May 14, 2011 by Joseph Jon Lanthier
More Slant reviews! One documentary and one transgressive film that I liked quite a bit.
As a proud Powell and Pressburger completist, my chief complaint regarding Craig McCall’s 12-years-in-the-making documentary Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff is that we’ve seen the best material here before. Essentially an expanded version of McCall’s featurette “Painting with Light,” available on the Criterion Collection’s Black Narcissus DVD and Blu-ray, Cameraman covers the entirety of Cardiff’s career as an operator, technician, 2nd unit director, cinematographer, and finally film director through copious clips and interviews with collaborators, notable fans, and the man himself. It should be said that “Painting with Light” is arguably one of the best Criterion supplements; Cardiff explicates, with down-to-earth sardonicism, the inner workings of a Technicolor camera, and passionately discusses the painters that influenced the light schemes of the Himalayan nunnery. But after Cameraman runs dry on this material, and Cardiff’s relationship with the Archers ends, the film offers precious little in the way of biographical piquancy to compensate for its subject’s myriad of uninteresting projects.
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The rare piece of transgressive art that’s more grimly meditative than satirical or allegorical, A Serbian Film’s most daring aspect may be the muddle of soul-searching it demands from its audience. With sickeningly smooth digital cinematography and a terminally rusted conscience, the film pummels an assembly line of taboos beyond the point of recognition—indeed, nearly beyond perversion. The filial kink and corporeal grittiness set out not to offend our rubric of taste, but to dismantle it, and thereby reveal the pensively anthropological nuance of their grotesqueness.
Pasolini’s similarly disturbing Salò bemoaned the manner in which fascism cultivates a world with two classes and no exploitative limits; one suspects from the title that A Serbian Film’s raucousness is meant to be taken as an analogous socio-political salvo. But aside from a sputtering monologue comparing Serbia’s masses to raped, dithering orphans, writer-director Srdjan Spasojevic’s content flowers with mostly psychological resonance; his film is better than the nationalist lividness that may have been its impetus.
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May 9, 2011 by Joseph Jon Lanthier
At Slant.
…Few directors, however, have tackled social and personal shape-shifting as concretely or as intuitively as Jonathan Demme. Throughout his diverse yet unified oeuvre, characters are uncannily aware of what makes them tick, to the point that exposition is occasionally bypassed altogether. Something Wild, one of his best films, stylizes this strength of personality a step further with people who are addicted to reinvention, both as a means of expression and as a method of exposing absurdity. When Lulu (Melanie Griffith) catches go-getter businessman Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels) skipping out on a lunch check in a Manhattan diner, she’s wearing a straight, black wig and faux-voodoo accoutrements around her neck and wrists; before the movie hits the halfway mark, she’s exchanged this for a cozy, floral sundress and cropped, bleach-blond hair. By the time the film ends, she’s dragged Driggs through at least four iterations of herself, and done it all with a sarcastic smile not for the thrill of the moment, but the depth of possibility at her fingertips.
In the third act, we meet Lulu’s ex-boyfriend, paroled criminal Ray (Ray Liotta), who gleefully remembers robbing convenience stores at gunpoint while wearing a ski mask, only to escape with the loot, ditch his headgear, don a coat, and return to the crime scene moments later unnoticed. There’s an unspoken philosophy shared by these two erstwhile lovers: that only fools and suckers distinguish human beings by traits as superficial as appearance and demeanor. And this, too, is a governing law of Demme’s cadence-oriented universe, a mid-’80s new-wave wonderland of pale pinks, purples, and blues where clusters of teenage rappers congregate at the periphery of our dramatic focus.
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