Lessons of Darkness

Fest-ing, Once Again

The first week of New York Film Festival press screenings is over, and I'm already wiped. Still, at least there have been a few films to recommend, including three of the four review-linked below (and especially Tony Manero, which is really something else).

Keep an eye out for more fest reviews in the coming days, for (among others) The Class and Happy-Go-Lucky, as well as my write-up of Fernando Meirelles' über-self-important Blindness.

Now:
Ghost Town (Slant magazine)
Igor (Slant magazine)

Later:
Religulous (Slant magazine)
The Lucky Ones (Slant magazine)

NYFF:
Tony Manero (Slant magazine)
Wendy and Lucy (Slant magazine)
The Windmill Movie (Slant magazine)
Waltz with Bashir (Slant magazine)

Burn After Reading (2008): B+

Superficially, Burn After Reading – a spy spoof about a bunch of nitwits knee-deep in baffling espionage – couldn’t have less in common with the Coen Brothers’ previous, Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. Yet as it smoothly segues from one goofy scenario to another, the surface foolishness of the Coens’ latest feels like a carefully designed bit of misdirection aimed at masking another tale of lonely, aimless people urgently in search of companionship, money – as in No Country, greed is the narrative’s prime impetus – and, fundamentally, dominion over a world that seems to be madly spinning out of control. When a CD created by recently fired CIA analyst Osborne (John Malkovich) is obtained by gym employees Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt), Linda sees it as an opportunity to get the cash she needs for reconstructive surgery. Osborne’s estranged ice queen wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) and her married treasury department paramour Harry (George Clooney) all figure into the rambling, convoluted story, which has a liveliness that implies comedy but a lingering sense of melancholy that hints at deeper motives. Burn After Reading’s stars bring screwball verve to their respective roles, with Malkovich in particular capturing hilarious indignation at the world’s random unjustness during his getting-fired introduction. Yet what resonates most forcefully is the sorrow underlying the Coens’ bright, bouncy, efficient mise-en-scène, from the look of desperation in McDormand’s overly cheery eyes to the directors’ finale, in which J.K. Simmons’ perplexed CIA head honcho listens in disbelief to a report about these various characters’ ignominious fates, most of which – in a nod to No Country’s controversy-inciting device – occur, like so much inconsequential nothing, off-screen.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Lou Adler

In 1981, famed music producer Lou Adler - fresh off the success of having directed Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke - made Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, a rough-and-tumble music-industry critique about an all-girl punk band's rise and fall. Virtually no one saw it, because Paramount never gave it a proper theatrical or VHS release. Nonetheless, its legacy endured thanks to bootlegs and TV broadcasts on USA Network's "Up All Night," and now, Rhino has seen fit to put the film out on DVD. To commemorate this long-in-the-making event, I spoke with Mr. Adler for IFC News.

Lou Adler on Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (IFC News)

Forever Strong (2008): C-

Because no sport should be deprived the inspirational Hollywood treatment, rugby finally gets a chance to take center screen courtesy of Forever Strong, a based-on-actual-events tale of a punk who, through an unlikely turn of events, winds up playing rugby for the hated rivals of his high school team, which is coached by his demanding father. Not to call into question the veracity of David Pliler’s script, but Ryan Little’s film is twaddle of the first order, offering up tropes from a variety of subgenres – CW-channel teens living the Gossip Girl party lifestyle, CW-channel teens in juvenile prison, tense father-son conflicts, an uplifting athletic narrative – with the usual flash and sizzle one has come to expect from such material. The only new twist provided here is rugby itself, a game which gets next to no national (or, for that matter, local) coverage and, thus, lends the proceedings some moderate novelty. Until, that is, director Little makes clear – by about his second heavily edited rugby match – that he has no interest in elucidating the basic ground rules (much less the finer details) of his chosen sport, thereby sapping his centerpiece competitions of any coherent suspense and unwisely focusing attention back on his story’s cornucopia of clichés.

In Salt Lake City, Utah, Rick Penning (Never Back Down’s Rick Faris) is a rugby star at odds with his coach father (Neal McDonough), the type of creep who orders players to perform cheap shots on opponents and doesn’t shake hands with rival coaches after games. In Forever Strong’s imaginary universe, rugby players are the most good-looking and popular kids around, spending their free time boozing it up with a harem of giggling hotties. This carefree existence, however, comes to a crashing halt for Penning when he decides to drink and drive with his girlfriend after a night of shirtless poolside revelry. After Penning smashes his convertible into a fence, the film provides the image of his girlfriend tangled up in barbed wire like dead meat, though as this is a PG-13 fable rather than a realistic drama, it turns out that she’s okay (save for a scarred cheek), meaning Penning doesn’t go straight to the big house but, instead, is sentenced to serve a year in a juvenile detention center. There, he meets prison ward Marcus (Sean Astin), who takes an interest in his newest charge and, after learning of Penning’s interest in rugby, dangles the promise of an early release if Penning agrees to try out for the famed Highland Rugby squad, whose trademark pre-game ritual is the iconic Maori Haka war dance.

Given that Highland is the arch rival of Penning’s high school team, and that coach Larry Gelwix (Gary Cole) demands that his players uphold the virtues of honesty, integrity and hard work, the arrogant, selfish Penning initially bristles at this plan. Penning rebels against Gelwix and his system (by secretly taking Vicodin), before being convinced by his new teammates – who just aren’t going to give up on him, gosh darn it! – that there’s real substance to their on and off-field activities (which include planting trees at a hospital and visiting with kids in the cancer ward), and that his me-first attitude must be replaced by respect for both himself and others. A few squabbles later, Penning comes around to the idea, realizing that Gelwix’s aim to churn out championship men as well as championship athletes might actually benefit his sorry self. Contrived corniness abounds, right up to the late revelation that Penning’s dad used to play for – and blames a career-ending injury on – Gelwix, which adds further complications to the film’s predetermined path to redemption, familial reconciliation, and athletic glory, all of which is given a superficially snazzy sun-dappled sheen by director Little.

Along the way, Forever Strong refuses to clue us into rugby fundamentals and provides game action shot in shaky, smeary close-ups, thereby turning the matches into displays of confusing movement and noise that are of little consequence. Still, if its sports sequences – which, in the national championship game, also involve the evil plans of Penning’s former friend and teammate Lars (Penn Badgley) – are tiresomely jumbled, they’re no more ineffective than the human drama on display. Though he handles his part with reasonable aplomb, Cole’s caring, levelheaded mentor routine has been done approximately five thousand times before, right down to the maxim-peppered speeches he delivers during workouts and before games. Whereas Cole at least imbues his stock character with a touch of recognizable humanity, Faris does little more than sporadically flash his six-pack abs and display his limited range of overblown glower-grimace-smile expressions, which bear a striking resemblance to those employed by Tom Cruise. They both, however, fare better than McDonough, whose thankless role as the severe, unyielding daddy Penning is so embarrassingly, unbelievably over-the-top cold, it turns the story’s underlying father-son dynamic into a virtual parody of itself.

Choke (2008): C+

Mixing nihilistic wit, stringent social satire and jagged pathos, Chuck Palahniuk’s writing has a tendency to careen wildly between bracing mordancy and messy, faux-shocking salaciousness. For a time, Clark Gregg’s adaptation of the Fight Club author’s Choke delivers enough of the former to compensate for the latter as it focuses on the plight of Victor (Sam Rockwell), a shaggy ne’er-do-well sex addict with a masturbation-crazed best friend named Denny (Brad William Henke) and a dementia-addled mother named Ida (Anjelica Huston), as well as growing feelings for mom’s doctor Paige (Kelly Macdonald). Victor is a slovenly cretin whose main tactic for finding love involves deliberately choking in restaurants so others will save him, and Rockwell imbues him with sarcastic guttersnipe scuzziness that’s rooted in anger and resentment at his psychotic druggie mother, who during his youth would habitually kidnap him from his foster parents to accompany her on lunatic adventures. With a wiseass smirk that masks acute pain, Rockwell makes Victor’s porno-lounge-lizard debauchery downright endearing. Choke’s bouncy narrative, however, quickly turns muddled, failing to find a consistent rhythm – or a visual style (à la David Fincher’s Fight Club) that might match the material’s nasty, hyperactive vigorousness – as it transitions between present-day sex-therapy sessions, Victor’s twisted relationship with Denny and Paige, insinuations of Victor’s divine lineage, and flashbacks to his childhood that lack the scope necessary to fully convey the source of his maternal issues. Palahniuk’s caustic humor translates most sharply in to-hell-with-everything Victor’s daily grind at a colonial America park. Yet aside from a few choice sequences, Gregg’s script largely comes up short on the transgressive or poignant front, offering up mundane “extreme” bits of nastiness and half-baked sentimentality that aren’t offset (much less electrified) by the filmmaker’s straightforward direction.

Sunday Night Link-orama

The New York Film Festival begins its press screening marathon tomorrow, so keep an eye out for reviews of a number of (supposedly) big titles in the coming weeks. In the meantime, however, here are links to my recent reviews.

Now Playing:
Righteous Kill (Slant magazine)
Flow: For Love of Water (Cinematical)
Bangkok Dangerous (2008) (Slant magazine)
August Evening (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:
Battle in Seattle (Slant magazine)
Humboldt County (Slant magazine)

Towelhead (2007): C-

Alan Ball returns to nasty, vile, repressed suburbia with Towelhead, an adaptation of Alicia Erian’s novel that the American Beauty writer fashions into another cartoonishly broad, repulsive vision of middle-class life. In a cookie-cutter Texas planned community in the early ‘90s (an arbitrary time frame employed mainly for its slightly dated outfits), thirteen-year-old Arab-American Jasira (a understated Summer Bishil) finds herself the sexual object of desire for both her Army reserve neighbor – husband and father Travis Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart) – as well as an African-American classmate named Thomas (Eugene Jones III) who pursues Jasira after apologizing for calling her “sand-nigger.” Seemingly every man wants to fondle, screw and/or shave the pubic hairs of Jasira, and Ball goes a very small way toward suggesting that these men’s relationships with her function as a means of channeling racist and chauvinistic urges. Towelhead, however, is first and foremost a grotesquerie. And thus, it subsumes any investigation of the way intolerance and perversion inform erotic desire – or the way that Jasira conflates this sexual attention with love and acceptance, which aren’t provided by her abusive Lebanese father Rifat (Peter Macdissi) – in favor of presenting a cavalcade of ugly caricatures fit for sensationalized scenarios. Ball attempts to prove himself an equal-opportunity offender by casting all of his characters (save for Toni Collette’s pregnant earth-mother and her conveniently Arabic-fluent husband) as noxious. Yet given that his plot generally strives for either pseudo-shocking graphicness (bloody tampons, bloody panties, porn fantasies) or wannabe-scathing “comedy” (involving Gulf War I, oil, scary black people) – two modes that frustrate rather than facilitate any real engagement with the racial/gender/cultural issues lurking beneath the surface – the film turns out to be merely a stridently reductive portrait of the messy clash between puberty and prejudice.

Gomorrah (2008): A-

Delivering social-realism tension without once dipping its toes into mobster-glorification waters, Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah – adapted from Roberto Saviano’s bestselling tome – is a tough, cynical, blistering fictionalized study of the Camorra crime organization that controls much of Naples (as well as wields worldwide influence, including having contributed money to the reconstruction of the World Trade Centers). The vicious, insidious grip that Camorra holds over the region is imparted via five plots (some overlapping) that comprise Garrone’s narrative, which traces a variety of Italians as they attempt to navigate lives either inside or outside the mafia. Garrone doesn’t bother with in-depth characterizations, but that’s not to say that the film’s players are shallow stick figures. Rather, each is cast as something of a pawn in a game over which they hold next to no control, whether it be an aged bagman who delivers cash payments to ordinary citizens on behalf of his Camorra bosses, the veteran tailor who chooses (at great personal peril) to covertly train Chinese clothes makers in his spare time, or two young thugs who find a weapons cache and decide to hazardously live out their Scarface dreams. With a journalistic rigor and expansiveness that recalls that of HBO’s The Wire (albeit on a considerably smaller scale), Gomorrah details the across-the-board pervasiveness of the criminal outfit’s supremacy, which grows not from one central power nucleus but from a variety of associated sources intricately tied up in basic societal foundations. Camorra’s infiltration of Naples’ cultural and political infrastructure is linked by the sensationalism-free script to the organization’s practice of illegally dumping toxic waste into landfills – a corruption of the land that’s in tune with Camorra’s corruption of communal order and young, malleable kids. Naples is depicted as a decaying cesspool populated by the damned, and walkway-lined housing projects, resembling crumbling pyramids, are the epicenter of much of the action involving men hurtling headlong to deaths that are presented with chilly, just-another-day-in-hell banality. Garrone’s rugged handheld cinematography is rooted in the Italian neo-realist tradition, while his multistrand story somewhat recalls that of Robert Altman’s larger overviews, a stylistic synthesis that, in the assured director’s hands, gives hard-hitting weight, vigor and scope to his grim portrait of a modern world falling fast into ruin.

(2008 New York Film Festival)

Elite Squad (2007): C

Failing to fulfill the promise of his stunning 2002 documentary Bus 174, José Padilha succumbs to monotonous, hollow flamboyance with his City of God clone Elite Squad. Co-written by God scribe Bráulio Mantovani, Padilha’s film peeks into Rio de Janeiro’s crime-ridden slums via the viewpoint of the police and, specifically, the BOPE special forces unit that fascistically combats crime and recruits members via a dehumanizing training system. Padilha strives to complicate his portrait of the unit as murderous, torturing thugs by focusing on Nascimento (Wagner Moura), a high-strung BOPE captain desperate to find his replacement and leave the BOPE and whose tense home life with a pregnant wife reveals the toll his profession takes on his psyche. Padilha, however, can’t let his narrative speak for itself, structuring the film around Nascimento’s dreary (and detachment-fostering) narration, which explicitly explains not only every one of his thoughts, emotions and motivations, but also those of the two recruits – wild man Neto (Caio Junqueira) and law student Matias (Andre Ramiro) – whom he hopes will assume his position. Through Matias’ relationship with a liberal, activist schoolmate (as well as his clunky classroom arguments), Elite Squad schematically lays out the racial and economic issues inherent in Rio’s problems. Such topics, however, are deprived of any gravity by the director’s entertain-first, edify-second decision to paint his uniformly schematic, unsympathetic characters – who, whether they be cops, the poor, dealers, or pot-smoking students, are all fingered as culpable for the city’s troubles – in one coarse shade. And the film’s aim to be a Latin American Battle of Algiers is sabotaged by Padilha’s flashy sub-Fernando Meirelles aesthetic (extreme color palette, whiplash handheld cinematography, spastic editing), which reveals a desire not for profound inquiry into serious subject matter but, rather, for base titillation.

The Grand (2007): B

Unlike Incident at Loch Ness, no knowledge of Werner Herzog’s career is required to fully appreciate screenwriter Zak Penn’s sophomore directorial effort The Grand. Respectfully sending up the professional poker tournaments that crowd ESPN’s various networks, Penn’s loose, semi-improvised story takes place at the titular contest, where a variety of colorful characters compete for a $10 million purse. It’s a familiar Christopher Guest mockumentary structure that Penn parlays into a series of uneven vignettes featuring a cast of notables, from Cheryl Hines and David Cross as competing siblings, to Ray Romano as Hines’ fantasy football-loving husband, to Dennis Farina as a suave old-school gambler, to Woody Harrelson as a drug-addled moron intent on using his winnings to buy back the Vegas casino that was bequeathed to him by his grandfather and which he lost in a haze of coke, heroin and LSD. The Grand’s ridicule is soft and its narrative proper is mere gossamer. Still, for every scene that goes nowhere – and there are more than a few – there’s some comedy gold lurking around the corner, in most cases courtesy of either Chris Parnell as a socially retarded, Dune-obsessed math wizard who talks in bizarre robotic cadences, or Werner Herzog as a frightening nutcase known as The German who claims that coffee is a “beverage of the cowards” and who explains, while cradling a white bunny on his lap, that he gains personal strength from killing an animal a day.