Stuff and Dough

Directed by: Cristi Puiu
Written by: Cristi Puiu & Razvan Radulescu
Full Credits from IMDb

Grade: B-



Rarely have I ever taken so few notes during a movie as I did during Stuff and Dough (Marfa si Banii), a maddening exercise in anticlimax that does for the Romanian New Wave what Cars did for Pixar: interrupt the winning streak. After near masterpieces like 12:08 East of Bucharest and 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, the film movement manages to disappoint with this (previously unreleased-in-this-country) debut feature, from the director of the heralded The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, that serves as a clear demonstration of how using the ordinary trials of ordinary people as a cinematic device can go so wrong. The film could approach the extraordinary, if it wanted to, as a tense road movie along the lines of Duel or The Wages of Fear, but instead settles as an ambling road trip full of minor conflicts that never quite develop and therefore never quite compel the audience’s attention. It is shot almost entirely from the backseat of a van, focused on the bull sessions, the false boasting and funny stories, between two pals and their female accessory.

Alexandru Papadopol has dreams of moving out of his parents’ house and getting his own food stand, bigger and better than the meager one his folks struggle to operate; so when a nose-picking local man offers him two years’ wages to deliver six packs of “medical supplies” from Contanta to Bucharest, a mere four hour drive, he jumps at the chance. His buddy Dragos Bucur tags along with his latest catch in tow, the nose-picking, Juliette-Lewis-type, Ioana Flora.

Deliver the stuff, get the dough—it sounds so simple and…basically it is. Stuff and Dough feels like it’s about to pick up after a few reels, at least for a moment, but the knuckles quickly unwhiten. The trio runs into trouble when a red jeep asks them to pull over and then attacks without provocation, bashing in the driver’s side window with a bat and smashing Papadopol’s legs in the passenger side door like they were Frank Vincent’s head, but Puiu doesn’t seem interested in sustaining tension; at most, Stuff and Dough is quick bits of foreplay interlaced with downtime. Though the red jeep continues to pop up menacingly from time to time, most elegantly in glimpses from the rear view mirror, the two groups do not confront one another again, and our band of heroes’ apprehension wanes easily. And if they’re not worried, why should we be?

I suppose we’re not supposed to, but if this isn’t a chase movie—as some critics are making it out to be—then what is it? A neorealist slice of life in post-Ceausescu Romania? Behold the Romanian countryside, its highway system, its wholesale markets, and its callow youth? At least the filmmakers use the running time to comment on the state of their motherland, on how the pressures of moving into modernity can tear comrades apart and about how one cruel and corrupt system has simply been replaced by another. Stuff and Dough is reflective and cautionary: young men just clear of their mother’s apron strings, like young nations recently freed from dictatorship, ought to proceed cautiously into their freedom-filled futures, lest they wind up in over their heads—that is, under the control of criminals, gangsters, killers and drug dealers. But to make the point, the filmmakers simply stick a dizzy camera in a car and let the cast shoot the shit. The actors all do an admirable job of achieving effortless authenticity, and the camerawork is at times graceful if shaky, but Stuff and Dough is hardly more compelling than actually driving for four hours through Romania with your friends to deliver a duffel bag of drugs. That is, despite its potential for action and adventure, thrills and chills, it’s pretty mundane. If that’s a rejection of Hollywood cliché, don’t let’s forget that some things become standards because they work so well and that repudiating convention is not a virtue in and of itself.


Watch the red van confrontation scene without subtitles:

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Directed by: Nicholas Stoller
Written by: Jason Segel
Full Credits from IMDb

Grade: B+

Wouldn’t the state of modern, mainstream, multiplex American cinema be so much stronger if all its generic romantic-comedies were as hilarious and sincere as Forgetting Sarah Marshall? (Its irritating, contemptible ad campaign not withstanding.) With a firm grasp of the workings of seriocomedy, the film (often) succeeds in moving beyond its superficial hilarity because it’s serious but refuses to take itself seriously; usually laughing at itself, it subtly succeeds dramatically, masking its emotion in self-deprecating humor so that it’s heartfelt but rarely sappy. (“I didn’t know it was a comedy,” star Jason Segel says at one point, a possible metamoment, of his show-within-the-movie, “but then someone told me and it really just opened things up.”)

I qualify with “rarely,” however, because unfortunately, with the irrepressibly prolific Judd Apatow producing, the film trips over the same failing that seems to do in most of his films, including that other Apatow gift to a former Freaks and Geeks cast member, Knocked Up: it goes on too long and has too many plot lines to wrap up, often involving secondary and even tertiary couples, that it has to pause the comedy for second-rate drama. But Sarah Marshall has a strength not even Apatow can diminish, the infinitely likable Segel, who also wrote the (presumably much-tinkered-with) script. He not only possesses the natural comic gift common to those in Apatow’s circle, but is able to bring a subtle measure of pathos to the film, best encapsulated by his, ahem, Dracula rock opera with puppets. When Segel sings, in a Count Chocula accent to Jim Steinman-inflected piano music, “if I see Van Helsing, I will slay him,” it’s first and foremost guffaw-worthy; but at the same time it’s also sad, with, absurdly, a bit of pitiable truth.

Though not often featured lately in Apatow productions because studio execs find him excessively strange, Segel has always been one of his most amiable players because he’s so easy to feel bad for. Here, he elicits our sympathy from the first reel when his long-time girlfriend, the eponymous Marshall (Kristen Bell) dumps him in a state of defenselessness, without even a towel to hide [his] behind. (The Simpsons Movie seems to have broken down the wall for full frontal male nudity in American comedies.) A man brandishing his penis on-screen is funny—isn’t it?—but a man butt-naked and weeping is also endearing. (Questionably endearing, however, is Segel’s unhealthy obsession with his own penis, which he twice reveals to the audience in book-ending scenes; he also has his doctor declare, “it’s a good-looking dick, it’s a beautiful dick” and, eventually, he goes so far as to cast it as his moral compass, when it refuses to become erect for a woman he probably ought not be sleeping with.)

When a series of awkward hook-ups prove unfulfilling, the broken-hearted Segel—established as such by his choice of songs, “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”—packs it up and heads to Hawaii for a holiday. The archipelago is the perfect post-break-up comic backdrop, with its contrapuntal surfeit of newly weds, engagement proposals and happy couples, but the decision to head for the Pacific seems more motivated from a desire by the pasty Apatow Gang to catch some sun and treat themselves to pastel-colored drinks. (As though, to paraphrase a Simpsons catch phrase, “the freaks and geeks are going to Hawaii!”) It must be nice to be able to procure sizeable Hollywood budgets to indulge your vacation whims. As one character notes, “Hawaii is a place for people to escape, for people who can’t deal with the real world.”

That, in a nutshell, sounds like the prototypical Apatow hero—a manboy who can’t function in the real world, at least not without the love of a good woman to set him straight. In accordance with the tropes of the genre, the length of the film serves as a means for Segel to get to know a nice girl, Mila Kunis, so he can eventually not bed her but make love to, er, with her. The plot may carry a touch of sexism, as A.O. Scott suggests—what with a plethora of fetching lookers fighting to claim a piece of Segel’s schlub so that he may be redeemed—but the relationship is good for Kunis, too. It encourages her to “go back to school”. (Uh, maybe.)

To his credit, Apatow has refined his formula, making it a bit more sophisticated (or, “he has become cautious enough to preempt the brand of criticism that met Knocked Up”), by turning the tables a bit near the end when he exposes the hero, Segel, not as a victim but as a bad boyfriend, a lazy and inattentive lover who got what he had coming. (But then Stoller has to spoil it all by cuing something stupid like a soft guitar riff.) Some couples break up because they can’t grow up if they’re still together, the filmmakers suggest. That’s an interesting twist, adding a measure of complexity to the characters, at least by date movie standards, but is it really necessary? Above all else, Apatow & Co. are naturally hilarious and have the remarkable ability to repeatedly provoke out loud laughter. So the question is, why does Judd see it necessary, time and again, to try and prove his hand as a dramatist? Is it a halfhearted, even condescending nod toward the female demographic, following the American Pie formula for success in which there’s ribald humor for the boys and romance for the girls? Apatow has yet to direct or produce a well-told story, not just a stack of comic set pieces in which his drama runs away with him. He needs to leave more for the (admittedly already crowded) deleted scenes section of the DVD and allow the stories wrap up a bit more quickly, even if it means they wrap up sloppily. (Regardless of its hilarity, even Superbad could have lost a reel or two.) Segel succeeds because he hides his emotions behind his comedy; Apatow ought to follow suit by playing up his comedic strengths, not hiding them behind layers of storytelling that never arises above the level of conventional. If you can’t be Woody Allen, it’s better not even to try.


Watch the (red band) trailer:

Flight of the Red Balloon

Directed by: Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Written by: Hou Hsiao-Hsien & François Margolin
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: B+

In Flight of the Red Balloon (Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge), Hou Hsiao-Hsien, like many a “foreign” filmmaker before him, abandons any and all clichés of moviemaking—that is, the tried and true conventions of Hollywood storytelling—in favor of something…pure? Simple? Fresh? His manner is gentle—the film begins in silence, and the soft murmurs of traffic slowly fade in—but the end result here is oppressive; set mostly in a cramped and cluttered apartment or in the narrow, shaded streets of Paris, Red Balloon largely keeps us tethered to the quotidian, making the audience feel like its star, the vividly frazzled, strung-out-on-stress Juliette Binoche. From an early shot through a moving subway train’s windshield, Hou informs us that, in today’s hectic world, Westerners are always, exhaustingly, pushing forward.

But, in contrast, he digs out life’s balloonality, the occasional, floatingly graceful respites from the taxing everyday: playing pinball in a café, collecting newspapers and empty bottles from an apartment floor, grabbing brass rings while riding a carousel horse. Captured through Hou’s lens, these small moments take on a nimble, empyrean elegance, one paralleled by the film’s titular red balloon. In contrast to the perpetually plowing ahead Binoche, the too-infrequently featured, free flying balloon floats upward and bobs back and forth. It is a piece of Eastern enlightenment that, like Hou, has drifted across the Urals into France. In the hands of a lesser director, shots of a floating balloon could fall into pretension, a la American Beauty’s “beautiful” plastic bag, or, even worse, it could be voiced by Eddie Murphy. In Hou’s hands, however, it really might be the most beautiful thing in Paris—his version of it anyway.

Flight of the Red Balloon is a self-described homage to, rather than a remake of, the French children’s-classic. It is a slice of life, sans much of a narrative arc, the story of single-mother Binoche as she takes puppetry lessons and raises her sweet son Simon Iteanu, with the help of immigrant nanny Song Fang, whose French, like mine, extends little beyond a polite “d’accord”. (As an Asian transplant and a filmmaker with a thing for red balloons—and Lamorisse’s film—she clearly seems a stand-in for Hou.)

Throughout the film, Hou places an emphasis on shadows—the balloon’s, the carousel horses’, Iteanu’s sisters’. His film is a contrast of light and dark, of East and West, of happiness and sadness, best represented in a serendipitously discovered painting in the Musée d'Orsay, awash in accidental symbolism, of a boy chasing a red balloon, his parents only visible in the far distance. (The film was commissioned by the museum, whose one requirement was that a scene be set there.) Bionche loves her son, but she’s a frantically upending presence, persistently panting and constantly disrupting the calm tableau of domesticity that Song has constructed for Iteanu, invading her Eastern tranquility with her Western neuroticism.

Binoche usually seems dissociated from her son’s life; when her friend asks Iteanu where she is, he replies, “probably tied up with her puppets.” At one point, she is yelling at, presumably, the boy’s father. “There’s no one beside me!” she shouts. “What about me?” the boy asks. (Hou, to his credit, plays out that last exchange quasi-comically.) So when the balloon hangs in the family’s flat’s window, watching the boy and his nanny prepare crepes, it seems to directly parallel an earlier scene of Binoche spying on her son and daughter playing in their living room. And then the first scene makes sense: Iteanu tries to coax the balloon down to his level, but it refuses and he gives up. It is a rejection from Hou to surrender his film’s ability to literally rise above the mundane, but also a rejection of the boy by his mother.

The balloon, then, is Binoche, or the balloon is God, the balloon is the viewer; all three might be true, specifically, but that’s too literal, an imposition of the prosaic onto the poetic; in a more general sense, the balloon is a merely a touch of the ethereal, so close and yet, with the characters’ heads so low to the ground, always just out of reach. It also functions as a means of cultural exchange, the object that allows Hou, the foreigner, to invade the West with his particular brand of meditative filmmaking. Too bad that style of filmmaking just doesn’t quite translate. In its own way, Flight of the Red Balloon is as exhausting in its languor as the febrile culture Hou seems to criticize.


Watch the trailer:

The Ruins

Directed by: Carter Smith
Written by: Scott B. Smith
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: B-

The Ruins ought to satisfy anyone (i.e. me, a few nights ago) jonesing for a horror movie, but that’s not to condone it; while commendably maintaining a palpable sense of discomfort, the filmmakers forget the most important thing in scary movies, the thing that made recent entries like Wolf Creek or Cloverfield so effective: recognizable and sympathetic characters.

An Anton Yelchin look-and-sound-a-like (Jonathan Tucker) and his girlfriend, a Jena Malone look-a-like—oh wait, that is Jena Malone—play turistas on holiday down Mexico way, along with their equally vanilla pals, Shawn Ashmore and Laura Ramsey. On the ill-considered advice of a German tourist—with the Hostel films, the bad advice of Europeans is becoming a horror movie convention—they travel to the off-the-beaten-path (in trailerspeak) ruins of a Mayan temple. Once there, savage natives start shouting at them—and not, to the dismay of our pidgin-tongued heroes, in Spanish—and drive them to the top of the temple, where they remain captive for the rest of the movie.

As horror movie filmmakers go, the Smiths display a measure of chutzpah: they not only lock their film into one location—not easy to pull off—but they keep nearly all of their characters alive almost to the very end, refusing to indulge the built-in demographic’s splatterlust. (Though at times the film is a bit gruesomely procedural, obligingly slipping into torture porn along the lines of “we’ll break your bones with a rock, then cut your legs off with a hunting knife and cauterize the stumps with a hot frying pan.”) The tense and terse storytelling—no extraneous subplots, no wasted time—that lets the filmmakers get away with the shortage of settings leaves little space for character, though. Tucker in particular, a stony C-lister, is a major drag on the film, offering, for example, little verisimilitude to the overt expository dialogue, eg. “each of us needs half a gallon of water a day to survive”; he certainly doesn’t possess the ability to create a credible character. (Malone, on the other hand, does a fine job; I don’t know whether to celebrate her for raising this film up a notch or scold her for wasting her time.) The filmmakers still manage to keep the film bopping along; unfortunately, however, they run out of steam and rush through the requisite slaughter/denouement, as though another group of filmmakers needed to use the set.


We are left of course with our last woman standing, although Smith defies convention a bit by making her anything but virtuous and sober; whereas horror films usually function as a means of punishing promiscuous teens, our redeemed survivor here is a heavy drinker (she spends the film hungover) and an infidelious girlfriend. The filmmakers are up to something other than giving our arrogant American heroes their comeuppance. (“This doesn’t happen!” Tucker tells his friends. “Four Americans on a vacation don’t just disappear!”) Our straight man, a med student, sacrifices himself for the team; the Smiths display a conservative bent here, showing little pity or clemency for the resident man of science and his complicit pals. (They gleefully offer a close-up of his dead body.) In The Ruins, the Native American savages, not without a method to their madness, serve only as secondary villains; our protagonists’ central nemesis is Mother Earth and its carnivorous vegetation. (Whose leaves bear a conspicuous resemblance to those of the marijuana plant.) The Ruins makes a point to remind us, along with every hurricane season, that nature isn’t exactly our friend. But the marketing team took it one step further. “Terror has evolved,” the movie poster’s tagline reads. Apparently our greatest enemy is evolution itself.


Watch the (red band) trailer:

Alexandra

Written & Directed by: Aleksandr Sokurov
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: B-

In its analysis of mother Russia’s historical thrust, Aleksandr Sokurov’s 2002 film Russian Ark (Russkiy Kovcheg) spoke specifically to its native audience; but it captivated foreign audiences as well, thanks in large part to the sheer mastery of its form—through the astounding gimmick of its unbroken and yet wildly mobile single take. To boot, its main character was hopelessly lost and confused from the first frame, and thus easy for the perplexed audience to latch on to. (Even better: the film plays out from his point of view; the first-person camera essentially makes the viewer the main character, particularly as other characters speak directly into the lens.)

The main character of his new, almost self-titled film, Alexandra (Aleksandra), on the other hand, is rather self-assured and thus doesn’t exactly welcome outsiders in. She knows exactly where she is, even if we don’t, and exactly what she thinks. The film works universally, in some ways, as a snapshot of the toll that war—especially endless war—takes on the individual and national psyches (as well as the physical landscape), a snapshot that could be loosely applied to, say, the War on Terror. But more so Sokurov is once again speaking directly to the Russian condition, including the generation gap and its causes; for international audiences, then, Alexandra slides into thematic esotericism. Despite its hefty and often beautiful images (one character is neatly summed up in an introductory shot of his abraded bare feet), as well as its sound performances, Alexandra lacks the gliding, first person dreaminess that made Russian Ark so accessible. The latter was entrancing, stupefying; Alexandra is just slow.

Perhaps if the film were more inviting, it might not seem to have the pacing problems that it seems to have. But, particularly in its first half, watching Alexandra is like strolling, slowly, down the street with grandma; there is a pleasure to be had from soaking in the world with such patience, but it can easily turn frustrating. Let’s get where we’re going already. Pick it up, lady.

Galina Vishnevskaya, a well known Soviet soprano, plays the title character, a stern old lady and natural materfamilias—she doesn’t hesitate to literally and figuratively push armed soldiers around as though they were small children or uxorious husbands—who arrives at a military outpost to visit her grandson (Vasily Shevtsov). She wanders the jerrybuilt barracks, and its rocky paths, in what look like painted-on shoes, talking to the soldiers; she also travels off-base to talk to the townspeople, the army’s enemies, all the while assessing the state of the motherland, doling out wisdom and receiving a bit of her own.

Alexandra’s dialogue is often a bit unbecomingly overt—“you can destroy,” Vishneyskaya tells the soldiers, “when will you learn to build?”—but its pace is so sleepy and striding that it manages to avoid feeling heavy-handed. In fact, Alexandra could almost be a comedy, a clash of cultures and generations, were it not for the unremittingly bleak surroundings.

Oppressively soaked in sunstroke orange and camouflage green, Sokurov’s frames capture the fragile and temporary quality of life during wartime. Every opening of a door on the military base rattles the walls, as though the tents and shanty shacks are about to fall down, while the buildings in town (presumably in Chechnya) are crumbling, folded-over, and bombed-out. Sokurov suggests that because the situation is so dangerous, or more so because it’s gone on for so long—the guns are remarked to be old, the tanks have dusty, creaky hatches—long-term construction becomes infeasible.

But, presumably to get past the censors, Alexandra strives to be even-handed, to fairly represent the points of view of the Russians and the Chechens, the soldiers and the civilians. No matter how much airtime Sokurov gives the disparate sides, though, his main point is that war, even beyond its life and death powers, doesn’t do anyone any good in the long run. (The surrounding fields are dusty, the vegetation just budding—as war prevents plants from growing, so too does it stall Russia’s “growth” as a nation.) But Alexandra, while at times sublimely moving, is for the most part too listless to be funny or sad or sweet, tearjerkingly or otherwise. It’s just a stern and somber lesson that mostly goes straight over my non-Russian head.


Watch the Trailer: (no subtitles)

My Kid Could Paint That

Directed by: Amir Bar-Lev
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: A

My Kid Could Paint That touches on a lot of Big Ideas, but above all it focuses on the nature of narratives. Four-year-old Marla Olmstead of upstate New York became a media sensation when her professional-level—whatever that means—abstract paintings began selling for thousands of dollars, and then became an object of scandal when it was suggested that her amateur-painter father may have had a hand in her works. (“Prodigy Schmodigy,” one headline read.)

If that sounds like a tailor-made media storyline, it might be because the news organizations covering the story concocted it. Director Amir Bar-Lev takes little Marla’s rise and fall as a jumping off point, using her as his subject but not his focus. His film tackles the essence of art, life, storytelling and the requisite imposition of narratives—even the problem of documentation itself. It’s a story about grown-ups, a local reporter says, and it’s also “a story about what happens with stories.”

From the start, My Kid Could Paint That is very conscious of its own construction: the film opens with the director interviewing Marla and her brother (or trying to interview, as the two prove reticent interlocutors). Many of the film’s shots include cameras, crew and boom mics, while the director is often audible during the talking head interviews. (Thus violating the usual documentary standard of the invisible creator; only The Fog of War, when Errol Morris occasionally, and angrily, questions Robert MacNamara from off camera, comes to mind as another recent example. Michael Moore and his followers are obviously excluded.)

My Kid Could Paint That raises, if not exactly deals with, many more complex intellectual concerns than the typical indie doc. It examines, for example, the Western world’s obsession with the child prodigy. (“If a kid is performing at an adult level,” an art critic for the Times says, “it’s like a magic trick.”) It also looks at the way celebrity diminishes the natural joy artists get from creating, as well as the way parents can relish the fame of their celebrity children; that the father, who seems like a nice enough guy, craves the limelight and the company of artists to the extent that he’ll exploit his child is a strong subtext that runs through the film. The film also looks at the relationship between the artist and the admirer, and the way fans stamp their own personalities onto the artist’s, especially when it’s a personality as easily dominated as a child’s. Finally, it examines, and to an extent explains, the theoretical underpinnings of modern art.

For starters, is abstract art bullshit if my kid can make it? Not necessarily, critics explain. Modern art often frustrates viewers because, unlike traditional modes of painting, it no longer clearly explains itself—that is, its story—to the audience. Figurative paintings, though static, still impart a story—Seurat tells us something, but Pollock tells us nothing. In abstract painting, the artwork by itself is no longer sufficient; it doesn’t tell a story, but rather comments on a “story” that we’re already expected to know. It requires a bit of homework.

Bar-Lev runs up against a similar issue in the making of his film: is the film itself, as it’s coming along, sufficient to explain itself? That is, is the story he’s constructing the whole story? Or does his presence, and the presence of other reporters, cameramen, art critics, etc., on the film’s fringes make him a part of the story? Paraphrasing Heisenberg, Marla’s mother notes early on that, “once you measure something, you alter it.” One of the key problems in the story is that no one but the parents can capture footage of Marla creating her paintings, footage that would potentially dispel the accusations of inauthenticity. (When an interview subject assumes the role of interviewer and asks the director what, exactly, he wants, he answers, “I want footage of Marla painting that would put my doubts to rest.”) Does the presence of strangers and a camera make Marla behave uncharacteristically, cause her to paint like a typical four year old, or is the whole thing a hoax?

Bar-Lev leaves it up to us while he cleverly puts himself into the film; by admitting his own presence he clues the audience in to the fact that his film is simply a story that he’s created, and though it deals in real people and facts, it’s not necessarily “the truth”. While the rest of the media turns against the family (because every rise needs a fall in a 60 Minutes world), the family expects him to exonerate them. But he has his own doubts that make him uncomfortable, raising the issue of, what are the documentarian’s obligations to his subject? Honesty and fairness, of course, but Bar-Lev realizes that the developing scandal is good for his own film; and as a human being with a moral compass, it makes him feel guilty.

Bar-Lev comes to understand the inherent unfairness of storytelling, which involves imposing a narrative structure on the chaos of reality that doesn’t lend itself easily to such simple strictures. The film climaxes in a tense interview with the parents when Bar-Lev all but accuses one or both of them of lying. Has the filmmaker betrayed them? Because they both look awfully betrayed. The mother eventually breaks into tears, which she recognizes is perfect for the film. “It’s documentary gold,” she snidely remarks before walking out; by the end, everyone realizes they are no longer actually living their lives but acting as characters in a manufactured story. That may be fair to do to adults in a media saturated world—but to kids? “What have I done to my children,” the mother asks near the end, “putting them through this?”


Watch the trailer:

Shine a Light

Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Music performed by: The Rolling Stones
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: B+

Despite Mick Jagger’s lively prancing—his energetic frontmannery—a Rolling Stones concert is above all a sonic affair, rather than a visual event. A concert film, then, would seem pretty straightforward, at best: something to hear, but not much to look at—the sort of thing that goes straight to DVD or PBS.

Martin Scorsese, however, through his ever-moving concert cam, manages to make Shine a Light both. Through fast-paced editing and vigorous camera movement, Scorsese and his team imbue the par for the course proceedings with palpable vigor, without ever lapsing into cheap concert-movie cliché. (There are no canted shots of Keith Richards from below, for example.) The Rolling Stones may be commanding showmen, but on a screen they would be little more than clownish, costumed dinosaurs without Scorsese, who understands how to translate their performing prowess to film. (See: the Bridges to Babylon DVD.) Together, the two are a hell of an entertaining pair. Shine a Light doesn’t so much provide a “you are there” experience as a distinct experience all its own; it’s not just a document, but a living document—a loud, dizzying and overwhelming experience of pure cinema, all shaky close-ups and dancing tracking shots.

Coordinating such a complexly choreographed film was no easy task, logistically and otherwise, Scorsese is sure to let us know. The first fifteen minutes are dedicated to the concert and the film’s arrangements, a choppy and comical behind the scenes/making of—a special feature built into the film—in which Scorsese and Jagger risibly butt heads. Making a movie is tough! Especially when it involves a neurotic New Yorker dealing with easygoing, non-committal burnouts. Finally, someone tries to explain it to Scorsese: “this is rock n’ roll.”

Those first 15 minutes are about all the back-stage/offstage footage we get, distinguishing Shine a Light from its most obvious antecedent, 1978’s The Last Waltz, in which Scorsese spends a good deal of film interviewing the Band and watching them shoot pool or jam. But why waste time, Scorsese’s and the Stones’, shooting B-roll with a band that has decades worth in the vaults? Every two or three songs, Scorsese punctuates the concert (two concerts actually, at the Beacon Theater in Fall 2006) with archival interview footage that superficially fills in the Stones’ backstory, usually some ironic clip of an interviewer asking a question along the lines of, “how long do you fellas think you can keep this up?”

A long time, obviously! All yuks aside, that’s the point—the Rolling Stones are old but the band still sounds tight, demonstrating the sort of fine-tuned collaboration that gets honed over 45 years on the road, and Jagger is still as limber as a teenager. Not only that, but the boys, even if they’re mugging a bit for the conspicuous cameras, give off the feeling that they genuinely love one another, that they have a blast doing what they do and doing it together. In the end, Shine a Light is a celebration of perseverance from a long-working director who only recently got his best director Oscar—a tribute to doing what you love for as long as you can still do it. In the Rolling Stones, Scorsese has found himself, despite their superficial dissimilarities.


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Love Songs

Written & Directed by: Christophe Honoré
Original Music by: Alex Beaupain
Full Credits from IMDb

Grade: B-

Love Songs’ opening credits display the names (last names only) of the cast and crew in big block letters, a nod to Godard & the French New Wave, director Honoré’s most obvious filmmaking antecedents. But behind the text run images of a gray, drab and overcast Paris—despite the cafes, it’s not quite the romantic Paris of postcards. As such, Honoré gets straight to his central theme, the one that also popped up in his previous film, Dans Paris—the conflict between romance and reality; between idealized history and bleak modernity; between Godard and the Bros. Dardenne; between love affairs and death.

But whereas Dans Paris maintained 90 minutes of joie de cinema, balancing Roman Duris’ melancholia against Louis Garrel’s playful buoyancy, Love Songs (Les Chansons d’Amour) falters by falling into self-seriousness. That is, Love Songs aims to reach dramatic heights within the pretense of the movie musical, whose emotions can never, inherently, reach more than a level of superficiality.

Garrel returns in Honoré’s latest to play a young graphic designer (I think), involved in a ménage a trois with Clotilde Hesme and Ludivine Sagnier. (Following The Dreamers and Dans Paris, it’s become to difficult to imagine Louis Garrel in a bed without two additional bunkmates.) Time Warner Cable describes the film pithily and perfectly: “a young French threesome express themselves with sex and pop music.” For the first several reels, Love Songs is as fun to watch as Time Warner makes it sound, thanks in large part to Garrel and his irrepressible likability as he treats a couch cushion like an infant or slides across rainslick macadam in his rubber soles, to the squealing delight of his lady friends.

After Dans Paris, some critics criticized Honoré as rather cloying in his aping of New Wave, et al. styles, but I find his mismash pastiche style of filmmaking to be palpably and infectiously impassioned: a character “walks away” by gliding as though standing on a conveyor belt (a favorite trick of Frankenheimer); Honoré suddenly cuts to still photos like he’s Chris Marker; the three characters lay in bed together, reading books with titles like “Perfect Happiness”, “Voluptuous Pleasures” and, of course, “Politics”. (It is, after all, a French film.)

The very first scene of dialogue in Love Songs is an argument over whether it’s morally acceptable to see a bad movie on purpose; Honoré takes his cinema seriously, so seriously he’s not afraid to treat the medium with an excited measure of playfulness. (Someone is holding a book? Cut to a page of the book!) Late in the film, a song sung by Yannick Renier sums it up nicely: “Have you ever loved,” he sings, “for the sheer sake of it? Have you ever taken a bite of the apple for the taste of the fruit—its sweetness and its zest?” If cinema is a glass of water, Honoré and Garrel are two tablets of Alka Seltzer.

Unfortunately their carbonating effects wear off after about 45 minutes and the glass of water that is Love Songs goes tepid again. A sudden death interrupts the love story and kills off most of the lightheartedness as well. Music, in Love Songs as in most any musical, is used as a means for the characters to sing through their feelings, to externalize the internalized. At first, it’s a means to brighten up dismal dialogue about jealousy or rain, saving the audience from prattling French characters. When Garrel is criticizing Sagnier with lines like, “little bitch, go to hell,” it’s much more fun to hear it sung.

But Love Songs takes on an unbefitting solemnity as Garrel and those around him try to cope with the sudden death. The film loses its pep; the songs follow suit, shedding their toe-tappingness. But its sourness rings hollow; Love Songs, from start to finish, is never emotionally credible. At its best, early on, it’s simply uninhibitedly joyous and when it loses that, it loses everything. If it’s between romance and reality, Honoré ought to err on the side of romance.


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Funny Games

Written & Directed by: Michael Haneke
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: A

Michael Haneke has said that his 1997 German-language film Funny Games was intended, most of all, for American audiences. Of course, the way to reach Americans, particularly those with the bloodlust Haneke’s film is meant to admonish, is not through subtitles, so the director, in an unprecedented move, has changed the actors and the language but otherwise produced a shot for shot remake of his own film. (Thus distinguishing himself from, say, Alfred Hitchcock, who remade his own The Man Who Knew Too Much, but not shot for shot, or Gus van Sant, who remade Psycho shot for shot, though it wasn’t his film originally.)

Haneke’s got good timing, if nothing else; if Funny Games, which uses cinematic hyperviolence to criticize hyperviolence in cinema, were ever coming stateside, on the heels of 2007, a particularly violent year for American movies as has been extensively noted elsewhere—from critics’ end-of-the-year essays to letters-to-the-editor—would be the time. But is Funny Games legitimate metacriticism, or is it merely glorified torture porn?

Watts and Tim Roth star as a husband-and-wife team who are terrorized, along with their prepubescent son, by two perfectly pleasant and yet sociopathic young men (Michael Pitt & Brady Corbet) who invade their idyllic Hamptons vacation home. A perfectly innocent domestic set-up—a squirm-inducing scene over borrowing some eggs—leads to a not-so-innocent result: Roth slaps Pitt in the face and the boys retaliate by breaking Roth’s knee cap with a golf club, turning one of his many bourgeois accoutrements against him, the ones Haneke obsesses over in gorgeous, fetishized close-ups. The boys proceed to beat and humiliate Watts, jump on Roth’s busted knee, wrap the kid’s head in a pillow cushion and terrify all of them with their blithe violence and lack of reason. (One of Haneke’s cheekiest moments is when he has his two torturers jokingly run through a list of conventional motives: Pitt says Corbet is a gay, white trash, drug addicted, thrill-seeking, spoiled rich kid with divorced, alcoholic parents—and a mother fucker. Another, more subtle suggestion of motive, comes when Haneke shoots Corbet standing in a door jamb, holding up a golf club like a mighty, solid phallus.)

Plus, they kill the family dog and reveal its corpse with a cruel and possibly hilarious game of “hot and cold”. If it’s true, as Haneke argues, that Americans eat-up violent movies for their violence, then Funny Games is their punishment, like the father who, catching his son smoking, makes him smoke the whole pack in succession. But what if the kid likes chain smoking? The film provokes an unbearably visceral reaction as Haneke relentlessly tortures his protagonists and, by extension, the audience. (It’s a tour de force of acting, from Pitt’s gleeful sociopath to Roth’s excruciating evocations of physical pain and emotional exhaustion; even Devon Gearhart, as the little boy, is terribly convincing as a scared shitless rugrat.) But it’s tough to believe that there’s much overlap between the multiplex crowds and the arthouse audience; that is, how many of the people filling the seats at Funny Games are torture porn enthusiasts tricked into Haneke’s scolding, and how many are masochistic arthouse junkies who thrive on Haneke’s spanking?

Therein lies the rub; Haneke may say his film is meant for American eyes in particular, presumably the kind that dole out millions in tickets for violent fare like the Hostel films, but really it’s only going to be seen by a different kind of American audience, who may still enjoy their violent movies, just with a bit more fine-tuned scripting, professional acting and intelligent direction.

Up against such audiences, Haneke’s film inevitably repels viewers if not by its sadistic violence then by its smugness. Where does this Haneke character get off thinking he’s fit to hold a mirror up to us? But if he can be forgiven his holier-than-thou attitude, he does provoke a conversation worth having about whether or not there is something terribly perverse about reveling in film violence of any kind, whether through voyeuristic pleasure or through catharsis. (Haneke’s film cruelly teases the audience and rejects the possibility of either.)

Near the film’s end, Pitt sums up Haneke’s controversial position when he posits that fiction is “just as real as reality.” (To his credit, Haneke has Corbet answer: “bullshit”.) For Haneke, it’s just as disturbing for us to not be repulsed by a violent film as it is for Corbet to sit in Watts and Roth’s posh living room and watch Nascar on the widescreen, high-definition television set while the couple sit next to him bound, gagged and in pain. (And, in Watts’ case, half-naked.)

More to the point, though, Haneke’s film is perversely entertaining for audiences with a taste for violent movies. Is there a fundamental contradiction between Haneke’s contempt for violence and his relishing in a violent attack on his audience, one that negates his intellectual argument? I saw Haneke’s original film for the first time, on DVD, a little over a year ago and I remembered it as being, above all, academic. I’m not sure if it was that my memory failed me, but watching the new version I was on the edge of my seat, feeling as emotionally distraught and tortured as his diegetic victims. The moments of metacinema, as when Pitt turns to the camera for Ferris Bueller-like asides on cinematic identification, nearly went right past me.

I suspect it may have been a result of expectations—I don’t expect movies in which people speak English to teach me overt lessons in film theory. Or perhaps it’s that subtitles rob a film of some of its potential emotional wallop; there is something to be taken from a work of art in its original language. Funny Games U.S. is far more thrilling than its ivory-tower predecessor; watching it was akin to watching any other horror movie, though with the emotional involvement raised exponentially. Funny Games offers up nothing to enjoy, only things to get upset about and lessons to learn; that is, it certainly does provoke an intellectual reaction, but much more so it elicits a pure emotional response, both awful and profound. At that point, there seems a disconnect between Haneke’s attempt and his end result—there’s still something perversely entertaining about his punishing cinematic exercise, and it’s not the stern talking to he tries to dish out.

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Ace in the Hole (1951)

Full credits from IMDb

Directed by: Billy Wilder
Written by: Walter Newman, Lesser Samuels & Billy Wilder

Grade: A-

It would be easy to say that the trenchant and blistering Ace in the Hole was “ahead of its time,” but it might be more accurate to simply admit that things have just always been bad. It’s troubling to think so, but Billy Wilder’s dramatic treatise on how and when journalists cross the line—and how the audience eats it up—feels incredibly timely, as it must have upon its release, too. A ripping and bitter yarn, Ace in the Hole never mutes its caustic view of the world, nor does it let the audience off the hook for one second. Accordingly, it flopped upon its release, probably because America wasn’t willing to look into such a sallow mirror.

Kirk Douglas, acting a bit too hammy, stars as a hard-drinking, troublemaking east-coast reporter stationed out west, in exile after being fired several times over from all the big city papers. Stuck in what he calls a “sun-baked Siberia,” he bemoans, as though out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, the lack of garlic pickles and chopped chicken liver. “Even for Albuquerque,” Douglas says, “this is pretty Albuquerque.”

Douglas is doing time, waiting for a big story that’ll get him another job back east—that is, wishing for disaster for the sake of a juicy story. “Bad news sells best and good news is no news,” Douglas says. “If there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog.” But before he can, he stumbles upon a cave-in at a mine with a fella, Richard Benedict, trapped in the rubble. Good news for the dog, bad news for the fella.

Colluding with the sheriff to keep Benedict trapped as long as possible, Douglas dictates how the news story progresses, seemingly ignoring that a man’s life is at stake. He does what he has to, even slaps a dame around, in order to get the story shaped just right, transforming the lonesome desert valley site into a full-blown media circus of the absurd in the process, complete with rides and ice cream—the film was re-titled, in an effort to give it a more box-office friendly title, The Big Carnival—all centered on Douglas’ ace, literally in a hole.

Early on, Douglas says of himself, defensively, “I don’t make things happen, all I do is write about them.” But that’s entirely untrue, we quickly learn—Douglas, to scoop the national story that could get him back to New York, crosses the line from impartial observer to active participant. (A conundrum revisited decades later in Capote.)

Wilder highlights, through Douglas’ cruel extension of the miner’s confinement, how journalism, at its most unctuous, compounds tragedy for the sake of a story. It’s what Douglas’ old publisher calls “phony, below-the-belt journalism.” (Douglas replies, “not below the belt, right in the gut!”)

At first, it seems like everyone’s making out from the tragedy—the trapped miner and his wife are making some serious scratch, Douglas is working towards getting his old New York gig back, his photographer-slash-apprentice is furthering his career, the sheriff is getting votes, and the public is being entertained—so why does it feel so downright filthy?

Probably because it’s obviously journalism at its worst—tearing democracy down rather than building it up. Douglas shores up support for the crooked sheriff to enhance his puff piece, while he ought to working his ass off to, say, expose a corrupt official. Not to mention that, in reality, more than a byline is at stake. Wilder skillfully undercuts the slick media perfidy, Douglas’ constructed “human interest” story, by interrupting scenes with genuine human interest: the grieving mother passes through a scene, on her way to light a votive candle to the saints, in prayer for her son’s life.

And that tragedy is just as much our fault as anyone else’s. Slowly, Wilder implicates the audience in the film’s treachery, accusing us of being complicit in such dirty dealings because we’re the ones who go out and buy the newspapers. In the end, of course, things don’t work out and the situation that seemed best for everybody turns out to the best for nobody, even the media consumers. The tragedy stings most pointedly when Douglas says in the middle of the film, “tomorrow this’ll be yesterday’s paper and they’ll wrap a fish in it.” So what’s the point?

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Michael Clayton

Written & Directed by: Tony Gilroy
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: B

It should be obvious that Michael Clayton is a character piece, since its title bears its main character’s name, but you’d have to read the back of the DVD to know that it’s also a piece of high-class corporate intrigue. Unfortunately, it stumbles in its attempts to reconcile the two, as well as in trying to reconcile the fact that while it’s made for adults, in that it doesn’t spoon-feed its audience, its earnest outrage at corporate corruption is at best naïve and at worst facile.

A Byzantine legal saga that opens in media res, Michael Clayton forces its audience to slowly make sense of it as it plays out. Director Gilroy allows scenes of dialogue to play out, only to explain in the middle of the next scene what the characters were talking about. In accordance, the picture opens with the ending and works its way back to how it got there.

Clayton is a lawfirm’s fixer, a “janitor,” sent to clean-up the mess made by an off-his-meds, manic-depressive Tom Wilkinson, a partner at Clayton’s firm who’s stripped naked in the middle of a deposition. Even worse, he’s begun to amass a case against the client he’s supposed to be defending, the manufacturer of a (poisonous) weed-killer that’s facing a class-action lawsuit from affected farmers—those noble American farmers.

George Clooney plays Clayton as a hangdog urban loser—introduced playing cards at midnight in a Chinatown basement—your standard sadsack (divorcee, custody on the weekends, losing his business on the side) who’s been screwed over by everyone, especially himself. As Tom Hanks is our Jimmy Stewart, Clooney has always been our Cary Grant, but Clooney continues to mature as an actor. As Clayton, he adds a bit of throaty husk to his voice, undercutting his movie star charisma. In effect, he’s added a measure of rugged Bogart to his graceful Grantness.

But Clooney’s performance is outdone by Wilkinson’s turn as the litigator who has flipped both his position and his wig. Wilkinson, captivatingly mad, rocks back and forth nervously and fidgets manically as he speaks, but never tips over into histrionics, impressively delivering nonsense lines—like, “I am Shiva, the God of Death”—with surprising credibility.

Tilda Swinton gives a fine turn as well (all three were nominated for acting Oscars, but only she won) as the cool-headed head-counsel. Gilroy cleverly clues us into her trembling vulnerability by belying her steely public professionalism through parallel editing; he introduces her by cutting between her confident delivery of public testimony and a private moment practicing the same speech, crying in the bathroom and topless but for a bra. (It’s her Marion Crane moment.)

With inspired bits like that, Gilroy commendably keeps the film deftly moving—it’s tight and terse without allowing its scenes to drag. (A tricky feat for a talky thriller.) Clooney, at one point, is leaving a dramatic message on Wilkinson’s voice mail but when enough’s enough Gilroy cuts him off. The mailbox is full; let’s get on with it.

But that’s because Gilroy’s got to move as quick as he can to cover all the ground he’s set up for himself. One of Michael Clayton’s biggest problems is that it spends a considerable number of its frames establishing aspects of Clayton’s character that don’t seem to have much impact on the corporate thriller that he’s a player within.

Gilroy’s other major problem is his immature indignation. Despite boasting one of film’s most chillingly clinical and procedural murder sequences, Michael Clayton is not a very chilling film. Corporations do terrible things and immoral law firms cover for them; it takes Clayton nearly an entire film to figure this out and to decide that it’s bad. If that’s a character arc, Clayton’s a little old to be learning it—it’s a simple lesson that college freshmen learn every fall.

The film ends with a bit of old-fashioned, self-righteous triumphalism incongruous with the bleak picture painted by the preceding film, and it makes sure that the audience isn’t implicated in the corruption that the film presents, leaving them free to tsk-tsk a corrupt, corporatized America from a comfortable and self-satisfied distance.

Clooney, with his earnest Murrowphilia, seems to appeal to one demographic above all—graying Democrats, who appreciate lessons learned and a dreary situation turned hopeful. Feel free to feel good—Clayton’s got a son, who he tells, “you’re not going to be one of these people that goes through life wondering why shit keeps falling out of the sky around them.” So there’s hope yet. In the real world, the Fed bails out Bear Sterns. It’s only people rich enough to buy an umbrella who don’t have to worry about shit falling out of the sky.

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The Bridge to Terabithia

Full Credits from IMDb

Directed by: Gabor Csupo
Written by: Jeff Stockwell & David Paterson

Grade: C+

Katherine Paterson’s The Bridge to Terabithia is one of those books that always ends up high on the list of novels that censorious administrators love to ban from school libraries. For starters, it has not one but several instances of young people taking the Lord’s name in vain, as well as allusions to paganism, a refusal to stand for the pledge of allegiance, underage smoking, a kid who calls her parents by their first names and a wild, allegorical scene involving the milking of a cow.

So why would Walden Media, with its known Christian agenda (including The Chronicles of Narnia franchise), want to produce a film version? Was it with the best of intentions—to rescue the novel’s touching core story from the book-burners? Unfortunately, it seems more for the purposes of Christianizing an ungodly book. Gone are all of the aforementioned objectionable aspects, and in their place, an expanded evangelizing subtext.

Two bullied young outcasts and new neighbors, Josh Hutcherson & AnnaSophia Robb, form a friendship over their shared creative impulses—Hutcherson is an artist, Robb a writer. Together, they invent a fantasyland in the woods behind their homes where they can escape from their humdrum lives, a magical kingdom they call Terabithia (where, for example, dragonflies are “warriors from the Tree Top Provinces”).

Conflicts that they duo face in Terabithia mirror and inform the conflicts they face in real life, with bullies manifest as giant trolls or flying squirrel monsters. Director Csupo doesn’t let the fantasy overwhelm the reality, and as a result he establishes an intriguing contrast between the wealth of imagination and the poverty of existence. But he relies too heavily on literalizing the kids’ fantasies, showing us Terabithia as it appears through the eyes of the children’s imaginations. For a film that propounds the importance of a healthy and active imagination, it doesn’t trust the audience to have one of their own.

That problem is endemic through the film, particularly in its use of an over-the-top soundtrack, including selections from Disney Radio (Miley Cyrus!), that leaves nothing open to interpretation. But the film's most objectionable aspect is surely its bullying Christianity. Robb is the secular child of fun-loving intellectuals who never goes to church, in contrast to Hutcherson and his family. (A notable contrast to the book, in which Hutcherson’s character’s family only goes to church on Easter, and only then begrudgingly.) So the Hutchersons take her to church one Sunday—first getting the tomboy into a proper dress, of course—where she literally fills her purse with the light of the Lord.

Afterwards, on a truck bed, there’s a frank discussion about religion between the kids, which Robb concludes by declaring, of Christianity, “you have to believe it and you hate it. I don’t, and I love it.” But she doesn’t love it properly, with the proper reverence of belief, and so for the head-in-the-clouds heathenism that she and her parents represent, the girl dies one rainy afternoon. Scared yet, pagans? But don’t worry—the film makes sure to let us know that Robb isn’t going to Hell. God kills little girls, but he’s not a monster. And that’s all the more reason to love Him, in all his merciful grace. Isn't it?

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