Aeon Flux (2005, USA)

Honestly, the less said, the better. As a teenager, I was a huge fan of the animated series, and though I had no high expecations for the movie . . . it could have at least been fun, right? Wasting a cast that includes Charlize Theron, Pete Postlethwaite, Frances McDormand, Johnny Lee Miller and Sophie Okonedo (surprisingly, Marton Csokas is the only one who emerges looking decent) on a badly-filmed, senseless movie such as this should be a crime, and director Karyn Kusama (Girlfight) may end up paying with her career. In retrospect, Theron should have been much more careful about her post-Oscar comments, as Halle Berry now has Theron's very own Catwoman to throw back in her face.

The Proposition (2005, Australian/UK)

I have seen several reviewers use the term “murder ballad” to describe The Proposition. The title of a 1996 album by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, the term may be lazy shorthand, but is still rather apt. Written by Cave and directed by John Hillcoat, The Proposition is both horrifying and beautiful, an atmospheric, character-driven ensemble piece obsessed with themes of love, loyalty, and redemption.

Set in the mid-19th century Australian bush (the bushranger era), a lawless environment only nominally ruled by the British, and bearing no small resemblance to America’s Old West. At the outset, Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce, looking even more tubercular than usual) and his mentally challenged younger brother, Mikey (Richard Wilson) are captured by the local police force led by Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone). Stanley is desperate to capture the eldest Burns brother, Arthur (Danny Huston), and uses to his advantage the recent falling out between the brothers, promising Charlie that if he brings Arthur in from the bush, dead or alive, Mikey will be saved from the gallows.

Everything that follows turns on this proposal, and impacts both the townsfolk – including Stanley’s wife, played by Emily Watson, as well as his increasingly volatile staff of officers – and the outlaws in the outback. For what is essentially a Western, and an incredibly violent one at that, this is not an action movie – Cave and Hillcoat are more interested in the characters and their relationships to one another, and to the atmosphere of a singular time and place in Australian history.

The cast is perfectly assembled, from Winstone and Watson, who make an odd-looking but deeply resonant pair, to John Hurt, playing the most well-read bounty hunter in fictional history, a wildly forceful man who quotes Darwin and expounds on the various racial inadequacies of Aboriginals and the Irish alike. As the king-like Arthur, Huston is magnetic, playing a man whom the local tribal people claim has the power to turn into a giant dog at will. Though he must certainly be mad, every action he takes is deliberate and unquestionable, and in the face of his charismatic brother, Charlie must make a decision that may undo the entire region.

Above the performances of the actors, the real triumph of The Proposition is its pervasive sense of atmosphere. After a certain point in the film, the final outcome seems almost fully transparent, but this never lessens the tension, the slow wait for an explosion to emerge. It can be almost unbearable to watch, while at the same time impossible to turn away from.

Charisma (1999, Japanese)

In their third project together, director Kiyoshi Kurosawa and actor Koji Yakusho venture once more into bizzaro world, with a dark story about a mysterious tree. Yakusho plays Yabuike, a disgraced police officer who, upon his dismissal from the force, ventures into the woods outside the city. He begins to live an almost feral and rather inexplicable existence there, and it seems without question that he has gone completely insane. Not long after his arrival in the woods, he encounters several groups of people – an oddly dedicated crew of foresters, a pair of diametrically opposed sisters, and a young ex-mental patient – all of whom are somehow tied to the titular tree. Yabuike is also drawn to this spindly-looking sapling, and begins to help tend it, despite being deeply unsure of whether it is a force for good or evil. (Is it protecting the surrounding woods, or destroying them? What will happen if the tree dies? Why does everyone care so damn much?) As in Kurosawa’s other films, details about background and plot are only implied, and the viewer is left to determine his or her own opinion about exactly what the hell is going on. Multiple theories seem possible, but will likely make even less sense than the film itself does.

Like Kurosawa/Yakusho's Doppelganger, Charisma is spotted with odd humor – so odd that some scenes seem almost unintentionally funny – and the entire movie seems at time a precursor for Doppelganger’s bizarre and hilarious chase sequence (which is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a film since the “Mountain Song” in The Taste of Tea). But in the end, Charisma is more akin to the team's previous effort, Cure, than to the later film, and the end result of all this dark humor is more disturbing than hopeful.

Welcome To Sarajevo/In This world (1997 & 2002, UK)

Even when considered separately, Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo and In This World mark the English director as a socially committed auteur. Taken together, the blend of fiction and reality within both films (something Winterbottom will return to in the upcoming Road to Guantanamo) also speaks to his abilities as a technically and conceptually innovative artist.

The closest existing parallel for Sarajevo is probably Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields – both films effectively fictionalize and extrapolate real events, featuring the stories of dedicated journalists who toe the line between an idealized objectivity and their human reactions to the terrifying events surrounding them. In Sarajevo, the central character (played wonderfully by Stephen Dillane) is a British journalist who risks both his job and his life to secret a Bosnian orphan out of the war-torn region and into his bucolic English-garden world (if there is one place where Winterbottom’s concepts falter, it is in his vision of England as supreme safe haven). While the film is firmly on the journalist’s side, it does not shy away from posing difficult questions about the responsibility of both individuals and the news media – what is more important, to walk down a sniper-infested street in order to help bear the dead away, or to tirelessly go on the air every night, advocating for social justice? For those (of whom I am one) a bit young to remember the horrors of the Bosnian war, simply substitute the Darfur crisis, and see how little things have changed in ten years, how easily the film’s specificity can translate to encompass so many different international crises.

As a film, Sarajevo exists firmly in a world of fictionalized reality. In This World effectively blurs the line between truth and fiction in its attempt to capture the lives of two Afghan refugees as they undertake a dangerous journey to the West. Netflix erroneously labels World as a documentary – though it is actually a work of feature filmmaking, Winterbottom uses the visual language of non-fiction in order to present an emotionally and textually convincing story. In fact, the filmmakers go one step further, not simply utilizing familiar documentary styles, but actually basing their story as close to life as possible. The two young non-actors who portray the refugees are really displaced Afghans from in and around one of Pakistan’s largest refugee camps. Their journey is based on real-life accounts from others who have traveled this same path, shot by a minimal crew in real locations between the Middle East and the West, and more than a few real people are utilized as actors and characters along the way. World’s unusual structure succeeds incredibly well – Winterbottom has made a beautiful film, one that is both visually arresting as well as emotionally and conceptually engaging.

One has to wonder, after a look at these projects (coupled, perhaps, with the director’s recent, not entirely fictional, Tristram Shandy), what exactly Winterbottom believes a director’s responsibility to be when it comes to distinguishing fact from fiction. Would Sarajevo and World have been as powerful had the director not brought his stories so close to reality? Would Tristram have been nearly so funny if the meta-meta-meta narrative was discarded in favor of a straight literary adaptation? As a socially motivated filmmaker, Winterbottom wears his heart on his sleeve, but his brain never makes simple choices, and as a result, both Sarajevo and World exist in a much more complex world than other recent films about similar subjects, such as Harrison’s Flowers and Dirty Pretty Things.

Spartan (2004, USA)

It doesn’t bode well for a movie when the reviewer can’t remember at 5P.M. what it was she watched at noon. To Spartan’s credit, perhaps I was just exceedingly hung over.

In any case, I picked up Spartan after reading a review of The Sentinel, which referred to the 2004 David Mamet film as an overlooked thriller about the Secret Service. More straightforward than many of Mamet’s other dramas/thrillers, such as The Spanish Prisoner and Heist, Spartan follows the activities of unnamed black ops soldier Val Kilmer as he fights many foes (both foreign and familiar) in order to rescue the daughter of the President of the United States. All of these details are actually quite vague, as Mamet avoids telling the audience exactly who the kidnapee is, or indeed what branch of the U.S. government Kilmer’s character really works for. His aim is to strip the extraneous exposition off of an otherwise economical thriller in order to focus tightly on the central character – unfortunately, the film flirts with pretentiousness by making everything needlessly opaque.

Indeed, Spartan turns out to be more of a character study than a drama or a thriller, as Mamet is more interested in his central character’s struggles against his nature as a soldier – told what do to at all times, and when to do it – in favor of the fulfillment of his duty. Kilmer’s flatness as an actor is put to good use here, going well with both Mamet’s stylized dialogue and the character’s background as a lifelong military man.

Though several of Mamet’s stock players show up, including Clark Gregg and William H. Macy, I was quite (selfishly) delighted to finally see a Mamet film that does not feature his horrifically mannered wife, Rebecca Pidgeon. Now, if only that film had been State and Main.

Domino (2005, UK/USA)

In the middle of Domino, Tony Scott’s fictionalization of the life of bounty hunter Domino Harvey, one particular scene pinpoints the film’s central problem. Domino (Keira Knightley) and her team (Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, and Riz Abbasi) have sat down with Domino’s mother and a team of television producers to discuss a reality T.V. show based on Domino’s life. The producer (Christopher Walken, phoning in the wacky yet again) is concerned that the footage they’ve gathered already is “too much like Cops,” and wants to lose the guys in favor of Domino’s sexy presence. Domino refuses – if she is going to do the show, everyone on her team will get equal coverage.

From this point on, Domino becomes the de facto leader of the team (though ostensibly still under the employment of Ed Mosbey (Rourke)), and Scott’s direction quite obviously stands in for Walken’s fictional character. The camera eats up Knightley’s body, sexualizing her character and injecting a dirty glamour into her violent lifestyle. Perhaps all of this is intended as a tongue-in-cheek gesture, but as with most everything else in Domino, it feels exceedingly hollow. It’s impossible to see how Scott could have missed the connection between the reality T.V. show and his film, but it’s quite likely that he just didn’t care.

Whereas the director’s Man on Fire used stylistic hyperbole (saturated colors, overblown subtitles, and frenetic jumpcuts) to give visual reinforcement to the emotional state of Denzel Washington’s character, here the same tropes are used for style’s sake alone. Rather than making a statement about the effects of a violent life, as Man did, Domino seems little more than Natural Born Killers redux. When an oracular Tom Waits shows up in the final third to give the bounty hunters a mystical purpose for their bloody mission, the film finally goes completely off the rails, attempting justify a series of bad decisions and violent mistakes. The painful, and yes, somehow grimily glamorous life of the real Domino Harvey, who committed suicide (possibly an accidental overdose) not long before Scott’s movie hit theaters, would likely have made an interesting and intelligent film about the reasons why an individual who seemed to have everything – money, good looks, brains – purposefully chose a life of violence. But through Scott’s eyes, Domino’s story has become little more than a sleazy, if well-packaged, piece of cinematic candy.

Pulse (2001, Japanese)

Pulse (Kairo), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 creep-fest about ghosts in the machine, is the latest victim of Hollywood’s mania for J-horror remakes. However, unlike staples of the genre such as the Ringu series (which was held back by overzealous production companies until after the American version was in theaters), Pulse is currently available on DVD in the U.S. – so if J-horror is your thing, snap it up before teen dreams Kristen Bell and Ian Somerhalder give it the PG-13 treatment in July 2006.

A little disclaimer – Kurosawa is currently one of my favorite directors, and I’ve been watching all of his films I can find since discovering Cure late last year. He’s a quirky master of psychological horror, and in movies like Doppelganger, Charisma, and the aforementioned Cure, the director and his favorite leading man, Koji Yakusho, plumb the often bizarre and ugly depths of the male Japanese mind. Paranoia runs rampant in these films, as do murderous schizophrenic tendencies and a blackly quirky sense of humor. They often tend to play on the border of J-horror without entirely tipping over the edge, but even the relatively straightforward drama Bright Future deals with issues of psychic rupture and a distinct mistrust of urban Japan.

Pulse shifts from this borderline style, wholeheartedly embracing the horror genre as packaging for familiar Kurosawa themes. The story begins with a trio of friends discussing their concern for a fourth friend, who has been holed up in his apartment for a few weeks working on a semi-secret computer program. After this friend’s bizarre suicide, the story shifts slightly, focusing on another young man and the creepy signals he is picking up through his computer’s internet connection. As these occurrences accelerate – strange, indistinct forms glimpsed on computer screens, coupled with a mysterious rash of suicides – the focus moves back and forth between the central protagonists, as it begins to appear that all of Tokyo may well be haunted by an unnerving number of unquiet spirits.

The structures of Kurosawa’s films can at times be maddening, as they often begin with only a cursory indication of plot details, requiring the viewer to pick up clues as the story progresses (which is often difficult while reading subtitles). The proceedings generally hang on mood rather than a strong story arc, and while mood is extremely important to effective J-horror, Pulse seems at times too drawn-out, so slow in mounting its final onslaught that the final third of the film ultimately loses a bit of steam.

However, what the final minutes of Pulse might lack in a horrific release of tension, they gain in a more subtle, pervasive sense of terror, indicating that Kurosawa’s intentions all along may not have been just about a good creep-out, but rather a twist on one of his favorite themes – isolation within the city and the loneliness of urban life. Kurosawa is adept at showing the solitude of urban spaces, particularly in densely populated Tokyo. Even before people start disappearing from the city streets, there is a visual emphasis in Pulse on empty, or nearly empty, rooms and deserted boulevards. Using horror to convey the desperate solitude of contemporary urban life is a nifty trick, but the match isn’t seamless, and if Kurosawa had excised a few of his atmospheric set pieces, the movie might have packed a bigger punch. Still, the director has managed something that I haven’t seen much of – J-horror that matches style with substance.

(Warning: do not watch this movie during the day, or in a room with a lot of lights on. Yes, this sounds like a ploy to scare your pants off, but Kurosawa’s the stinker, not me – visual details in the film are so subtle, and the colors so murky, that you may have no idea what’s going on if there’s any light bouncing off the screen.)

All Souls: Stories on the Edge of Murder (2005, Dutch)

The Dutch film All Souls is not a conventional narrative, but rather a compilation of sixteen short films on one subject. That subject is Theo van Gogh – in particular, his 2004 murder at the hands of Mohammed Bouyeri, a Muslim fundamentalist. Van Gogh was a controversial figure in Dutch society, known perhaps as much for his polemical writing and public words as for his controversial films. The films, particularly Submission, a short that ostensibly deals with violence against women in Muslim society, were seen as the motivation for Bouyeri’s actions, though van Gogh wrote a great deal in his last years about his anti-Muslim sentiments, and actively supported politicians with anti-immigration platforms – these were themes that connected all of his creative activities. Van Gogh’s murder spurred anti-Muslim violence and police action in the Netherlands, and the country is still reeling from the discovery that it may not be as liberal and tolerant as it once believed itself to be.

Working from this background, the films in All Souls do little to add thoughtful critique to the life and legacy of Theo van Gogh. To begin with, there are simply too many pieces here – with sixteen films packed into a 90-minute running time, few are able to sustain any thematic depth. Further complicating this problem is the quality of the films themselves. Most feature little more than cursory investigations into issues surrounding van Gogh, and many are simply baffling as to their intent. For example, Betsy is executed in classic horror-film style – an old farmer wakes in the middle of the night to discover that his goat is missing. He follows the animal’s trail into what seems to be a morgue (shaky camera, haunting music, and all), and finally finds “Betsy” in a room that looks set for a dinner party – there is soft music, a bottle of wine, and a photograph of Theo van Gogh. Is this meant to be a satirical critique of van Gogh’s famous fondness for calling Muslims “goat-fuckers?” There’s no way to tell within the short frame and clunky style of this piece. If it is meant as satire, the tactic of turning such a cruel and pointless barb back at the man who spoke it is little more than grade-school retaliation.

Even those films that can boast a bit more gloss and professionalism, such as 72 Virgins, are often baffling, at best. Virgins follows the recently dead van Gogh (an exaggerated scimitar stuck in his gut) as he moves through a mundane afterlife bureaucracy. Upon discovering that the price to pay for heaven is the erasure of his individual personality, van Gogh chooses to re-enter the world as a ghost. In Virgins, the filmmakers seem to be holding van Gogh up as a symbol of free speech and individual choice, but that message doesn’t quite mesh with the film’s satiric take on some of the man’s personal views. Furthermore, it is incredibly narrow view to take, one that does not seem to give anything of value back to the subject, and could indeed serve to as a continuing irritant to Dutch-Muslim relations.

Other films, like Stabat Mater and Goodbye, are simply incomprehensible, and look more like film student projects than professional cinema. There is also an obsession with news media that runs through several films, including Nightwatch and Cloud of Dust, but the fictionalization of news media in pieces like Cloud call the veracity of others, such as 2/11, in which we are supposedly listening to van Gogh’s friends describe their feelings and memories of the day he died, into question. (The title of the latter piece, an obvious reference to 9/11, is a questionable touch in an otherwise respectful, and somewhat saddening, film. If the piece dealt with the murder's fallout within Dutch society, and not the man himself, perhaps this choice would have hit closer to the mark.) On the whole, All Souls is a badly curated grab-bag of films about an important subject. Someone should make a film about Theo van Gogh and his impact on Dutch life, but please, don’t give any of these nascent auteurs the job.

Ae Fond Kiss . . . (2004, UK)

Ken Loach’s contemporary romance, Ae Fond Kiss . . . (the title is taken from a poem by Robert Burns), takes material that is by this point familiar territory for many filmgoers – the struggle for South Asians to be recognized and respected in the United Kingdom – and narrows the focus tightly, so as to make the story feel fresh and unique.

Casim (newcomer Atta Yaqub) is a first-generation Scot of Pakistani decent, attempting to balance his personal needs with his family’s strict values. When he meets Roisin (Eva Birthistle), an Irish-Catholic music teacher at his sister’s school, their awkward friendship quickly turns into an affair, horrifying Casim’s Muslim community and endangering Roisin’s job.

Yaqub and Birthistle are not particularly accomplished actors, but their chemistry, and the quiet way in which Loach folds their external difficulties into their relationship, makes them an utterly compelling pair. In some ways, Kiss can be seen as the inverse of Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding. In that film, the director widens her scope, expanding to take every character, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, into account. In contrast, Loach chooses to pinpoint his view, making Casim and Roisin the only figures of true importance. Interestingly, the results of these very different tactics are actually quite similar – both directors end up presenting fresh views of what are essentially very conventional stories of love and family.

Clean (2004, French/Canadian)

Clean is the second pairing of writer-director Olivier Assayas and actress Maggie Cheung. The first, Irma Vep, won Cheung an international cult following, adding to her successes on the Hong Kong action circuit and in the art films of Wong Kar-Wai. Her performance in Clean earned her a well-deserved Best Actress honor at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, and should serve to make her an even more recognizable star, despite a limited release in the United States.

Clean follows Cheung’s character, Emily Wang, as she travels through North America and Europe in a quest to regain control of her life after a lengthy addiction to heroin and the related death of her husband. Unlike many films that deal directly with drug abuse and rock n’ roll lifestyles, Clean is remarkably underplayed, a much quieter piece than the subject matter might indicate. Cheung is the heart of the movie, effortlessly portraying a woman who is forced to change her individualistic, hedonistic lifestyle in order to survive. As her gruff father-in-law, Nick Nolte quietly shows us a man whose belief in forgiveness gives Emily a chance to redeem herself.

Assayas directs deftly, capturing a sense of realism that exists outside of the more conventional realist dramas of Hollywood and mainstream European films. His camera moves quickly, capturing blurred images and striving to project a sense of time as it rushes through the urban landscapes of Paris, London, and San Francisco. In one sense, time is what Emily is batting against in her attempt to kick drugs, but in another way, it is what she is trying to capture and protect as she seeks the stability to reconnect with the young son whom she barely knows.

Adding to the texture built by Assayas’s camera and the stellar central performances is Brian Eno’s subtle score. Eno is the perfect composer for this project – an individual who has known the pains and joys of a breakneck lifestyle, but who has since matured to accept and celebrate even life’s more painful changes.

King Kong (2005, USA)

Lordy, this was awful. The pacing and the structure of Peter Jackson's remake were all over the place - I think he suffers from what I like to call "George Lucas Syndrome," in that he should NEVER be allowed this much control over a project. Jackson simply doesn't have the internal capabilities to rein himself in. With the Rings movies, there was a strong underlyinng structure provided by the book. With Kong, the entire film devolved into endless minutes of creature fights - ape vs. man, ape vs. dinosaur, man vs. bug, man vs. man . . . the middle section could have lost a good 20 or so minutes and come out being twice as forceful. Add to this crippling problem some very bizzare character choices (what was with the overwrought relationship between Jimmy & Hayes?), gross miscasting (Jack Black, who was enjoyable if you could imagine that he was in on the joke), and lazy acting (adrien brody). I thought Naomi Watts looked perfect, but I just can't believe her as a comedianne - she's only funy in farce, like her role in I <3 Huckabee's.

I know there were many critics who found Kong to be quite enjoyable, even a good film. I see it as a pointless exercise. Not just in that it is an unsurprising remake, but because much has been made of Jackson's painstaking recreation of Depression-era New York. But why does a particular time and place need to be recreated unless the audience is going to be given something new to chew on? If the period detail is matched with a good story and thematic depth - for instance, in Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock, not a great film, but a really interesting one, which shares some thematic similarities with Kong - then there's a purpose to be had. Otherwise, I'll just pull out my DVD of the original My Man Godfrey, which was actually made in the 1930's, to get my fill of authentic Depression-era New York.

Songs From the Second Floor (2000, Swedish)

I didn't make it to the theater this weekend (and neither did anyone else, Mr. Tom Cruise! Hah!), but I did watch a very weird, very slow Swedish film called Songs From the Second Floor. Generally, I'm not one to mind extremely slow, episodic films (as you can probably tell from my profile), but I nearly shut Songs off midway. Not that it was necessarily bad, but it didn't really seem to be doing much of anything.

The film takes place in Sweden, perhaps in a slightly futuristic, near-apocalypse world. There are endless traffic jams, religious crises, corporate and independent business is on the verge of collapse, the dead stalk the living, etc. There's no real story, per se, just a cycle of semi-joined episodes, some featuring the same characters, some seemingly unrelated. Songs is close to being funny (or perhaps I was just in the wrong mood), as many aspects of life in this weird alternate reality are quite literal - for example, being "haunted" loses all of its metaphoric meaning. However, there's a sense of melancholy that prevents the nascent humor from developing. If Songs is a satire, it's a straight-faced one.

Visually, the movie is quite interesting - some very beautiful and haunting set pieces (reminiscent of Gilliam's Brazil or perhaps a very stark Jeunet film), and almost everything is captured with a medium-shot stationary camera. For the entirety of the film, the camera almost never moves, to the point that when it finally begins to track movement in a few late scenes, it's quite a surprise. I do not recommend watching it on a small television - between the relentless medium shots, which contain incredible detail, and the subtitles, you might lose a lot of visual impact.

Thematically, Songs seemed a bit obvious, but then, I don't know a lot about contemporary Swedish life, so this may be one of those films that means a lot more if the viewer is invested in the social system from which it arises. I'm giving the film the benefit of the doubt because it has gained a bit of popular critical attention (if you consider Roger Ebert a critic, and not a reviewer), but I'm still not quite buying it.