East Village Idiot

Lazy Heart

2010-02-02T15:55:00.000-08:00

Thirty years after playing a small Texas town’s dim, handsome jock in Peter Bogdanavich’s The Last Picture Show, Jeff Bridges returns to the parched Southwest in Crazy Heart, with what could be his breakthrough character gone to flesh and seed.

Bridges plays Bad Blake, an alcoholic over-the-hill country singer (Is there any other kind?) Bad’s boozy fall from grace lands him in a series of desert honky tonks for a string of desperate, sparsely attended shows played through a sweat and puke-stained shirt. Sparks somewhat unconvincingly fly when fledgling journalist Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal) stops by one show to interview the fallen star, and inspires his gradual, painful redemption.

Crazy Heart’s stubborn resistance to a plot-propelling conflict is an odd thing to see in a movie otherwise rife with clichés.

Not every plotline can or should reinvent the wheel. And Crazy Heart has its moments. Its early live performance scenes endear us to and make us feel embarrassed for Bad. (You look on as the shows teeter on the verge of drunken disaster with the same wince Bad gives his lonely, weathered one night stands on those hungover mornings after.) These scenes also hint at some insight into the music industry. When Jean asks Bad if he “ever gets tired of playing” his signature big hit, I realized how tedious life on the road must get. I also wondered how the film’s composer, T. Bone Burnett, went about creating a soundtrack he knew going in would have to contain both crowd-pleasing hits and relative duds.

But Crazy Heart doesn’t dig deep enough. Musical interludes and discussions of the country genre (grizzled old vets of the “real” country versus the mass-produced poster boys—here embodied by an uncredited Colin Farrell’s Tommy Sweet—fronting the “glossy” modern country) are relegated to the sidelines. And don’t expect any revelations about journalism. For all we know, Maggie took it up as a hobby to avoid the extracurricular drudgery of crocheting.

What could have been and almost is a unique look at a craft like music or writing gives way to a trite, oddly listless romantic and family drama. Jean was burned in the past, so she’s weary of Bad. Bad adores Buddy, Jean’s son possibly more than Jean (shades of Jerry Maguire). Naturally this is because Bad is estranged from his own boy, with Buddy being the second in a line of surrogates after Tommy.

Then Bad’s struggle with the hooch kicks into high gear and Crazy Heart abruptly turns into Leaving Las Nashville. After Bad pukes into one too many motel room wastebaskets and loses Buddy as he gets plastered in a shopping mall bar, Jean rejects him and sends him straight into the arms of his buddy Wayne Kramer (the great Robert Duvall, also a producer, in a sinfully underwritten, boring and extraneous role).

There isn’t a bad performance across the board; even the faded floozies with caked on makeup who rub up against Bad have their charms. But aside from Bridges, no one’s acting or, more troublingly, character is memorable. Crazy Heart’s characters, like its loose strands of a plot (part concert movie, part alcoholic nightmare, part romance, part horror movie about aging) never cohere.

Crazy Heart plays like one of the commercial country hits Bad deplores, hinting at misery, but through a glossy veneer, with redemption never in doubt, just off the next exit on the lonely desert highway.

The White Ribbon

2010-01-07T20:59:00.001-08:00

“Beauty must suffer.” So says The Doctor (Rainer Bock) in a small German town in Michael Haneke’s latest, The White Ribbon. The line could apply to the characters living in the bucolic village in 1915 as it hurtles toward World War I, the modernity that war unleashed and the fascism it provoked in Germany.

At least that’s what Haneke, or his narrator (Ernst Jacobi), tells us at the start of the film. The voiceover technique is often derided as intrusive and heavy-handed. It’s especially conspicuous in a work by this sometimes stubbornly oblique director. This narrator warns us of the odd tragedies that will befall the village and reflects on the light they shed “some of the things that would go on to happen in this country.”

A narrator is a useful technique here, because despite the film’s early telegraph of incipient horror, The White Ribbon is Haneke’s most restrained and sedate work. At times, the pacing is almost too glacial, the whole film too stately and clinical. (Christian Berger’s starkly gorgeous cinematography recalls a B&W Days of Heaven and jolts you just as you may start to nod off.)

But if you think about the earlier entries on the Austrian’s resume, you’ll realize that a Haneke movie usually winds up being compelling despite taking its sweet time to convince you that all its underlying unpleasantness is worth it.

In this case, the bad news starts when the doctor takes a nasty spill off his horse. This being a Haneke movie, the fall was no accident, but caused by a wire strung between two trees. Other bad omens: The Baron’s son, Sigi (Fion Mutert) is hanged naked and upside-down in the woods, the barn burns down and a peasant mother is killed in the mill.

Aside from the doctor’s incident, we don’t see any of these events take place. Haneke is only interested in the aftermath. Some villagers swear vengeance and some seek escape from the increasingly “cruel, miserable” village. But everyone suspects. And it’s strongly implied (we could never expect this director to spell everything out) that the community youths are behind it all.

A note on the children: they are strikingly beautiful. (And the child actors, like the entire cast, are flawless.) Despite some early comparisons to Village of the Damned, their wickedness is not painted in broad strokes. “Looking back, I always thought it was strange how Klara (Maria-Victoria Dragus) and her friends walked to the edge of the woods after school instead of running home with the rest of us," says the narrator. That’s about as damning as it gets. At least until the very end when The Teacher (Christian Friedel) shares his suspicions. (The Teacher’s courtship of Eva, the metaphorically named young nanny played by the Leonie Benesch in a standout performance, provides the most comic relief I’ve ever seen in a Haneke flick.)

Haneke rests the blame for the children’s indiscretions, no matter how savage (they torture and nearly blind a retarded child), on their parents. “Our sin punishes our parents’ sin, and their parents’ sin to the third and fourth generations,” the perpetrators write in one note.

Original sin is a very Christian idea. But Haneke indicts religion’s rigid single-mindedness and hypocrisy in the character of the Pastor (Burghart Klausner), an abusive brute who straps his adolescent son to his mattress to keep him from masturbating and then dismisses warnings that his daughter is, we’re led to believe, the ringleader of the town miscreants.

Then there’s The White Ribbon’s greatest, most squirm-inducing scene, in which the Doctor (who for a while looked like the only character over 18 devoid of sinister intentions) breaks things off with his girlfriend, criticizing her as “plain, ugly and reeking of bad breath.” She grimaces and tells him he “must be very unhappy to be so mean.” And then she asks how he could desert her after she’d caught him fingering his daughter and told no one; it’s classic Haneke—a bomb disrupting the kind of silence where you could have heard a pin drop.

That said, what Haneke leaves offscreen is always more disturbing than what he shows. And as in Benny’s Video, Funny Games and Cache, it’s the misdeeds of children that get lodged in the viewer’s skull. And it’s the teenagers in The White Ribbon who would become the disenfranchised young adults most susceptible to Hitler’s spell 15 years later.

In his narration that closes the film, The Teacher says that in the spring of 1916, the German army drafted him to fight in the First World War. But for the people living in The White Ribbon’s pastoral Eden, the battle was already lost.

Bad Educations

2009-11-19T19:20:00.000-08:00

Perhaps to atone for the enduring myth of the “casting couch,” Hollywood often returns to the theme of young people being corrupted by conniving elders. From Hitchcock’s damsels in distress to Rosemary’s Baby to Taxi Driver and Mulholland Drive, a long history of movies suggests that youth isn’t wasted on the young, but snatched out from under them.

Raymond Warner Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends is an unorthodox entry in the genre by dint of its gay characters and unwavering cynicism. Fassbinder never really graduated from being the enfant terrible of German cinema (he overdosed at 37, having already directed 40 feature length films). So it’s unsurprising that this story of Fox, a working-class circus performer (played by Fassbinder) picked up, taken in and swindled by a group of “prissy, posh” sophisticates is bleak through to the end.

The most intriguing thing about Fox and Friends is its peripheral treatment of homosexuality. It’s a testament to Fassbinder that his 1974 movie outpaces many being made in today’s professedly liberal and liberated Hollywood. It’s a “gay movie” that is neither PSA nor a minstrel show. The film is largely confined to places where its characters could live quietly and without tension—gay bars and boutiques, cruising areas and their own apartments. But even casual acquaintances and family members don’t bat an eye.

Fassbinder was a libertine, but any salaciousness in Fox and Friends is muted by the film’s classical composition. There is no fancy camerawork, jumbled chronology or postmodern trickery to distract from the barebones plot. But the static medium shots frame unusual activities, like naked bathhouse patrons and businessmen tentatively picking up hustlers in public bathrooms. Fassbinder’s measured technique is more effective at establishing this subculture than showy frenetic devices could be. It lets these people and places, and not the cinematographer, expose themselves.

Besides, Fassbinder hasn’t made gay underworld expose, but an indictment of money and its ruinous effects on individuals and their relationships. Eugen tries to cultivate Fox, but it’s a selfish effort. He teaches him how to order off of a French menu, which wine goes with which course and what clothes to wear. But he imparts all of this wisdom to spare himself any embarrassment. The irony is that Fox funds all of Eugen’s sophistication with his rapidly dwindling lotto winnings.

Eventually, Eugen and his family dupe Fox into saving their bankrupt business. It’s a damning critique of the capitalist system—a somewhat dim prole who falls into chance money keeping an industrialist family’s fortune afloat. But the confidence trick has an even more cynical take on the power dynamic that, no matter how buried, is inherent to all relationships: each partner provides something the other needs. It’s refreshing to see the naïve, young buck end up the (accidental) breadwinner and not just a hood ornament. But Fox, needy, clueless and attracted to Eugen’s classy façade, still draws the short end of the stick.

Fox and His Friends is a very German movie. The distrust of capitalism is grounded in the personal. But the movie’s quiet efficiency tempers plot developments (and some fantastically kitschy settings) that would otherwise veer toward melodrama. There’s also a sense of somewhat wearily looking beyond national borders for enlightenment (whether through posh French restaurants, American johns or an ill-fated trip to Marrakech), only to stay bound by the same old personal and cultural handicaps.

Jenny (Carry Mulligan) is another babe in the woods battling social constrictions in An Education. Unlike Fox, Jenny’s got the brains to match her effortless charm. She also benefits from her supportive if overbearing mom and dad (Alfred Molina, ranging from funny to stern without becoming a movie dad cliché) to steer her in the right direction (which in this case leads straight to Oxford). But she still falls for a duplicitous would-be mentor, David (Peter Sarsgaard), whose displays of fleeting glamour nearly derail Jenny’s straight march to self-made success.

Jenny is the most promising student at her starchy girls prep school. She’s one of those students whose middle-class parents did not enroll her in private school for etiquette lessons, but to see her study through the night and unlock the Pandora’s Box of potential that admission to elite universities suggests to this day.

Life hasn’t hardened Jenny yet. Naiveté is the only chink her in her cardigan-heavy armor. (An Education pours her endearing cluelessness on a bit thick.) She dreams of a life in Paris where she’ll “eat in good restaurants, smoke lots of cigarettes and watch great films.” David spots her and her giant cello seeking shelter from a downpour and drives her to her modest two-family home. He drops the names of some jazz greats and smokes a cigarette (she turns one down for fear of her parents smelling the residue). She is smitten.

After charming Jenny’s parents (they’re biggest objection is not his age—a dozen years older than Jenny—but his Jewishness) with wit and cultural references, David takes her out on the town for a…chamber music concert. She meets Danny (Dominick Cooper), a dapper friend of David’s, and his affable ditz of a girlfriend, Helen (Rosamund Pike, who like Cooper is engaging and underused). After nodding off at the recital, the crew heads to a smoky jazz club. Jenny’s downfall is underway.

As the relationship progresses and Jenny’s grades freefall, David grows sinister and Jenny reluctant. Sarsgaard nails David’s seductiveness, but is a bit one-note. That’s due more to the character’s limitations than the actor’s. David is a small-time crook with some shady real estate dealings (he basically moves black people into white neighborhoods, a subplot that mirrors the movie’s commentary on Britain’s stubborn class divisions). But, unlike Eugen fleecing Fox, his motives for wooing Cassie remain vague.

Mulligan nails it, alternating between levelheaded intelligence, vulnerability and suspicion as David’s well-crafted front begins to crumble. In the wake of her suitor’s betrayal and the opportunities it endangers, she avoids the easy histrionics that lesser actors might employ in favor of quietly picking up the pieces.

It’s a good thing that Jenny’s alternative “education” took place before Swinging London kicked into psychedelic full gear. Otherwise she might have been lost for good. The setting in 1964 also mercifully confines Jenny’s struggles to her character (mostly) instead of mooring them to the decade’s burgeoning feminist movement. She is able to handle her problems on her own, without the sort of social pedagogy movies always make shrill or reductive.

As An Education concludes, Jenny grasps the implications of her tumultuous year, saying she “feel[s] old. But not very wise.” Fox and His Friends and An Education are two sturdy entries in a canon of movies that provide that wisdom.

Trash Humpers and Antichrist

2009-11-06T17:06:00.001-08:00

Is a movie a success if you’re still thinking about it days after viewing? This was the case with Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers and Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, two entries in the New York Film Festival that I very nearly walked out on, whose endings could not arrive soon enough, that made me question the credibility, if not sanity, of the selection committee. But the imagery in both was indelible. These are flawed, irritating provocations. And both are worthwhile.

Korine shot Trash Humpers on VHS and wanted the no-budget movie to resemble “found footage” salvaged from a dumpster (likely assaulted by one of the film’s demented participants). You can’t accuse the man of taking himself too seriously. In a Q&A after the movie, he said he wanted to make the “shittiest looking movie possible.” Fair enough, but you might ask why often snooty festival selection committees the world over consistently fall for his half-baked experiments.

Trash Humpers is not a complete wash. As cheap as it looks, the VHS film lends a bleached, fuzzy feel to the movie that often heightens its beauty. Twilight and nighttime scenes are especially affective. In one early sequence, the camera focuses away from its horny subjects doing God knows what in a big box parking lot to linger on a magnificent magenta sunset. In a complimentary shot, Korine takes a break from the manic cuts for a long, soft-focus gaze at a streetlamp against the darkness. There’s also the time the lens sticks on the female humper as she sits forlornly on the curb and watches her cohorts screw some bushes. (It’s one of the only times where a characters recognizes, or at least wonders, what the hell is going on and hangs her head in shamed confusion.)

Moments like these don’t just impress because they’re surrounded by, well, garbage. They stand on their own. If only Trash Humpers had more of them. Instead, Korine assaults us with more and more of the titular visual gag (it gets old about 30 seconds into the movie).

There is also the matter of sound: Trash Humpers is the most aurally unpleasant movie I have ever seen. Its characters rarely speak; they bray, howl and guffaw. Think of a cross between South Park’s Mr. Hanky and Jim Carry’s “Most Annoying Sound in the World” in Dumb and Dumber for an idea of the torture your ears are about to endure.

Trash Humper’s sonic endurance test is all the more unsettling for being unexpected. The first few minutes are nearly silent. When dialogue arrives, the content is either self-consciously base (lots of gay jokes) or comically pretentious. There are two coherent monologues: a frilly contemplation delivered by a poet and a colloquial digression on modern ennui as the gang drives through a barren suburb (“I can smell their sadness in the trees,” says the driver.) They struck a chord with me, but bomb with the characters (who actually kill the poet, for kicks, after his screed). Funny enough, but the dismissal robs the audience of any sustained reprieve from the gutter.

With Trash Humpers, Korine reaches for a combination of David Lynch’s ironic absurdity (a few moments explicitly recall Elephant Man) and Jon Waters’ anarchic, white trash bonhomie. But he lacks Lynch’s coal-black humor and formal control and Waters’ madcap glee. As Trash Humpers grinded on, the audience was less given to courtesy laughs and started to seem perplexed more than anything else. But maybe they weren’t confused at all. They could have just realized Korine’s joke was on them.

Antichrist, unlike Trash Humpers, takes itself very seriously. And if Korine’s audience feigned laughter, Von Trier’s must have repressed it, because Antichrist often feels like a parody of art house pretension. Trash Humpers hints at redemption through children as one character cradles her new, albeit kidnapped, baby. Antichrist wallows in misery as a couple torture each other after the death of theirs.

The movie begins with the gorgeous cinematography (by Anthony Dod Mantle) that sustains the rest of the film. A couple, unnamed beyond He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), ravage each other over every conceivable surface of their well-appointed home. (There’s a penetration shot thrown in, presumably to ruffle MPAA feathers.) While husband and wife are in heat, their baby boy escapes from his crib, catches a glimpse of the action and falls out an open window to his death. (He falls alongside a teddybear he clutches; the bear’s plunge is shown in extended slow-mo.)

He is a psychotherapist of some kind, and misguidedly dedicates himself to curing his wrecked wife with obtuse psychobabble. She takes to smashing her head repeatedly against a toilet bowl. In a sign of things to come (and few people watching Antichrist’s are unaware of what’s to come), she initiates sex, he demurs and she bites his nipple until the skin breaks.

What better time to go on a country retreat? And so they head up to their wood cabin, subtly called Eden, arriving only after She complains that the ground burns her feet and He spots a deer bloodily carrying a stillborn (or maybe half-born) fawn.

For all its heavy-handed foreboding and willfully dull shrink talk, the first two-thirds of Antichrist is intriguing to watch. Dafoe excels once again at playing an insufferable ass; if there’s one voice you don’t mind hearing in monotone, it’s his. And his off-kilter features are softened here—he actually looks classically handsome in certain scenes—which tempers the storm clouds Von Trier hangs over the rest of the film. Gainsbourg nails every conceivable shade of distress, treating viewers to something resembling the Kubler-Ross model on meth. As impressive as the two leads (in fact, the movie’s only two actors) are individually, they never betray much chemistry (actually, they don’t appear in the same frame that often). But I guess that’s the point.

Antichrist’s main asset is Mantle’s camerawork. From the pristine black and white of the prologue to the abstract flourishes (a beating pulse, a slow-motion silhouetted walk through the woods) to the slate-toned nature scenes, this is a great looking movie.

Unfortunately, Von Trier wants viewers to avert their eyes. After building to a slow burn (the woman in front of me was out cold after 15 minutes), Antichrist explodes first into a ludicrous jumble of mystical/psychological/astrological/paranormalsociological/feminist phooey. Then, I guess to relieve the actors’ and the audience’s confusion, She smashes a wood log into His balls. (This is when the lady in front of me woke up.)

What follows is a flat-out slasher movie, with some talking animals thrown in for good measure. (“Chaos Reigns,” as uttered by a disemboweled fox, has become the movie’s catchphrase, though I’m not sure how Von Trier would take the cackling that swept the audience following its delivery). The denouement of Antichrist sees a horde of faceless women climbing up a hill toward Him. It’s Von Trier’s last attempt to hammer home a thesis, but the bludgeoning on display throughout will leave most people searching for an exit rather than a resolution.

Arthouse films often pride themselves on the sort of subtlety that withholds graphic details, sexual and violent, from their supposedly evolved audiences. But surprisingly it is the cerebral, stylized Antichrist and not the subversively lowbrow Trash Humpers that threatens to become a cynical exploitation flick. Von Trier’s expensive therapy session—he couldn’t hold the camera during film because his “hands shook with depression”—shabbily deconstructs little more than a marriage. Risqué sex and violence aside, Antichrist sticks to genre conventions; Trash Humpers discards genre altogether.

Both directors sought visceral reactions with these incendiary movies. They’re masturbatory works. And despite their merits, it’s the audience that ultimately gets jerked around.

The Hurt Locker

2009-07-11T15:54:00.001-07:00

The Hurt Locker is the greatest video game movie ever made. This is not a slight. It’s an acknowledgment of how director Katherine Bigelow’s film distills the action movie to its pulsing, suspenseful basics.

Bigelow deposits the viewer right in the middle of the action. A US Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal team patrols a deserted street in downtown Baghdad. There’s no exposition, but the roles are clear. The levelheaded Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) calmly gives orders to the cocksure Sergeant Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce) as he approaches a bomb in need of diffusing. Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) nervously eyes the streets, each scattered civilian a cause for potentially fatal concern.

The tense opening sequence only lasts a few minutes. So it gives little away to reveal that the mission fails, with a passerby detonating the bomb via cell phone. Thompson is killed, despite the heavy, almost astronautic protective armor he wears.

This is an unsentimental movie; Sanborn and Eldridge’s reaction to Thompson’s death consists only of muted anger. Thompson is replaced by Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) and the soldiers have no choice but to wearily welcome him into the fold.

Bigelow replaces any pathos the audience expects from these characters with a tireless regard for routine. The film is little more than a series of vignettes that observe the bomb squad at work. These sequences veer from hushed and clinical to suspenseful and adrenalized, but, like the men they showcase, never lose their finesse.

And the movie audience does not watch them alone. Iraqi citizens are always on the periphery of the crew. Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd’s handheld camera frequently cuts to their street level or birds eye view. This technique alternately humanizes the locals and makes them suspect. Ironically, it’s the civilians outfitted with the most Western accessories that stir alarm among the Americans. A cell phone prompts a raised gun. A camcorder results in crosshairs. (“What’s this guy doing, putting me on YouTube?” screams Eldridge.)

The framing device implicates the viewer as well. The Hurt Locker has no political agenda and refuses to glamorize what little violence it shows. But the audience I saw it with hooted and applauded at the conclusion of one lengthy sequence when the squad, reduced to sitting ducks under fire in the middle of the desert, shot and killed its last enemy at long range. It was odd—a very blockbuster reaction to such a smart, clinical and topical film. The blood and killings and explosions in The Hurt Locker are muted relative to standard summer fare. But brought back down to earth, they resonate.

Subtlety extends to the lead performances. Renner resembles a young, downhome Russell Crowe and, like Crowe, possesses a simmering intensity that tempers James’s battlefield bravado. Mackie makes exasperation a fine art as the cerebral Sanborn attempts to constrict, and then just tolerate, James’s swagger. And the babyfaced Geraghty nails Eldridge’s rage and constant panic—he seems on the verge of a breakdown for the entire film.

James’s bluster cracks twice in the movie, both times when he is in domestic situations far from IEDs. The first finds him in the home of an Iraqi family whose son he fears dead. His glimpse into their familiar home life—modest furniture clustered around the TV, a courteous host insisting James makes himself comfortable—provokes his sole jolt of terrified outsider alienation.

The other finds him stateside with his own wife and son, lost in a gleaming supermarket with miles of neon cereal boxes. Grocery shopping is a routine that is far more disorienting for James than bomb-diffusion. “War is a drug,” says the movie’s opening quote. And James is hooked, unable to extract himself from the rush of battle and enjoy the freedoms he ostensibly fights for.

The Hurt Locker is a restrained, human-scale action movie in a season of Transformers-style CGI bombast. For once, the prevention of loud explosions is more thrilling than their wanton detonation.

The Girlfriend Experience

2009-05-12T16:11:00.001-07:00

A few months after releasing Che, his four-and-a-half hour Che Guevera biopic, Steven Soderbergh returns with The Girlfriend Experience, a 77-minute long take on five days in the life of Chelsea (porn star Sasha Grey), a high-end Manhattan escort. The director is fond of mixing it up; his resume includes big-budget blockbusters (the Ocean's series), Oscar-baiting star vehicles (Erin Brockovich) and indie fare (The Limey, Full Frontal, Bubble).

As Soderbergh said at a Tribeca Film Festival panel following his latest, "movies need to have either absolute perspective or none at all." He called The Girlfriend Experience "a myopic movie" about a very narrow breed of New Yorkers doing very specific things in October of 2008. And while The Girlfriend Experience represents a downsizing of budget, scope and star power for the director, his ambition is undiminished.

The movie's pinpoint topicality comes not only from its protagonist's resemblance to a certain governor-toppling working girl, but from its production coinciding with last fall's Wall Street meltdown. Pillow talk between Chelsea and her clients revolves around crumbling portfolios, bailouts and cautious investment strategies.

But fiscal panic hasn't hurt her client's willingness to shell out. Dates occur in swank downtown lounges and hotels, the camera lingering on their facades in establishing shots. Chelsea name drops designers and upscale restaurants, Patrick Bateman-style. "I met with Philip on October 5^th and 6^th. I wore a Michael Kors dress and shoes with La Perla lingerie underneath and diamond stud earrings."

Grey's deadpan delivery is coolly appealing. "During lunch he talked about the financial crisis. And when we got back to the room, he immediately got on the phone and ordered some Macallan 25. I put on a Kiki de Montparnasse corset, panties and gloves. After he got off the phone, we made out for awhile," Chelsea's voiceover narration tells us as she commits a tryst to paper. (A businessman suggests she write a memoir: "There's a huge market out there for that these days.")

Soderbergh called The Girlfriend Experience "a movie about transactions," with the film's Great Recession backdrop exposing their fragility. Chelsea sleeps with "the hobbyist", an escort connoisseur, in hopes of a favorable, profit-boosting review on his website. Her real boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos), is a personal trainer often seen haggling with clients looking for their own form of physical wish-fulfillment. Everything and everyone is for sale. "If they wanted you to be yourself, they wouldn't be paying you," Chelsea explains to a journalist (in a whole different sort of transaction).

The hobbyist criticizes Chelsea for her "flat affect." But Grey's dry monotone and vacant stare only strengthen the actor's performance; they bring the character's odd girlish giggle and flash of life behind the eyes into sharp relief. Soderbergh praised Grey for the "Zen" she brought to Chelsea. (He knew a porn star "in command of sexual situations" would fit the part.) But it's the almost-reluctant emotions that manage to break through Chelsea's cool façade (all of them outside of the bedroom) that keep you watching.

Domestic scenes between Chelsea and Chris are bathed in warm amber hues, but offer no more emotional warmth than the many hotel flings, here tinted a clinical blue. The pair's selfish indifference to one another suggests that the emotional toll of "the real thing" is just as taxing as paid simulations and truncated "experiences."

Character anomie aside, The Girlfriend Experience is too funny to be cynical and too broad an indictment of consumer culture to be a didactic slam on the world's oldest profession. For Soderbergh, prostitution is no different than investment banking, which is no different than filmmaking. (Moderator Caryn James asked Soderbergh if he felt he'd prostituted himself with the Ocean's movies; he diffused the awkwardness by saying all of his movies required him to sell his time and ideas to executives.)

The Girlfriend Experience might not rake it in like Soderbergh's mainstream efforts. But the hordes who queued up for the three Tribeca screenings indicate a collective interest in the gilded underbelly of Wall Street's good old days, when, as the director said "money became a national fetish."

Porn is another national pastime (Soderbergh noted that Utah has the highest porn traffic rate in America) and Grey's stature in that industry will likely draw many one-handed keyboard tappers to the arthouse.

Will they be disappointed with the lack of onscreen sex in the movie? "I excel at undercutting expectations," Soderbergh shrugged. He hoped that people desensitized by Grey's graphic pornography would be jolted by the inverse, saying that "fantasy is what you can't have."

With money dried up and the elicit thrill of sex dimmed by accessibility, the confluence of the two in The Girlfriend Experience make it the ultimate post-crash fantasy.

Blank City

2009-05-05T13:04:00.000-07:00

As downtown New York seems to teeter on the brink of a fresh set of “bad old days,” Celine Danhier’s compelling documentary, Blank City, reminds audiences that they might stand to gain as much from fiscal ruin as they do to lose.

Blank City played at a Tribeca Film Festival screening in the now-trendified East Village. But the young, French Danhier’s examination of New York’s No Wave cinema movement of the ‘70s and ‘80s conjures the neighborhood in burned-out tatters. Rents for floor-through lofts peaked at $300. Neighborhood streets were so desolate that movie shoots took place in broad daylight without permits or distracting passersby. Such alienation and constant fear (“Walking home at night felt like going to war,” is a constant refrain) produced a frenetic creative hotbed that prospered in since-shuttered outposts like Max’s Kansas City, CBGB’s and the New Cinema on St. Mark’s.

No Wave filmmakers defied mainstream categorization (director Lydia Lunch: “I’m fine with the No Wave label, because the word ‘no’ is in it”). But they strived to elevate cheap 8mm and 16mm film stock above the esoteric film school ghetto to which those grainy formats had been confined. These were no-budget art films, but traditional narrative was key. Influences included Godard, Fellini, Antonioni and Cassavettes, brilliant filmmakers who, while outside the Hollywood mainstream, attracted the New Yorker raves and subsequent uptown crowds that the No Wave misfits ostensibly shunned.

Blank City showcases a dizzying array of avant-garde filmmakers. And while it’s gratifying to see so many underground artists gain exposure, the movie’s purview is almost too encyclopedic. The impression is of a splinter group of artists who lived in the East Village in the late ‘70s, all made edgy movies and all hated each other. There are petty squabbles and romantic soap operas (“I respect his talent, his art and his intelligence, but he didn’t even have to say anything for people to despise him” Lunch says of former flame Nick Zedd) but scant camaraderie. And the film’s segue from late-‘70s/early-‘80s No Wave (highlighting Amos Poe, Jim Jarmusch, Charlie Ahearn, Beth and Scott B, Eric Mitchell and others) to the shock-heavy Cinema of Transgression (Zedd, Richard Kern, Casandra Stark) of the Reagan years is flimsy.

Outward misanthropy be damned (Steve Buscemi, something of a No Wave muse, remembers his giddiness whenever he witnessed a reluctant half-smile from Zedd), many subjects (including, yes, Zedd) emphasized that humor was key to the subgenre. No Wave was born of the desperation that living in a bombed out East Village (“It looked like postwar Dresden!”) inspired. But it also rebelled against the self-important high art scene that was about to explode onto already-sanitized SoHo galleries and, God forbid, Park Avenue living rooms—at least until growing recognition inevitably diluted the genre’s scrappy charm.

It’s possible that No Wave was a victim of its own success. Jean-Michel Basquiat, an emblem of the ‘80s New York art scene is eviscerated by his peers for, as Poe says “making money cool. I still hate him for that.” And Buschemi recounts his ambivalence about attending one friend’s film premiere uptown in Chelsea, “outside the art ghetto.”

Parties weren’t made to last, of course, and Blank City attributes the death of scrappy No Wave cinema to all the usual external suspects: drugs, AIDS, gentrification, Reaganism and the recently deceased money culture it inspired.

But Blank City is no elegy. Several interviews were shot after the economic meltdown, and Poe for one is optimistic about the “power of ideas” finally fighting back against the “lying, murdering thugs” selling wars in the desert from Washington and intangible derivatives from Wall Street. Jarmusch echoes that thought with the documentary’s closing line: “Forget about the past; bring on the future!”

Hunger

2009-03-26T13:45:00.001-07:00

Hunger is about the body, its waste and torments. Excrement smears the IRA inmates' walls in director Steve McQueen's debut film about the 1981 Irish hunger strike led by Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender). Piss is funneled under cellblock doors to flood the hall. Nightsticks rain down on naked flesh. Food is refused to the point of fatal emaciation.

But McQueen bristled when an audience member at a recent IFC Center Q& A called it violent. "Show me a summer blockbuster whose death toll and wasted bullets don't outnumber

Hunger's," he reasoned. But Hunger's unflinching portrayal of corporal punishment, self-inflicted or not, sears the retinas more than any comic book adaptation's could. It's a testament to McQueen that his debut film will likely force you to avert your eyes.

Such an aversion might make viewers complicit with the British government that McQueen renders through a grave, dismissive Margaret Thatcher voiceover. It's a fitting decision for the director who said the movie is "about the power of the mouth more than anything else. When nothing was going in, volumes were coming out," he explained. Thatcher's interjections are the only times Hunger refers to the ethnic and religious struggles behind the IRA impriso

nments and hunger strike.

Shying away from the political, conflict initially revolves around guards and prisoners in Her Majesty's Prison Maze, and brutally so. Inmates are pushed, dragged and clubbed down the block's narrow halls, dunked in ice-cold water and anally probed during contraband searches. It's in one of these sequences that we first meet Sands. Beaten to a pulp, lying naked and supine with his glazed eyes staring at the camera, the audience wonders what further debasement could possibly await him.

Physical abuse gives way to intellectual and spiritual debate in the film's crackling centerpiece. Sands summons a priest to announce his plans for the strike. Over twenty minutes (interrupted by only two cuts) the pair veers between the mundane ("Better than smoking the Bible, ay," the priest asks while Sands enjoys a rare tobacco cigarette instead of his usual substitute, a shredded page from the Book of Lamentations) and the profound. Father Moran points out the futility of the plan and the damage, including Sands' son, it will leave in its wake, but stubborn Irish resolve prevails. "I don't think I'll be seeing you again, Bobby," he concedes.

McQueen saves his most devastating work for the film's final third, which witnesses Bobby's prolonged disintegration. The director said he envisioned Hunger as a silent movie; this act is largely free of dialogue. Instead the viewer observes Bobby's oozing sores, protruding ribs and bloody bowel movements in blue-toned, almost clinical close-up. The intimate, sustained portrayal of Bobby's decline (he died after 66 days; ten fellow strikers followed) avoids fetishism only because of the profound context of dehumanization the films has established—witness a split screen shot of a lone guard sobbing as his peers partake in savage beatings for proof that degradation extends beyond the prisoners.

Hunger's bleak themes and solemn imagery, coupled with the director's video-artist background, distinguish it from standard cinematic fare. But McQueen corrected an audience member at a recent IFC Center Q&A who called it "a work of art." "I want everyone to look at this as a feature film," he said. Veering between lyrical beauty (flashbacks of a young Bobby running through a meadow punctuate his deathbed scenes) and stark decay, Hunger qualifies as both.

Redux Reflux

2009-03-15T20:29:00.001-07:00

"To avoid fainting, keep repeating to yourself, 'It's only a movie…It's only a movie…It's only a movie.'" Such was The Last House on the Left's marketing slogan upon its 1972 release. It wasn't much of an exaggeration. The British Board of Film Classification deemed the movie so disturbing that it did not allow its release until March of 2008. Critics were torn. The movie was borderline exploitation: two teenage girls head into the city for a rock concert and are abducted, raped and murdered by a Manson-like gang whose members coincidentally spend the night at the home of one victim's parents. Murders revealed, mom and dad enact a revenge so violent (famously including a castration at the hands, or rather mouth, of the mother) it would be comical were it not for the film's low-budget grit and potent exploration of loss.

A remake of Last House on the Left was released last weekend. It is the latest in a long line of slasher remakes including Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, The Hitcher, Prom Night and last month's Friday the 13^th. All of these movies retain the basic plots of their sources. But gone is the endearing rawness—sometimes edgy (Texas Chainsaw…_), sometimes campy (Friday the 13^th)—that made them cult classics. In its place is a numbing big studio gloss even miniscule budgets can afford these days. These facsimiles also shy away from the nihilism that made the originals shocking. Leatherhead's killing sprees in the updated TCM stem from being called a retard. One of the teen victims in Last House redux springs miraculously back to life at the end.

No matter how watered down these remakes are, Hollywood churns them out because for all the red onscreen, they bring out the green. With the family friendly exception of Pixar movies, horror might be Hollywood's most consistently bankable genre. Budgets are razor-thin; the intended audiences indifferent to the critical lashings most slasher movies (deservedly) receive. The foolproof equation breeds laziness. Not all horror movies scrape the bottom of the barrel and continue to burrow through the floor beneath it. But the worthwhile entries are poorly and tirelessly imitated to within an inch of the genre's life.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween ushered in the teen slasher genre in the '70s. Both are classics, the former for its bleached, cinema-verite photography, gallows humor and Vietnam allegories and the latter for its elegantly composed shots, restrained pacing and chillingly effective score. (Neither shows much blood.) But the bargain basement knockoffs (Prom Night, The Hills have Eyes, Friday the 13^t^h, the so-bad-it's-almost-good Sleepaway Camp) and infernal sequels that followed made horror movies a laughing stock for all but the schlock-happiest Fangoria subscriber.

With the exception of 1984's original A Nightmare on Elm Street (featuring Freddy Krueger before he became a disfigured, utensil-handed Borscht Belt comic) mainstream horror did not regain respectability until Scream in 1996. That Wes Craven smash deftly mixed comedy and horror with a winking self-awareness of genre conventions. A slasher revival followed, but the post-modern irony shtick got old fast. Scream exposed, though hardly subverted, all the rules. By mimicking Scream, its sequels and too-clever-by-half imitators (the largely forgotten I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend series) became just as formulaic as the hackwork their predecessor mocked.

Torture porn, critically maligned as it is, at least introduced a fresh slasher milieu. The rusty, industrial ascetic of the Saw and Hostel movies compliment their anonymous brutality. The victims are harshly unsympathetic, their sad fates even more transparent than in previous horror films. Sex always equals death in a slasher movie, but torture porn's methodical killings are more tactilely retributive than usual. Hostel's louts pay for hedonistic romps through depressed Eastern European backwaters with exacting amputations, their limbs and organs to be sold on the black market. The junkies whose halfway house becomes a deathtrap obstacle course in Saw II choose between instant death and a dip in a tub of hypodermic needles. And therein lies the problem with joyless, self-important torture porn: in punishing its victims for having fun, it doesn't let the audience have any.

Horror is in a rut. Queasy, embarassed nostalgia aside, there is little worthwhile about the recent rush of slasher remakes. The best horror movies are the unheralded ones. They introduce new villains and mythologies, fresh techniques (The Blair Witch Project's Dramamine-requiring handheld camera) and surprises (the zombies of 28 Days Later who run rather than hobble). Slasher fans are genuflecting at the altar of genre icons for now. But like Michael Meyers lurking in the shadows, there's got to be a new face of horror waiting to deliver audiences from the current spate of lazy retreads and into a fresh form of evil.

Every Upcoming Movie Will Now Be About the Recession

2009-03-09T20:57:00.001-07:00

Hollywood never needs excuses to revel in an imagined apocalypse. From The Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Night of the Living Dead to Escape from New York to 28 Days Later to I Am Legend, few scenarios are mined more frequently than impending human eradication. And critics and audiences alike frequently impose deeper meanings on movies dealing with Earthly destruction, whether such allegories are intended by the filmmakers or not. The alien invasion flicks of the Cold War '50s represent pinko infiltration/insurrection and nuclear dread. George Romero's zombie movies comment on the civil rights struggles of the '60s (the original Night of the Living Dead) and the mad consumerism that blossomed post-Vietnam (in the mall-set Dawn of the Dead). Other entries in the genre are viewed as time capsule parables about subsequent zeitgeist panics: the crack epidemic and urban decay (Escape…), HIV/AIDS (28 Days Later) and 9/11 (28 Days Later, again).

With America in the midst of another mass anxiety attack, prepare for a slew of reviews and Sunday Arts & Leisure feature pieces devoted to what will now be the theme of every successful movie released in the next nine months: The Great Recession of 2008- God Knows When.

This year has already seen the release of three suddenly prescient movies. Confessions of a Shopaholic, initially sold as a tween Sex and the City (with Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren getting plum exposure in the trailer), rebranded itself as a movie about a shallow material girl who realizes the folly of her spendthrift ways (by working at a finance firm, no less). The International, a Clive Owen dud, is about a nefarious bank wiping out investor portfolios and dallying in political assassinations. And Watchmen recreates the grimy New York of 1985 at the precise moment New Yorkers (or at least the city's journalists) are alternately dreading and exulting in the possible return of squeegee men and Times Square porn palaces.

Public Enemies is the upcoming release best custom-fitted for the economic meltdown. Set in the Depression, it tells the story of bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and the FBI agent (Christian Bale) hot on his trail. Just as 1968's Bonnie and Clyde is a Great Depression period piece that nonetheless became emblematic of the '60s counterculture, expect Public Enemies to acquire topical resonance, with many rooting for the assumed villain as he fights the good fight. Amelia, an Amelia Earhart biopic starring Hilary Swank, is another Depression-era movie coming out this year. The taglines ("Just as the markets crashed, Amelia took flight") and Captain Sully parallels will nauseate. (On the bright side, Hilary Swank, after a few disastrous turns as a sexpot, is back on fertile Oscar ground as a woman fighting her way into a man's world.)

Two annihilation epics tread on more familiar, bombed out blockbuster territory this summer: Michael Bay's 2012 and McG's Terminator Salvation. The Mayans and Nostradamus marked December 2012 as the date of end times--sure to be rendered deafeningly by Bay's CGI and sound editing. Inverting the not-too-distant future destruction scenario are Ice Age 3: The Age of the Dinosaurs and Year One. Both movies are set in prehistoric olden times and offer a glimpse into the sort of hunter-gatherer lifestyle that the more pessimistic (and press hungry) economic doomsayers see as a logical endpoint to our societal regression.

The flaw in declaring many of these imminent releases timely, or at least purposefully so, is the source material they grew out of. The Road follows a father and son on a despairing, perilous journey through a landscape made barren by an unnamed cataclysm. Their experience might mirror that of people currently reviewing their 401K statements, but the movie is an adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel from the frothy days of 2006. And of course, Terminator Salvation emerges from an enduring blockbuster franchise that has spanned nearly four decades.

Topicality is usually achieved by accident. It is possible to make a movie for the times in which it's released, but more likely that the times will make the movie. Maybe there's no collective psychic pull among moviegoers to flock to certain films at certain times after all. When Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings did gangbusters in the months following 9/11, some critics said audiences facing murky real world conflicts had responded to those neatly delineated cinematic battles between good and evil. Certain journalists viewed The Dark Knight, with its themes of moral ambiguity, tough justice and invasive surveillance techniques, as a cathartic response to, if not defense of, the senescent Bush administration.

But maybe in these cases viewers were simply responding to engaging movies sown from already iconic entertainment sagas.

It's tempting to declare a zeitgeist when one might not exist. Entertainment grows more fragmented by the day. When 10% of Americans see The Dark Knight on the big screen in the film's opening seventy-two hours, there is reason to cheer. Maybe Johnny Depp beats out mortgage woes and latent bank heist fantasies as the biggest draw of Public Enemies. Maybe not. What's certain is that at a time when a $10 movie ticket is the costliest entertainment many people can afford, these movies will be packed, regardless of audience motive.

2 or 3 Things I Know About her

2009-03-02T18:02:00.001-08:00

Freud argues that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but Jean-Luc Godard would disagree when it comes to a lit cigarette. How else to explain the prolonged close-up of a burning smoke in the director's Two or Three Things I Know About Her? Like the movie's other famed close shot—a cup of coffee reminiscent of the cosmos—the sequence turns the mundane into the profound.

Godard's nominal plot follows a day in the life of Juliette (Marina Vlady), a Parisian housewife who moonlights as a prostitute. But by 1967 when this movie was released, the director was not concerned with narrative. This movie is about the dynamic between style and substance. "One might say that living in society today is almost like living in a vast comic strip," says the narrator (voiced by Godard). While the film's lush Technicolor photography recalls a comic book, the weighty, occasionally soporific interior monologues (covering the Vietnam war, laundry detergent advertisements and everything in between) it frames will not be serialized by Marvel anytime soon.

Despite its title declaration of familiarity, 2 or 3 Things... asks questions. What is language? "Language is the house man lives in," says Juliette. That is not a decent definition of language in a film that practically drowns in it. Then again, the many words in this wordy film are circuitous; they pose rhetorical questions and offer vague declarations ("I was the world; the world was me," Maria recalls feeling during a recent trick) but seldom resolution. What of modernity? 2 or 3 Things... does not tackle that subject in its dialogue, but it's a postmodern work that serves as a commentary on modernity's destabilizing influence.

Dubious progress is why the characters question language and art. It's why traditional family structures have collapsed to the point where a comfortable housewife drops her children off at a brothel's daycare center as she looks for johns. And it's why Godard's characters, despite retaining their own chic glamour, live far away from the quaint Rues of postcard Paris in monolithic apartment towers abutting construction cranes and freeways.

2 or 3 Things... is a distillation of Godard's favorite themes: nationality, self, advertising, color. A travel agency fronts as a whorehouse, its walls lined with splashy posters peddling a whole different sort of exotic product. Bangkok, India and Spain are sold through the sort of reductive imagery (a Buddhist temple, the Taj Mahal, a bullfighter) that promotes travel to this day. This is no less crude than the packaging of sex and flesh. A buffoonish American client wears a white t-shirt with the American flag emblazoned across it. He has his two hookers wear TWA and Pan Am luggage over their heads to avoid eye contact. Maria was mistaken in her earlier sexual reverie: people are products; products are people.

With art, Godard says, "the style is the man; therefore art is the humanizing of forms." It's the human touches in this movie—the brief swelling of classical music, Juliette reading a bedtime story to her son—that make 2 or 3 Things... more than a philosophy essay or advertisement itself. It's in these moments that the viewer remembers what Godard is defending.

The Class

2009-02-10T14:47:00.000-08:00

In Laurent Cantet's The Class, high school teacher Francois Marin (Francois Begaudeau) is shocked to learn that his students routinely leave the lower-class fringe environs of the 20th Arrondissement for the more glamorous precincts of central Paris. The movie does not follow them on these excursions, containing itself within the struggling public school it documents. This initially jars. Faculty introductions and rote grammar lessons dominate the first hour of The Class, which opens on the first day back from summer vacation. Francois teaches French to a group of “nice, but tough,” mostly immigrant students. He’s a delicate wisp of a man (and thus the froggiest of the bunch) perpetually struggling for control of his classroom. But the movie diffuses the tension inherent to the ghetto-high-school-in-peril genre with lessons on the imperfect subjunctive. Miraculously the audience does not stampede the box office for a refund, and instead settles into the rhythms of this affecting film.

Here is the rare Issue movie that doesn’t feel like a public service announcement. To use a venerable maxim of high school writing classes it shows rather than tells. And what it shows is a mélange of diverse adolescent faces united only by their blemishes. These are teenagers rarely seen in American movies outside of Gus Van Sant’s inter-Oscar bait experimental offerings. The kids are roundly excellent, but sisters-in-sass Esmeralda (Esmerelda Quertani) and Khoumba (Rachel Regulier) stand out alongside sullen Souleyman (Frank Keita), shy Louise (Louise Grinberg) and ambitious Nassim (Nassim Amrabt). These descriptors sound reductive but The Class eschews the nerd-jock-princess-goth paradigms that have defined the best and worst high school movies since John Hughes established the template. Its characters are not two-dimensional ambassadors of their racial or ethnic backgrounds either, a pitfall of the multiculti genre. The students are empathetic because they cannot be distilled to a single ingredient. Insolent and indifferent one moment and reverentially engaged the next, The Class’ teens prove that an inconsistent character (particularly one suffering daily trig quizzes) is not necessarily a weak one.

The most compelling scenes avoid schmaltz but still open tear ducts. A boy named Carl reads an essay on his likes (“helping my mom around the house”) and dislikes (“visiting my brother in jail”). An intelligent student’s parents beam when Francois praises their son despite a limited understanding of the French he speaks. Inarticulate Souleyman excels at a photo collage of his reticent mother, earning a rare commendation from Francois that leaves him in gleeful disbelief. Heartrending, perceptive scenes make The Class an anomaly: too grounded in reality too feel like typical entertainment and too emotionally potent to register as a documentary.

If The Class makes one slight stumble it’s in the glacial exposition of the second hour’s dramatic conflict. Maybe the movie needed the sort of structure and suspense this dilemma provides (it involves a student’s potential expulsion) but it does not entirely jive with the first half’s freeform pleasures.

While Cantet's import is about messy, xenophobic modern-day France, its take on education and growing up will resonate with most viewers. And its optimistic theme of immigrant ambition overcoming the odds is uniquely American.

Oscar '09

2009-01-21T14:47:00.000-08:00

The theme of this years Academy Awards is that there is no theme. Last year’s ceremony showcased a slew of violent, depressive takes on the American psyche, with No Country for Old Men proving a superior downer to There Will Be Blood. Martin Scorcese dominated 2007, basking in long-overdue Academy accolades for The Departed. Past shows have been defined by individual blockbusters (Forrest Gump, Titanic, Gladiator) that left their edgier, critically adored counterparts (Pulp Fiction, LA Confidential, Traffic) fighting for the scraps, often in the screenplay categories. All five best picture nominees in 1997 were independently financed, a momentary triumph for the indie movement that in retrospect was its death knell.

But despite many favorites this year, the top awards will likely be scattered among several different movies that are diverse in narrative and production.

Slumdog Millionaire is the frontrunner for the big prize. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (stars, schmaltz, vaguely edgy director) and Milk (Sean Penn, topicality, patting of liberal backs) are locks for nominations. Frost/Nixon and The Dark Knight are favorites for the remaining two slots. But I’m going to say that Gran Torino will sneak in and upset Frost/Nixon. Frost has been an awards show also-ran and hasn’t generated the audience buzz or box-office scratch of the other nominations. Gran Torino has the Clint Eastwood pedigree and recently broke out as a surprise box-office champ in its wide release. This means a bigger audience for a ceremony whose recent ratings have been as anemic as its featured starlets. Apply the same box office argument on a much larger scale to The Dark Knight. At a time when increasingly small niche audiences are watching their movies on an ever-multiplying number of platforms, a well-received $525 million-generating cultural behemoth (and the awards campaign that money affords) is too big to ignore.

As usual, the nominated directors will follow suit with Best Picture. Expect Ron Howard to sneak in ahead of The Dark Knight’s Christopher Knight if Frost/Nixon indeed goes without a Picture nod.

Not much mystery here. Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) and Sean Penn (Milk) lead the pack. Gran Torino’s Clint Eastwood (in what he says is his last performance) and Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon) are locks. Brad Pitt is the presumed fifth nominee; his star power combined with Button’s epic scope and digital wizardry will likely result in a nod. But many reviews were lukewarm and he’ll probably show up at the ceremony regardless (see: ratings). If he’s snubbed, look for Richard Jenkins (The Visitor) to take his place.

Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married), Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road) and Meryl Streep (Doubt) won’t be losing any sleep on nomination eve. Kristen Scott Thomas earned raves for her restrained turn in I’ve Loved You So Long and Winslet aside this year’s likely acting nominees are unusually light on the foreign thespians the Academy loves. Perceived wisdom suggests Angelina Jolie (The Changeling) in the fifth slot. But there was grumbling in that movie’s initial reviews over her Oscar-baiting histrionics. That and what I feel and hope to be St. Brangelina fatigue will open the slot up to Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky), another Brit and an unknown (the Academy fawns over those too) in a very star-studded category.

It’s all about Heath. Despite rumblings of a backlash against the traveling eulogy parade, Josh Brolin (Milk), Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder) and Phillip Seymour Hoffmann (Doubt) will all wake up Thursday morning happy to be nominated and in no rush to write a speech. The fifth spot is about as open as any in the major categories: James Franco (for Milk, which could double as a write-in vote for his great job in Pineapple Express), Tom Cruise (though two nominations for a comedy like Tropic Thunder would be pushing it), Dev Patel (someone in Slumdog has to get an acting nod, right?) and Michael Shannon (a standout handicapped by limited screen time in Revolutionary Road). I'll go with Franco for double-timing it.

This category is a perennial question mark. Frontrunners are rare and out-of-the-blue winners (Marisa Tomei, Marcia Gay Harden) are frequent. Viola Davis is the kind of relative unknown this category favors and her brief but potent performance in Doubt could make her the leader of the pack. Kate Winslet’s a sure thing for a nomination, but The Reader lacks Revolutionary Road’s momentum and prestige. There is always a spot or two reserved at the Oscars for whatever Woody Allen movie came out that year, so Penelope Cruz is a safe bet for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Tomei will be up for it again for The Wrestler (never underestimate the appeal of a hooker/stripper with a heart of a gold). I’ll give Debra Winger the fifth slot for Rachel Getting Married—as Mickey Rourke and countless others can attest, Hollywood loves embracing its prodigal sons and daughters.

Wendy and Lucy

2008-12-27T15:02:00.000-08:00

It’s the rare movie Q&A where the director has to contend with a dog. But such a canine intrusion can be tolerated when the mutt (Lucy) belongs to the director (Kelly Reichardt) and shares top billing in her latest film, Wendy and Lucy. Reichardt recently spoke with Star critic Marshall Fine at the Emelin Theater in Mamaroneck. And despite a rambunctious Lucy (“She’s clearly not trained”, Reichardt explained, making the dog’s finely calibrated “performance” all the more impressive), the director shed light on her critically-appraised (and suddenly topical) feature.

Wendy and Lucy is a minimalist movie. The barebones plot—girl (Wendy, played by a subtle Michelle Williams) loses dog (Lucy, starring as herself) on her trip north to Alaska—is unaccompanied by music and goes for long stretches without dialogue. Reichardt shot it in two weeks and hunkered down in her Queens apartment for six months of editing. But there is a warmth to the film that belies its precise production. Cinematographer Sam Levy bathes the woods outside of Portland in an amber glow. A nighttime scene with a group of runaway teenagers and their pierced, prematurely weathered faces illuminated only by a bonfire is particularly effective. The friendship Lucy strikes with a security guard (Wally Dalton) is her lone (human) beacon; just about every other character she meets represents a roadblock.

Reichardt wanted to make a movie about people “without a net.” Wendy doesn’t have a family, education or savings account to fall back on. “You can’t get a job without a job; can’t get a house without a house,” says the guard. While these limitations can be tragic (the film was inspired by Hurricane Katrina and the brutal class divide it exposed), they also allow Wendy to fall off the grid in an America where it is increasingly difficult to do so. Reichardt explained that the Portland of the film is meant to look anonymous; its superstores stand as oases in massive parking lots just as they do in every other town. The big box strip mall ennui of the modern road trip (what would Kerouac think?) compels Lucy to keep running toward an unknown future until she’s practically out of land. Wendy might be rootless, but is there anything out there worth being rooted down to?

It’s hard to ignore the relevance of a film with a broke, homeless heroine who just scrapes by on the quest for a better life. But Reichardt (who shot the film a year before the credit crisis left all of us couch-diving for nickels) shudders to think of her movies as soapboxes. The director omitted character exposition (an injury that left Wendy’s ankle in a brace is unexplained) and Psych 101 lecturing (“I’m going to say I didn’t hear that,” she responded to a question about the lack of maternal figures).

While unsentimental, Wendy and Lucy is affecting. Reichardt has empathy to spare—she spoke of the movie’s “gutter punk” transients like a worried mother—but does not romanticize Wendy’s struggle. She has made a lean movie for lean times, refusing to prey on audience emotion. Even despite that adorable dog.

Hey Mickey, what's my line?

2008-12-11T15:27:00.000-08:00

Mickey Rourke disappeared from the public eye years ago. And for a half hour, the packed house at the Times Center on December 8th thought he’d pulled a similar act on his talk with New York Times reporter Lynn Hirschberg and director Darren Aronofsky. But he eventually made an entrance in a pinstriped suit and purple John Lennon shades that he wore despite the dimmed auditorium setting. There’s serious Oscar buzz for Rourke’s turn as Randy “The Ram” Robinson in Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. Despite his bad boy image, Rourke wouldn’t blow this shot at career redemption with a missed appearance.

Rourke all but shoved the moderator off the stage as he entertained the crowed with expletive-laden self-deprecation. But mostly Rourke offered effusive praise for the director who inspired what he called the best work of his roller coaster career. He’d never seen Aronofsky before they had a meeting in the Meatpacking District (“Uh-huh. I’ll always call it the Village.”). Despite Aronofsky pulling up on a green bicycle and wearing a yellow helmet, Rourke “could just tell he had a huge set of balls.” Initially reluctant to do a wrestling movie with a director “whose only exercise comes from buttoning his suit,” Rourke came to see him as “one of the greats who only come around every thirty years. To me, he’s the new Coppola.”

He needed the help. The years Rourke spent boxing hindered rather than prepared him for the role. Boxers look down their disfigured noses at wrestlers. The broad, theatrical fighting moves of WWE matches are anathema to the hunched stances and quick, intricate jabs required of successful boxers.

Six grueling months of training humbled him. His trainer, a former member of the Israeli army (who would “put that cap thing on” whenever they hit the gym during Shabbat) had to push him up and guide him down the stairs of his TriBeCa walkup. He bonded with the wrestlers he met and learned the business, for better (a backstage camaraderie that brightens the often bleak film) and worse (life-altering injuries, a dependence on “vitamins” that Rourke mentioned with a wink).

Rourke has not seen The Wrestler. He won’t for “a few years” He never looks back on his movies until they’re long gone from the theaters since he only looks for their flaws. As Aronofsky said, “he is a man who is absolutely impossible to compliment.” The actor even tried to leave the stage when Hirschberg announced she would be showing a clip from the film. After the moderator shot him down (perhaps out of fear he would never return) he compromised by sticking his fingers in his ears and closing his eyes.

Whatever confidence Rourke lacks in his performances has not changed the work ethic behind them. A graduate of New York’s Actor’s Studio, the Times called him “one of the few true method actors of today.” Aronofsky noted the rewarding challenge of such an understated actor playing a character whose trade demands hamming it up. “Anger is easy,” Rourke said of the Ram’s wrestling scenes and tempter tantrums. It was the longing and regret called for in scenes between Randy and his estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) that took an emotional toll. The actors met on camera. Aronofsky explained that “the daughter is a woman who only knows her celebrity father through imagery and that’s just how Evan knew of Mickey.” It’s the kind of authenticity that permeates the film and has made its star an awards season frontrunner.

Whatever praise that Rourke continues to receiving on his comeback tour is unlikely to go to his head. A member of the audience recalled that Rourke had once said in an interview that he could teach anyone to act in fifteen minutes. “Sorry, I was all messed up when I said that,” he admitted. “I think had a court date the next morning.”

City by the Fay

2008-12-04T15:03:00.000-08:00

There’s a tension between the political and the personal in Milk that is shared by director Gus Van Sant and the man his compelling film brings to life. Milk begins in a New York subway station in 1970, with Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), a gay, closeted 40 year-old, picking up the cherubic Scott (and endearing James Franco). The pair head to the Castro, San Francisco’s burgeoning gay enclave. Milk has no plan, but quickly finds himself at the forefront of a revolution.

San Francisco’s, and the Castro’s, place in the contemporary imagination make it hard to believe that just forty years ago, working-class old-timers made the city inhospitable towards gays. But Milk is surrounded by resistance and brutality that inspire him to start a movement in his modest camera storefront. He becomes the first openly gay man elected to major office. From there, he battles conservative foes on the national stage (Anita Bryant, orange juice spokeswoman-cum-Patron Saint of Bible Belt Bigotry) and municipal halls (family values champion Dan White, played with an effective mix of creepiness and vulnerability by Josh Brolin).

Van Sant’s recent films have been restrained exercises in style (Elephant, Gerry, Last Days, Paranoid Park) that abandoned traditional narrative for sometimes gorgeous and sometimes ponderous lyricism. With Milk the director is tempered by three timeworn genres—the biopic, the docudrama and the Issue movie—that often mute their subjects, reducing them to textbook blurbs. Milk avoids this fate and provides an engaging portrait despite a first half that is too reliant on archival footage and Penn's gratuitous voiceover narration.

The director’s occasional trademark flourishes (slow motion, freeze-frames, loooong tracking shots) distract in on an otherwise staid film, but solid, straightforward storytelling triumphs. Penn also dials down his usual histrionics in a subdued, poignant and at times funny performance—is Milk his first character since Jeff Spiccoli to have a sense of humor?

Milk’s political insights comprise some of its most absorbing moments. But Van Sant does not spell out why Harvey Milk tirelessly threw himself into the machine. He was a successful politician, but not a natural. (He lost his first three bids for office.) He was well-liked (with a few glaring exceptions) but not above getting down and dirty and trading favors. But the big question is whether Milk’s political career owed a greater debt to a moral calling or sheer ambition.

This dilemma makes Scott one of the film’s most intriguing characters. Milk could be swayed by a suicidal gay teenager calling from across the country. He mentions that three of his four boyfriends killed themselves rather than step out of the closet. There are emotional reasons for him to seek change. But Scott delivers an ultimatum: me or the campaign. And despite years of longing after the split, Milk lets him leave without an argument. It’s a testament to Franco that his performance elevates Scott above romantic lynchpin. What could have been a peripheral character winds up exposing Milk’s emotional handicap, putting a welcome/humanizing dent in the halo.

Harvey Milk brought progress. But Milk’s closing credits remind the audience of the AIDS epidemic that shortly followed his death. And Proposition 6, the legislation proposed in the film that would prohibit gays from teaching in public schools, brings Proposition 8 to mind. Milk used to open speeches with the line “I want to recruit you.” Hopefully the film will do the same and usher in a new generation of change.

Houston Street

2008-11-30T20:33:00.000-08:00

The recent closure of Avenue A’s Pioneer Theater set off another round of hand-wringing over the sorry state of indie film and the diminished audience appetite—even in New York!—for avant-garde cinema. The Pioneer is a major loss. Eccentric retrospectives focused exclusively on Luis Guzman flicks and 42nd Street Smut Films of the Late 70s. And it might be the only movie theater in the world to lay claim to both a Robert Altman Q&A and a recurring double bill of Poultrygeist and Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie. But there are still a number of venerable arthouse theaters that endure. And a number of them are located right along Houston Street, just a stone’s throw from the Pioneer’s old stomping grounds.

The Landmark Sunshine (Houston between Eldridge and Christie) is a spiffy newcomer to the New York indie scene. It opened in a converted vaudeville theater in 2001. Landmark screens relatively mainstream independent movies (current options include Synecdoche, New York and Happy-Go-Lucky) for mind-bogglingly long runs. (Man on Wire has been there since July.) This theater stands out in the Houston Street crowd for remarkably tush-friendly stadium seats, perhaps explaining its frequent red-carpet premieres.

Across Houston Street on 2nd Avenue and 2nd Street is the Anthology Film Archives. Founded in 1970, it has operated out of its distinctive brick home (a former courthouse) for thirty years, seemingly without a single cosmetic touchup. The theater emphasizes experimental (very) early cinema, shorts, foreign film and avant-garde work of the 60s and 70s. Recent repertories examined the New York vigilante genre, the Polish director Andrzej Wajda and contemporary Turkish cinema. Anthology sates the most obscure cinematic appetites. Chomping at the bit for Paraguayan Hammock, the 160 minute long movie about, well, little more than a Paraguayan hammock? Anthology is the place for you.

The Angelika (Houston and Mercer) opened in 1989 during the heady days of the American indie explosion. It’s defiantly 90s: a coffeehouse monopolizes the entire ground floor and its marquee makes it seem like a Miramax annex. These days the Angelika runs the most mainstream fare of the Houston crew and skips the retrospectives and midnight movies that set its peers apart from the multiplex herd. Still, the Angelika is an institution and a uniquely New York one—don’t fret over the shaking floor; it’s just the 6 train rumbling down below.

In 2005, the IFC Center replaced the Waverly Theater on 6th Avenue just above Houston Street. The IFC runs shorts before all of its screenings—sometimes a blessing and sometimes a fate worse than Fandango commercials. Its slate of new movies consists of festival favorites that otherwise would not have seen the light of day. (This is New York’s House of Mumblecore.) The midnight movie is religion here—Buffy: The Musical and El Topo are perennial favorites. You can also count on the IFC reviving either a Lynch or a Bergman movie on any given weekend. Another Lynchian quirk: the concession stand serves a roast trademarked by the master of the surreal himself.

Walk west down Houston and you’ll find Film Forum, the granddaddy of New York arthouses. As with actual granddaddy’s (which many of its patrons are), Film Forum’s programming can smell a little musty, but God you’ll miss it when it’s gone. Like the Met, this is where you go for the European masters: Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, Bergman. It’s not all repertory though; the theater was the first outside the festival circuit to screen Lou Reed’s Berlin and will soon run Wendy and Lucy, Kelly’s Reichardt’s hotly anticipated collaboration with Michelle Williams.

Whether you’re looking for subtitles or sexploitation, animated shorts or Renoir marathons, the Houston Street crawl will likely deliver.

Lifelines

2008-11-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

Danny Boyle has a flair for the apocalyptic. Trainspotting’s junkies famously dived into a scummy toilet for a hit. 28 Days Later conjured an eerie, strangely beautiful London depopulated by all but rats and zombies. And the scientists in Sunshine were on a mission to blow up the sun to save an ailing earth. Slumdog Millionaire, the director’s latest, has plenty of misery to go around, but it’s wrapped up in a tidy (albeit clever) romantic bow that makes its characters’ tribulations feel a bit contrived. Still, Slumdog Millionaire is an unabashed epic and a compelling one at that, so viewers can forgive its genre conventions.

Slumdog Millionaire has been described as Dickens transplanted to millennial Mumbai. Jamal is eighteen years old and about to hit the jackpot on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. But he’s not after the money. Rather, he hopes that his performance wins over Natika, the girl of his dreams. Jamal’s life story (abject poverty and time spent in a seriously deranged “orphanage”) and his budding romance with Natika are related via flashbacks that explain how a lowly chaiwalla (tea server) knows answers that have stopped even the country’s upper-crust lawyers and doctors in their tracks.

Boyle’s movies alternately revere and subvert or modernize tired genre tropes. 28 Days Later was a zombie movie, but its zombies didn’t lumber; they hauled ass. Slumdog Millionaire alludes to Bollywood, India’s gargantuan and often garish movie industry, and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle employs the same vibrant color palette. But Boyle doesn’t shy away from the country’s underbelly. (Indian censors are expected to have a field day.) Audiences pulled in by Fox Searchlight’s sunny advertising campaign—“A buoyant hymn to life!”—will be shocked by much of the film’s violence and despair.

The rags portion of this Horatio Alger tale is more compelling than the riches that Jamal and his malevolent brother Salim (a complex character well-played by Madhur Mittal) acquire. Their progress parallels Mumbai’s transformation into a modern, skyscraping metropolis where luxury glass towers replace filthy, destitute slums. (Jamal, in a funny bit, works at a call center.) Boyle takes an ambivalent view on the city’s evolution. Does it owe more to Jamal’s good-hearted pluck and fortunate destiny (“It is written”) or Salim’s criminal ruthlessness? In the end it is a composite of the two, but Boyle is more interested in the painful means that accompany such a metamorphosis than the end.

Slumdog Millionaire has many joyous moments and such likeable characters that the audience winds up rooting for them. But you can’t help but think that Boyle is a bit hesitant about a happy ending.

I've Loved You So Long

2008-11-18T15:34:00.000-08:00

It’s been seven years and the French are still trying to live down Amélie. At least that’s what some of the country’s more successful recent imports suggest. I’ve Loved You So Long is the latest in a string of decidedly unsentimental Gallic films (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2 Days in Paris, Dans Paris, Tell No One) that serves as a corrective to the glossy, whimsical Parisian postcards American audiences consistently lap up.

Kristen Scott Thomas plays Juliette Fontaine, a middle-aged woman fresh out of prison. She struggles to readjust to civilian life with the help of her altruistic sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein) in the sort of high-ceilinged, tastefully appointed home only the French can muster. The movie is no charm offensive—bear in mind Amélie came out in the autumn of the Freedom Fry—but its insightful performances and intimacy compensate for the absence of boulangeries and Eiffel Tower shots.

Writer and director Philippe Claudel moves things along at a pace just above glacial, but that restraint is necessary to appreciate the depths of Thomas’ portrayal. Juliette is first shown in close-up, weary and sans makeup. Lea’s attempts at even the most diminutive small talk are met with painful indifference. Juliette can’t be bothered to ingratiate herself with Lea’s husband Luc (a convincingly hesitant Serge Hazanavicius) or warm to the couple’s adorable daughters. But things gradually change: Juliette picks up a would-be Don Juan at a bar; she visits museums; enjoys swims with Lea and teaches her niece to play the piano. Claudel wisely avoids a lecture on the role prisons or a society play in rehabilitating its criminals. Juliette’s rebirth is inspired by culture, by an outward aesthetic that nonetheless penetrates.

Juliette’s change is a moving thing to watch, but it’s undermined by a bit of manipulation from Claudel. The audience knows from early on that Juliette was doing time for the murder of her young son. But she is so fragile. Her progress is elegant. Her intelligent sister loves and nurtures her. Because we root for Juliette, we wait for the twist we know is coming.

Some critics have said the reveal is a letdown, but I’ve Loved You So Long would not have benefited from a Shyamalian gotcha ending. It’s the structure that is a bit grating; the movie’s psychological depth would not have been compromised had the details of Juliette’s crime been known from the start. As it is, the dramatic ending seems histrionic compared to the subtlety that preceded it.

Still, witnessing Juliette’s thaw makes up for the off-key denouement. There’s a moment when she enters the quiet, darkened house and fears she is once again alone. The relief and gratitude on her face when she finds her surrogate family says it all: she’s come home.

F U Tube

2008-11-14T09:05:00.000-08:00

It didn’t take long for The New York Times to move beyond conventional election analysis into the murky waters of the trend piece. But here it is, leading the first Sunday Styles section of the post-November 4th world: Generation O. “More 18-29-year-olds went to the polls this year than in any election since 1972…These younger voters…may forever be known as Generation O,” posits Damian Cave. Never mind that percentage-wise the youth turnout was not quite as a robust as had been predicted (and only a smidgen higher, at 52%, than in 2004 when John Kerry galvanized the young imagination).

The Styles section has long prided itself on coining (or popularizing already antiquated) inane catchphrases—think metrosexual, drunkorexia, bromance, the man date. But its breathless coverage of this generational love affair ignores an ironic twist in the 2008 race: the internet, that great agent of the young, was just as important to John McCain’s stodgy campaign as it was to Obama’s slick machine. Only whereas the president elect harnessed the internet’s elusive power, McCain sat by as it led to his undoing.

Grassroots was to the Obama campaign what maverick was to the McCain/Palin candidacy. The first-term Illinois senator was not supposed to win. He was up against the indomitable Clinton establishment and its reservoir of experience and deep pockets. But Obama and his people were clued in to the power of the internet in a way that stubbornly eluded older politicians. There were fundraising websites. Facebook groups. Emails and text messages seemingly from the candidate himself (convincing no more a discerning political pupil than Scarlet Johansson of a personal correspondence).

Obama built an online community that realized the internet’s best potential. He created a savvy, coherent forum that met practical goals (spread the word; raise money, even incrementally) but also realized the loftier ambition of empowering (and flattering) his devotees. Hope and change are intangible. But the internet and its infinite tentacles made them seem within reach.

John McCain did not steer the internet his way and the result was the inverse of Obama’s: a burlesque of disgruntled supporters tragically out of synch with their candidate. An elderly woman at a town hall meeting told McCain she could not trust Obama. Her reason, after a moment’ hesitation: “he’s an Arab.” When McCain mentioned his opponent’s name in speeches he was routinely meet with jeers of “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” A sheriff introducing Sarah Palin at a rally made sure to address the Democratic nominee by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama. You can guess where he placed the emphasis. An Obama volunteer asked a crowd of Pennsylvania Republicans why his friend, under Palin’s policy, should have to pay for a rape kit. “She should pay double,” bellowed a man in the crowd.

McCain hardly enabled this pettiness. He quickly removed the microphone from the elderly lady and clarified that Obama was “a good man. A family man.” (He did not clarify that Obama is a Christian, a seemingly gratuitous revision in light of earlier campaign controversies.) He winced at the caterwauling. But the damage was done. The internet is often lauded for its immediacy, but rarely for its permanence. Witnesses posted clips of these unfortunate incidents on the web, bloggers had a field day and millions of people sent them to the inboxes of family and friends. A picture emerged of a listless candidate surrounded by a lynch mob.

The 2008 election was a modern one, but it exposed some dissonant, primitive truths about the internet. The web creates communities, but also encourages cliques. It enables universalism, but also preposterous niches. Facebook might unite you with a fellow stamp enthusiast, but the time spent ogling each other’s collections via online photo albums can potentially take you away from your family or that next door neighbor you’ve never met. And as McCain ruefully learned this year, the internet provides unparalleled access to information, but also occasional unwanted exposure to the noxious and loathsome (incessant penis enlargement spam being the proverbial, disconcertingly small tip of the iceberg). It wasn’t just the internet that did McCain in, but the subset of ignorant, bigoted McCain supporters that found their way on to the screen and at once appalled and appealed to the admittedly baser instincts of smug liberals and undecided voters alike. To borrow some internet lingo, the internet plagued the McCain campaign with a bad case of TMI.

Let The Right One In

2008-11-08T08:31:00.000-08:00

Sociologists take note: accidental exposure to Abba is no longer the greatest threat facing Sweden’s teenagers. For starters, there is the child murderer on the loose in Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. The killer’s peculiar method of draining his victims’ blood serves an even higher evil: feeding his vampire daughter, Eli (Lina Leandersson). Don’t dismiss the thriller as schlock with subtitles. Let the Right One In is a tender, gracefully shot coming of age tale with a slasher veneer. Its genre elements subside as Eli befriends Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), an outcast neighbor whose struggle with the local bullies is so extreme as to make bloodsucker company a relief.

The running joke here is that Oskar suffers more acute isolation than his undead companion. Eli, forever twelve, has practical, immediate concerns (fresh blood, heavy curtains, impatiently waiting to be invited into homes she visits) and is spared the pubescent speed bumps (divorced parents, idiot teachers, schoolyard thugs) that confront frail Oskar. The young vampiress meets Oskar as he fantasizes about the revenge he might have on his tormentors and coaxes the same violent defense mechanisms out of him that she yearns to suppress in herself. But both child actors imbue their characters with a sweet vulnerability and longing that elicit the kind of audience empathy rarely found in horror films. A potent scene in which Eli makes an unbidden entrance into a sullen Oskar's home (and the searing aftermath) illuminates the emotional heft that the movie offers as an antidote to the usual featherweight character development in current horror cinema.

Let the Right One In’s vampire story might serve as adolescent parable, but the movie respects its genre roots. The lighting is austere, alternating pitch black fright scenes with stark white, snowy landscapes. Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography eschews gruesome close-ups for elegant wide shots. And Johan Soderqvist’s score spares viewers the cheap musical jolts that so often cue horror fans to jump in their sets. Still, Alfredson and writer John Lindqvist (upon whose novel the movie is based) do not take their film too seriously and include gleefully dark comic moments (particularly a school ice-skating trip gone fantastically awry) to lighten the somber mood.

Things only fall apart in the final scene, a tacked on coda that spoils what would have been a subtle conclusion. Let the Right One In is a horror film with few scares, a black comedy with few outright laughs. What kept it ticking until its very end was the fragile bond between Eli and Oskar and the fortitude Oskar’s supernatural friend inspired in him. But the movie ends not with a triumph of humanity but of the supernatural. It is a lame concession to genre norms, at its hoariest going so far as to hint at a sequel.

Sulk Mania

2008-11-02T15:34:00.000-08:00

Randy “The Ram” Robinson, the hulking over-the-hill prizefighter in The Wrestler, is not the film’s only player looking for redemption. Star Mickey Rourke and director Darren Aronofsky also aim to revitalize their careers with the unassuming drama. Robinson’s floundering career in the ring has left his personal life a shambles; his estranged daughter Stephanie (Rachel Evan Wood) detests him and his only love interest is the reluctant stripper Cassidy (Marisa Tomei, in another role with a single digit costume budget). After a heart attack and failed attempts at stability with both women, Randy enters the fray one last time. But Rourke’s and Aronofsky’s naturalistic performance and direction suggest that neither career will burn out anytime soon.

The Wrestler is Aronofsky’s first feature to deal with human destruction working from the outside in. Pi, Requiem for a Dream and the misguided The Fountain all examined the effects a ravaged mind could have on the body. But Randy’s punishment begins externally. It comes in the gruesome, hard-to-watch form of body slams, folding chairs and staple guns. Fans that had to turn away from Requiem’s close-ups of track marks and plunging hypodermic needles: you have been warned. Fittingly for a movie about the physical, The Wrestler is the least cerebral of Aronosfky’s films in tone and production values. Robert Siegel’s dialogue is restrained and straightforward, its more emotive moments tersely distilled to their cores. Maryse Alberti’s cinematography provides a bleached palette to match Randy’s weariness and the film’s forlorn Jersey Shore setting. And gone are the flashy editing techniques—split screens! Time jumping! Hyperkinetic montages!—that defined Aronofsky’s earlier efforts.

The Fountain, despite its intellectual and visual ambitions, flummoxed many critics and alienated all but Aronofsky’s most avid fans with its muddled time travel story arc. Ann Hornaday called it an “earnest, magnificent wreck” in The Washington Post. Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times was less kind, saying that enduring it was “a pretty decent case for euthanasia; here is what it’s like to long for a swift, merciful end.” With The Wrestler, Aronofsky and Rourke (no stranger to career frustration himself and, by the weathered looks of him, a man who could identify with the Ram’s pathological self-abuse) find success by scaling back their ambitions. Rourke withdraws further and further into himself over the course of the film. At its conclusion he is an empty shell, spurned by the two women who were his last hopes. “That’s the only place they love me. Out there,” he says of the ring—displayed here as more of a fraternity than a deathtrap—before his ill-advised final brawl. And so he flings himself back into the embrace of the community that had lost faith in him. Aronofsky and Rourke have done the same and famously forgiving Hollywood is sure to provide a warm welcome back.

"The Roaches Wave Hello"

2008-10-25T17:31:00.000-07:00

Mars Bar does not blend. Its exterior is caked in evolving neon murals and graffiti, “Dive In” scrawled above the glorious dive bar’s rickety front door. But its outward brazenness betrays a dark, dank inside whose patrons want nothing more than anonymous bender. Recently, both sides have taken a hit. The Mars Bars windows have been cleaned. Timid passersby can finally look in and the customers, reluctantly, can see out.

A series of Avalon luxury buildings have enveloped Mars Bar’s block in a cloak of hastily constructed glass mediocrity. Down the street you’ll find Blue and Gold, a high priced boutique imported to the East Village from East Hampton, the neighborhood’s spiritual antithesis despite the shared geographic moniker. Also on the block is Bowery Wine Company, co-owned by Bruce Willis (who honed his chops as a restaurateur with the highly regarded Planet Hollywood franchise) and easily among the most generic bars an unlucky soul might stumble upon in Manhattan. Across Houston is a behemoth Whole Foods store, saved from complete yuppie oblivion only by the marvelous, cheap beer store at its northeastern corner. True, Mars Bar does have a neighbor in debauchery with The Cock (nee The Hole), the notoriously louche cesspool of a gay bar just an eightball’s throw away. But gone are the days when Mars Bar was the rule of the area and not the exception to it.

As one of the ever-dwindling holdouts of the East Village’s CBGB heyday, any sign of a Mars Bar cleanup or, heaven forbid, renovation is greeted with consternation by it grizzled, stumbling clientele. Rex, the Dee Snyder look-alike who does not appear to have left the bar in eleven years, says the cops (who have busted into the place on the few occasions I’ve found myself there past New York’s 4am closing time) have it in for the joint. But with a set of customers like Rex, Crazy Dave (thrown out of the bar an average of twice a day) and Handsome Eddie (whose Lazy Boy chair occupies a corner), you can rest assured that one of New York’s great bastions of sleaze and grime will not go gently into that good night. Where would East Villagers drink when the sun comes up if it did?

George Washington

2008-10-24T11:28:00.000-07:00

“He just wanted greatness.” That’s how Nasia (Candace Evaofski) describes her friend George (Donald Holden) in David Gordon Greene’s George Washington. The same could be said for the wunderkind director himself, just 25 when he made the ambitious, lyrical film. George Washington depicts one summer in the lives of impoverished youths in a decayed North Carolina town. Tragedy and triumph bookend the season and catapult the protagonists into complicated, compromised adulthood.

Greene flaunts his influences. The film is uncannily reminiscent of Terrance Malick’s masterful Days of Heaven. This means lush cinematography (by Tim Orr) of pastoral landscapes threatened by (and dependent on) modern industrialism. Evaofski’s stirring voiceover narration, packed with plainspoken childhood wisdom (“The grown-ups in my town, they were never kids like me and my friends. They had worked in wars and build machines.”) also recalls Malick. But unlike Malick’s seemingly effortless beauties, Greene’s film, while an ascetic delight, occasionally falters under the weight of its artistic flourishes.

Editors Steven Gonzales and Zene Baker’s provide an elliptical structure that compliments the film’s dreamy tone, but negates Greene’s naturalistic dialogue and simple plot. Moments of ethereal grace—George visiting his friend’s burial place (“No one will bother you here”), Nasia telling George, “I hope you live forever” — rub against stalled narrative asides and Orr’s overdependence on slow-motion.

George Washington suggests a literary horror film. Characters are challenged by their own mortality. “I’m not a very good person. I didn’t feel anything,” says Sonya (Rachael Hardy) after witnessing a friend’s death. Viewers will not say the same of Green’s fitfully transcendent debut. Thankfully, the young director is unlikely to face his own mortality any time soon.

Hack to School

2008-10-14T18:53:00.000-07:00

The few compelling scenes in Antonio Campos’ Afterschool occur within its first thirty seconds and do not belong to the movie itself. Robert (Ezra Miller) watches You Tube clips from his boarding school dorm. There are cackling babies and sleeping kittens. The bits grow ominous: a skateboarder crashes onto concrete; Saddam Hussein’s is hanged; a young girl is debased in a needlessly protracted porn outtake. Sadly for the audience, it only gets worse. When Robert starts shooting his own videos, his camera catches the drug overdoses of two popular students. The memorial video he is assigned to produce details the school’s and his own unraveling.

Afterschool mistakes formal pretension and glacial pacing for art. Cinematographer Jodie Lee Lipes favors spare wide shots and reluctant pans. This refinement suggests a corrective to crude viral videos. But the framing is still an amateurish debacle. The images lack the beauty and foreboding intrigue found in Elephant and Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant’s deliberately paced studies of teenage disaffection. Some good will come out of Afterschool if You Tube amateurs realize they can save their money and skip film school.

Campos’ dialogue is similarly muted and unadorned, realism at odds with the clinical photography. Characters betray zero emotion and lack a plot that might have mitigated these flaws. But there is no narrative arc or climax to supplement the contemplative stillness; the film is all reaction. A cheap last minute twist excels only at audience manipulation. Afterschool is a joyless lecture on How We Live Now. It suffers from the same shortcomings of the Web 2.0 culture it means to critique. Only here, artifice compounds banality. Stick with the sleepy kittens.

Iowa Lineman

2008-10-14T18:42:00.000-07:00

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell is named after one of the titular musician’s songs, but it also describes the relationship between the Iowan teen runaway and the 1970s downtown New York counterculture he helped define at its multicultural, pansexual peak.

Russell was a beguiling composite of divergent traits: shy, yet forceful; avant-garde with pop sensibilities; a perfectionist who never met a deadline and painfully insecure about his talents despite genius. His reticence and transmutability—he struggled to accept his homosexuality—formed a charisma that drew people in just as his stubborn work ethic repelled them. The most heartrending moments in the film are the interviews with those who never questioned their allegiance to the complicated, difficult man: his overwhelmingly decent parents— have Kleenex ready for their segments—and his boyfriend, Tom Lee.

Russell’s music imbues Wild Combination with hypnotic grace. The documentary’s most vivid moments feature how-did-they-get-this footage of ecstatic dancers at legendary downtown clubs like The Loft. Russell drew on the orgiastic ferment of the 1970s New York underground with nods to disco, soul, folk, spoken word and the ambient “echo noise” that later defined the New Wave movement. The movie expertly captures that dynamic, bygone time that claimed Russell, who died of AIDS in 1991, as a victim.

Wild Combination is the rare film chronicle of art that registers as art itself. It is a compliment to say that the films more esoteric shots—wake from the Staten Island ferry, spasmodic bursts of monochrome synced to the music, lyrical shots of farmland—are reminiscent of the gorgeous, calculated randomness of Russell’s work itself.

Mister Foe

2008-09-20T13:35:00.000-07:00

Daniele Radcliffe is not the only British child star coming of age this fall. While Harry Potter grabs headlines for dropping trow in the Broadway production of Equus, Jamie Bell, star of 2000’s Billy Elliot turns up in the decidedly adult Mister Foe, giving an emotionally and physically bare performance of his own. Bell plays Hallam Foe, the type for whom the term arrested development was coined. Hallam is a sexually confused young man who mourns his mother’s death by dressing up in her clothes and makeup. The shady circumstances of his mom’s passing- this being a Scottish film, she drowned in a loch, but how?- have Hallam constantly looking where he shouldn’t. These investigatory impulses extend into the perverse when he becomes the reigning Peeping Tom of the Highlands, ogling passersby engaged in the coital bliss that evades him.

Hallam winds up homeless in Edinburgh after his exasperated stepmother Verity (whom he suspects of killing his mom) kicks him out of the family’s turreted palace. He encounters the hardships that often accompany a movie hero’s arrival in a strange city- drunk hobos, leering old men looking for a trick, overzealous cops and pounding rain- before gazing upon, Kate, a not-so-dead ringer for his mum. The stalking commences, followed by a faintly believable love affair straight out of Sophocles.

Early in their relationship, Kate tells Hallam that she “likes creepy guys,” a dubious harbinger if ever there was one. Kate’s sentiment must be shared by the viewer if he hopes to love the film, for its characters taken together could fill a new volume of the DSM. The abundant flaws on display- there are gold diggers, adulterers, stalkers and suicides, to name a few- make for narrative conflict and comic absurdity, but keep the audience just as removed from the characters as they are from each other.

Despite many luscious shots of Edinburgh, the film’s photography has a clinical grey-blue coldness about it that keeps its characters and their many quirks at arms length. For an off-putting character to be endearing, he must be placed in an off-kilter setting. Stanley Kubrick and Tim Burton movies excel at this; loathsome as A Clockwork Orange’s Alex is, he represents perfectly the dystopian environment that Kubrick’s film conjures. And would audiences sympathize with Edward Scissorhands if he did not offer a comic contrast to his Technicolor suburban nightmare? Foe’s application of war paint and animal skins is an amusing diversion, but a shallow one that feels out of place in a movie otherwise grounded in realism.

The gratuitous murder mystery at the periphery of the film also contributes to its scattershot mood. I never bought into it anymore than the cynical cops or adults of the film. Mister Foe already flirts with lazy pop psychology. Foe’s fitful investigation into his mother’s death seems like little more than a pragmatic justification of his arrested development and oedipal urges.

Like its titular Peeping Tom, Mister Foe observes some intriguing characters, many of them up to no good fun. But the audience is beset by the same limitations of the peeper, denied any intimacy with the quirky people it glances.

Bowery Hums

2008-09-13T08:59:00.001-07:00

Is it fair to say that Keith McNally has fallen behind the curve when the curve has ceased to exist? The restaurateur has finalized plans to open a brick oven pizzeria on the corner of Bowery and Houston. As if on cue, neighborhood preservationists got in a lather, with the jeremiads about the death of yet another New York neighborhood coming fast and furious. But the hand-wringing over the Bowery, until recently an iconic preserve of downtown derelicts, comes a day late and a dollar short. In the last year or so, the strip’s restaurant supply stores, flophouses and methadone clinics have come to stand beside a Whole Foods monstrosity, the gleaming New Museum of Contemporary Art and chic Bowery Hotel.

McNally is renowned for restaurants that open in “frontier” neighborhoods, quickly giving them a respectable polish. Tribeca, SoHo, the Lower East Side, the Meatpacking District: all once-bohemian enclaves turned into real estate, shopping or nightlife meccas. Of course, McNally alone cannot be credited (or more likely blamed) for gentrifying these hoods: the Lower East Side had already ceded much of its skuzzy charm to slumming uptowners when Schiller’s set up shop and pioneers like Florent Morellet ran Meatpacking strongholds before Pastis made the area’s cobblestone streets safe for stilettos. Whether you view a McNally opening as an expiration or certification of cool, it signals a change.

Lately though, McNally’s Midas touch has lost its luster. Morandi opened in 2006 on a firmly established stretch of 7th Avenue in Greenwich Village. Its rustic Italian menu and interiors represented a departure from his patented French bistro formula. It generated the inevitable Page Six mentions and opening week excitement. But reviews were lukewarm at best- Frank Bruni’s Times takedown of the restaurant and its chef, Jody Williams, caused a minor kerfuffle, with McNally accusing the critic of sexism- and the restaurant never became quite the destination that previous McNally entries had.

I suspect McNally will be fine. He is alone among the A-list or New York restaurateurs for claiming a roster of spots-The Odeon, Lucky Strike, Balthazar, Schiller’s Liquor Bar, Pastis- where the buzz generates itself, unmoored to celebrity designers or chefs. The spaces are handsome but restrained, the decor unlikely to induce the acid flashbacks of a Jeffrey Chodorow dinner. The chefs are competent but unfussy, serving straightforward bistro fare- burgers, steak frites, croquet monsieur’s- to customers seeking a respite from occasionally pretentious greenmarket hegemony on one end and molecular Petri dishes like deep-fried mayonnaise on the other.

McNally may not be the first member of the establishment to colonize the Bowery. But it’s tough to fault him for not putting a new neighborhood on the map when, at this point, the Manhattan map is very clearly drawn. Given McNally’s track record and the genial buzz his restaurants often produce, the imminent pizzeria will likely add to the bustle of the new Bowery, even if it doesn’t create it.

LES Artistes

2008-08-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

As the New York gallery scene slowly migrates from West Chelsea to the Lower East Side, Beautiful Losers arrives in theaters as a documentary portrait of Alleged Gallery, the groundbreaking exhibition space that opened on Ludlow Street in1992. With a graffiti-laden bodega exterior that telegraphed the roughhewn street art found inside, Alleged introduced a motley cru of young artists including Barry McGee, Ed Templeton, Mike Mills, Harmony Korine and Spike Jonze to the mainstream. Director Aaron Rose, Alleged’s curator, offers incomparable insight, but his intimate ties to the gallery and its artists result in a hermetic and fawning appraisal.

Beautiful Losers assumes a familiarity with the subject that neglects the uninitiated. Watching it does not inspire the unmitigated terror that an in-law’s home movie would. But the film does leave the less savvy viewer like me with a feeling of being on the outside looking in. The losers in questions are a charismatic bunch; it’s a shame we don’t get to know them better. Part of the problem might be that while the artists did share a gallery, they did not cohere around a particular genre. Inspirations ran the gamut from skate culture to advertising to graffiti to comic books to punk rock. The documentary teaches you a little about all of these muses, but would be stronger if it taught you everything about one. Of course, a more myopic background would give many of the Alleged artists short thrift.

Another solution to the film’s scattershot feel would have been a closer examination of the gallery itself. Participants attest to the cult-like loyalty that Alleged inspired in its artists and audiences: painters slept beneath their portraits rather than in hotels; exhibitions and their showcased artists shuttled between New York. Los Angeles and Tokyo and Rose ran the space for years despite the enormous financial burden it imposed. But just as it falls short of illuminating the art itself, Beautiful Losers struggles to put the gallery in its context. I had hoped to hear more about the pre-gentrified Lower East Side- what attracted a pioneer like Rose to this frontier and how the bohemian charge that Alleged sparked paved the way for the stiletto-choked nightlife destination the LES has become.

Glossing over the Disneyfication of the neighborhood is one thing; giving a free pass to the artists regarding their own commercial embrace is a larger failure. Alleged alumni quickly graduated from the scruffy gallery scene to Pepsi and Apple contracts. And while their advertisements might have gone against the grain aesthetically, they still fattened the pockets of those grey flannel suits. The co-opting of such an anti-establishment crew deserved a more thorough if not critical analysis.

Beautiful Losers is like a reunion between exceptionally quirky and talented college friends. It is a pleasant and endearing celebration. But it only touches the surface, offering a perfunctory crash course on a formative time and place while looking past the occasional bald patch or spare tire.

Some American Broads

2008-08-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

Movie critics are in the midst of yet another frenaissance with New York icon and cinematic expatriate Woody Allen. After releasing seventeen Manhattan-centric movies each year for the past 62 years, Woody decamped for London with Match Point in 2005. The film won Allen his best reviews in years, with many declaring the hop across the pond just the breath of fresh air he needed. However the next two anglophiliac exercises, Scoop and Cassandra’s Dream, fell short of Match Point’s promise. So now the director has gone in search of the exotic once again with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, set in the titular Spanish city.

The film follows the exploits of Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (current Allen muse Scarlett Johannson), two young Americans whose summer abroad is disrupted by quintessentially suave Spaniard Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem sans mop top). A love triangle emerges and eventually expands into a square with the introduction of Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), Juan Antonio’s crazed ex-wife.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona excels as a meditation on Allen’s own wanderlust. Cristina bemoans the “puritanical and materialistic” America she’s left behind. Allen, no stranger to sordid tabloid speculation and perpetual Hollywood outlier, didn’t have to strain too hard to write such a character. Vicky’s bland fiancé Doug (Chris Messina) is the sole connection to New York in the film. If Doug-a corporate lawyer and a prude in pleated khakis- embodies contemporary New York for Allen, the city might be waiting a long while for the return of its prodigal son. For now though, Barcelona, or at least Allen’s version of it, provides the articulate bohemian café culture that millennial Manhattan lacks. But the bevy of tourist snapshots in Vicky Cristina suggest that Allen does not know the city all that intimately. And that hazy sense of place rubs off on the characters who inhabit it.

Stacked up against Allen's ouevre, his latest lacks both the (arguably overcooked) pathos of tragedies like Crimes and Misdemeanors, Interiors and Match Point and the belly laughs of Annie Hall or Bullets Over Broadway. The director is capable of a happy medium- Hannah and Her Sisters, my favorite Woody movie, incorporates elements of both genres- but Vicky Cristina Barcelona feels muddled, not confident of what it wants to be. This problem boils down to underwritten characters. Allen, via the film’s narrator, hammers us over the head with the philosophical schism between pragmatic Vicky and impetuous Cristina. (Voiceover narration is rarely a good sign in movies. Directors might as well send a telegraph describing their characters’ motivations.) Allen even provides glimpses of how the pair might turn out if they slavishly adhere to their divergent paths: conventionally successful but emotionally stilted Judy (Patricia Clarkson) and passionate but deranged Maria Elena.

But the friends are held at a curious distance from each other over the course of the film, denying any sort of synthesis or evolution of opinion. I wish Vicky and Cristina really went at it. Not in a darkroom, as Cristina and Marie Elena do, but over dinner or a drink. So many of Woody’s characters have engaged in emotional combat like this: the sisters in Hannah, Judy Davis and Sydney Pollack in Husband and Wives, Mariel Hemingway and Allen himself in Manhattan. Exhausted and furious and incorrigible as they may seem, their only salve is bitter, profane, intelligent conversation. It might be the languid Catalonian sun that makes Vicky and Cristina soft. Perhaps a sequel could find them in baggage at JFK, enjoying the kind of barbed confrontation Woody always provided at top form.

Radiohead

2008-08-16T09:38:00.000-07:00

The opening night of the All Points West Music and Arts Festival in Jersey City coincided with another set of opening ceremonies in Beijing. While music fans were deprived of that televised event, they nevertheless displayed Olympian endurance leading up to the performances. The thousands of concertgoers who bypassed the costly ferry service endured packed PATH trains from Manhattan to Jersey City followed by light rail service to the park itself. This might not sound so bad until you consider that once deposited at the park’s main entrance, another twenty or thirty minutes of hoofing it awaited you. All of this was a minor imposition on the way to the concert. But returning to the city with the full crush of dazed concertgoers fleeing at once- feet swollen and consciousness in various states of compromise- was another story.

Getting a drink was another significant hurdle. Upon having my ticket scanned and crotch massaged by security, I entered the grounds to find another line for 21+ wristbands. The grumbling increased as I approached the ID table and read the rules: Five Drinks per individual; Last Call 8:30. Huh? Wristband applied, I then discovered that drinking was only allowed in two designated holding pens on the periphery of the field. You heard it everywhere: “Fucking Jersey.” Where else were people to direct their anger than that timeworn punching bag?

Luckily, Radiohead was there to save the day. Attendees had already lightened up after the initial cattle calls. A mélange of hipsters, club kids and elderly dropouts swaying through dance acts Underworld and Girl Power quickly gave way to a determined crowd closing in on the main stage in anticipation of the already-iconic British rock quintet. Thom Yorke and company took the stage just a few minutes after their scheduled start time as the sea of people amassed and crowded closer to the front. The set that followed relied heavily on In Rainbows, their latest album and a mellower one. Despite the deliberate pace, the crowd was entranced. You could hear a pin drop during the down tempo tracks ("How to Disappear Completely", "Reckoner", "House of Cards") while the more anthemic, older songs ("Just", "Street Spirit") got the crowd revved up but never too raucous.

Radiohead is not given to chatter; aside from a few quips from Yorke, they tore through their set with a cool efficiency. But who needs talk when you have that catalog to mine? Some fans are disappointed that the band has veered away from its traditional rock roots. Each of its albums shows Radiohead at a different step in its sonic evolution, from The Bends’ wailing guitars to Kid A’s moody electronic beeps to In Rainbows’ somber synthesis of sounds old and new. But over a two and a half hour set (five hours if you were lucky enough to catch both nights), the guys miraculously make it all coalesce. It’s the most richly textured concert performance I’ve ever seen, with the band- and audience- enjoying its more conventional early work just as much as its subsequent experimental forays.

As Radiohead played past their allotted timeslot and the tens of thousands who had come to see them faced a midnight journey back to New York, the band concluded its set with “Everything in Its Right Place” off of Kid A. It was a testament to the group that despite less than ideal conditions leading up to its show, the choice of closer was appropriate.

Shilling in the Name of...

2008-08-12T12:12:00.000-07:00

There is irony in the Republicans holding their upcoming convention at Minneapolis’ Xcel Energy Center. As Paris Hilton and gas pumps remind us, the energy crisis is one of this election’s most pressing issues. It’s certainly an issue that 90s political rockers Rage Against the Machine might howl about when they hit the Twin Cities on September 3, smack in the middle of the GOP’s confetti-clogged nominating process. The band will rage against the evils of war, oppression and greed ten miles from the convention itself at…the Target Center? Target- the rich man’s Wal-Mart- may not have the abysmal public relations record of that other retail behemoth. But Rage playing under the banner of a corporation that lacks a living wage contract and labor unions should still raise some brows. And in a move that budget-minded Target shoppers would reject, tickets to the concert will sell for $60.

It’s true that a dwindling number of stadiums in this country have escaped the corporate branding iron. And $60 is a paltry price to pay for a big name band in this day of extortionate ticket prices. But things have not changed that drastically from eight years ago when Rage Against the Machine put on a free show at a public site across the street from the 2000 Democratic National Convention. Granted, that event erupted into a skirmish between cops and attendees that involved rocks, pepper spray and rubber bullets. Then again, the average Rage Against the Machine fan likely isn’t looking for concerts to end with a Kumbaya medley.

There is risk involved in tying ostensibly counterculture events in a corporate bow. Who can forget Woodstock ’99? Thanks in part to $12 pizzas and $4 bottled waters being sold at the sponsor tents, that wan facsimile of the original Woodstock ended in arson, vandalism and rape. Rage guitarist Tom Morello- who played the event- later said the melee “suggested an affinity between the looters and rapists at the event and the corporate entities that sponsored it.” Rage Against the Machine is looking for a reaction by playing down the street from the Republican convention. But the reaction that such pronounced dissonance between artist and venue might provoke is questionable. Some Rage fans might look at being pepper sprayed as a badger of honor, a way of sticking it to the man. But what does it say when you pay the man for that privilege?

Go West

2008-08-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

Tonight Radiohead headlines the inaugural All Points West Music & Arts Festival in Jersey City. They will be preceded by British electronic duo Underworld on the stage set up at Liberty State Park. This is a lineup to celebrate, but might also inspire consternation among superstitious New York area music fans, at least those who recall that the same two bands were scheduled to open the ill-fated Field Day festival five years ago. Field Day will long be remembered as a calamitous disappointment: a stellar roster of performers was set to perform on Long Island’s North Fork before local law enforcement, government officials and environmentalists put the kibosh on the event. People who had purchased tickets could opt for a refund or a relocated “field day” revolving around the Meadowlands parking lot in New Jersey. (Torrential rain put a damper on that already-underwhelming substitute.)

New Yorkers want and deserve a solid festival in their own backyard. Austin holds two venerable festivals each year- Austin City Limits and South by Southwest- that practically engulf the city. This summer, Chicago hosted both Lollapalooza and the Pitchfork Music Festival. And each summer music fans from across the country descend on Manchester, Tennessee and Indio, California for their respective Bonnaroo and Coachella festivals. Of course, New York does present organizers with a substantial roadblock: too many people and not enough land. But the city’s incalculable contributions to music over the years and its ceaseless creative energy should outweigh logistics.

Despite the ominous weather forecast for the weekend, All Points West has successfully avoided the metaphorical gathering clouds that doomed Field Day. Let’s hope the event is a success and becomes a mainstay. New Yorkers shouldn’t have to travel to points further west than Jersey to get their festival fill.

2008-07-31T08:23:00.000-07:00

In a summer where the average American cannot afford a vacation, the movies have provided a climate-controlled alternative. The Dark Knight is the biggest audience phenomenon since Titanic;. it will likely gross upwards of a half billion dollars. Iron Man and the latest Indiana Jones installment have joined the rarefied $300 million club. Few movies that were expected to do well disappointed. However, the market lacks a summer stalwart: the sleeper hit, that elusive, modestly-budgeted, out-of-the-blue smash that owes its success not to Burger King tie-ins, but to word of mouth.

Recent buzzed about independent films like The Wackness, My Winnipeg, Savage Grace and Brick Lane have landed at the box office with a resounding thud; none has taken in over a million dollars. Compare these results to those of summer sleepers past: Napoleon Dynamite ($45 million), Little Miss Sunshine ($60 million), March of the Penguins ($77 million), Fahrenheit 9/11($120 million), The Blair Witch Project ($141 million) and, however inexplicable, My Big Fat Greek Wedding ($251 million).

There are commercial reasons for this summer’s dearth of indie surprises. The film release calendar has grown increasingly schizophrenic; prestige pictures clamor for winter’s awards season buzz (and its attendant box office bump) while shoot 'em ups dominate summer. The recent writer’s strike wreaked more havoc on small films vying for a summer release date than on event movies that had already begun their lengthy post-production schedules. And sadly, several independent distributors including Tartan, Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse have either folded entirely or merged with the major studios that funded them. (The indie authenticity of such subsidiary outfits is another debate.)

Another explanation for the lack of event indies is that independent-minded directors now funnel their energy into blockbusters. Just a few years and a few films after bursting onto the scene with quirky fare like Swingers and Memento, Jon Favreau. and Christopher Nolan helmed Iron Man and The Dark Knight. Guillermo del Toro applied the same lush visual imagination to Hellboy 2 that he did to Pan’s Labyrinth, only with a larger budget and ad campaign. Sam Raimi was one of the earliest examples of the current auteur career projection, graduating from the blood-soaked Evil Dead trilogy to the Spiderman series. Raimi’s evolution took nearly twenty years; the younger crop of directors seems to make the leap to the big leagues the moment their debut film takes a prize at Sundance.

Despite the void this trend creates in the low-budget market, a benefit is that long-reviled summer event movies are actually garnering critical praise: Iron Man and Dark Knight both rate above 90% on http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ and the Oscar buzz surrounding Heath Ledger’s role as the Joker is building. Directors like Raimi, Fav and Nolan have kept their artistry intact. They’re still make cult movies, just for much bigger cults. With quality movies playing in the multiplex next door, people may feel less incentive to track down the nearest art house.

Reprise

2008-05-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

Reprise begins with Erik (Espen Klauman Hoiner) and Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie), two twenty three year olds standing in front of a mailbox. They are aspiring authors, manuscripts in hand. After dropping their novels in the mail, a fanciful, sped up montage looks into their (imagined) futures: critical adoration, rabid cult audiences, fierce academic debate, doomed romances, African street revolutions triggered by their prose. It’s an amusing aside. But the choppiness that this diversion introduces to the film lingers. These flashy, New Wave indulgences of debut director Joachim Trier threaten to ironically evoke the strained pretensions of the young literary set his solid film gently mocks. Thankfully the pace settles, resulting in a nimble exploration of youth forging an artistic (and adult) identity.

Phillip’s fate briefly approaches the grandiose daydream by the mailbox. His novel is published to some acclaim and decent sales. Erik’s book is rejected, though he harbors little ill will towards his friend. (An Americanized version of this movie, and most likely American writers, would surely revel in such animosity.) Of course, it is a universal truth that fame and success are mixed blessings, so Phillip spirals into a profound depression that ends in a suicide attempt. His fleeting success over and his health on the mend, Phillip returns to Erik and their core group of friends. The film is strongest when examining twentysomething male camaraderie. There is vulgar machismo posing- incapable of healthy relationships, the gang dismisses women as intellectually bankrupt sex objects, cultural one-upmanship (the obscure references come fast and furious), naïve hero worship (of a reclusive, depressed cult author) and relentless binge drinking. There is also their utter dependency on one another, for reasons of sanity and inspiration.

Fortunes shift as Erik writes a book that becomes the latest victim of the publishing hype machine. A vapid talk show host says it is “about madness,” suggesting that Phillip was no small inspiration. Ultimately, neither young writer quite realize their marvelous ambitions. Reprise settles into a minor key as it shows its young characters stumble into adulthood and its attendant compromises: modest goals, quiet accomplishments, generic but happy relationships and the occasional business suit. In short, all the bourgeois trappings the film’s characters initially spurned. Reprise, like the literary strivers it documents, has its faults. There is occasional audience manipulation; several scenes forecast Phillip checking out for good. And a climactic party montage verges on John Hughes territory. But for the most part, Reprise succeeds as a bittersweet homage to youthful talents and indiscretions. It mirrors the success of its protagonists in distilling a lifetime of passions and references into a coherent whole.

Dive Alive

2008-02-28T13:43:00.000-08:00

Dejectedly surveying the NYU-strewn wreckage at Botanica, my friend Dan and I decided to hop over to Milano’s next door. After navigating one of the narrowest bars we’d ever encountered (made all the more treacherous for Dan by his yoga mat, which ran perpendicular to the bar both physically and philosophically), we found a mellow, amber-lit back area with a smattering of two-tops. Initially thrown off by the Shania Twain song blaring over the speakers, we ordered drinks and quickly remedied the music situation with Pixies and Joy Division tracks via the Rolling Stones-laden jukebox.

Milano’s is a classic dive, with grizzled old vets who have likely been glued to the same barstools long enough to function as art installations, a cash-only policy, pungent, saloon-style bathrooms and practically sepia-toned photographs of legendary patrons (and requisite Irish flag) festooning the walls. It's the type of place where you'll hesitate to order anything more "refined" than a whiskey, though eye-rolling was kept to a minimum when Dan asked for a Pinot Noir. Located in boutique-ridden Nolita, it’s an old warhorse that has defiantly bucked the relentless gentrification that has engulfed the area. Drinks are cheap ($5 a pop with additional discounts during happy hour) and are served from 8 a.m. (!) through 4 a.m.

Babies Everywhere

2008-02-21T13:57:00.000-08:00

Following in the wake of Knocked Up, that other pregnancy movie, two newish releases have been riding different waves of hype: Juno (to Oprah, blockbuster status, the Oscars) and the Romanian 4 Months, 3Weeks and 2 Days (to the Palm d’Or, Film Comment dissections and sustained runs at Los Angeles and New York arthouse showcases).
The former tells the story of quirkily named, sixteen year old Juno (Ellen Page), who discovers she is pregnant after a tryst with Bleeker (Michael Cera). Antics ensue as she befriends the uber-yuppie couple (played by Jennifer Garner and a creepy Jason Bateman) that wishes to adopt her unborn child.

Juno has been lauded for its “freshness” and its convincing hipster dialogue. But I found the “hip,” “young” dialogue strained and cloying and off-the-mark. Despite an ever-widening gulf between me and my teen years, I am virtually certain that the adolescent parlance on display in the film resonates with few of its teenage viewers. Slightly less offensive but nearly as irksome is the incessant use of folksy alternative guitar-strumming throughout. There is nothing wrong with this kind of music, but it is best enjoyed in moderation and makes for a dull soundtrack when there are no alternatives to be heard.

The (strangely unheralded) strength of the film to me was its quiet moments, particularly those involving Jennifer Garner, who, frankly, stole the show from Page. Garner’s reaction to Juno telling her character she’s lucky not to be the pregnant one is priceless, as is the scene in the mall when she desperately wishes to feel the baby kick. I wish there had been more of these scenes. There were plenty of opportunities for their inclusion: the scene in which Juno reveals to her parents that she is pregnant is one of them. Instead, it struck me as false and oddly truncated. Also disappointing and unrealistic is the lack of focus on the torment and unease that a pregnant sixteen-year old would undoubtedly feel at the hands of high-school peers. Juno has enough bright moments to make it a worthwhile rental, but is wholly undeserving of its praise (especially that egregious Best Picture nomination) and media-dubbed “importance.”

Veering in the opposite direction of Juno is Christian Mungiu’s 4 Months…. It has no soundtrack or cheeseburger telephone to promote. The dialogue eschews showiness and is often purposefully banal. And the film itself is alternately bleached and murky. Most strikingly though, it does not revolve around an accidental pregnancy’s coming to fruition, but rather its agonizingly deliberated termination. As Otilia, Anamaria Marinca is in nearly every frame of the movie as she loyally aids her friend Gabita Laura Vasiliu in obtaining an illegal abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania. She is phenomenal. In one sustained shot we see her at a dinner party, surrounded by inane conversation, with an agonized, shell-shocked expression as she ponders the fate of her friend, and her own choices, after leaving Gabita alone in a seedy hotel room.

While strenuously unsympathetic and apolitical (it could easily fuel the fires of both sides of the abortion debate), 4 Months... does not treat its characters or milieu with kid’s gloves. Dr. Bebe, the abortionist, is a monster. Gabita is not particularly bright. And the communist society portrayed within is overwhelmingly bleak, with everything (from cigarettes to sex to abortion) is commoditized in a brutal barter economy. Despite an ambiguous ending that would never have passed muster with the Juno test audiences, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days nonetheless stays with the viewer far longer than its Hollywood counterpart.

Vampire Weekend

2008-01-31T14:18:00.000-08:00

I checked out a show by this endlessly buzzed-about quartet at the Bowery Ballroom on Tuesday night. A couple of worrisome signs preceded the show. Though I’m unaware of the opening act’s history, their derisive introduction of Vampire Weekend implied an understandable frustration over the endless press ink that’s been spilled over the fresh-faced band, whose members have been out of college (Columbia) for eighteen months. Then there were the four camera jockeys planted all over the venue filming the show for posterity, confirmation perhaps that Vampire has read their own, largely euphoric press and swallowed it whole. As it turns out, the band will probably end up shelving this footage. At most, they’ll look back at it nostalgically as a memento of their incipient touring days, before they cohered as a live act.

I’ve no interest on jumping on the inevitable and tired backlash bandwagon against this group. I was wholly unaware of the blogosphere having built these guys up as the Next Big Thing over the past year. And I can only shake my head at the same engine now gleefully ripping them to shreds. It’s a tired cycle: “underground” act is anointed new indie darling; group attracts fans outside of the Williamsburg-Lower East Side axis of hip; group is abandoned by blogging hipsters who have their homepages set to Pitchfork.

Their debut contains five very good-to-great songs: despite the band wearing its influences (Afro-pop, Graceland and, as they are less eager to admit, the Strokes) on its sleeve, the music is catchy and light. But all four members are undeniably green when it comes to performing. Chris Tomson threw his drumstick straight into the air a minute or so into the first song and spent much of the set hunched over and grinning maniacally when not playing. Also appearing slightly autistic was keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij who, along with frontman Ezra Koenig, busted out several spastic dance moves during the course of the gig. Such movements can actually amplify a performances (see: David Byrne in Stop Making Sense or Ian Curtis channeled by Sam Riley in Control), but came off studied and self-conscious in this instance. Ultimately, I appreciated the show as an opportunity to see a band on the cusp of what may well become major stardom and to appreciate the endearingly novice antics of a competent group still working out its kinks.

2008-01-30T13:54:00.000-08:00

Atonement, director Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s fine novel, makes clear at the start that it share’s little of its source’s regard for subtlety. “England, 1935” is scrawled letter by letter across the screen, each stroke accompanied by the clang of a typewriter. A series of too-quick jumpshots then follows Briony Tallis (played by Saorse Ronan as a child, Romola Garai as a teenager and Vanessa Redgrave as an old woman) as she gracelessly plods through her English country home. Thankfully, things calm down after that. The narrative is set in motion when Briony witnesses what she naively misinterprets as an act of cruelty by Robbie (James McAvoy), the son of servants who lives on the grounds) towards her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley). She goes on to read a pornographic letter that Robbie had entrusted her to deliver to Cecilia (he having mistaken it for a later, revised draft) and interrupt a tryst between the fledgling couple in the library. Given her earlier fears, she naturally sees this as a physical attack and the culmination of Robbie’s sexual deviance. After yet another wrongful accusation by Briony, Robbie is sent away to jail, then to war, effectively dislocating the family (Cecilia cannot forgive her sister’s ignorant machinations nor her parent’s for taking the child’s word) and leading Briony to atone for her mistakes for the remainder of her life.

The film is not without considerable strengths: the cinematography is lush, the actors are all competent (a few are stellar) and a fair amount of the dialogue lives up to McEwan’s perceptive, eloquent repartee. But certain scenes are handled clumsily: there is really no need for the close-up shot of “cunt” being typed across the entire width of the screen as Wright tell us, for the third time, the contents of Robbie’s letter. Nor is it clear why Wright changed McEwan’s poetic description of a single corpse lying at, and intertwined with, the base of a tree into a score of neatly arranged dead children with bullets through their heads. Furthermore, several of the novel’s most indelible (ant not exactly extraneous) sequences are curiously omitted.

In fairness, Atonement is a difficult novel to adapt. Its strength, in my mind, lies more in its psychological acuity than in its romance or period detail. There is also that unconventional structure to tackle: the first and third part of McEwan’s work (as well as its epilogue) focus on the evolution of Briony and her writing, while the middle section abruptly shifts to a World War II narrative, with Robbie as its center. It might be the fault of a baffled marketing department or a deliberate re-imagining of the source material. But Atonement is being sold as, and too often feels like, a conventional romance rather than an intricate look at the mental and creative development of a writer from her confused, fanciful adolescence to wise, measured and mournful old age. When the movie focuses on Briony’s maturing consciousness (as it does when she correctly reinterprets the events of that last idyllic summer via flashback and in Redgrave’s wonderful concluding monologue) it is a success. But there are too many mawkish bits, including a ridiculous postscript showing Cecilia and Robbie frolicking along the cliffs of Dover, that ultimately do a disservice to McEwan and the intentions of his novel.

2008-01-29T10:55:00.000-08:00

Despite the fact that Hollywood releases only one or two major musicals each year, the genre constantly seems to be at the forefront of critics’ minds. The scarcity of musical offerings is at once a cause for concern (for those wishing the genre was not perpetually on its deathbed) and excitement: they’re still being made, after all! And because so few musicals are produced, those that do make it down the pipeline are often backed by big names and bigger budgets, resulting in crowds and Oscar-baiting spectacle. Along with the Western, the musical is a largely forgotten relic of the bygone studio days that evokes nostalgic reverence among much of a public that constantly hopes for a revival. I recently saw two musicals: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, in movie theaters and Spring Awakening, on Broadway. Both struck me as strenuously unorthodox entries in the genre that, while trying to subvert the clichés of the form, sacrifice much of its joy.

Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd (an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 Broadway musical) goes against the cheery musical grain by cloaking itself in darkness and spilling buckets of fire-engine red blood. The plot sees Sweeney (Johnny Depp) seeking vengeance on Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who years earlier kidnapped his wife and daughter and sent him into exile. Along the way, he meets Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham-Carter), baker of the “worst pies in London.” Sweeney hones his skills for an eventual confrontation with Turpin as a maniacal barber whose customers, once he has slashed their throats, find their way into said meat pies.
The plot is devious fun, and tailor-made for the quirky Burton, who once again excels at lending an eerie gothic edge to his films. The Victorian London of the film may hew closely to the grimey and depraved version seen in countless other movies and books, but it is an ambience that, for me, never tires. But for a musical to work, the music has to be good. And Sweeney Todd’s music mostly left me cold. This might be symptomatic of the production essentially being an opera: the music is not intended as a flashy diversion from the story, but is rather how the story develops, with few speaking scenes to break it up. Amateurish singers (particularly Bonham-Carter, whose voice is distractingly bad) compound the problem, leading me to appreciate the set design and occasionally successful dark humor and little else.

Spring Awakening flouts Broadway convention with raunch. Adapted by Duncan Sheik from a 1891 German play about burgeoning sexuality amongst repressed teenagers, it features simulated masturbation and sex and fair amounts of exposed young flesh. As with Sweeney Todd, the musical frame momentarily casts this sensual frankness in a shocking light. But modern audiences have undoubtedly seen far lewder content not only in movie theaters and sordid computer downloads, but on their own televisions on daytime soap operas. Spring Awakening does not attempt to be puerile or even titillating. It is a tragedy. But its tragic story of doomed young love has been recycled endlessly. The score is competent though it contains only a handful of great tracks. The formula is stale: there are unrequited crushes; squirmy homosexuals and melodramatically severe, one-dimensional authority figures. Appropriate to the simplistic material are frequently amateurish (if musically talented) actors. By trying too rewrite all the rules, Spring Awakening focuses too much on the flesh at the expense of the heart.

2008-01-15T08:12:00.000-08:00

In There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson transposes his preferred themes of avarice and dysfunction onto the California desert during the early 20th Century. While not technically Anderson’s first period piece (a write-up in the current New Yorker argues that Boogie Nights, his electrifying look at the San Fernando Valley porn industry of the 70’s and 80’s, remains his finest film), it is surely the most self-consciously epic and refined. And despite stretches where it takes a bit too much of its own time to develop, it ultimately engrosses, with both its grand images and narrative intriciacies seared upon the viewer's mind. It is the rare movie in which all the elements come together both forcefully and seamlessly. The acting, particularly Daniel Day-Lewis’, is volcanic, but saved by the tremendous scope of the film from being overbearing. Johnny Greenwood’s mesmerizing score complements the action onscreen rather than intrudes upon it. The lush camerawork and exacting production detail recall Days of Heaven and the movie itself could qualify as a continuation of that Terrence Malick classic, detailing what happens after the pastoral idyll is corrupted by man and machine.

Anderson traces the rise to fortune (and, in a nutty epilogue, subsequent drunken decline) of Texas oilman Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis). With his son, H.W. (Dillon Fraesier) in tow, Plainview traverses the expansive and largely undeveloped California landscape (stunningly rendered by Robert Elswit’s cinematography) convincing various townspeople to sell him land for drilling. During one of these stops, he is visited by Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) who tips him off about the oil bubbling beneath the surface of Litte Boston, his hometown. Upon Plainview’s arrival there, the plot kicks into high gear, introducing an adversary in Paul’s brother, Eli Sunday (also played by Dano). Eli is an evangelical minister and self-professed faith healer whose surface spirituality is at odds with Plainview’s transparent (and his own, thinly veiled) greed.

This conflict is the American binary of pious self-improvement and blind capitalist ambition made manifest. Only here, the piety is fraudulent and, were it ever pure, fully tainted by the prospect of oil riches. Daniel and Eli are both duplicitous salesman, with more in common than they would ever like to admit. This is not a story of good versus evil; all intentions are muddled. Even the normally solid family structure is compromised. As in his earlier works, the family Anderson depicts here is a surrogate one. Plainview masquerades as H.W.’s father, using him as a “sweet face to buy land,” after the real father, a fellow driller, is killed in a well. A stranger appears on the scene who claims to be Plainview’s half-brother, a dubious claim whose ficition is quickly exposed, its author swiftly dispatched. All is suspect. We first see Plainview in a dark abyss; neither he nor his many adversaries ever emerge from it to see the light..

Manhola Dargis, in the Times, interpreted the movie as a metaphor for George W. Bush: a rich, Texan oilman who will stop at nothing, including blood, to get his way. She might be onto something: “I want to rule and never, ever explain myself,” says Plainview. But perhaps the contemporary contextualization is a narrow one. There Will Be Blood is a timeless American fable in which the drive to succeed often lays waist to those individuals and institutions both behind the wheel and trying to slam on the brakes.

Another one bites the dust

2008-01-04T13:29:00.000-08:00

Another year’s conclusion brought the usual barrage of Top 10 lists from the nation’s critics. Everybody seems to love Top 10 lists while at the same time being vaguely ashamed of them. They’re by nature reductive and simpleminded, forsaking genuine critical insight in the name of easy reading that will inevitably land near the top of the “Most Emailed” list on whichever publication’s website they appear. Predictably, the critics at the New York Times consider themselves above all this. Many of their culture writers offered year-end analyses that, while singling out exceptional films they’d seen in 2007, eschewed the timeworn Top 10 formula in favor of Top 18 lists or articles that did away with rankings altogether in favor of bloated commentaries on the most “important” movies of the year and what they say about Us and our Time. Despite these formal pretensions though, I admit to liking many of their picks for movies and albums of the year. From the Times and other sources (AFI, National Board of Review, various “critic’s circles” for film and metacritic.com, Rolling Stone for music) I’ve attempted to cull the most often-heralded pieces of work for an even more condensed guide to the best of ’07.

No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood rise, in my estimation, to the top of the collective critical heap For whatever reason though, the Cohen brothers are almost unanimously singled out for direction over Paul Thomas Anderson. Daniel-Day Lewis is top actor for all but a few critics who prefer either George Clooney (Michael Clayton), Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd) or Frank Langella (Starting Out in the Evening). Likewise, Julie Christie (Away From Her) appears to be the overwhelming favorite for best actress, with a few critics and publications opting instead for either Ellen Page (Juno) or Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose). And seemingly every movie critic in America engages in the Knocked Up vs. Superbad debate in their columns, with Knocked Up having a clear edge.

Radiohead, unsurprisingly and deservedly, continues to enthrall music critics: In Rainbows is the consensus choice for album of the year, with its innovative marketing and purchasing scheme emerging as the biggest story in music in 2007. Bruce Springsteen (Magic), Arcade Fire (Neon Bible), Les Savy Fav (Let’s Stay Friends), MIA (Kala), Amy Winehouse (Frank), LCD Soundsystem (Sound of Silver), Kanye West (Graduation) and Jay Z (the American Gangster soundtrack) are also frequent guests on critic’s year-end honor rolls. Two other recurring themes: Rhianna’s “Umbrella” is the undisputed song of the year and Britney Spears, or at least her producers, managed to create an album that, startlingly, did not suck.

Deep End

2008-01-04T13:25:00.000-08:00

When I was 13, on Christmas, I received a book profiling great cult movies. Most were from the 60’s and 70’s, many were horror films and a good number were vaguely pornographic. One in particular jumped out at me. Called Deep End, it concerned an adolescent protagonist undergoing a sexual awakening who spent a great deal of his time near a swimming pool. I was sold. Last night, a decade after learning about this movie, I finally had the chance to see it for myself.

Deep End is the work of Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski. The art house cinema on my block is conducting a retrospective of his work, most of which is in Polish. Deep End, however, is in English and set there, in a dreary neighborhood on the outskirts of London in 1971. Mike is a 15-year old who begins work at the local bathhouse. He falls in lust with Susan, a co-attendant who is several years older than he. This is a pretty thorough encapsulation of the movie’s plot, as it is essentially a sustained cinematic rendering of a sexually anxious fever dream. All of the major adult characters, male and female, are carnivorous sexual predators. Mike encounters one old cow (the Brit slang left a mark) who brings herself to climax by clinging to him whilst breathlessly reenacting sportscaster commentary from old football games. There are the requisite saggy prostitutes and leering male teachers and the nubile young bodies to which they are drawn.

Luckily, the relatively boilerplate tableau is redeemed by the camerawork, the performances and the score. The characters are flawlessly framed. The lens at times creates a gauzy effect which mirrors Mike’s cloudy naiveté and perpetual dream state. And there are a couple of instances where successive jump cuts, an often annoying indie affectation, are employed effectively. The actors are all strong, including Jane Asher, who played Susan in the movie and was Paul McCartney’s muse in the 1960s. Perhaps best of all, the score is subtle but still atmospheric and, I’m convinced, served as inspiration for Tangerine Dream’s ambient work in Risky Business. And it was composed done by Yusuf Islam, nee Cat Stevens (born Steven Georgiou)!

Deep End ultimately provided me with yet another opportunity to indulge in my (perhaps foolish) nostalgia for eras I never experienced. I especially seek out films and books pertaining to the 70s and early 80s. They often include rampant boozing and drugging and indiscriminate, if not anonymous, sex. And while I might not necessarily wish to replicate such behavior in my personal life, I would be thrilled if the staid, paranoid culture we find ourselves in today could rediscover some of the hedonist joie de vivre so abundant in those heady post-sexual revolution, pre-Age of Paranoia times.

Little Scene

2008-01-04T13:20:00.000-08:00

I’ve been making the rounds of the obscure indie movie front lately and have reaffirmed my belief that a lot of these “films” remain unseen simply because they are quite bad. Diving Bell and the Butterfly is not so obscure and by far the best of the bunch, despite falling short of my breathless anticipation based on the trailer. The vast majority of movies would be improved if they existed solely in trailer form. Anyway, Diving Bell... was fitfully beautiful and the story (about a man who is rendered paralyzed after a stroke and dictates an entire memoir by blinking his eye) is incredible. But it was more tedious and less lyrical than I would have liked. Barcelona: A Map, was mediocre and took place entirely in a single apartment building, depriving me of the opportunity to see the city itself on screen which was the only reason I bought a ticket. Also, bizarrely, a revelation of incest at the end of the film is treated as casually as most people’s discussions of what to have for dinner. This troubled me and kind of ruined the whole movie. Still, Barcelona was a masterpiece suitable for inclusion in the national archives compared to Chaotic Ana, a movie I saw based on a) the description of the main character living in a cave in Ibiza and b) because it co-stars hot sexagenarian Charlotte Rampling. This movie was indescribably bad. And it took itself far too seriously to fall into the so-bad-it’s-good category. I cannot begin to quantify its suckiness or delineate its completely nonsensical and impossible-to-follow plot. I think it had something to do with past lives and Woman Throughout History. Revoltingly, it ended with the titular heroine defecating in the mouth of a conservative American congressman, at which point the audience collectively gave up and attempted to appreciate the movie as camp. It still fell short.

Speaking of shitty politicians, I have been observing the presidential race at arm’s length since it began, seemingly, 9 years ago. Not in love with any of the candidates, as usual. However, I despise Rudy Giuliani and am frightened by Mike Huckabee due to both his uber-Christianity and the fact that he (allegedly) runs 10 miles before dawn every day. In the event of a victory for either of these candidates, I will be packing up my bags and decamping for Montreal.

Judd Apatow

2008-01-04T13:19:00.001-08:00

Christmas Day brought me to a showing of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. It was just fine: funny enough to merit a high ranking on the Netflix queue when it is released but not crying for a run to the theater. Having seen Superbad the day before, my expectations were irrationally high. But despite some funny material, Walk Hard got me worrying about the Judd Apatow comedy monolith currently enveloping Hollywood. Apatow is branding everything in sight. The trailers preceding Dewey Cox included three movies from “The Creators of The 40-Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad” or some derivation thereof. All looked OK, none looked up to snuff with his earlier, signature material.

In the case of several movies in the Apatow pipeline, the man himself served merely as producer, with no hand in writing or direction. I don’t begrudge Apatow his success—I could watch 40 Year Old... and Knocked Up on an interminable loop and be happy as a clam and Superbad (which he also had no creative control over, but produced) was a riot. He’s also been playing the game for over a decade with several critically acclaimed but little-seen “cult” projects (“Undeclared” and “Freaks and Geeks”) under his belt. Understandably, he is relishing his newfound fame and, I’m sure, fortune. But as New York’s Undulating Curve of Shifting Expectations tells us, success often begets backlash. The dilution of the Apatow brand from clever, raunchy comedies with a heart to broad slapstick or lazy parody would be a lightning-quick reversal of fortune and sadly tarnish the reputation of the man deservedly deemed the next great hope of comedy.