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.")

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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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Heartless

Written & Directed by: Philip Ridley
Full credits at IMDb

It’s not that the world has gone to hell in Heartless—it’s that Hell has gone to the world! What if, wonders this grungy, trippy, thoughtful moral-horror-fable, those nihilistic East London delinquents that Harry Brown preferred to plug were actually agents of Satan? Jamie (Jim Sturgess) is the first person to discover this demonic conspiracy, because he kinda bridges the divide between humans and supernatural evil. He’s Two Face, with a huge heart-shaped birthmark over his eye, a sort of perpetual shiner that makes him look like Harvey Dent after the acid. Not unlike many a misguided gangbanger, he lacks a father, and so falls under the corrupting influence of a figure who’ll fill that hole; the character is even called "Papa"! And Papa B (Joseph Mawle) offers to remove that disfiguring birthmark with magic—and thus, to Jamie’s mind, to give him a chance of finding panacean love—if Jamie will add some chaos to the world: like, graffiti? Or maybe just some gruesome murders?

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Triangle

Written & Directed by: Christopher Smith
Full credits at IMDb

Triangle is a time travel movie without a time machine—its repetitious chronoloops are set into motion instead by some unseen, punitive cosmic-force. Melissa George stars as Jess, a single mother with an autistic son, who goes sailing with acquaintances and strangers; before the daytrip’s machinations and romantic jealousies can erupt into drama, the wind cuts out and an epic electrical storm rolls in. Even worse, time begins to unfold, with dreams and radio transmissions providing glimpses of a distressed future. Oh, and then, an abandoned, out-of-joint oceanliner—yes, your classic ghost ship—emerges from the fog to rescue them. Or, to prove their undoing: this floating Overlook Hotel’s eerily emptied corridors, its decked-out dining hall without banqueters, will become the setting for most of their deaths.

Triangle slips into a slasher formula governed by an oneiric logic, in which The Last Girl Standing is being hunted by herself. Jess is tasked—or rather, Future Jess assigns Past Jess—to kill herself and her friends in an attempt to break out of the loop. Instead, it proves rather Sisyphean: after they’re all dead, time resets and a fresh batch arrives. And there are morbid, horrifying signs that this loop has already played out dozens of times. Writer-director Smith crafts unbearably tense murder-mystery madness, a narrative tour-de-force that borrows conspicuously from Timecrimes and becomes a kind of Groundhog Day…of Terror! But, beyond its dashing narrative success (which I suspect might be less impressive on repeated viewings), Triangle tackles tricky themes. The time-loop is initiated by a terrible act of violence. But it’s not just that cruelty that proves so detestable—it’s the nauseating futility of trying to atone for violence with more of it. That’s a message all of us warmongering Westerners, Brit and American alike, could still stand to hear. Grade: A-


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Poetry

Written & Directed by: Lee Chang-dong
Full credits at IMDb

Poetry (Shi), Lee Chang-dong’s attempt to reconcile the awful with the awesome, explores the origins of beauty and searches for the poetry in a culture so ostensibly devoid of it. The movie finds the mundane and the monstrous living side-by-side everywhere it looks—even sharing the same apartment—and then asks, how do we make peace between the simple, natural beauty of apples and trees and the terrible violence humans inflict upon other humans?

Yoon Jeong-hee, South Korea’s Meryl Streep, gives an epic starring-performance as a grandmother with custody of her grandson, a woman on the cusp of dementia who makes a living by caring for a stroke victim. She seems subsumed with a deep, pervasive sadness that she tries to get out in a poetry class. (“I do like flowers and say odd things” she offers as proof of her “poetic vein”.) But it only gets worse when she discovers her grandson was involved in repeated gang rapes that drove a classmate to suicide. Yes, that boy steeped in banal boyhood signifiers—junk food, dumb television—is a monster; his benign-seeming schoolyard chums are his co-conspirators in a program of systematized sexual assault.

And yet Poetry acknowledges there is still beauty to be found all around: sunny, island fishing-idylls, before the dead body washes in; architecturally staggering churches, before the funeral mass; riverside quiet, before the rainstorm. “Even the suffering is beautiful,” one character says. Lee, a poet of images according to the terms he has set—he is a director who sees the world, really sees it—dramatizes beautifully how maybe it’s from this conflict that “poetry” arises: beauty from ugliness, truth from chaos. Grade: A


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Paranormal Activity 2

Directed by: Tod Williams
Written by: Michael R. Perry, Christopher B. Landon & Tom Pabst

Paranormal Activity 2 is a lot like Poltergeist, except it’s bad. Like that 1982 ghostie, this newest installment of a fledgling franchise explores the origins of American prosperity, and shares a fear of middle-class signifiers: here, toys that come to life and, in its best moment, possessed cabinets. But the movie of which we’re most reminded, of course, is the franchise founder. And this movie’s failures just illuminate the triumphs of the first. Paranormal Activity père succeeded by virtue of its minimalism, exploiting in tandem its expert one-upmanship pacing and the tyranny of the long take: the audience was imprisoned in the unedited shot, with the gripping guarantee that whatever scare director Oren Peli had in store of them would be creepier than the last. Like any well-behaved horror sequel, this part-two has more—more characters, more cameras—because new director Tod Williams doesn't understand that the aesthetic only works with less.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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The Loved Ones

Written & Directed by: Sean Byrne
Full credits at IMDb

Hell hath no fury, indeed! In [Aussie gorefest] The Loved Ones...a rejected ugly-duckling doesn’t get her revenge by taking off her glasses, letting her hair down and proving beautiful (a la She’s All That, or countless sitcom episodes). She gets it by going psychokidnapper, sending her father, who wouldn’t be too out of place amid the Texas Chainsaw Massacre clan, to abduct her uninterested love interest on the night of the big dance and bring him home for a prom of their own.

As father and daughter, John Brumpton and Robin McLeavy are skin-crawling in their sociopathic glee, slathering in incestuous undertones their roles as baby-talking milk-chuggers who’ll drive a knife through your foot, slam a nail through your dick, or scrape a fork across your chest—and then chuck salt in the fresh wounds...

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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