Lessons of Darkness

Monday-rama

I'm once again playing catch-up, thanks to a busy weekend of non-work-related craziness. Thus, here's my latest Sandbox column as well as some new reviews, including my disappointed take on Rob Zombie's Halloween II.

The Sandbox: The Case for Remaking Games (IFC News)

Out Now:
Halloween II (Slant magazine)
Big Fan (Slant magazine)
At the Edge of the World (Slant magazine) 

Recovery

I'm still attempting to recuperate from this weekend's various festivities, so no chit-chat for this belated link dump.

Out Now:
World's Greatest Dad (Slant magazine)
My One and Only (Slant magazine)
Post Grad (Slant magazine)
X Games 3D: The Movie (Slant magazine)

Still Walking (2009): B+

Still Walking has a modesty that’s apt to be mistaken for slightness, as Hirokazu Kore-eda’s (After Life, Nobody Knows) tale of a day-and-night familial reunion has such a patient, tranquil surface that it’s easy to overlook the complex interpersonal dynamics at play. Indebted to the domestic-strife dramas of both Ozu and Naruse, Kore-eda’s latest assembles two generations of the Yokoyama clan on the anniversary of the oldest son’s death, a wound that’s yet to heal and which proves the most pressing (though hardly the only) cause of both adults and children’s anger, resentment and sorrow. With the action confined to the parents’ cramped living quarters, Kore-eda creates an affecting claustrophobia in tune with the oppressive emotions stifling his characters. While his direction can at times be a tad wooden and inexpressive, his avoidance of overt flourishes – save for a clunky bit of butterfly symbolism – nonetheless maintains primary focus on his subtly simmering conflicts. The director neither wholly condemns nor absolves of responsibility any of his subjects, all of whom are burdened by their own unrealized expectations for others. The family’s nurturing mother (a wonderful Kirin Kiki) is prone to blunt, callous, judgmental asides about her kids, and the surviving son’s (Horoshi Abe) suppressed fury at his pompous retired doctor father – who disapproves of his offspring’s non-medical profession – is complicated by his own absence of a backbone. Still Walking can be a tad obvious in laying out its tangled relationships but its sincere consideration of its characters’ longing for acceptance and approval – as well as its pinpoint accumulation of household and cooking details – rings true, right up to a conclusion that wordlessly expresses the inextricable if often unwanted influence parents have on their progeny.

Inglourious Basterds (2009): A-

Quentin Tarantino’s cinema has always been one of authorial wish-fulfillment, his gangsters’ pop culture-inflected tough talk, his African-American badasses’ use of the n-word, and his fetishistic love of fierce femininity (and women’s feet) all reflections of their maker’s deeply rooted concerns and compulsions. QT’s work is the lens through which his own desires (and innumerable movie influences) are refracted, and thus Inglourious Basterds is something close to an ideal Tarantino flick, an impertinent and often tasteless epic that rewrites WII history as a fairy tale (“Once upon a time…” it begins) for gonzo genre kicks and, in doing so, articulates its maker’s faith in film’s capacity for self-expression. With his crazily revisionist tale of a group of ass-kicking Jewish-American secret agents rolling through Nazi Germany collecting Kraut scalps with a viciousness equal to that of their enemies, Tarantino reconfigures the past as a rollicking prank. And yet, he also does so as a means of demonstrating cinema’s preeminent might and its status as a vehicle for realizing personal (and, here, communal) fantasies, with his alterna-historical take on the fall of the Third Reich functioning, first and foremost, as the director’s tribute to his chosen medium.

All of which, admittedly, makes Inglourious Basterds sound like an academic slog, and countless critics have found its structure – a series of long discussions punctuated by gunfire and/or brutality that bucks the tradition of QT’s Dirty Dozen and spaghetti Western influences, but is in tune with his own chit-chatty oeuvre – meandering and slack. Yet unlike the draggy opening half of Death Proof or the indulgences of Kill Bill, here QT’s protracted conversational set pieces aren’t merely self-satisfied show-offs; his dialogues serve to develop character, tweak convention, and still uphold his wartime predecessors’ thrill-first modus operandi by building tension with meticulous precision. Rarely have QT’s talk-a-thons seemed so primed to explode, beginning with [spoilers follow] a tour-de-force of sustained suspense in which a French dairy farmer in 1941 is visited by Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), nicknamed “The Jew Hunter,” who’s in search of the region’s one Semitic family that has escaped his grasp. Exuding a geniality and good humor that belies his coldblooded inclinations, Waltz is terrifyingly chilling. As continues to be the case throughout Inglourious Basterds, though, it’s Tarantino’s poised visual schema (striking shot-countershots; deft use of slow motion; pans, such as one around Landa and the farmer, that convey shifting upper-hand dynamics) and brash narrative structure (primarily long scenes and flashbacks, at least two of which get blaxploitation narration from Samuel L. Jackson) that create edge-of-your-seat tension.

That electricity continues once Tarantino flash-forwards four years to shift attention to bifurcated points of interest: the Basterds, a ragtag crew led by Tennessee-bred Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), and Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish beauty who, having escaped Landa years prior, now runs a Parisian movie palace where Goebbels’ (Sylvester Groth) latest celluloid propaganda Nation’s Pride will premiere in front of the Third Reich’s high command, including the Führur (Martin Wuttke). How these parallel strands meet is a slowly unraveling mystery. Inglourious Basterds, however, gets most of its juice from moment-to-moment showdowns, whether it’s between Raine’s Basterds – which include The Office’s B.J. Novak and Hostel director Eli Roth as the baseball bat-wielding “Bear Jew” – and captured Nazi soldiers, or between undercover agents and a grinning Gestapo cretin at a basement tavern. This last sequence is one of Tarantino’s career apexes, a nail-biter of such formal assuredness and escalating anxiety that the pleasure of being strung along its minefield of cloak-and-dagger maneuvers is only matched by the scene’s underlying meta self-consciousness. The German actress-turned-double-agent (Diane Kruger), the Brit spy who was previously a P.W. Pabst-expert film critic (Michael Fassbender), the group’s pop culture-centric drinking game, the tête-à-tête’s element of deceptive performance – all of these facets potently convey Tarantino’s sense of film as a paradigm-shifting weapon, and as an instrument of making manifest outrageous pulp (revenge) fantasies.

In Inglourious Basterds, Hitler attends the film premiere because he recognizes the art form’s ability to inspire, Raine and company make reference to the theatrical nature of their work (via comments about baseball and Carnegie Hall), and Shosanna plots to end the war herself via highly flammable nitrate film stocks. While Tarantino’s cine-commentary is ubiquitous, it’s never intrusive or inapt, and as the story rolls towards its gleefully cathartic B-movie finale, the material even seems slightly at-odds with itself. The director’s giddy films-are-powerful pronouncements soon become juxtaposed with a faint but nonetheless present melancholy and anger – seen in the vengeful eyes of Roth’s Bear Jew as he doles out Hitler’s death sentence – over the recognition that no amount of clever cinematic tomfoolery can truly undo what’s done. Simultaneous celebration and critique, Inglourious Basterds nonetheless eventually favors the former over the latter, culminating in the image of a cackling face projected on a screen engulfed in flames (celluloid as righteous cleansing hellfire!) that exhilaratingly encapsulates Tarantino’s belief in the movies’ capacity to locate and communicate those things he and we think, feel, crave. It is, in a word, glourious.

Funny People (2009): C+

A cardboard theater standee for Funny People in which its unsmiling cast poses in front of mosaic-of-life snapshots above the text “The Third Film From the Writer/Director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up” tempts one to turn and flee this Very Important Movie from reigning cinematic comedy kingpin Judd Apatow. And true to its advertising, Apatow’s third turn behind the camera takes itself far more seriously than its predecessors, striving for deep, mature commentary on life, comedy and its practitioners amidst an avalanche of the director’s trademark cock-and-balls jokes. Nonetheless, this step toward grown-up seriousness isn’t, it turns out, a wholly misguided one, at least up until a bloated third act whose indulgent aimlessness is the direct result of Apatow searching, in vain, for a way to profoundly comment on mortality, the fleeting nature of opportunities, and the excitement and loneliness of a showbiz life.

Funny People stars Adam Sandler as film comedian George Simmons, a prick who’s made a mint starring in crap and now lives a miserable life in his Hollywood mansion screwing beauties who don’t like him and pitifully searching for human contact via chitchat with the maid. George is a fictional take on the real Sandler as well as an apparent vision of what Apatow fears he’ll become, a future-self juxtaposed by the past-self embodied by Seth Rogen’s Ira Wright, an up-and-coming stand-up comic to whom George, after learning that he’s terminally ill, takes a shine. George’s ominous blood disease leads him toward introspection and reconciliation, primarily with Laura (Apatow’s wife Leslie Mann), aka the love who got away, a self-reflective journey of reckoning with personal failures that’s complemented by bits involving Ira and his pals (Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman) that play like a more muted, industry-centric version of the guys-guys sequences from Knocked Up.

One-liners are delivered with a tentative hesitancy that makes manifest the thin line between humor and the anger, sadness and regret that fuel it. And Apatow’s humanist dramedy and both-sides-of-the-coin celeb life portrait often makes up for its shakiness with blunt sincerity and lead performances that, modeled in part after the actors’ own careers, cut reasonably close to the bone. But then, a prolonged visit by George and Ira to married-with-kids Laura’s home hurls the film into a tailspin from which recovery is next to impossible. This distended sequence may be the writer/director’s rebuke to traditional comedic pacing and clichés (the latter via its inversion of the classic race-to-the-airport climax). Yet in its home stretch, Funny People’s action drags so unnecessarily that it not only drains any impact from its refreshingly pragmatic view of second chances and one’s ability to truly change, but inadvertently eats up time that would have been better allocated to its thoroughly shortchanged conclusion.

Timing Out

This week's round-up features my newest Sandbox column for IFC News, Slant magazine reviews of District 9 and The Time Traveler's Wife, and my debut feature for Time Out New York, a primer on the work of Hayao Miyazaki timed to the release of his latest, Ponyo.

The Illustrated Man (Time Out New York)
The Sandbox: The Trouble with Cutscenes (IFC News)

Out Now:
District 9 (Slant magazine)
The Time Traveler's Wife (Slant magazine)
I Sell the Dead (Slant magazine)

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009): C

Basically Team America: World Police played straight and minus the political edge, Stephen Sommers’ G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra has everything an adolescent boy might crave: buff, fearless soldiers, plentiful gunfire and explosions, and opposing objects of horndog desire in the form of buxom redhead do-gooder Scarlett (Rachel Nichols) and svelte brunette vixen Baroness (Sienna Miller). Encased in skin-tight black leather that only breathes through a cleavage-revealing slit, Miller in particular is a hormonal teenager’s wet dream made real. Her baddie provides the requisite erotic charge to go alongside director Sommers’ incessant CG mayhem, which is surprisingly graphic (no obligatory shots of parachuting-to-safety pilots à la the cartoon) and features enough high-tech sci-fi military hardware – voice-controlled jets, rocket-equipped Hummers, super-powering Acceleration Suits – to make Michael Bay salivate with jealousy. G.I. Joe concerns the titular covert international military squad’s battle with a Scottish weapons dealer (Christopher Eccleston) and his scientist (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who have personal grudges against hunky new Joe recruit Duke (Channing Tatum). Nonetheless, story particulars, most of which have to do with nanomachines, are of little importance. Rather, the focus is first and foremost on rock-‘em-sock-‘em clichés, so many of which were parodied by Matt Parker and Trey Stone’s aforementioned puppet blockbuster – macho posturing, a wheelchair-bound unit commander, team members’ sexual repartee, the destruction of good guy HQ, the annihilation of the Eiffel Tower – that Sommers seems to have used that film as a virtual template. While G.I. Joe’s mimicry of Team America may confirm that parody’s astuteness, it also proves the durability of said tropes, if only in the hearts and minds of middle-schoolers. Although given how vapid, monotonous, and cheesy Sommers’ computer-enhanced, personality-deprived saga ultimately proves, it’s hard to imagine even my Joe-loving nine-year-old self being anything more than moderately diverted by this feature-length Hasbro toy commercial.