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Jury duty - which was supposed to begin last Wednesday, but will now commence on Tuesday - has wound up lightening my recent work load. Nonetheless, some new stuff for this rainy (at least here on the East Coast) Friday.
Today:
The Invisible (Slant magazine)
The Last Time (Slant magazine)
Something to Cheer About (Slant magazine)
Sing Now or Forever Hold Your Peace (Slant magazine)
Post-Today:
Paris Je T'Aime (Slant magazine)
September Dawn (Slant magazine)
Set to the country ditty “Benson, Arizona,” the intro spaceship sequence of Dark Star is an apt career-opening moment for John Carpenter, whose directorial debut – like so much of his underrated genre output – is steeped in classic Western tropes. Nods to Howard Hawks, however, are here married to a tongue-in-cheek spoof of Kubrick’s 2001, whose sentient, emotional HAL is reconfigured by Carpenter and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (future scribe of Alien) into a chatty female motherboard and a stubborn bomb who wants to explode in the loading bay despite being informed that the launch order was an error. Somewhat episodic in nature, the film – made while Carpenter and O’Bannon were completing their postgraduate degrees at USC’s film school – concerns the various misadventures of the titular ship’s three astronauts. Their mission is to destroy unstable stars to facilitate intergalactic colonization, though the filmmakers primarily use the trio’s story as a vehicle for updating the sci-fi genre for the ‘70s hippie-slacker-drug counterculture via goofy gags and a fittingly grungy, ramshackle aesthetic. Dark Star isn’t nearly as funny as it once was (as a kid, its humor seemed considerably more inspired), but it nonetheless has its amusing moments, such as Pinback’s (O’Bannon) cartoony elevator-shaft pursuit of a beach ball-shaped pet alien, or a final, cosmically loony image of a surfboarding spaceman. And more interestingly, it contains glimmers of its director’s future trademarks, from its minimalist synth score and efficient widescreen panoramas to its inventive use of low-fi special effects.
Making a derivative New Zealand version of Napoleon Dynamite is a bad idea. Meg Ryan's plastic surgery was really unsuccessful. The farcical films of Francis Veber aren't as cute as they think they are.
In other words, this week's regular collection of review links holds few surprises, aside from the fact that Vacancy - a lean, mean, efficient B-movie throwback - is surprisingly decent.
Today:
Vacancy (Slant magazine)
In the Land of Women (Slant magazine)
The Valet (Cinematical)
Goodbye Momo (Slant magazine)
After Today:
Eagle vs. Shark (Slant magazine)
Civic Duty (Slant magazine)
Diggers (Slant magazine)
The Hip Hop Project (Slant magazine)
Crazy Love (Slant magazine)
Finally, let me take this opportunity to point readers to the below write-up of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters, which is certainly the most bizarre new release currently playing - as well as one of the finest. Go in celebration of 4/20. Go because adult animation this stone-cold crazy needs to be supported. Go because, quite frankly, it rules.
Die-hard Aqua Teen Hunger Force fans may have never expected the Cartoon Network animated series – part of the channel’s “Adult Swim” line-up, and a spin-off of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast – to make it the big-screen, but they’ll likely be the only ones prepared for the sheer, uninhibited insanity of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters. To say that the maiden feature-length adventure of mutant happy meal rejects Master Shake, Frylock and Meatwad is an origin story would be to describe its hilarious tale in conventional terms, a mistake given that the so-called narrative primarily adheres to creators Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis’ inventive flights of freakazoid fancy. A time-traveling Abe Lincoln, talking watermelons, a pelvic-thrusting robot chicken-man (i.e. the Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past), familiar villains (the Plutonians and Mooninites), and other assorted oddities all play a part in the trio’s crazy quest to stop the rampaging Insanoflex exercise machine. It’s a flimsy premise that’s used as a springboard for events too bizarre and nonsensical to coherently recount in print, though suffice it to say that much of the action takes place in and around the non-aqua, non-teenage trio’s New Jersey Shore home (as well as the oft-destroyed abode of their grumpy, balding, hairy-chested neighbor Carl).
Its foundation the contentious relationship between its super-powered anthropomorphic fast food items – with Frylock as the calm voice of reason, Shake as the selfish, arrogant jerk, and Meatwad as Shake’s retarded whipping boy – the go-for-broke film offers up an eclectic blend of science-fiction madness, sarcastic one-liners and arbitrary pop culture references that result in an outsized, aggressive form of the series’ trademark comedic abstraction. A self-consciously anti-conformist, surrealistic animated saga for adults, it glides along to the beat of its own foul-mouthed drum (or, rather, the magically powered drums of Rush’s Neil Peart), never stopping to offer any concessions to mainstream audience expectations or demands and, in the process, proving to be that rare major studio-financed movie whose every fiber is the product of a thoroughly unique, maverick voice. A 90-minute runtime is eventually the largest hindrance to Aqua Teen’s rollicking, free-form momentum. Yet there’s ultimately something exhilarating – and, dare I say, liberating? – about the film’s chaotic avant-garde energy, which is rooted in haphazard, wacko contrasts like the opening’s belligerent death metal-playing refreshment stand items, as well as random gags such as the year’s most inspired cameo, from SNL and 30 Rock’s Tina Fey as the Aqua Team’s big, bosomy burrito momma.
Anyone’s who’s seen a Michael Haneke film will know where Benny’s Video is headed from its opening VHS images of a pig’s slaughter. Modern alienation and a murderous act that defies social and moral law are right around the corner courtesy of detached and discontent Benny (Arno Frisch), a teenager with MIA parents, a successful pyramid scheme that he operates at school, and a room filled with video cameras and recording equipment that function as the filter through which he interacts with the world. When listening to heavy metal, watching horror movies and news reports about Bosnian atrocities, and poring over his pig-killing vid grow wearisome, Benny picks up a girl at his local movie rental store and brings her home. Romance isn’t the air, however, as this meet-cute quickly leads to the aforementioned brutal incident that the preachy Haneke – via an obscured video monitor perspective on the action – refuses to outright show us, a denial intended to prod and chastise viewers for wanting to see such a horror. Numerous cash transactions (between pyramid scheming kids, or at McDonald’s) are meant to be symptomatic of a society that places self-interest, greed and deception above the common good, while media-refracted violence and absentee parents are fingered as the prime culprits in our individual and cultural degeneration. They’re all arguments that Haneke delivers with frosty menace – hence the film’s status as part two of the director’s “Trilogy of Emotional Glaciation” (preceded by The Seventh Continent, followed by 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) – but, alas, an also typically pedantic, haranguing tenor.
The Seventh Continent’s static presentation of schoolgirls successively leapfrogging a pommel horse sums up the cinema of Michael Haneke: cold, structurally rigorous, and repetitive. Proving that his work’s formal and thematic lynchpins existed from his career’s outset, the Austrian director’s debut film concerns the inspired-by-real-events tale of a bourgeois family – husband Georg (Dieter Berner), wife Anna (Birgit Doll), and daughter Eva (Leni Tanzer) – who responded to the dreary monotony of their middle class life by going haywire. I won’t spill exact details about the third-act’s “twist,” but in classic Haneke fashion, early depictions of day-to-day drudgery (going to work, putting away groceries, family breakfasts) contain a portentous vibe that naturally culminates in the other shoe violently dropping. Incongruous pop songs set against mundane dinner and driving sequences meld with news reports about Middle East violence and a televised concert by Meatloaf to form a critique of contemporary media as vacuous and/or toxic, and of modern life as alienating and empty. Georg and Anna’s rebellion against their hollow, materialistic existence – an attempt to attain the “peace” seemingly conveyed by their local car wash’s Australia tourism advertisement (irony alert!) – is given a chilling banality by Haneke’s exacting mise-en-scène, which often cuts off characters’ heads as a means of visualizing their loneliness and isolation. Yet his harsh, meticulous artistry is employed in the service of a didactic critique that merely confirms – through its narrow portrait of life as unrelentingly bleak – its own gloomy cynicism, nevermore so than during the excessively protracted, sympathy-free finale that makes one feel as if the director is secretly enjoying his tableau of horrific disintegration.
All of the films reviewed this week pale in comparison to Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, which I was fortunate enough to catch during its recently concluded, first-ever NYC theatrical run. My review of that 1977 masterpiece can be found below this post.
As for the new stuff, well, Disturbia and Year of the Dog aren't half bad, which makes them twice as good as Pathfinder and a little bit better than next week's Hopkins-Gosling thriller Fracture.
This Weekend:
Year of the Dog (Slant magazine)
Disturbia (Slant magazine)
Pathfinder (Slant magazine)
Dreaming Lhasa (Slant magazine)
Future Weekends:
Fracture (Slant magazine)
Killer of Sheep begins with a father chastising his son for not protecting his brother from bullies, concluding the reprimand by telling the boy that it’s time for him to learn what life is really like. Such a lesson is blisteringly delivered by Charles Burnett’s 1977 masterpiece, which is finally receiving its first U.S. theatrical release 30 years after Burnett produced it as his UCLA film school thesis, and whose emotional and sociological incisiveness hasn’t been dulled a bit by three decades of concealment (caused by music rights issues). Perhaps the preeminent example of American Neo-Realism, Burnett’s debut – which in 1990 was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry – is an aching glimpse at life in Watts, CA, its wandering yet nonetheless searing gaze focusing most specifically on titular slaughterhouse worker Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), his wife (the luminous, soulful Kaycee Moore), and their two children. They’re a family perilously surviving on the fringe, and one whose day-to-day travails are dramatized by Burnett with a lyrical grace infused with sadness and sympathy, the director so invested in his characters’ plight that it’s as if the film itself is on the verge of tears when Stan, taking a brief break from fixing his busted sink, matter-of-factly states “I’m working myself into my own hell.”
Exhaustion, frustration, fear and anguish line Stan’s face upon realizing that it’s once again time for his daily sheep-killing grind, emotions which Burnett pinpoints with a multitude of scenes whose ostensibly offhand poetry is partly derived from their frank, gritty realism. Stan holding a coffee mug to his cheek (a sensation that reminds him of making love), aimless kids wasting away their days playing in dilapidated buildings and on railroad tracks (their rock-throwing set to a singer’s hope for “No races or religions, that’s America to me”), Stan’s arduous, ultimately unsuccessful efforts to purchase a new car engine – all of these incidents manage to capture truths about the human (and, specifically, African-American) condition, about the way in which happiness is a fleeting treasure, about the destructiveness of inertia, and about the pain that accompanies striving to make it from one morning to the next. “You gonna fall behind?” asks a girl to her sick, out-of-school friend, and the echo of the statement – are all of these destitute young ones going to fall behind in life’s race? – reverberates, like so much of Killer of Sheep’s natural, casual dialogue, with the force of a freight train.
Violence permeates Burnett’s compassionate portrait, from that of the slaughterhouse to the neighborhood kids’ aggressive horsing around (which repeatedly ends with a child crying). This physical brutality is complemented by emotional suffering, whether it be Stan’s dogged attempts to persevere in the face of dire circumstances, or his relationship to his spouse, whose desperate need for sexual intimacy is rebuffed by her remote, sleep-deprived husband. The tensions between genders are found in both the younger and older generations, whose strained dynamics are paralleled via Burnett’s piercing, poignant juxtapositions, such as when Stan’s rejection of his wife’s romantic entreaty segues into the sight of adolescent boys callously throwing dirt at a girl hanging sheets on a clothesline. Even when an image of running children is followed by that of sheep being herded toward their death, Burnett never overtly or insistently preaches, his film dreamily meandering from one verité moment to the next with an absolute minimum of directorial underlining. Scored to the laments of Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth” and Paul Robeson’s “The House I Live In” (among others), his is a tale so smoothly and effortlessly constructed that the boundaries between the staged and the authentic seemingly cease to exist.
Stan’s daughter wears a hangdog mask that serves as a reflection of her dad’s despondent countenance, and despite Killer of Sheep’s alternately funny and heartbreaking depiction of its gone-to-seed milieu – where criminal opportunities, untrustworthy slackers and decent men in search of sustenance commingle amidst infrastructural rubble – it’s this image of the silently gazing child that eventually comes to define Burnett’s film. Throughout, kids act as witnesses to poverty, to hostility and viciousness, to misery, and what emerges from these visions of observant juveniles is an impression of harmful osmosis, of kids being infected with a deep-rooted, corrosive spiritual poison. Burnett’s representation of urban poverty is laced with sly humor and culminates with Stan achieving, if not outright relief and contentment, at least a momentary measure of personal and familial peace. Yet any optimism ultimately remains tempered, with the dual birth/death conclusion conveying – as do the alert eyes of its errant baby-faces – the sense that, for these marginalized people desperately trying to cling to some form of the American Dream, joy will always be tempered by sorrow, and hardship will likely be the legacy they pass on to their descendents.
Dead Silence’s ghoul, Mary Shaw, is an undead ventriloquist who slays her victims by eating their tongues when they scream. In spite of all the yawning elicited by the film, there’s little chance such a fate will befall anyone unlucky enough to endure James Wan’s unscary movie, which somehow operates under the assumption that a dumb nursery rhyme, a colorless visual palette punctuated by deep reds, and some creaky dolls will frighten anyone over the age of five. Wan’s personal follow-up to the original Saw (which, like this dud, he concocted with writer Leigh Whannell) is an exhaustively inept affair marked by pitiful staging, no-dimensional characters, and countless narrative illogicalities, including: Why does hero Jamie (Ryan Kwanten) keep carrying around creepy puppet Billy when he’s convinced the thing is evil? Why does detective Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg) let Jamie run free when he’s the only suspect in his wife’s murder? And why are we supposed to be scared of ventriloquist dummies whose main tactics are hiding motionless underneath sheets and slowly turning their giant eyes? Chucky needn’t be worried about losing his crown as cinema’s premiere toy serial killer, since at least his later big-screen outings had the good sense to treat their goofy subject matter with a big, fat ironic wink. Dead Silence, on the other hand, proceeds with a level of grim seriousness that’s at extreme odds with its campy premise, resulting in a raft of missed opportunities for knowing, tongue-in-cheek humor that’s spearheaded by [spoiler – haha! – alert] the story’s ultimate embodiment of evil: an Anna Nicole Smith-style gold-digger.
A groovy, socially conscious triumph, the Oscar-winning Happy Feet stands at the very top of the 2006 animated kid’s film class. It’s no surprise to discover that George Miller – the man behind Babe and its stellar sequel – is capable of crafting children’s entertainment that’s at once playful, intelligent and modestly profound, but his ability to make penguins seem fresh and fascinating after 2005’s ubiquitous March of the Penguins hype is more than a minor feat. In this rollicking tale, young penguin Mumble (Elijah Wood) becomes a pariah when it’s revealed that he can’t sing like the rest of his flock – their songs (imaginative hybrids of tunes by Prince, Boys II Men, and countless others) functioning as the lynchpin of the mating ritual – but instead has irrepressibly dancing feet (modeled on the moves of Savion Glover). Mumble’s toe-tapping saga is one of exclusion and intolerance, his difference derided but ultimately proven to be the key to the penguins’ survival, as the animals’ way of life is threatened by a severe fish shortage caused by humans. Especially during close-ups and picturesque master shots of the frigid landscape during snowstorms and sunrise, Miller’s CG animation is a wondrous thing to behold, and his two centerpiece action sequences (involving a seal and two killer whales, respectively) are both formally exquisite and technically breathtaking. What truly holds Happy Feet together, however, is the magical, mystical aura that envelops Mumble’s boisterous journey from arctic snow to caged zoo and back again, the director marvelously capturing a sense of the world’s grand beauty and strangeness – and, just as impressively, finding two suitable, distinct roles for that strangest Hollywood bird of all, Robin Williams.
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