‘blurbs’ Category

  1. Viewing Log #2

    March 4, 2011 by Joseph Jon Lanthier

    …more seeings…

    WHAT HAPPENED WAS (1994, Tom Noonan). Like his very occasional collaborator Wallace Shawn, Noonan writes characters that reveal their hidden ferocity to one another by tedious degrees. But Noonan’s got a sense of cultural despondency that eludes Shawn, even at his most fervidly futile (The Fever) — in What Happened Was, Noonan’s directorial debut, television becomes a kind of oracle whose prophecies of comfort and illumination refuse to yield anything humanly useful. The movie was adapted by the director/writer himself, from his stageplay; the camera is perhaps predictably a bit too aware of itself throughout. (The lens flits between the windows of a dollhouse and Noonan’s own sunken, horrified eyes at the climax.) But Noonan and Karen Sillas, portraying work acquaintances on a hesitant dinner date at the latter’s apartment, rise to the occasion with explicitly cinematic performances–the former especially, offering an above-average manifestation of his middle-aged creeper shtick, emotes with minuscule gestures that evince his inner anxiety. (When his date serves a microwaved scallop dish, he lifts a piece on his fork, sniffs daintily, and bites down, his eyebrows rising.) When the script turns to the couple’s hobbies the drama derails almost like a Sherwood Anderson short story and spirals off, albeit with mesmerizing patience, into Greek grotesquerie. Still, my girlfriend Rachel couldn’t get through the first 20 minutes: “The characters are talking like they’re in a shitty play,” she commented. I imagine, however, that this is part of Noonan’s point. We’re all playing parts in shitty plays, and only by luck or confidence do we get to write our own dialog. (Next stop: Noonan’s The Wife.)

    LAMBERT THE SHEEPISH LION (1951, Jack Hannah). I confess a weakness for the shorts collected in Disney’s “Rarities” tin–uncategorizable now, in my childhood they were often found along with more standard Mickey and Donald fare as bonus, VHS-padding features. Among them, Lambert the Sheepish Lion feels surprisingly contemporary, aside from Sterling Holloway’s “well, gee!” narration and the ersatz-Andrews Sisters theme song. The story of a lion cub mistakenly delivered to a sheep’s maternal care, the plot’s essentially The Ugly Duckling jacked up with the life-and-death drama of a wolf’s visitation. (Lambert finds himself alienated from his herd until post-adolescence, where his carnivorousness proves useful.) But the character design of the dopey, older Lambert bests, probably intentionally, the shagginess of Chuck Jones’ similar creature in Inky and the Myna Bird, and against the satyr-like pastels of the sheep he’s quite effectively more Alfred E. Newman than Frank L. Baum’s skittish Leo. (Lambert doesn’t want to be king of the forest–he just wants FRIENDS, for fuck’s sake.) I could fault the film for initiating a narrative key to my self-loathing–namely, that’s it’s not only “cool” to be different but necessary, and that social acceptance must follow periods of intense alienation through which one discovers his or her utilitarian value. But why spoil it?

    KABOOM (2011, Greg Araki). Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather was more a riff on mumblecore than noir; the film prevails most indelibly as a kind of listless love letter to a slacker ethos so dedicated it can withstand the agency of the mystery genre. Greg Araki’s KABOOM similarly infuses sci-fi and psychedelic thriller elements to test the meditative queerness of the “Doom Generation” rather than the other way around. (Guess who wins.) It’s a mostly bright and bushy (in all senses) affair; Araki giddily captures these few rather eventful days in the life of a loose group of ambiguously sexual art school students with crisply flamboyant digital colors, and protagonist Smith (Thomas Dekker) is likably calm and inquisitive whether confronted with dangerously potent edibles, a possible cult murder, or his own amorphous lust. (He’s less “bisexual” than an egalitarian nymphomaniac; he’d probably make a bumper sticker out of David Geffen’s quip that, whatever else can be said about the lifestyle, swinging both ways doubles one’s chances of getting laid.) As with John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, however, the heady sensitivity of the ubiquitous humping and its adjacent fuck-philosophizing make everything else seem perfunctory, a dramatic dilemma Araki occasionally revels in. (Smith’s lesbian friend dates a straight-up sorceress without much tangible conflict; Smith’s far too busy deciphering the desultory nature of his allegedly hetero roommate’s masculinity to bother doubting magic.) But the director/writer just as occasionally allows the plot to dither into flippancy, and by the awkwardly expository third act his narrative permissiveness has grown just as broad as his characters’ promiscuity. If only those intoxicating few final frames had an inch more of context, KABOOM might deserve more than the cult audience its divisiveness portends. Still, one has to adore an eschatology this full of bangs, whimpers, and animal masks.

    BRIEFLY

    - The Sunset Limited (2011, Tommy Lee Jones). I really have to wonder if McCarthy approves of this rather planate reading, or of Jones’s nearly religious intoning in No Country. (I always read McCarthy’s novels with a deadened, twisted voice in my head that can only communicate emotion through syntax.) There’s an editorializing heft to the delivery here that smacks of authorial adulation and audience condescension — Jones and Jackson shepherd our attention through multiple utterances of the “n” word and social criticisms that they likely believe aren’t really meant to be so cynical…are they? As far as an item for a book tour press kit this is solid material, but for anyone who’s actually teetered on the edge of a train station platform and felt the cold eyes of an oncoming car judging his despair, this is a plastic product.

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  2. Viewing Log, January 2011, Week 1

    January 10, 2011 by Joseph Jon Lanthier

    Brief words on some stuff I sawed.
    Hopefully they’ll be briefer in the future…

    MEGAMIND (2010, Tom McGrath)
    We might say that Pixar’s emotional signature baroquely examines how maturity is often shaped by losses we never overcome; the resonance of Dreamworks’s storytelling, then, frequently rests in the manner that innocent expectations often fail to achieve fruition (most indelibly managed in the father/son relationships of Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and How to Train Your Dragon). Megamind, however, is the first film from that studio aside from Shrek 2 & etc that I felt coasted on this truism in a generic fashion rather than endowing it with mercilessly specific heft. The titular blue brain-meanie (Will Ferrell) takes his mythic villianry for granted until he accidentally does in his Michaelangelo-sculpted arch-nemesis Metro Man (Brad Pitt); the ambiguous existential space he’s then forced to inhabit demands that he embody both ends of the comic book dualism binary. Since it’s a kids’ movie, the writing occasionally feels timid towards the Camus-like knottiness of the protagonist’s resulting transformation, and over-compensates with flat jokes (David Cross, as Megamind’s talking fish sidekick, doesn’t do much aside from act as a sounding board for his boss’s puerilely naughty thoughts). But McGrath makes up in plot what he can’t muster in dialog; that Tina Fey’s cropped hair careerist begins dating a dybbuk’d nebbish under false pretenses provides enough of a (mega)mindfuck to earn the obligatory “gotcha!”s of the ending. Between this and Greenberg I think we can safely assume that Hollywood doesn’t view Ben Stiller as a sentient being.

    FOUR LIONS (2010, Christopher Morris)
    I’ve always felt that, despite the formidable guffaws it provides, the bumbling comedy of The Thick of It/In the Loop represents a new kind of political apathy–”Got Bureaucracy?”, this trans-Atlantic franchise seems to ask, cynically convinced that no matter how determined the brainy bleeding hearts of the west intermittently become, they’re no match for the stentorian dunces at the top of the legislative heap. Don’t get me wrong: We should laugh at our leaders’ shortcomings from time to time, especially since learning of the egregious errors that both provoked and then failed to protect us from 9-11. What else can we do? Four Lions, written and directed by Thick of It collaborators, examines incompetence on the other side, following a group of militant British-Muslim sleeper cells through a mishap-laden training in Pakistan and subsequent suicide bombing attempts in England. It’s not precisely satire; the surreality of life isn’t exposed but speculated upon and made grotesque. Terrorists aren’t politicians–when they succumb to stupidity, they don’t get re-elected, they simply die, leaving their missions unaccomplished.

    In this way Four Lions means to reverse the ontological joke of The Thick of It, implying that the movie is a giddy riff on extremism’s inanity rather than a colorfully closer-to-reality-than-you’d-care-to-admit farce; but the sheer fancy of it emasculates the spoofing. (Why couldn’t it have been the story of a band of dolts toiling under a genuinely ruthless Jihadist? I mean, aside from the incredibly incendiary potential of such a premise?) It’s also simply not that funny, aside from the plump whitey (Nigel Lindsay) who wants to blow up a mosque to mobilize the fundies. There are too many “This is mah Jihad, bro”s, too many physical flubs–so when the filmmakers decide to remind us of the fact that these jokers are toying with life and death, the intrusion of violence has no bubble of comic safety to pop. There are effectively schizoid sequences–”You’re going to paradise, brother crow!”–but what starts out as a general observation of the way that terrorism’s larger-than-life threats loom surreptitiously about us sours with the urge to give these largely interchangeable characters souls to be redeemed or lost. That the best material (one of the “lions” raps the word “died” as “da-heed”) is squandered over the end credits, after the comedy has been made complicated, encapsulates my hesitancy towards the movie’s tone. We’re only invited to laugh at the supreme buffoonery of violent fundamentalism in theory; as soon as evil thoughts turn to (attempted) evil deeds we must be reminded that these are “real people” to be “pitied”.

    THE NARROW MARGIN (1952, Richard Fleischer).
    Despite their anecdotal typecasting as phallic euphemisms, trains are more fittingly the psycho-scape of choice for heat oppressed brains–men under fire, bulleting towards a distant goal, barely maintaining a desperate grip on the sangfroid they require to finish the job. The train illustrates the devil’s bargain implied by any tense task: The faster one moves towards completion, the blurrier the context of duty becomes. The inverse of Howard Hawks’s manic-depressive theatrical comedy 20th Century, Richard Fleischer’s The Narrow Margin is the train noir par excellence–it’s as tight as a coach seat, bearing all the rickety necessity of a meal car. Appropriately, the plot is merely palatable: A detective with a smallish frog in his throat (Charles McGraw) is sent to Chicago to retrieve a gangster’s widow (Marie Windsor) who plans to name names while testifying in California.

    The detective’s pudgy partner (Don Beddoe) is snuffed out before they even get out of the widow’s apartment (her pearl necklace pops off at the top of the stairs, and the camera jaggedly follows the beads’ descent to a dark corridor where a gunman silently waits); the mob boss’s entourage then spend the remainder of the transcontinental trip attempting to buy off the detective’s protectoracy by appealing to his guilt (he’s offered “a lot of money” that could take care of his partner’s wife). The dialog is clipped to the quick, and rife with enough arbitrary one-upmanship to make Preston Sturges crack a smile–(between the detective and the gun moll) ”You make me sick to my stomach!” ”Well use your own sink!”–while the story curves with blunt tortuousness around the detective’s conscience and a blonde honey-cum-single-mother (Jacqueline White) that arouses an awareness of his loneliness. But unlike in 20th Century, the camera comes along for the ride. It squeezes past corpulent co-passengers as it dollies through hallways (narrow margins, indeed), leads us on with squinting suspicions and then fails to follow through with eye-line matches, and, in one memorable scene, gets kicked and thrown aside in a scuffle. The parsimonious shadow (odd for a B noir) and contemplatively tilted angles don’t simply impose a sense of dime store claustrophobia, either: The spatial mercurialness of the train is the detective’s steel-tipped head cracked open and flung across the western states.

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  3. The Blurst of Times: 2010 in Review

    January 5, 2011 by Joseph Jon Lanthier

    No intro from yours truly aside from this: I look forward to what American film in 2011 has that can possibly stand confidently alongside the domestic releases of Film Socialisme, Certified Copy, and a host of others. I glimpse a distant fata morgana of hope that some will likely scoff at with the same superciliousness that the choices below have provoked.

    Ahem. Without further a-spew, my top ten list re-printed from Slant Magazine. I’ve written very brief comments on films not yet reviewed or blurbed, and linked/quoted to stuff I’ve already blah-blah-blah’d on.

    10. Applause – My buddy Alejandro Adams objects to Martin Zandvliet’s Applause partially on the grounds that it’s another nail in the coffin of the Dogme vow; true enough, but the sarcasm-speckled trajectory of the hammer is a daring one. The descent of alcoholic actress and divorced mother Thea (Paprika Steen) into mediocrity (forget about madness) is the Dogme historical narrative personified – what is LVT but a scowling progenitor, sick of his own invention and hopelessly clinging to his personal excesses, but still somehow convinced of his custodial rights?

    9. White Material – (from my SFIFF round-up) “Conflating the tense and the vacant, the parched and the slick, Denis affixes De Bankolé’s metaphysical cipher of an insurgent as the film’s political vortex, but none of the tingly violence sticks; the narrative has allegorical symbols to spare but a paucity of correlating subtext. The muddled politics are an inherent metaphor for South Africa’s own confusion, of course (the question is less ‘Which side are you on?’ than ‘How well can you aim?’), but they numb the violence to subcutaneous pins and needles. This is a frightfully empty, clumpy movie—in other words, a horror film.” (more…)

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  4. More on True Grit

    by Joseph Jon Lanthier

    On Fernando Croce’s Facebook wall the esteemed critic Richard von Busack and myself debated a few of the film’s points. I offered this further analysis of the penultimate scene, which I feel is integral to the movie’s failure….

    I’d be curious to hear a more detailed formal defense of the emotional success of the “night ride,” because to me its hollowness is entirely a matter of composition. The fact that it’s a montage feels like a cheat – they squeeze the passage of time but sacrifice the tension, as we know there’s no way a film will cross-dissolve to tragedy. I also feel that, in the novel, the scene’s heartbreak is entirely dependent on the rawness and plausibility of Mattie’s detailed retrospection — but in the film this is only represented with venom-coma’d, upward-angled perspective shots of dim, calligraphic trees. (They’re silkily contemplative in a way that doesn’t feel desperately numb, and distract from the harshness.)

    Then there’s the altogether pleased-with-himself demeanor of Rooster, even in spite of the foreshadowed horse defense. He spends the whole ride grunting carnally, and appears to have located the best of both worlds in being able to rescue one life while simultaneously torturing and dispatching a “dispensable” one. (This makes the earlier scene with the natives suggestive of a food chain he adheres to rather than indicative of any coherent personal ethics.) This characterization might simply be more of the skewed moral fabric the Coens are crocheting their old west with, but it bristles against the soundtrack’s classically messiah cues and the awe-struck tones of the epilogue – thus my comment that they don’t know what “heroism” is supposed to look like anymore.

    And I think the decision to depict Rooster as a “savage, hold most of the noble” was admirable, and closer to the novel’s spirit than the 1969 adaptation, but the resulting tone favors the brothers’ indifference to and occasional amusement by cruelty rather than Mattie’s final acceptance of compassionate slivers in a mostly dumb and uncaring world.

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  5. True Grit (2010) **1/2

    January 2, 2011 by Joseph Jon Lanthier

    Part of what appeals to me about the Coen Brothers’ cinema is their seeming (and likely purposeful) lack of understanding when it comes to heroism. They poke fun at well-meaning ignorants (Raising Arizona, Fargo), beatify aimlessness (Lebowski), and, more generally, locate the absurd beauty of fallibility. But their characters never appear noble or larger than life without additionally feeling lifeless. Even the moral superiority of Fargo‘s protagonist — a rarely sympathetic character in the Coen-verse — is filtered through distancing regionalism and quirkiness (she’s an ethical enforcement idiot savant).

    It’s little wonder, then, that True Grit is the Coen aesthetic at its most limpid and most limp. As with No Country, the effective moments are transcribed from the source material; it’s a curiosity, and a disappointment, when they do divert from the original text (eg, the fate of Tom Cheney, played by Josh Brolin). Their ear for idiosyncratic slobber animates Charles Portis’ prim patois with the expected exactitude and stable charm; indeed, it’s the only way to convincingly deliver a yarn about a barely-adolescent (Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross) who takes off after her father’s killer with grizzled marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges, drooling over his cantankerous bon mots as though they were drowned in sausage gravy) and the younger, more sensible ranger La Boeuf (Matt Damon, professionally powering through a thanklessly straight role).

    The cadavers stack up with nearly the same unceremonious swiftness as in No Country, and because a sardonic mercenary-codger, rather than a vacant mercenary-sadist, is behind them, they’re viewed as comic rather than contemplative (as in Burn After Reading). The classical “western-ness” of the cinematography has rewards — the clothes are always clean even if the spittle erupts without mercy, while the darkness swaddling the night scenes has a soft vastness to it — but obligatory handheld footage (river crossings, etc) and picturesque, upward glancing montages through pencil-y trees muddle it. Not even the ostensible fidelity to the original novel is fulfilled — all the gnarled, thickly southern dialog and irresistibly potboiler plot points are there, sure, but the film’s intimacy with Mattie’s perspective wavers so violently that she seems like a 3rd wheel for most of the 2nd act, rather than the progenitor of the tale’s characterizations. And the Coens’ can’t let Rooster escape without one final charlatanism: When the book’s most tragic death is hollowly represented, the implicit sacrifice (the hierarchical robbing of one life to redeem another) is a dessert, not a painfully compassionate decision. The concept of the old west is teeming with artful nihilism, but Rooster’s transformation from drunken braggart to Anton Chigurh-like mechanism with an odd haircut is a tonally repugnant exercise. Leave it to the Coens to find the affection in agnostic frustration (A Serious Man) and the hatefulness in hard-earned purpose.

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