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...

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Stone

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

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

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

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Red Riding: 1974

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

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

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

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Blue Valentine

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

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

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

Keep reading my discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Dogtooth

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

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

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

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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

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

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

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

Keep reading at The L Magazine

Inspector Bellamy

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

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

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Somewhere

Written & Directed by: Sofia Coppola
Full credits at IMDb

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

Keep reading my discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Frozen

Written & Directed by: Adam Green
Full credits at IMDb

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

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

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Rabbit Hole

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

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

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

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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All Good Things

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

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

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

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Tiny Furniture

Written & Directed by: Lena Dunham
Full credits at IMDb

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

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

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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