Cold Weather

Written & Directed by: Aaron Katz
Full credits at IMDb

Life is boring in Cold Weather—but art? Art's a gas! Doug (Cris Lankenau) lives in gray and rainy Portland, works in an ice factory (about as exciting as in a box factory), and rooms with his sister, Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn); the most fun they have is going whale watching in the rain and not seeing any whales. They live in a quiet city, whose activity-level matches that of their ambling, somnolent narrative.

Like the mumblecore heroes they initially resemble, brother, sister and their friends lack an emotional language; everything's "good," "nice," or "I don't know". (It may not be set in Brooklyn, but Portland's "SE Brooklyn St." becomes a crucial location in the plot.) Communication is dominated by pleasantries and cliches; the characters amble around in what resembles an anti-depressant-fueled torpor, until Doug's visiting ex (Robyn Rikoon) apparently vanishes under seemingly malicious circumstances. Doug (also a one-time forensics major) and his DJ co-worker Carlos (Raul Castillo), both hooked on Arthur Conan Doyle novels, are tossed into a mystery of their own, becoming blue-collar hipster versions of Holmes and Watson (with Gail as their spunky female sidekick, thrown in for the 21st Century); they're tossed-together detectives modeling themselves on detective fiction, both literature and television, feeding off the thrill of life imitating art.

Geeky signifiers replace The Cool, like Seinfeld gone sleuthing: a batting cage replaces a pipe, and Swedish fish replace a stakeout's cardboard coffee cups. (The film also pays homage to great predecessors: a clue turns up in a pornographic magazine, which along with the Pacific Northwest setting evokes Twin Peaks; and the post-modern consideration of the genre, along with baseball statistics as a plot device, recalls Paul Auster.) There's a rough-at-first learning process of how to conduct an investigation, but the movie serves as a testament to the everyman's capacity for ordinary snooping. Doug slips easily into the chivalrous role, saving the distressed damsel; the characters even begin to share some of their feelings with one another. It's as though through action, they learn emotion. Grade: A


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I Saw the Devil

Directed by: Kim Ji-woon
Written by: Park Hoon-jung
Full credits at IMDb

I Saw the Devil, a proudly in-poor-taste thriller about predators playing with their food, opens on a serial killer who's a methodical madman—not unlike, you might say, the filmmakers, who plot their first act with the propulsive precision of expert pulp novelists; think Jim Thompson, or even Cormac McCarthy. The movie's first forty minutes or so—in which special agent and widower Soo-hyeon (Lee Byung-hun) pursues his fiancée's killer while the butcher, Kyung-Chul (Oldboy's Choi Min-sik), stalks fresh prey—is refreshingly efficient: emotional, but never indulgent; psychological, but only broadly, like an issue of Detective Comics. Its focus never strays from The Hunts, its pared-down, parallel procedurals—psychokiller and vigilante, not so much mouse and cat as cat and, um, bigger cat.

When the two converge, the opening act comes to a breathless close and I Saw the Devil devolves into gimmick: bereaved defeats bereaver but, instead of killing him, lets him go and tracks him from a distance.

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Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts

I'm inclined to think cynically of Oscar voters, so I expect the very worst of the nominees will take the prize. So, how could the cute kids of Strangers No More lose? Except maybe even Oscar voters will see through this unbearable schmaltz. I think Warriors is too generic to stir significant support (pollution? yawn! in China? double yawn!); maybe if its cameras had actually been around for when the corporate bullies came a-terrorizing. As for Killing in the Name, its chief advantage is that it centers on a scarce-as-hen's-teeth prize: a moderate voice of Islam, something for which politicized dunderheads (Oscar voters, right?) are always clamoring. But its story, about a man whose wedding was bombed by jihadis and who now travels the globe speaking out against violence among Muslims, is way too haphazard, hopping around the globe because it's too damn hard to find all the sources you need in one place. (An Al Qaeda spokesman in one hemisphere, convicted terrorists in another.) My favorite of the bunch was Sun Come Up, but I think it's because it was the only one to which I could personally relate: didn't those Carterets, displaced by climate change, seem like they were victims of "natural" gentrification? The way sea waters pushed them out of their home reminded me of the waves of wealthy kids making rents in certain neighborhoods unaffordable. But global warming? That just makes me think of that limousine liberal, Davis Guggenheim, who couldn't even get a nomination, blech. So, despite my reservations, my money's on Poster Girl.

Read all of my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine

We Are What We Are

Written & Directed by: Jorge Michel Grau
Full credits at IMDb

We Are What We Are (Somos Lo Que Hay), a gory and somber horror movie, reargrounds its genre and advances its characters to the fore. In general, a laudable approach: forming an affinity for the victims—or even, as here, the killers—is what makes the merely grisly truly frightening. Scary movies depend on sympathy. But as sci-fi slog Monsters demonstrated last year, this strategy comes at a risk--what if the characters aren't sympathetic? What if they're not as compelling as the sensational backdrop?

That's the problem with this Mexican import, which concerns a family that just lost its patriarch and sole provider—of human flesh! He put the food on the table for this pack of Mexicannibals: a critical, controlling and castrating mother and three adolescent children. The movie looks like a (South of) Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel, but its themes are less macabre: it's more like French family drama A Christmas Tale with interludes of feral violence. The drama, though, is lame...

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Vanishing on 7th Street

Directed by: Brad Anderson
Written by: Anthony Jaswinski
Full credits at IMDb

Horror's underlying phobia, the fear of the unlighted, is made literal in this solemn, Shyamalanian scarer: it's not what might be hiding in the shadows that threatens to devour the movie's apocalypse-survivors, but darkness itself. (Yes, this premise is very similar to a Dr. Who episode.) As the latest horror movie that loathes its audience, Vanishing begins at an AMC multiplex, where a theater full of knuckleheads (howling at the latest Adam Sandler comedy) instantly goes dark, the patrons disappeared like outspoken Pinochet critics, their clothes left behind like a rapture. Such dematerialization proves a citywide epidemic.

Unfortunately, after this goosepimpling set-up—in which streets are deserted I Am Legend style, and airplanes stumble out of the sky—Vanishing gives way to the schematic assembly of archetypal strangers in a dive bar on the titular block...

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Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts

The Oscar-nominated animated shorts program sports fewer unifying threads than [do the] live action shorts. But that's not to say they don't speak to each other. So let me take these in twos, and start by talking about Wall-E. That Pixar feature sported two thematic strains that some critics suggested were in opposition (I disagreed): a fierce environmentalism and a love of cultural ephemera. Those two ideas were embodied by two of our shorts—and, again, placed at odds.

The satiric Let's Pollute adopts a post-war educational film aesthetic, complete with sonorous and authoritative voice over narration, that finds its comedy in saying the opposite of what it believes: that polluting is our civic duty, and we should all be doing more of it. The short ridicules consumerism and maligns corporations (like last year's winner, Logorama), while the throwback style subtly suggests that blame lies at the feet of the profligate baby boomer. (In that way, it's not unlike Mad Men!) Lost Thing, on the other hand, has an affinity for technology that Let's Pollute doesn't share—an affection expressed in steampunk design.

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine

Lovers of Hate

Written & Directed by: Bryan Poyser
Full credits at IMDb

Lovers of Hate, a cleverly structured and perfectly plotted comic-bummer, takes familiar types and jostles them into unfamiliar places. The movie borrows the old fraternal-foils formula: Rudy (Chris Doubek) can't hold a job, lives out his car, showers in a car-wash and pines for (and perpetually pesters) his ex-wife, Diana (Heather Kafka). His little brother Paul (Alex Karpovsky, slimy and supercilious as ever) is the successful author of a popular fantasy series for children for which Rudy claims some credit. When Paul goes to Park City to work on a new book—is there a Sundance joke I'm not getting?—Rudy follows uninvited to discover his brother is having a fling with Diana.

This queasy love triangle tale tightens like a noir with a heartbreaking slapstick edge, as simmering professional and romantic jealousies work their way to the fore.

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Oscar-Nominated Live-Action Shorts

The whole shorts package is fascinating because it offers glimpses of what appeals to the Academy—but, succinctly, in miniature. Like, in "Na Wewe" (my second fave of the lot), you have the Rwandan genocide (Hotel Rwanda), treated with a soft touch of absurdist levity (Life is Beautiful). Rwanda '94 is practically Poland '39 (Schindler's List), as Oscars go! And the story embraces commonality, humanism, while underlining the arbitrariness of our differences (The Blind Side, The Kids Are All Right). In "God of Love"—which retooled the Cupid myth for a French New Wave-affected present—they take a trip to the ballet (at Lincoln Center!!) to see, what else, Swan Lake—and we all know how much the Academy likes that!

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine

Sanctum

Directed by: Alister Grierson
Written by: John Garvin & Andrew Wight

It's set within alien-like terrain, often underwater, at the last frontier of earthly exploration: because it boasts so many of his hallmarks—the villain is the corporate underwriter!—you can see why James Cameron slapped his name onto Sanctum, as executive producer. (It even features an actress, Alice Parkinson, who uncannily evokes a young Sigourney Weaver.) It's also in digital 3D, the newish technology for which Cameron has become the leading advocate—which is why it's so disappointing that Grierson, the director who comes approved by his persnickety producer, seems to have little understanding of how to use the effect for maximum, um, effect.

He does not, at least, indugle 3D's most egregious excess—he eschews eye-poking "boo!" moments. Great 3D does not jut out at you, but sucks you into it. Grierson works hard to make the 3D subtle—so much so that, for most of the movie, it's invisible.

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