Lessons of Darkness

Fest-acular

Thanks to a busy work schedule and a young daughter whose illness has led to many recent sleepless nights, this latest link dump is - big surprise! - late. Nonetheless, it's got lots of goodness, from new NYFF (and Time Out New York) reviews, to my most recent Sandbox column, to a podcast I was happy to do with Greencine Daily editor extraordinaire Aaron Hillis and the Filmbrain himself, Andrew Grant. Enjoy.

The Sandbox: When Corporations Collide (IFC News)

NYFF '09 PODCAST: Wild Grass + NYFF Preview (Greencine Daily)

Out Now:

Pandorum (Slant magazine)
Coco Before Chanel (Slant magazine)
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (Slant magazine)
Intimate Enemies (Slant magazine)
The Blue Tooth Virgin (Time Out New York)

NYFF:
Broken Embraces (Slant magazine)
The Red Riding Trilogy (Slant magazine)
Lebanon (Slant magazine)
Sweetgrass (Slant magazine)
Ghost Town (Slant magazine)
Hadwijch (Slant magazine)

Sunday Morning Round-Up

The New York Film Festival is now in full swing, meaning lots of new reviews will be appearing here over the coming three weeks. Before that deluge begins, however, here's my latest collection of stuff, including three new pieces for Time Out New York.

Out Now:
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (TONY)
I Can Do Bad All By Myself (TONY)
Fatal Promises (TONY)
Paris (Slant magazine)
Fuel (Slant magazine)

Bright Star (2009): B

A period piece typified by restraint, delicacy and the romantic spirit of its renowned subject, Jane Campion’s Bright Star details the amorous three-year affair of 19th-century poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Cornish). In keeping with Campion’s career-long interest in investigating and depicting the female perspective, the film sticks closely to Fanny, a young girl with a knack for sewing and, as she confesses to Keats early on, only an amateur knowledge of poetry. Fanny’s gumption, independence and beauty endear her to Keats, a struggling young writer living with poet and benefactor Charles Brown (an adept Paul Schneider), and their feelings blossom despite Keats’ unemployed, penniless condition, which – as Fanny’s mother regularly reminds her – makes him an unsuitable candidate for marriage. Both this obstacle and the jealous interference of Brown, whose fondness for Keats’ writing borders on the possessive, frustrate Keats and Fanny’s attempts to be together, with Campion’s clear-eyed, beautifully composed images (including a recurring one of the couple pressed up against opposite sides of the same wall) evoking the social structures that threaten to keep them apart. Whishaw’s reserved performance and Cornish’s sensitive turn work in tandem to create a poignant portrait of longing and (largely unconsummated) passion. Ultimately more moving, however, is the film’s deft evocation of Keats’ prose through both integrated spoken-word passages that feel both natural and reverent, as well as via seasonal snapshots of the verdant English countryside that (along with numerous images of caressing hands) have a potent tactility.

35 Shots of Rum (2009): A-

Claire Denis has an almost-unparalleled gift for blending poeticism and realism, a combination once again seamlessly achieved in 35 Shots of Rum, her magnificently understated and piercing portrait of the difficulty of letting go. With a tip of the hat to Yasujiro Ozu via the recurring sight of trains (specifically, the dawn, midday and dusk views out their lead cars’ front windows), Denis subtly addresses the inexorable forward march of time – as well as the desire to halt that progress and remain in immediate moments of bliss – through the story of metro conductor Lionel (Alex Descas), his grown daughter Josephine (Mati Diop), their neighbor and Josephine’s potential romantic interest Noé (Grégoire Colin), and Lionel’s sometimes girlfriend, taxi driver Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue). Lionel and Gabrielle have professions defined by movement, and the story’s focus is on their (and Josephine and Noé’s) attempts to cling to a current situation that’s slipping through their fingers or pine for one already lost, whether it be Lionel’s desire to have Josephine remain at home, Noé’s inability to move out of (and sell all the furniture within) his parents’ apartment, or Gabrielle’s longing for earlier days when Josephine was young and she and Lionel were closer. Such issues, also felt in the difficult transition into retirement experienced by Lionel’s colleague René (Julieth Mars Toussaint), permeate 35 Shots, which expresses its individual, familial and romantic relationships and tensions with an affecting blend of lived-in authenticity and graceful lyricism. Once again working with moody Brit band Tindersticks and cinematographer par excellence Agnes Godard, whose work here is both silky and warm, Denis depicts everyday details (buying a rice cooker, going to work) and conveys overarching emotional upheavals with a compassion and gentleness that’s quietly devastating. More straightforward than The Intruder, her keenly observed latest pinpoints the pain and joy felt by parents and children as they learn to move on, never more so than in a sumptuous late-night café sequence that casts drinking and dancing as mechanisms for her characters’ process of gauging, changing and defining viewpoints.

The Storm Before the Storm

Apologies, apologies. A busy work schedule has made this latest link collection late - it covers the past two weeks - and, truth be told, the upcoming New York Film Festival will likely continue my recent tardy streak. In the meantime, though, enjoy these pieces, the first two of which deal with Gamer.

The Sandbox: Virtual Hypocrisy (IFC News)

Out Now:
Gamer (Slant magazine)
Whiteout (Slant magazine)
All About Steve (Slant magazine)
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Slant magazine)
Not Forgotten (Slant magazine)

9 (2009): C+

Beautifully designed but short on depth or novelty, 9 posits a post-doomsday world in which the preceding war between man and machines resulted in the almost complete annihilation of both, leaving behind only a band of animated cloth-like dolls to pick up the apocalyptic pieces. Expanded from his Academy Award-winning short, Shane Acker’s directorial debut concerns 9 (Elijah Wood), who awakens to a frightening junkyard landscape in which compatriots – each bestowed with a number on their backs, and resembling slighter skinnier versions of Little Big Planet’s sackboys – struggle to survive while being hunted by a ferocious robot dog with an animal skull for a head. What follows is a visually arresting sci-fi Adam and Eve saga in which 9 accidentally rouses the Machine responsible for mankind’s extinction and then endeavors (at great cost to his friends) to thwart its plans for domination, a narrative that affords many hectic chase and fight sequences but scant emotional or thematic complexity. Pamela Pettler’s screenplay fails to provide imaginative context for her diminutive, magically alive protagonists, thereby frustrating investment in their bizarre reality, undercutting any serious attempts to imagine 9 as a vessel for civilization’s redemption and rebirth, and creating an inescapable sense that one has been down this Terminator/WALL-E path countless times before. Acker’s steampunk aesthetic is impeccably crafted, and his centerpiece clashes are orchestrated with vigorous flair. Too bad, then, that 9’s ideas never live up to its style.

Sketchy

Over at IFC News, I take a look at films born from comedy sketches, and come up with the five best and worst. Unsurprisingly, Saturday Night Live prominently factors into both lists.

The Five Best Films Based on Comedy Sketches (IFC News)

The Five Worst Films Based on Comedy Sketches (IFC News)

Extract (2009): B-

Mike Judge returns to the workplace with Extract, but unlike Office Space, he seems not only somewhat unfamiliar with his chosen milieu – a suburban extract plant founded and owned by Joel (Jason Bateman) – but uninterested in actually exploring its unique employer-employee dynamics. Instead, the actual setting feels like something of an afterthought, which is how one might describe much of Judge’s follow-up to Idiocracy, which manages to be pleasant without ever eliciting much in the way of laughter. The nominal story is a tangled web involving Joel’s efforts to sell his company despite a potential lawsuit from a testicle-injured coworker (Clifton Collins Jr.), his concurrent, moronic plot – concocted with a doofus druggie bartender (Ben Affleck) – to make his wife (Kristen Wiig) cheat on him with a hired gigolo (Dustin Milligan), and his budding feelings for a new hire (Mila Kunis) who, it turns out, is a grifter. Eschewing sociological office satire, Judge instead goes for a broader, cartoony vision of human stupidity, a more limited aim that, predictably, reaps more limited rewards. Still, courtesy of Bateman’s ordinary-Joe buffoonery, Wiig’s pitch-perfect soft-spoken awkwardness, and Affleck’s brain-fried idiocy, Extract is, if not riotous, at least agreeable, and in the person of David Koechner’s intrusive neighbor, continues Judge’s portrait of nosy, slow-talking, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer pests as the true source of everyday evil.