sturdy slasher flick that laces its splattery slayings with some anti-establishment undertones. Detective Frank McCrae (Tom Atkins) is on the hunt for a killer cop whose modus operandi involves offing anyone that crosses his path, his investigation leading him to believe that the unfaithfully married officer (Bruce Campbell) pinned for the crimes isn't the real culprit. He’s right, of course, as the gargantuan law enforcement villain is none other than resurrected “shoot first and ask questions later” supercop Matt Cordell (Robert Z’Dar), who’s risen from the grave to stick it to the crooked mayor and police commissioner (Richard Roundtree) who gave him a one-way ticket to Sing Sing to live with the very cretins he’d put behind bars. It’s the return of the vengeful repressed, and in Lustig and Cohen’s capable hands, Cordell’s rampage is an instrument for both murderous kicks – the best involving a face being smothered in wet sidewalk cement – and goofy commentary about the selfishness, greediness and corruption of our official powers-that-be. Unfortunately, the pair’s contributions to the film’s pleasures don’t turn out to be quite equal: while Cohen’s script is full of moments both funny (McCrae’s wan attempt at a smile) and sharply political (a man selfishly ignoring a pursued woman’s cries for help), Lustig’s direction is occasionally listless, though never as embarrassing as the awful make-up used for Cordell’s scarified mug.