Tiny Mix Tapes | Film Reviews

Film Review: Beyond the Black Rainbow (Dir. Panos Cosmatos)

Daniel Sargeant — Wed, 23 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Beyond the Black Rainbow
Dir. Panos Cosmatos

[Magnet Releasing; 2011]

by Daniel Sargeant

Rating:

VHS fetishism occupies a peculiar space in cinema. It’s a part of the arch-camp that defines the style of the filmmakers in the Troma set, but it also maintains a confused relationship with the self-awareness that’s such a defining trait of camp. Videophiles find themselves enamored with both the shoestring aesthetics and the unabashed earnestness of filmmakers from Ed Wood to Ti West. Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow is a film heavily in thrall to the nascent VHS cult, drawing deeply from a tradition of marginalized genre and distorted aesthetic.

Story occupies only a fraction of Cosmatos’s project, while the fragments of Black Rainbow’s plot that are comprehensible tend to bleakness. There is a laboratory where an evil doctor works. According to the infomercial that opens the film, a researcher has discovered a means for generating happiness in subjects who enroll at the facility. As the film continues, it becomes clear the lab is occupied by only one patient, one doctor, and one assistant. Another doctor, Arboria — the founder and namesake of the facility — lies sedated and dying a few floors above. The patient, Elena (Eva Allan), suffers from an unimaginable psychic distress that comes accompanied by an unruly telekinesis. The doctor, Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers), practices a horrifying brand of psychotherapy; he is able to control the intensity of Elena’s pain with the turn of a knob. The assistant exists mostly because the second act needs a mutilated body. This is pretty much all the narrative Cosmatos gives the viewer; motivation isn’t discussed or addressed. The facility and its characters exist entirely so that Cosmatos can exercise his staggeringly impressive visual imagination.

The simplest visual analogue for Cosmatos’s designs would be Kubrick in 2001, but the intensity of color and contrast, the severity of objects and rituals, and the juxtapositions of horrific and vulnerable are all products of the director’s originality. He heaps image after image upon the viewer, paired with a score that alternates between ominous drone and the sort of techno that dominated darker film montages in the 80s. Unfortunately, Cosmatos is so enamored with creating his twisted psychedelia that he’s unable to communicate his ideas; rather than have style serve as text, the film instead ends up an incoherent series of images that haunt only up until they start to bore. Everything moves obnoxiously slowly; there is little dialogue, but when people speak they do so only in the same sluggish, exhausting cadence. Dr. Nyle is insane and has been for a long time; he’s reached a moment where he wants to both sexually overpower and physically destroy his patient, the near-paralytic young girl over whom his control is total. The source of Nyles’s insanity is unknown, as is Elena’s origin, and the film’s unwillingness to bend its aesthetic enough to let the viewer develop a relationship with any character makes it hard to care what happens to either protagonist. Given the film’s conclusion — a short chase scene; some lazy, random deaths; a faux-sinister and overserious final image — it’s not hard to imagine that Cosmatos doesn’t care what happens to his characters, either. They exist only so he can have a laboratory for his aesthetic.

Genre films often leave the critical apparatus bereft of anything to say; what that apparatus goes in search of, genre films dismiss out of hand (and vice versa). Writing, characterization, catharsis, and thematics are an afterthought for filmmakers like Panos Cosmatos. Instead, he obsesses over color and texture; meditating on the construction of his slickly constructed labyrinth and the violent choreography of his villain’s aggression holds more appeal for him than crafting an accessible narrative for his audience. Which is fine, sometimes: Beyond the Black Rainbow has one extended music break that makes it obvious how brilliant Cosmatos would be directing music videos. Unfortunately, these images would never be enough to sustain a committed viewer for two hours, unless that viewer was the sort of devoted genre acolyte for whom whole festivals and online communities exist. For the rest of us, Black Rainbow will remain frustratingly out of reach, an object only enjoyable as mute ornament, not as significant filmmaking.

Film Review: Bonsái (Dir. Cristián Jiménez )

Lorian Long — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:48:47 +0000

Bonsái
Dir. Cristián Jiménez

[Strand Releasing; 2011]

by Lorian Long

Rating:

I can’t fucking stand films about writers. It’s like smelling my farts after a night of whiskey-drinking in a room with no windows, no air, just pure stink. Watching a filmmaker attempt to portray something you do in your head, at home, alone, picking your scalp, deleting and self-loathing for hours, in a ‘romantic’ or ‘whimsical’ light, is pretty much the most disgusting thing ever. Writing is boring, writing is awful, writing is embarrassing. It is not sexy. Unfortunately, most films try to make it sexy, and they’re all bad liars. The gems that do make it work — Adaptation, Barton Fink, The Squid and the Whale, and the best monster of them all, The Shining — offer the subject some redemption, but ultimately the life of a writer is about as boring as dating one. And here we have Cristián Jiménez’s Bonsái, a film about two writers/literature students who meet, fall in love, and break up. Snooze.

Based on Alejandro Zambra’s novella by the same name, Bonsái is the story of Julio (Diego Noguera) and Emilia (Nathalia Galgni), two students who meet in a literature class, lie to each other about reading Proust, and end up making cute love with copies of Carver, Flaubert, and Perec littering the apartment floor. Fast forward eight years later and Julio is a struggling writer who occasionally fucks his neighbor, Blanca (played with beautiful subtlety by Trinidad Gonzalez), to whom he fabricates a lie about transcribing a famous writer’s novel, when in reality, he is writing the story of his relationship with Emilia.

Despite the film’s overwhelming tendency to shout ART IS SEXY as Emilia orgasms loudly post-bedtime readings of Proust, there are moments of genuine weariness as Blanca indirectly (and directly) acknowledges the cliché of fetishizing young literary love. “It’s a youthful search,” Julio says in bed, after she tells him that the characters of the novel he’s supposedly transcribing for someone else are “stuck-up kids.” To his reply, she answers, “Right. In search of their own belly button.” She entertains his lies, reading and listening to the awkward prose she knows is his own, and there’s a kind of grace in this acceptance, albeit of the self-hating, coddling sort. Not every woman is strong enough (or miserable enough) to sleep with indulgent idiots who are oblivious to the love and affection thrown their way by women who could crush graduate school muses between their thighs but, more often than not, are just too damn tired, and lonely, to care. In one scene, Julio takes Blanca to see a band in a club he used to frequent with Emilia, and Blanca sits down, asks to leave early, and ends the night throwing up at home. The film’s obvious point is that Blanca is not Emilia, and that Julio will never find another Emilia, but what I found more interesting was Blanca’s refusal to be Emilia for Julio, and the disgust (cue puking) at such an attempt to recreate a love on the page, when all you’re really doing is putting words next to each other and barely making rent every month as you turn 30. Writing a novel is not a noble act, and any attempt to suggest so is as flawed and self-serving as this review you’re reading right now.

Bonsai’s cheap cinematic sentiment of ‘because what really matters is that he let the only woman he loved go away’ is obnoxious in its own right, but my hostility also comes from a nastier place reeking of ‘life imitates art,’ and that is my own experience with eroticizing writers and literature. My relationships attempted to survive Nabokov’s entire canon, a directed readings on Finnegans Wake, Infinite Jest, 2666, Europe Central, and yeah, Proust. Just as Julio and Emilia try to make things ‘last’ by embarking upon the entirety of Proust’s seven volumes (they only make it through Swann’s Way), my relationships also turned to books to weigh us down, anchoring us to a life of bedtime reading and little talking, pages and pages of language offering nothing but a reminder that even art can’t save you from certain tragedies: no matter how romantic and hopeful it might seem, it’s all just filler for our eventual boring death. Not to mention that kind of anchoring can transform itself into an overcoat full of stones as you do your best Virginia Woolf imitation.

Now, I find myself to be like Blanca — worn, old, annoyed by readers and writers but still preferring that act of creation to most other things in my life, still spending Saturday nights re-organizing my bookshelves, and dating young writers who try to pick up women in front of me so they can recreate James Joyce’s Stephen Hero, in which Stephen attempts to bed two women at once. I watch from the other side of the room, the sidelines, smiling bitterly, all for the sake of literature. It’s a dirty existence. It’s a lie we tell ourselves — that art makes life mean something, that art means anything at all, when it’s just another distraction from acknowledging our existence in the abyss, an utter absence of significance, a layer upon nothing. Emilia’s preferred utterance to Julio’s pronouncements of love is “Blah, blah, blah” — three words that do infinitely more for the film than Julio’s tears as he re-reads Swann’s Way after hearing news of Emilia’s death. This kind of easy faith in art is a well-lit corridor of sentimentality and obvious emotion. Then again, what else is there to do but continue to lie, continue to read, continue to write, continue to create? It’s the only pursuit we have, other than the death drive. Just once, though, it’d be great to see a film about writers that is as dull and pointless as my sitting here has been for the past two hours.

Film Review: Battleship (Dir. Peter Berg)

Alex Peterson — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Battleship
Dir. Peter Berg

[Universal Pictures; 2012]

by Alex Peterson

Rating:

This is how Battleship works: Troublesome Boy steals burrito from convenience store to impress Girl at Bar. Boy’s straightlaced Brother decides this is last straw, forces him to join Navy. Boy is hot-headed, but rises to rank of Lieutenant in span of montage, despite fact that Boy exhibits none of qualities United States Navy takes into consideration when giving men control of multi-billion dollar machinery. Boy’s Girlfriend (formerly known as Girl at Bar), physical trainer for surly Afghanistan veterans, is also daughter of Admiral that Boy desperately wants to impress. Because of stupid scientists sending signals spaceward, aliens attack, assault, and annihilate Boy’s Brother, upsetting Boy nearly as much as inability to impress Admiral, who is too preoccupied with aliens to be impressed anyway. Boy takes revenge on aliens by plotting destruction of attacking alien warships in style reminiscent of board game on which movie is based.

In other words, this is how Battleship works: Like a sentence sans articles. It’s a high-concept action movie reduced to a series of ideas linked by little more than the spatial proximity of the frames of film they were printed on. What happens in Battleship has been dictated by the success of the past movies it apes, the other Hasbro toys (GI Joe and Transformers) that have managed to acquire their own summer movies.

The first half of the film is tedious exposition, the kind of boy-chases-girl tomfoolery you might expect from a film trying its damndest to replicate the magic of Michael Bay’s Transformers. You’ll spend this half waiting for the aliens, in hopes that they will suck up the tedium. They don’t, but it’s not their fault: they’re actually some of the better-imagined aliens in recent movies, which doesn’t change the way the film has them act, which is, in a word, dumb. When they detect weaponry or hostile human soldiers with their high-tech sensors, their response more often than not is to stand down, to not fire unless fired upon. Under their protective robot suits, the aliens appear to be very much like humans whose evolutionary processes took a few alternate turns, which is interesting (they’re not fanged lizards or amorphous blobs, nor do they bleed battery acid). But since they appear to be an entirely warlike race, a people who go about the galaxies plundering, it’s curious that they’ve missed an essential rule of warfare, which is that victory must be total if it is to be at all.

Nevertheless, when the aliens do show up, there is a glimmer of ingenuity to the remorselessly numbing proceedings. But when they turn out to be entirely one-dimensional dumbasses, there is nothing to do (you’re stuck in the theater) but turn your attention back to the lazy underacting of Liam Neeson (the Admiral), the spastic overacting of Taylor Kitsch (the Boy), and the staid non-acting of Rihanna (the pop star inexplicably cast in an action movie). Peter Berg, who’s moved from being an actor himself to directing would-be blockbusters (this, The Kingdom, Hancock), has an awful sense of narrative rhythm and a repulsive eye for framing shots. His over-the-shoulders, in particular, almost always feature more of the shoulder they’re looking over than the face we’re looking at.

So, you’ll end up focusing on the little things. The way the Boy and his girlfriend (Brooklyn Decker) tell each other, “I love you,” and how remarkably genuine it feels; the way missiles launched across the open water, their smoke trails pirouetting and giant flames roaring, momentarily lift the action to the less-than-infuriatingly boring; the intensity of the guy playing the Japanese Naval captain (Tadanobu Asano), whose presence is so gripping that you wince every time he has to deliver an awful line.

Here’s hoping the upcoming live-action Hasbro blockbusters Candyland and Lincoln Logs land a director who can do more than elicit a longing for the combination of tastelessness and talent you at least get with Michael Bay.

Film Review: Polisse (Dir. Maïwenn)

Susanna Locascio — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:30:00 +0000

Polisse
Dir. Maïwenn

[IFC Films; 2011]

by Susanna Locascio

Rating:

The ensemble cop drama Polisse, the third film by French director Maïwenn, finally arrives in the US a year after its Cannes debut (and Jury Prize win). She was inspired to make the film after watching a documentary on officers in the Parisian Child Protection Unit (CPU), the branch of the police that deals with child and teen abuse. It’s worth noting that Maïwenn did her own first-hand research, interning with a police unit herself before crafting the script with writer Emmanuelle Bercot (who also plays an officer in the film). Even so, the film feels loose and improvisatory, its sequences linked mainly by the resurfacing cast of characters whose faces and back-stories we slowly come to recognize. Maïwenn’s approach to this squeamish subject is unsentimental, the dialogue and camera driven by a restless energy. For most of its two-plus hours, Polisse is loud and boisterous, with emotions that run both hot and cold, and scenes that click by at a rapid pace. Given the inherent high stakes, Maïwenn doesn’t overplay her hand, but allows certain moments their peak of humor or despair. Sharply observed and compassionate, Polisse highlights the humanity of its protectors, perpetrators, and victims.

The opening scene of Polisse sets the tone for the rest of the film. Chrys (Karole Rocher) talks to a young girl, trying to determine whether or not the girl’s father is abusing her. It’s the most intimate of procedural routines, one we will see repeated with other supposed victims again. The officers modulate their tone for the accused, probing with harsh quickness that’s surprisingly effective. On both sides their main tool is language, and they combat its frustrating ambiguity with direct, almost clinical questions. Maïwenn’s interest in realism and documentary film is apparent not only in the fluid, handheld camerawork, but also in the way she threads the details of the officers’ jobs into the film’s narrative. As in any bureaucracy, resources are contested and scarce, and slogging through caseloads doesn’t allow time — or even much finesse — for psychological counseling. The officers try to be kind, but I was surprised by the brusque, straightforward, almost humiliating way they handle cases. Questioning is conducted in open rooms crowded with desks, with other officers in earshot. We occasionally see the lead-up to an accusation, but never the aftermath, a choice Maïwenn made deliberately to mirror the intense but limited involvement the CPU officers have with their cases.

The team of CPU officers the film follows run the gamut in terms of gender and ethnicity but all speak in a rough, slangy vernacular. The job seems to require a social, incisive instinct — a kind of bullshit radar — that’s also on display in the joking, libidinous banter they share over meals and coffee breaks. In contrast, Maïwenn’s own character is a more spectral presence in Polisse. She plays Melissa, a photographer on assignment to document the unit’s work, and is as patrician and reserved as unit members are working-class and expressive. One of the film’s central characters is Fred (played by the rapper Joeystarr), an intimidating and slightly volatile officer who struggles under the burden of what he sees in his work. Rather predictably, Fred and Melissa clash and then connect, finding they are more alike in their empathy than is first apparent.

A good part of the narrative focuses on the officers’ personal lives, on the families and romances they fight to preserve. This is especially difficult for the officers who are parents and whose fears of the worst are made manifest everyday. The violence, sexual abuse, exploitation, and neglect they witness create an emotional fracture, an intense pressure that begs release. They meet up outside of work to drink, play charades, and celebrate birthdays and their rare, small victories. When I saw the film, the audience seemed fully on board: they gasped when a strung-out junkie dropped her infant son, and they laughed, along with the officers, at a teenage girl who trades a blowjob for the return of her stolen cell phone. The officers taunt the ignorant girl; it’s insensitive, but also very funny. Marred worlds have their own internal logic.

Maïwenn clearly has a preference for realism and covers this terrain by relying heavily on documentary techniques. She works with highly trained actors off a precise script, but relies on improvisation and input from CPU officers on set. The film was shot using multiple handheld cameras for each take, a visual choice that fits the story very well. Maïwenn was nothing if not thorough, leaving her editors 150 hours of footage to work with. They’ve shaped an impressive film from that raw material, but most of the credit should go to the director. It takes subtlety and craft to create the cruel, chaotic reality depicted in Polisse.

Film Review: What to Expect When You're Expecting (Dir. Kirk Jones)

Alex Peterson — Mon, 21 May 2012 12:46:15 +0000

What to Expect When You're Expecting
Dir. Kirk Jones

[Lionsgate Entertainment; 2012]

by Alex Peterson

Rating:

It’s become medium business in the past few years to cram second-tier (usually former first-tier) stars into big, rambling, shambling love comedies and coast on the recognizability of their faces for two hours. It’s audacious of these films to ask for two whole hours; an hour and a half is as long as any comedy should be, brevity is the soul of wit, etc. Presumably, the second hour is needed to provide ample enough screen time for stars like Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Lopez.

In this one, instead of trying to hook up on Valentine’s or New Year’s (or because Steve Harvey says they should), everybody’s having a baby. Diaz, Lopez, Elizabeth Banks, Brooklyn Decker, and Anna Kendrick, along with their respective partners — played by a bunch of bland guys in very tight shirts — fret, bicker, and generally act like people in real life don’t ever actually act, while being excessively frazzled, gassy, crampy, grumpy, hormonal, and all the other supposed symptoms that accompany knowing you’re going to bring life into the world. Each character’s story is constantly in danger of being nudged out of the way by the next, which gives the best actors in the film (Banks and Kendrick) less than a fighting chance of delivering a real performance.

The one memorable element of What to Expect When You’re Expect is Chris Rock as Vic, a veteran daddy with blunt parenting advice for Holly’s (Jennifer Lopez’s) hubby. Vic delivers some needed gravity through his well-known, no-bullshit persona, at one point telling the pussyfooting, soon-to-be-father that thinking you’re happy in your 20s just means you have yet to discover the exhausting but inimitable pleasure of raising kids. His liveliness stands out in an amazingly by-the-numbers movie, but it’s even more conspicuous to see him playing the only black character — barely even given a name — in an almost totally whitewashed cast.

What do you expect when this many famous faces have been mushed together: a real movie, or a strange perversion of that face-morphing technique that music video directors used to rely on all the time in the 90s? If you drift in and out of sleep over the course of What To Expect When You’re Expecting’s interminable runtime (a distinct possibility) then you’ll probably see a new face every time you crack open your lids, making the whole experience look something like Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video filtered through images from a supermarket tabloid rack and run in extreme slow-motion. Which, if it existed, would be something I’d watch 50 times before going anywhere near What to Expect When You’re Expecting again.

Film Review: The Color Wheel (Dir. Alex Ross Perry)

Jeff Rovinelli — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:30:00 +0000

The Color Wheel
Dir. Alex Ross Perry

[Cinema Conservancy; 2011]

by Jeff Rovinelli

Rating:

Director Alex Ross Perry’s last film, Impolex, transposed the literary play of Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow into an aesthetic that resembled a film made by a 14-year-old who was somehow endowed with the ability to operate a 16mm camera, to unexpectedly effective, if minor, ends. His most recent film, The Color Wheel, makes something of the opposite move, taking the markers of the fast-decaying “mumblecore movement” — shitty camerawork, non-actors talking constantly about almost nothing, the lives of twenty-somethings, humor of the most uncomfortable variety — and pushing them in a self-consciously retro-literary direction.

Taking the 1970s self-discovery-via-road-trip model as his starting point, Perry sketches a dirt-simple narrative concerning a non-starter of a writer (Alex Ross Perry) helping his aspiring TV journalist sister (Carlan Altman, who also co-wrote the script) out of her ex’s apartment. In classic mumblecore tradition, each are consumed with the most prosaic of relationship problems, and the bulk of the action consists of a series of bitterly awkward encounters conveyed through dialogue that careens from comedic to deeply pathetic, often at the same time. For the majority of the running time, Perry is content to define his characters through their jobs and their tics, with no sign of any inner depth worth speaking of. But at long last comes the film’s vicious kicker of a final twist, and the non-details of the bulk of the film are suddenly reworked into a psycho-dramatic shocker that renders The Color Wheel deeply reminiscent of 70s chamber pieces, both shockingly gonzo and shockingly coherent.

If only it were possible to discuss The Color Wheel without discussing that twist. (An aside: I find that the culture of “spoiler warning” stands in the way of discussion and criticism. I’d love to spoil the whole thing for you all, if only to make a point, but I’ll wait for a later date to wage that war.) For now, it should be enough to describe it as deeply transgressive in a way that’s been, at least to my knowledge, totally foreign to the mumblecore genre up until now. Its implications are wide-reaching, both in terms of everything else contained in the film and in terms of the mumblecore movement as a whole. It brings out the insecurities at the core of the genre in a truly unsettling fashion, laying out a whole new terrain of incisive social ramifications for the generation the movement has documented so attentively.

It’s easy to get stuck on those final minutes because, in some ways, they retroactively justify elements of the rest of the film that initially read as overly mannered (much of the dialogue), pointlessly amateurish (the camerawork, the blocking of scenes), or just plain irritating. It’s certainly true that much of the pleasure of the moment does arise from the realization of the “point” of earlier, seemingly insignificant bits. But a closer viewing offers up many pleasures even in these earlier scenes, from a gorgeous sequence of the sister walking through a park that finds the bleakly emotive heart in countless washed out, lo-fi photo spreads, to the bluntness of a pre-coital conversation: “I’ve been wanting this since eighth grade.” “I’ve been wanting this since two hours ago.” Moments such as these point to Perry’s ability to work the raw materials of ultra-low budget filmmaking into forms that are successful as transient moments of effective cinema — even as he allows the rawness of the form to become enmeshed in a discussion of the implications of that particular mode of filmmaking. Most compellingly, this discussion never takes the form of a meta-narrative, but locates itself in film’s narrative, in its characters, their fears, and their lusts. If it’s a commentary on mumblecore, it’s only because it’s a comment on the sorts of people who populate its worlds.

With its ultimate insistence on character over meta-play, The Color Wheel is oddly retro-modernist for a film that’s being touted as “the cinema of the future” (to quote from Ignatiy Vishnevetskey of Ebert Presents At The Movies), but it’s hard to deny the power of a film that dares to make a bold statement from means and methods that typically devote themselves to the deliberately minor. Especially if it’s also funny.

Film Review: Elena (Dir. Andrei Zvyagintsev )

Jafarkas — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:30:00 +0000

Elena
Dir. Andrei Zvyagintsev

[Zeitgeist Films; 2012]

by Jafarkas

Rating:

It’s not so much the banality of evil but the evil of banality in contemporary Russia that’s explored in Andrei Zvyagintsev’s newest feature, Elena. Using a framework borrowed from that obscure piece of Russian literature known as Crime and Punishment, the film hones the precision of understatement into a face-slapping critique of Russian oligarchy, whose apathetic corruption trickles down to infect every rung of society. Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov is replaced by the titular anti-heroine, Elena (Nadezhda Markina), a retired nurse who shares a life with her second husband Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov), a wealthy retiree (whose name, at the risk of going out on a political limb, feels like a minor swipe at a more well-known Vladimir). Although they live in the same apartment, eat their meals, and even have sex together, the differences in their relative situations manifest themselves quickly. They sleep in separate beds, primarily so they can watch their separate televisions; Elena rides the bus, while Vladimir drives his luxury car; she does housework, while he works out in the gym and ogles younger women. These differences extend to their respective families as well: Elena’s son is an unemployed father of two, perpetually cash-strapped and unable to provide as good a life for his family as Vladimir provides Elena; Vladimir’s daughter, on the other hand, is a jaded party girl who shuns family, both her own and the potential of creating one, and lives off her father’s wealth (the film never reveals the source of Vladimir’s money).

Elena utilizes its first two sequences to contrast Elena and Vladimir’s existences, showing their daily routines in often mundane detail. In spite of these differences, their relationship functions because of a mutual appreciation for the other’s company, and an understanding that somewhat resembles love, although it’s much more of a social contract than a binding of souls. The contractual nature of their marriage is made evident as Vladimir lays on his eventual death bed, dictating to Elena of the terms of his will: she, who cares for him in his last days, will receive a stipend but not the requested money for her grandson’s college education. His daughter — who in juxtaposing scenes spits on her father’s existence to Elena only to then charms Vladimir with this very same bile — will receive everything else. It’s also no accident that she seems to resemble the younger, attractive women that Vladimir gazes on with lust. It is this injustice and the revelation of Elena’s status that provides the Dostoevskyian moment. Yet while Raskolnikov was driven mad by the visceral nature of his crime, Elena’s sin occurs in the ease of contemporary irony, as she combines her Soviet-financed nurse’s knowledge with Viagra, the pinnacle of modern capitalism, to put a figurative knife in Vladimir’s failing heart.

While Raskolnikov’s crime could find some justification in both the good he could have accomplished as a doctor and the inequality of tsarism and its revolutionary outcome, Zvyagintsev undercuts any vindication by transposing Vladimir’s shallow existence onto Elena’s family: the grandson is a violent thug who beats up homeless youths, reflecting Vladimir’s need to feel superior to his wife’s family. Ultimately, the upgrade in Elena’s provisions for her family provides no difference; they sit in front of the TV drinking beer in the crappy old apartment and in the nice new one just the same. As the film reminds us several times — most visibly through the opening and closing image of the leafless branch outside Elena’s window — the past will inevitably recur, worsening each time. The hollowness of the Soviet revolution is the hollowness of the Putinist oligarchy and its capitalism that does not deliver the promised results — at least the former had some ideal of fairness, however detached from reality it was. The only hint of a hopeful future is the enigmatic image of Elena’s infant grandchild alone in the center of Vladimir’s bed: has his death yielded new potential for this child, or is the baby destined to become simply his newest incarnation?

Film Review: Tonight You're Mine (Dir. David Mackenzie)

Paul Bower — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Tonight You're Mine
Dir. David Mackenzie

[Roadside Attractions; 2012]

by Paul Bower

Rating:

Shot on location during Scotland’s annual T In The Park music festival, director David Mackenzie’s latest film probably seemed like a really great idea at the time. Detailing one craaaazy night in the lives of two young musicians who seem very different at the outset but then go on to find that they have some very important things in common, the film progressively limns their inherent emotional and sexual chemistry, which in turn causes them to question their place in this mixed-up grown-up world. I hate to make Tonight You’re Mine seem so pat and obvious, but it is so pat and obvious — sometimes achingly so. The immediacy and cheapness of emotion in this film provides for some truly giddy, intoxicatingly youthful moments, but they’re quickly followed by an uncanny emptiness that, if handled more deftly by the filmmakers — or even noticed at all — could’ve served as an interesting comment on both consumerism in general and the commodified rebellion of the modern festival circuit in particular.

Adam (Luke Treadaway) is the constantly sunglassed front-man of an electropop duo riding a wave of adulation resulting from the moderate success of their latest single. Morello (Natalia Tena) is a keyboard player and singer for a positive, free-spirited girl group which sadly almost entirely lacks development as an element in the story. Shot inventively enough, we first meet the two of them during a promotional video Adam and his bandmate are shooting in the back of a compact car, driving through T In The Park, passing festival goers left and right. After an altercation with Morello and her band, some weird old spiritual dude handcuffs Adam and her together to teach them a lesson about getting along and peace and harmony and… that’s pretty much the conceit of the film. Not sure whether to indulge in some of the more primal opportunities for classic slapstick presented by this handcuffed situation or to strive for something more cerebral, Mr. Mackenzie attempts to straddle the two. The result is altogether predictable and slightly boring.

The performances in this film are solid and sometimes inventive, and the slightly improvisational nature of the film, flowing naturally from the tight schedule of filming during a major music fest, creates lovely moments that linger and almost make up for the cloying, fake depth of the story and some of its more heavy-handed comedic and romantic bits. It’s interesting that Mackenzie, whose most celebrated work (Young Adam) is such a classic, noirish, formal piece, would essentially let the wheels fall off and attempt something free-form and spontaneous. One can applaud the effort, but the formal elements of Mackenzie’s past works creep into the narrative of Tonight You’re Mine and seem completely out of place.

The essentially tragic thing about Tonight You’re Mine (and quite a few music festivals, now that I think of it) is this way of dressing up despair and everydayness with the trappings of harmlessly reckless youth, providing the absolute maximum capacity for easy nostalgia in a neatly wrapped, all-inclusive weekend package. For all of its intoxicated hijinks and vaguely hedonistic elements, the film strikes a resoundingly hollow, oddly establishmentarian, and moralistic note about love and relationships. This isn’t dionysian. This is Disney.

Film Review: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Dir. John Madden)

Alex Peterson — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:00:00 +0000

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Dir. John Madden

[Fox Searchlight; 2012]

by Alex Peterson

Rating:

Although it’s almost entirely inconsequential, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel maintains throughout its lackluster runtime precisely one stirring aspect, even if it stirs in exactly the wrong direction. The movie uses the entire country of India as its own Magical Negro, bypassing the worthy aim of capturing (photographically or script-wise) the beauty and culture of the subcontinent in favor of using it to guide a passel of bored English gentlefolk towards some peace in their twilight years.

The Magical Negro, a cinematic trope identified by Spike Lee, is a perennial pop panacea: the dark-skinned quasi-mystic who lends his soulful ear and sage words to a white person in trouble. The most prominent examples are Morgan Freeman’s Red in The Shawshank Redemption, Scatman Crothers’ Hallorann in The Shining (the Magical Negro pops up a lot in Stephen King works), and Djimon Hounsou in In America and Gladiator. Too many filmmakers look for a narrative shortcut in their reliance on conflicted, neurotic white characters who believe in the myth of some mysterious, pure wisdom coursing through other races — people who can remain true to themselves (and by extension, their culture) rather than be led astray by society’s evils. Here we have a horde of neurotic whites nursing at the wisdom-teat of an entire nation’s worth of dark-skinned people. Undoubtedly, whole countries have been substituted for a single Magical Negro before (Under the Tuscan Sun? The Piano?) but perhaps never with such weightless results.

Actors Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, and a handful of less recognizable pros have been assembled to play discontented old Brits settling into a charmingly run-down old folks’ home in Jaipur, India. Ostensibly, they’ve come for an alternative to the hell of retirement in gloomy England; in actuality, they’re looking to receive the healing power of the cute Indian culture they didn’t know they’d been missing. Everything’s a joke on aging, fusty English manners, or the gastronomical effects of Indian food until, inevitably, each of the retirees begin to realize that India really does have the ability to lend them a new lease on life, at which point late life lessons are served up en masse.

Nighy and Wilkinson — as a retiree who invested his savings badly and a homosexual court magistrate, respectively — make the most out of their roles. Both actors are blessed with the ability to play crap material gamely while giving the impression that they’re in on the joke. Nighy is an ace at conveying ironic distance from sub-par scripts (witness Wrath of the Titans and Wild Targets, for two recent examples), and Wilkinson, a great actor, lucks out in Marigold by landing the only character whose problems convey a real interest in India (he’s searching for an Indian man who holds a long-lost connection to his youth).

Smith and Dench — as a wheelchair-bound former servant and a widowed housewife, respectively — are each more than enough actress to handle the schlock with which they’ve been saddled (Smith spends the movie gradually easing out of her lifelong racism by gradually developing an appreciation for the hard work done by India’s Untouchable caste). But both make the mistake of going for the kind of gravity usually reserved for Shakespeare or Ibsen — acting that seems ridiculously unnecessary when it’s reduced to portentous speeches about the nobility of the underclasses or the best way to dip a biscuit into tea.

As you might guess from the trailers, things more or less work themselves out for everyone involved, and India remains as placid an imaginary playground as it ever was in a movie that didn’t care about it at all. But it doesn’t follow that movies aimed at an older demographic should be more simplistic, and there’s no way that Baby Boomers have greater tolerance for tired tropes like the Magical Negro than do the rest of us. That generation grew up on movies from the 50s and 60s, which were the days of Melville, Mann, Godard, and the late, great work of Renoir and Hawks. Marigold, though, plays to more conservative tastes that themselves don’t justify the kind of derivative stereotyping the film practices. Like The Bucket List, it’s another generic parade of irascible, shockingly foul-mouthed, and wizened geriatric stereotypes — a film that treats the elderly and the dark-skinned like sketches on a drawing board while raising the narratively damning question of why they decided to put older people front and center in the first place.

Film Review: The Dictator (Dir. Larry Charles)

Alan Zilberman — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

The Dictator
Dir. Larry Charles

[Paramount Pictures; 2012]

by Alan Zilberman

Rating:

General Aladeen, the latest creation from firebrand comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, is depressingly similar to Borat and Brüno. All three have silly accents and unconventional attitudes toward human sexuality. They are foreigners, and their prejudice informs how they interact with ordinary Americans. Most importantly, their lack of basic tact is a deliberate attempt to make the audience feel uncomfortable. But what makes The Dictator, Cohen’s latest, different from Brüno (TMT Review) and Borat is that he can no longer include live pranks in his work. He’s simply too famous to surprise anyone. Without any opportunity for improvised insanity, Cohen relies on the belief he can still shock an audience. After six years of this stuff, the only shocking thing is how he persists in trying to make this material still seem fresh.

Waydiya is the made-up country where Aladeen serves as leader. Thanks to his unlimited wealth, he has the power to change his country’s language and to call Hollywood’s sexiest starlets for impersonal one-night stands. Anyone who questions his methods receives an immediate death sentence. But when Aladeen flies to New York to speak before the United Nations, his head of security Tamir (Ben Kingsley) stages a daring coup. He swaps Aladeen with a double (also played by Cohen), whisking the real general to Brooklyn and shearing his trademark beard. In order to stop Tamir from bringing democracy from Waydiya, Aladeen enlists the help of Nadal (Jason Mantzoukas), a former nuclear scientist, but in the meantime, Zoey (Anna Faris) the food co-op manager enlists Aladeen as an employee. His draconian policies help revitalize the business.

The Dictator fires at all the familiar targets. His character is a patriarchal anti-Semite, surprised whenever American pluralism clashes with his limited worldview. This leads to lazy running gags — Aladeen jokes that Zoey looks like a little boy because she has short hair — and forced comic set-pieces. A trailer for The Dictator already reveals the sequence in which Aladeen and Nadal board a helicopter with a pair of hapless tourists, and its artificial construction kills their attempt to provoke. As with most of the screenplay, written by Cohen and three others, context conforms to punchlines when it should be the other way around. Director Larry Charles tries to imbue the formula with energy through transgressive sight gags (for instance, we watch Aladeen assist in childbirth from inside a woman’s body), yet the anything-goes approach only shows how the team is running out of ideas. Gross-out humor rarely inspires laughter when it exists for its own sake.

There is no denying Sacha Baron Cohen is a talented comic actor. His early work, particularly on Da Ali G Show, was so unexpectedly hilarious that it sometimes had me gasping for breath. Now that Cohen is a familiar brand, I’d like to see him refocus his efforts. His appearances in Hugo and Sweeney Todd were promising, so I’m curious whether his rumored turn as Freddie Mercury could signal a permanent shift in his career. The Dictator’s best attempt at satire, a lengthy list of America’s foreign policy blunders, is cheerfully poisonous in a way that makes the rest of the film seem lazy by comparison. With any luck, this will be the death knell of Cohen’s star vehicles.

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Beyond the Black Rainbow
Dir. Panos Cosmatos

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Dir. Cristián Jiménez

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Dir. Peter Berg

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Dir. Maïwenn

What to Expect When You're Expecting
Dir. Kirk Jones

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Dir. Alex Ross Perry

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Dir. Andrei Zvyagintsev

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Dir. David Mackenzie

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Dir. John Madden

The Dictator
Dir. Larry Charles