Lessons of Darkness

City of Men (2007): C

Paulo Morelli’s City of Men revisits the Rio de Janeiro favelas of Fernando Meirellas’ City of God, and like that supremely over-heralded 2002 film, it utilizes its slum locale not for inquisitive sociological inquiry but blah melodrama and stereotypical gangster histrionics. Morelli ostensibly wants to place greater emphasis on his characters than Meirellas did, meaning that he borrows his predecessor’s luridly flamboyant cinematographic signatures but shows slightly more restraint in employing them. Still, that hardly changes the fact that his tale’s interest in the tangled web of relationships and emotions surrounding two fatherless 18-year-old men is less than its infatuation with a guns-a-blazin’ gang war between rival crews of murderous thugs. No doubt things are awful in the favelas, yet Morelli’s tale of fathers, brothers and sons is a jumble of corny plot incidents – none more so than Ace (Douglas Silva) accidentally forgetting his toddler son at the beach – and flashy firefights, all of which are amplified by the director’s cheap, garish mise-en-scéne. City of Men presumes to be about young men’s struggles to survive – and escape – a home where forces out of their control exert continuing negative influence. However, between Morelli’s contrived plotting and empty aesthetics, all the film really proves is that God’s cruddy, exploit-rather-than-enlighten legacy continues.

The Messengers (2007): C-

What’s the point of making a horror film if you can’t even manage a single scare or unsettling moment? That’s the only intriguing topic of conversation prompted by The Messengers, the derivative-at-every-turn English-language debut of The Pang Brothers (Bangkok Dangerous, The Eye). Thanks to older daughter Jess’ (Kristen Stewart) unspecified bad behavior, a father (Dylan McDermott) and mother (Penelope Ann Miller) move their clan from Chicago to a dilapidated farmhouse in North Dakota, where their mute infant son begins seeing creepy crawly ghosts. Jess soon does too, though darn it, mom and dad just don’t believe her! What’s a teenage girl to do? How about freak out, vainly enlist the help of a cute local guy, and wait until the film gets to a third act in which the shit hits the fan so thoroughly that everyone must accept her outrageous claims about malevolent specters. The Pangs’ refusal to immediately reveal Jess’ relocation-prompting delinquent crime generates more mystery than their actual ghost story, which turns out to be merely a lame J-horror rehash that can’t even effectively utilize The X-Files’ sinister Cigarette Smoking Man, William B. Davis. Between the wretched dialogue, obvious red herrings, mundane effects work, and dearth of noteworthy set pieces, the only message worth relaying about The Messengers is: Avoid.

Seven Day Timeout

I'll be taking a brief hiatus from my regular critic duties next week to - gasp! - actually enjoy a family vacation. Consequently, to tide loyal readers over until my return, here's a new collection of review links, including one for my quite positive write-up of David Mamet's upcoming Redbelt.

Now:
The Spiderwick Chronicles (Slant magazine)
Definitely, Maybe (Slant magazine)
Ezra (Slant magazine)
The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (Slant magazine)
In Bruges (Slant magazine)
Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins (Slant magazine)

Later:
Redbelt (Slant magazine)
Dark Matter (Slant magazine)
The Unknown Woman (Slant magazine)

The Duchess of Langeais (2007): C+

According to an interview included in the film’s press notes, 79-year-old Jacques Rivette sought a visual style for The Duchess of Langeais (aka Don’t Touch the Axe) that mirrored the prose style of his source material, a novella by Andre Balzac. Not being a specialist on the acclaimed realist author, I can’t assess whether this aim is successfully realized, but the lush, expressive cinematographic design of Rivette’s latest is not enough to energize his torpid early 19th-century tale of frustrated romance. There’s much to admire in the abstract about Rivette’s style, from his gorgeously refined compositions, to his measured camera pans, to his use of windows and doorways as thematically charged framing devices. But the more concrete reaction elicited by Duchess – a theatrically staged story about the ill-fated back-and-forth romantic games played by French general Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu) and the Duchess Antoinette de Langeais (Jeanne Balibar) – is trying tedium, as the French master resolutely seeks to generate pent-up passion and tension by avoiding any ounce of liveliness (or even breathing space). Well acted and aesthetically attractive, the film remains by and large inert, doing less to rouse the mind or heart than to simply stir up an urge to check one’s watch.

Black Sabbath (1963): A-

Mario Bava pays respect to his influential horror forefathers by having Boris Karloff act as host for – and star in one segment of – Black Sabbath (aka The Three Faces of Fear), a triptych of terrifying tales that reportedly was the Italian director’s favorite work. It’s certainly his most well known, and with good reason, considering its wealth of iconically chilling sights and luxurious, suspenseful cinematography. Obsession, greed, madness and hunger (of both a sexual and carnivorous variety) mark the film’s three stories: the first (“The Telephone”) concerns a woman tormented by increasingly menacing phone calls; the second (“The Wurdulak”) details a vampire crisis that engulfs a rural family and a wayward traveler; and the third “(A Drop of Water”) charts the deadly consequences of a nurse’s disrespectful covetousness. The dexterity Bava exhibits across these quite distinct narratives is somewhat astounding, from the lurid colors and serpentine camera pans of his giallo-ish opener, to the palpable suspense and gothic beauty of his triumphant Karloff-headlined second story, to the EC Comics-style spookiness of his concluding entry, which features a corpse whose undead smile is unforgettable. Black Sabbath is a gem of stunning visuals, but more fundamentally, it’s also – like the rest of his finest films – an exemplar of expressionistic visual storytelling.

Diary of the Dead (2007): B+

Less a fourth installment in his illustrious zombie series than a parallel-universe reboot, George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead depicts a modern-day outbreak of hungry undead through the prism of film student Jason Creed’s (Joshua Close) video camera. Comparisons to the 9/11-exploiting Cloverfield are inevitable but the more cogent analogy is with Brian DePalma’s Redacted, though Romero’s first-person aesthetic is tighter and his critique of the Iraq war (and the news media’s coverage of it) is significantly more astute. An introductory scene featuring Jason and his pals making a horror film in the woods as a senior class project nicely needles genre conventions, right down to the inclusion of a disaffected British professor less interested in grades than booze. Yet once news of paranormal phenomena begins circulating, Diary – which is presented as Jason’s film about the crisis (titled The Death of Death) – merges its meta-cinema concerns with allegorical commentary about the individual and collective toll of our current overseas campaign, the self-validating narcissism of our document-everything-and-upload-it-online culture, and the subjectivity (and unreliability) of the moving image. Unfortunately, that latter point isn’t allowed to trickle out of the action proper but is, instead, loudly and repetitively articulated, from Jason saying “The camera’s the thing!” to his girlfriend/editor Debra (the largely unbearable Michelle Morgan) twice claiming that if something isn’t photographed, it doesn’t exist. When married to his cast’s generally amateurish performances, Romero’s preference for making thematic arguments through awkward dialogue exposition – while somewhat true to the egomaniacal mode of confessional communication seen in everything from The Real World to the latest YouTube clip – threatens to undermine his stinging portrait of the media’s dwindling competence for transmitting truth. That it doesn’t is due in large part to Romero’s expert, guerilla-style HD craftsmanship, his knack for repeatedly generating and sustaining tension, and, ultimately, his versatile ability to deliver both a blisteringly pessimistic final image regarding humanity’s capacity for vileness in times of chaos, as well as a riotous (and strangely touching) sequence involving a bomb-throwing deaf Amish badass.

Black Sunday (1960): A-

A crossbreed of Universal’s 1930s scarefests and Hammer Films’ then-contemporary monster mashes, 1960’s Black Sunday (aka The Mask of Satan) introduced the world to Italian maestro Mario Bava and screen siren Barbara Steele, and remains one of the cinema’s preeminent examples of gothic horror. Bava’s first directorial effort after years working as cinematographer to, among others, Jacques Tourneur and Raoul Walsh is a sumptuous black-and-white spectacle, a moody, chilling tale of a vampire witch (Steele) who, accidentally resurrected after 200 years of forced slumber, attempts to possess the body of her identical-looking descendent. Bava’s plotting is reasonably tight but Black Sunday isn’t about narrative deftness but atmosphere – specifically, a dreamy blend of ominous terror and fiery eroticism embodied by the striking, statuesque Steele. And what lingers long after the film’s specific plot points have faded from memory are its images – a shot from Steele’s point of view as the spiked Mask of Satan descends onto her face; a glimpse of her reanimating villainess’ fleshy, meaty body; the sight of a demonic coachman lashing steeds as his carriage hurtles along against a stormy sky – which feel as if they’d been ripped straight out of a nightmare.

Super! Super! Super!

It's Super Bowl Sunday, and just about time for the nation to begin getting its collective drink on. Thus, I'll keep this short and sweet: five new reviews, two of them positive, three of them not-so-much. Enjoy.

In Theaters:
The Eye (2008) (Slant magazine)
Over Her Dead Body (Slant magazine)
Praying with Lior (Cinematical)

Coming Soon:
The Bank Job (Slant magazine)
All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (Slant magazine)