short film reviews, criticism, and occasional musing.

Monday, February 25, 2008

The Brave One (2007, USA)

I'll admit it - I fell asleep. My boyfriend asked how I could honestly review The Brave One given this fact, so I'll try to keep this to the first hour or so. Very rote direction and writing. I'm disappointed in Neil Jordan, who has made some really good films, and rarely makes conventional ones. Everything just unfolded with such certainty, which I felt uncomfortable about given the treatment of the subject matter - the controversy, for me, ended up being in the inevitability of the plotline. Shouldn't there have been more hesitation surrounding Jodie Foster's character transformation from victim to vigilante? In some ways, there wasn't really any transition, like a whole quarter hour plus was chopped out between the hospital bed and the first revenge killing. Perhaps spending more time with Foster's character and less on Terrence Howard could have helped. In any case, I only have a vague understanding of what happened in the second half, but as I didn't feel at all interested in rewatching to find out, I count this film as a failure. A big disappointment, to be honest.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, USA)

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is possibly the most beautifully photographed film I've seen from last year, despite the occasional stylistic pretensions. Roger Deakins' cinematography here exceeds his work in No Country for Old Men (both of which he was nominated for, though he ended up being beaten by Robert Elswit for There Will Be Blood, a worthy choice), as it extends its creativity beyond the other, more stripped-down film. It's a beautiful achievement, and Assassination is worth watching for the photography alone.

The film is a challenge. It's long, ponderous, and occasionally gets a bit lost in itself. But the mood of longing and regret is pervasive, as is the fascination the film has with the cult of fame. Near the end of the nineteenth century, the Ford brothers, Robert (Casey Affleck) and Charlie (Sam Rockwell), meet up with the outlaw Jesse James (Brad Pitt) to help the James Gang pull off its final train robbery. Robert tries to insinuate himself with his childhood hero, but James is spooked by his adoration, and Affleck milks this sentiment in a performance that begins by being entirely creepy and ends on a baldly sympathetic note. As we follow Ford through his strange relationship with James, we see his developing disillusionment with a man who grows more unstable with each passing week. Pitt's performance isn't really a focal point here - he's serviceable, but nothing special, particularly when measured against Affleck. My feeling about Pitt as an actor has long been that he revolves around two poles, manic and laconic, and he has trouble reaching any part of the spectrum in between. James' psychosis suits Pitt's abilities well, but he has difficulty investing the character with much beyond this affectation - by the end, I'm not sure we know much more than Robert Ford did about what made Jesse James tick.


Note - If you ever want to be really annoying, and god knows why you would, but . . . . it's super-fun to talk to people about this movie by using its full title. Like, "Hey, there was this thing in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" . . . or "I was thinking about The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" . . . Trust me.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Immediate Impressions on the 80th Academy Awards

Amy Ryan, Heidi Klum, Kelly Preston, Marion Cotillard, Cate Blanchett and Katherine Heigl had the best dresses, though Heigl was wearing way too much bronzer.

Daniel Day-Lewis didn't look like a wino! Neither did Johnny Depp! Hooray! However, Gray Busey was sooooo drunk. Damn. I wonder if they let him inside?

As usual, Renee Zellweger just seemed so unhappy. I love short haircuts, but hers is awful. And what was up with Javier Bardem rockin' the Mel Gibson hair?

Why the FUCK was Miley Cyrus at the FUCKING Oscars? I know they're trying to skew younger, but that's just stupid.

I kind of can't believe that this was Tilda Swinton's first Oscar nomination. She absolutely deserved recognition for Orlando, but I guess the majority of her work is too weird for much mainstream award-giving. Also, she should have played Elizabeth I. I love Cate Blanchett, but Tilda would have really kicked some major ass in that role. My feeling is that her win was something like an overlook "oops," kind of like when Julie Andrews won for Mary Poppins. She should have won for a lot of prior work, but they're just getting around to it now.

Really? A piece on how the voting process works? That was dumb. Just move the show along, people. It could be at least a half hour shorter if they hadn't felt the need to throw in all of the montages that were put together in case the WGA strike hadn't ended.

I think it's kind of awesome that 3 of the 5 nominees for Best Original Screenplay were women. It's also kind of rad that a woman won it, though I'm still not entirely convinced that Diablo Cody was really the right choice. Consolation prize - I don't think it ever had a chance at Best Picture.

Yay, Daniel Day-Lewis. Not really a lot of doubt there, but it was still great to see him win. Not so sure about the double pirate earrings, though.

It was a Coen year. Normally, that would make me really happy, because they've been two of my favorite filmmakers for at least 10 years (also - "Henry Kissenger, Man on the Go"? That's awesome.), but I just felt stronger about Blood. But Cormac McCarthy looked so happy! How can I argue with that?

How to play the Oscar drinking game? One drink for every montage. One for every time they cut someone's speech off. And one for every time they show Nicholson in those stupid sunglasses. For the record, I'm wasted. (Not really. I stopped somewhere in the second hour.)

That was an incredibly boring show.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, USA)

Believe it or not, but I had never seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre prior to last Sunday night. I've never been big on Westerns until very recently, though I must admit that it was largely my admiration for There Will Be Blood that finally spurred me to see Treasure, since reading that Paul Thomas Anderson apparently watched it nearly every night before filming. The impact is obvious on both the style and content of Blood, which, like Treasure is also not really a Western when you get down to it. Both films focus on the venality of human nature and what happens when greed gets into the bloodstream. The only real difference is that in the latter film the object of desire is oil, not gold, and that John Houston provides multiple counterpoints for his main character in a way that Anderson does not. In Treasure, Humphrey Bogart plays Fred C. Dobbs, an American drifter down and out in Mexico. It's there that he meets up with Bob Curtain (Tim Holt) and Howard (Walter Houston), and the three hatch a plan to search for gold in the mountains outside of Durango. From there, the movie unfolds slowly, charting the change in each character, particularly Dobbs, as the trio strikes gold and decides what to do with it. Like Blood, Treasure focuses on the arid, brutal landscape of the Western side of the continent, places that reflect the brutality of the men who seek treasure under the surface of the land.

Exotica (1994, Canadian)

Exotica is all about recontextualizing the object of desire, constantly reworking the moment of impact, the point at which one event happened that altered many lives. In Atom Egoyan's breakthrough film, a small group of people revolve around such a single point in time. Egoyan shows us, slowly, the margins of this point without ever fully explaining the center. Instead he plays around it, investing the event with a sense of monumental importance in part because we can never know the entire story, and can only interpret for ourselves.

The main players are Francis (Bruce Greenwood), a tax man grieving for someone lost, Christina (Mia Kirshner), a stripper performing a nightly schoolgirl routine, Eric (Elias Koteas), the MC at Christina's strip joint, and Thomas (Don McKellar), a pet-store owner whose external view on the others helps the audience understand what's going on, how Francis, Christina and Eric are all locked into an endless cycle of grief and denial. In many ways it is as if their lives ended on a day several years past, and all they can do is attempt to rework it, get it right this time. It's a dramatic work of understatement, while at the same time an exploration of how loss affects a community as much as it does any one individual.

Monday, February 18, 2008

In Bruges (2008, UK/Belgian)

Anchored by strong performances from three very good actors (my personal distaste for Colin Farrell rebels at this statement, but I can't not admit it - he's good), Martin McDonagh's In Bruges is a darkly funny morality tale that's a little heavy on the plotting. I can't help but feel a little fatigued by the hit man framing, a device that seems dragged out of a dozen Tarantino rip-offs from the late 90's. But McDonagh is wise to forgo the sense of dirty glamour that most of those films purported about gangsterism, and instead sticks his pair of down-and-outs in Bruges, Belgium, to meditate on what they've done. Ray (Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) couldn't be an unlikelier couple - Ray is all brash upstart, forever wanting to go down to the pub rather than wait around for a call from their employer (a hilarious and terrifying Ralph Fiennes), while Ken is genuinely moved by the Medieval architecture and dreamlike provincialism of Bruges. But sightseeing gets put on hold fairly quickly, as a mistake Ray made on the job comes back to haunt all three men.

I wasn't expecting much from In Bruges, but ended up finding it funnier - a very dirty brand of funny, but that's the Irish for you - and a bit more thoughtful than the trailers had led me to believe. Still, for a movie that dwells so much on Hell and Purgatory, it feels light, as if McDonagh's real interest was in the character of a lost weekend in Bruges, which may explain why the plot feels forced at times, compromising the strength of the acting and the mood. This is McDonaugh's first film as a director, and I'd be interested to see what he might do with a more stripped-down narrative.

Through most of the second half of the movie, I couldn't help but stare at Ralph Fiennes' face. I wish I could remember where I read someone online opining about how even as Voldemort in the Harry Potter series, Fiennes is still magnetically attractive. That's no mean feat - Voldemort doesn't have a nose. In Bruges is the first time I can remember seeing age on Fiennes - while his face is still generally unlined and that bone structure can't be denied, it's starting to stretch into strange dimensions like some weird plastic, especially when he's shouting obscenities. The beauty returns when his face is at rest - a monster retreating to hide. Whereas Johnny Depp's mind-blowing good looks and eternal youthfulness (I call him Dorian Gray) have served him well as the eternal man-child, Fiennes' handsomeness lends itself to snakiness, to evil. I think I like him best not as the romantic lead (though he's definitely good at that), but as the man you can imagine got away with murder, literally, because of his face (wasn't that half the point of Quiz Show?). He was an inspired choice for Voldemort, and I think I would be happy to continue to watch him playing baddies into ripe old age.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Mr. Brooks (2007, USA)

Just so we're PERFECTLY clear - Mr. Brooks (Kevin Costner) is a wealthy box company owner. He also has an alternate personality (William Hurt) who tells him to kill people. After killing some people one night, Dane Cook catches him and begs to be taught how to kill. In the meantime, Mr. Brooks is being chased by multi-millionaire police detective Demi Moore, who is going through a really nasty divorce with that guy Samantha used to fuck on Sex in the City while possibly also being stalked by another serial killer who just escaped from prison. Oh, and there's also trouble at home, as Mr. Brooks' teenage daughter has just quit college and is hiding some shady secrets of her own (she's pregnant! and maybe some other stuff!).

Got it?

Good. Now for some questions -

1) Exactly how many serial killers are running around Portland at any particular point in time?
2) Why is it still acceptable, in this day and age, to show Kevin Costner naked?
3) Or for that matter, hire Demi Moore to act in a film?
4) How is it that no one notices the 5-minute stretches where Mr. Brooks is conferring with his alter ego? Do they just assume that he's really slow?
5) Why does an uber-rich box company owner drive around in a 1980's Volvo? Also . . . an uber-rich box company owner?
6) When did William Hurt enroll at the Shatner school of enunciation?
7) How does one go about buying a cemetery for investment purposes?

Okay, I'll stop. In truth, Mr. Brooks is a work of stupid genius, and it's completely fucking hilarious. It's not just bad, it's insane, and begging for some MST3K treatment like nothing I've seen since perhaps Mindhunters. But to be serious for a moment, I must admit I'm relieved to know that I am exempt from being stalked and killed by Mr. Brooks by virtue of the fact that I don't own a vacuum cleaner.

4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007, Romanian)

Watching 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, I couldn't help but keep thinking of Persepolis - in both films, the lives of the characters, most specifically the lives of the female characters, are greatly circumscribed by the political climate of the country they're living in. Despite the gulf of differences between Romanian and Iranian culture, not to mention the stylistic differences of the films themselves, they essentially say the same thing about the devastating impact political totalitarianism has on the individual psyche.

But while the scope of Persepolis is wide, 4 Months focuses on the individual event as monument. In the span of less than a single day, two friends living in late Communist Romania must procure an abortion for one of them. The lengths to which one goes for the other are both heartening - everyone should be lucky enough to have a friend like this - and utterly horrifying. Though only one of the two is undergoing the procedure, both of their lives are forever changed in this short span of time. In fact, it's the woman who did not have the abortion who may come away from this day most damaged. 4 Months is a gut-wrenching film, but not always for the reasons you'd think - I found a simple argument between one of the women and her boyfriend to be nearly as difficult to watch as the sequence dealing with the abortion itself. The story is presented in a spare, absolutely minimalist style. At times you can see little more than the backdrop of a room and one character talking or thinking. It's not the style alone that gives the film its sense of absolute realism, but all of the parts that end up running together. I came away from 4 Months wondering who to recommend it to - in a way, no one in particular and everyone I know.

Monday, February 04, 2008

Make/Remake - 3:10 to Yuma (1957 and 2007, both USA)

While the thematic underpinnings are the same in both versions of 3:10 to Yuma, they're otherwise very different films. The original is very spare, concentrating more on the tension of the waiting game in the second half than on the larger scope of the Wild West. The 2007 remake is a more complex beast - along with a greatly expanded running time (an additional 30 or 40 minutes), the newer movie features a much more complex network of characters as well as a shift in attention from the hotel room scenes to the urgency of the ride from Bisbee to Contention. There's also a greater depth to Dan's character - in particular his background and his relationship with his family - and this is evident from the very first scenes.

Unlike the original, which starts off with the stagecoach hijack, the latter movie begins with an expanded sequence concerning Dan's financial and familial plights. As played by Christina Bale, Dan is more of a sad sack than the prior character version. Van Heflin's Dan is not so much a coward as a fatalist. He doesn't believe that his intercession in the events going on around him will really make a difference one way or another. In contrast, Bale's Dan is a man who has failed at life - he's deep in hock to a local lender and is about to lose his farm. His cattle are dying, his eldest son is rebelling against him, and no one in town shows him any respect. He's not whole, as rather obviously evidenced by a wooden leg, a souvenir from the Civil War. This less stoic characterization makes Dan's interaction with outlaw Ben Wade all the more complex. It also changes the nature of his mission to take Ben to the prison train - in the original, it's more strictly (though not entirely) a mercenary mission and less of a point of pride.

In eliding the mission's progress from Bisbee to Contention, which comprises the bulk of the latter film, the relationship between Dan and Ben in the original is focused on what happens between the two men in the hotel room, as they wait for the 3:10 train to arrive. It's more of a psychological game in the original than the drawn-out bonding that happens in the remake. Adventures and danger along the trial, together with a greater range of interactions with other denizens of the Western genre, link the men in a way that simply doesn't exist in the original.

(CAUTION: SPOILERS)

But I think the true mark of the latter film's position as a "revisionist" Western comes at the end of the story. Since I saw the 2007 movie a week before watching the 1957 one, i had to ask myself if the original's filmmakers were really going to kill Dan off. The end is in fact so radically different that it's kind of amazing that it doesn't end up affecting the transmission of the theme. In the latter movie, after Dan is shot down at the threshold of the train, Ben turns on his own gang, killing them all in cold blood before putting himself back on the course to prison. In the original, both men narrowly escape the gang, jumping aboard the train as it pulls away from the station and riding towards Yuma together. They seem content with the decisions that they've made - Dan has redeemed a sense of pride that he didn't always know he needed, and Ben has grown to respect the man who has risked his life to usher him towards jail (even though he never plans to stay there for long).

The latter version is obviously more dramatic - I wonder if contemporary audiences would have been satisfied if neither of the leads had died violently. I don't know if Ben's transformation would have carried the dramatic weight if Dan had been allowed to live. So what does this mean for the original? The end of the earlier film contains a sense of hope that the 2007 version lacks. Dan is alive, the much-needed rains start to fall on the parched Arizona ground, and his wife awaits him nearby. He's ready to start a new chapter of his life, while Ben's more episodic journey takes yet another turn. It doesn't lessen Dan's willingness to sacrifice his life in order to do the right thing.

(END OF SPOILERS)

In general, the party line is that remakes are never quite as good as the original. There are plenty of exceptions to this rule, but it holds fairly steady through shifts in genre and era. 3:10 to Yuma is an exception in that both movies have strengths that the other lacks. I happen to prefer the remake to the original, but both films are linked by a strong story and generally strong execution as well. Their differences actually support the power of the source material, and both are boosted by strong casts and excellent cinematography.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I found Charlie Prince to be the most interesting character the remake had to offer. In the original, he's little more than Ben's anonymous right-hand-man. The latter Charlie Prince is a not-so-ambiguously homosexual cowboy, excellently played by Ben Foster. The choice to subvert Charlie's sexuality in a rather overt way is interesting, and I've been thinking a lot on it as a feature of the "revisionist" brand that i mentioned above. The latter film is more interested in exploring different kinds of manhood than the former was. Charlie is a badass cowboy, a psychopath really, and some critics have called his characterization bigoted because of the interconnectedness between his sexuality and his violence. But I find it interesting that Ben is pretty much the only person who doesn't question Charlie's sexuality as impacting his loyalty or effectiveness. This says as much about Ben as it does about Charlie, and it also adds an additional dynamic to their father-son relationship, which mirrors that of Dan and his own son. I'm still working out exactly how Charlie Prince functions in the scope of the film, and the closest comparison I can make is that to the character of Omar Little in the television series The Wire. Like Charlie, Omar is gay, and he's also pretty much the most feared person on the streets of Baltimore. How others respond to Omar's sexuality is a more informative route of investigation than merely looking into how Omar's sexuality is tied to his code of violence. I think the same is true of Charlie Prince. His complex coded sexuality is a controversial choice, but it's not facile nor is it necessarily bigoted.

My Brilliant Career (1979, Australian)

Why have I never seen this film before? I have a weakness for strong heroines in period pictures, seeing that A Room With a View was one of my first favorite movies. In Gillian Armstrong's debut feature, Judy Davis plays Sybylla Melvyn, a headstrong young woman growing up in the Australian bush in the early 20th century. No one quite knows what to do with Sybylla, who is convinced that she can forge a "career" above all other things - love, family, money, and social expectation. While watching, I was reminded of another film I watched recently, Year of the Dog, which likewise plays with the viewer's expectations of romance and independence. Career is a wonderful film, introducing ideas about femininity that Anderson has continued to play with throughout her career. The same could be said of Judy Davis - Career was her second film, heralding other early roles that would be similarly complicated, as in A Passage to India and Impromptu.

And how sexy was Sam Neill back then?

Halloween (2007, USA)

Rob Zombie's Halloween is terribly unpleasant. I'm not a big slasher movie fan (it's the repetition that gets me more than the blood spilled), but I've been interested in Zombie as a filmmaker ever since I heard him give a great interview on NPR a few years back about censorship and the studio system. As a writer/director, he can certainly bring the nasty - the first ten minutes or so of Halloween are incredibly horrible, even though no one actually dies until a little while later. It's Zombie's sense of atmosphere that's so strong, bringing out the grime and awfulness of Michael Meyers' lower-class upbringing. The intent is to inject some kind of meaning into Meyers' decent into murderousness, and while Zombie certainly pulls together a complete picture of an abusive childhood, he never entirely discounts Meyers' internal disfunction as a root cause.

Unfortunately, Zombie's atmospheric sensibility can only go so far, and the movie ends up being too long and drawn-out to really sustain any momentum. Slasher films might be all about seeing the bodies hit the floor, but tightening up the second half and losing a kill scene or two would have really helped balance the movie, especially as the establishment of Meyers' character takes up a good hour of the film's outset. By the time the final chase sequence was even halfway through, my attention was wandering.

I'd be remiss not to mention the awesome cast that Zombie assembled for this project. Forget all of the cute teenage girls without their tops on - Malcolm McDowell? Brad Dourif? William Forsythe, Clint Howard, Danny Trejo and UDO KIER? It's like a convention of b-movie character actors and bit players from the last three decades.