Lessons of Darkness

Duck Season (2004): B+

Fernando Eimbcke’s Duck Season is one of the year’s great surprises – a nuanced, authentic portrait of adolescent ennui and maturation that treats pre-teen emotions with a Jim Jarmusch-ian brand of detached sympathy and bemusement. Set entirely on a Sunday and largely inside a high-rise Mexico tenement apartment, Eimbcke’s directorial debut concerns fourteen-year-old best friends Flama (Daniel Miranda) and Moko (Diego Cataño), whose leisurely, parent-free day of playing “Bush vs. Bin Laden” games of Halo, eating pizza, and drinking large Cokes is thrown for a loop by the arrival of neighboring sixteen-year-old Rita (Danny Perea) – who wants to use Flama’s kitchen to cook – and pizza deliveryman Ulises (Enrique Arreola). What ensues is a series of small-scale vignettes with large-scale reverberations for the boys’ friendship, with both compelled to confront their complicated feelings for each other as they find themselves on a figurative threshold between a comforting past and unknown, uncertain future. Aside from one explanation-overload moment in which Ulises clarifies the film’s title (related to a painting Flama’s divorcing parents are fighting over) and, consequently, Flama and Moko’s migration into a new phase of teenagerdom, Eimbcke never excessively stresses the underlying forces at play; instead, he lets them naturally ooze out from languorous scenarios that he deftly dramatizes via a collection of cleverly composed black-and-white compositions that stress his character’s shifting relationships to one another. Duck Season’s consistently underplayed humor and pathos ultimately, however, owes much to its cast’s naturalistic indolence, the foursome’s amusingly languid (yet sensitive and subtly tense) performances – unlike the building’s on-and-off electricity – giving the action a consistent emotional charge.

2006's Final Links

A few more site-specific reviews - as well as an ego-stroking tally of my criticism output for the year - may appear on the blog before December 31st, but this will undoubtedly be my last collection of off-site links for 2006. So Happy Holidays to all, and I'll see you again in 2007...

Today:
Night at the Museum (Slant magazine)

Next Year:
An Unreasonable Man (Slant magazine)
Tears of the Black Tiger (Slant magazine)
Penelope (Slant magazine)
Puccini for Beginners (Slant magazine)

indieWIRE Film Critics' Poll '06

As a result of the heavily documented turnover at The Village Voice, critic/editor Dennis Lim has this year relocated his annual film critics poll to indieWIRE. And once again, I was invited to contribute to Lim's definitive year-end round-up. My "best of the year" ballot - as well as my sole contribution to the feature's comments section - can be found at the following links.

My indieWIRE Film Critics' Poll '06 Ballot

My comment about Robert Altman (fourth from top)

Notes on a Scandal (2006): C+

Oh, how deliciously campy Notes on a Scandal might have been had director Richard Eyre taken a more deliriously hysterical approach to his material. Instead, alas, his film (based on Zoe Heller’s novel) tackles its tale of women-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown with only one eye toward frenzied feverishness, burrowing inside the crazed psyche of a schoolteacher named Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) whose bitter disdain for students and coworkers alike masks a burning desire for lifelong companionship of the female kind. She finds her supposed soul mate in Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), the faculty’s new art teacher who’s married to an older man (Bill Nighy) and the mother of a Down Syndrome-afflicted boy. Elucidated via Machiavellian narration as she writes in her diary, Barbara’s Single White Female impulses are subsequently amplified by her discovery of Sheba’s Mary Kay Letourneau-style indiscretions. Though the frigid, virginal Barbara comes across as an implausible relic of a bygone age, and despite the story’s unflattering (read: borderline misogynistic and homophobic) characterizations of its feminine protagonists, Notes on a Scandal could still have turned out to be a guilty pleasure were it more uninhibited and less rushed, its second half’s swiftly introduced and resolved conflicts far less pleasantly frantic than Philip Glass’ overheated score. As it stands, however, Eyre’s film proves a disappointing missed opportunity, albeit one that features a superbly unguarded performance by Blanchett and the finest work in years by Dench, whose cold, curt bitchiness – thankfully set free from the confines of airless period dramas – is a thing to behold, never more so than when Barbara describes Sheba’s son as “a tiresome court jester” or ruminates about unexpected erotic charges in her groin while lying naked in a bathtub.

Venus (2006): C+

Venus won’t elicit many swoons, but if Roger Michell’s film never quite musters the energy to be more than a placid hybrid of Nobody’s Fool and Lolita, it nonetheless provides a satisfactory showcase for Peter O’Toole. In the familiar role of a once-famous actor prone to drink, the aged O’Toole proves he still knows how to wield that thundering, magisterial voice – regal yet playful, and always a surprise coming from such a slender, lithe figure – and though he’s unable to elevate corny moments such as a peeping-tom pratfall better suited for Ben Stiller, his quiet, mildly pathetic nobility lends weight to Hanif Kureishi’s lurching story. Uncomfortably vacillating between cute comedic bickering and hungry erotic longing, Venus traces Maurice’s (O’Toole) relationships with both best friend Ian (Leslie Phillips) – with whom he swaps medication, shares booze, and cuts toenails – and Ian’s niece Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), the latter beginning as a Pygmalion affair but soon becoming something more overtly sexual. Any commentary on the evolving nature of desire, however, is somewhat stymied by the fact that Michell, because Kureishi’s script speeds past its creepily tender moments to make time for senior citizen humor, fails to fully explore his May-December romance’s physical aspect. It’s an inadequacy that leaves the film – aside from graceful moments steeped in regret and raw hurt shared between O’Toole and Vanessa Redgrave (as Maurice’s wife) – an awkward mélange of scenes featuring its star staring lasciviously at his nubile object of affection, and then carrying on with his grumpy old pal as if they were a married couple.

Top Ten 2006, Part I

As always, December brings with it a slew of retrospective lists. And as in 2004 and 2005, the first of my own year-end wrap-ups is the annual Slant magazine feature, in which yours truly and editor Ed Gonzalez offer up our own opinions on the last twelve months' best and worst films.

(Shamelessly self-promoting side note: I wrote the intro)

Slant magazine's 2006: Year in Film (Slant magazine)

Burnout

After a final, hectic week of last-second screenings, my brain is too tired to come up with something clever to say about this bunch of reviews. So aside from pointing out that Clint Eastwood's second WWII film of the year, Letters from Iwo Jima, is the best thing I've seen in the past few days, I'll just let them speak for themselves.

This Week:
Eragon (Slant magazine)

After This Week:
Letters from Iwo Jima (Slant magazine)
We Are Marshall (Slant magazine)
Rocky Balboa (Slant magazine)
Matthew Barney: No Restraint (Slant magazine)
Alpha Dog (Slant magazine)
In the Pit (Slant magazine)

Last Week:
Off the Black (Slant magazine)

Mafioso (1962): B+

Light silliness comfortably coexists with neorealist socio-economic critiques in Mafioso, a largely unseen (at least stateside) 1962 comic gem from Alberto Lattuada, a filmmaker whose international reputation has largely been predicated on his having co-directed Fellini’s Variety Lights. With this story of Northern Italian auto factory foreman Antonio Badalamenti’s (Alberto Sordi) vacation to his Southern Sicily hometown, Lattuada straddles a fine line between comedy and tragedy, indulging in gags and jokes – such as Antonio’s boss randomly confessing that he actually hails from Trenton, NJ – that bring levity to his otherwise poignant portrait of the sharply regionalized country’s post-war cultural and financial divisions. Having never met her in-laws, Antonio’s urbane blond wife Marta (Norma Bengell) arrives with inappropriate gifts in tow and then rankles the clan by smoking and acting the snob, while Antonio finds himself embroiled in mob business after the local godfather Don Vincenzo (Ugo Attanasio) begins prepping him – to his complete ignorance – for a covert job. The era’s notions of machismo and honor are skewered with deft reverence by Lattuada, who crisply addresses relevant issues of national and personal identity while never neglecting his film’s underlying humor. In the end, though, it’s Sordi’s masterful performance as the blissfully unaware Antonio – a man blinded by his love of home – that ultimately supplies Mafioso with both its high-wire exuberance and humanistic tenderness.

Flushed Away (2006): C+

With Flushed Away, the understated drollness that defines Aardman Studios’ finest efforts (Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) takes a back seat to the scatological hyperactivity that typifies the work of co-producer DreamWorks Animation. That the two outfits are strange bedfellows has been apparent since the outset of their union, and yet there’s nonetheless something depressing about watching anthropomorphic CG rats designed in the style of Aardman’s prior claymation protagonists behave like rejects from Shrek, making flip pop culture allusions and boasting hipper-than-thou attitudes that fail to cover up their inherent featurelessness. The story of a pet rat named Roddy (Hugh Jackman) who learns the value of family and friendship after he’s unceremoniously flushed down the toilet to a sewer city of fellow vermin – and then finds himself in the middle of an adventure with plucky Rita (Kate Winslet) – Flushed Away is bursting with visual gags and colorful characters but very little heart, its state of perpetual motion preventing any measure of honest-to-goodness emotional attachment. The animation is sharp, the one-liners are occasionally witty, and the voicework is uniformly solid, with special kudos going to Ian McKellen as the deranged Toad intent on bringing about a rat holocaust. But like a mouse on a spinning wheel, it’s a film that moves at a breakneck pace but ultimately goes nowhere.

Dreamgirls (2006): C

Bill Condon may be a more capable filmmaker than Rob Marshall, but his Dreamgirls lacks the one quality that Marshall’s sub-par Best Picture winner Chicago had going for it – an invigorating, irresistible, knockout score. It’s a shortcoming attributable to the 1981 Broadway source material, and one glaringly amplified by the fact that Condon’s adaptation of Tom Eyen’s book – so lackluster that it doesn’t dramatize its central professional and romantic conflicts as much as it verbally articulates them – relies on its mundane music to bolster its otherwise thin Motown-set story. Infamously based upon Diana Ross and the Supremes, Dreamgirls charts the tumultuous ups and downs of the Dreamettes, who – with the help of shady promoter Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx) – make a name for themselves backing up fading R&B star James “Thunder” Early (Eddie Murphy). Rapid chart-topping crossover success, however, is soon complicated by the tension between beautiful lead singer Deena Jones (Beyoncé Knowles) and self-destructive Effie White (American Idol runner-up Jennifer Hudson), the latter’s demotion from the front-and-center to backup duties because of her weight and titanic ego leading to nasty discord.

Condon isn’t much of a visual stylist, and his centerpiece set pieces lack a requisite electric charge. Nonetheless, the blame for the proceedings’ tepid mediocrity – aside from the writer/director’s cursory treatment of the Civil Rights movement raging outside his insulating nightclub locales, a cause Deena/Diana betrays by discarding Effie/Florence Ballard for white-audience popularity – falls squarely on Eyen and Henry Krieger’s so-so original tunes, which faithfully replicate the sounds of ‘60s and ‘70s pop-R&B hits (including some by B.B. King and Jackson 5 look-alikes) but never hit anything approaching an ecstatic high note. Hudson’s powerhouse pipes and soulful sassiness give her enough diva-tastic vivacity to ensure an Academy Award nomination (if not win). Yet the primary reason the all-attitude, little-depth newcomer stands out so forcefully from her illustrious costars is that they’re either stuck playing one-dimensional sexy scoundrels (Foxx), busy proving their wholesale inability to emote outside of decently choreographed musical sequences (Knowles), or tepidly rehashing decades-old sketch comedy routines (Murphy, whose Early proves to be a slightly more pitiful variation on the comedian’s memorable “It’s too hot in the hot tub!” James Brown caricature).