Brooding, sophisticated and drop-dead gorgeous, Drive is lowbrow trash rewrit as highbrow treasure. Its clumsy coincidences, unnaturalistic expository dialogue and pulpy themes—vengeance, sacrifice, redemption—are brought to life with elegance and gravitas: it's the action movie treated like art, the cinematic equivalent of literary genre fiction. Ryan Gosling plays an unnamed mechanic with sidelines as both stuntman and getaway driver. He's a stoic loner steeped in Jean-Pierre Melvillean melancholy, possessed of preternatural driving abilities, capable of both honorable service and shocking barbarity.
At the same time, director Nicolas Winding Refn has said, "I've always wanted to remake [Sixteen Candles] in one way or another and, in a very unlikely way, I've done that in Drive." The movie switches between two tones: the world-weary and the romantic.
When I describe the plot of Restless, Gus Van Sant's sweet new movie about the paucity of time, the finality of death, and the small measures of love that give our short lives meaning, try not to roll your eyes. Ok, yes, it's about two teenagers who meet cute at a memorial service—she as a guest, he as a crasher, like Harold and Maude without the age discrepancy—and, yes, she has a terminal illness and he has a best friend who's the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot. But, despite this dangerous level of whimsy—compounded by a Danny Elfman score—Restless succeeds thanks to its winsome leads, black comedy and irreverent spirit. Plus, it'll make you cry.
Though tearjerker would be the wrong word because of its pejorative implication. Restless earns your tears, eschewing in favor of charisma the emotional manipulation that typically mars movies about death-disrupted puppy love, from Love Story to A Walk to Remember.
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh Written by: Scott Z. Burns Full credits at IMDb
The alarmist Contagion is the apotheosis of our germophobic age of hand sanitizer. From its repulsed series of shots of people making contact with each other or manhandling water glasses, I learned that no one should never touch anyone or anything, especially their own faces. That's how disease spreads, and diseases are like nature's weapons of mass destruction. (You saw The Happening, right?) This pathological aphephobia fits in well with a global culture in which relationships and socialization are increasingly moving on-line; the one relationship in the movie that blossoms does so through text messages. Physical contact can be fatal—our fingers may as well be made of knives—but nobody ever caught chiropteran swine flu from Facebook. (You'll excuse all the scientific terminology as half of this movie's all-star cast plays doctors and speaks in jargon-heavy dialogue.) "Our best defense," Laurence Fishburn's character says, "is social distancing." And yet Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns don't put much faith in virtual realities, as the film's "blogger"—the modern iteration of your archetypal shoe-leather newshound—comes off almost as bad as the contagious disease itself...
Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine
Directed by: David R. Ellis Written by: Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg Full credits at IMDb
If I think of horror movies set on lakes, I think of Friday the 13th and I Spit on Your Grave. Shark Night 3D takes place on a lake, a shark-infested saltwater lake, and it feels like a blend of those two precedents: like the former, the villain is a preternatural predator—nature's boogeyman, the shark; like the latter, the real bad guys are actually a few violent, perverted and crudely racist good ol' boys. The sharks are their minions, physical manifestations of their bigotry, sexual violence, and class insecurities. They're true monsters.
And a band of college-aged archetypes are their quarry, spending their mid-semester recess at a friend's Louisiana lakeside/sharkside house—there's The Nerd, The Jock, The Gamer and The Black Guy; The Slut, The Latina and The Virgin, each a total hottie. (This is PG-13, so the topless ladies are always seen up to their necks in water or with their backs to the camera; The Nerd has a muscled physique and chiseled features, but he wears glasses.)
Directed by: Gonzalo López-Gallego Written by: Brian Miller & Cory Goodman Full credits at IMDb
It's not NASA that launches Apollo 18's secret title-mission—it's the department of defense, signaling that this is no mere movie about the space shuttle program (however serendipitously timed to its demise). It's instead about the noble sacrifice honorable volunteers make for their country—on the orders of craven, corrupt civilians in control of our national (and intergalactic) safety. The movie's three astronauts are, unbeknownst to themselves, American soldiers in space. Their enemy? Killer spiders from the moon.
There was a time when a movie with space poison-spreading arachnids would have taken its name from them, but Apollo 18 borrows instead from its conspiratorial revisionism.
Directed by: Alex Kalman, Josh Safdie and Ben Safdie
In the Safdies' previous features, The Pleasure of Being Robbed and Daddy Longlegs, the brothers depicted Manhattan with detail as rich as an early Law & Order episode—not just its gritty streetscapes and local "characters" but also its marginal ephemera, on which they let their cameras linger: classic New York moments with hobos, hoods and hot dog vendors. The Safdies' mastery of these authentic-seeming asides comes from years of real-life wanderings through the city's fringes, with eyes and ears open—and camera at the ready.
Buttons is a two-part compilation of seconds-long "found films"by the brothers and their longtime friend Alex Kalman, shot on pocket cameras over nine years of Bloomberg mayoralty. They're the kind of arbitrarily captured moments of people-just-being-people you might stumble across on YouTube, here stitched together with brightly colored title cards (Private Idaho style).
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is a Gothic haunted-house movie (or a haunted Gothic-house movie?) that very, very closely follows the tropes established by all of its forebears (if we're listing some, don't forget The Orphanage, also produced by Guillermo del Toro)—except its monsters are super campy but its tone is super serious, like Gremlins without a single wink or smile. What a huge mistake. Anyway, what relevance do haunted-house movies have now? If there's a modicum of intelligence in their design, they can't help but comment on our housing situation, right? If this movie does any business—and that's a big "if"—it'll probably be because it tapped into Americans' new fears of their homes, brought on by the foreclosure crisis. In this remake, the house—or, rather, its hell-deep foundation (the mortgage?)—tears its family apart, but also brings it closer together, much like a defaulted loan can, depending on the circumstances.
Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine
Written & Directed by: Terrence Malick
Full credits at IMDb
The Tree of Life is not a political film—it transcends such material limitations and reaches for something more numinous: to discover humanity's relationship to the divine; to find the whole of cosmological history in just one man. And then, it stops. The movie begins with The Fall, the descent from grace into the entropy of nature, and loops back to trace the events building up to it. And I mean way back: Malick visits the dawn of time, the creation of the stars and the planets, the first signs of life on earth and the cosmically brief reign of the dinosaurs. This epic drama of celestial and saurian bodies culminates in the birth of a boy into Eisenhower's America, a Cain born unto an Eden called post-war Waco, where he progresses through a childhood that's an ideal of beauty and peace after eons of chaos: it's made of frogs and rabbits, Halloweens and Fourths of July, horseplay and baseball, Mahler and Brahms, and a father who looms like the Old Testament God. (Phew. You get the sense Malick shot 1,440 frames for every 24 he used.) Here is the innocence—the paradise to be lost.
Malick depicts the past in organic shapes: it's all trees, grass and open water, all spirals and tendrils, the texture of the light as central to the film as the faces of his protagonists. In contrast, the present appears as the angular, geometric and boxy impositions of man, cold order placed on sublime freedom, all metal and glass, where water flows in a controlled stream from a faucet rather than splashing freely in a lake. We can trace the origins of this degeneration; serpents arise to defile the childhood idyll: polio, layoffs, death, sexual awakening, masturbation, Oedipal conflict with a stern patriarch. Drawing on his own personal experience, the director finds in his memories a way to make sense of the metaphysical, wrestling with broader philosophical problems. (When a child dies, the film's mother asks God, "what are we to you?" Against images of stars being born in a spatially and temporally infinite universe, Malick suggests the answer is "not much.") But then the film loses its spiritual edge, becoming instead a loose, lyrical portrait of fathers and sons lost in its own bathos, insufficiently ambitious and too narrow in scope. The Tree of Life is not ultimately about God, the fall from grace, or Reaganism—it's just the personal tragedy of one man nostalgic for a youth he can't reclaim. Grade: B+
Written & Directed by: Ken Kesey & Alison Ellwood
Full credits at IMDb
Early on in Magic Trip, an assembled-footage documentary about the Merry Pranksters' famous ride, ringmaster Ken Kesey acknowledges that his now-legendary trip—whose historical significance has perhaps been overstated—couldn't be a book. It's an experience, he says, not literature. (Perhaps a knock to Tom Wolfe, who goes conspicuously unmentioned?) But Gibney and Ellwood's film isn't an experience—it crams a psychedelic, transcendental happening into the confines of narrative-documentary cliche, translating the lyrical into the prosaic. It's literature. (The musical cues, for example, are painfully literal, including gospel over a digression on the civil rights movement and "Got My Mojo Workin'" over a segment about romantic entanglements.)
An animated sequence, set to a recording of Kesey narrating one of his earliest acid trips as it's happening, captures the dynamism of hallucinogenic drugs. Otherwise, the movie is mostly flat 16mm footage, shot by Kesey and friends and seen publicly here for the first time, supplemented by 35mm stills; together, these two media still add up to a incomplete, limiting, and monotonous visual record. In Gibney and Ellwood's moviola, the footage feels like little more than the home movies they are, despite the hippie freaks who star in them or the interviewed participants who make sense of them—valuable to the historian perhaps, but not the general audience. Grade: C
Notice it's not called "The Cave of Pretty Pictures." Herzog's documentary, about the earth's oldest known paintings in France's Chauvet Cave, is a philosophical, poetic examination—in three dimensions!—of these primitive-yet-sophisticated illustrations; it grapples with the mysteries that linger after science has established bare fact. OK, they're 32,000 years old—but did their creators weep at night? Herzog's focus is scattered, even drifting toward what the cave might have smelled like (anticipating post-3D smell-o-vision?), but that's understandable: he and his filmmaking team were given unprecedented access to the cave—which is hard to reach even with permission, and where even human breath can contaminate the specimens—that won't likely be granted to anyone else any time soon, so you can't really fault his impulse to cover every conceivable angle.
His camera glides over the uneven bumps of the stone walls, the significance of the artworks that decorate them presented in the director's unmistakably Teutonic-inflected English. (The crew prowls along, illuminating its path by flashlight like criminals—almost like they're the explorers who invaded the pharaohs' tombs.) Herzog expounds on how the early examples of figuration unite Paleolithic man with his modern counterpart, establishing a throughline from cave painting to camera; in fact, he sees in the cave paintings suggestions of the illusion of motion, making them a kind of Muybridgean proto-cinema. Herzog connects the paleolithic to the present: shadow dancers to Fred Astaire, the fusion of women and animals to Picasso, depictions of the female body to Baywatch, the attribution of melodramatic beauty to nature to the German Romantics. A crude bone-flute from a nearby region can be used to play the melody of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Herzog is so fascinated by the past because he looks at it and sees himself. Some things change over the course of millenia. But others, like the torch-ash swiped 28,000 years ago that looks freshly fallen, don't. "We are locked in history," Herzog says. "They"—the cave painters—"were not." Grade: B
Directed by: Adam Wingard
Written by: Simon Barrett
Full credits at IMDb
You know who's worse than serial killers? Fanboys! That's the punch line to this one-gag thriller, in which Amy Seimetz meets-cute nice-guy Joe Swanberg at an AA meeting. She'll eventually take her clothes off for him (though not as quickly as Greta Gerwig would have), and then involve him in a deadly situation when her serial-killer ex escapes from custody. The miserablist A Horrible Way to Die crosscuts the awkwardly blossoming romance between these two troubled types with the tastefully edited road-trip rampage of an unleashed sociopath with a large Internet following. (AJ Bowen plays this mustachioed schlub, who, in a different context, could pass for a character in a Joe Swanberg movie.) It's mumblecore with homicidal tendencies.
Directed by: Marcus Nispel
Written by: Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Sean Hood
Full credits at IMDb
Of course Lionsgate would tap Marcus Nispel to direct this, right? The Platinum Dunes hack-for-hire has become the modern master of the schlockhouse reboot. Proving he could capably revive the Friday the 13th and Texas Chainsaw franchises, why not move him on to some other cheesy 80s property like Conan? This new movie has been in the works for almost a decade, as part of a carefully rolled out rebranding of the Conan character, who dates back to Robert E. Howard's Depression-era fantasy stories but "had grown plain weird," as Brooks Barnes recently reported. The company that owned the rights withdrew all Conan merchandise from the market in 2002, and has been slowly reintroducing new stuff ever since: new comics, a strong-selling computer game, and now the film. This carefully controlled strategy has culminated in a movie tailor-made for boys, who'll be thrilled into buying new things by the copious gore and bare breasts without being bored by things like character development or smart pacing. (Here's the structure: violence-violence-violence-exposition-violence-violence-violence. Repeat for 110 minutes.) But what's inoffensive for one demographic is exhausting, exasperating for another.
Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine
Brooding, sophisticated and drop-dead gorgeous, Drive is lowbrow trash rewrit as highbrow treasure. Its clumsy coincidences, unnaturalistic expository dialogue and pulpy themes—vengeance, sacrifice, redemption—are brought to life with elegance and gravitas: it's the action movie treated like art, the cinematic equivalent of literary genre fiction. Ryan Gosling plays an unnamed mechanic with sidelines as both stuntman and getaway driver. He's a stoic loner steeped in Jean-Pierre Melvillean melancholy, possessed of preternatural driving abilities, capable of both honorable service and shocking barbarity.
