Lessons of Darkness

Devil's Night

Since most of my recent writing has yet to be published, this week's update contains only three new reviews - one of which is mildly positive, two of which are severely negative. Nonetheless, be sure to check out my contributions (#10 and #2) to IFC's Halloween-themed list The 25 Scariest Moments in Non-Horror Films, as well as my interview with Ti West, whose awesome The House of the Devil opens in select cities today.

Ti West Gives Horror a Good Name (IFC News)
  
The 25 Scariest Moments in Non-Horror Films (IFC News)
 
  
Out Now:
The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day (Slant magazine)
Skin (Slant magazine)
Labor Day (Slant magazine)

An Education (2009): C

Little more than a teen-targeted public service announcement for both avoiding relationships with mature men and staying in school, An Education plays like something fit for a high school heath education class. In 1960s England, 16-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan) spends her days and nights following demanding daddy’s (Alfred Molina) orders to keep grades up in order to get into Oxford. Those plans go awry, however, when she meets David (Peter Sarsgaard), a dashing, sophisticated older chap who goes about wooing the girl – taking her on dates, introducing her to his jet-setting friends (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike) – despite the fact that their age difference makes him, for all intents and purposes, a borderline-pervert. Jenny is so taken with David that she soon begins neglecting schoolwork and condescendingly blowing off her concerned teacher (Olivia Williams) and school headmistress (Emma Thompson). It’s an about-face that director Lone Scherfig (working from Nick Hornby’s adaptation of Lynn Barber’s memoir) casts in a positive light at least in part by depicting the former as a dowdy spinster and the latter as a curt anti-Semite. An Education revels in Jenny’s young love not because it truly approves of it but so that the predictable third act script-flipping – in which David turns out to be far from Prince Charming – can come as a great big preachy shock. Scherfig’s direction is silky but her material telegraphs early on its underlying function as a simplistic, pedantic cautionary tale. And though Mulligan ably expresses Jenny’s initial bliss and ultimate heartbreak, her performance is consistently more sturdy than surprising. All the while, a dimly grinning Sarsgaard proves infinitely less charming and irresistible than his character is supposed to be, and Molina chews scenery so ferociously that his scenes take on an unintended air of a made-for-TV movie.

Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire (2009): C

An exploitative social drama dressed up in Oscar-baiting inner-city threads, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire mucks around in low-income-housing misery, abuse and degradation in search not of enlightenment but merely liberal-guilt shock. In 1987, obese Precious (Gabby Sidibe) is 16 and still in junior high school, pregnant with her second baby by her incestuous father, and forced to return home each day to a mother (Mo’Nique) who does nothing but collect welfare, watch game shows in her dank apartment, and viciously beat and berate her daughter. Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer) drenches his prolonged, venom-dripping scenes of maternal malevolence – like mom callously tossing Precious’ Down’s Syndrome baby onto a chair and then trying to kill her daughter by throwing a TV on her head – and other assorted spectacles of Precious’ debasement in mucky blacks and blooming whites. All the while, the director, though eliciting heartfelt performances from his leads, lays on crass and/or excessive gestures (Precious’ daddy-rape features cutaway shots of sizzling eggs; Precious retreats into escapist fantasies of the glamorous celeb life with a light-skinned boyfriend) that speak less to the character’s grief and coping mechanisms than to the filmmaker’s own show-offy tendencies. Looking in the mirror, Precious imagines her reflection as a white girl, yet racial and socio-economic issues make up very little of Precious, which far too frequently sidesteps serious inquiry in favor of simply indulging in ghastly sights of its African-American heroine’s humiliation (at one point, she steals a bucket of fried chicken and, when done, leaves the grease smeared on her face). Precious’ salvation comes via both a lesbian GED prep teacher (Paula Patton) who encourages her to write, and a social worker (Mariah Carey) who compels her to open up about her home life. But just as Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher pile tribulations onto their protagonist (culminating with an HIV+ diagnosis) not to inform but merely to exploit, so too does Precious’ climactic, cathartic confrontation with Mommy Dearest resound as merely disingenuous uplift.

The 47th New York Film Festival 

Law Abiding Citizen (2009): C+

A titular hyphen isn’t the only thing missing from Law Abiding Citizen – logic is also in woefully short supply. One of the year’s most willfully inane Hollywood blockbusters, F. Gary Gray’s tale is basically a legal-themed variation on Saw. The story revolves around a seemingly average husband and father named Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) who – ten years after his wife and child are slain, and one of the two criminals walks thanks to a plea deal negotiated by district attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) – goes on a trap-heavy killing spree in order to teach Nick and his cronies the true meaning of justice. The twist is that Clyde carries out his plot while in jail, using a variety of devices so blatantly nonsensical that the action quickly tips over into campiness, which is further amplified by the self-seriousness with which the material addresses issues of fairness and virtue. Law Abiding Citizen is the type of rubbish that asks one to believe that Clyde, stuck in solitary confinement, could somehow manage (without an accomplice’s aid) to boobytrap a judge’s cell phone with a secret bullet-firing mechanism that he could trigger whenever he fancies, an outrageous bit of nonsense typical of the proceedings. And yet other than a third act dragged down by ponderous stabs at gravity, Gray’s film is so wholly unaware of its own idiocy – and that goes for Foxx and Butler too, who sell their roles with undeserved intensity – that it proves a frequently hilarious, mildly entertaining genre throwaway, as well as a prototypical example of the way in which bad movies only become good bad movies unintentionally.

October Grouching

My latest batch of reviews doesn't feature much in the way of positivity. And if it's as good as its predecessors, Saw VI - which I'll be reviewing later today (link following) - won't do much to alter that mood.

The Sandbox: Five Rules for Making a Decent Video Game Adaptation (IFC News)

Out Now:
Amelia (Slant magazine)
Saw VI (Slant magazine)
Astro Boy (Time Out New York)
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (Time Out New York)
Motherhood (Time Out New York)
The Stepfather (2009) (Slant magazine)

The Boondock Saints (1999): C-

Troy Duffy’s The Boondock Saints was, as history tells it, enthusiastically acquired by Miramax and then, once push came to shove over production disagreements, dropped like a stone. It was a deserved fate, considering that this dim-witted, aesthetically clunky Tarantino clone prizes glib violence, rank misogyny and even-ranker homophobia in the service of “edginess.” In Boston, brothers Connor (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Murphy McManus (Norman Reedus) decide, on what seems like a whim, to ditch their meat-packing jobs – perhaps because they’re tired of punching out manly women, as they do in an intro sequence? –  in order to become righteous vigilantes. Their targets are local mafioso, and their enterprise comes to include the participation of a spazzy mob bagman named “Funny Man’ (David Della Rocco). Despite all the boozing, caressing of firearms, and meaningless window-dressing prayers spoken right before they execute their victims, there’s no energy to the proceedings, which are clumsily doused in slow-motion and edited with awkward, bewildering fades. The McManus brothers’ murderous rampage is glorified with such gleeful abandon that it’s either embarrassing or laughable (or both), while Willem Dafoe flounders badly trying to make wine out of urine from a homosexual detective role that calls for him to flamboyantly prance about and slander other gay men as “fags.” A coda, in which (phony) man-on-the-street TV news interviews find a public split over the virtuousness of the McManus’ actions, feigns interest in the issue of vigilantism with such straightfaced seriousness, it’s borderline-insulting.

Happiness (1998): B+

Todd Solondz’s Happiness was greeted with controversy upon its 1998 release thanks to its empathetic portrait of a suburban husband and father of three who has a deviant taste for young boys. Detached from the hubbub, however, it’s harder to discern the actual objection to Solondz’s approach to this, the most incendiary of his sophomore effort’s various narrative strands, as his treatment exhibits an almost pitch-perfect balance between condescension and compassion, a mode that the director employs throughout his ironically titled tapestry of misery. Solondz’s familiarity with his New Jersey milieu lends legitimacy to his mostly appalling characterizations, though his gift is one of tone, as immediately evidenced by an opening date between quiet, nervous Joy (Jane Adams) and boyfriend Andy (Jon Lovitz) that careens emotionally to both devastating and hilarious effect. Whether with regards to Joy, her happy homemaker sister Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) and pretentious literary star sibling Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), or phone sex pervert Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and pedophile Bill (Dylan Baker), the filmmaker finds a way to look down upon his characters while still retaining a measure of understanding for their alienated torment. Cheap laughs and disturbing desolation somehow prove ideal bedfellows in Happiness, whether in the sight of overweight confessed murderer Kristina (Camryn Manheim) retreating from her gruesome deeds by scarfing down ice cream sundaes, or recently separated Lenny (Ben Gazzara) responding to the company of his awful family by deliberately ignoring doctor’s orders and suicidally drenching his meal in salt. Solondz’s bleak worldview is at once amusing and horrifying, and in its climactic confessional conversation between Bill and his young son, the film expresses a wrenching, nightmarish agony over human nature.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009): B+

Loneliness, anger and fear are primal emotions that, in the hearts of children, can swell and consume with great tumult, a fact that Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are taps into with tenderness and respect. In adapting Maurice Sendak’s beloved 1963 children’s book for the screen, Jonze adds much – an unavoidable result of his source material containing only nine sentences and 400 words – and yet, in the final tally, not all that much save for deeper expressions of those turbulent anxieties that always defined Sendak’s classic. As in print, the Being John Malkovich director’s tale focuses on riotous Max (Max Records), a young boy who’s introduced pursuing the family dog around the house while wearing a dirty wolf costume, brandishing a knife and howling like an animal. He’s a beast, and yet one whose unchecked fury stems not from innate beastliness but, in this version, from the sadness that comes from neglect. One senses this immediately from the subsequent scene in which, while building a snow igloo on the front yard, Max is first ignored by his cell phone-obsessed older sister (Pepita Emmerichs) and then – after he entices her friends to a snowball fight that ends with his igloo smashed (the ceiling, and world, caving in) and him in tears – callously ditched by her.

Mom (Catherine Keener) is more attentive, but Max is unable to alleviate her taxing work concerns with funny dances and, when she opts to spend the night not playing in his fort but giggling and drinking with a new beau (Mark Ruffalo), the boy snaps. A bite to mom’s shoulder during a tantrum sends him scurrying into the woods and, via Jonze’s sinuous jump-fades, into a dreamworld where a boat – not unlike the homemade toy one found in his room – is waiting to be piloted to a distant shore where, around a raging bonfire, enormous furry creatures (surprisingly expressive CG-enhanced puppets) reside. Jonze segues smoothly from heightened handheld-shot domestic realism to entrancing fantasticality, his camera steadying slightly and attuning itself more fully to the sparkle of the sun and the tactility of the autumnal forest and barren desert in which Max finds himself. This magical island netherworld, boasting the potential for both jolly warmth and alienating cold, is the byproduct of Max’s vivid, tormented imagination, and as such, the Wild Things that inhabit it are the story’s de facto heart, vessels through which Max can explore, wrestle with, and understand his own (and his mother’s) sorrowful emotions.

Of the Wild Things, it is Carol (voiced, with sensitivity and ferocious frustration, by James Gandolfini) who most closely speaks to Max, as the monster’s misery over the departure of his beloved KW (Lauren Ambrose) mirrors that of Max’s own social isolation and absentee father’s abandonment. Depending on the moment, Carol is at once a proxy for Max’s interior state and the child to “King” Max’s parent, a duality that Jonze and co-screenwriter Dave Eggers shrewdly refuse to reconcile. Through this central relationship the film delicately comes to inhabit a very specific, childlike mindset, one in which loss and solitude and tempestuous acting-out are all of a lucid, logical piece. And though the director refuses to let a tender moment breathe without first smothering it with borderline-twee indie rock (often accompanied by Karen O’s humming), his cinematography beautifully alternates between exhibiting womb-like warmth and frightening, kinetic volatility. Despite its bouncy physicality and young protagonist, the melancholic Wild Things is not a movie for kids. It is, however, a mature, striking exploration of the way that kids feel – their need for comfort and safety, and their instinct to revolt when deserted – and how understanding those emotional dynamics can be (as expressed by a near-heartbreaking silent final glance between reunited mother and son) the first step toward an adult awareness of one’s parents and self.

Antichrist (2009): C

Aiming to incite shock and outrage with Antichrist, Lars von Trier instead merely produces numbing indifference. Working from a template that strongly recalls that of Don’t Look Know, the Danish filmmaker’s latest begins with an overwrought intro – shot in look-at-me slow-motion and black-and-white, and scored to classical music – in which a husband (Willem Dafoe) and wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) screw in the shower and on the couch (penetration imagery included, thanks to body doubles) while their son tumbles out of his crib and takes a fatal leap out of their apartment window. This trauma is earth-shattering for the couple but von Trier’s deliberately self-important aesthetics strip it of any emotional impact, and thus negate any potent poignancy and horror from the couple’s subsequent trip to a remote Pacific Northwest cabin. There, von Trier alternates between bickering-couple scenes and hallucinatory super-slo-mo panoramas of Gainsbourg sleepwalking through what turns out to be an unholy forest. Dafoe and Gainsbourg commit to their at-odds characters, with her guilt and anger at him amplified by his cold, clinical psychiatric attempts to help her. Yet they’re not characters but merely emblems mired in von Trier’s semi-serious goof-off, which alternates between laughable stabs at biblical import (the forest is really called Eden?) and cathartic/destructive violence (highlighted by the already notorious bit of below-the-waist mutilation). Antichrist only sporadically feels like an effort interested in grappling with the miserable fallout from tragedy, with its wannabe-scandalous provocations creating a situation not where “chaos reigns” (as a talking fox memorably claims), but rather one in which silliness abounds.

The 47th New York Film Festival

Surrogates (2009): C

Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates gets little right. Its first crucial misstep is an inability to properly set up its own fiction, positing a world in which people now interact with each other and society via robotic avatars known as Surrogates, but failing to ever explain why such a radical development would be welcomed by humanity at large. The stated reason is to decrease crime and allow for fantasy fulfillment, but those aims seem at odds with each other – wouldn’t one of the prime kicks afforded by Surrogates be violent, even sadistic behavior? Regardless, the film’s story revolves around a detective (Bruce Willis) who, while investigating a case in which the destruction of a surrogate resulted in the death of its user, is forced to unplug and interface directly with reality, a radical act that’s thoroughly avoided by his wife (Rosamund Pike), who uses surrogacy as a means of coping with the death of their son. In this subplot, Surrogates locates a thematic avenue ripe for exploration – namely, the means by which artificial interactivity functions as a vehicle for denial. And again, Mostow’s film stumbles badly, treating its underlying issues of grief, fear and the inherently social nature of humanity cursorily so that it can concentrate on airbrushing its cast members when they’re plasticine surrogates – with Radha Mitchell coming closest to a vision of mechanized perfection – and staging dull chase sequences. Whether in scruffy human form or as a smooth-skinned, neatly coiffed machine, Willis seems plain bored, which is forgivable given that this nonsensical mystery has all the get-up-and-go of a dead battery.