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.