Lessons of Darkness

Altered States (1980): C+

The primordial soul of ancient mankind is the “truth” which scientist Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) seeks in Ken Russell’s Altered States, a film whose tedium is intermittently broken up by eruptions of psychosexual Russell-ian montage madness. Eddie believes that, by ingesting psychotropic drugs and spending hours in watery isolation chambers, he can tap into his genetic code’s ancient elements, a quest that marks him as mad to everyone, including irrationally smitten girlfriend Emily (Blair Brown). Russell shoots Eddie’s spells in the tubular tank in ominous low-angles but generally seems bored by his characters’ debates about whether Eddie’s research is inspired or insane, and his direction thus only picks up in Eddie’s two key hallucinations, which involve (among other things) explosions of fiery fluids, Jesus, Eddie in a multi-eyed goat mask having sex, and Emily posing as, and then transforming into, a lizard. Despite the considerable effort put into these sequences, 2001-style awe and grandeur escape Altered States, which exudes such apathy during its human-interest moments that it never adequately sells, as something worth taking seriously, Eddie’s religious-scientific desire to commune with the universe’s fundamental essence. As the proceedings briskly fly – at one point, a single cut leapfrogs Eddie and Emily’s marriage (including having two kids) and divorce – the silliness of the entire endeavor (based on the book, and disowned, by Paddy Chayefsky) becomes more readily apparent, culminating in Eddie physically and psychologically regressing back to a primitive monkey-man state and roaming the nearby zoo in search of fresh deer to eat.

Dreaming Big

Since I was away for much of last week, I've only got one new review to post in this latest link collection. It's for Christopher Nolan's much-anticipated follow-up to The Dark Knight, Inception, which I found to be depressingly underwhelming.

Out Now:
Inception (Slant magazine)

Predators (2010): B

Taking its title cue from Aliens in order to position itself as the true first sequel to 1987’s Arnold Schwarzenegger classic, Predators – opening with an image of Adrien Brody’s commando awakening to find himself freefalling through the atmosphere – drops one right into its action, which revolves around a group of disparate killers dumped in a lush, imposing jungle. Focusing on multicultural strangers who’ve crash-landed in an otherworldly tropical locale lends the proceedings a deliberate Lost vibe, though despite such surface similarities, producer Robert Rodriguez and director Nimród Antal’s primary source material is John McTiernan’s original. Patiently establishing a mood of ominous mystery as to both the characters’ environment as well as the reason for their selection in what soon turns out to be a round of The Most Dangerous Game, the filmmakers generate tension from the tantalizing unknown. Antal’s camera is the key to this early atmosphere, his striking widescreen compositions – often of miniscule, silhouetted people dwarfed by inhospitable surroundings – creating a disquieting sense of scale, and ever-present danger. Once the motley crew discovers that they’re being hunted by a trio of alien Predators, the material shifts into a more straightforward horror-combat vein, but Antal’s lucid images of terror and wonder continually elevate the action. Just as the script opts for Reagan-era tough-guy speak and one-liners (often matched by cuts or zooms into close-up), Antal’s signature visual employs digital effects for a distinctly ‘80s-style matte-painting panorama of a skyline filled with multiple planets. Predators uses such period clichés not for wink-wink humor but, instead, to align itself with its predecessor’s rugged spirit, a goal that continues through a sturdy second-act cameo (which also recalls Tim Robbins’ appearance in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds) and only flags during a third-act bogged down by outlandish decision-making and gimmicky pseudo-twists. Between suitably intense turns by Brody and Alice Braga and Antal’s taut, impressively orchestrated mayhem, it’s a big-budget B-movie made with some A-level flair.

Gentlemen Broncos (2009): C

Jared Hess’s fondness for mocking oddballs isn’t absent in Gentlemen Broncos, but there’s a tad more compassion to be found in his latest weirdo odyssey, in which nerdy budding author Benjamin (Michael Angarano) has his loony fantasy/sci-fi novel plagiarized by his idol, down-on-his-luck scribe Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement, he of HBO’s Flight of the Conchords and the Hess/Napoleon Dynamite rip-off Eagle Vs. Shark). Hess’ manicured, symmetrical aesthetic is still too heavily indebted to Wes Anderson. Yet in his low-fi staging of fictional sequences from Chevalier’s book about a long-maned intergalactic hero named Bronco (Sam Rockwell) – as well as scenes from Chevalier’s rip-off version, in which Bronco becomes a white-haired transvestite (also Rockwell) – he strikes a proper balance between making fun of such make-believe nonsense and empathetically celebrating its goofy majesty. Though Clement has one hilarious scene in which he reads his agent a passage from an aspiring writer’s dreadful manuscript, Rockwell is the film’s only consistently amusing presence, thanks to borderline-dada moments that find him battling armed, flying stags (which he destroys, at one point, with projectile vomit). That absurdist vitality, however, is far too often nonexistent in Gentlemen Broncos, even when the story – which finds Benjamin’s prose not only stolen by bestseller Chevalier, but also bastardized by a duo of aspiring low-budget filmmakers – warps itself into a bizarro critique of both indie and big-studio moviemaking.

Twosome

Two quick review links for this Sunday night. Enjoy.

Out Now:
The Last Airbender (Slant magazine)
[REC] 2 (Slant magazine)

The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009): D

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo may have been trash, but at least it had a lucid narrative. The film’s first sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, is not so fortunate, offering up an incoherent mishmash of incidents and flashbacks barely connected to any sort of foundational purpose, save for the further exaltation of piercing-overloaded computer hacker antihero Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace). Set a year after the last film’s events, this adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s second “Millennium Trilogy” novel finds noble journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) investigating a sex trafficking ring – naturally, given the series’ exploitative obsession with violence against women – after a fellow reporter is murdered. His investigation is complicated once Lisbeth is fingered for the slayings (as well as for offing her rapist guardian), though shortly after this development, Daniel Alfredson’s film devolves into a momentum-free mess concerned, primarily, with Lisbeth’s quest to reckon with her abusive past. Giant thugs who feel no pain and burn victim villains all eventually factor into the narratively challenged, glossily photographed action, which like its predecessor feigns interest in societal gender dynamics while sensationalizing everything in sight. Devoid of a gripping plot or characters who seem the least bit like human beings – not only is Lisbeth a computer genius with expert fighting skills, but she now also has a photographic memory and the ability to literally rise from the grave! – The Girl Who Played with Fire proves merely strained pulp awash in insincere you-go-riot-grrrl attitude.

Fish Tank (2010): B

Andrea Arnold’s verité aesthetics can often be pronounced to the point of affectation, but unlike in her thriller Red Road, this approach is reasonably well suited to the kitchen-sink realism of Fish Tank. Arnold’s second directorial feature adheres to a rather archetypal coming-of-age narrative in which angry Essex, England fifteen-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) enters into a relationship with her skanky, neglectful mother’s (Kierston Wareing) alluring new boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender). Arnold’s jittery camerawork gets at her protagonist’s fury and rage as well as the instability of her present condition as a wasteful, perpetually pissed wannabe dancer roaming dilapidated projects, trash-strewn streets and stormy coastlines. Alas, that same cinematography also often proves self-consciously accentuated, leading to a stylistic unevenness to match the filmmaker’s jagged storytelling. Mia’s insecurities, her anger at her upbringing, and her desire (epitomized by her fondness for Bobby Womack’s cover of “California Dreamin’”) for a happier life in which affection isn’t expressed through “I hate you” are all depicted with striking naturalism. It’s a shame, then, that the underlying plot follows a routine path, not to mention one saddled with leaden symbolism like a fish dying in a grass field or a white horse chained up in an abandoned asphalt field. Still, in a POV shot of Mia watching Connor remove her shoes and pants before tucking her into bed, and a latter scene (lit primarily by a streetlamp shining outside a smudgy window) in which the girl showcases her dance routine for Connor, Red Road empathetically attunes itself to its heroine’s clumsy attempts – often modeled after her lousy parental role models – to understand and deal with her sexual awakening. And though the script’s Mike Leigh-ish working-class miserablism is undercut by an ill-fitting bit of third-act suspense and an unearned optimistic finale, the film’s rough patches are nonetheless considerably smoothed over by its performers, with ferocious newcomer Jarvis exuding potent adolescent confusion, anger and yearning, and Fassbender marrying force-of-personality magnetism with subtle treacherousness.

Bluebeard (2009): B+

Catherine Breillat’s fondness for female sexuality-themed provocations makes her Bluebeard an ideal marriage of creator and content, allowing the French director – working in the more placid, refined mode of 2007’s superb The Last Mistress – another opportunity to plumb sex-violence-domination dynamics. Breillat’s film is in fact two separate stories, the first concerning the destitute Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton) and her marriage to the hulking, wealthy lord Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas), and the second a pseudo-framing narrative in which a young girl (Marilou Lopes-Benites) reads the tale of Bluebeard to her frightened older sister (Lola Giovannetti) in a musty attic. In the former, Breillat follows her source material’s basic template but tweaks it in not-inconsiderable ways, turning Marie-Catherine into an active, fearless participant in her betrothal and coloring her journey from penniless single girl to independent bride with shades of ingrained sexist violence (“There are many invasions,” she muses tellingly early on to her sis). Throughout, the patient rhythms and uneasy silence of Breillat’s direction casts a hypnotic spell, turning the ostensibly refined proceedings – in which Bluebeard is less a monster than a pitiful lonely man troubled by his actions – into a moody fantasia of barely repressed compulsions and desire, as epitomized by matching shots of caressing hands hovering over hands. And in a stunning finale, one that finds images of death both fossilized in a loving tableau and materializing out of nowhere, Breillat captures the potent, potentially lethal power of fairy tales.

Day of the Dead (2008): D-

Steve Miner is responsible for many a crappy horror film (Friday the 13^th Part 2 and III, Halloween H2O), so it’s no surprise that his Day of the Dead is incompetent in every respect, right down to its having nothing to do with the George A. Romero classic whose title it appropriates. In this thoroughly generic zombie-outbreak saga, a small Colorado town is quarantined by the military for mysterious reasons which become not so mysterious once the townsfolk start mutating into pizza-faced monsters with a taste for human flesh. The plague magically spares a corporal (Mena Suvari) who, along with a few survivors, endeavor to escape the hordes of hungry creatures, whose heads are prone to explode in great big phony CGI blasts when shot or set on fire. Miner’s special effects look terrible but they’re in keeping with a script that refuses to have a single character act as one might logically expect, with civilians becoming suddenly adept at firearms, and military personnel talking and behaving like either civilians or comic book superheroes. Inconsistency runs rampant throughout this dreadful direct-to-DVD effort, as the infected are alternately berserk animals, canny tacticians (they even hide corpses in closets!), and – in the case of wimpy soldier Bud (Stark Sands), who’s meant to recall Bub from Romero’s original – conscious beasts who don’t chomp on people because of love and, I kid you not, their vegetarianism. Toss in Nick Cannon as an insufferable tough-guy with a penchant for painful pop-culture quips, and rarely has a film about mankind’s last stand against bio-terror made such a lousy case for humanity’s continued existence.