Kaboom

Written & Directed by: Gregg Araki
Full credits at IMDb

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

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


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Gabi on the Roof in July

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

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

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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The Housemaid

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

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

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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True Grit

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

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

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Biutiful

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

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

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Season of the Witch

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

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

But neither is it Valhalla Rising...

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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