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.

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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.

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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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The Fighter

Directed by: David O. Russell
Written by: Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson
Full credits at IMDb

This movie’s as hooked on clichés as [Christian] Bale’s character is on crack, and yet a lot of it—at least half of it—kind of works, thanks to Russell’s direction. You can see some meta-parallels that might have attracted him to the project: like Bale’s character, he showed some promise as a kid, but now seems past his prime. (I actually like, if not love, Huckabees, but I don’t think I’m in the majority there.) Like [Mark] Wahlberg’s, he’s been counted-out by copious haters, but this movie marks his revalidation, his relegitimizing, his comeback. (Curiously, this movie is Wahlberg’s pet project, but he took the flattest character of the lot—the dramatic catalyst.)

Bale has his own striking parallel to his character: did you see Terminator: Salvation? That performance was pathetic—pure, but unintentional, self-parody, worse than the Batmans. But this movie offers him some kind of redemption. Sure, it’s an Oscar-crazy, bug-eyed, scenery chewing kind of performance. But it’s solid and, best of all, fits in neatly with the performances around it.

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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And Everything is Going Fine

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh

Chronicling the life of Spalding Gray as told by Spalding Gray, And Everything is Going Fine is about Spalding Gray. But it's also about stories—namely, the ones we make up about ourselves. From 120 hours of interviews and performance footage, Steven Soderbergh, who directed one of Gray's monologue-movies in the 90s, fashions one last master monologue, 90 minutes of clear biographical narrative—no small feat!—from Gray's New England childhood to the creation of his classic monologues and his late life as a reluctant family man.

Gray was a fine actor, but his raison d'etre was his unique talent for converting life into theater—for forging a sort of public psychoanalysis, narcissism indulged from a knowing distance. (He called it "poetic journalism.")

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Sweetgrass

Directed by: Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Full credits at IMDb

Sweetgrass purely documents: without music, talking heads or bottom-thirds, it chronicles an old-fashioned sheep-drive through the mountains of Montana in 2003—the last time such shepherding would occur. This movie’s not so much about the sheep, though, which are often shot like Riefenstahlian crowds. It’s about the cowboys—er, sheepboys?—who move them. An unsentimental elegy for a classically American way of life emerges: a rugged, Western way of life, populated by irascible, vulgar-mouthed good ol' boys whose heads are surely as thick as the calluses on their hands. One even dresses like the Marlboro Man.

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Black Swan

Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Written by: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz & John McLaughlin

On its surface, Black Swan depicts the burdens of ballet (some might argue the clichés?): the competitiveness, the sexual aggression, the controlling stage moms, the infantilized adults. But Aronofsky seems more interested in female performers in general, fashioning a kind of dude-feminist critique of an industry that demands impossible perfection of women—of their bodies, of their talents—to the point that it drives them to suicide after it makes them crazy: thus, the way reality slowly slips away from Portman, her hallucinations of a deteriorating body. It also gives the movie a metacinematic dimension: is Black Swan also about how Winona Ryder’s career got stolen from her? Or Barbara Hershey’s, for that matter?

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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NY Export: Opus Jazz

Directed by: Henry Joost and Jody Lee Lipes
Full credits at IMDb

West Side Story looms large over NY Export: Opus Jazz, a Jerome Robbins ballet choreographed the year after Story opened on Broadway. It’s set to a cool jazz score (by Robert Prince), and features young New Yorkers snapping their fingers and fluttering their palms above their heads. They even dance in a gym. But this 45-minute film adaptation is like that iconic film purified: stripped of stars, soundstages and singing, and returned to awesome basics—the city and the dance.

NY Export: Opus Jazz recaptures the raw, exhilarating energy Robert Wise got out of Story’s opening scene and extends it into a self-contained story of its own. It juxtaposes the fantastical and the real: ballet, on the streets of New York. (Not unlike U-Carmen’s opera in a South African shantytown.)

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Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Written & Directed by: Jalmari Talmander
Full credits at IMDb

Growing up means putting away childish things—or, killing them, as in Rare Exports. In this Finnish coming-of-age Christmas escapade, a group of guys must save The Holidays by blowing up Santa Claus. Wait, really? Well, they have good reason: this is not your Coca-Cola Kringle, but rather a Father Christmas who boils naughty children in his cauldron and feeds on Blitzen's carcass. Wait, seriously? Yeah, it's more Silent Night, Deadly Night than Miracle on 34th Street—more Black Christmas than Crosby-crooned White—though writer-director Helander borrows the mold cast by the child-friendly and -focused adventures Dante and Donner made under Spielberg's banner in the 80s.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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The American

Directed by: Anton Corbijn
Written by: Rowan Joffe

Like Michael Clayton, The American is another one of those George Clooney movies for grown-ups, in which character, backstory and plot aren’t simply handed out—you have to work for them. Just not very hard. Clooney, of course, plays a disaffected, world-weary expatriate; sad, suave and gravelly voiced, he’s pitched somewhere between anti-hero and hero. (Clooney used to be his generation’s Cary Grant. Now he’s going for its Bogart.) He reads books about butterflies in his spare time, and the strangers he meets during his exile in an Italian backwater take to calling him Mr. Butterfly. Is he a hit man? An arms dealer? A super spy? Or just a gracefully aged hunk?

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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