Source Code

Directed by: Duncan Jones
Written by: Ben Ripley
Full credits at IMDb

A gripping and gooey sci-fi thriller about fate, do-overs, and not sweating the small stuff, Source Code is like Groundhog Day, if it had been written during the War on Terror by Philip K. Dick. Using the titular technology, the U.S. military sends the consciousness of helicopter pilot Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) into the body of a passenger on a terrorist-targeted commuter train, eight minutes before it exploded. Source Code isn't time travel; it's more like simulation, because Colter can't change what happened. (He's supposed to identify the bomber, so authorities can nab him in the post-explosion present.) Like an avatar unloosed in Liberty City, however, he can endlessly explore this recreated world, choosing every possible adventure, perpetually revisiting every detail of the eight-minute mystery.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Putty Hill

Written & Directed by: Matthew Porterfield
Full credits at IMDb

Putty Hill revolves around, but is not about, the death by overdose of a 24-year-old; the movie doesn't engage with such sensational plots: a group of teens in the woods stumbles across federal marshals hunting a bank robber, and they just laugh and walk away. Instead, writer-director Matthew Porterfield looks in on the lives of those who survived the addict; the movie is about them, as it sketches a bare portrait, retracing the dead man's steps, finding the empty spaces—and people—he left behind, from his beer-soaked karaoke funeral to the bare, flashlighted house where he died. The movie seems looking for a ghost, though, that doesn't exist: Putty Hill is a search through emptiness for something, for anything, that finds only nothing.

It's structured like a documentary portrait, but of fictional characters; the director emerges unobscured by artifice, directly questioning the characters when he's not simply watching them go about quotidian routines: it's like he's catching fictional characters in the usually ignored spaces between traditional scenes (like Gus Van Sant in Elephant), ignoring most of the surrounding drama. It's set in Baltimore, but looks an airplane's ride away from The Wire's innercity Bodymore—it looks like the rural South—yet it shares many of the same problems: drugs, crime, unemployment, ex-cons, ennui. Moving through houses whose walls stand undecorated, Putty Hill is infused with a profound sadness, and a spiritual emptiness, crafting not just a regional portrait but an eerie and somnolent picture of a whole Lost Generation. Grade: B+


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White Irish Drinkers

Written & Directed by: John Gray
Full credits from IMDb

Early in White Irish Drinkers, a Brooklyn-set bildungsfilm soaked in beer and coming-of-age cliches, a couple of Travolta-dressed slicks wander into an Irish bar. "Go back to Bensonhurst," the bartender tells them, "you disco fucks." Though it shares its setting—Bay Ridge, 1970s—with Saturday Night Fever, Drinkers feels a subway stop away from that movie's flashing lights and kitschy style. Which is to say: this movie's not about the American-born sons of Italy, but those of Ireland.

Nick Thurston plays Brian Leary (see? Irish), a sensitive boy—for a first date, he takes a girl on an afternoon stroll through Green-Wood—with a no-good bruddah (Geoffrey Wigdor), a poor put-upon muddah (Karen Allen), and a rough and tumble da (Stephen Lang, doing his best Ed Harris). Brian's a gifted artist ("Vincent van Faggot") who dabbles in petty theft, torn between two possible futures: College? Or jail, literal and not?

Keep reading at The L Magazine, or read my interview with the director.


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Four Lions

Directed by: Christopher Morris
Written by: Christopher Morris, with Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain and Simon Blackwell
Full credits at IMDb

The conceptually ballsy Four Lions is a very funny movie...about terrorism! It's centered on an English cell of disaffected young men with radical Mujahideen tendencies, plotting to suicide-bomb London. Director Morris humanizes them by positing them as familiar Apatow types: bickering buddies who can't figure out, at prayer time, which way Mecca lies. (The horrifying subtext of these wouldbe jihadis' buffoonery is that we're powerless to stop such morons from exploding us.) The skittish camera and skit-ish structure—not to mention the sense of humor, based around awkwardness, asshole behavior and perpetual incompetence—recalls the improv-based, handheld-shot English television comedies, from Ricky Gervais' multiple series through 2009's big-screen In the Loop. (Morris' previous credits are all from UK TV.)

The most unsettling part of the movie is how, through this kind of stylistic and structural familiarity, it makes us feel something we wouldn't readily think we could. Morris' gutsiest move, counterintuitively, is to exploit comedy cliches: the main character's wife and son, for example, buck-up his suicide-bombing spirits when he becomes discouraged and his plot looks bound to fail. C'mon, buddy—you can do it! Weirdly, we want him to: Four Lions is about a man struggling to follow his dreams, setbacks and all, and thus taps into the sympathies we've established over a lifetime of narrative experience. Who doesn't want to see a man accomplish his goals with the help of his friends? A comedy about radical Muslim terrorists is one thing—one that makes us root for our own demise is quite another. Grade: A-


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Black Death

Directed by: Christopher Smith
Written by: Dario Poloni
Full credits at IMDb

For once, it's not really about the journey—it's the getting there that counts. In Black Death, Christopher Smith's medieval road movie, a rogue's gallery of papally sanctioned Glourious Basterds travel through a bubo-scarred hellscape to a village untouched by plague, either to learn their secret cure or to slaughter them for apostasy. It's a bubonic play stripped of Hollywood gloss, a Season of the Witch corrective, torchlit and bathed in soot and smoke. ("If you don't have smoke, you don't have the right atmosphere," the production designer says in the press notes. "Wherever you went in the Middle Ages, it was smoky.") But it's not just an aesthetic antidote to the movies' Middle Ages banality—it's thematically counteractive as well, bitter with God-bashing venom.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Deep in the Woods

Directed by: Benoît Jacquot
Written by: Julien Boivent & Benoît Jacquot
Full credits at IMDb

The title (Au Fond Des Bois) refers not only to a physical position, but also a psycho-spiritual condition: this peculiar road movie-courtroom drama is often set on the back trails of rural 19th Century France—it meanders through isolated villages like Xena stripped of kitsch—but also features characters whose minds are lost in the deep recesses of human ignorance, naivete and superstition.

Nahuel Perez Biscayart plays the Templeton-faced itinerant Timothee, who rapes and ensorcells a young maiden (Isild Le Besco); as though he is literally magnetic, she abandons her father and her home to follow him on his wanderings. He is the master mesmerist, a puppeteer of human marionettes, the opposite of an exorcist...

Keep reading this dispatch from 2011's Rendezvous with French Cinema at The L Magazine


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Cold Weather

Written & Directed by: Aaron Katz
Full credits at IMDb

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

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

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


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I Saw the Devil

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

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

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

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts

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

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

We Are What We Are

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

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

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

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Vanishing on 7th Street

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

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

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

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts

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

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

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine