The Other Guys

Dir. Adam McKay

2010
2.0

By now, no one should be confused about what kind of a movie they're going to get from writer/director Adam McKay. His films function as wish fulfillment for Saturday Night Live devotees masochistically demanding that show's aesthetic be stretched well beyond its capacity and ignominiously retrofitted with indiscernible attempts at plot. They've been treated to a number of hit-or-miss (mostly miss) spinoff films over the years but McKay's special brand of sketch comedy indebted features manage to dodge the “spinoff” tag, the kiss of death for critical success. A former Second City member and SNL head writer, perhaps it is McKay's history as a socially minded comedian and his position as an occasional contributor to The Huffington Post that informs one of the more misguided forays into the realm of political comedy with his most recent feature The Other Guys. I wish I knew what someone like Arianna Huffington thought of Mr. McKay's pretensions of serious political commentary within this most plebian bromance.

Surely this must be a parodic farce. Following in the footstep's of last year's brilliant In the Loop and Jason Reitman's reportedly efficient condemnation of corporate decadence and emotional distance, Up in the Air, is it possible that we already have to suffer a lowest common denominator parody of the timely critiques of endemic political and corporate corruption those films proffered? Missing even the screwball sophistication of the Coen's Burn After Reading, The Other Guys is a philistine reworking of the “buddy cop” formula that is unfortunately convinced of its own nonexistent cultural criticism. Though billed as a parody, the film nails all the tropes of the genre without invention or traces of humor (as always with McKay, jokes are found between not within plot points) from the dealing-with-it-my-way psychological baggage of Mark Wahlberg's Terry Holtz or Ferrell's best good-cop-with-a-dark-past impersonation. These archetypes are only funny when they actively avoid acknowledging the thin vestments of their implausible personalities.

And avoid they do. Not just in a failed caricature of machismo defense mechanisms but in McKay's characteristic avoidance and downright fear of plot development. It's no wonder, really. His films predictably fall apart under the slightest demands of narrative. Try comparing the film's first half an hour with its last. In the first: an opening pyrotechnic-laden chase sequence (reminiscent of every action flick with a malnourished budget since the dawn of CGI) followed quickly by a frankly mind numbing series of police procedural sketches. In the last: a shootout massacre built up to by moments of “what the hell are they talking about” last minute plot points. Judging by the film's beyond-heavy-handed final credit sequence, McKay seems to think he's designed a conspiracy thriller and a scathing political satire in one laugh out loud romp of a good time. That he could be any further from the truth seems pretty much inconceivable.

McKay's conviction in satirical posturing and the pre-established precedent of a spoof comedy accounts for his blatant use of sexism and racism as tools for pandering to dick-in-hand loners and latent cynics. He makes limited attempts to account for these errors of taste but his defensive jokes are dated before they even leave the cinema's speakers. The film lobs so many softballs at easy targets, relies so heavily on Ferrell's brand of physical and verbal deadpan and comes up with so few noteworthy jokes (the best of which are a silent wrestling match at the wake of two accidentally suicidal cops and Michael Keaton's repeated references to 90s girl pop group TLC) that it's hard to believe that this is the same director who delivered the deliciously idiosyncratic Anchorman earlier this decade. That film, the cult American comedy of the last ten years just behind Superbad, had a couple of luxuries: existence outside the Appatow brand and audience expectations for McKay set just a notch below veteran disappointer Kevin Smith. That McKay can no longer cash in on these advantages certainly does not stop him from trying.

McKay's medium is sketch writing, a still under appreciated art form. The extent to which most people understand the liberties and restrictions of sketch comedy is in weekly doses of SNL. McKay writes well in short, discrete incidents but can't string his comedy (nor his drama) together sensibly in feature form. That he has tried is honorable but that he continues to make no improvement is disheartening. McKay is digging his own grave as a one trick pony. That his latest film will be the cause for a handful of guffaws is beside the point. The Other Guys shamefully prostitutes itself for easy laughs, cuts its losses and gets you out of theater before you start demanding a slide show presentation on the respective salaries of the Hollywood producers and stars involved in the kind of film so detached from its own lack of merit that it truly believes itself to be not only educational but entertaining.

Gangs of New York

Dir. Martin Scorsese
2002
7.4


Watching Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York recently, I came to appreciate–rather belatedly I must admit–certain drawbacks to the now [in]famous auteur theory. Of course, the theory itself is meant to define a director as an author of a film by highlighting thematic and stylistic motifs from the his/her output. The goal was to realize authorial preeminence within an industrial process. The consequences of an academic theory that proffers solidarity with an artist only make themselves evident much further down the line, when aged auteurs are given greater credence than their upstart contemporaries. Gangs of New York plays like a study on the inborn flaws of auteurism. Foreshadowing the narcissistic debacle of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009), Gangs is ultimately not a self contained historical epic but a Martin Scorsese Historical Epic.

Beginning a film with a vainglorious and highly orchestrated battle sequence that skews aestheticization of violence in favor of glorification via rapid editing and ill-advised, anachronistic score choice (not to be confused with the ironic audio visual juxtaposition of, for instance, Scorsese's own Mean Streets), exceeds the limitations of 'minor transgression'. It cheapens the sincerity of the entire enterprise. This imprudent tactic leaves Scorsese with a lot of ground to make up. Thankfully, the remainder of the film is rhythmically and tonally well tempered. A period drama about Irish immigrants in New York City during the mid-19th century, the film's script surreptitiously extracts dramatic plot points while moving gracefully through a compelling story. Scorsese's attention to surface details both broad and confined is simply extraordinary. His sets are towering marvels in particular the subterranean Irish tavern of the Five Points.

Scorsese has become well known for extracting memorable performances from his leads and Gangs is no exception. Daniel Day-Lewis' William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting anticipates the fire and brimstone of America's own Daniel Plainview in P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007). Cameron Diaz's Jenny Everdeane is one of Scorsese's strongest female characters and the director's most forceful indictment of the misogyny more than occasionally found in his own films. And of course there is Scorsese's muse, Leo. His understated performance as Amsterdam Vallon, the son of a slain Roman Catholic priest, stands quietly and thus all the more noticeably in the shadow of Day-Lewis' furious histrionics. The emotional territory he covers in Gangs (in particular, contradictory feelings of guilt and loyalty) would be covered again in Scorsese's magnificent The Departed (2006) but it is not the weight of the burden but the mode of coping that makes his restrained performance so affecting. His internal angst reveals itself seldom but the verisimilitude by which he conveys Vallon's psychological trauma lends his trajectory an undeniable sense of fatalism and gives his performance meaningful depth.

Then the problem is not within the superficial fabric of the film. With great performances, unparalleled art direction and a fine script, what is lacking in Gangs is found in the smallest but most unexpected errors of confidence. In particular, in two long time Scorsese collaborators: editor Thelma Schnoomaker and DP Michael Ballhaus. Both have worked with Scorsese since the 1980s and perhaps one can chock these mistakes up to hive mind mentality. Schoonmaker's editing on her first collaboration with Scorsese, Raging Bull, undoubtedly played a part in that film's critical success. In Gangs, her cutting is mostly appropriate but occasionally (as in the aforementioned battle scene) becomes an exercise in excess. Rapid alternations between POV and third person shots cause the action to be confounding and disorienting but hardly heighten the immediacy of the violence. Ballhaus' cinematography is practiced and patient. In one sublime sequence his camera outlines the entire existential journey many of the immigrant Irish will make: arriving in one boat, departing in another and finally arriving “home” in a third wooden vessel. His shots are well composed though his muted tonal palette, handsome as it is, seems calculated to meet the expectations of an American period drama. Furthermore, he occasionally injects a “Scorsese shot”, particularly favoring the dolly zoom most memorably used in Goodfellas. The technique is as tasteless here as it was brilliantly metaphysical in that film.

The fact that Gangs of New York comes embedded with Scorsesean calling cards does not render it defective but certainly has a pejorative effect. The problem is not with the motifs themselves. His ideological themes of masculinity, patriarchy, Catholic guilt and morality are adequately explored here as they are in many of his other features. However, despite the good faith by which he investigates these subjects, the sheer amount of material Scorsese attempts to cover even in a film of such girth, while incorporating ample amounts of romance and action, inevitably invites skepticism in regards to what could have been left on the cutting room floor. Scorsese's hamburger comes with everything on it effectively reducing the impact of individual flavors and textures. Each additional aspect obscures the subtleties of the others. Shifting the film's political agenda into high gear toward the finale eclipses the intricate underpinnings of the emotional relationships between the principle characters, especially Vallon and Cutting.

My last complaint is in regards to how, despite the sheer amount of creative intensity, Gangs of New York is in some ways sadly predictable. Everything about the film is entirely explicable. Scorsese opts for legend over myth and grounds his film in historical realism occasionally airing on the side of melodrama. Which is not a cinematic sin but does jive with the Scorsese's history of innovation and the film's tangible sense of self-importance. Gangs can be placed in a very broad category of historical dramas which attempt to place discrete relationships and intricate emotions, some of which are intrinsically linked to the time period, into a wider socio-political and historical context. The goal is to make the viewer aware of the likeness between what they are seeing in the “past” and what they live in their daily lives. Contemporary relevance in period films can often get over extended for the sake of viewer empathy. In doing so, some or all of the unique perspective of the time can be lost. Scorsese generally demands a lot and Gangs in particular is so saturated with detail and context that it very nearly alienates the viewer. There is much to enjoy in Gangs of New York. Still, it will never be a great film. For better or worse, it always be a Martin Scorsese film.

The Dark Knight

Dir. Christopher Nolan
2008
6.9


The problem with retrospective criticism is obvious. A film's value is dynamic. It changes over time based on a number of variables. Of particular interest here is how the quality of the films that follow it in the director's oeuvre might adversely affect an otherwise accomplished feature. For me, no two films better emphasis this dilemma than Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight and his follow up, the turgid Inception. Two years ago The Dark Knight so thrilled me that I went to see it in theaters a half dozen times. I fondly remember weeks of infatuation and discussion amongst peers. Since that time, I have tried to embrace an unyielding critical eye that will righteously recognize superficiality; not simply looking past but looking through. I admit that on occasion I have overcompensated. In my youthful attempt to aggressively assert my opinion, I may have treated some films more harshly than they perhaps deserved. I failed to exercise the discretion and rectitude I have come to respect in many of the critics I follow. I am still, it seems, in the anti-navel gazing stage of my development as a film critic.

Which makes reanalysis that much harder. Inception so negatively influenced my opinion of Christopher Nolan that I was persuaded to reevaluate what I loved so much about The Dark Knight. Much of what I initially enjoyed is still present: the orchestration of spectacle, the convincing use of archetypes as mouthpieces for oppositional philosophies, Heath Ledger's still awe inducing performance. What crops up though, which cannot be excused as projection of doubt, are various flaws which detract from the pleasure of analytical examination. Though Nolan, with the assistance of his brother Jonathan, manages to write sophisticated monologues that inform like a college lecture on the fundamentals of philosophy, he largely fails to write many characteristically human interactions. Case in point: Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes strained relationship is certainly not helped by a noteworthy lack of humanity in their conversation. As Bruce Wayne has to constantly conceal his alter ego, so too does Nolan sometimes inexplicably conceal fulness of being beneath an exterior shell of fractured identity. Though we are meant to sympathize with Bruce Wayne, the viewer is often at odds with Wayne's lack of genuinely sympathetic characteristics.

There is also the inevitable complaint about the film's structure and lack of a distinct climax. The film prefers incident over arc to power its narrative. Though, as in Inception, each setpiece heightens the film's overall intensity, the dead air between them tends to suffocate rather than extend the drama. By the end, the hazards of the film's numerous action sequences are fully divorced from the emotional drama that initially propelled them. The intensity is inexhaustible but its impact is deadened by Nolan's decision to make the whole back half of his film a climax (sound familiar?). The irony of the bathetic consequences of such an adrenally influenced decision is somehow base and transcendental. Motivations are expository and relatively clear though not necessarily simplified. Nolan designs a complex polemical web with The Dark Knight and rigorously avoids resolution of ontological dissonances. This lack of resolution is the fundamental characteristic that keeps the film from disappearing into the void of sterile action cinema. It is also the film's most well deserved plaudit.

Nolan should be lauded for taming his wild horse of a film though the fact that he is responsible for its bad behavior slightly diminishes the accomplishment. Though The Dark Knight's conclusion doesn't quite hold water it is nonetheless comforting to see a director willing to put his reputation at risk both intentionally and inadvertently. Throughout the film, Nolan juggles chainsaws and swims with killer sharks; knowing full well that his solipsism may cause him irreparable harm. If anything was evinced by Inception it was that Christopher Nolan has a dangerously high opinion of himself and his films. While that film took fewer risks than The Dark Knight and resulted in a notably smaller pay off, it cemented directorial traits one could have chosen to identify or ignore in The Dark Knight. Interviews with Nolan elicit empirical levels of conceit, misplaced confidence in his base knowledge of the world and stubborn artistic inflexibility. He is amiable but vaguely puerile in his conception of how movies should be made.

A good friend pointed out that Inception is a highly enjoyable movie to watch but does not hold up under close scrutiny. I second this notion. As for the The Dark Knight, it fairs far better but is still best enjoyed viscerally rather than academically. The film captures an insular and microcosmic world that bears more than a slight resemblance to our own. Nolan supplies his film with a largely empathetic populace: confused, naïve to the complexity of the law, bigoted and self-righteous. That so many words are minced in reference to “the people” conveys directorial accordance with the film's assertion about the unnerving lack of facility for the principles of democracy to effect change. For a film so enthusiastically involved with diametrically opposing pairs, it is disheartening that this conclusion exists without opposition. Inception left me with little hope that Nolan fully appreciates or even recognizes this subtextual insinuation. In the end we are left to wonder if the reason why Inception was such a bloody mess was because Christopher Nolan amputated himself in some indelible way with The Dark Knight.

Inception

This review was originally published here on Tiny Mix Tapes

Dir. Christopher Nolan
2010
2.5


Since seeing Christopher Nolan's Inception for the first time more than two weeks ago I have cycled through a series of feelings from glossy eyed amazement to utter contempt to cool irony and finally plain disappointment. I've settled on disappointment because I think it is the most judicial of all emotions one could possibly feel about a film like Inception and its director Christopher Nolan. Nolan came from a modest, innovative background in the early years of this past decade and has built steadily toward envelope-pushing studio productions. His films are enjoyable and thought provoking due to their characteristic combination of confident spectacle and earnest intelligence. They are introverted and textually interact almost exclusively with themselves although they are capable of being read widely. Up until now, Nolan has seemed uninterested in his place amongst heavy hitting filmmakers. Unexpectedly, it is pretense and a cocksure attitude about the ideological content of big budget blockbusters that causes Inception to feel disingenuous and insecure. Those same characteristics are also utilized to dismiss contemporary Hollywood cinema as vapid and insincere. Ironically, this pretentious attitude is the reason Inception has risen to levels of extreme, undeserved recognition amongst viewers and critics.

Inception represents the zeitgeist of popular American cinema. So saturated by dainty romantic comedies, predictable slasher reboots and disingenuous, market driven sequels even a humble version of Inception's high concept psychological thriller could have attracted a wealth of attention. However, modesty is not the strong suit of summer blockbusters. Inception is no exception with immodesty becoming the genesis of innumerable gestures that cause the film to be both absurdly entertaining and gratingly insufferable. At every step the film overcompensates as best exemplified by the relentlessly brooding score that places a dramatic emphasis on even the most stale bites of dialog as if to suggest that every miniscule detail is of the utmost importance. Bloated and self-congratulatory, Inception eventually becomes unwieldy and ends as an absolute mess. Nolan's previous film, The Dark Knight, was also something of a mess, albeit a mostly endearing one. That film opted for noir polemics over, say, the dialectics of Westerns or as the Joker said best “an unstoppable force colliding with an immovable object.” The effect was undeniably disabling. While not everyone appreciated the choice, Nolan took a big risk that delivered in the form of one of the most talked about films of 2008.

With Inception, Nolan largely abandons his history of challenging polemics in favor of a manipulative and highly unethical cinema of distraction. After an expository opening half burdened by malnourished jargon and an obligatory chase sequence, the film succumbs to trope after action film trope, dismembering and condensing three genre films into one. The back half of the film is a four-tiered reverse-heist complete with kidnapping, car chase, Matrix-esque zero gravity fight scenes and vintage 007 extreme sport killing sprees. Not surprisingly, this initially thrilling setpiece so lacks self-restraint that it eventually becomes inane. Nolan gets so caught up in his action film purism and the complexity of his interrelated mechanisms that his screenplay falls into film limbo; drama and action drifting around purposelessly. I suppose one could sardonically praise Nolan for designing a film that adheres to self-made dream logic.

What Nolan should not be praised for, however, is designing a consistent or meaningful film. While the film's action is occasionally engaging the actors who take part in it are almost entirely vacant. Nolan's characters lack any kind of depth. Even Dominic Cobb (Dicaprio), who receives most of the screenplays enervated emotional energy, is an archetype of very plain proportions. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Arthur is a snoozy stiff. The capacity of Ellen Page's Ariadne to perceive the very obvious signs of Cobb's psychological damage seems to indicate that on some level Nolan realizes that his characters are flimsy and uninteresting. This is all pretty predictable fair from Nolan. He seems to relish using actors who can't fulfill the basic needs of their characters. With the exception of Marion Cotillard as the underdeveloped but still deeply disturbing vision of Cobb's deceased wife Mal, the remainder of the characters are more Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes than Joker or Leonard Shelby. Noteworthy is Wally Pfister's cinematography which is even better than it was in The Dark Knight. Here he gives action sequences room to breathe and deftly captures Inception's surrealist universe. Its just too bad Nolan's subconscious didn't populate this cinematic dream world with less clunky projections.

Pauline Kael once said of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (both the film and its director have likely been of some great influence on Christopher Nolan) "If big film directors are to get credit for doing badly what others have been doing brilliantly for years with no money, just because they've put it on a big screen, then businessmen are greater than poets and theft is art." Though ripe for commentary and conversation, Inception is a deeply flawed film. Shooting to be mind blowingly great, it ends up just OK. Not nearly as audacious as folks have made it out to be, Inception is the kind of self-important art that preys on the insecurities of its patrons. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised as Nolan takes his film's psychological premise to its most literal extreme, doing to his audience exactly what Cobb and his gang do to poor Robert Fischer: implant a simple idea in the most elaborate and lavish way possible. Nolan's simple idea? That Inception is a film worth getting excited over and believing in. That idea has taken hold amongst many but remains, just as in the film, an immoral coercion of our emotions and ego.

A Single Man

Dir. Tom Ford
2009
7.5


In dealing with Tom Ford's debut feature film A Single Man, I came to the conclusion that it would be ideal to write two reviews. The first would discuss the film's sexual politics. In fact, just in reading or hearing about the film one is likely to find out, first and foremost, that A Single Man is about a gay man. While this review would no doubt defend the film as being about a lot more than “a gay man” it would also note, at the risk of sounding bigoted, how, were the film about a straight man coping with the loss of his heterosexual partner, two reviews would be entirely superfluous. In other words: controversy and timeliness are built into A Single Man's take on America's relationship to homosexuals. This same review would draw parallels to 2008's Milk and ask whether or not sexual persecution in cinema is exploitative when it is shown by a person of the same orientation being portrayed? On a tangent this review might also attempt at defining the difference between gay cinema and the academically fetishized blanket genre “queer cinema”.

The second review is the one you will find here. This review critiques the film's cinematic merits. One could suggest that this is a restrictive means of judging a film. No art lives inside a cultural vacuum and a film like A Single Man is as likely to change an uncertain voter's perspective as any campaign speech. And while the Prop 8 debate still rages on, in this tiny corner of the world I'd like to talk a little about color, light, dedication and love. A Single Man is a day in the life of George Falconer, an older English man who teaches at a university in Southern California. As you've likely gleamed from my introduction, George is also gay. Having lost his lover of 16 years in a car crash 8 months earlier, George has finally had enough of his internal suffering and decides to kill himself. The story is told alternately in stylized flashback sequences and present tense vignettes between George and his housekeeper, sexually curious student, former female lover (Julianne Moore is divine as damaged goods) and myriad others.

Director Tom Ford is an openly gay fashion designer turned filmmaker who impressively financed the entire seven million dollar project himself. Ford is self-proclaimed lover of cinema and his handsome film is evidence enough of that. With sets designed by the folks over at AMC's powerhouse drama Mad Men and outfits that would make Edith Head swoon, A Single Man is an impeccable looking film. Ford's attention to detail is remarkable and not limited to sets and costumes. The film teems with erotic energy. Certain body parts, mouths in particular, become so intensely charged with sexuality that their image seems pressed to the screen, just about to burst through. There is also Colin Firth's performance as George and his ability to tell the whole story of his emotional life with just his face. Ford meticulously captures the sometimes hallucinatory subtlety of George's perception with remarkable efficiency.

Of course all this attention to lush detail has a cost. Fashion tends to work in dizzyingly fast paced or instantaneous mediums (run way shows and photo shoots respectively). At times it seems as if Ford is trying to capture too much in a single shot, an understandable side effect of the fashion industries need for “the perfect photo”. Unfortunately, in conjunction with this perfectionism is Ford's insistence on premature cutting and editing. While his unique use of filmic blush, where the cold color palette saturates at moments of physical or emotional intimacy, is an impressive derivation from Hitchcock's historic use of lighting as mood, Ford tends to rush things along forgetting to give his film room to breath. Cutting is properly used in places (ex. George's fragmented flashbacks of receiving the news of his lover's death), but overall Ford has difficulty committing to long takes and mise en scene.

A Single Man is a film about the fragility of perfection. On the exterior the stodgy, stiff, immaculately soignée George is a picture of English intellectual rigidity. Inside though he is something else entirely. George is best surmised in a mid-film, haunting tableau of his desk where all his important possessions are arranged perfectly while his revolver sits at an angle, disturbing the pristine symmetry of the arrangement. The audio visual aspects of Ford's film are as impeccably put together as George's wardrobe and home. But his film lacks inner turmoil; George's restless soul. Ford's drama is uneven and his dialog is stilted, just a shade too literary. What we miss is the shattering and putting back together again of George's heart. Firth works hard to overcome the slow script but in the end chocks up an incredible performance that the film does not completely deserve. Maybe the film's subject matter was just too close to home for Ford and he compensated by making the text into more of a film than it otherwise needed to be. Whatever the case may be, A Single Man represents an impressive, fresh faced debut from a director worth looking out for.

Grave of the Fireflies

Dir. Isao Takahata
1988
9.0


A few months ago a good friend suggested I watch Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro and Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies in tandem. Released by the same studio in the same year, one could hardly find two more opposing companions. Miyazaki's Totoro is a light hearted account of childhood adventure with a profound yet gentle subtext. Takahata's Fireflies is a full blown, heart breaking tragedy. Channeling all the frustration and anguish of post-war Japan without once submitting to outrage or propaganda, Grave of the Fireflies is focused not on the superficial valor of wartime heroes but on the hapless civilian casualties. It is at once both mythic and human, neo-realist and magically surreal. It is also a testament to the absolute cultural and psychological devastation left in the wake of WWII and its continuing influence on new generations of filmmakers.

Takahata's film represents a composite of three types of war films: the glorifying war film (think: Independence Day), the emotionally devastating war film (think: Saving Private Ryan) and the politically and/or morally inconclusive war film (think: Gary Cooper on the mount in Sergeant York). For a war film (or more precisely a film about war) it contains little action although it doesn't avoid graphic violence. Images of bodies being ceremonially burned and cities being torched are grisly and upsetting but Takahata never makes his film into a piece of propaganda. In the tradition of the Italian neorealists who regularly fought against a faceless or nonexistent enemy (that enemy was often Italy itself), Takahata's film avoids a distinct antagonist. In fact, not a single character in the film speaks a hateful word against “the enemy”. Every citizen conserves all their energy to be put toward optimistic patriotism.

As for the film's protagonists, a boy and his younger sister, their drama is weighty but never exploitative. The children's father is in the Navy and is never seen. They are looked after by their mother until she dies in an air raid. They are sent to live with their aunt who is burdened by their appetites and perceived uselessness. Though she harasses the children about their complacency during wartime she is never vilified. When the children decide they have had enough of her misinterpreted tyranny they flee to an abandoned bomb shelter. As the two slowly descend into starvation the horrific contradiction of wartime nationalism becomes self-evident: while Japan cares deeply for its population, it is helpless to stop the slow death of two of its citizens. The tragedy heightens when the viewer realizes that is the pride and unfortunate choices made by the boy that will ultimately cause both his and his sister's deaths. However, it is his selflessness and bravery, critical and controversial terms given the boy's stealing and looting during wartime solidarity, that allows them to stay alive as long as they do.

Most especially in these scenes by the lake where the bomb shelter is located, Fireflies recalls Kenji Mizoguchi's mastery of formal composition and dramatic integrity. The hallucinatory juxtaposition of fire falling from the sky causing mass destruction and the serenity of fireflies illuminating ponds and caverns while joyous laughter echoes from all around, reflects and becomes largely symbolic of the brutal tragedy the two children face: a country both divided and united by war. Though the locations remains largely static, the narrative takes on mythic proportions. Takahata lends a divine humanity to the film's more purposefully allegorical second half. Even when he dips into surrealism, Takahata maintains an intense sense of gravity with each image adding to a tantamount sense of fate.

Ultimately the film represents all that post-war Japanese filmmakers have had to face in coming to terms with the devastation of defeat. Much like post-war German cinema, this sub-conscious weight has greatly affected the mood of the country's more thoughtful filmmakers. If Miyazaki could be charged with escapism (an unjust accusation if one is willing to seriously study the recurrent themes in his oeuvre) the same cannot be said about Takahata. His dedication to the individual in a time of national crisis is both heartbreaking and fortifying. One of the foremost post-war filmmakers in Japan, Yasujiro Ozu, showed that there is drama and sadness, joy and death behind every door. Grave of the Fireflies is not meant to be an anecdotal microcosm but just one door in the infinite hallway of suffering that was, and continues to be, WWII.

My Neighbor Totoro

Dir. Hayao Miyazaki
1988
8.2


For my part, I have seldom known external rupture. From my birth to when I left for college I lived in the same place, never once changing school districts or towns. Internally my experience was bread and butter: as a youth I created adventure and occasion out of the most commonplace objects and ordinary events. As a teenager I rebelled against my perceived commonality and turned inward, discovering (or perhaps inventing) all sorts of meaningless melancholy and angst. I sometimes wonder what my childhood and subsequent adolescence would have been like had they not been so regular and consistent. What if I had been faced with a real outside threat to the stability I had long ceased appreciating? It is this sort of hypothetical question regarding the universal experience of childhood that Hayao Miyazaki has been exploring for years. It is in My Neighbor Totoro that he answers the question as firmly, simply and gracefully as possible.

Miyazaki makes kids films about what it's like to be a kid, as opposed to the contrived schlock of so many Hollywood G-rated films which are all slick production and dichotomous simplification. In regards to the smooth and undoubtedly coercive experience of Hollywood versus the challenging, exciting and sometimes a bit frightening world of Miyazaki, one might argue that while it is certainly important at an early age for a child to feel empowered, it is also important for them to feel safe. Miyazaki knows that the former is, if not more important, generally less of a priority. Miyazaki's films feature children, divorced from the protection of their parents, making decisions for themselves. These decisions, which are often physically realized in a surreal, quasi-fictional environment, are nonetheless grounded in day-to-day reality and informed by the strange yet beautiful rationality of children.

For the girls in My Neighbor Totoro the challenge to their confidence is a move from a town to a rural farming community. A country idyll, initially fixed in animated realism turns magical when the younger of the two girls follows a small creature into the trunk of a massive Camphor tree and discovers the drowsy giant Totoro. What is perhaps most impeccable about the film from this point forward is how the discovery does not launch a serious narrative arc of any kind. As viewers we are privy to the growing bond between the sisters and the relationship between the two and their father and mother, the latter of whom is in a long-term care hospital.

While rich with moments of childhood fantasy which cross over into reality in a characteristically Miyazakian way, the film does not eschew seriousness. When their father fails to return on time from the university he teaches at, the girls hold a vigil at the bus stop where Totoro joins as a surrogate father figure. Fantasy characters as stand-in family members are a recurring theme in Miyazaki's work which further suggests the symbiotic relationship between the real and the imagined. At the news that their mother has fallen ill again, the younger girl attempts to walk to the hospital and along the way gets lost. Her elder sister and an collective of neighbors begin a search that turns desperate when a girl's shoe is located in a nearby pond. Faced with mounting tension the film elegantly unwinds with the family united around a symbolically charged ear of corn.

A beautiful film from first frame to last and an evocative excursion into the minds of children, My Neighbor Totoro delicately balances subtle character development with a heartwarming story of family and community. Without moralizing or becoming heavy handed, Miyazaki illustrates the dramatic conversion from conventional life to exotic adventure that only children are capable of. As our frontal lobes develop and we begin to reason away the more fantastic trappings of our imaginations, so too does it become more difficult to face the darker shades of reality. While children may not have an understanding of death, adults often struggle to find a means of coping with that knowledge. My Neighbor Totoro exemplifies the courage and strength in children who are given the opportunity to feel empowered and independent; who are not sheltered from reality but rather use the real world as a building block for something far more exciting but no less profound.

The Road

Dir. John Hillcoat
2009
6.0


What makes a novel unfilmable? With regards to The Road, John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name, many critics have settled comfortably on the director's inability to capture the “tone” of the novel. The novel itself is a compact epic about the condition of the human soul under intolerable pressure and the small means by which one survives both personal and global catastrophe. McCarthy's “tone” is one of patience and grief; love and doubt. Evoking a sense of American spiritualism, McCarthy's novel is spacious even at claustrophobically suspenseful moments. The text's episodes are punctuated by the physical blank space on the page which isolate them from each other and give the reader an indeterminable sense of time passing. And rightly so, as the characters themselves have no sense of time. As the father himself says “for ever is no time at all.” Perhaps this is the biggest difference in tone: where McCarthy strips away the artifice of his medium (including chapter markers, punctuation and character names) in an effort to connect the reader viscerally to the tragedy of his story, Hillcoat pads his melodramatic adaptation with cinematic fluff only occasionally exhibiting a capacity to transcend cinematic restrictions.

In this way director and elder protagonist are ethically linked. Throughout the film, the father (Viggo Mortensen) fails to reconcile his now-archaic morality with its absence in the post-apocalyptic world. He renders everything in black and white terms: they are bad because they cannibalize and we are good because we suffer before God. In a civilized world this view is functional, if overly simplistic, but morality in the new world is as useless as the scattered dollar bills and shelled out computers found in the ash covered country houses and burnt-out cities of the film. The Road represents a world in which economic and moral systems of value have imploded. The Father clings desperately to his roots as a conscientious human being though he gradually sheds his sense of identity when he leaves his wedding ring and photo of his wife behind. Still, he continues to draw lines on a canvas that no longer exists and never fully abandons himself to the moral grey zone of the new world. What is more complicated still is that this self-righteous “good man” is also a bigot. Though he claims faith, he trusts no one. By the film's conclusion he has not fully reconciled himself to the overhanging cloud of savagery which has been creeping in on him as slowly as death.

So too does Hillcoat never fully abandon the pretenses of narrative in favor of a post-Hollywood cinema the likes of which might have stunned unsuspecting viewers. Of course, this is not entirely his fault. A film is not a novel. A film, at least on this kind of scale, is not an individual endeavor. Even if Hillcoat had desired to supersede the rigorous guidelines of the American studio system it is quite likely that an intolerable amount of bureaucracy would have stood in his way. Be that as it may, let us not forget Billy Wilder. Or Hitchcock. No doubt comparing John Hillcoat to Alfred Hitchcock is going to sound crass and controversial but the point is that expansive, subversive work can be realized under the restrictive hold of the modern studio system but it must be done fastidiously and with great inspiration.

So, it isn't Sunset Boulevard or Rear Window but The Road is not a complete wash. Though Hillcoat lacks total authority over the original text, nevertheless the film does a couple of things quite well. Javier Aguirresarobe's cinematography is a manic depressive relative of Roger Deakin's on Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of the Jesses James. Here, rather than fields of golden wheat and snow covered valleys, Aguirresarobe elegantly captures each dying blade of grass and sagging telephone poll. In flashback, saturated cold orange light is expertly used in contrast with the film's monochromatic present tense. Also in common with Jesse James is a score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, the purveyors of dark Americana. Unfortunately, due to the film's already heightened and over-milked melodrama, Ellis and Cave's score is insultingly ineffective. Perhaps the snatches of diegetic piano music occurring occasionally throughout the film would have sufficed. Mortensen puts in another performance for the books, although Kodi Smit-McPhee as his son manages to upstage him at crucial moments. Charlize Theron is fine in flashback sequences as an emotionally devastated mother who chooses death over suffering. The singular recurring prop, a pistol with two bullets, resonates with intense dual meaning: survival or suicide.

In the end we are faced with what The Road could have been (elegiac tone poem) and what it is (moralizing studio melodrama). For what he might have intended to do with the text, perhaps it best to say that Hillcoat attempts too much. Despite minimalist dialog the film covers morality, God, the myth of Prometheus, value systems, modern family relationships (the film's finale resoundingly concludes that the rural Christian nuclear family, dog included, is best) in the context of a psychological thriller that simply doesn't excite. In short, there is too much pristine imagery and not enough acting. The depth of the characters' relationships rely too much on audience inference, which is ironic given how often Hillcoat forcibly directs our sympathies. In the future the director must commit himself more fully to his work lest it disappoint audiences on both ends of the cinematic spectrum.

Toy Story 3

This review was originally published here on Tiny Mix Tapes.

Dir. Lee Unkrich
2010
9.0


I have made no secret about my adoration for Pixar Animation Studio. Be it from an academic perspective or a humanitarian one, I've been singing the studio's' praises publicly for a couple years and privately for as long as I can remember. However, rather than spend time waxing nostalgic over my first experience seeing Toy Story as a seven year old or drawing parallels between Pixar's developmental progress as a studio and the thematic content of its filmography, I will instead simply say this: before Toy Story 3, I hadn't had so much fun at a movie in years. From its opening setpiece, a classic western with an increasingly hysterical modern tilt, to the shards of raw emotion that stick out with greater clarity than any 3-D projection, Toy Story 3 is as remarkable a film as it is a delightful night out with friends and family.

Magnificently dovetailing with Pixar's recent output, the film is equal parts prison drama, three-hankie weepie and family comedy, blending the emotional reach of Up with the theatricality of WALL-E. Beginning as a comedy of errors with the ensemble of Toys being mistakenly thrown out rather than extradited to the green zone of the family attic, Toy Story 3 initially offers much space for the audience to wonder whether the film won't be the adrenal adventure of its predecessors. Perhaps a small, contemplative film: more Bergman than Spielberg. Knowing it's a kid's film, it's still not totally unreasonable to imagine Pixar pulling off such a trick. Considering the existential thoughtfulness of Up, the near avante-garde visual texture of WALL-E, the New Wave-ish glory of Ratatouille not to mention the critical and commercial success of all three, Pixar was primed to make a film that further transcended the static notion of modern children's films. The manifest of this possibility is the complex ideological debate of individual ingenuity vs. group integrity that surges throughout the first act. The film builds up to Marxist fervor at the utopian day care center which the Toys (with the exception of Woody) choose over the return to a position of subordination to a benevolent ruler (the seventeen year old Andy) who has all but forgotten their existence. For a short time it almost looks like Toy Story 3 is set to become a heady dystopian fever dream of soviet proportions.

What happens instead is far more fitting and much less pretentious. The contention between the individual and the community continues but as a subtext rather than a full blown theme. The day care center is revealed to be a feudal hierarchy. At its apex is misanthrope Lotso Bear who parades as southern gentleman while his cane and limp evoke the tyranny of Orson Welles' crooked police detective in A Touch of Evil. The day care is divided between the heavenly Butterfly Room and the hellish nightmare of the Caterpillar Room (characterized by a deft parody of the terrifying camera work in Requiem for a Dream). When Buzz Lightyear attempts to reason with kingpin Lotso he discovers the horrific extent to which Lotso rules his toy kingdom. He is “brainwashed” and returns to the Toys as a foot soldier of injustice, holding his former comrades in captivity. Woody returns out solidarity with his fellow Toys and arranges a rescue mission that becomes the central, astounding setpiece of the film's second half.

This second half, which prominently features the film's most impressive narrative twists, sublimely realized emotional landscapes, visual gags (I just about died laughing at Mr. Tortilla Head) and one liners fully overpowers the social subtext of the film's first half. Which, to be honest, is fine. While adults and critics alike will no doubt salivate at Pixar's by-turns comic and terrifyingly accurate reimagining of captivity narratives, prison dramas and classic horror films, the task of paying it back to the old masters who inform and influence their work has always been second to Pixar Studio's desire to create new works of authentic genius. This may sound like conjecture but how often does a film bring together ideological dialectics and stunning visual invention all while de-vilifying commercialist capitalism? By my count, three.

For a film that accomplishes so much from a studio that has been at the peak of its creative power since 2007, Toy Story 3's final sequences are something of a swan song to the cinema of our lives. A handful of us have had the honor of growing up alongside Pixar. If Andy's handing off his “friends” airs on the side of sentimentality...well...that's just fine. It is rare in cinema that such a passionate and heartfelt relationship should spring up between not only viewers and a single film but viewers and an entire studio's creative outpouring. But such is this case with Pixar. Though their films never fail to be as dynamic as anything the art house world has to offer, it always feels like the folks behind the films are gently consoling us. They are insisting that it's OK to hold on to certain things forever. The imperative to grow up, to become an adult, can and should coexist symbiotically with the need to remain, at least in part, a child. If we could all hold onto our sense of childlike wonder and imagination the way Pixar's team has than Toy Story 3 wouldn't just be the prized object we celebrate fleetingly but just one more enchanting plaything in the toy box of our endless youth.

Mysterious Object at Noon

Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
2000
8.0


In dramatic cinema we are constantly being met with the moment when everything falls into place. Sometimes this is accomplished through a gradual building up of narrative steam or the sudden onslaught of “the twist.” Either way, our outlying concerns for the welfare of the given film's characters and our enthusiasm (ranging from ecstatic to stupefied) for the film's mystery are neatly wrapped up. We have even come to expect this kind of neatness (perhaps even more so) in documentary films. So you'll understand what I mean when I say that it as much a relief as a frustration to meet a film that wraps nothing up; that lays itself bare (or at least seems to) for the repressed scrutiny of an audience not altogether comfortable with this kind of candid behavior. I use these active verbs to stress how Mysterious Object at Noon, the debut full length documentary from Apichatpong “”Just Call Me Joe” Weerasethakul, engages with its audience as a means of locating an abstracted understanding of itself both as a film and as a representative of Weerasethakul's home country of Thailand.

Mysterious Object is a conceptual piece of documentary filmmaking. The film is based on the Surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse wherein a small group will build an illustration piecemeal usually resulting in an abstract representation of collective psychic continuity. One person draws along part of the paper then covers their drawing leaving only a line trailing down to where the next person will sketch. In Weerasethakul's film he and his film crew travel across their native Thailand asking people to tell a small section of an apparently invented folkloric tale. Intercut into these serenely earnest moments is Weerasethakul's no-budget visual translation of each teller's tale. As it it stands this is an unremarkable albeit faintly clever concept and stretching it to 85 minutes might have been an unfortunate choice were it not for Weerasethakul's own natural gifts as a story teller.

Using the documentary footage and stagey adaptation as a base, the director assembles an unconventional collage of relationships. The story tellers become linked to their creations through the call and response style editing. The tellers also link themselves to the personal memories which inform their take on the film's story; those memories themselves greatly affected by Thailand's history. The film crew becomes linked to the story tellers and often engage with them from behind the camera. The film crew too becomes engaged with the non-professional actors who are used to visualize the evolution of this modern day folk tale. Slowly a world begins to form one that is both highly autonomous and frighteningly at odds with reality. This reality, the internal contradiction of how Thailand has viewed itself cinematically throughout history vs. how the "other half" has lived and continues to live there, is at the center of Weerasethakul's beating heart of a film.

The tale told is one of transformation and hidden identity. A young crippled boy is looked after by a caring teacher who one day unleashes from within her a “mysterious object” that becomes a young boy with the ability to transform into anyone he likes. The teacher is revived and the crippled boy must choose between the teacher and the magical young boy who is impersonating her. He chooses the teacher. Allegorically speaking the tale's meaning is as clear as day: though it may look and sound the same, Thailand's portrayal in cinema is not only at odds with its true identity but must be rejected in order for the country to reconcile itself and move forward. If this is the case one might guess that the tale's crippled boy is none other that Weerasethakul himself, a filmmaker unable to get his films screened in his home country due to unfortunate censorship laws that deems his films “unfit” for Thailand's Nationalist cinema.

Though highly interpretive, Mysterious Object at Noon instills in the viewer a feeling of interconnectivity and unity despite its abstractions. If the tale told in the film and the fragmented means by which it is told is in fact the story of the Thai people then one might assert that the melancholy that begins the film and the youthful playfulness that ends it imply an optimistic outlook. There is no doubt that Weerasethakul is a humanist and a director unlikely to abandon his home in the quest for notoriety. The film he has given us, built out of the shattered pieces of a country rich with love and ripe with suffering, is in turns somber, joyous, absurd, cruel, hopeful and most of all beautiful.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

This review was originally published here on Tiny Mix Tapes.

Dir. Banksy
2010
10.0


In light of the serious theoretical debate surrounding English street art pioneer Banksy's “documentary” Exit Through the Gift Shop I'd like to pose a multi-tiered question. In our highly academic engagement with the complexity of the Banksy ethos aren't we becoming the victims of the very same joke we are trying so desperately to escape being the punch line of? Is this obsessive Holier-Than-Though atmosphere just a malignant side effect of the critic's self loathing? Are we not as bad as L.A.'s soulless faux-literati who parade their affectations of seriousness and insight (not to mention sincerity) or the art collector pricks who juxtapose Banksy's work alongside minor Renoirs without batting an eye? Hugging our pretensions close we have unknowingly become the targets of Banksy's anti-expectation art. Critics have made a lot of oblique assumptions about Banksy's intentions with Exit in a vain attempt to deconstruct his film and simplify its elliptical dialectics. I'm going to attempt to be less crass but no more succinct: I am the victim of Exit Through the Gift Shop's recondite gag, if it in fact exists at all, though I try so hard to escape the ideological pot holes other critics have fallen into on their way toward “figuring out” the film. As we look desperately for the code to decipher this endlessly unfurling life à clef, Banksy laughs all the way to the moral bank to deposit the sea of coins we've tossed into the infinite fountain of the occult, from which he draws not only his healthy humanitarian salary but also the inspiration that has propelled him into the stratosphere of modern art.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is in turns affecting, insightful and hilarious. It supercedes narrative constraints in a way that is pure Banksy: emotionally modern and structurally post-modern. Banksy, despite his capacity for vicious satire, is devotedly human at heart. His work is a seismic indicator of his dedication to the people often overlooked by sovereigns and tycoons. However, his tactics are reactionary. Street art itself is a reaction to the depravity of high art. Banksy's hidden identity is a retaliation against celebrity which itself is often a facade masking an ugly reality. Exit, like the rest of his art, is emotionally rich and psychologically complex. And the premise? Deliciously meta! A French ex-pat (Thierry Guetta) who never stops filming promises to create a documentary which is never truly made and in turn becomes the subject of a new documentary (accredited to a man without a face) which some propose (in a paranoid attempt not to be the tag line of an elaborate and possibly self-created Banksy hoax) is itself not a documentary at all.

For any person with intellectual hang-ups this will be something to lose sleep over. Banksy, who has undergone a dramatic apotheosis at the hands of a desperate and self-degrading youth culture, is an artist for whom the immediacy of his medium has always been its most important aspect. It is the act of street art, not so much the culture that formed out of the connection between himself and other artists, that defines Banksy's genius. His genuine love of and adoration for the people for whom his work serves as a reminder of life's trials and tribulations as well as its simple pleasures is supported through his contempt for and subversion of fascism and abusive social institutions. This naturally stands in stark contrast to the supercilious seriousness of today's youth who selfishly utilize anything and everything as a means of assimilating its "importance" into their own lives in the vain hope of finding the one thing that is going to validate their entire existence. If these holy fools ever managed to find the immortal something they want so desperately they would undoubtedly strangle the life out of it.

As for the film's proto-idiot savant protagonist, for whom the final product and/or the process by which that product is reached is always secondary to how it can utilized for self-serving desires, his self-constructed alter ego, Mr. Brainwash, gets it all wrong. During the film he notes that “street art is about brainwash,” which the viewer interprets as Thierry rightly recognizing street art's themes of anti-authoritarianism and contempt for political corruption. What the film reveals however is something altogether darker: that the “artist”-by-way-of-pathological-observer-gone-culture-debasing-charlatan (not to be confused with filmmaker, documentarian or even authentic artist), who inarticulately expresses himself through bumbling non-sequitors and confused metaphors, has accidentally discovered street art's power of manipulation over not just wanton youth but snarky bourgeoisie as well. While Mr. Brainwash rakes in thousands of dollars for derivative works of kitschy pop art pastiche, Banksy, Shephard Fairey and others look on in horror and disbelief. The latent disciple of street art has unwittingly overthrown the masters.

If all this has you scratching your head like the apes of Banksy's graffiti then consider yourself unequivocally united with the collective subconscious of all who have viewed this brilliant meta-docu-film. More than just an engaging social and psychological study, the film is also a eulogy for the lost innocence of not only street art but man as well. Effortlessly constructing a spellbinding tale of obsession, fate, identity and illusion, Banksy has once again created a work that will undoubtedly turn commercially successful (and inevitably be co-opted by the “hip” who will further misconstrue and denigrate its diverse set of meanings) despite the great lengths he goes to show his derision for such a possibility. The film has already fallen prey to intense self-congratulating skepticism (which somehow passes for criticism...?) and there is no end in sight for that. Exit Through the Gift Shop's impeccability is in its refusal to glorify the viewer's intellect or their capacity to uncover the remote “truth” of a film. The back patting experience of contemporary art house cinema and the stupefying effects of the Hollywood blockbuster prove, in Banksy's paint stained hands, two sides of the same coin: one that is meant to make the viewer feel superior. Banksy instead places a shadow just outside the viewer's peripheral vision and dares us to guess what it is, where it comes from and what it means for us. But unlike so many filmmakers his well being does not rely upon our interest. In fact, Banksy's take it or leave it disposition may be the most mysteriously engaging aspect of his work. Like Plato's allegorical cave we struggle against the chains of our expectations all while philosopher king Banksy beckons us forth into the searing rays of enlightenment.

Banksy has always been an artist aware of the capacity for his art to disappear forever. This idea obviously chokes the creative subconscious of Mr. Brainwash but if anything it arouses in Banksy the ability and knowledge to achieve the transcendental attitude by which he goes on surreptitiously making his art, in plain view of the public, largely for himself. Given all this intrigue, this may be the best time to ironically suggest that the film quietly told me what it was about in one brief snippet wherein a passerby to Banksy's mutilated telephone booth piece when asked what she thinks about it wryly replies in a sublimely Banksian manner “someone doesn't like BT telephone service.” In other words: analysis has its cost. So, shut up and watch the damn movie.

A Taste of Cherry

Dir. Abbas Kiarostami
1997
9.0


More than a decade before critics came up with a term for the growing trend of thoughtful albeit at times affectation smothered films featuring protagonists plodding their way through life's dreary necessities (also known as Slow Cinema), Abbas Kiarostami anticipated and transcended the movement. However, as in all arenas of history there is rarely one discreet starting point for a movement and to suggest that Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry laid the foundation for Slow Cinema would be indelicate and ignorant. What A Taste of Cherry does discreetly represent is an apex of the pre-Slow Cinema age of spiritual perambulating over perfunctory story telling, a trait which would later become one of the myriad slippery signifiers of Slow Cinema. More so than its debatable cinematic importance (the film did win the Palm d'Or at Cannes after all) is the film's power as a cinematic metaphor of projection.

This concept of projection works splendidly in cinema because it is bound to the most basic and common manner in which film has historically been viewed. However, the kind of projecting required and unconsciously elicited by A Taste of Cherry is defined by its viewers. Unlike the flash-bang of narrative cinema with its constructs and manipulations, A Taste of Cherry takes away the tension/release or question/answer framework which most narrative features adhere to. In the absence of clear direction and motivation in the film itself, the viewer is left to decide everything. Rather than have questions answered or even have them posed at all, we as viewers have to project onto the film our own desires, misgivings and insecurities. Thus the film takes on a unique quality of assimilated personality and vulnerability.

We enter into a cerebral mode early on as Kiarostami interpolates us not as perverse voyeurs but spiritual passengers. We spend much of the film in protagonist's Mr. Badhi's passenger seat (fittingly this seat was filled by Kiarostami himself throughout the shooting). Badhi drives slowly around Tehran before entering into the city's solitary foothills, all the while eliciting an unknown favor from strangers. As it turns out Badhi is seeking someone to bury his body after he commits suicide. Upon this revelation the film releases some of its former passivity and begins to ease the viewer into a series of episodes which constitute a familiar “life in a day” structure. In and through meandering conversations with three outsiders (a soldier, a seminarian and a taxidermist) each with a profoundly different relation to death (the soldier destroys life, the seminarian attempts to maintain it, and the taxidermist seeks to preserve it) Kiarostami demonstrates, via the reactionary Badhi, man's evolution from the bullying anti-logic of youth to the closed-door spirituality that has little relation to a real, complex world and finally the practiced pragmaticism of the aged who accept death begrudgingly. Each episode is a journey for Badhi not simply through physical terrain but his soul and intellect as well.

If there is a theme in A Taste of Cherry it might be the meeting point of the latter two. Badhi has calculated that his life has no value amongst the living although the doubt that slips in toward the film's conclusion is a telling reminder that value like life itself is dynamic. The same kind of calculation might be practiced on film or any art for that matter. What merits excellence and aren't our perceptions wielded (at least in part) by our pretenses? Badhi appears well off and in good health although his tanned handsome face slopes downward toward his self-dug grave. However, this is not enough for him and while we never discover what has prompted his decision to end his life Kiarostami seems to be suggesting through the film's minimalist dialog that the reason is not so important. For Badhi, as with Kiarostami, the action becomes subordinate to the decision to act.

Of course all this investment in Badhi and his journey evaporates with the film's conclusion. Kiarostami pulls away the curtain of artifice that exists in even the most methodically unmethodical regions of cinema. Handicam footage of the shooting of A Taste of Cherry reveals, however, not the “tiresome distancing strategy” Roger Ebert interprets, but rather an uncharacteristic openness to cinema's largest intrinsic fault: its corrupted imitation of real life. Even in a film as visually beautiful and emotionally haunting as A Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami's willingness to interrupt his own quiet reverie should be celebrated rather than condemned. The footage, only a few minutes worth, evokes a tangible human relationship between people which we retrospectively discover mimics our own relationship to Badhi. The moment in which lead actor Homayon Ershadi hands Kiarostami a cigarette illustrates a sublime counterpoint to the heart breaking final shot of Badhi's face: eyes closed, lit by strands of lightning darting from the heaven he hopes to soon occupy. The closing shot of soldiers (whether they are actors or actual army men is never made clear) socializing along the slopes underlines the intention of this unlikely inclusion: in every act of theater, beyond every curtain and behind every character there are human beings whose lives are the inspiration for and starting point of all performances.

A Serious Man

Dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
2009
8.8


Co-en-i-za-tion:
-noun
the attribution of a universal or symbolic quality to transient and otherwise helpless human beings.

A Serious Man, the Coen brothers' 14th feature, opens with the quote “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” If ever there was an aphorism which the characters in the brothers' films applied less to their lives, I would like to see it. Whether it be the vendetta driven Lewelyn Moss or the scheming of Jerry Lundegaard, Coen characters have a unfailing tendency to complicate their lives in a misguided effort to simplify them. In A Serious Man we bear witness to the trials and tribulations of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg). In a state of constant frenetic panic, Larry's world unwinds until nothing remains but the very core of his being. In it's calling into question the usefulness of allegory and its subsequent affect on our ability to endure misfortune, the Coen's make one of the more remarkable turnarounds of their impressive career. A Serious Man exalts rather than depraves the suffering of its protagonist, easily making it the most humanitarian film in the brothers' grim body of work.

Over the course of their career, the Coens have become masters of allegorical realism. The self-contained worlds of their films give the impression that there is always a lesson needing to be learned. Occasionally this attribute has devolved into absurd social satire (Burn After Reading) but for the most part the Coens have maintained the heady combination of stories unique enough to capture our interest but universal enough to sustain the high moral ground they tend to tread upon. A Serious Man aligns itself most closely with Fargo as a film about the universe inflicting its indifferent wrath upon a man. Like Jerry Lundegaard and Barton Fink before him, Larry Gopnik becomes painfully aware of his own simplicity and impressionability, which in turn shatters the small world he lives in. However, the parallels to A Serious Man are not found simply within a single text or within the Coen's oeuvre. The film is a composite of numerous stories with each marking the point at which faith in a higher power must either be accepted or rejected.

To call A Serious Man a film about Judaism is both a under and overstatement. The important religious elements are here (faith, morality, fidelity, etc.) but the film is not simply about a man coming to terms with God's way (“The boss isn't always right, but he's always the boss.”). Larry, in Murphy's Law free fall, is driven by the question “Why?” but the Coens are driven by a different, related question: “How?” How do we believe? The brothers point to the religious significance of allegory and parable which have played a large part in how they tell their own stories. Where Larry, in vain attempts to assert his seriousness, seeks to understand the math or the reason behind his suffering, the Coens suggest that there is no reason and never was. In their impressionistic use of the story of Job (Larry), David and Goliath (Larry's habitually pot smoking son Danny [Aaron Wolff] is hounded by the beastly Fagle), and Adam and Eve (the film's prologue in the Polish shteti) among others, the Coen's are really illustrating a complex portrait of the uselessness of parables as a means of, or reason for, living.

This reading is complicated because without the allegories to give it existential buoyancy A Serious Man might never leave its narrative bed; lying prostrate in the face of an uncaring universe. When Larry seeks spiritual guidance from a trinity of Rabbis he finds the naivete of the junior Rabbi an immediate tool for reassessment. When this fails, the practiced pragmatism of the 2nd Rabbi, who not only gives Larry a feasible solution but also becomes the mouthpiece for the Coens assertions about the use of purpose driven tales, only redoubles Larry's conviction that God wishes him to suffer. From the 3rd Rabbi he is given nothing, which is perhaps all he ever needed. Throughout the film various characters give credence to Larry's suffering as he proclaims to everyone “I haven't done anything!” The tighter Larry grips his metaphysical oiled rope, the faster he descends into the swirling madness of the film's finale.

“I understand the math. I don't understand the cat,” Larry asserts to his blackmailing Korean student, Clive. In this case the context is Shrodinger's Paradox, but the quote can be read widely. Larry is a rational man but the world is not a rational place. Through sheer perseverance Larry attempts to understand why these unfortunate incidents keep occurring in his life but ironically detaches himself from their real life consequences. We constantly are catching him in media res, always shocked by some new fact that, to him and us, has come out of nowhere. Though it may sound like a world of suffering, the Coens actually come to empathize with Larry. Calling attention to their own thematic use of allegory, the Coens have finally found a character they do not wish to make a martyr of contemporary morality. They almost give him a satisfying ending but then it wouldn't be a Coen brothers film without some level of ambiguity. Larry's call from the doctor and the approaching storm are not the final nails in the grave of the Gopniks or the Jewish clan at Saint Louis, Minnesota. They are, in fact, reiterations of the film's opening quote. We never truly figure out what is right and wrong because the destructive will of the universe (or God) comes to sweep us all away before our existential queries are answered. With questions swirling around the film's ending (What will happen Larry? Why isn't Danny frightened of the oncoming tornado? What is the significance of the recurring Jefferson Airplane song?), the film's iconic final shot may be the best answer. Or perhaps better still are the words of Clive's inconsistent father: “Please, accept the mystery.”

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Dir. Wes Anderson
2009
6.3


For what it could have been, anyone might have assumed Wes Anderson was the perfect director for a film adaptation of the Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. Anderson has a history of channeling the repressed trauma of childhood and chronicling the misplaced desires of patriarchs while still being lovingly committed to traditional familial values and affection. However, while Dahl presented a knowing and gentle sympathy for children, Anderson's Mr. Fox appears mysteriously callous toward kids and adults alike. In the last decade, the director's profound empathy for his characters has receded leaving in its wake a shallow, superficially delightful circus of fantastic auteurist signifiers (the “Anderson trademarks”: slow motion sequences over 60s pop music, perfectionist refinement of costume and set detail, banal quirkiness, etc.). What makes Anderson's films fun to watch used to be meticulously balanced with what made them difficult to watch. His archetypes (the unholy trinity of The Loser, The Stoic Wife and The Bastard) though recognizable throughout his filmography have been systematically reduced from flawed but beautiful statues to infantile water color portraits. Much as Mr. Fox delights in lateral movement over depth of field (see the film's opening sequence) so too has Wes Anderson come to delight in fanciful vision over rigorous realization.

Perhaps the question really is: why the high standards for Anderson? While he is certainly of the American school of auteurism, beyond The Royal Tenenbaums it is arguable that Anderson has done little that is anywhere near as complete. Rushmore is the pretentious purist's favorite while The Life Aquatic was perhaps his most accessible film (or at least most widely seen) before Fantastic Mr. Fox. Darjeeling Limited was a failure on almost every level and one is hard pressed to find a casual viewer whose actually seen Bottle Rocket. However, this lack of obviousness, the vague sense of the occult, is what brings viewers back to Anderson's films even if they themselves don't realize it. While Anderson's most important elements and themes came together with exquisite empathy in The Royal Tenebaums, it has largely been left up to the viewer to discern the importance (or lack thereof) in the remainder of his oeuvre.

And for the most part it has been there: the psychological portraits of the aforementioned archetypes and their patient and sympathetic dissection, the non-linear transgressions into bizarre, idiosyncratic worlds, and the strangely updated sign posts of classic cinema. Anderson has always represented an intentional and thus self-aware digression from the norms of Hollywood. Despite his big name rosters he has never been an actor's director. His films are alternatingly cathartic and not with narrative structures that air on the side of nomadic and ephemeral. Though his art direction is compulsively organized, the films themselves appear loose, capable of going in one direction or another; shifting their weight distractedly while making plot decisions on the fly. There are no real surprises in Anderson's filmography because everything is some kind of a surprise.

So, where does Fantastic Mr. Fox fit into all this cerebral cinephilia? It doesn't. The trend one could identify as early as The Life Aquatic has been fully realized. With Mr. Fox, Anderson has largely abandoned his early earnest efforts to portray unrealized characters. He opts instead for the venue of children's film and uses it as an excuse for lazy and hopelessly disappointing workmanship. Mr. Fox, (here The Bastard becomes not a “son-of-a-bitch” but a “Wild Animal”) is worse than his predecessors, who recited self-prepared speeches about their obvious short comings without really believing in them, by knowingly betraying the one's who care about him all the while celebrating for them their fortune at having such a “fantastic” presence in their lives. This difference is naturally thin and difficult to nail down in writing but painfully obvious on screen. It is also greatly aided by an important inter-oeuvre thematic transgression: constant character (and thus viewer) empathy for The Bastard. Compare the way Mr. Fox's family (with the exception of his son Ash who plays the alienated and hopelessly self-deluded Loser) and friends treat his selfish actions throughout the film with the coldness Royal Tenenbaum is met with upon his return to his family home. Despite the seemingly great lengths that Mr. Fox goes to win back the respect and adoration of everyone (ironic yet expected given that this has always been his intention) they are physical not emotional hurdles. The 85 minute adventure narrative condenses all Anderson's once carefully detailed themes into visual tropes and dull exposition.

Anderson has always loved The Bastard, the one who turned his back on everyone who ever gave a damn about him in order to satisfy some internal, animalistic and deeply (although never too deeply) repressed desire. Mr. Fox is Anderson's most simplified and fully-realized Bastard. A self declared Wild Animal, Anderson embraces this default persona and calls for all the film's animals to all become “Wild,” which, if we follow the analogy, means they should all become slaves to their respective primal instincts. Which, especially at the point during which this action is called for by Mr. Fox, should not involve working together to help the the bastard who has, of course, single-handedly gotten them into their current predicament. The Bastard used to be a loner in Anderson's films: the guy no one wanted to see, much less help. In Fantastic Mr. Fox he becomes the down-and-out self-sacrificing character who all other characters eventually come to pity despite that he has not truly changed nor attempted to. Which, for anyone dedicated to the subtly of Anderson's films, is even more disappointing than the film's deplorable deus ex machina finale. In the end, despite Fantastic Mr. Fox being the ill-fitting puzzle piece of Wes Anderson's authentic puzzle of modern relationships, the film is best summarized by the simple platitude (which is also Anderson's uncomfortable, obvious and contradictory self-reference) Mrs. Fox expresses at the film's cavernous mid-point: this story is just too predictable.

The Hurt Locker

Dir. Kathryn Bigelow
2008
9.6


With a film as culturally significant as Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker it can be difficult to identify a critical starting point, especially at this late hour. I begin this way because after its sweep of the Oscars, its feted run at the major international film festivals and the editorial press it has received from nearly every film magazine in print not to mention the publicity it has accrued through American political journals, it is difficult to imagine a time when The Hurt Locker did not exist on such a broad plane. Had I written this review while the film was still in theaters or even upon my first viewing several months ago this introduction would have never crossed my mind, never mind this page. Nevertheless, here we are. As a budding critic I feel the push to add my personal perceptions to the insurmountable melting pot of analysis that surrounds the film. However, as a young cinephile for whom great films often take on an untouchable, transcendent quality I struggle with reconciling my intrinsic and often contradictory desire to be both an objective spectator and enthralled participant. Fortunately, I found a cinematic outlet for this internal conflict in the landscape of struggle that defines The Hurt Locker.

Though The Hurt Locker is indisputably greater than the sum of its parts, its ten minute opening set piece nevertheless sets the hyper-kinetic and fragmented tone of the narrative. Captured under the tyranny of the relentless sun, the film instantly makes psychic connections to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Albert Camus' The Stranger, works driven by that celestial malevolence whose unforgiving intensity can shatter the soul of man. This scene, as with all other major set pieces in the film, is intensely calculated to produce a specific effect: the tension-release of drug addiction. The impatient POV shooting combined with the extra-diegetic sound of jets screaming overhead and confrontational babble readily assert the intensity of the fear we immediately recognize in ourselves and the relief we feel when the bomb finally does explode. This technique invariably lays the framework for painful self-actualization in the viewer and the infinitely more complex sense of guilt that will arise when we realize our self-indulgent proclivity for immediate resolution over long term suspense. Barry Ackroyd's masterful cinéma vérité camerawork, a distant relative of Emmanuel Lubezki's more phantasmal work with Alfonso Cuaron, immediately interpolates the viewer into the position of voyeur. This placement puts us alongside the crowd of Iraqi civilians who watch casually from their balconies as the film's bomb squad protagonists go to work. The conclusion of this powerful opener casts an ominous influence on the way the bomb diffusers view these detached witnesses. Not only that, their paranoid gaze implicates our own displaced pleasure at watching personal and political drama unfold.

These themes (voyeurism and addiction), for which Ackroyd's jittery camera and Sergeant William James' (the brilliant Jeremy Renner) cigarette are the respective symbols, maintain a ripeness of meaning throughout the film. The film's self-declared agenda, to elucidate the “war as drug” metaphor, is thankfully proved in context rather than in exposition. Not unlike Apocalypse Now!'s hallucinatory realization of the Vietnam War as a personal battle of remote morality versus conditioned madness, The Hurt Locker supposes that a radical shift must take place within any man at war in order for him to either thrive in his environment or flee the face of horror. At first, Sergeant James seems an archetype, a Pragmatic Nihilist, but spoils this simplicity in his questionable attachment to (and ultimate obsession with) the Iraqi boy he befriends. My personal favorite reading of James' character is the modern Leviathan: a composite of America's contradictory desires and misplaced trust, a comparison that takes on a level of superficial believability whenever James' dons his Man-God bombsuit. He is at once Pontius Pilate washing his hands (or body) of the blood of an innocent and Jesus Christ the self-sacrificing savior of mankind. In the end, of course, Bigelow does all these reductive types one better by proving that James' is just a man with one love: life in the crosshairs of death.

James' presence is the catalyst for the painful catharsis' of his fellow team members. Sergeant J.T. Sanbourne (Anthony Mackie), the dogmatically conservative member of the group, discovers in himself an acute jealousy at being outperformed by the new maverick. After a near death experience in the film's final set piece, Sanbourne drops his facade of machismo and flaunts an unwavering affection for both James and the world he has left behind. Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is troubled from the start, hoisting on himself the blame for the death of his former team leader. A reappearing Army therapist adds an introspective and revealing quality to Eldridge's suffering, while simultaneously offering him the emotional support soldiers often deny themselves in the face of wishing to appear unbreakable. It is of course a purposeful irony that said therapist's untimely death in the field would be the impetus for Eldridge's immediately-repressed nervous breakdown. While Sanbourne initially outwardly despises James and then comes to love him, Eldridge goes from expected ambivalence to indignant hatred after a frenzied and ill-conceived mission results in an injury which hospitalizes him.

With an appropriate if melodramatic epilogue leading into the film's much needed metaphysical 'release', The Hurt Locker concludes by being nothing short of outstanding. A feverish travelogue through the dark night of the soul, the film bridges a thirty year gap with the greatest of hyper-realist war films: Apocalypse Now! While that film was a hazily beautiful piece of deconstructionist filmmaking and despite the great number of obvious differences, The Hurt Locker is truly its cinematic complement. Here the drug of choice is not a psychedelic which distorts reality and detaches the participants from the grotesque realities of war, but a narcotic which brings the immediacy and visceral intensity of combat to an almost intolerable closeness. The Hurt Locker is, in short, the most complete and intense staring contest any lover of cinema could ever hope for. You blink, you die. So, how did you do?