Lessons of Darkness

Hairspray (2007): B-

Adam Shankman’s Hairspray is efficiently staged and spiritually faithful to both the Broadway musical upon which it’s based, as well as John Waters’ 1988 film. Yet though colorful, cheery and energetic, there’s something missing from this song-and-dance routine, and it’s the wacky, transgressive, indie-posing-as-mainstream-movie vibe of Waters’ original. Presumably like the stage show, this star-studded Hairspray hews closely to Waters’ narrative, which involves the efforts of chubby 1962 teen Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky) to make a name for herself on local TV’s afternoon dance program The Corny Collins Show, a goal that leads to conflict between underdog outsiders (fatties and blacks, mostly) and the entrenched white establishment. Rather than trying to capture the around-the-edges skuzziness and makeshift charm of its big-screen predecessor, Shankman’s film goes for big, jazzy glossiness. It’s a tack that’s understandable – who wants to try and one-up Waters at his own game? – but one that nonetheless saps the material of its authentic Baltimore-fringe verve. The result is a mildly charming trifle, notable for offering up barely hummable (and too many) musical numbers, an opportunity to ponder tweeners’ inexplicable infatuation with Zach “High School Musical” Effron, and a chance to groan at fat suit-encased John Travolta futilely attempting to inhabit Divine’s high heels – as well as sing in a female voice – as Edna Turnblad.

P2 (2007): C+

P2 has quite a bit going for it, which makes its eventual reliance on inane genre gimmicks that much more disappointing. The premise of Franck Khalfoun’s thriller is promisingly lean and taut: working late on Christmas Eve, businesswoman Angela (Rachel Nichols) gets stranded in her Manhattan office complex’s underground garage and then gets stalked by psychotic security guard Thomas (Wes Bentley). It’s a one-on-one showdown primed to stoke that common fear of being alone in an empty parking lot late at night, and for a time, P2 lives up to its potential, generating chills from Thomas’ obsessed stalker routine and, once Angela escapes his clutches, from their game of hide and seek in the multi-story subterranean facility. Nichols exhibits credible grit even after being stuffed into a sexy cocktail dress that turns all attention to her heaving cleavage (which Khalfoun’s camera makes sure to ogle), and Bentley is both menacing and kind of hilarious as a lonely lunatic whose murderous impulses coexist with a romantic streak and an aversion to animal cruelty. Yet whether it’s due to a lack of imagination or sheer laziness, the film too often partakes in illogical narrative shortcuts that undercut its this-could-happen atmosphere, clearly laying out its realistic cat-and-mouse ground rules, and then having characters perform unbelievable feats and travel implausible distances given their circumstances – cheap, manipulative decisions that disrupt continuity and sap one’s investment in the proceedings.

Things We Lost in the Fire (2007): B

Danish director Susanne Bier’s fondness for melodrama continues with Things We Lost in the Fire, a reasonably sturdy saga of loss, grieving and addiction buoyed by a fierce, formidable performance from Benicio Del Toro. Bier’s English-language debut concerns the aftershocks of husband and father Steven’s (David Duchovny) sudden murder, which thoroughly reconfigures the lives of both Steven’s widow Audrey (Halle Berry) and his childhood best friend Jerry (Del Toro), a flophouse-dwelling heroin junkie whom Steven, against his wife’s wishes, continued to visit and help out. In response to the tragedy, Audrey asks Jerry to move into the family’s garage, which is in the process of being renovated after a calamitous fire. Although such a plot development seems destined to lead to a corny situation whereby Jerry becomes Audrey’s surrogate for Steven, Bier’s film instead overtly addresses the impractical, unbelievable impossibility of that scenario before moving on to examine the painful and difficult ongoing process of recovery. Things We Lost in the Fire is often as overwrought as it is heartrending – a scene in which Audrey asks Jerry to get in her bed and rub her earlobe the way Steven used to is embarrassingly awful. Still, Bier more often than not keeps things grounded in relatable, realistic sentiments, while Del Toro conveys an awe-inspiring range of raw, naked emotions that are all somehow amplified – rather than turned facile – by his raft of quirky, crazy mannerisms.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007): D

Adam Sandler, Kevin James, and the art of mainstream cinematic comedy all realize new lows with I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, one of the year’s most stunningly feeble offerings. Directed with typical clumsiness by Dennis Dugan, Sandler’s latest – co-written by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor – is a thoroughly unfunny and generally offensive groaner masquerading as a tolerant social statement, with the painfully schematic story concerning two fireman buddies, Chuck (Sandler) and Larry (James), who decide to enter a civil union in order to preserve widower Larry’s health benefits. Not surprisingly, what this plot amounts to is little more than an endless stream of lame, noxious jokes directed at gays, all of which are supposed to be taken in good fun given that the film eventually has its hetero protagonists learning, first-hand, about the discrimination and humiliation faced by gays on a regular basis, and endeavoring to change public perception about their same-sex brethren. If anyone’s buying this have your-cake-and-eat-it-too tack – in which Sandler and company get to first mock “faggots” and then condemn such intolerance – as empowering, then perhaps they’d also be interested in hearing about some prime Siberian real estate I’m looking to unload…

Paranoid Park (2007): B+

Gus Van Sant continues the formal experimentation of his prior “Death Trilogy” (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days) with Paranoid Park, creating an entrancing, subjective portrait of a high school teen (Gabe Nevins’ Alex) who recounts, via writing in his journal, the events that led him to commit a grave crime. With its rewinding and fast-forwarding, its flip-flopping between Super 8 and 35mm footage, its soundtrack’s squeals and blips and scratching, its heavy use of classic Nino Rotto scores, and its hallucinatory slow-motion shots of skateboarders, the film is visually and sonically intoxicating. Shot by cinematographic god Christopher Doyle, Van Sant’s latest is intensely attuned to a particular mood of adolescent confusion and self-centeredness, and also to the way memories operate and feel. Images of skaters floating through the air convey Alex’s desperate desire for escape, while the decision to obscure the face of Alex’s mother suggests the parental absence that’s contributed to the boy’s loneliness and aimlessness. Generational friction is present but so too is a sense of teens striving to simultaneously fit in with their peers and feign adulthood, the latter via both Alex’s attempt to discuss Iraq as well as his and girlfriend Jennifer’s (Taylor Momsen) game of dress-up with grown-up clothes. Paranoid Park’s triumph, however, is its aesthetic design, a combination of authentic realism and self-conscious, lyrical artifice in which sound – epitomized by a gorgeous, hilarious break-up sequence between Alex and Jennifer during which her fury is blotted out by Rotto’s music from Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits – proves to be the director’s primary mode of expressing emotional and thematic content.

(2007 New York Film Festival)

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006): B+

Insanity reigns supreme in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, a tale whose off-the-charts screwiness obscures virtually all shortcomings. Based on Patrick Süskind’s supposedly unfilmable novel, Tom Tykwer’s film concerns Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), a boy in 18th-century Paris who’s born (from the womb of a miscarriage-prone mother) underneath a filthy market stand, left to rot on the muck-strewn ground, rescued and sent to a wretched orphanage and, later, to work for a brutal taskmaster, and finally purchased by a down-on-his-luck Parisian perfumer (crazily overacting Dustin Hoffman). This last act of kindness is motivated by the fact that Grenouille has a preternaturally gifted sense of smell, which Tykwer visualizes via bravura camera swoops and zooms into the filthy, putrid pores of the Dickensian metropolis that Grenouille, in his own demented way, yearns to beautify with enthralling aromas. Tykwer’s baroque direction is borderline Grand Guignol, which beautifully meshes with both the craziness of his material as well as with Grenouille himself, whose desire to experience and preserve every imaginable scent leads him down a path of murderous madness. Thrillingly, hilariously over-the-top, Perfume is enraptured with sensory experience’s capacity for revelation and corruption, and its lack of inhibition – which also extends to its performances – ultimately results in a climax so mesmerizingly out-there that it’s impossible to resist.

Link Time

The next month should be hectic, as I've got to finish seeing this year's awards contenders before submitting my various end-of-year lists. As a result, keep an eye out for many new site-specific reviews.

For now, though, here's a collection of pre-Thanksgiving links.

In Theaters:
Beowulf (Slant magazine)
Southland Tales (Cinematical)
Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:
Enchanted (Slant magazine)
Hitman (Slant magazine)
Oswald's Ghost (Slant magazine)

The Kite Runner (2007): C-

The Kite Runner is the type of film one would expect from Marc Forster – banal, trite and apt to ramrod simplistic symbolism down viewers’ throats. Having never read Khaled Hosseini’s acclaimed bestseller, I can’t speak to the faithfulness of Forster’s adaptation, but what he puts on screen is corny and/or offensive pap of the first order. In recounting the tale of Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi), a rich Afghan boy and budding storyteller, and Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada), his saintly best friend and the son of Amir’s father’s (Homayon Ershadi) loyal servant, Forster exhibits nary a hint of genuine interest in his story’s underlying issues of class difference, tradition, and cultural standards of masculinity, too busy is he filling everyone’s mouth with hoary platitudes and lavishing attention on cheesy CG kite-flying sequences. Staging big, sweeping emotional incidents for maximum melodramatic effect (including a “tastefully” shot incident of rape) is the director’s prime concern, meaning that any trace of honest-to-goodness humanity suffers a quick death. The early section detailing Amir and Hassan’s childhood in 1978 is schematic and blunt, as Forster wastes no opportunity to reiterate that Amir is a coward and Hassan is a paragon of virtue. And the film’s reductiveness is epitomized by its cartoon, black-and-white conception of Afghanistan, which is a shimmering paradise during Amir’s youth and then, when the adult Amir (Khalid Abdalla) travels back to Kabul in 2000, is depicted as the Taliban-run seventh circle of hell. That everyone Amir cares about must die so that he can be “good again” is noxious enough; that The Kite Runner climaxes with such a laughably contrived reunion between Amir and his childhood bully, however, simply reveals the entire affair’s bedrock disingenuousness.

Next (2007): C+

In Next, Nicolas Cage’s Cris boasts Tom Hanks’ haircut from The Da Vinci Code. He also can see two minutes into the future, but it’s debatable whether Cris’ supernatural ability is any more interesting than his strange coiffure, given the general silliness of this adventure. The special power Cris possesses makes him desirable to FBI agent Ferris (Julianne Moore), who wants him to help the feds locate a nuke scheduled to be detonated in downtown L.A. by a multicultural group of terrorists without any apparent motives. Fearing that if he cooperates, the government will never let him return to his life, Cris flees with a woman (Jessica Biel) whose future he can see into for more than the usual 120 seconds. Director Lee Tamahori treats his material’s paranormal elements with as much respect as possible given the general illogicality of his prophesy-focused scenario. And his action sequences – such as Cris anticipating punches during a fight, or dodging logs during a sprint down a hillside – have a cheesy energy and humor that isn’t diminished by sub-par CG effects. All the while, a thoroughly miscast Moore vainly strives to convey hardass authority as a stereotypical no-nonsense law enforcement agent, though it’s Cage’s hair and Biel’s lips that ultimately carry most of the acting load.

A Little Bit of Everything

This weekend's collection of links features, among other things, one ringing endorsement (The Band's Visit), somewhat surprised praise (The Mist), less-surprised disappointment (Fred Claus), and unfettered negativity (The Savages). Which means there's probably something for everyone.

Now Playing:
Fred Claus (Slant magazine)

Playing Soon:
The Band's Visit (Slant magazine)
The Mist (Slant magazine)
The Savages (Slant magazine)
This Christmas (Slant magazine)
Midnight Eagle (Slant magazine)