Lessons of Darkness

2012 (2009): D

2009-11-12T11:57:27-05:00

2012 may be the dimmest, most clichéd, most simultaneously maudlin and callous big-ticket film of the year, a dunderheaded end-of-the-world special-effects extravaganza that stands as the defining entrant in, and the nadir of, the disaster porn genre. Roland Emmerich’s epic slab of cinematic compost concerns the planet’s destruction in 2012, the date that the Mayans predicted such a cataclysm would take place. Thanks to some Indian research studies, do-gooder geologist Adrian (Chiwetel Ejiofor) learns of Earth’s impending fate and counsels his pragmatic (i.e. cretinous) boss Carl (Oliver Platt) as well as the noble President (Danny Glover) that the world will soon cease to exist thanks to solar flares, an overheating planet core, and massive earthquakes and tidal waves. While Adrian and Carl bicker over whether to inform the populace at large about the coming events, science fiction writer Jackson (John Cusack) – whose book, wouldntchaknow, is being read by Adrian – reunites with his estranged wife and two kids while trying to escape an exploding Yellowstone National Park and a California crumbling and sliding into the sea. Along the way, Emmerich pulls out all the moldy, idiotic dramatic tropes he can muster (fathers mending fences with, and saying goodbye to, sons; altruists facing tsunami deaths head-on; sacrificial acts of heroism; global landmarks getting smashed to pieces; etc.) without even pretending to plausibly dramatize them.

2012’s scripting is so lame that it makes the director’s prior works of moronic national monument destruction (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow) look like the collected works of Chaucer in comparison. Emmerichs’s spectacle is meant to be Big Dumb Fun, but its excessiveness – which would have been perfect for 2009’s chosen techno-craze, 3D – isn’t exhilarating as much as embarrassingly campy, a series of do-or-die scenarios that have little tether to reality in a narrative or visual sense, and seem designed only to further the director’s favored unreal digitized aesthetic. Clocking in at a borderline-insulting 158 minutes, the film is emotionally manipulative about its in-dire-straits protagonists’ fates to an egregious extent. And yet despite an affected interest in human survival, goodness and selflessness, it exploits panoramas of mass death for horrifying kicks to the point that the action proves downright heartless, and its syrupy bathos disingenuous and maddening. Still, considering its corniness, inanity, and wrongness – which extends to the story’s celebration of bad sci-fi as a moral exemplar and its contention that crisis can cure familial tensions and (in a laughable subplot) kids’ bedwetting – 2012 does manage, from catastrophic start to Noah’s Ark finale, to be accidentally uproarious, though its efforts to be the archetypal disaster film are so thoroughly achieved that one can only hope the genocidal genre has now reached its own end date.

A Serious Man (2009): B+

2009-11-12T11:09:22-05:00

The title of the Coen Bros.’ A Serious Man is both ironic and not, as the filmmaking duo’s latest is a borderline-farce about a 1967 Midwestern Jewish family’s disintegration that slowly reveals layers of ever-graver fatalism. Of a thematic piece with their prior No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading, the Coens’ tale concerns physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a put-upon man whose wife is leaving him for a pretentious bon vivant (a fantastic Fred Melamed), whose student is attempting to bribe/blackmail him for a better grade, and whose brother (Richard Kind) is locked away in his bathroom draining a sebaceous cyst. Larry searches for answers to his problems in reason but, as evidenced by a blackboard overwhelmed by an Uncertainty Principle equation, comes up with nothing. Thus, he turns to the temple, where a trio of rabbis afford him no greater enlightenment, blathering on about a beautiful parking lot or recounting a parable about a goy who received a seemingly divine message from God inscribed on the inside of his teeth. As Larry navigates his insular Jewish suburban community, all he discovers is pitiless randomness – or, as suggested by a Jewish folklore prologue in which a woman in a shtetl kills a man (Fyvush Finkel) she believes to be a dybbuk (i.e. demon), is his misery an act of carefully orchestrated cultural payback from a God angry at past transgressions? The Coens’ latest isn’t drawn in one-to-one cause-effect lines, its obliqueness lending suspense and interpretative depth to the Job-like suffering of Larry, which might also simply be the byproduct of – and elucidate a lesson about – small personal moral transgressions snowballing into catastrophe. “Don’t you need somebody to love?” croons Jefferson Airplane in the radio earplugs of Larry’s pot-smoking son (Aaron Wolff), and the question lingers in the air like a taunt throughout A Serious Man, a portrait of cruel inevitability at once universal and rooted in a specific Jewish tradition, imbued with dry humor and genuine pathos, and defined by a nimbleness, wit and mystery that demands to be taken seriously.

The White Ribbon (2009): C+

2009-11-12T10:54:25-05:00

Michael Haneke tones down the admonitory audience haranguing with his Palme d'Or-winning The White Ribbon, a welcome relief that nonetheless doesn’t salvage the film from being another of the Funny Games auteur’s unpersuasively rigid portraits of man’s venality. In the small Austrian agricultural village of Eichwald in the years preceding WWI, a place where church and farming are the dominate spheres of life, a spate of crimes – a doctor is injured when his horse is tripped by a mysterious wire; the local Baron’s son is tortured, as is a mentally handicapped child; a barn fire is set – casts a pall over the tight-knit community. Shooting in strikingly flat digital black-and-white, Haneke keeps most of these terrible events off-screen while focusing his gaze on the townsfolk, a quietly horrific bunch made up of domineering, abusive, child-molesting parents and packs of suspicious kids straight out of Village of the Damned. The only signs of goodness amidst the vast cruelty and depravity on display comes via a schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) and the young nanny (Leonie Benesch) whom he courts, and in his depiction of their love, Haneke exhibits, for the first time in years, genuine empathy for humanity. Their romance, however, can’t counter the increasingly inescapable fact that The White Ribbon is, for all its monochromatic aesthetic splendor, formal meticulousness, and period setting, simply the latest Haneke censure of the bourgeoisie, whose decorous exteriors mask ugly malice. Once it’s convincingly suggested [spoiler alert] that the town’s youth are to blame, their actions a response to the culture of suffering fostered by their guardian adults, Haneke’s tale reveals its true hand as one about “the return of the repressed.” Not content to leave his material abstract, however, the director also – via the schoolteacher’s intro narration that the story might “clarify some things that happened later in our country” – implicitly positions his film as an explanation for the origins of National Socialism, a tack at once moderately reductive (despite a valid point about the consequences of Germanic authoritarianism) and unconvincingly argued by The White Ribbon’s evocative but largely one-note people-are-creeps time capsule.

The 47th New York Film Festival

Paranormal Activity (2009): C

2009-11-09T14:49:54-05:00

On the evidence of Paranormal Activity, ten years is how long filmmakers must wait before blatantly ripping off cult classics. Oren Peli’s super-low-budget film is a shameless domestic variation on The Blair Witch Project, not only in its use of faux-verité documentary footage for a ghost story but with regards to its actual finale, which has the embarrassing gall to actually end [minor spoiler alert] with its camera tipped over on its side. The bump-in-the-night action focuses on Micah (Micah Sloat) and girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherson), a grating couple whose lives are upended by the arrival in their home of a seemingly malevolent specter that’s been haunting Katie since childhood. Micah’s response is to yell at the spirit, buy a camera and document the proceedings, which Katie naturally bristles at but allows because, well, there has to be footage for the audience to watch. While the supernatural spookiness initially amounts to little more than a few scary noises emanating from downstairs in the wee hours of the morning, things soon spiral into more overtly creepy realms. A recurring shot of the couple’s nighttime bedroom – with the focus always on an open doorway – lends the action a sense of inescapable doom. Yet otherwise, this is the same old thing dressed up in very slightly different clothes, right down to mundane character bickering, the halfhearted stabs at creating a mythological context for the otherworldly events, and the inevitable letdown of a climax that can’t possibly live up to the film’s preceding suggestions of unholy terror.

The Messenger (2009): B+

2009-11-09T09:13:09-05:00

Staying out of an actor’s way is a considerable directorial skill, and one that Oren Moverman exhibits with assurance throughout The Messenger, the tale of a decorated Iraqi war hero named Will (Ben Foster) who, upon returning to the States, is assigned to spend his last three months of active duty alongside old pro Tony (Woody Harrelson) notifying families of their enlisted relatives’ deaths. Aside from his use of heavy metal to further suggest Will’s roiling inner state, Moverman uses an impressive amount of restraint in dramatizing his scenario, which finds Will and Tony slowly forming a bond – and, in the process, finding a means of expressing their twisted feelings of guilt, shame, grief and longing – while carrying out their arduous task. That Will eventually falls for, and tentatively attempts to woo, a single mother named Olivia (Samantha Morton) who’s notified by the duo of her husband’s death does, initially, reek of screenwriting contrivance. Yet Moverman’s scripting is subdued and emotionally authentic, and Foster and Morton – especially in a kitchen-set conversation, shot in one unbroken take, that finds both performers nimbly modulating, and vacillating between, conflicting emotions – prove more than capable of keeping the narrative strand honest. Harrelson too takes what originally seems a caricatured role (hardass warhorse breaking in the new guy) and makes him believably multifaceted, a man whose professional regret, personal demons, and miserable military responsibility (enduring the tears and blows of grieving parents and wives) have conspired to leave him a cracked, if not wholly broken, man. The Messenger conveys the lingering damage wrought by conflict but, more than that, a universal need for stability and comfort, and if its ending carries with it a whiff of Hollywood hopefulness, it’s a mood that, following on the heels of its humanist portrait of suffering and surviving, nonetheless seems well-earned.

Brain Dead

2009-11-06T12:49:12-05:00

After a grueling work week, I've got nothing to say except that The Box is suprisingly loopy (in a good way), and both games featured in this week's Sandbox column are worth your time and cash.

The Sandbox: Breathing New Life into Old Forms (IFC News)

Out Now:
The Box (Slant magazine)
A Christmas Carol (Slant magazine)
Collapse (Slant magazine)
Splinterheads (Slant magazine)

Adventureland (2009): C+

2009-11-06T09:03:43-05:00

Adventureland has a potent sense of time (1987), place (suburbia) and setting (a local amusement park, the summer after college graduation). What writer/director Greg Mottola’s semi-autobiographical follow-up to Superbad is crucially lacking, however, is verve, as his story – about James’ (Jesse Eisenberg) efforts to navigate issues of love and friendship while working at the titular venue – too frequently mistakes tameness for restraint. To be sure, Mottola’s preference for humor that springs from character drama rather than easy scatological gags lends heart to his tale, which thanks to Eisenberg’s well-modulated turn taps into the sense of unease and continuing identity definition and reconfiguration undergone by early-twentysomethings. Yet despite Eisenberg’s earnest performance as well as sturdy work by supporting players Kristen Stewart, Ryan Reynolds and Martin Starr, Mottola’s film coasts along on a pleasant but innocuous wavelength, content to occupy that middle ground where insights are authentic but far from revelatory and comedy is more amiable than riotous. Despite the inclusion of a dorky character who likes to unexpectedly punch James in the crotch, Adventureland is a story comprised of likeable bores, and their mildness unfortunately epitomizes the proceedings, which could use far more of Superbad’s authentic-teen bawdiness, and whose nostalgia proves meek and unadventurous.

Devil's Night

2009-10-30T16:29:36-04:00

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

Ti West Gives Horror a Good Name (IFC News)

The 25 Scariest Moments in Non-Horror Films (IFC News)

Out Now:
The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day (Slant magazine)
Skin (Slant magazine)
Labor Day (Slant magazine)

An Education (2009): C

2009-10-28T09:32:39-04:00

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

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

2009-10-28T09:17:43-04:00

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

The 47th New York Film Festival

Law Abiding Citizen (2009): C+

2009-10-26T09:34:48-04:00

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

October Grouching

2009-10-23T14:13:03-04:00

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

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

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

The Boondock Saints (1999): C-

2009-10-23T09:04:55-04:00

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

Happiness (1998): B+

2009-10-20T14:07:59-04:00

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

Where the Wild Things Are (2009): B+

2009-10-14T16:42:54-04:00

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

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

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