Lessons of Darkness

Close, But No Vice

Because of a schedule conflict, I wasn't able to catch Michael Mann's big-screen update of Miami Vice this week. Nonetheless, I've seen quite a few of this weekend's other new releases, including the following three: the barely-better-than-expected Little Miss Sunshine; the so-so The Ant Bully; and the quirky, engaging I Like Killing Flies.

Little Miss Sunshine (Slant magazine)
The Ant Bully (Slant magazine)
I Like Killing Flies (Slant magazine)

And as promised, reviews of A Scanner Darkly, Scoop and Lady in the Water can be found below.

Lady in the Water (2006): D

A petulant assertion of its creator’s messianic greatness, M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water may not be quite as awful as 2004’s The Village, but this mind-bogglingly convoluted batch of children’s fable gobbledygook certainly qualifies as stunning narcissistic self-exposure from a filmmaker blind to his own escalating failings as a storyteller. In place of the trademark concluding twists that have defined his progressively unrewarding output, Shyamalan here replaces such gimmickry with sheer, unadulterated egomania. It’s a quantity in abundant supply, oozing from not only the director’s decision to cast himself as a writer whose prose has the potential to change the world (and who’s doomed to die a martyr for his ahead-of-their-time ideas), but also from his arrogant belief that carelessly tying together an un-fantastical fantasy narrative with elaborate rules and nonsensical terms like narf, scrunt and Heep – Oh My! – would somehow be enough to generate any genuine spiritual/humanist magic. To put it bluntly: It’s not.

The film’s tale is a tortuously involved affair involving a “narf” (i.e. a supernatural, fortune-telling sea nymph) named Story (a blankly translucent Bryce Dallas Howard) who shows up in the swimming pool of a Pennsylvania apartment complex called The Cove run by Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), a withdrawn stutterer who harbors a tragic secret. The narf – who is being hunted by ferocious grass-haired “scrunts” that are disobeying the laws set forth by the tree-dwelling “tartutics” (don’t ask) – has arrived to share a glance with Shyamalan’s Vick Ran and, in doing so, unclog his writer’s block so that he might pen his important pontifications, though a secondary objective involves inspiring the building’s alienated inhabitants to realize that every life has value, that strength comes from collective togetherness, and that there are cosmic forces greater than ourselves. It’s a parable full of hogwash, albeit hogwash that Shyamalan has sincere faith in, a fact made clear by the earnestness of his script, the lovingly gentle cinematography of Christopher Doyle (which largely eschews the director’s typical long tracking shots), and the care with which he treats Giamatti’s superbly sympathetic performance as the desperate-to-believe Heep.

Yet the gallons of laughable nonsense peddled by Lady in the Water is impossibly tough to swallow without gagging, beginning with its fundamentally suspense-free plot construction (in which Heep runs from apartment to apartment like an everyman Robert Langdon trying to crack the muddled myth’s code) and character development shortcuts (such as Cove residents buying the entire narf legend hook, line and sinker while barely batting an eye), to more exasperating missteps like giving his human protagonist an unremarked-upon ability to indefinitely hold his breath underwater, employing hoary Gremlins-style Asian stereotypes, and, finally, inflicting violent punishment against snobbish – and, more importantly, wrongheaded – film critic Mr. Farber (Bob Balaban), the last of which comes off as the unbecoming byproduct of the director’s insecurities. Shyamalan valiantly struggles to infuse his soggy saga’s final note of communal altruism with some transcendent enchantment. But with the director’s own self-importance hopelessly drowning out his characters’ noble selflessness, Lady in the Water becomes a case study of an increasingly defensive filmmaker falling off the auteurist deep end.

Scoop (2006): C

So long as his films were reasonably sharp, Woody Allen’s clockwork efficiency in churning out a movie a year represented an admirable (and largely bygone) dedication to workmanship and the value of inventive minds remaining constantly inventive. As the director’s output has grown progressively lousier, however, such a tight schedule has seemed like a creative hindrance rather than a help, an impression further fostered by Scoop, a comedy even more inert than last year’s excessively heralded Allen drama Match Point. While vacationing in London, American journalism student Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson) stumbles upon the story of a lifetime when recently departed ace reporter Joe Strombel (Deadwood’s Ian McShane), having temporarily escaped the Grim Reaper’s clutches, returns from the grave to relay a scoop that identifies a wealthy politico’s son (Hugh Jackman) as the famed Tarot Card serial killer. Enlisting the help of two-bit nebbish magician Sid Waterman (Allen), Sondra investigates – and then falls in love with – her dashing suspect, all while enduring enough stammering Woody-isms to fill the English Channel. The director’s trademark neurotic routine long ago lust its luster, but it’s not just Allen’s familiar performance that renders Scoop so flaccid: also blame that unfortunate condition on a miscast Johansson’s flat, awkward comedic line readings, Allen’s typical compositional blahness, and go-nowhere scenes that appear to have been slapped together without any consideration for jovial, snappy rhythm.

A Scanner Darkly (2006): B

Philip K. Dick’s 1977 cautionary tale of deleterious drugs and insidious government/corporate power gets a rotoscoping makeover in Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, which employs the filmmaker’s Waking Life visual schema – in which live-action actors and sets are covered by hallucinatory computer-drawn animation – as a means of amplifying its portrait of fluctuating, unstable identity. In a not-too-distant future marked by omnipresent surveillance, a cop named Fred (Keanu Reeves) goes undercover as a dope user named Bob Arctor to gain intel on a narcotics ring peddling the highly addictive, wildly disorienting, brain-damaging Substance D. When in the field, Fred wears civilian clothes, while at work he’s forced to wear a computerized costume (called a “scramble suit”) that displays a blurry series of human façades. It’s an imagistic disparity between clarity and opacity that parallels Fred’s mounting inability – once the drugs take hold, confusion sets in, and a grasp on reality disappears during conversations with friends Barris (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Luckman (Woody Harrelson), as well as romantic moments with coke fiend Donna (Winona Ryder) – to discern whether he’s Fred, Bob, or both at the same time. Reeves’ spaced-out demeanor is well suited to Fred/Bob’s bewilderment, and Downey Jr.’s fidgety, motor-mouthed performance (so compelling one can’t help but think of the actor’s notorious drug exploits) brings manic energy to the frequently static proceedings. Although the script’s reams of dialogue reflect Linklater’s fascination with the spoken word’s ability to both unite and alienate people, A Scanner Darkly is often dramatically sluggish, its conversational overload – while engaging on a moment-to-moment basis – proving to be a drag on its momentum. Such talkativeness would be significantly more wearisome, however, were it not for the director’s ability to tap into his source material’s atmosphere of unsettling paranoia, which gradually creeps into the film’s electrified fabric as it draws closer to its hauntingly unromantic finale and Dick-penned coda for the friends lost to drugs in ‘70s southern California.

Better Late Than Never

With studios screening this weekend's films only days (and, in one case, hours) before their box office openings, I was too busy writing up last-second reviews to get this post up on Friday morning. Nonetheless, here are my thoughts on most of the weekend's new offerings, none of which (save for Monster House) I'd actually recommend paying money to see.

This Weekend:
Clerks II (Slant magazine)
Monster House (Slant magazine)
My Super Ex-Girlfriend (Slant magazine)
Azumi (Slant magazine)

Sometime After This Weekend:
The Puffy Chair (Slant magazine)

Coming soon: Reviews of A Scanner Darkly, Lady in the Water, Little Miss Sunshine, The Ant Bully, and Woody Allen's Scoop.

The Descent (2006): C+

As a bloody nightmare populated only by women and set in a deep, dark, narrow passageway-lined cave, The Descent certainly doesn’t lack for allegorical interpretations. Unfortunately, Neil Marshall’s tale of underground adventuring-gone-awry isn’t sturdy enough to support even superficial readings as a gory tract about feminism, lesbianism, or post-traumatic catharsis, with any analytic promise weakened by its characters’ featurelessness and then wholly diluted by a third act that’s light on stirring symbolism and heavy on ponderous guy-related tension between Shauna Macdonald’s grieving Sarah (who lost her hubby and daughter in a car accident one year earlier) and Natalie Mendoza’s She-Ra warrior Juno. Marshall sabotages a good deal of surprise and suspense by delivering, on two separate occasions, telling shots (one of Juno, one of a cave guidebook) that foreshadow future doom, though the Dog Soldiers director almost compensates for such ham-fistedness with a handful of expertly choreographed ‘jolt’ scares (including one filmed, Blair Witch-style, through a DV camcorder) once all subterranean hell breaks loose and his nondescript female protagonists are beset by the cavern’s carnivorous mutants. With a vengeance-driven finale that’s alternately shocking, ugly, and preposterous, The Descent gets stuck in a hole it can’t extricate itself from, yet this final misstep is ultimately no more troublesome than the overriding ordinariness of Marshall’s polished but ho-hum B-movie – essentially a more grave, and less unintentionally hilarious, version of The Cave.

Little Man, Big Trouble

There's no nice way to put this: today's new releases basically stink. Still, at least the Wayans Brothers' Little Man elicits a few chuckles, something that can't be said about You, Me and Dupree.

Today:
Little Man (Slant magazine)
You, Me and Dupree (Slant magazine)
The Groomsmen (Slant magazine)

Check back next week for a giant batch of new stuff, including reviews of Clerks II, Monster House, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, another Ed Burns flick, and a Robin Williams thriller that, alas, fails to thrill...

The Brothers Quay Collection: Ten Astonishing Short Films (1984-1993): A-

The stop-motion animation of the Quay Brothers – twins Stephen and Timothy, who were born in Pennsylvania but have long resided in London – operates on a nearly subconscious level, their abstract, surrealist imagery hopelessly confounding literal interpretations. Their uniquely fanciful shorts certainly live up to the glowing adjective used in the title of Kino’s The Brothers Quay Collection: Ten Astonishing Shorts, an invaluable compilation that culls together their classic output from the ‘80s and ‘90s. Concocted with coiled twine, slithering wire, rusty screws and nails, cracked doll faces, stringy hair, grimy nails, red meat, and haunting human actors, the Quay Brothers’ films are fueled by what might be dubbed “organic magic,” as almost all are defined by the stimulation of vigorous life in otherwise inanimate human debris. As evidenced by 1984’s “The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer,” the Brothers’ early films boast a distinctly European sensibility influenced by Czech animation master Jan Svankmajer, though it’s with their later shorts – such as the mesmerizing masterpiece “Street of Crocodiles” (a mythical portrait of madness and identity that also pays homage to turn-of-the-century cinematic techniques) and their two music videos for His Name Is Alive (in which the sonic and the visual seem symbiotically fused together) – that the duo’s highly eccentric individuality is most fully realized. With their jittery puppet physicality, shadowy black-and-white opaqueness and stunningly active cinematography, the shorts strive to recreate the irrational logic of frightening/alluring nightmares, an endeavor confirmed by their “narrative” focus on sleep and cerebral interiority (as in “The Comb”) and proven successful by their effects on this viewer, whose dreams are always more fantastical immediately after engaging with the Brothers’ work.

Happy Birthday to Me (1981): C+

Essentially a camp-tastic footnote to the late-‘70s, early-’80s slasher flick craze, Happy Birthday to Me at least distinguishes itself from the pack by refusing to conclude with its first climactic twist, instead choosing to pile on a second, even more batshit-insane ending in an apparent effort to make sure viewers finish the film with incredulous smiles on their faces. Ginny (Melissa Sue Anderson, aka Little House on the Prairie’s blind Mary Ingalls) is part of an elitist boarding school clique made up of premiere students (all seemingly played by 25-year-olds), though she and her supposedly intelligent pals spend most of their time drinking, smoking and raucously celebrating at sporting events (including a dirt bike race won by a French ambassador’s son?!?). One by one, the nondescript kids die, with director J. Lee Thompson (Cape Fear, believe it or not) using blunt edits and severe close-ups to cast suspicion on characters who are obviously guilty of nothing more than being slightly-to-very unattractive. Yet despite a general lack of tension, the film – even before its preposterous finale – nonetheless boasts a couple of elements that keep it from becoming totally worthless: a dose of second-rate (but still unsettling) giallo bizarreness that shrouds the story in mystery, and a series of moderately inventive slayings, the best of which involves a romantic, late-night, fireside snack of shish kebob.

Will Pirates Plunder Supes' Loot?

That's what the box office prognosticators seem to think, though in terms of quality, Bryan Singer's Superman Returns is considerably superior to the Johnny Depp-headlined Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. My review of the former can be found below this post; my thoughts on the latter are accessible via this brand spankin' new link.

Tomorrow:
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (Slant magazine)
Beowulf & Grendel (Slant magazine)

And of the following upcoming releases, the one to seek out is definitely the bizzare, unique Brothers of the Head.

In the Future:
Brothers of the Head (Slant magazine)
Renaissance (Slant magazine)
Mini's First Time (Slant magazine)
My First Wedding (Slant magazine)