Cinemania

2013-05-19T14:48:00.004-07:00

The Hunt (Denmark, 2012, Thomas Vinterberg)

Ben Livant:

As we all know, the difference between the great play and all the not-so-great plays is that the former has a second act at least as good if not better than its first act. The second act of The Hunt (2012) is not at least as good as the first. It's better. The Hunt is a great play.

The first act is almost unbearable to watch. The increasing intensity of the injustice reaches a degree of severity that began to affect me physically. I honestly was not confident that I would be able to stick it out. To what extent is the life of an innocent man going to be destroyed? Getting sent to jail starts to look like the best possible option as his whole social world turns against him. Soon enough it is probable enough that he will kill himself out of despair, as the Scandinavian-style Shirley Jackson story keeps contracting the black hole around him.

Yet, as certain as we are about the protagonist with respect to the first, single accusation against him, as the reports circulate that there have been other violations in the nursery school, we have to wonder if there is anything factual to them. Have we been sucker-punched by the narrative? No. That we can have any second thoughts about the man is not a sucker-punch but a direct blow. At us. To even entertain the idea that he might be what just about everyone is convinced his is, this is to take a sip of the Jim Jones group-think Kool-aid that has poisoned the town's well.

At the same time, I believe it is reasonable to grasp at the possibility that he might be guilty. What a relief it would be if he was! Please open the escape hatch from this room in which there is almost no ethical air and the walls of untruth keep pressing inward to crush a decent man to death and us along with him. But no, there is very little to make us abandon our sympathy with him and the suffering just gets worse.

This tremendous weight bearing down is progressively lifted in the second act. Exactly what we were praying for in the first act is delivered to us in increments. The solitary dignity that has just managed to sustain him so far gains some desperately needed social assistance from his son and his son's godfather who never abandoned him. He is released from custody because the police determine that the charges against him have been fabricated. Finally, his best friend realizes the terrible wrong that has been committed. As this accumulates positively, so does our hope that - ohmigod! - are we actually going to make it out of this movie with a happy ending? Jesus, I didn't think I was going to get out alive at all. The conclusion of the film pours battery acid in the wound. Turns out the sucker-punch comes in the second act. What fools we were to believe that everyone could just let bygones be bygones. That the water supply of the town would be pure ever after. That the poison everyone drank wasn't still pumping in their blood and would do so forever more. And the same thing only inverted for the protagonist, how in hell can he continue to be a member of that club that will have him again? Forgive and forget? Forget it! The entire community - including the virtuous survivor of the collective torture season - is saturated in sin. Jacob referenced Haneke's The White Ribbon.

The performance by the lead actor is the sort for which an award should be awarded. All the acting is very fine - especially from the little girl, wow! - working off a script that is excellent for its lean brutality. The only other Vinterberg I have seen is The Celebration (1998), which has its strengths but overindulges itself dramatically to the point of grotesque caricature that borders on baroque excess. The Hunt employs stylistic gestures at moments - particularly in the final scene, allowing the conclusion to resonate with serious metaphoric depth - but it is otherwise a film of austere naturalistic rigor.

This is in the service of the terrible realism of the premise and the plot. It would be nice to believe that such a story could never happen in real life. But just as there are true tragedies of children molested by perverts, there are true tragedies of adults' lives being ruined by some little kid's little lie. The Hunt is a hard movie. Really tough. For as much as we like to think we would never drink from that cup, we would. We most definitely would.

Dan Jardine:

Like you, my only experience of Vinterberg before this was The Celebration, a film that I liked a little more than you (I mostly dug its mordant sense of humour and unexpected tonal shifts), but not nearly as much as I like The Hunt, which was the best film of this year's Victoria International Film Festival.

You and Jacob quite appropriately reference Shirley Jackson and Haneke, I flash on Clouzot's Le Corbeau, but they are all of a piece. The citizenry in small communities turn in on themselves, devouring their own, all while firmly convinced that they are doing the right thing. Again, as you rightly discern, The Hunt tills fresh soil when it moves past this premise to take a cold, hard look at the effect that this feeding frenzy has on the entire community. A child drops a bombshell that spirals into a sequence of mistakes and errors in judgment by the well-intentioned adults around her, and the subsequent revelation of a series of often unpleasant but honest truths about behaviours that suffer from the terrible affliction of being so recognizably and plausibly human mark much of what makes this film so fascinating, horrifying and ultimately great. Lucas, the poor protagonist (the brilliant Mads Mikkelson) is eventually confronted by a terrifying catch-22: if the girl sticks to her story, he is a dead man. If she recants, it is because she is ashamed.

How would any of us survive? But survive Lucas does, refusing to let his accusers rest on their comfortable and holier-than-thou laurels. Rather than turn tail, he stands tall, taking their abuse, and returning it in kind. Lucas is particularly concerned with confronting Theo, his closest friend and father of Klara, the accuser (a remarkably naturalistic Annike Wedderkopp.) Thomas Bo Larsen, who plays Theo, gives the third great performance in this film, conveying his character's agony and confusion with equal parts subtlety and skill. The film's resolution appears to rest on the successful reclamation of this friendship, but then it takes one final left at Albuquerque.

Thankfully, we are spared from the ultimate horror of the protagonist's crucifixion, and instead are led to an uneasy resolution. The townspeople allow the exile to return to the fold in a ceremonial celebration that is laden with the weight of communal guilt, anger, distrust and uncertainty, culminating in an unforgettably explosive and dreadful climax.

Often painful but always riveting, The Hunt is a reason to celebrate, marking the convergence of startling talents and great vision.

Often painful but always riveting, The Hunt is a reason to celebrate, marking the convergence of startling talents and great vision.

2013-05-03T13:06:00.000-07:00

Five Stellar Poker Movies

Poker has exploded in popularity over the past decade, and movies have definitely played a part in catapulting these games of chance to the forefront of our leisure activities. Behold this list of stellar films that employ poker in a meaningful way, either to advance the plot and/or develop the characters therein.

The Cincinnati Kid Set in 1930s New Orleans, this Norman Jewison-directed, Steve McQueen-starring pic centres on a young up-and-comer trying to beat the master, played by Edgar G. Robinson. Think of this as a slighter version of The Hustler, but on a different sort of felt.

Rounders Just when you think you’re out, they pull you back in again. Matt Damon returns to the poker table to aid a friend in debt to dangerous people. John Dahl’s film is not as sinister or complex as its cinematic cousin, House of Games, but it is fun to see these young Hollywood studs (Damon, Edward Norton, Gretchen Mol) strut their stuff. This is the film largely responsible for the recent explosion in the popularity of Texas Hold 'Em.

Croupier Clive Owens’ breakthrough in the title role of this Mike Hodges thriller offers a glimpse into the life on the other side of the green felt. The Croupier dreams of using his work in his art (as a writer) but this leads to sometimes predictable (and other times far less so) complications.

House of Games David Mamet’s sometimes baffling, never less than fascinating glimpse into the dark underbelly of this world where it turns out that winning games of chance involve more skill (and con artistry) than luck.

California Split The Odd Couple of poker films. This typically narratively loose-limbed, character-driven film by Robert Altman features two unlikely partners in crime, Elliot Gould and George Segal, who end up on the wrong end of debts that necessitate a series of wacky adventures in pursuit of the big payoff in a Reno poker showdown.

The Runners-up

A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966)

High Roller: The Stu Unger Story (2003)

2013-05-01T11:17:00.000-07:00

Gasland (USA, 2010, Josh Fox)

Ben Livant:

I asked you to supply me with this doc because more than once over the last couple months Paul has been on me to see it. He was right to do so. It is indeed a must-see documentary. After I get my kids to watch it and we return the disc to you, I will be on you to look at it yourself.

In the meantime, you are spared a review from me because this time out it suffices for me simply to agree with what some other reviewers have already said.

From Wiki: Robert Koehler of Variety referred to it as "one of the most effective and expressive environmental films of recent years… Gasland may become to the dangers of natural gas drilling what Silent Spring was to DDT.”

Eric Kohn of IndieWire wrote, "Gasland is the paragon of first person activist filmmaking done right… By grounding a massive environmental issue in its personal ramifications, [Josh] Fox turns Gasland into a remarkably urgent diary of national concerns."

Stewart Nusbaumer of the Huffington Post wrote "Gasland... just might take you from outrage right into the fire of action."

The Denton Record Chronicle said “Fox decides that his own backyard in Pennsylvania isn’t his exclusive property... Set to his own banjo music and clever footage, Gasland is both sad and scary... if your soul isn’t moved by the documentary, yours is a heart of shale."

Bloomberg News critic Dave Shiflett wrote that Fox "may go down in history as the Paul Revere of fracking."

After you have seen it, the short Wiki entry on the film is worth reading in full to learn how the gas capitalists have reacted; insisting the contamination is from biogenic gas unreleased by them rather than thermogenic gas released by them. This is a lie. But the gas coming out of the water tap is actually only the most visible problem. All the fracking chemicals leached into the aquifer is the deeper, unseen, truly terrifying pollution.

Here is the Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasland.

2013-04-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

FIFTEEN FILMS OF PERSONAL SIGNIFICANCE

A Facebook exercise is now a blog post. The task: Think of 15 movies that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. These are the films that no matter what they were thought of critically, shaped your world.

First up: The Films Chosen by Ben Livant

1. Emil and the Detectives (1964) - I saw this was I was five or maybe just four years old at the British Embassy in Warsaw. It is the first film I remember. And I use the word "remember" reservedly. For many years, I did not know if I had watched a movie, had a dream or lived through some real life event.

2. Full Metal Jacket (1987) - Has the singular distinction of making me change my mind about a film like no other before or since. Just loathed it as I walked out of the theatre, thought it was garbage. But I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks afterward. Finally woke up one morning convinced it was truly brilliant. I continue to be convinced.

3. The Red Balloon (1956) - Someone gave me the gift of showing this to me when I was still a child. Years later as an adult, I could not refrain from finding certain faults in the film. But when I first saw it, I was absolutely transported. The poignant beauty of it - the Frenchness dripping everywhere like the music of Fauré I had heard my father play on the piano - sublime.

4. The Aristocats (1970) - I must have seen Mary Poppins, which I believe took my older brother's cinema cherry, but it must have gone in one eye and out the other. This here feature length cartoon was definitely my first big toke off the Disney bong. It was the entertainment before a birthday party. Even though I knew there would be ice cream and cake at the house, I did not want to leave the theatre.

5. Planet of the Apes (1968) - I will be surprised if somebody else has an entry like this; that is, for a film I didn't even see! Well, I saw it years later on TV. But back in the day, my brother saw it, came home and told me all about it. Of course, this is just as much a testament to his storytelling prowess, (and the original novel?) The sucker-punch ending landed squarely on my jaw. And the conceptual force of the post-apocalyptic Earth hurt my head.

6. St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967) - My first exposure to graphic violence. Meant to be shocking, the depiction certainly shocked me. Was upset enough at bedtime to need a parent to soothe my nerves. Or was that after my brother talked me through "The Planet of the Apes?" Naw, it was definitely the mobster gore.

7. Natalie Wood (1938-1981) - No, she is not a movie. But she was a movie star. My first. I associate my earliest proto-sexual feelings with the sound of Diana Ross' voice. Sorta knocked my knees together. Looking at Natalie Wood's face a few years later, the sensation started to travel above my knees.

8. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) - If a better buddy movie has ever been made, I have yet to see it. Only years later did I come to realize that the first time I watched these two men together, I wanted to fuck both of them. I have watched them together in this movie many more times over the years and every time I do, I still want to fuck both of them. And I'm into Natalie Wood!

9. Alphaville (1965) - Not yet adolescent, at least I was pubescent. But I still didn't have a clue. It was "Emil and the Detectives" all over again, but on drugs this time; some sort of black and white hallucinogen. Clearly, I got caught in the crossfire of Noir for nice kids and Noir for radical beatniks.

10. The Incident (1967) - More or less a stage play of character-driven, high-stakes drama, the NYC verisimilitude gets right up in your face. Watching this on late-night TV, growing up in Regina but regularly going to NYC to visit all my relatives, this movie actually cashed the cheque that all those weekly episodes of Kojak wrote in bogus ink.

11. The Godfather I & II (1972/1974) - I take this to be one whole experience. It is impossible to overestimate the degree to which this film conditioned my adolescent attitude about masculinity. Simply put, I wanted to be these guys. Jesus help me, I still do. But I'm trying to evolve.

12. Apocalypse Now (1979) - This is the film that made me stop eating popcorn while watching movies forever after. Saw it by myself in the theatre. Just stayed in my seat for the next screening and stared at it again. The usher appeared to know how I felt.

13. Three Brothers (1981) - The importance of this film for me is odd considering that I remember almost nothing about it. Yet, there is a scene close to the end, between a grandfather and a grandchild. Like the rest of the film, I do not remember it as such. All I know is it made me cry and I kept on crying even after the final credits had rolled and the house lights came on.

14. Cinema Paradiso (1988) - It's the music, the music, the music!

15. The Bicycle Thief (1948) - Wiki: "Four years after its release, was deemed the greatest film of all time by Sight & Sound." Damn straight! Absolutely goddamn right!!!

Next Up, Dan Jardine's Selections:

1. Nosferatu (1922) Scared the bejezus outta me as a child. I don’t think I saw the whole film, probably because I was too bloody scared, but I do remember Shrenk’s rat teeth and skanky finger nails, and his chilling disappearance to the crowing of the cock at dawn.

2. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) I came to this one much later in life, but in many ways I am thankful for that. Most importantly, I got to see it projected in a theatre, rather than on a tv screen, and with the accompaniment of a live orchestra. A chilling, harrowing, mesmerizing piece; heartbreaking and horrifying. Falconetti!

3. Freaks (1932) Right up there with Nosferatu in fear factor, Browning’s film haunted me for years after I saw it as a youngster on late night TV. Helped to establish horror films as an early genre favourite, both alluring and repulsive. “One of us! One of us!” No thank you, very much!

4. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) The grey clouds lurking behind this American Christmas Carol’s silver lining have always been the big appeal of this film for me. Jimmy Stewart’s dark night of the soul has always resonated, even if the tear-jerking happy ending softens the bleak subtext.

5. The Third Man (1949) I watched this as a cynical teenager in a university theatre of like-minded, faux world-weary types, and immediately identified with its desperate post-war sadness and jaded, bleary European-ness. All this and Orson Welles too! Citizen Kane is the more important film, but The Third Man is the one that sticks with me to this day.

6. Seven Samurai (1954) I saw this first in my twenties, and it set the bar for all action/adventure films I have seen since. Kurosawa understood how important it was to establish context and give us characters worth caring about before throwing them in harm’s way. So many directors think you need to trade this for memorable action sequences when Kurosawa proved that you can have your cake and eat it too.

7. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) The holy grail of my movie experiences. I may have seen other films in the theatre before this, but no memory of them remains, whereas Kubrick’s space opera, which blew my ten year-old mind back in the day, has taken up permanent residence in my subconscious. 2001 unclipped my skull cap, and washed my mind clean. The film redefined what movies could be (for me), and I would never look at them the same way again. The ultimate trip? No doubt.

8. The Planet of the Apes (1968) The best Twilight Zone I never saw. I watched this film within months of seeing Kubrick’s opus, and it is a great credit to TPOTA that the film endures in my memory as a sort of intuitive counterpoint to the cagey and chilly hopefulness of 2001. TPOTA is one of cinema’s great fuck you’s to pompous humanity. As you may have guessed by now, I was a cynical little shit.

9. Godfather 1 & 2 (1972/4) Coppola loomed large for me in the 70s—this list could easily include all four films he made this decade. As a young wannabe radical myself, I recognized a kindred spirit in FFC. Add to this the exquisite attention to detail you sense in every frame as well as the career-defining performances by nearly every cast member, and you have pretty much everything you need to make a permanent impression on a young film buff.

10. Network (1976) This film was (and is) right in my wheel house. In high school, I was (and to some extent remain to this day) a cynic in an idealist’s body who was really starting to get into films with a politically radical agenda, and Network fit the bill better than any film I had ever seen. Remains an eerily prescient masterpiece. Plus, I see your Natalie Wood and I raise you one crazy ass beautiful Faye Dunaway!

11. Taxi Driver (1977) This is probably the most purely visceral experience I have ever had in the movie theatre. Travis Bickle’s pathology mirrored society’s (New York’s, at the very least), and DeNiro’s performance—which remains his best—rubbed me raw. The best word I can use to describe my reaction is awestruck.

12. Eraserhead (1977) I guess it should come as little surprise that the 70s was the formative decade for my cinematic consciousness, or that—given my childhood attraction to horror films—that David Lynch’s most personal and devastatingly surreal film should make my list. Having grown up in a household with two alcoholics, I was also a sucker for the film’s degenerate premise that parenthood is the ultimate horrorshow.

13. Deer Hunter (1978) A huge piece of shit, or a brilliant slice of Americana? Why not both? I recognized that the politics of the Vietnam-set scenes went against everything I believed (and continue to believe) in, but there is something undeniably potent at work in the rest of the film. One of the few films I re-visited in the theatres during its initial run, so powerful was its impact. I cannot look at the film today.

[The 25 year gap between films that appears now does not mean that I stopped watching or being impressed with movies. There could be many reasons that there were not many films made in the intervening years that had a powerful enough personal impact to make this list, but mostly I suspect it was a function of age (mine, not he movie’s). Simply put, I suspect that I was too old to be surprised/shocked/deeply affected by much, but not yet old enough to realize that great cinematic experiences need to be cherished. And to be fair to myself, there are films on this list (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Seven Samurai, The Third Man) that I first watched during this apparently barren period. So there’s that as well.]

14. Dogville (2003) One of the few times where I felt like the entire theatre was sharing a common experience. As the credits rolled, nobody moved. Several minutes passed before people began to gather their belongings and head for the door. Von Trier is a provocateur, and his unique blending of Bertold Brecht and Thorton Wilder struck me as a singular masterpiece then (and to this day), a film that works on just about every level. Gobsmacked.

15. Into the Wild (2007) Tough call for the last spot on this list. I could have gone with Before Sunrise/Sunset as well, as it expresses a similar simmering romanticism, but there is something about the Christopher McCandless story that hit me at a deeper, more personal level. I often dreamt of chucking it all, living by my wits, so I could easily identify with the protagonist. That he was also attractive, well-educated, intelligent and naively idealistic didn’t hurt either. A film that never, after over a dozen viewings, fails to move me to tears.

2013-04-16T10:57:00.003-07:00

Movie-Themed Slot Machines

Movie themed games have become more popular because whereas in the past the theme was just used loosely, borrowing images and characters, nowadays, the makers of the games are making deals with the movies so that they can use clips and apply the idea of the film much more effectively and make the whole experience much more enjoyable for gamers.

Braveheart was a massively successful and iconic movie, and the online slots version of it is dramatic and intense, with a real footage from the film being used as an intro. It's a 25 payline slot game with lots of winning combinations, and also extra features. One of these is the Kilt Lift feature where you have the opportunity to pick a kilt and reveal a prize. The graphics and sound effects are very impressive in this game and it ties in nicely with the film to make a great online casino experience.

King Kong is another great online slot game with fantastic graphics and opportunities to win. It has four bonus features, and two modes, Jungle and Big City mode which puts it in another category to most other online slots games. There are great clips to enjoy from the movie too so this game is also very interactive.

In the Forrest Gump online slot game, you can see lots of different clips from the movie throughout the game. Film distributors are more than willing because of the rise in online casinos and the continuing popularity in the standard casino games such as slots. Many online casinos such as Gaming Club offer bonuses to match your deposits when you are playing slots games, so if you are playing for real money, you can have often have double what you started with (and sometimes more) to play with. Alternatively you can enjoy online slots for free and take advantage of the many movie themes on offer.

2013-03-24T13:53:00.003-07:00

The Kid With a Bike (Dardennes Brothers, France, 2011)

Ben Livant:

French Loach.

By "Loach" obviously I mean, well, Loach; that sort of scrapped-knuckle realism about the fractured domestic lives of working-class people, utterly without sentimentality. By "French" I mean the cliché conception about that culture always including an element of romanticism; in this case, a mysterious atom around which molecules of love come together. The Kid With a Bike I like, very much. It is lean and uncompromising yet delicate and sensitive at the same time.

In the first place, it is a error to think that realism must always be grim. This story concludes on an upbeat note. The optimism is earned, however. All of the dramatic conflicts that come up are addressed and resolved in perfectly credible ways. The narrative solves only those problems that it raised. We are not compelled to fill in blanks in order to save the appearances.

This plot solidity is matched by an equally grounded approach to dialogue. The characters are often taciturn, which is appropriate, and when they do converse it is prosaic in the extreme but without degenerating into sensationalistic crudity. I'd have to check, but I believe there is no vulgar language at all. Insofar as angry swearing is proto-violence, the lack of it signals an essentially safe social environment for our protagonist, which is ultimately born out by the story. Simultaneously, though, there is only the most minimal use of music and it is never used to reassure us that the world will work out to be benign. It is only at the happy ending - itself understated and without a trace of glamour - that all threats have been neutralized and everything looks hopeful.

Meanwhile, there is that inexplicable - may as well call it spiritual - goodness that manifests itself. Nothing miraculous. Far from it. The lady just has the right moral stuff. She is a concentrated case of what human beings can, in fact, be sometimes. Extra, extra, read all about it: Rejected and neglected orphan child gets adopted by ultra-maternal saint! This corniness is completely avoided by the film. The Kid With a Bike would come off as some sort of far-fetched fairy tale but for the gradual, incremental development of the connection between the boy and the woman. Yet, as matter-of-fact as she is, her motivation is never disclosed. Her altruistic conduct is simply a given; indeed, a gift. Take it or leave it. The kid takes it. And so do we.

To be honest, I would not have been able to take it if it had not been brilliantly balanced by the father's abandonment of his offspring. Here is the deepest accomplishment of the art. Perhaps he was a deadbeat before, but this man trying to pull up his bootstraps now to help himself only, not also his son, remains a deadbeat dad. As a single person, he is reasonable, admirable, but as a father he is beyond pitiful, reprehensible. The way he is portrayed is totally free of Bad Guy-ification, while plainly presenting him as the bad guy, a non-villainous villain. If the emergence of motherhood verges on too righteous to be true, the degeneration of fatherhood saves it by being too true to be sinister. The guy just does not have the right moral stuff. Nothing evil. Far from it. He's a concentrated case of what human being can, in fact, sometimes be.

Dan Jardine:

I dug this film plenty enough, and you have touched upon most of the aspects of TKWAB that worked for me, so I don't need to go back over now-familiar territory by re-iterating them here. However, please allow me to single out the work of Thomas Doret as the titular character. The kid avec son bicyclette gives such a completely naturalistic and authentic performance that, so long as he was on screen, I never for a moment doubted the machinations of the screenplay that conspired to make his life so bloody miserable. Doret, mining a familiar vein, reminiscent of other hard knock kids, such as Antoine Doinel in 400 Blows or Martin Compston in Sweet Sixteen, strikes the mother lode here. Really great stuff.

That said, not everything in the film meets that same standard. Specifically, the screenplay of TKWAB disappoints when it comes to explaining the undying devotion of Samantha (Cecile de France) the boy's presumptive mother figure. You say that the boy accepts it, as the audience does, but I remain a little sceptical. I need plausible motivation for my central characters, particularly in films in the neo-realistic style like this one, and the Dardennes come up a little short here.

That said, this is a solid film with a stellar performance by Doret at its core. Well worth the 87 minute investment that is TKWAB's running time.

2013-03-24T09:58:00.002-07:00

This is 40 (Judd Apatow, USA, 2012)

Ben Livant:

Another from the Judd & Rudd camp. I have seen a few before, mostly without Rudd.

I guess at this point it has to be acknowledged that Apatow is the Neil Simon of today. I realize he directs almost as often as he writes and he produces much more often than either. So my comparison may seem misguided. Nevertheless, my point is that Apatow's comedic sensibility has now assumed a nearly hegemonic position in Hollywood just as Simon's dominance of Broadway was transferred to a central place up on mainstream screens back in the day.

More substantively, both of them are experts at creating opportunities for humour in essentially plot-less yet conflictual social situations that are a cut above the competition by somehow giving the impression that an actual story is being told. Supporting this narrative illusion is the stylistic trick of slipping in a serving of dramatic meat in the interpersonal relations. The characterizations are very broad but the dialogue can be genuinely meaningful, while always moored to the mandate to be funny. If I signal to this as a particularly Jewish approach to conversation - emotionally intense yet intellectually focused at the same time, in the service of jokes - I hope I will be forgiven for perpetuating a stereotype.

The point of contrast between Simon and Apatow I would highlight, however, it that the former attended to a decidedly grown-up domestic point of view whereas the latter - reflecting an advancing infantilization of the culture at large over our lifetime - has been oriented much more to a post-adolescent/sub-adult perspective. This goes much deeper than the realm of culture, branching out from the society as such, with serious roots in the changing soil of political economy. Forget about that graduate paper, though. Let it suffice to say that Apatow's characters are not just more explicitly sexual and verbally vulgar than those of the previous generation - they are much, much more unsure of their individual identities, social roles and moral responsibilities. This is precisely the source of their humour.

THIS IS 40 looks on the face of it to be about early mid-life crisis in a marriage on both sides equally that resonates as semi-dysfunctional family life. In fact, the supposed adults are sub-adults who have never fully committed to the ball-and-chain of spouse and children. Nor have they maturely accepted the middle-aged duty of caring for their parents in whatever form necessary. They struggle with their domestic assignments in what appears to be a regressive manner but it is really a post-adolescent individualism that has never receded. Their parents are the same except more so; replicating their original self-centred sins by being not just undependable grandparents but also weak-assed guardians of a second set of kids. No wonder the two daughters come off as the most reasonable and reliable; not just the calm and naively wise pre-teen, the combustible teenager is legitimately so and by juxtaposition shows up her explosive parents as illegitimately so.

To the extent that this is found ethically unacceptable, it will probably be found unfunny. Personally, I do not find fault with these characters as I believe they accurately reflect our so-called post-modern times and they deserve to be laughed at. Besides, the requisite happy ending arrives. Love triumphs and everyone walks over the finish line with some new-found dignity. I enjoyed THIS IS 40. I only ask for a few guffaws from a comedy and this movie brought out of me that few for which I ask. If nothing else, the scene in the principal's office killed me; hilarious to begin with but truly side-splitting in the out-take as the credits roll. That actress (Melissa McCarthy) was also one of the funniest things in BRIDESMAIDS.

2013-03-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, USA, 2007)

Ben Livant:

I did not know that this film existed until Jacob asked you for it. When it was agreed by all parties to the viewing session that we would watch it, I was not particularly interested in doing so. What a fine surprise! I was engrossed by this film and for the most part impressed by it too.

First things first, the basic historical facts were for me an education. Of course, I knew that the man was a legend in his own lifetime and soon enough was mythologized after his death, especially by celebrations of the out-law as a counter-cultural footnote to Robin Hood. But the circumstances surrounding his demise were entirely unknown to me. Never did understand what Dylan meant when he sang that he looks just like Robert Ford but he feels just like Jesse James, in Outlaw Blues.

Turning to the approach of the story, obviously it is a departure from the conventional action-oriented depictions of gun-slinging pirates in the American mid-west. It follows in the footsteps perhaps first laid down by Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992). No doubt in keeping with the novel on which it is based, the film is solidly grounded in character studies that explore personal psychology with considerable depth. I think the casting is excellent, the performances very good and the dialogue definitely better than average.

The verbal exchanges are entirely credible, yet they oscillate with a sort of proto-aphoristic quality. Not as stylistically mannered and certainly not also quasi-surreal, Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995) nevertheless appears to me to be an influence on TAOJJBTCRF (2007). Related to this and deserving of special mention is Roger Deakin's cinematography. It is every now and then a bit too flashy for the good of the realism but these occasional excesses are in the service of elevating a folk tale to the level of self-conscious art that enhances prosaic figures with a delicate aura.

All of this comes together narratively along a line that connects Robert Ford to the likes of Mark David Chapman. The repressed homo-erotic obsession and neurotic idolatry are laid out in plain view. But just as fascinatingly obvious is the near split personality of Jesse James, the loving family man and good provider versus the ruthlessly violent yet self-tormented loner. It is missing the point simply to observe that he decided he would rather die than be taken by police. He effectively uses Ford as a way to commit suicide, nuturing the boy's potential to become his killer by playing with his affections and insecurities. The mental cat-and-mouse makes me want to revisit The Missouri Breaks (1976), a film that was universally panned when it came out but I recall had something of a pre-Apocalypse Now (1979) Willard--Kurtz encounter on the rolling plains.

Thematically TAOJJBTCRF examines the cult of the personality in the nascent mass media of 19th Century USA as an aspect of the emergence of a national culture. The centrality of "the last frontier" or the "winning of the West" as an imperial project cannot be over-estimated. In this post-Civil War continental consolidation, Jesse James, the still-Confederate criminal, had to be domesticated in every sense of the term; not just defeated as an actual dangerous person and ideologically upheld as an emblem of successful conquest, also dialectically refashioned as a symbol of settler exceptionalism and nostalgically possessed as a safe fantasy figure. Buffaloes, First Nations, Jesse James - dead dead dead, but alive on nickels and stamps and on stage.

The latter is, for me, the most fascinating part of the history - Robert Ford re-enacting the assassination again and again in theatrical performances. Before the option of rewinding the tape to show a clip over and over again on the six o'clock news, live re-enactment was required. But where to begin with the micro-psychological and macro-cultural ramifications of Ford playing himself? That he soon enough became a public pariah was over-determined; betrayed his leader, shot the victim in the back, did it for the reward money, traded on the despicable deed for fame and further fortune - never mind that he LOVED the man. But just as there is a line that connects Ford to the likes of Chapman, there is a line that connects both of them to everyone on Star Search. Prior to the advent of electronic recording, Ford, playing himself night after night over 800 times, comes down to us today as a kind of perverse pioneer for the cause of celebrity; a martyr for the 15 minutes supposedly promised to everyone appearing on so-called reality TV.

Runs a tad too long, leans a bit too hard on music and relies too much on voice-over narration, otherwise a pretty cool movie. At the very least, you gotta admire the title, lengthy even abbreviated as TAOJJBTCRF.

Dan Jardine:

I take your qualified admiration for this film, and I raise the ante. I think this film is this close to being a masterpiece. I hold TAOJJBTCRF in the same regard as I do the aforementioned Dead Man, and feel it is better than the more critically lauded Coen Brothers film released not only in the same year, but the same month, No Country for Old Men. Writer/director Andrew Dominik does an impressive job of demystifying the Western, the most elemental of American film genres, while simultaneously casting a suitably jaundiced eye on the cult of celebrity worship that has been informing popular entertainment down through the ages.

In Dominik's feature debut Chopper, the terrifying and monstrous central character conflates his tale to myth in his own telling, thereby revealing his deeper insecurities. In Dominik's second feature, it is the seemingly supporting character, the weasel-like Robert Ford, who is tasked with the narrative, and in the telling, the mythology is revealed through Ford's fragile psychology for the hollowness at its core. The film examines the symbiotic relationship between the myth-makers and the legend that, in this case, leads to the devastation of both. By the end of his life, James is exhausted by the effort of being this mythic figure, and his time spent in cat-like torture of the mouse-like Ford brothers ( Robert and Charley) provokes the duo, fearful of their imminent annihilation, to strike first, which the film leads you to believe was James' intent all along. The film's third act explores the fall out of this act, as Ford attempts to cash in on his notoriety, only to find that myth-making cuts both ways. When you are cast in the part of the coward, the public will always see you as the coward, even when you are the casting director and principle player, striving to be the hero.

No doubt, this film walks a fine line. TAOJJBTCRF is at times an earthy, unsentimentally cruel film, which paradoxically indulges in grandiose, mythic gestures which the story subsequently subverts with its gritty realism. Dominik employs this lush, romantic style in order to expose the emptiness of the myth, not only of Jesse James, but of the mechanisms that support a fawning celebrity culture. Yes, the film is a tad long, as the second act stretch could use some prudent editing, but many of those things you identify as weakness, such as Deakin's occasionally too-grand cinematography and the film's emphasis on the Warren Ellis/Nick Cave score and sometimes ubiquitous voice-over narration, are useful in more deeply exploring TAOJJBTCRF's themes. Dominik uses these conventional elements of a traditional western bio-pic in order to contrast them with the de-mythological storyline, and thereby de-construct them.

The acting in TAOJJBTCRF is uniformly excellent, but I feel compelled, given how he often toils in the shadow of his older brother, to single out the work of Casey Affleck, who gives a nuanced and in many ways heartbreaking performance as the neurotic James-worshipping Robert Ford. Affleck manages to strike so many right notes, that by the end of the film, it is easy to forget what a loathsome toady he was at film's start, and you cannot help but feel real pain as Ford's inevitably sad fate unravels before our eyes.

2013-03-22T14:54:00.001-07:00

Anna Karenina (Joe Wright, UK, 2012)

Be Livant:

I do not want Keira Knightley. Even weekly, I would perform weakly. Maybe monthly, but mostly not. Plainly she has something going for her that many people find movie star-worthy. It's just not getting to me where I live. Considering that this is nothing if not a love story, a plot of passion, my inability to get with the leading lady pretty much ruined the film for me. She's just not sexy enough. And her acting is so obviously on display, such a pronounced effort on her part. Throw in my equal displeasure with the leading man in Anna Karenina - a Duran Duran reject on quaaludes - and the erotic void becomes near total.

The finishing touch on this dark hole of non-desire is the subordination of the story to a stagey presentation intended to make a dense text exciting to look at. As valid as it is to make a thick novel as filmic as possible, this cinematographic priority is here coordinated around set design, costume, hyper-theatrical lighting and fantasy-style editing. The result is a musical without music. Sometimes this is eye-catching in an engaging way. But more's the pity because it fundamentally distracts us from the inner fires of the characters.

I have focused on the failure of the film to generate the requisite emotional heat. Yet, I need also to complain that it does not even begin to serve the intellectual heft of Tolstoy's book, which I have actually read, albeit 30 years ago. The screenplay is by Tom Stoppard and is occasionally concisely meaningful. But for the most part, instead of dialogue we are served neato-keano visuals and the original author's ethical indignation about the bankrupt values of the high society of his time is essentially absent.

The high society of his time - and place! Real estate is said to be all about location, location, location. Yeah, well, so it goes for literary setting too. If you cannot get me solidly on Russian soil when supposedly giving me a taste of Tolstoy, do not bother. Anna Karenina is so far from anything seriously Russian, I cannot see why the director bothered. And yes, Russia then, at that time, in all its feudal backwardness and aristocratic lethargy. It is in the context of underdeveloped bourgeois cultural norms, the failure of the Russian elite to be up to speed even to Victorian liberalism, that Tolstoy crafted a late Romantic critique with proto-feminist sensibility. The film does not do even minimal justice to the themes informing the tragedy.

War and Peace made to look like Hugo under the aesthetic principles of Baz Luhrmann is what I next expect from whoever directed Anna Karenina.

2013-03-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

Promised Land (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2012)

Ben Livant:

According to WIKI: " New York Times film critic A.O. Scott praised Promised Land as a film that "works" mainly "by putting character ahead of story." To the degree that it is felt that the film does indeed work, Scott is correct. But conversely, to the degree that it is felt that the film does not work - Scott is still correct; the film puts character ahead of story.

Instead of the usual plot-driven excuse for light entertainment, this is an issue-centered drama set in a complex social situation in which the character do not merely emote but actually express serious ideas. In other words, the dialogue is substantive; occasionally a bit too didactic, but sometimes authentically on point. Promised Land ultimately does not fulfill its promise, however. As realistic as the characters are, the standard Hollywood approach ultimately overtakes the narrative. What should be a thoroughly political story goes over to a personal morality tale.

I could get up on my radical high-horse about how Promised Land is ideologically ham-strung by coming down to a matter of individual conscience. But I respect the left-liberal orientation of the film for the critical virtues it has. Directly addressing the topic of fracking with clear environmental concern and socio-economic intelligence, the film has moments of considerable depth. One scene does an excellent job of situating the contest between foreign oil and domestic natural gas in the context of the connection between militarism abroad and poverty at home. Another conversation is especially blunt regarding the precarious American family farm. This draws much of its force in juxtaposition to the pastoral setting, perhaps too pristine in the presentation, yet the nostalgia for yeoman agriculture implicitly opposes agri-business just as it explicitly challenges the petro-chemical corporation. And there are other worthwhile bits.

But none of this can coalesce and gain momentum as it should, indeed, as I get the impression it sincerely wants to because of the conceptual focus on personal conscience instead of political consciousness. Even though the story includes obviously political elements - divide-and-conquer marketing tactics, propaganda competition, town-hall democracy - there are two features driving the morality tale that are simply bogus and these falsehoods are at the center of the problem of the political insufficiency in the film.

Number one, the main character is fundamentally naive about the company that has promoted him into the top rank of its executive. This is beyond implausible. It is middle-class nonsense that falls down on the job of recognizing an eager recruit to the ruling class for being just that. The whole show requires the protagonist to be out of the loop of real power and wealth as reflected in the devious strategy of his firm. That he gets back in touch with his roots before the closing curtain to finish as a figure of wholesome goodness rather than corrupt villainy is actually neither here nor there. (Hey, it is Matt Damon, eh?) The point is that his entire moral struggle is a load of bullocks in the first place because nothing other than a fully formed company man would ever be on site in pursuit of the project. In fact, exactly such a corporate hit man appears as the antagonist in the story, complete with a plot twist. This only highlights how ludicrous it is to begin with that the protagonist is not exactly the same animal.

Number two, the antagonist is the source of enrionmentalist opposition to the project, injected into the situation by the company as a straw man to be burned later in public; his delegitimation intended to be the way to win over the townsfolk once and for all. This is where the film really stumbles on it's middle-American feet. It is all too true that capital and the state employ agent provocateurs to infiltrate organizations and movements for purposes of espionage, internal sabotage media marginalization, suppression by force and more. But there has to be something to infiltrate! There is, in fact, a growing awareness and opposition to fracking all over the world, including the US heartland, and it is precisely this political development that corporations and governments mean to repress by whatever means necessary. In Promised Land there is nothing to infiltrate. The film is so nervous about ascribing even the most modestly politicized environmental consciousness and activism to any local citizens in a community, it is so worried about alienating its mainstream audience, it does a terrible disservice to the very people it means to represent.

Hummnn, I guess I did get up on my radical high-horse after all to explain how Promised Land is ideologically ham-strung by coming down to a matter of individual conscience. But I did so because I think the movie is worth taking seriously. As do the energy capitalists.

Back to WIKI:

Leading up to the film's release, a spokesperson for Independent Petroleum Association of America said, "We have to address the concerns that are laid out in these types of films." The industry planned to send scientific studies to film critics, to distribute leaflets to film audiences, and to use social media like Facebook and Twitter as a response to the film.^[11]^[16]Where the industry launched "direct attacks" at Gasland, it instead sought to portray Promised Land as "derivative, condescending and clichéd . In Pennsylvania, the industry group Marcellus Shale Coalition bought a 16-second onscreen ad to be shown at 75 percent of theaters in the state at the same time Promised Land was released.

James Schamus, chief executive of the film's distributor Focus Features said, "We've been surprised at the emergence of what looks like a concerted campaign targeting the film even before anyone's seen it."^[11] As the film was released, he said, "Fracking is a great premise for real drama. It represents Americans deeply conflicted about how to deal with these issues." He compared the industry's stealth campaign against the film to the one depicted within the film.

2013-03-21T17:38:00.002-07:00

Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, France, 1959)

Ben Livant:

A Gallic Tony Perkins playing Travis Bickle in embryo; sans the post-traumatic stress disorder from 'Nam, of course, or Algeria, for that matter; and speaking of which, as scripted by Camus' kid conceived after a one-night stand with Graham Greene. This is Catholicism in crisis.

Or go to the existentialist headwater. The man in Pickpocket is a stream that flows from Dostoevsky's "Raskolnikov." But it flows backwards, so to speak. The man in Crime and Punishment commits murder and is undone by his own conscience. Guilt remains morally functional. Bresson's petty thief has no conscience. Yet, he is undone precisely by this moral void in him.

Two times in the dialogue, explicit reference is made to the Neitzschean concept of "The Superman." The pickpocket attempts to rationalize his essentially sociopathic conduct as a transvaluation of values, a program of amoralism for the higher human that trumps the regular ethics of plain people who take their cue from God. The closing scene in the film drives home that the would-be ubermench is a failure according to his own misguided philosophy of himself.

In the end, he requires redemption just the same as any other sinner. Even before he surrenders to the love given to him by the woman in the very last shot of the film, he had taken it upon himself at the start of the final act to provide for her and her illegitimate child by another man. Thus, the story takes a dramatic shift away from irreligious Ayn Rand-style egotism to the need to care for others; others who have faith, as the woman does, which she openly indicates to him earlier on in the film. Without the slightest reliance on any ecclesiastical reference - Pickpocket does not advocate for the church as such - the protagonist effectively comes back to it.

With at least as much if not more voice-over narration than dialogue, the exposition is given by way of an epistolary device. On a number of occasions we are reminded of this by the visual presentation of a pen-holding hand writing a letter. You may recall that voice-over is a pet peeve of mine. Not now. It is entirely appropriate in this instance, not just to reinforce that the focus is on the psychological interiority of the character rather than his actions. Beyond this, it suggests that the whole telling of the story is a formal confession. Of course, this is meaningful not in relation to secular law enforcement officials or - again - the clergy, but rather to the society at large as a requirement of personal atonement; public proof of private baptism.

Such is the power of Catholicism in France in 1959. If it sounds like post-Kierkegaard Protestantism, well, what do you expect from an anguished Christian spark of any kind, almost drowned by athesthic doubt in the middle of the 20th Century? There is certainly something akin to Dreyer and even a bit Bergman here. And then again, not. It is so definitely French. This culture is famous for its passion but the withdrawl of this very passion is always possible and infamous when it happens. Who give the cold shoulder colder than a Frenchman? This is to recognize already on the basis of this, my first Bresson ever, aesthetically there is clearly a line from his static detachment to Godard's nearly clinical gaze.

I am hard-pressed to explain my own experience of the film. The underwritten dialogue, the wooden performances, the economical editing, the lackluster cinematography - why is it so powerful? What fascinates me so much is that all of this is not working in a verite-realist way, yet it is not stylised or ritualistic either. The whole thing is obviously naturalistic but does not amount to an exercise in naturalism. On this point I am reminded of Ozu, although the Japanese director is often obviously poetic and Bresson is consistently prosaic. The film is pragmatic to the point of being almost mechanical, yet it is saturated with soulfullness. How? I honestly cannot say.

But as this is, indeed, my first Bresson ever, it is appropriate that I refrain from attempting to theorize further. Suffice to conclude by saying that the film really affected me both emotionally and intellectually. Pickpocket is a masterpiece!

2013-03-21T16:23:00.000-07:00

Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, France, 1951)

Ben Livant:

I was taken aback by how little I cared for this film. Naturally, I was expecting the exact opposite having been so impressed by Pickpocket (1959) and notified that Diary Of A Country Priest (1951) was also highly esteemed by you. I have since read at Wiki that it was the work that first established Bresson's international reputation, was the subject of an influential essay by Bazin and held a central place of inspiration for Scorsese. Clearly, this is a piece of art that I am supposed to care for; me, with my cinephile pretensions.

I use the word, "care" with precise intentionality. Because it's not as if the film didn't thoroughly engage my brain. I closely studied the turmoil in the character, hung on his every agonized thought. All the while I kept waiting for the moment when I would feel something with, or even for, or even about him. Never happened. My heart was unable to get involved. This is plainly a problem for what Bazin declared a masterpiece "because of its power to stir the emotions, rather than the intelligence."

I guess I like my anguished existential Catholicism from the outside-in rather than the inside-out when it comes to proximity to the church. As I mentioned in my review of Pickpocket, I was captivated by its religiousity-without-religion, so to speak now; the pursuit of faith by way of a non-believer's journey to a non-institutional congregation with one other who believes. Outside-in. Obviously, DOACP is inside-out in spades.

The protagonist is a man of the cloth whose collar may as well be made of metal and attached to a chain nailed to the alter. He is a kind of a convict in the church who is only able to escape his theological prison at the 11th hour before his death. He seeks absolution from a fellow fallen priest. Finally at peace in his new, true, faith, he has come to be confident that God's grace is not restricted to the official sacrament but is instead accessible universally. Oppressed by parochialism in every sense of the term, ultimately he cannot stomach it and his stomach cancer becomes in the end his pathway to Christian Pantheism. Christ is still on the cross, just so happens he's everywhere else as well. I hope this displays that I got it. I just couldn't feel it. Too much of an inside job for an outsider like me.

I can understand how it must have messed up Marty though, especially if he saw it when it came out, would have been all of nine years old at the time. And not just as a Catholic that would lapse. As an observant director in the making. The effectiveness of the epistolary voice-over as the organizing principle that I observed for Pickpocket was already mature inDOACP. Plus, the latter is a more visually arresting film than the former, or perhaps it would be better to say that the imagery is much less utilitarian. There are shots which do more than serve the story. One in particular is simply beautiful, a slow zoom in through an exterior, snow falling, to an interior on the other side of a window. And all the other aspects contributing to what I referred to in the previous review as Bresson achieving something somehow naturalistic and utterly not at the same time. So, yeah, I recognize why the film made audiences all over the world take notice of the director.

Dan Jardine:

This is very interesting, for my response to these two films is almost exactly the opposite of yours. I was much more moved by Priest than Pickpocket, and found the latter more intellectually interesting than affecting.

I found Robert Bresson’s Christ allegory surprisingly powerful, considering my first impressions of the titular country priest (Claude Laydu) were not particularly positive. The thin and wan young man is so clearly ill-fitted to his first parish in the small French town of Ambricourt, with a demeanor so meek and a bearing so painfully humble, you could be excused for wondering why he hadn’t signed up at the nearest monastery instead. Compounding the priest’s difficulties is the daily reminder of the townspeople’s narrow-minded provincialism, their sometimes active hostility towards this outsider in their midst and his discovery that he simply cannot engage with these people. He just does not get them, which does not auger well for his first assignment.

The lighting and camera angles Bresson uses to capture the priest emphasize his martyrdom at the hands of these vindictive, petty villagers. Laydu has an innate aspect of suffering in his eyes and a gentle manner that serves this character very well. Trapped in this hostile environment, where people seem entirely absorbed by secular concerns, the priest’s only escape is his diary, where he can give complete expression to his frustrations. By contrast, one of the most prominent aural effects in the film is the cacophony of footsteps receding from the priest, indicative of how the town has little use for him and is always moving away from him.

Yet, this most devout man is unable to pray himself. He suffers too much to pray, a "prisoner of the Holy Agony." Perhaps he can’t pray because he feels unworthy of God’s attention, or he worries that prayer may confirm his belief that God hates him. Still, his is a life of abject denial, abjuring all the pleasures of the flesh. He takes his vows very seriously, unlike priests in earlier generations who were all fat, according to one character. He seeks a state of Zen-like absence of all desire. The priest, whose Eraserhead-boy hair adds a certain Lynchian surrealism to the character, has a rather androgynous, even asexual quality, and his beliefs and habits give him a life that is as close to a purely spiritual one as a flesh and bone human could have. Subsisting on wine and bread (every meal is a sacrament), the priest claims he cannot eat anything else as his stomach will not digest it. We wonder, as does his mentor Father Torcy, if he might not be bringing all this illness on himself by refusing to eat anything of substance. Is he really not of this world, or is this a self-fulfilling prophecy?

The priest begins everyday with a firm resolve and determined gait, but these brief rallies of body and spirit rarely last, as his return at day’s end, beaten down, hunched over attests. Moving through the world as if he is on the verge of complete collapse, bearing the Sisyphusian weight of his parishioners indiscretions and hypocrisy, the priest is also assailed by his own fears, doubts and scruples. Bresson’s expressive black and white cinematography is reminiscent of early David Lean (Oliver Twist/Great Expectations) though a little more restrained. Presenting the priest as dwarfed by long shots of him trudging through the landscape, he is ever-diminishing in the townspeople’s and camera’s eye. He’s also presented as a figure hemmed in by the architecture—gates, doorways, window frames, he is even shot through glass—visible, but once-removed.
He soon realizes that people elude him, he doesn’t "get them." He seems almost mopey and pathetic, certainly self-loathing; we must be drawn to wonder why he bothers to invest so much of himself in a parish that returns so little. Even in his greatest triumph, in the remarkable spiritual showdown for the soul of the desperate Countess (sorta like The Exorcist, but w/o the pea soup and cuss words. Oh, and no Satan either. Come to think of it, nevermind), he is ultimately defeated by the town’s condemning misinterpretation of his motives. While he is able to give the Countess peace, he does not have any himself. At least, not until he is forced to flea Ambricourt in order to seek a doctor’s care for his worsening health.

The suffering endured by the priest as he tries to be a spiritual man in this spiritual wasteland, where he devotes himself to others who have no use for him, at the cost of his own well-being, indicates that Bresson is offering us a modern day retelling of the story of Christ. The priest finds peace only in the very few moments that he is able to escape from Ambricourt, such as during his motorcycle ride with the young activist Olivier, ultimately faces his personal Golgotha in a dirty attic in the northern French town of Lille, where he may not have a collection of disciples to carry on in his footsteps, but does have a witness to report that the young priest was finally able to proclaim that "All is Grace." It seems that there is no place in our increasingly secular world for these sorts of old-fashioned saints. As a contemporary comment on the powerful element of suffering and redemption that is the centre of the Christ story, Diary of a Country Priest is a very interesting and unexpectedly (for this old agnostic) moving experience, and would provide an interesting double bill with a certain controversial ’04 release that claims to walk down a similar road.

2013-03-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, USA, 2012)

Ben Livant:

No, Silver Linings Playbook is not nearly as good as writer/director David O. Russell's previous film The Fighter. But I suppose this is because it's based on a work of fiction, whereas The Fighter is based on a true story. There is also the working-class social framework, overt and acute in The Fighter, just covert and mellow in SLP. And ultimately, the sibling rivalry and maternal favouritism in the family dynamic of The Fighter is intense and troubled. In SLP, the paternal favouritism is mostly a back story afterthought and the romantic conflict is, frankly, quite contrived. Or should the invidious comparison of the two films simply come down to a difference of drugs; a serious problem in The Fighter, a joke in SLP?

This registered, I enjoyed SLP. I understand why its basically blue collar optimism will make the film a hit. It should not be judged next to any sort of realistic drama. Instead, it should be evaluated in the company of the kind of comedy for adults that is dominant these days; you know, stuff by Apatow. Side by side with this sort of stuff, SLP is more emotionally substantive. It feels more true to life and on this basis it speaks to people looking for at least a dose of honesty when it comes to the domestic troubles of folks who have fallen on hard times; economically, psychologically, romantically, all around. The upbeat message is popular, of course, in the end a confirmation of the love in the family.

The ensemble performances are attractively naturalistic. Ever since Winter's Bone, I have had my eye on Jennifer Lawrence and I am enjoying watching her career take off. But goddamn, just when I thought I would never see DeNiro do it again - he does it again. Guy killed me this time out. I just gotta give it up to him one more time.

Dan Jardine:

To praise a film because it is more emotionally substantive than a Judd Apatow film is akin to applauding Ethan Hawke because he does Shakespeare better than Keanu Reeves.

Okay, all cheapshots aside, I cannot say that Silver Linings Playbook worked for me at any level beyond that of a well-made and acted rom-com. I dig that Russell is playing in a slightly different blue collar sandbox than most films of this ilk, but beyond papering over a lot of script deficiencies with some terrific casting, I'm not sure what else this film brings to the genre that hasn't been done many times before. Sure, the film raises the stakes a bit by introducing a mental illness angle to the romance, but all that potential credibility is dissipated with a resolution that is both conventional and trite.

Lastly, I rankle at some of the same matters that you do, but even more so, I am irked by the incredible buzz this film has generated in the critical community (92% approval rating at Rotten-Tomatoes, 81% at Metacritic), as well as with Academy members who have seen fit to nominate the film for eight awards, including all the major categories (picture, director, acting.) I love the work that deNiro and Lawrence do here, the latter proving that her work in Winter's Bone was no fluke, but ultimately all they do is prove the old adage that you can cover up a lot of problems with the script by hiring good actors.

2013-03-21T11:57:00.001-07:00

Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik, USA, 2012)

Ben Livant:

I will start by noting that I enjoyed Killing Them Softly, but it is not nearly as good as director Andrew Dominik's film about Jesse James and the guy who killed him. KTS has a good sense of humour in the dialogue and there are some elegant pieces of cinematography. But the internal dynamism of the plot is weak due to the quasi-impressionistic story-telling style.

The characterizations are strong but it is difficult to care about any of them in particular because the narrative very intentionally does not affectively hitch its wagon to a central protagonist. Yes, Brad Pitt's character is functionally the star of the show, but hardly emotionally so. Again, this is no accident. The film purposefully takes a detached viewpoint in order to impose a certain intellectual consideration on the proceedings.

As to the content of this intellectual consideration, it is made plain enough. Wiki records that Rotten Tomatoes billboards that the film "is a darkly comic, visceral thriller that doubles as a cautionary tale on capitalism, whose message is delivered with sledgehammer force." This is a bit too general, unless you want to take the USA as simply the most concentrated case of anti-social profit-seeking on the planet.

More than once in the film and from more than one character, it is explicitly stated that there is no society to American society; there is no shared community, only competitive individualism. And it is further stated in the end that the culture of the nation is nothing but ruthless business.

The main device employed to advance the message of the film is the contextualization of the story in the last days of the Bush Jr. administration, during which the banks were bailed out and Obama delivered his high rhetoric on the campaign trail. Media reportage of this is juxtaposed mis-en-scene as our low-life hoods engage in their sordid deeds. Hence, the Rotten Tomatoes observation of sledgehammer force with respect to theme.

Naturally, given my politics, I quite liked being banged on my head in this manner. Yet, given my politics again, the lack of depth is just as striking to me. I recently found weak the critique of cyber-capitalism and virtual wealth in Cosmopolis. If that critique suffered from middle-class metaphoricity infatuated with po-mo indeterminacy, KTS suffers from working-class literalness over-reliant on direct analogy. In both, what is needed is some realist attention to actual social relations; i.e., better developed class awareness in more mundane, mainstream sociological situations. In the end, both are slumming in minority sub-cultures of the system on behalf of aesthetic experience rather than explication of the system.

KTS is a better film than Cosmopolis, by the way. Well, I liked it a lot more. I do have to mention, though, that there are two scences of violence that for me are over the top. One is too visceral and the other too much poetry in motion. But I am willing to allow that an argument could be made that both of them serve the message. I just do not require such sledgehammer force when it comes depictions of physical brutalty, especially for a message lacking depth. Still, all said, I do recommend the film to you.

Dan Jardine:

Thanks for the recommendation. Killing Them Softly is a noir-ish crime drama with a brain, and for no other reason than that, it should be applauded. Thankfully, it has even more going for it than that. I quite enjoyed the down and dirty story here, as well as the occasionally sizzling dialogue, and the wealth of very good acting on display here, but, like you, I feel that the film's ambitions are not quite realized. Dominik gives us a glimpse of the dirty underbelly of America's economic reality in the transition period between Dubya's failed presidency and Obama's as yet unrealized one, rightly pointing out that despite the optimism exuded by the new president in his acceptance speech, there is very little hope or change for folks down on the street. For them, America remains a place where life is nasty, brutish, and for many, violently short. This the film does very well, as Obama's voiceover juxtaposed with the filth-littered streets says everything we need to know about the contrast between rhetoric and reality.

If you are going to craft a story with an allegorical bent, you need to see it all the way through. You need to attach these characters to the system from which they emerge, and to which they owe compliance. The characters clearly do not have relationships, they have transactions, exchanging money for murder. If only the film had done a better job of contextualizing the characters in the larger world. Who are they taking orders from? And who do their bosses take their orders from?

I concur that the film's Tarantino-isms don't quite work. The film is at cross purposes when it elevates the violence to visual poetry, particularly considering that implicit criticism that the film makes of this very same violence. Dominik appears to want to have it both ways, to be wagging his finger at the violence inherent in the system, while depicting it in ways that provide the sort of visceral thrill can override the very sort of critical thought that much of the film clearly wants to engage.

The film's punchline, delivered by Pitt's character in the film's final moments, is a little too on the nose for my tastes, but there have been far more egregious examples of underestimating the cinematic sagacity of your viewing public, so I am willing to indulge Dominik here. However, I think the case can be made that if the film had done a slightly better job of SHOWING this to be the case, it would not have needed to state it so explicitly.

KTS is a good film, a solid addition to Dominik's resume, but a modest disappointment given the greatness of his previous film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Dominik remains a filmmaker to watch.

2013-02-03T21:48:00.002-08:00

Django Unchained (USA, 2012, Tarantino)

Ben Livant:

I think you were even more right than you intended to be. That is, I figure I like this movie less than you do. You criticized the story for running out of steam by the third act. I'd need to know where exactly you think the third act kicks in, 'cause I certainly felt the story was riding on false momentum a lot sooner than the last third of the running time, which is far too long, by the way.

If I was going to be generous, I would grant that I was intrigued up until Leo's character and Waltz' character take their bullets. But in all honesty, the true energy of the emancipation-unto-revenge premise is spent well before Leo and his world even show up, the plot devise to rescue the protagonist's wife definitely notwithstanding. So I guess I am making my chop after the first act instead of the second like you.

In any case, we clearly agree that the supposedly retributive carnage after Leo and Waltz go down is not working for us. You suggested that it was not just gratuitous but an attempt to cover up a stalled narrative with spectacle. I see that chip you have laid down and raise you with another. My bet is that Tarantino's plot weakness this time out derives from his footnote-to-Pekinpah, still-male-adolescent worldview that violence is problem-solving with respect to not only social conflict in the real world but also dramatic form in story-telling. In my estimation, Django exhausts its potential the first time the protagonist kills himself a couple of white men and enables his mentor to finish off a third. Outwitting the proto-Klan mob that attempts to seek pay-back for this cake is some sweet icing on it, but after this everything is dramatically forced, especially the crimson action.

All of this structural criticism is for me secondary to the thematic failure of the film to fulfill the emancipation-unto-revenge premise. I give Quentin the benefit of the doubt ideologically. This fantasy means to be politically correct. But it is all too obvious thatDjango wasn't written by Spike Lee, eh? The problem is not that the protagonist needs to be kick-started by the benevolence of an enlightened white man. It's that the protagonist never equals the white man as a fascinating personality in his own right. The sad truth is, Django is some semi-gloss paint drying compared to the phosphorescence that splashes forth from the European. The main man never becomes for us as charismatic. Not even close. This won't do in general, but it seriously won't do in a tale intended to liberate the subaltern, facilitate his human development and celebrate his achievement of justice.

I will also throw in a feminist objection. After the central position of a strong heroine in Inglorious Basterds, the female McGuffin in Django is a significant setback for the director. Not offensively objectified sexually or a stock type conforming to a genre requirement, the woman in the story is a non-person, an emotional void, a prop. This is boring in its own right and for those of us attracted to complex characters, insulting too. What is more, or less as the case be, since she is the single thing motivating our title character, her status as a non-entity is transferred to him and makes him that much more bland.

Lastly, at what point does tongue-in-cheek silliness stop counting as novel and start smelling stale? When Tarantino first showed up 20 years ago, he was hailed as some sort of cinematic deconstructionist, a post-modern Godard, blah blah blah. I knew this was empty hype, but there was a freshness to his style and a charm to his cheekiness. Inglorious Basterds is far and away his most ambitious film and arguably his best. So, clearly I acknowledge that he recently advanced his art, playing to his irreverent strengths while generating more intellectual substance than ever before. Django, on the other hand, is not even as good as his early work. Heck, it's not as good as Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, a film in which most definitely the sexy brother is the main course and the cute honky is a side dish.

And Dan Jardine:

There is little doubt that DU is lesser Tarantino, and is a bit of a disappointment particularly when you sidle it up to its glorious predecessor, but I did find plenty to applaud in Django, at least before the third act malaise set in.

Tarantino still commands the screen with words, images and music (has "I Got a Name" ever had such resonance?) in ways that very few directors working today could ever hope to approach. There are a number of scenes in the opening two acts that rank high on the QT fun metre, including the Mel Brook's homage found in the aforementioned pre-Klan mob scene, as well as the tremendously suspenseful bar/street scene that plays out as Waltz's Dr. King (ha!) lays out his bounty hunter scheme to Django, while simultaneously taking down a criminal miscreant while facing down an extremely hostile town. I also mostly dug the set-up as the movie moved into diCaprio's Candieland, particularly the agonizing scene where diCaprio learns of our heroes' ruse and rubs this knowledge in their faces.

That said, many of your complaints are certainly valid. The film is certainly a big step backwards when it comes to gender politics. Most of QT's films feature at least one strong female heroine, but the only woman of note in DU is a damsel in distress who has little to do other than look pretty and faint well. Furthermore, the film does not come close to matching the thematic complexities or dramatic satisfaction of the similarly revenge-motived Inglourious Basterds, largely because Django lacks the words, words, words (to borrow from Hamlet) of Dr. King. Part of this failure is on QT's shoulders, for not giving Foxx enough to work with in the script, but let's face it. Much as I like him, Foxx is simply no match for Waltz in the screen presence or movie charisma department. So, the film spends far too much time celebrating the white hero's character, while not allowing its titular character nearly enough heroic deeds or actions.

I will take you up on one aspect of your complaint that the film does not fulfil its dramatic obligation because it denies Django his emancipation revenge, only in that the man does get a measure of revenge, though his target is not who we expect. No, that goes to Waltz, who gets to take down the Candie man. Instead, Django gets his when he takes out Stephen, that most despicable of all slaves, the co-opted house slave and Uncle Tom figure. I will admit to finding it a bit jarring to see Sam Jackson in this role, but damn he played that villainous figure so beautifully and horribly convincingly that his eventual demise was cathartic and therapeutic.

But was it cathartic and therapeutic enough to rescue the final act? No. As you have noted, the film by this point had lost its way, awash in a crimson ocean of violent excess that suggest QT's struggles to find an appropriate finale for his epic "Southern." Interupting the inanity with a Tarantino cameo as an Aussie accent slave trader and capping it with Foxx on a prancing pony was so self-consciously silly that I can't imagine any but the most hard core Tarantino fan giving it a pass.

I had enough of a good time at Django to wish that it had been better. If Tarantino had found a way around the third act corner he had painted himself into without resorting to a blood dimmed tide of absurd depths, he may have had something for the ages. Instead we are left with a flawed, though entertaining film. Clearly this is one film where (a whole lot) less could have led to (plenty) more.

2012-09-13T11:44:00.002-07:00

La Strada (1954, Italy, Frederico Fellini)

Dan Jardine:

The legendary Frederico Fellini began his career in movies as a screenwriter for neo-realist pioneer filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, and his great success would establish the expectation that Fellini would follow in his mentor’s footsteps. While his earliest films, including I Vitelloni, met with neo-realist’s approval, Fellini was soon subsequently denounced as a turncoat to the cause for crafting films, the first of which would be La Strada, that operated at a heightened level of reality, where fancy and fantasy would play vital roles. Fellini considered his films those of the Italian reconstruction, and rather than dwelling on the devastation left behind by the war, he wanted to point his films in a more guardedly hopeful direction. Yet, there is little doubt that La Strada has at least one foot firmly in the "old school" language of neo-realism, with its unvarnished depiction of a ravaged countryside, peopled by an often inarticulate and taciturn citizenry. Still, the film has an unmistakable other-ness to it as well, as it is an early precursor to the sort of magical realism the would take hold in Fellini’s late-career efforts.

La Strada is centered around the decidedly atypical and quite possibly symbolic figure of the part imbecile, part saint Gelsomina. Played by Fellini’s wife, Guilietta Masina, Gelsomina is an expressive, Chaplin of City Lights-era character who’s as open-hearted as she is dull-witted. It seems fitting (if cruel) that she is sold by her impoverished mother to a carnival strong man, Zampano (Anthony Quinn), who viciously trains her as both his sidekick and sexual conquest. Gelsomina has a bird-like quality, delicate and strangely beautiful, as well as a prophetic ability to predict the weather, yet she is unable to avoid the brutish Zampano’s fits of ineffable rage and violence.

With Gelsomina operating in full clown make-up, it is fitting that much of the film’s second half takes place in and around a circus, filling the film with quirky secondary characters who help give the film an alternate sense of reality. It is here that the put-upon Gelsomina meets the Fool (Richard Basehart), who appears to her almost as an angel, full-winged and floating above her on a tightrope (an image Wim Wenders would apprehend to full effect in the magnificent Wings of Desire). While he would later disappoint her, the Fool tries to guide her with his parable of the pebble, an act that would prove to be both her doing and undoing, urging her as he does to remain with and tend to the spiritually bereft Zampano.

Typical of most Fellini films, the narrative is episodic in nature, with the familiar motif of travel (La Strad literally means the road) providing the justification for the picaresque nature of the film. The film’s central characters —Gelsomina, Zampano and the Fool--are character types who somehow manage the neat trick of also being distinctive and dimensional creations. And Fellini knows how to push the empathy buttons, particularly with Gelsomina, whose innate saintliness and simultaneous powerlessness sometimes threaten to flood the film in tidal waves of pathos, as well as with the judicious deployment of a memorable Nino Rota-penned score (The Godfather). Fellini’s talent for using striking images to evoke moods and themes operates throughout, as the shot of a deserted Gelsomina watching a lonely horse clopping down the street in the wee hours can attest.

La Strada ends where it began, on a long stretch of abandoned shoreline. However, the journey that we (and the characters) have traveled leaves us perhaps even radically affected, and, like Zampano, changed permanently, and hopefully for the better.

2012-09-12T19:11:00.005-07:00

Reefer Madness (1938, USA, Louis Gasner)

Reefer Madness opens with a siren-warning that "[m]arijuana is…a violent narcotic…the Real Public Enemy Number One!" The camera then focuses on Dr. Carroll, a school principal working on the side for the "Department of Narcotics" lecturing a middle-aged audience on this scourge, preaching right to the camera (and you and me, by obvious implication) warning the assemblage that ganja is a greater Menace 2 Society than heroin or opium, in the apparent hopes that they’ll scurry home and lock their kids in the closet to keep them safe and sound from the temptation of the spliff. Didn’t anyone tell these folks not to oversell their product? Regardless, as the evidence mounts before us, it becomes clear that general purpose of Reefer Madness was not pedantry, but vicarious lasciviousness.

According to Reefer Madness, "marihuana" use leads to rampant sex, brutal violence, murder and mental insanity. You’d also think that with such debauchery to its credit, the film would be more entertaining, wouldn’t you? Ah, well. The film proper then gets underway, as Dr. Carroll’s hysterical warnings segue into a flashback that serves as both example and once-lost hour long episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. All right, I’m kidding about the latter, but not so much. Reefer Madness soon tips its intent to be the same sort of instructional film as those lensed at the time that were aimed at educating young people about perils of sexual promiscuity. However, (gasp!) oft-times these films were made to appeal to the very audience they were supposedly railing against. That’s right, those less-than-pure of heart who bought their tickets in hopes of seeing some less-than-wholesome action portrayed up there on the big screen, and you can be sure that the filmmakers knew it, tossing in just enough lurid shots to keep the customer satisfied.

And one suspects that the Reefer Madness’s filmmaker’s intentions may not have been exactly above reproach here. Either that or they were a group of terrible hypocrites, because the way the camera leers at the behaviour of these crazy mixed up kids as they engage in all sorts of degenerate activities will make you want to take a shower. The film is not much more than a series of ogling shots of women getting dressed, couples smoking dope (these have gotta be the most inefficient smokers of this particular herbal remedy that I’ve ever seen. It’s a wonder they were able to find any sorta buzz at all) then making out, and finally descending into the sort of group lunacy (whose rapid deterioration from weed is mystifying. I mean, how’d they get their hands on such killer grass back then?) that you can only appreciate if you view the film as pure camp, or make a drinking game out of spotting cliched expressions of mental illness (bug-eyed, jibbering hyperventilation being a personal favourite).

Director Gasnier, who built his minor career around these sorts of instructional flicks, uses a lot of silent film school techniques—extreme close-up (ill-advised when working with a group of mediocrities, as is the case here) to push the film’s key emotional buttons (both of them), as well as rapid cross-cut editing to build tension and establish mood through contrast (again, recommended only if you have tension to build and moods to contrast, unlike here). So, while the movie is pretty poorly written, and terribly overacted, at least you can give Gasnier his props for understanding some of the basic grammar of film. That he uses his limited skills to produce such ridiculous material is to his embarrassment something that can only be appreciated through our amusement.

2012-09-12T06:18:00.001-07:00

Tupac: Resurrected (2003, USA, Lauren Lazin)

Dan Jardine:

Tupac: Resurrected is a fascinating, if flawed, documentary that finds an unusual hook to lure in its audience: The film tells Tupac’s story in his own words, culling the ubiquitous voice-over narration from a plethora of interviews and layering them over videos and found footage of Shakur. This is at once the film’s greatest strength, as the immediacy of hearing Tupac tell his own story in his own words, years after his own death, is both eerie and affecting, as well as its Achilles heel, as the story of Tupac’s life would benefit from the sort of critical external analysis and interpretation that Shakur is unable to bring to his own life. Still, there’s something unshakably powerful and affecting in this tragic tale of one gifted young man’s rise from misery of poverty to the sort of fame and great wealth that most of us can only dream of. That this did not bring him the peace and happiness we would have hoped, and in fact almost certainly contributed to his very early death, is the film’s final sorrowful lesson.

A gifted actor and poet, a teenaged Shakur was invited to attend the Baltimore School of Performing Arts. Although he loved all his classes, his mother withdrew him from the school to head to California where she hoped to escape the violence of Maryland’s mean streets. Unfortunately, once in SoCal, the Shakur’s found only more of the same. Tupac claimed that this helped him to relate to everyone’s struggle, and that he was able to dedicate his music to depicting this reality in graphic detail in hopes of stopping the disintegration of the African American inner-city reality. To critics of his song’s brutality he retorted, "I didn’t create the violence, I diagnosed it." There is no doubt that Tupac’s music has a rawness that speaks directly about things that affect his community, but Tupac’s life, riddled with violence, arrests and imprisonment, leads one to wonder if he wasn’t just identifying the problem, but also identifying with it. He seems to have been well on the way to becoming the self-destructive figures depicted in his music when he was shot to death in 1996.

The enigmatic Shakur was perhaps the most influential rapper to emerge out of hip hop’s remarkably fruitful era of the early 90s. His paradoxical life was both extraordinary and typical, as he was a sensitive and artistically-inclined mama’s boy who filled the paternal gap in his single-parent home by gravitating to the macho world of gangsters. Yet, unlike so many young men who fall into a life on the streets, Tupac was encouraged by his street patrons, those same shady pimps and drug dealers who would swallow up the lives of so many other young men, to get out of this life, to use his talents to rise above the gangsta life. That he would take their advice to such wild success, yet fall victim to the influences of these same figures and forces, is perhaps the film’s ultimate irony. That this keenly intelligent and socially active young man would be foolish enough to believe that Suge Knight, a gangsta record exec of the ominously-named Death Row Records, was not only a good man to trust his career with, but even a trusted friend, shows something of Tupac’s naivete and desperate need for strong masculine models in his life, and his willingness to turn just about anywhere to satisfy it.

"You need a man to teach you how to be a man," notes Tupac, which is something Bill Cosby might wanna think about before he starts condemning the behaviour of young male African Americans, and the lyrical content of many hip hop artists, whose work he proclaims is letting the side down, to borrow a sports metaphor. And if Tupac were still here, I’m sure he’d ask the Cos where all the successful elder male role models have gone? They sure aren’t in the ‘hood anymore, imparting their pearly wisdom for the younguns. They’ve fled the communities from which they were born, and by and large successfully melted away into the giant, insular pot of secure, patrolled and fenced neighbourhoods. Tupac would surely remind Bill of the perils of being raised by a single mother, where the only strong men available to turn to for guidance were drug dealers and pimps. While drug dealers were urging Tupac to get out and live his dream, where are the Bill Cosby’s of this world when the Tupac’s of the ‘hood are casting around for positive male influences?

As a young man trying to find his footing and establish his place in hip hop culture, Tupac promoted the theory of Thug Life, which he suggested as a means of championing the underdog, rather than the criminal. Thug life, he contended, is about overcoming obstacles, about being strong. "America" he famously suggests, "IS thug life." Tupac also noted, in a moment of introspection, that he was "most like my mom cuz I’m arrogant, totally arrogant." His self-diagnosis proves astute when he states that "My ego was out of control; I had to get humble." Unfortunately, this lesson came at a cost, as Tupac’s early supporters seem to have had a profound effect upon his behaviour. He began to evolve into the stereotype, beginning to look more and more like the criminal gangsta rather than a follower of the thug life. Whether it was residual resentment against his mother, one-time Black Panther and radical activist Afeni Shakur, a rising antipathy borne out of her drug addiction or arrogance, or if it was merely the predictable effect of having as his principle male influence people with pronounced destructive and misogynist viewpoints, Tupac’s attitude towards and treatment of women in his music and subsequently in his life was to prove troubling, and even vile, as his later arrests for sexual misconduct and assault would attest. As a statement on the significance of Tupac’s life, the film would have been strengthened if it had been a little more willing to challenge Tupac’s behaviour toward and treatment of women. The central contradiction in Tupac’s life, that he was capable of astute self-analysis, yet often too cocky to wonder if he wasn’t being as adversely affected by this life as the people he wrote about, is one of the keys to understanding Shakur’s complex life.

In the end, the pressure of being a 20-something black role model for men may simply have been too much to bear. Tupac expressed his fear of the responsibility that such a position put him in. And while he hints at some personal growth and maturity, particularly after his eventual incarceration proved a humbling experience that "Kills the spirit. I couldn’t write in prison," it remains something of a gap in the film that, while he assures us it is so, we cannot be sure that his time in prison caused Tupac to abandon his youthful hubris and destructive treatment of women. However, his evolution as an artist showed us a young man who was an activist, involved in the community, who showed signs of becoming a more self-aware and self-critical artist, as his music moved from the political to the personal. Was he learning the skills of self-examination necessary to be not just a great artist and good citizen but also a good person? Unfortunately, his murder renders the question moot.

2012-09-08T08:02:00.002-07:00

Giant (1956, USA, George Stevens) AKA You Bought it Sight Unseen

Dan Jardine:

Giant is a great big old-fashioned film that is framed as an epic, as it spans several decades in the lives of an extended family of characters at a time in Texas history when sweeping social and economic changes were besetting its people. Yet, the story has a quiet intimacy to it despite the immense grandeur of the setting and the scope of the historical backdrop. The heart of the story is found in the protagonists, the Benedict family, and their changing relationship to the land, its people and each other, with the consequent triumphs and tragedies forming the emotional screen onto which these images are cast.

Giant covers the better part of the first half of the 20th Century Texas as it moves from traditional agrarian forms of commerce (specifically, cattle ranching) to more risky but economically rewarding forms (fossil fuels). While the film may simplify the history a bit, it doesn’t whitewash it either, describing the theft of the land, which was bought by acquisitive white ranchers for 5 cents an acre, which left the indigenous (as well as subsequent illegal immigrant) Mexicans impoverished. The arrogance of Texans towards these folks is implicit in every exchange, and at first goes largely unquestioned. That is, until Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor) arrives. After Jordan Benedict (Rock Hudson) successfully wins her heart in a whirlwind and stormy courtship, Leslie is swept away from her gentrified East Coast existence and dropped rather unceremoniously into a frontier Texan life that nearly proves her undoing. However, in a nice twist on the whole "fish out of water" cliché, Leslie proves a quick study, and rather than being crushed by the experience, finds herself not only adapting, but bringing about significant change herself.

What makes Giant an atypical film of its genre (epic western) is the primary importance of Leslie’s civilizing influence on the rough and ready denizens of the Benedict Reata. Director Stevens (Shane, A Place in the Sun) is right at home in the western genre, which allows him to play around with its conventions in order to drive his points home. Those familiar with westerns will recognize the tensions at work between the traditional ranchers and the more modern-minded oil farmers. Stevens quickly establishes a number of dualities. "Your country, our county. Makes us sound so far apart," says Leslie. The "us versus them" conflicts are not just between Texas and the east coast, but also between Mexicans and Texans, rich and poor, men and women, as well as cattle and oil. There is also plenty of antagonism between genders (as Leslie refuses to play the dutiful wife) as well as emergent racial tensions (as Leslie refuses to accept the residing opinion that Mexican-Americans are somehow lesser humans) which add considerably to the complexity of film’s themes. The feminization of the Benedict ranch, which plays with the macho credo of traditional westerns, while the interesting gender-bending friendship of Jordan’s rather butch sister, the Calamity Jane-like Luz (Mercedes McCambridge) and his rather effete nemesis Jett (James Dean) further complicates the film’s subtextual sexual politics. One of my favourite images in the film is the silhouette of the Luz and Jett shot against the great big west Texan sky. Not only does it highlight the film’s interestingly ambiguous sexuality, it’s just way cool.

Elizabeth Taylor is in rare thespian (rather than movie star) mode, giving a capable performance as the high-spirited and high-minded Leslie. Raised on the dreaded East Coast, with its book-learning and snooty attitudes, Leslie quickly becomes the ranch’s conscience, determined to guide her strong-willed and self-assured husband to discover his humility. Taylor is charming and likeable, and in the lighter scenes she and Hudson make a believable pairing. There is little doubt that she is the film’s moral centre, and Taylor proves up to the task. As her cattle-ranching husband, Hudson certainly looks the part of a western hero, tall, rugged, square-jawed. But he quickly gets wooden and unconvincing when trying to emote in the film’s dramatic scenes, and is always at his best in the moments of light romance and comedy. James Dean, in the third of his breakout roles in 1956 (Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden) is an interesting choice to play Jett. At first he is all self-conscious twitches and tics, but Dean undergoes an interesting transformation as his character’s fortunes change, emerging as a degenerate symbol of the modern Texan oilman.

Giant certainly makes great use of its Texan setting, with a palette rich in dusty-tinted hues, and vast vistas, one heaped upon the next. Stevens’ imagery is often quite resonant, as he proves capable of making powerful statements with nary a word spoken, such as when we suddenly see Angel’s flag-draped coffin, a moving elegy while also making an understated but eloquent statement about the costs of war. However, once the character dynamics and thematic elements are established by the film’s midpoint, the remainder of the film starts to stutters and stumbles through the suddenly episodic narrative. As the characters begin to age rather rapidly in this scenario, contemporary audiences may find the makeup and wigs used to depict these changes rather laughable. And while the film seems to veer off course at times, and occasionally lose its way, staggering towards the finale like an exhausted marathon runner at high altitude, Stevens does manage to find a hidden reserve in order to deliver one last push to the finish line, as the dust-up in a small diner between Rock and the racist owner proves to be a rollicking knock-em-down, drag-em-out conclusion to an uneven, but satisfying variation on the traditional western.

Score: 81/100

2012-07-31T11:07:00.002-07:00

We Need to Talk About Kevin (UK, 2011, Lynne Ramsay)

Ben Livant:

I am going to give the book I have not read on which the film is based the benefit of the doubt. I am going to assume that the novel is a compelling read because it successfully provides the psychological interiority of the character of the mother who recalls the story from her first person point of view. It is precisely this inner mentality that the film fails to deliver. Or, maybe the fault does reside with the original source material. Either way, the film never gets inside the head of the mother.

Tilda Swinton puts in a strong performance as Chistopher Walken's twin sister, a pale death-mask to be sure. Director Lynne Ramsey demonstrates that she can decorate a room in the house that Hitchcock built, albeit decked out with art-house dread rather than his main-frame suspense. The total picture does not add up to more than the sum of its parts, however. It presents a portrait of a terribly dysfunctional family due to a horribly sociopathic member who victimizes another member. But this comes over as an almost objective account that never reveals the deep subjectivity of the victim. This it must do in order for the narrative to bring out from our palms the clammy recognition that we are in the presence of pure evil.

Meanwhile, the notion of pure evil has always offended me conceptually. No doubt, there are homicidal maniacs that walk the earth. And admittedly, there is a biological basis for the depravity of these individuals. But as Mary Shelly makes clear in no uncertain terms, monsters are made. Some sinister electricity has to be jolted into bad flesh in order for it to come together as Frankenstein. So-called natural born killers need nurturing too; nasty nurturing, but nurturing nonetheless.

We Need To Talk About Kevin gives but a single nod in this direction. The mother was ambivalent about becoming a mother and this is for the boy a corrupting cause insofar as he has always had a sixth sense that he was not wanted in the first place. Other than this extremely vague suggestion that he is reacting to what he intuites to be a false show of love on her part, his socio-pathology is presented as utterly innate. It is absolutely mysterious in relation to his immediate human relations. It is plainly laid out that mom wants to love him but he does everthing in his power to prevent her from doing so. How his larger social environment beyond his home life shapes him we are shown not at all. Honestly, more than once watching the film I flashed on The Excorcist. Kevin is essentially possessed by The Devil. From his first screams in the stroller to his last arrow shot in the school gym.

I would not take offense with this - yet another Hannibal Lecter tale - if it did not so easily play into the most reactionary, right-wing sentiments. To make the ideological point with a slogan, there is a direct line from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the death penalty in Texas, (the B-movie camp of the former withstanding.) We Need To Talk About Kevin gives at least a couple loud cues to lean in this direction. The inclusion of a scene featuring Kevin as a sexual being is vital to demonizing him. The mother accidentally invades his privacy while he is masturbating and he suffers no shame. Quite the contrary, he wickedly continues his beastial act, perversely compelling his mother to be his witness. The incest implication is candid within this exhibitionist rape.

More subtle but perhaps even more off-putting, the dialogue in the the final jail-house scene notifies us that because he was tried as a minor, Kevin will be out on the streets soon enough. I have already noted that this lends itself to conservative ranting about the need for more punishing law and order. The present point is that the audience is supposed to leave the theatre knowing that killer-Kevin is waiting for them. If not tonight, tomorrow night. And while it is dramatically legitimate and perhaps even emotionally gratifying for the kid to confess at the end that even he does not understand his own motivations, this is hardly comforting to contemplate after he is out on parole. In short, the film finishes with a hack shock effect.

Clearly, this sort of movie is just not my cup of tea. I will acknowledge that it is to be commended for refraining from overt sensationalism. There is almost no violence and very little gruesome graphics. A staggering degree of menace is achieved simply at the level of atmospherics and I suppose for fans of the sicko genre We Need To Talk About Kevin is thinking-man's stylish. But I believe the best horror penetrates beyond external vibe to internal thought-process and I have to reiterate that the film never truly takes us within mom's head. Think of any number of films by Polanski for the standard that is informing me.

The trailer

2012-07-31T10:55:00.000-07:00

The Mill and the Cross

Ben Livant:

I know you (editor's note: that would be me, Dan Jardine) have only seen the first few minutes of this film (editor's note: I've since seen the whole film. And really dug it), so I won't spoil it for you. Not because I am going to shut up about it. Because there is nothing to spoil. Well, that is, insofar as we all issue spoiler alerts only with respect to divulging information about plot. Is it possible to spoil setting, characterizations, atmosphere, theme? I guess so, in the most basic sense of not wanting to hear the opinion or analysis of something not already personally experienced. You might save this review for after you've seen the film yourself, but I don't think it will make a difference. The Mill and the Cross is unspoilable.

This is because this movie is not a "movie." Falling squarely between being an etude and an homage, it is an essay. Inspired by and entirely about Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1564 painting, The Way to Calvary, The Mill and the Cross is very much a companion piece to the book of the same name by the art historian, Michael Francis Gibson. This might give the impression that the film is a public-television style documentary. Wrong impression. Or it might give the impression that the film is a history-channel style dramatization. Again, wrong impression. But enough impressionism. We are talking about the Flemish Renaissance.

Not talking about it, actually. The Mill and the Cross is almost completely free of of language. Human bodies make all sorts of sounds, including vocal utterances, but there are very few words spoken. And the few words that are spoken are not conversations between two or more people. There is no dialogue. Instead, a mere handful of cursory speeches are given by individuals who just happen to be in the company of others. Ostensibly said to these other characters, these monological acts are actually soliloquies a second-step abstractly removed. These meta-thought-balloons belong to Bruegel himself or his patron, not as historical personages but rather as "colour commentators" on the concepts present in the painting. This holds as well for the female figure drawn by the film-maker from the painting. Any other vocalizing is so much theatrical-extra "rhubarb, rhubarb" equally meaningful only at a second-step abstractly removed. It ushers not from dramatic characters properly understood but rather painted images that have been "brought to life" as cinematic images.

This bringing-to-life is the raison d'etre of the film. The Mill and the Cross is an animation of a still life. But be clear. The purpose is not to enhance the non-moving picture by making it move for us. The exact opposite. The purpose is to appreciate the non-moving picture but making us move into it. This is no trivial difference. The former would be a lame Disney cartoon. The latter is a remarkable non-movie movie. The Mill and the Cross is two-dimensional celluloid in motion at 24 frames per second. Yet the experience of watching it is akin to moving about a three-dimensional model of the painting, walking around inside a museum diorama, interacting with a hologram.

Slow and a little bit boring, yet this feels absolutely as it should and dialectically makes the experience captivating and intense. Hyper-accelerated as we are today by the speed of our technologies, it is quite a profound feeling to stay still and actually contemplate anything. The Way to Calvary certainly merits our sustained attention. The Mill and the Crossprovides a sort of stoner's take on Bruegel's masterpiece, if the stoner happens to be a scholar with expertise in the work of the genius painter. It is at once intellectually acute to the point of being a pedagogical pronouncement and mysteriously enveloping to the point of being a trippy scene.

This feeling of sleep-walking through a realistic world unrealistically conjured by a sorcerer is achieved by the truly artistic application of CGI. The obvious artificiality of CGI that so often obstructs the very effect it is employed to obtain, in this instance serves to create a mesmerizing interface of details from the painting and the extrapolation of these staged for the camera. After all, the original work is itself an artificial representation. Using the phoniness of CGI to interface with the phoniness of painting, The Mill and the Cross manages to liquefy the heavy oil long ago dried solid on the canvas.

The trailer

2012-07-30T10:20:00.000-07:00

Melancholia (Denmark, 2011, Lars von Trier)

Ben Livant:

Just as NHL addicts love to pick and choose from the whole league to create their dream team, film buffs make Top Ten lists. And just like a hockey fan who wants to see nothing more than a show-down between his best goalie and his favorite forward, cinema enthusiasts enjoy programing the ultimate double-bill.

I rarely read reviews so I really do have to ask: Is it just me or has everybody else also observed that this film paired against Terrence Malick's latest is the ultimate double-bill this year? Come on! Is this not a match made in heaven (or hell, however you want to conceive of it), a fight to the death (or the after-life), a contest between the eternal light of God's grace and the black hole of nothingness?

Both films deliver outstandingly arresting visuals that establish inescapably affecting atmospheres that speak to the human condition. And the two films are (almost) equally pretentious. They find it in every way legitimate to fill up a massive metaphysical frame with the paint of personal psychology. In the shoot-out between The Tree of Life and Melancholia, however, I am inclined to cheer for the latter. My reasons are three.

In the first philosophic place, my supposedly supernatural soul about which believers are so optimistic is just too supposed for me to take optimistically. You know. Death and taxes. In that order. Couple things you can count on. Death of me, death of you, death of the planet...eventually. Can't avoid the void. The first rule of the realist.

Secondly, I respectfully request a splash of irony from all painters on the cosmic canvas. Von Trier's picture is somewhat ironic, whereas Malick's painting is dead serious (not-dead serious, that is, angels-forever serious). This is not to suggest that Melancholia has a sense of humour. It is just as un-funny as The Tree of Life. My point is that von Trier's film is somewhat less pretentious because the depiction of the end of the world is less literal event and more metaphoric device than the opening of the pearly gates in Malick's movie.

(On the other hand, maybe von Trier does crack what he considers to be a joke. Many scenes in Melancholia are precisely paced, choreographed, to the Prelude of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. This is THE Romantic work of art that functioned as the point of mediation between Schopenhauer and [yes, I'm reading him right now, having just finished my course in] Nietzsche. The emotional power of the music is repetitively borrowed by the film almost to the point of being camp. Yet, the parallels that may be drawn between the so-opposite sisters in the film and the antithetical conceptions in Wagner's tragic opera of day/life/illusion and night/death/actuality are there for the drawing. About this, I believe von Trier is sincere. And, duh, he sides with night/death/actuality unto nihilistic despair. [Unlike Wagner who also sides with this but on behalf of erotic pathos.] )

My final reason for my preference is positively prosaic, which is to say that I am positive about prose that makes some goddamn sense. The narrative in The Tree of Life is incoherent. I suspect that it is intended to be poetic and I am confident that it is meant to be profound, but it's an ineffectual parable as far as I can make out that attempts to pass off inept drama as a glorious aesthetic experience. Melancholia, conversely, is one hell of a two act play. Not only did it make perfect sense as a story, the formal construction of the narrative is remarkably powerful.

Much of this resides in the control of our cognition von Trier achieves by telling us the ending at the beginning. But the radical stylistic juxtaposition of the two acts is equally important. It facilitates the inversion of the binary represented by the sisters. They effectively switch places with respect to our sympathies and in so doing validate von Trier's attitude that existence is just so much non-existence. Correction. His take is more explicitly negative. The sister that is his stand-in says not just that life on earth is the only life in the universe. She declares further that life on earth is evil.

According to what moral compass this orientation is charted, I notice von Trier declines to disclose. What is plain is that this is no "disaster movie" since the end of the world can hardly be considered a disaster if life on earth is evil. Guess we just have to accept the opinion of a clinically depressive film-maker as reliable testimony on this topic. Or not. Personally, I have put meatloaf in my mouth many, many times and not once has it tasted to me like ashes. But I would be a liar if I failed to confess that Melancholia made me wake up in the middle of the night, unable to fall back asleep. It's a very intense trip, the artistic authority of which cannot be denied. I think it is an excellent film.

I propose we adopt the notion that von Trier has become - if he wasn't already - a master of horror. In support of this campaign, I hope I will be forgiven for quoting at length from my review of his Antichrist:

It's title notwithstanding, there is no moral reference point - period. Call me a prude but I have to side with the Sunday school types who would no doubt label it degenerate. I prefer the term decadent because for me it suggests a less individualistic, more general sociological decay. At some point, it behooves us to wonder what a work of art is reflecting about the culture at large, and this film is universal nihilism posing as a piece of personal psychosis. The nasty supernatural trappings are just that; pretentious window dressing, just the stuff to fool lots of reviewers into thinking the film is philosophically assertive. But given all the rest of the uber-grizzly fare, some of the supposedly occult implications about the natural world were sorta goofy; not full-out funny, but dorky nonetheless and therefore laughable. The ending is a head-scratcher, to be sure. But so what? We've been too badly brutalized to care. In short, it's just another horror movie folks.

I stand by that review and I maintain now that Melancholia is another horror movie. But I do not think it is "just" another one. Again, I think it is excellent. This time out the ending ain't no head-scratcher, that's for sure. And this time out, the individual mental illness does not "pose" as the apocalypse. This is because the occult implications in Melancholia are in no way conceptually shabby. Tracing the etymology of the word "melancholia," Wiki arrives at Old English terms including "saturine," as in, under the influence of Saturn. The depressive sister is a kind of witch, an intuitive astrological seer, Nostradamus in a dress. She looks at the sky and knows - just knows - it's over. In keeping with a Stephen King protagonist, this character is made sick by her own power.

Until she isn't.

Never mind religion. We are long past spiritualist hope. Turns out the man of science can't face the fact. The lord of the manor with his telescope hedges his bet with a full grocery cart of survivalist supplies. But his devolution from advanced technologist to hoarder of basic necessities is secondary to him living with a false faith from the get-go, the belief that practical rationality will render him invincible. Hence, going over to manic panic, he kills himself in supreme selfishness.

And forget about the noble bearing of true love, a mother's love, a sister's love. The earthy woman of social bonds who honestly cares for her family and thinks it only proper to seek the company of others in town when confronted by crisis, turns out to be yet another who can't face the fact. Her personality as the reliable nurturer decomposes to reveal that her essence is anxiety which manifests as incapacity. She too is subject to manic panic, just happens in fits and starts. Hence, it is only due to her crazy sister that she does not loose her own mind completely.

So it turns out that the depressive, the previously incapacitated, is finally calm, cool and collected. She is the truly brave person, the sane one in the end, because she has been facing the fact all along. Only fools and cowards live life to the fullest, feel any sort of purpose that might bring about some sort of immortality. These foolish cowards, these cowardly fools, want to leave a legacy. But even if they do write their own epitaph, it is no more meaningful than a commercial copywriter's tag-line. It is the girl who can't get out of bed in the morning, the gal who is forever mourning, she is the one who is able to shake off the covers come Judgment-less Day. For she is under the sign of Planet Melancholia. She has always known that this ain't the age of the dawning of Aquarius. Hence, she strips naked to bask in the glow of death.

Dan Jardine:

I have nothing much to add to this excellent review. Melancholia is not only a far superior film to Tree of Life, it is a superior film, period. Not quite in the same league as von Trier's best, such as Dogville, Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, but it is also a welcome return to form after the heinous Antichrist.

The trailer

2012-07-25T18:11:00.000-07:00

Ides of March (USA, 2011, George Clooney)

Ben Livant:

The West Wing for boys instead of girls. The erotic soap-opera romantics have been replaced by language-as-a-weapon hard-ball sports. Ostensibly a no-nonsense examination of politics as a profession in a supposedly democratic system, The Ides of March is at the core yet another bleeding-heart morality tale. The topic is the loss of innocence and the entrenchment of cynicism due to deal-making and back-stabbing on the campaign trail.

Gone is the optimism of Frank Capra 70 years ago. The ending of The Ides of March is hardly happy. Our initially virtuous hero turns out to be an anti-hero, a Machiavellian operator par excellence. The film is not at all complacent about this. We are plainly meant to find it tragic that mastering the political machine necessarily entails losing your soul. Boo-hoo. What remains is Capraesque liberalism about what the individual is supposed to be able to become in American society if not for the moral decay that attends unchecked and imbalanced power. Specifically in this story, the drive to gain it.

Oh, the sorrowful saga of what it takes to be endorsed by your delegates to run for the highest office in the land. The terrible compromises, the undermining of integrity, the corruption of the individual himself and therefore the system. Will it ever be possible again for a Mr. Deeds to go to Washington and save the republic? Is there not one person who will stand up to Mephistopheles? Shucks, if not the guy seeking the nomination, his campaign manager, his right-hand man; you know, to keep the man-who-would-be-king honest to himself, true to the people and good for the country?

The Ides of March boils down to a big breast-beating session within the Democratic caucus. The brow-furrowing is all about the ravages of in-fighting, the party's self-defeating inability to rehabilitate itself as the proper master of the nation, the current Democratic presidency notwithstanding. Besides, the movie is based on a play about the candidacy race of Howard Dean back in 2004. More historical inspiration, the plot requires no small reliance on a tendency Bill Clinton notoriously added to his public portrait. So much for not making dramatic use of personal sexuality in the manner of The West Wing. Too bad the status of women in the film is just as unacceptably invisible and inferior as it is in The Social Network, another infatuation with masculine rivalry that doesn't even begin to address how and for whom the system is rigged in the first place.

The cast is packed with talent and the performances are very good. There is no gratuitious action and the dialogue is crisp. As I've already alluded, there is a certain melodramatic strain informing the plot, but for the most part it is a lean chess-game that keeps us guessing about the next move. All in all, an intelligent thiller with its partisan sentiments on full display. As I am not a huge fan of the genre and definitely not a member of the party, The Ides of March was for me, a boy, only marginally more profound than The West Wing.

The trailer

2012-07-24T09:41:00.002-07:00

Shame (UK/USA, 2011, Steve McQueen)

Ben Livant:

If you hadn't seen the films but merely heard a plot synopsis of each, Steve McQueen's current offering, Shame, could easily sound entirely different than his 2008 debut, Hunger. The latter is about an actual person from a relatively recent historical period, a public figure who became so as the result of his involvement in a political action. The former is a fiction in the immediately contemporary setting about an individual grappling with his personal problem, in a fundamentally private way.

Yet, the films have in common a preoccupation with human suffering as it is localized on the concrete materiality of the particular person. Not that there is any shortage of psychological anguish involved. Far from it. But this is phenomenologically grounded in the physical body, be it in pain or supposed pleasure. Both Hunger and Shame examine pathologies that amount to protracted suicide missions.

In Hunger, this self-destructiveness takes the form of a martyr complex on behalf of what the protagonist believes is his purpose in a great social struggle. He does die and his death does, in fact, make a martyr of him. In turn, this makes a massive symbolic contribution to the cause. The substance of the story of Bobby Sands and the ideological complexity of "The Troubles" in Ireland 30 years ago are treated with tremendous sensitivity. (To say nothing of the aesthetic power of the film.) But at the center of the picture is the director's focus on a man starving himself to death, willfully wasting his body away.

In Shame, the protagonist is attempting to fuck himself to death. The extent to which he is doing this willfully is inverse to the extent to which he is unwilling to admit to himself that his compulsive sexual activity is self-destructive. The main dramatic thrust of the film has to do with him - and us - being forced to face this fact. The flip-side of the political protester in Hunger refusing to eat, the carnal maniac in Shame cannot eat enough pussy and all the rest of it. The same coin remains. He is trying to use up his body, exhaust all of its erotic energy, achieve the perfect orgasm that is perfect because it will kill him. (To say nothing of the aesthetic power of the film.)

Perhaps because Hunger is so obviously contextualized in a true story of no trivial historical importance, I am inclined to think that Shame should be subjected to interpretation beyond the experience of the main character to the culture at large. This is, after all, not your run-of-the-mill addiction and it demands special consideration. Junkie for drugs, glutton for food, obsessive gambler - sex addict? No doubt, they exist - although certainly less frequently than other types of addicts - that is not at issue. The difficulty is conceptual insofar as we generally know that enough-is-enough when it comes to drugs, food, gambling - but we tend to feel that nobody is getting enough sex.

To get at this another way, what keeps Shame from being pornography? Is not the character living the cliche male fantasy? Keep in mind that he is not just masturbating in the bathroom, not just watching XXX videos, not just having virtual relations on the internet. He is having actual sex in real life constantly. And not just with prostitutes. Even more, not just with women he must pursue. He is having it also with women who pursue him. And all of his partners are unquestionably attractive. For he is just as unquestionably attractive. He is nothing less than a chick magnet, a true stud, a sex machine whose piston runs all night, every night. For the red-blooded, heterosexual man in the audience, the protagonist doesn't have a problem - he's living the dream!... no?

No. McQueen shows the dream as nightmare. Shame is just too emotionally disturbing to be taken as Puritan propaganda for monogamy, but there can be no doubt that the treadmill of promiscuity is presented as a disease. The sources of the disease are not made clear, however, either internally at the level of the narrative or externally with respect to sociological implications. In my view, it is precisely this ambiguity that elevates Shame from being a voyeuristic sneak-peak at a degenerate to a serious study of a tortured soul in a world of terrible alienation.

We in the audience are depressed looking at this person because we know the world in which he lives is the one in which we too live. All around us, all the time, sex sells everything and everything sold is sexy. It doesn't take too much critical perspective to see that the dominant commercial forces in the culture aim to promote sex addiction in all of us, however cryptically embedded in consumerism, the ultimate addiction. Or not so encoded. That Oil of Olay ad looks good to me point blank.

As I happen to be theoretically inclined, I have been able to identify this sociological implication. A reading internal to the narrative I find more challenging to devise. No back-story is provided to explain the nature of the protagonist's relationship with his sister. The most that can be grasped is that she is just as damaged as he is, just as full of shame, albeit in a different, female way. He wants to push her away. She wants to draw him near. But whatever happened to them (molested as children?) or between them (incest as adolescents?) can only be speculated.

I maintain that such speculation about the siblings' past should be canceled. This forces us to face the fact of his addiction, as well as her own suicidal tendency, with no more insight into all of this than he has; indeed, with less. McQueen robs us of any vantage point that would allow us to judge the character. Yet, it is utterly impossible to identify with him. The ambiguous ending only adds to our discomfort. Hey, I had to watch two episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm right after Shame to get over how icky the film made me feel.

One thing is for sure. If Hunger allowed you to expect more arresting images from McQueen and another totally committed performance from Fassbender, your expectation should have been met by Shame. These artists are making, well, art. Damn affecting art, at that. On this score, I have to register my only reservation with Shame. Too much music, the excellent use of it notwithstanding. As always in cinema, the music tells us how to feel. This is the fail-safe ensuring that even the stupidest guy in the audience does not mistake the film for soft-porn. But with no false modesty I must indicate that I am not the stupidest guy in the audience. Fassbender's face said it all.

Besides, any male hetero-sexist gaze would have got the message when the character expands his sexual universe to include homosexual experience. Here the script is to be commended for its sophistication. It absolutely avoids any homophobic suggestion that this gay encounter represents rock-bottom for the character. The message is that his illness is intensifying such that he will fuck literally anybody.

It becomes not unreasonable to suspect that he will soon enough engage in desperate acts of necrophilia and beastiality. Not out of lust that is perverse. Out of lust that is insatiable as such. Lust that is lost. Lust that has no specific object. Lust that is an empty generality, making the man stick his penis into any hole, giving him no pleasure at all. I reiterate that Shame is not an advertisement for monogamy. Less dismissible, the character is something of a poster boy for celibacy and anti-onanism to boot.

And Dan Jardine:

You've covered much that I wanted to talk about already, so instead of revisiting them, I'm going to focus on a few of the elements of the film that are particularly striking.

Shame shows us writer/director Steve McQueen's continuing fascination with people in bondage. With Hunger, the prison is literal, while in Shame, it is emotional. And while Hunger is clearly the more important film, a potent marriage of cinematic skill and narrative force that is as rare as it is precious, Shame is neither shamed nor diminished by comparison. Shame is more modest in scope and ambition, but the film keeps its aims well within its grasp. Seizing us by the throat from the get-go with an image of torment that resonates and repeats in various forms throughout the remainder of the film, and not releasing its grip until the sharp, agonizing final black out, Shame is as memorable and convincing a portrait of emotional imprisonment as Hunger is of the material one.

The film only offers up the most vague details of its main character's history, and I admit that my need to know the root causes of Brandon's (Fassbender) addiction often led me to exquisite frustration, as McQueen consistently pulled back from providing the sort of detailed back story that would have allowed me to come some conclusions about this character's self-destructive behaviour. This is a daring move on the director's part, as it risks alienating an audience trained to sleuth for psychological clues in the history of its characters. However, McQueen's refusal to connect the dots in our protagonist's past leads us away from the easy answers such a move would provide, and while it is possible in some stories to come to more general conclusions about human behaviour by digging through the particular details of an individual's history, such comforting conclusions evade us in Shame, and the film is much stronger for it. McQueen provides us with clues enough revealing a mysterious but clearly devastating childhood trauma, one shared with his equally and yet completely differently unhinged sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) to satisfy those committed to a morbid emotional post-mortem, without it becoming the sort of catch-all answer that many in the audience may be seeking. This ambiguity and uncertainty force us out of the safe havens that such insights might provide, and back into the film, back into the anguished existence of both the protagonist and his sister.

What McQueen did so exquisitely in Hunger and what he continues to do so well here, is allow us to sit in silence with his characters, in order to absorb their suffering through the potency of his use of sound and image. There are so many moments of mindfulness suffusing the film, filling us with discomfort, confusion, dread and longing, that it feels like a punishment to those I omit to mention any. Still, the scenes on the subway that bookkend the film are worthy of scrutiny, particularly given the extra level of agony added to the sequence by our knowledge of all that has passed before.

Of course Fassbender is well-deserving of all the praise he has received (and the strange sort of honour that accompanies being snubbed for an Oscar nom) but let us not forget the fine work of Carey Mulligan here. Reminscent of an Anglo Michelle Williams, Mulligan likewise pours herself into her roles with great conviction. Here, her lack of self-consciousness is a key element of her complete commitment to her work in this role of a deeply battered and bruised soul.

There is nothing shameful in the fact that Shame is not an accomplishment on the level of Hunger, as I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of films in the last decade that are. Shame is not so much a step backwards as a step sideways, an effort that will probably be judged, after McQueen's long career is put into perspective many years hence, a relatively minor work by a gifted filmmaker.

The trailer

2012-07-22T18:40:00.000-07:00

A Personal Journey Through Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset: Laden With Happiness and Tears

Dan Jardine:

There are many reasons that Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset demand, like Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece Godfather I and II, to be addressed as a single unit, but two are predominate. Firstly, doing so allows us to enjoy the invigorating spectacle of the two film’s bold balancing act, as on the one hand there stands the optimism and hopefulness of the (more) conventionally romantic Before Sunrise, while on the other hand, we witness the often savage skewering of same in the much bleaker and despairing sequel. Secondly, the two films are more rewarding when consumed as one because we observe the counter-development of these films’ protagonists, as they effectively switch positions and outlooks over the course of the two stories, all the while maintaining the opposites attract magnetism that drives the romantic genre.

Further, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are two films that have a deceptively simple concept masking a their depth and grandness of design. What could be more straightforward than placing two attractive, intelligent people together in two gorgeous cultural landmarks, and letting them, to borrow from Hamlet, use their words, words, words to seduce both the audience and each other? And yet, behind this thin façade are two edgy and wise films that I continue to find, a dozen or more viewings down the road, profound in purpose and effect. These two films, which mark director Richard Linklater's crowning achievement as a filmmaker, prove craftily subversive, as the director seduces us with the conventions of a traditional love story, teasing out our expectations, only to undermine them time and again with cynicism and even despair. Sunrise and Sunset coyly employ then cleverly attack the romantic delusions that have been passed down through the ages, and which still have such a firm grip on us, perhaps best exemplified by popular sentiments found in song ("All You Need is Love") and film ("Love Conquers All.") Further, these films ask us to consider the very nature and purpose of our existence in a fragmentary, superficial and transient universe. Amidst some of the most beautiful art and architecture that Europe has to offer, and often accompanied by a soundtrack of history's most enduring composers (Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Strauss), the two leads, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) search for meaning and permanence in a world that emphasizes disposable consumerism. The contrast of the past, and its constant glories with the modern, and its confusion and transience is surely not accidental. In the context of a world where we are only expected to be as happy as our latest acquisition, we share the experiences of the protagonists, who soak up the atmosphere of cultures that have been built over centuries.

Finally, to wrap up this prolonged introduction, I must come clean with a bit of a confessional aside in order to reveal a deeply personal reason that Linklater’s films have, beyond what I hope to show are some impressive aesthetic appeal, held me in their sway. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset have acted as a strange sort of Greek chorus as I have recently been facing down the challenge of enduring the dissolution of a 22 year marriage. Having the two leads in these movies echo my thoughts and reveal my feelings has been both unsettling in a “how did they know that’s how I felt?” way, and comforting in a “so, I’m not the only one who feels this way!” sort of way.

In Before Sunrise, the young twenty-something couple's conversation is preoccupied with death, transience and the fragility of life. I found it both moving and telling that the story that wins Celine over and convinces her to disembark the train and spend the night in Vienna with Jesse revolves around the tale he tells of himself as a child seeing his grandmother's ghost in the spray of a water hose, a fact that we learn in a conversation that also focuses on reincarnation, the fracturing of the individual spirit in the modern world, and Celine's 24/7 obsession with her own mortality. In fact, when the couple first meet, she is reading a George Bataille anthology titled Madame Edwarda, Le Mort (The Dead Man.) Further, the young couple visit the Freidhof de Namenlosen, a graveyard filled with Viennese suicide and plague victims, many of them resting for eternity in the sort of anonymity that had Thomas Gray opining that "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air." And near the film's end, when Jesse quotes for Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening," he focuses upon the passages that emphasize the inevitability of decline and death ("Time will have its Fancy/To-morrow or To-day"). All the while, the couple search for evidence of things that can persist. Staying awake in defiance of that harbinger of mortality—the night—hoping to cheat the death of each day by stealing the time that they shouldn't even by having together, their conversations inevitably swing back to all the proofs that they see around them of the ephemeral, particularly in the realm of human relationships, where nothing sticks, where disintegration and collapse seem to be the norm. It is not merely in conversation, of course, that they hope to cheat death, but also in their burgeoning relationship. It is standard operating procedure in the romance genre to escape mortality through timeless love. In a daring bit of teasery, Linklater takes this expectation and dangles the hope for a happily ever after ending for the duration of both films.

Immersed in century's old art and architecture, the young couple in Before Sunrise search for meaning and clarity in their conversations, hoping that the connection they are forging will give them something to cling to in this potential shipwreck of life. Yet, it is only in Before Sunset that it is clear these lessons have been truly learned. The Celine and Jesse of this film are so young and unseasoned that they don't realize just how special this connection and their time together is, and it is only after nine years of struggle that they are able to put what they had together in Vienna into its proper perspective. The magnitude and rarity of their Viennese Brief Encounter is only evident through the perspective that the years provide. Also, on the most practical level, Sunset must be seen as a completion of the previous film insofar as the latter film picks up where Sunrise left off. Furthermore, the second film provides high relief for the first, as the Sunset reimagines the themes, moods and conversations of Sunset from a new vantage point nine years hence. Indeed, Sunrise acts much like Sir Walter Raleigh's "Nymph's Reply to the Shephard," a determinedly sceptical poetic response to "The Passionate Shephard to His Love," Christopher Marlowe's self-consciously romantic paeon to pastoral idylls. I contend that the dialectical tension between the styles and outlooks of these two films serves to enhance our appreciation of their depth and significance. Like Godfather I and II, these two films are fulfilling when taken as parts of a whole, rather than as separate entities, and viewing the films in a single sitting a much more rewarding and complete experience of the films.

Before Sunrise appeared on the scene relatively early in the career of director Richard Linklater, and in it he seems content to let his protagonist's words and the beauty of the Viennese cityscape do most of the talking for him. While Robin Wood's seminal essay "Rethinking Romantic Love: Before Sunrise" offers up a spirited defence of a deeper reading of the film's cinematic qualities, using one scene in particular (the imaginary phone calls), to point out how sophisticated Linklater's visual instincts are, the reality is that Before Sunrise consists of a largely static camera, with characters delivering the dialogue in a series of standard two shots, while occasionally breaking the camera away long enough to linger lovingly on the gorgeousness that is Vienna.

However, by the time he filmed Before Sunset, Linklater seems to have developed a little more cinematic ambition. Stylistically, in Sunset, the fluid camerawork distinguishes the film from its more static predecessor, as Linklater glides through the streets of Paris, rarely resting his shots for more than a second or two on the beauty that surrounds his protagonists, delivering the city sidelong glances instead, as the couple, reflecting the increased speed with which time is passing them by, roam the Parisian streets and waterways. The camera seems to recognize that this couple does not have the same luxury of time that they did nine years previous, as even the film's length (75 minutes vs. the 100 minutes of Sunrise) places the characters in the context of even further temporal urgency. Furthermore, the anxiety and restlessness that informs their attitudes and dominates their conversation is well-matched by the film's incessant movement. It is a classic case of the film's style informing and strengthening its content.

And speaking of time, the years that have passed between the two films have not been kind to our heroes. In Before Sunrise, Celine believes in magic, embraces reincarnation, accepts fortune-telling and is enchanted by the words of the street corner poet. In the second film, the bloom is off the rose, as one life appears to be plenty enough for her now. The intervening years seem to have been particularly hard on her, as Celine has developed a hardened, cynical shell that Jesse finds difficult to crack. What was flippancy in Sunrise—her repeated references to how men are lucky that women don't devour them after sex, the way some insects to—has become bleak pessimism in Sunset. She has seen how the world functions, and even though she appears to be committed through her work to make the world a better place, she is not hopeful of its future. For every optimistic note that Jesse tries to strike, Celine finds a discordant one. Her work for environmental causes appears to have developed not out of humanitarian optimism, but rather a finger-in-the-dike pessimism the blame for which, it eventually emerges, is a series of failed relationships the fault for which she finally lays at Jesse's feet. These failures pointedly remind Celine of what a profound and unique experience their night in Vienna was, in much the same way that Before Sunrise reminds us of the creative failure that is the vast majority of mainstream Hollywood romantic comedies. Just as traditional rom-coms encourage an almost delusional level of romantic optimism in their devotees, so too has Celine's Viennese encounter raised her expectations so high, that her feelings of betrayal by her experiences in the years since have been all the greater.

When we first see Jesse in Before Sunrise, he is brash and open, but also freshly wounded by love. Despite winning Celine over with the story of his grandmother's ghost, the younger Jesse is sceptical to the point of cynicism at times, blithely dismissing the inexplicable or the uncertain. However, by contrast to Celine, in Before Sunset, Jesse appears happy enough, married with a child and a modestly successful novel under his belt. There is something more upward-looking in the Jesse of Before Sunset. For example, while he has an irritating habit in Sunrise of contesting nearly all of Celine's thoughts and feelings, in Before Sunset he proves himself far less irritatingly self-involved, and while clearly pessimistic on a personal level, he is much more hopeful in a global sense. It is, one should not, an optimism that grates on Celine. All in all, at first blush, it appears that Jesse has aged well, while Celine has not. But we gradually sense Jesse's deep-seated sorrow as, when the latter movie reaches its climax, we learn that he, for all his apparent hopefulness and optimism in the film's first hour, is the victim of a profound dissatisfaction. Perhaps it is his earlier heartbreak that has led him to seek the safety of a comfortable relationship, but the consequences to his happiness appear to be devastating, as the Jesse of Before Sunset appears to be on the verge of a fundamental psychic disintegration.

Just as Celine's romantic bitterness has been provoked by memories of Vienna, Jesse's impending emotional collapse can be found in the stirring up of old ghosts as well. His lament, as the film nears a close, of the complete lack of passion in his current relationship could be dismissed as the sound of yet another generation settling for a little bit less, but there is something a bit deeper and more fundamentally disturbing happening here. Both Jesse and Celine appear to be on the verge of becoming that German couple squabbling in the train at the beginning of Before Sunrise, and all those middle-aged couples—their anecdotes are rife with stories of parents, grandparents, and friends who have betrayed their commitment to one another--they speak of in Sunrise whose untenable relationships have become a seemingly inevitable tedium of soul-sucking routine. And Celine is forced to face up to the poverty of her love life, and admit to feeling that the magic, romanticism and optimism that guided her thoughts nine years previous had misguided and even betrayed her, feeding into lofty expectations that could not possibly be met by a disaffected and disinterested world. The years of pain and disappointment have led the two lovers to swap philosophical outlooks.

The struggle in these films is no less epic than that of a Greek tragedy between forces of free will and fate. Are our young lovers doomed to fall into the same patterns of disappointment and dissatisfaction that have befallen every generation as it nears middle age? Or are they going to find a way to overcome the great weight that the natural, historical and cultural forces—Time as the oppressor in Auden's poetry, the dissolution of the individual in Seurat's painting, the resurrection of Notre Dame Cathedral, the endurance of the river Seine, the Prater's Wheel of Fortune-esque ferris wheel--that surround these characters and constantly remind them of the crushing inevitability of the passage of time, and which seem to conspire to keep us all in their sway?

The final twenty-five minutes of conversation that winds up Before Sunset are the most deeply affecting moments of the two films. Here, both characters face up to their life's failures, and seem on the brink of falling into a desperate cynicism. Life has come up so far short of the vaulted expectations that the night in Vienna bred in them. However, rather than the disappointment dissolving into a series of recriminations or a spiral of mutual regret, the film takes a miraculous healing turn at the end, and the characters rise above their ruefulness, and use it as a springboard into hope, guarded as it must remain given all that continues to separate them, including geography and pre-existing relationships. As a result, the final moments in Celine's apartment are poignant in a way rarely found in more conventional romances. After spending over three hours watching them connect, and after waiting 9 years to have answered the question on everyones lips-- "will they or won't they?"-- we have become so attached to this couple that it is quite impressive that Before Sunset is able to deliver a conclusion that is not only wholly befitting the couple, who have got so much invested in the lives that they've built apart from one another, yet who clearly need each other to find that faith in life that appears to have left them, but that is among the most eloquent and evocative in filmdom. The carnal union that caps these films is entirely appropriate given the strictures of the romantic genre, but these moments do not come without raising audience concerns. They may be putting off death, both physical and emotional, just a little bit through sex, but is it a temporary reprieve? Ambiguity remains, as we must wonder what reservations and uncertainties lay in store for them the morning after.

Indeed, you would have to be entirely bereft of the proverbial feline curiosity not to wonder where they go from here. Jesse has a son for whom he has sacrificed nearly everything, while Celine's work gives her life a centre and meaning. Are these impediments too great to be scaled? Or will they navigate these global concerns to fine the happiness we all feel they deserve. Linklater leaves this up to the audience, but perhaps we will revisit these characters in the next decade, and learn if the cynics or the romantics have ruled the day. Linklater's two films move us towards a new understanding of the genre of romantic films. While conventional romances spend almost all of their energy convincing the audience that consequences be damned, this particular couple is going to hook up, and it is going to be worth all of our emotional commitment because if they don't hook up, we'll like DIE or something. These films get you thinking about the real nuts and bolts of relationship-building, and more importantly, ask us to confront the consequences on attempting to build relationships in the real world of those illusory and harmful myths that we perpetuate in our romantic fictions. In Before Sunset, Celine's bitterness is rooted in the long shadow that the idealistic romantic fantasy of her one night with Jesse cast on the rest of her life. Her failures with men all come back to their inability to hold a candle to the fantasy that she built around this single Viennese night.

I can only hope that Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke give us all a chance to revisit these films in the near future through the kaleidoscopic viewfinder of a third entry in the series. I would love another chance to check in with these characters, to see how their futures have telescoped together (or apart), and more importantly, to weigh whether the films still have as profound a personal effect upon me as they currently do. To wrap things up, I will take one final glimpse of the two film's cinematic suggestiveness. There are many memorable conversations in these two films, but as images go, few can top in significance the shot in Before Sunrise of two trains forging their way through the Viennese night. Both move swiftly and in the same direction, but the do not share the same track. They run along on parallel tracks until, just as the camera parts ways with the trains, the trajectories of two trains diverge, one moving up, the other down. As symbols go, this representation of the future of our two leads, and the future of most relationships, is fitting. I will take advantage of the train's metaphorical aptness as a keen indicator that it is time to step off of the tracks and take my leave.