Directed by: Michael Winterbottom Full credits at IMDb
Many of director Michael Winterbottom's movies blur the line between the fictional and the real; those that do can be divided into two categories: politically charged, human-scaled dramas about the Middle East (The Road to Guantanamo, In This World, A Mighty Heart) and artsy larks with Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People, Tristram Shandy). Winterbottom's latest, The Trip, adapted from a six-part BBC series, falls firmly into the second camp: regardless of how much of it is "real," it's a conspicuous vanity project for Coogan, highlighting the actor's discontent with his failed personal relationships and hamstrung Hollywood career.
Written & Directed by: Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado Full credits at IMDb
The first horror movie out of Israel, Rabies (Kalevet) feels like a typical slasher with one teensy twist—its baddie is neutralized within the first few minutes. That psychokiller, setting traps in the woods to snag his mortal quarry, is shot with a tranquilizer, and spends the rest of the film asleep on the forest floor. While he naps, more mayhem unfolds than he could have wreaked in his wettest dreams, as his would've-been victims accidentally assume his murderous mantle.
Several groups—randy teens; a campground assessor and his dog; a salacious cop and his sad sack partner; a bloodied brother and his kidnapped sister-lover—cross paths in a mine-ridden timberland, with disastrous results for each: if the booby traps don't get them (bear traps!), their fellow citizens will...
Keep reading this dispatch from the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine
Directed by: Jim Mickle Written by: Nick Damici & Jim Mickle Full credits at IMDb
Strangely libertarian and pro-Canada, horror-road movie Stake Land boasts the stock archetypes and mythic aspirations common to comic books, but filtered through the unsmiling misery of realism—a glaring tonal disconnect that makes the movie silly, but witless. It's set in a post-apocalyptic America overrun with vampires, except the bloodsuckers are feral and monster-faced, more like zombies than the debonair living dead to which storytellers from Anne Rice through Stephanie Meyer have accustomed us. It may be a vampire movie, but Stake Land comes via George Romero; unfortunately, in its lameness, it has more in common with Survival of the Dead than Dawn.
Directed by: Michael Greenspan Written by: Christopher Dodd
Trapping a character in one place is a challenge for so mobile a medium as movies. Danny Boyle met it recently with kinetic frenzy, swamping 127 Hours' pinned protagonist with flashbacks, fantasies and videocam confessions. In Rodrigo Cortés' Buried, Ryan Reynolds awakes in a coffin with nothing but a lighter, a cell phone, and a high-stakes kidnapping mystery to solve; the movie overcomes its formal limitations with narrative urgency. In contrast, the first 30 minutes of Wrecked, a near-dialogueless anti-thriller directed by Michael Greenspan, sport no such bourgeois trappings as excitement or exigency: a bloody Adrien Brody wakes up in a totaled car, his leg caught under the dash, his head addled with amnesia. He cries. He mutters. He moans. He has a dream—about being stuck in the same car, in the same stretch of woods.
OK, so eventually a mystery emerges for him to sort out, but its stakes don't readily reveal themselves...
The writer and director of the original Saw and the producing team behind Paranormal Activity make strange bedfellows: in 2004, the former introduced the buckets-of-blood aesthetic that would define horror for the rest of the decade; the latter represent the most successful rejection of that trend, scaring audiences with little more than flickering shadows and rustling bed sheets. Their collaboration, Insidious, a traditional haunted house movie with contemporary twists, finds director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell longing to prove themselves, to evince their understanding of horror movie history, to demonstrate they are no mere fanboys but dedicated students of the genre—to rescue reputations sullied after seven Saws and infinite imitators.
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.
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+
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?
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-
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.
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
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
Many of director Michael Winterbottom's movies blur the line between the fictional and the real; those that do can be divided into two categories: politically charged, human-scaled dramas about the Middle East (The Road to Guantanamo, In This World, A Mighty Heart) and artsy larks with Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People, Tristram Shandy). Winterbottom's latest, The Trip, adapted from a six-part BBC series, falls firmly into the second camp: regardless of how much of it is "real," it's a conspicuous vanity project for Coogan, highlighting the actor's discontent with his failed personal relationships and hamstrung Hollywood career.
