The Rite

Directed by: Mikael Håfström
Written by: Michael Petroni
Full credits at IMDb

The small town in which The Rite opens looks like the Lowell of The Fighter—that is, like no one has invested in it (and, in particular, its signage) since 1973. That's the year at which the movie feels frozen in both aesthetic and essence: it's the year The Exorcist opened, and the year at which The Rite would like exorcism movies to have stopped being made.

In an essay I wrote this summer, "The Evolution of the Exorcism Movie," I suggested a continuum for parsing an exorcism-movie's politics, with the Catholic conservatism of Friedkin-Blatty's ur-text at one end (in which the Devil is a horned monster from Hell), and the psychological revisionism of the 2006 German movie Requiem at the other (in which "evil," if it even exists, is more amorphous). Thanks to that import, which posits a young girl's "possession" as more likely an amalgam of epilepsy and psychosis, the exorcism movie can no longer ignore or quickly dismiss the tension between the spiritual and the medical, between demons and psychosis. The last major exorcism movie, August's The Last Exorcism, left the question as to the source of its evil—hell-spawn or nervous breakdown?—ambiguous until its final reel. I wrote that, though that reel felt disappointingly literal, I was pleased that the filmmakers "went farther than any other...yet in moving the exorcism movie away from proselytizing for Catholicism and toward a more complex vision of human suffering. Perhaps the next exorcism movie won't conclude so cravenly." But The Rite not only concludes cravenly, it opens cravenly, and stays craven in between. It doesn't just take a step back—it takes ten.

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The King's Speech

Directed by: Tom Hooper
Written by: David Seidler
Full credits at IMDb

The movie work[s] hard to make George VI seem American—or at least, sympathetic to America's awards-voting audiences. As a born and raised subject of Uncle Sam, I have a deep-seated disdain for monarchy. To help viewers like me feel sympathetic for ol' Bertie, then, the filmmakers try to posit monarchism as a form of malformed democracy. The king's foil—the casually vulgar Rush, introduced on the toilet not unlike Rooster Cogburn—cheekily—subverts the fustiness of formality, but this is a movie with great feeling for the Old English way, a deep conservatism, but also an Americanesque love of the people, for whom it is said that the King speaks—it's less like he rules the people than they rule he. (Just without those pesky elections!) After all, Edward abdicates not because he's a rule breaker, but because as a rule breaker he can no longer claim that populist mantle.

Keep reading my discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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127 Hours

Directed by: Danny Boyle
Written by: Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy
Full credits at IMDb

You know what I saw in 127 Hours? An Iraq War allegory! The crazy part is I'm totally serious. I mean, c'mon, it takes place in a desert, in April 2003 (roughly six weeks after George Bush Jr.'s invasion of Iraq began) and is basically a story about American arrogance getting its due: like Donald Rumsfeld and Christopher McCandless, Ralston totally underestimates a foreign power (nature), and receives cruel comeuppance in return (for what he calls his "supreme selfishness.") It's like a microcosmic form of the battering America is still taking over in the Middle East. I also got the sense that the filmmakers were suggesting that the reason the U.S. can't win the War on Terror is because it doesn't have the balls to cut off its own arm? (Its residents won't even drive their cars less!) Anyway, you could see Ralston's story as a triumph of the human spirit, I guess, but as a battle against Nature it's a pretty Pyrrhic victory, eh?

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Zenith

Written & Directed by: Vladan Nikolic
Full credits at IMDb

This narrated-to-death dystopian sci-fi takes place in 2044, when genetically engineered happiness has turned into numbness, and people pay a premium just to feel pain. But it also frequently flashes back to prelapsarian times, in which a New World Order conspiracy is rantingly outlined on video cassette--rather, on a series of tapes hunted down like horcruxes. Zenith's most major problem among its many problems is its tiring triteness: it boasts familiar visions of a dystopian future interlaced with familiar glimpses of a grand conspiracy past.

How familiar? I immediately thought of Jared Loughner (even though he was still an anonymous schizophrenic when Zenith wrapped shooting), from the film's thesis about language as a means of control--the names of emotions have largely disappeared, though our hero magically remembers them, as though some sort of "chosen one"--to its ultimate assertion that conspiracy theories are the purview of the mentally deranged, and can be explained easily: rich people just like doing weird, gross things. (Including incest, which the movie, like Splice, suggests results from playing God through bioengineering.) Perhaps the sole virtue is the way Nikolic, with cinematographer Vladimir Subotic, use unaltered outerborough locations as settings for the crumbling world of the failed future. In at least that one aspect, the director finally transforms the familiar into something that's not. Grade: C-


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Kaboom

Written & Directed by: Gregg Araki
Full credits at IMDb

Kaboom plays like a kitschy, queer-eyed spoof of Donnie Darko, so much so that, following the lead of Friedberg-Seltzer, you could call it Richard Kelly Movie. By day, Araki's flick is campy and brightly colored, like a college-campus comedy; by night, it adopts the steely pallor of a Platinum Dunes slasher. The mix is, uh, awkward--like a surreal and flamboyant neo-noir, written by Bret Easton Ellis and aired on the CW; it's part Buffy and part Brick; part Twin Peaks and part 90210.

Am I making it sound better than it is? Set among carping homos, lusty undergrads and powerful drugs, Kaboom stars Thomas Dekker, channeling Wes Bentley through an emo filter, as a freshman with a hard-on for his straight Scandinava-hunk roommate (Chris Zylka) and a FWB fucklationship with Haley Bennett. (As for his major, he's "undeclared"--get it?) But a few weird dreams and hallucinogenic drugs later, he's witnessing homicide by assailants in animal masks. Voo doo dolls are involved, as are threeways, a bona fide witch (doubling as a lesbo psychostalker), and an epic conspiracy to facilitate an encroaching apocalypse. It builds to an awesome FTW ending, literally and not. But the 80 preceding minutes of loud and literal melodrama are a real turn off. Grade: C-


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Gabi on the Roof in July

Directed by: Lawrence Michael Levine
Written by: Lawrence Michael Levine & Kate Kirtz
Full credits at IMDb

Gabi on the Roof in July, winner of best narrative feature at last year's Brooklyn Film Festival, concerns a brother and sister who're like Mumblecore equivalents of Astaire and Rogers. As with characters in a classic musical, sans the song-and-dance, their flaws and strengths are complementary; both boast a character trait the other lacks: he's responsible, she's fun, and each needs to take a page from the other. As such, they also embody the movie's central tension: not only between growing up and being cool, but also between two different styles of cinema—the self-serious drama and the easygoing comedy.

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The Housemaid

Written & Directed by: Im Sang-soo
Full credits at IMDb

The charge most often leveled at the director of Oldboy, Park Chan-Wook, is that he's a vapid stylist. He's not the only one! The Housemaid, the latest from Park's South Korean compatriot and fellow Seoul native, Im Sang-soo, is spiffy, sexy and super-shallow, a far cry from its politically scathing original. In that 1960 film, directed by Kim Ki-young, bourgeois materialism got its comeuppance in the form of a mentally unstable and domestically destabilizing servant. Either there's no longer any shame in middle-class morality (are they disappearing in Korea like in the U.S.?) or Im Sang-soo just isn't a radical: he updates the story by setting it among the inarguably odious super wealthy, ancien riche identifiable not just by their cavernous home but their taste for opera, red wine and gourmet food, whose ample leftovers bypass fridge for trash.

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True Grit

Written & Directed by: Ethan & Joel Coen
Full credits at IMDb

True Grit visits, at its very end, a Wild West show ca. 1903, where frontier life is, after just a few decades, already a joke—a commercialized circus. But we don't have to wait that long to see such a thing: this whole fucking movie plays the Wild West for cheap yuks. I guess what I mean is, the Coen Bros. are back to their old shit again here, indulging their worst instincts for hyuk hyuk goofery. Hoberman called this "one of the brothers' least facetious movies," but to me that sounds like calling one of the sisters in The Fighter the "least ugly". Brashly sketching broad types with an exaggerated sense of humor might have worked for 60s-era suburban Jews or contemporary DC bureaucrats—because then and now were strange and anxious times, and Jews and the political classes are so inherently wacky—but it doesn't for Old West archetypes. It never does: I can't think of a(n American) Western-comedy that was any good, can you?

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Biutiful

Directed by: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Written by: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Armando Bo & Nicolás Giacobone
Full credits at IMDb

Biutiful—whose intentional misspelling is about as clever as The Pursuit of Happyness'—is set in a dirty, dingily lit city of hustlers and homeless, a world of exposed pipes and peeling paint. But I wasn't impressed by its true grit; it struck me instead as aesthetically oppressive miserablism, in which the film unabashedly wallows as though squalor contains inherent meaning and thus beauty. (Is it p-p-p-p-poverty porn!?) Bah, this is one long manipulation—like, it's not even enough that Bardem has cancer: he has prostate, liver, and bone cancer!

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Season of the Witch

Directed by: Dominic Sena
Written by: Bragi F. Schut
Full credits at IMDb

In Season of the Witch, a team of Crusades-deserters, hangers-on and a priest literally stop The Black Death with just their swords, a Latin prayer book and their shaken-but-restored faith in God. But really, it's a movie about whether we should try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in civilian court. When the movie opens, Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman, playing Crusaders with an anachronistic repartee, kid each other nonchalantly about the number of enemies they'll slay—joking that continues across a violent montage of the greatest Crusades of the 1330s and 40s. That youthful cockiness has a rude moral awakening within 15 years, in the face of a battle toll that includes women and children. What Christ would command this? So they desert God's Army, abandoning battlefield for bubonically scarred countryside, its boilbubbled faces and mass graves of plaguecorpses. Sorcerer's Apprentice this ain't.

But neither is it Valhalla Rising...

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