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'Tis the season for scares. And over at IFC News, I've gotten into the Halloween spirit by sampling some horror anthologies which, in their own way, represent the best and worst that the subgenre has to offer.
Tales From the Dark Side of Anthologies (IFC News)
Resident Evil: Extinction, the third installment in the based-on-a-videogame franchise, is also its Back to the Future III, a Western-tinged adventure whose innovations are so scant that the only things keeping the enterprise afloat are clumsy references to its predecessors. Milla Jovovich returns again, flipping and karate-kicking T-virus-infected dogs, which – like the introductory sight of Jovovich nude in a shower, and then in her iconic slinky, skimpy red dress – helps provide some warm-and-fuzzy memories of when the franchise was so bad it was good, rather than just kinda bad. Director Russell Mulcahy’s film (written by series founder Paul W.S. Anderson) finds Jovovich’s now-superpowered – and still irresistibly sexy – badass Alice out in the Nevada desert with a band of survivors led by Claire Redfield (Ali Larter). There, she’s hunted by the Umbrella Corporation’s mad scientist Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen), who’s trying to find a way, à la Day of the Dead, to domesticate the world’s dominant zombie population. The pulpy good times of the first two Resident Evils, however, are in short supply, in part because the saga is now wholly spinning its narrative wheels, and in part because nothing very cheesy-cool happens. Alice uses telekinesis to fight hordes of zombie men and zombie bats, but all in the service of an ill-defined quest that – despite intimations that it’s the “final chapter” – feels like a narrative way station on the road to yet another, probably even less focused sequel.
The Palm d’Or-winning toast of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is the latest Romanian import (after The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 12:08 East to Bucharest) to arrive stateside with an established critical-darling rep. And Cristian Mungiu’s film doesn’t disappoint, charting with blunt realism and intense humanism the efforts of a young woman to procure for her friend/college dorm roommate an illegal back-door abortion in 1987 Romania. The focal point of this soberly realized tale is Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who – when not placating her boyfriend by joining him and his family for dinner – laboriously attempts to assist Gabita (Laura Vasiuliu) by finding a hotel room for the procedure and dealing with the doctor (Vlad Ivanov) who’s agreed to perform the abortion (for an exorbitant price). 4 Months has all the stylistic hallmarks of the new Romanian cinema (neo-realism drama, a dour visual palette, sparse soundtrack music) but unlike its two most notable Romanian predecessors, there’s nothing funny about its day-in-the-miserable-life portrait, which is rife with urban-rural, young-old, and male-female tensions that all conspire to beat down the selfless, honest Otilia. Mungiu’s fascination with modes (and codes) of behavior gives his period piece a resonant universality, as attention always remains on Otilia’s moment-to-moment experience. And despite the lingering image of the unwanted fetus in question, the film, by taking Otilia’s rather than Gabita’s perspective, eventually proves itself less about abortion than about the survival of females in a world designed to subjugate them.
(2007 New York Film Festival)
The hate mail has already started pouring in about my review of American Gangster, Ridley Scott's heavily hyped, Oscar-contending gangster saga. Of course, if any of these naysayers had actually seen the film in question, they'd know what a dog it is. Read all about it - as well as some other notable new releases - via the below links.
Coming Soon:
American Gangster (Slant magazine)
Already Here:
Saw IV (Slant magazine)
Dan in Real Life (Slant magazine)
Slipstream (Cinematical)
As with last year’s Venus, Starting Out in the Evening stars a venerable actor in a May-December romance, though its concerns are less the nature of sexual hunger than the possibility of reinvention and the importance of seizing the moment. New York novelist Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), his four novels long since out of print, finds his decade-long effort to complete his next book interrupted by Heather (Lauren Ambrose), an admiring grad student who wants to write her master’s thesis on his work. Adapted from Brian Morton’s novel, Andrew Wagner’s film depicts Leonard’s reaction to this lively, fiercely intelligent female presence – who concludes their first meeting by passionately kissing his hand, to which he responds by placing his palm over her adoring eyes – as a gradual thawing out, with hesitancy giving way first to friendliness, and then to something more romantic. This set-up has all the hallmarks of twilight-drenched somber melodrama, but Starting Out in the Evening is shrewder than it initially lets on, primarily because it refuses to schematically pigeonhole its characters, such as Leonard’s daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor), whose biological clock is ticking loudly – as her father, a kindred opportunity waster, likes to remind her – and yet who is undeniably drawn to ex-boyfriend Casey (Adrian Lester), who doesn’t want children. Heather’s project is driven by self-interest, reverence, and genuine affection, and Leonard’s fascination with Heather is similarly comprised of mixed feelings, including pride, selfishness, loneliness and amorous longing. Wagner’s quietly reserved direction suitably mirrors Leonard’s demeanor, but it also occasionally veers into literary pretentiousness, and Leonard and Heather’s physical intimacy is – regardless of its chaste nature – never completely convincing. These miscues, however, are mostly overshadowed by Langella and Ambrose, the former putting on a masterful display of internalized confusion and the latter radiating sharp-witted, live-wire brashness. Their mutating rapport is multifaceted, though more responsible for the film’s mature portrait of professional and personal desires is its acute acknowledgment that a life’s work – or, even, a single decision – is often the byproduct of myriad complex forces, and not merely reducible to easy, undemanding cause-effect analysis.
Part heist-gone-awry crime pic, part family drama, Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead finds the 83-year-old director once again in fine form after 2005’s dreadful Find Me Guilty. Comfortably ensconced in its maker’s beloved New York milieu, the film charts the build-up to, and fallout from, the robbery of a Westchester mom-and-pop jewelry store orchestrated by shady corporate accountant and heroin addict Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his weak-willed kid brother Hank (Ethan Hawke). Kelly Masterson’s script is grippingly (if somewhat unnecessarily) fractured so that the narrative jumps back and forth between pre- and post-crime action, a structure that eventually reveals not only that the pilfered establishment was owned by Andy and Hank’s mother and father – the former suffering mortal wounds during the stick-up – but also that this family tree’s roots have long been rotted beyond repair. Before the Devil begins with Andy blissfully screwing wife Gina (Marisa Tomei, frequently sans clothes), an appropriate opening given that the subsequent proceedings are a case study in relatives fucking each other (over). Hoffman and Hawke both overact to their hearts content, but Lumet’s direction is crisp and brutal. And if the filmmaker’s desire to elevate his story to the realm of epic tragedy is neither justified nor successful, his latest nonetheless proves to be a triumphantly brisk, bleak B-movie.
Time for yet another delayed link dump - featuring my remaining NYFF coverage for Slant - in which I provide links to reviews both positive (No Country for Old Men, Gone Baby Gone) and negative (Lars and the Real Girl, Reservation Road).
Plus, I also offer up my thoughts on Criterion's new DVD release of Days of Heaven, which is almost as good as the movie itself.
Out Now:
Gone Baby Gone (Slant magazine)
30 Days of Night (Slant magazine)
Reservation Road (Cinematical)
Lars and the Real Girl (Slant magazine)
The Final Season (Slant magazine)
Out Later:
Music Within (Slant magazine)
How to Cook Your Life (Slant magazine)
DVD:
Days of Heaven - DVD (Slant magazine)
NYFF:
No Country for Old Men (Slant magazine)
I Just Didn't Do It (Slant magazine)
Runnin' Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (Slant magazine)
Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project (Slant magazine)
Calle Santa Fe (Slant magazine)
The latest piece of preening liberal-guilt cinema, Gavin Hood’s Rendition is laughably melodramatic and agonizingly inert, more interested in its pretzel-y narrative structure than issues of torture, justice and “extraordinary rendition,” the policy in which terror suspects are transferred and indefinitely imprisoned in foreign countries. On his way home from an unspecified business meeting in “Northern Africa,” American citizen Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) is grabbed by U.S. agents and shuttled off to a secret prison on the orders of a CIA neocon villainess (Meryl Streep), all because cell phone records indicate he may have been involved in an African market bombing in which an American agent was killed. Meanwhile, the deceased’s partner Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) is tasked with watching Anwar be tortured by a brutish cop (Igal Naor) whose daughter – in yet another of many concurrently running fatuous subplots – is having an affair with a young jihadist. Every moment is simplistically sketched and primed for maximum didacticism, while cast members, including Reese Witherspoon as Anwar’s Mariane Pearl-ish pregnant wife, are left to embody single virtues: Gyllenhaal is nobility, Witherspoon is loyalty, Streep is evil incarnate, Alan Arkin’s senator is self-serving careerism, and so on. Hood finds no way to tie his story’s various strands together in a compelling way, but his blundering direction is eventually no more egregious than the film’s simplistic, stacked-deck diatribe against U.S. military tactics and preachy, moral equivalence portrait of Americans and Arabs.
My last two articles for SOMA magazine - an August 2007 feature on Julie Delpy, and a September 2007 piece on Paul Haggis - never made it online, so I'm very happy to report that my latest contribution has recently been posted on the mag's site. It's the October's issue's cover story: a profile of Michael Pitt, who speaks - very, very concisely - about acting, his band Pagoda, and his disgust with Fox News.
Note: As is always the case with SOMA's site, the below link will simply get you to the main content page. From there, select the article.
An Iconoclast Flirts with the Mainstream (SOMA magazine)
We're into the New York Film Festival's press screening stretch run, so after this week, posts should hopefully be more frequent. In the meantime, though, here's a quick link dump.
Out Now:
Michael Clayton (Slant magazine)
Finishing the Game (Slant magazine)
The Good Night (Slant magazine)
NYFF:
I'm Not There (Slant magazine)
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