Stone

Directed by: John Curran
Written by: Angus MacLachlan
Full credits at IMDb

The cynical Stone is set-up like those neo-noirs John Dahl used to make in the 90s, except it’s stripped of any and all urgency. It does, though, retain the high-minded pretension toward something more meaningful that you’d get from, say, The Last Seduction. In this case, it’s an exploration of sin—its roots and its costs, themes underlined by the frequent snippets of religious talk radio smeared on the soundtrack. AM chatter is one of the pleasures enjoyed by Robert DeNiro’s parole officer; another is illicit intercourse, which he gets from an affair he reluctantly enters with the sexpot wife (Milla Jovovich, in the panty-less, Linda Fiorentino femme fatale role) of one of his cases (Edward Norton).

Unfortunately, there’s not much pleasure for the audience in any of that—just a vague sense of familiarity. And then there's Norton’s “profoundly spiritual” nervous breakdown, which has more campy charm than sympathetic poignancy (though because of the way Curran lets it play out, laughter feels like the incorrect reaction). As Anthony Cohan-Miccio put it in The L, "Stone is as hard to take seriously as it is to enjoy."

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Red Riding: 1974

Directed by: Julian Jarrold
Written by: Tony Grisoni
Full credits at IMDb

As an archetype, the private detective is a relic—even for stories set in the early '70s. The closest we come in this age is The Investigative Journalist, which is why, in Red Riding: 1974, it's the scruffy cub reporter (Andrew Garfield) for The Yorkshire Post who takes the Marlowe-grade beatings and torturings from crooked cops when he gets Too Close To The Truth.

Director Jarrold frequently shoots his Zodiac-reminiscent installment, the first of three parts that form a miniseries, as though through a honeycream filter, capturing Garfield as he digs into a string of missing girls, comes up against regionalist obstructions, and uncovers local corruption involving a developer—and pillar of the community! If that reminds you of, say, Dale Cooper, Laura Palmer and Ben Horne, it's because the mystery in 1974 is of the familiarly structured sort...

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Blue Valentine

Directed by: Derek Cianfrance
Written by: Derek Cianfrance, Joey Curtis & Cami Delavigne
Full credits at IMDb

I've been struggling for roughly 48 hours over whether or not I should say this out loud, whether or not I'll calm down with the passage of time. But in the days since [I] saw Blue Valentine my enthusiasm hasn't waned: I'm as riveted watching Ryan Gosling act as I am watching Brando in movies from the 50s! I'm not kidding! If you had asked me last week to make a list of the best acted American movies of all time, it would have been a bunch of Elia Kazan films; if you asked me today, Blue Valentine might have knocked Baby Doll off the list. For real!

So, the disappointment—and there's always a "but" during Prestige Pic season, ain't there?—is that he and Michelle Williams are so darn good in a movie that's not nearly at their level.

Keep reading my discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Dogtooth

Directed by: Giorgos Lanthimos
Written by: Efthymis Filippou & Giorgos Lanthimos
Full credits at IMDb

What if someone rewrote The Village so that instead of terrible, it was engaging, challenging, maybe a little mysterious? In Dogtooth (Kynodontas), three semiologically scrambled children have been raised in a fortified, isolated house where they're taught that "telephone" means salt shaker and "sea" means arm chair. They exercise, re-watch home videos of themselves, and test each other's endurance (e.g., how long can you keep your finger under boiling water?). And the boy, at least, has mechanical intercourse with an outsider, a prostitute, brought in by their mad industrialist father.

You've heard of the Choose Your Own Adventure books? This is Choose Your Own Allegory. Its ground-level widescreen rarely looks up, and often chops heads out of the frame. It's like a poker-faced aesthetic—looking straight ahead, without expression—but the abstruseness begs to be given shape.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Essay: Why is Every Novel-to-Movie Adaptation Terrible?

Never Let Me Go is a really bad movie: not just for its lazy dependence on cliches—gray uniforms + English countryside = unsettling—but because of its blind fealty to its source material. And, this comes from someone who hasn't even read the Kazuo Ishiguro novel on which the film is based! Yet even I can sense that the filmmakers are like storytelling dogs, obedient to their source-novel master.

From what I've heard, there are differences between the two, particularly in the way director Mark Romanek is upfront about the tragic scifi story, in which clones-in-love are harvested for organs, in spots where Ishiguro is more withholding. But those differences are surely slight. At the movie's two-thirds point, Kiera Knightley apologizes to her friends, played by Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, for keeping those two lovebirds apart for so long. I was surprised to learn they were even in love. I mean, I got that Mulligan had some sort of crush. But the film's impact hinges upon the epicness of this love, and yet doesn't even take the time to establish it, really. Screenwriter Alex Garland, usually Danny Boyle's collaborator, conspicuously follows Ishiguro's plotting to a fault, to the point that the filmmakers are dutifully moving through a narrative, diagrammatically hitting plot-point touchstones without stopping to consider if anything needs to be developed deeper—if, perhaps, the superficialities don't suffice. As if, there's no time! Ishiguro told a certain story, and its bare shell must be retained at all costs!

Last year, Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lovely Bones had a similar feel, as did Robert Schwentke's The Time Traveler's Wife. (Both had copious other problems, as well.) Submission to source material has become endemic in our film culture; almost every novel-to-screen adaptation these days suffers from it.

Keep reading at The L Magazine

Inspector Bellamy

Directed by: Claude Chabrol
Written by: Odile Barski & Claude Chabrol

You could almost call this movie Inspector Nick Charles: though it's peppered with minor profundities, it's an airy trifle—a warmly written and acted jumble of character studies. Claude Chabrol reportedly wrote this engaging, popular-appeal potboiler for star Gerard Depardieu who, now thick with age (and a nose like Karl Malden, mon dieu!!), plays a famous-but-retired police detective pulled into a Chandler-esque mystery, filled in with fleshed-out characters—as per usual with Chabrol, the story is far less important than the people in it. (The story includes a lot of fraternal bickering, sibling rivalry with a no-good brother who, in the film's best joke, arrives in the middle of the night with ominous Tchaikovsky music blaring...from the taxi! "Could you turn that down please?")

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Somewhere

Written & Directed by: Sofia Coppola
Full credits at IMDb

I've never been much of a Little Sofia fan, and always saw her as more of an inward-glancer than a director with an expansive eye. But whatever; I was actually a bit surprised that I kinda, sorta enjoyed Somewhere, mostly for...its Jarmusch-ian pace. I think it's 15 minutes before we hear any meaningful dialogue; before that, a car speeds laps, blondes pole-dance, patrons gawk, and many cigarettes are smoked. But no one says anything more important than "here's your check, sir". I admire the movie's patience, and I doubt any movie shot by Harris Savides could be anything less than fucking beautiful. What's so disappointing about Somewhere is that its beauty is to no end. I don't think I've ever taken fewer notes during a movie; near the end, I just started writing down anything, like basic plot synopses, just so I'd be sure to have something to [write] about. Is there anything more to this movie than its portrait of The Drudgery of Stardom? Gosh—is it true that movie stars don't have it all?

Keep reading my discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Frozen

Written & Directed by: Adam Green
Full credits at IMDb

For us to sympathize with their terror and eventual slaughter, horror movie protagonists have to feel realistic. But, realistic for whom? There's a fine line between sympathetic, identifiable, and odious. For those who complained about the schmucks fronting Cloverfield—who, for me, were likable, at least, by virtue of their recognizability—man, oh man: wait until you see Frozen's trio of entitled, whiter-than-white douchebags: selfish, whiny and mean skiers, fer Chrissakes, donning that ultimate signifier of Caucasoid privilege. They get trapped on a T-bar at night, after everyone of the hill has gone home for a long weekend. Whose fears does this set-up tap into but well-off WASPs?

Writer-director Green is better known for his Hatchet dyad and its gore-schlock pastiche. But there are no deformed rednecks seeking revenge here (though frequent Jason-Voorhees-portrayer Kane Hodder pops up in a small part): Green seems after something more classical, more rooted in suspense and suggestion...at least until one of the characters jumps out of the chair.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Rabbit Hole

Directed by: John Cameron Mitchell
Written by: David Lindsay-Abaire
Full credits at IMDb

These are some mutherfuckin' white people! I mean, like, the super-domesticated, bourgeois-extreme Westchester types: she gardens, he plays squash, she uses verbs like "accost." Most of all, though—like classic whiteys—they don't care about anyone or anything but themselves. And, unfortunately, neither does Rabbit Hole.

Really, this is some kind of porn for tragedy fetishists, a voyeuristic window unto grief...I can't imagine how horrible it would be to lose a small child, but I think that's a big part of this movie's problem. Rabbit Hole acknowledges that outsiders feel uncomfortable around a couple steeped in such loss, but doesn't seem to realize it puts the audience at that kind of remove, too. Like some of the couple's friends, I don't really want to spend time with them. It's awkward because I can't even pretend to relate. All I can do is gawk like an asshole. And I'd rather not!

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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All Good Things

Directed by: Andrew Jarecki
Written by: Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling
Full credits at IMDb

All Good Things boasts something more alluring than its heavy-hitter cast (including not just Ryan Gosling and Frank Langella but also Philip Baker Hall!): it also packs the lurid appeal of its true-crime subject matter—already fodder for a Law & Order episode—in which the names have been changed so screenwriters Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling can be as speculative and trashy as they wanna be. In real life, Robert Durst was investigated for the disappearance of his wife; in All Good Things, "David Marks" murders his wife (Kirsten Dunst). After killing the dog. It's left to the viewer to decide which was worse.

For director Andrew Jarecki, who made his name with Capturing the Friedmans, this is yet another story of privileged white people with dark sides. Gosling plays the scion of a real estate baron (Langella, imperious), a member of the family that has owned half of Times Square since it was farmland—Old Money that sips cocktails with the Moynihans and tells Abe Beame what to do.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Tiny Furniture

Written & Directed by: Lena Dunham
Full credits at IMDb

Dunham’s promising debut hints at Mumblecore, what with its post-college malaise and its supporting role for Alex Karpovsky. But its visual style is far finer, its ornate, psychologically evocative set designs captured (by Jody Lee Lipes) on a tripod in Gordon Willis-like widescreen: book-lined walls in an apartment so modernly designed, so alienatingly white it feels like a spaceship. It’s no accident that Karpovsky’s character reads a Woody Allen hardcover before turning in.

What other movies does Tiny Furniture recall? Perhaps, most glaringly, Aazel Jacobs’ Momma’s Man, not only for its downtown setting and its child returning to the nest, but because Dunham cuts costs, as Jacobs did, by casting her real mother (Laurie Simmons) as “her mother” and her real sister (Grace Dunham) as “her sister,” and by using their real apartment as the film’s “apartment”.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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The Fighter

Directed by: David O. Russell
Written by: Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson
Full credits at IMDb

This movie’s as hooked on clichés as [Christian] Bale’s character is on crack, and yet a lot of it—at least half of it—kind of works, thanks to Russell’s direction. You can see some meta-parallels that might have attracted him to the project: like Bale’s character, he showed some promise as a kid, but now seems past his prime. (I actually like, if not love, Huckabees, but I don’t think I’m in the majority there.) Like [Mark] Wahlberg’s, he’s been counted-out by copious haters, but this movie marks his revalidation, his relegitimizing, his comeback. (Curiously, this movie is Wahlberg’s pet project, but he took the flattest character of the lot—the dramatic catalyst.)

Bale has his own striking parallel to his character: did you see Terminator: Salvation? That performance was pathetic—pure, but unintentional, self-parody, worse than the Batmans. But this movie offers him some kind of redemption. Sure, it’s an Oscar-crazy, bug-eyed, scenery chewing kind of performance. But it’s solid and, best of all, fits in neatly with the performances around it.

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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And Everything is Going Fine

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh

Chronicling the life of Spalding Gray as told by Spalding Gray, And Everything is Going Fine is about Spalding Gray. But it's also about stories—namely, the ones we make up about ourselves. From 120 hours of interviews and performance footage, Steven Soderbergh, who directed one of Gray's monologue-movies in the 90s, fashions one last master monologue, 90 minutes of clear biographical narrative—no small feat!—from Gray's New England childhood to the creation of his classic monologues and his late life as a reluctant family man.

Gray was a fine actor, but his raison d'etre was his unique talent for converting life into theater—for forging a sort of public psychoanalysis, narcissism indulged from a knowing distance. (He called it "poetic journalism.")

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Sweetgrass

Directed by: Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Full credits at IMDb

Sweetgrass purely documents: without music, talking heads or bottom-thirds, it chronicles an old-fashioned sheep-drive through the mountains of Montana in 2003—the last time such shepherding would occur. This movie’s not so much about the sheep, though, which are often shot like Riefenstahlian crowds. It’s about the cowboys—er, sheepboys?—who move them. An unsentimental elegy for a classically American way of life emerges: a rugged, Western way of life, populated by irascible, vulgar-mouthed good ol' boys whose heads are surely as thick as the calluses on their hands. One even dresses like the Marlboro Man.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Black Swan

Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Written by: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz & John McLaughlin

On its surface, Black Swan depicts the burdens of ballet (some might argue the clichés?): the competitiveness, the sexual aggression, the controlling stage moms, the infantilized adults. But Aronofsky seems more interested in female performers in general, fashioning a kind of dude-feminist critique of an industry that demands impossible perfection of women—of their bodies, of their talents—to the point that it drives them to suicide after it makes them crazy: thus, the way reality slowly slips away from Portman, her hallucinations of a deteriorating body. It also gives the movie a metacinematic dimension: is Black Swan also about how Winona Ryder’s career got stolen from her? Or Barbara Hershey’s, for that matter?

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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NY Export: Opus Jazz

Directed by: Henry Joost and Jody Lee Lipes
Full credits at IMDb

West Side Story looms large over NY Export: Opus Jazz, a Jerome Robbins ballet choreographed the year after Story opened on Broadway. It’s set to a cool jazz score (by Robert Prince), and features young New Yorkers snapping their fingers and fluttering their palms above their heads. They even dance in a gym. But this 45-minute film adaptation is like that iconic film purified: stripped of stars, soundstages and singing, and returned to awesome basics—the city and the dance.

NY Export: Opus Jazz recaptures the raw, exhilarating energy Robert Wise got out of Story’s opening scene and extends it into a self-contained story of its own. It juxtaposes the fantastical and the real: ballet, on the streets of New York. (Not unlike U-Carmen’s opera in a South African shantytown.)

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Written & Directed by: Jalmari Talmander
Full credits at IMDb

Growing up means putting away childish things—or, killing them, as in Rare Exports. In this Finnish coming-of-age Christmas escapade, a group of guys must save The Holidays by blowing up Santa Claus. Wait, really? Well, they have good reason: this is not your Coca-Cola Kringle, but rather a Father Christmas who boils naughty children in his cauldron and feeds on Blitzen's carcass. Wait, seriously? Yeah, it's more Silent Night, Deadly Night than Miracle on 34th Street—more Black Christmas than Crosby-crooned White—though writer-director Helander borrows the mold cast by the child-friendly and -focused adventures Dante and Donner made under Spielberg's banner in the 80s.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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The American

Directed by: Anton Corbijn
Written by: Rowan Joffe

Like Michael Clayton, The American is another one of those George Clooney movies for grown-ups, in which character, backstory and plot aren’t simply handed out—you have to work for them. Just not very hard. Clooney, of course, plays a disaffected, world-weary expatriate; sad, suave and gravelly voiced, he’s pitched somewhere between anti-hero and hero. (Clooney used to be his generation’s Cary Grant. Now he’s going for its Bogart.) He reads books about butterflies in his spare time, and the strangers he meets during his exile in an Italian backwater take to calling him Mr. Butterfly. Is he a hit man? An arms dealer? A super spy? Or just a gracefully aged hunk?

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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