Diplomatic Sense
February 4, 2010
Do you know how to read action movies or do you simply obey advertising hype? From Paris With Love delivers the minimal spills and thrills to those who like action movies for escapist release, yet beyond its hype, it is also politically aware filmmaking—without the sanctimoniousness of Syriana, United 93 or The Messenger. Those films pretend to address the post-9/11 crisis while From Paris With Love gets all up in the mess, making it personal and exciting. [Read more]
Power and Passion
January 28, 2010
Back onscreen in Edge of Darkness, after a seven-year absence, Mel Gibson looks like hell. He’s certainly been through it—enduring the worst public vilification since Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson. But he’s still quite a good actor and brings a believably gruff, on-edge solidity to his role as Irish Boston cop Thomas Craven, who is searching for his daughter’s killer. He’s more believable than Sean Penn’s flamboyant grieving father turn in Mystic River. Had Gibson played Jack Nicholson’s role in The Departed the film might have achieved the authenticity that was lost to Scorsese’s lowlife fantasizing. Gibson roots Craven in credible middle-aged fatigue as if to prove he’s a truer artist than his haters claim. [Read more]
Truth on Trial
January 21, 2010
America may not be ready for André Téchiné’s superb new movie The Girl on the Train. To judge by the audience’s gasp at the film’s Lincoln Center world premiere last year, Téchiné’s signature interest in how race, class and sex intersect remains shocking. When screenwriter Jean-Marie Besset revealed that The Girl on the Train’s plot was based on New York’s famous 1985 Tawana Brawley affair, here transposed to contemporary France, the middle-class spectators’ anxiety suggested that the Brawley rape case’s issues were still discomforting—even 20 years after Spike Lee memorialized the case with Do The Right Thing’s wall of graffiti declaring: TAWANA TOLD THE TRUTH. [Read more]
The Book of Eli
January 14, 2010
The Book of Eli, yet another apocalyptic fantasy, suggests that Denzel Washington has become America’s dullest actor. This old news is confirmed by the fact that he also produced The Book of Eli, which was written and directed by twin brothers Allen and Albert Hughes, the scurrilous team whose Menace II Society and American Pimp proved they shared Denzel’s taste for kitsch. These perpetual hip-hop adolescents cater to Denzel’s inner brat by providing him with a Mad Max role: Eli is a traveler, a “walker” strolling with an arm-length phallic blade and bad-ass attitude (super powers to geeks like the Hughes) through a devastated, monochrome landscape full of marauders and cannibals. [Read more]
Automatic Pity for the People
January 14, 2010
The 1994 Nas song “Life’s a Bitch”—one of the most cynical, yet most admired rap singles ever made—has finally found its film equivalent. The song appears on the soundtrack of the new British movie Fish Tank as to authenticate its grim story of a teenage white girl’s alienation. But the pathetic, council-flat life of runty 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) doesn’t take place in Nas’ 1990s. Despite the film’s pretenses of social realism, its contemporary-set story merely borrows those once-fashionable postures of working-class alienation. It’s the same sullen despondency that makes “Life’s a Bitch” so irredeemably phony. Both song and film pander to underprivileged self-pity. [Read more]
Puppy Love
January 8, 2010
Film Forum’s Akira Kurosawa series (Jan. 6 through Feb. 4) begins the decade as more than a career retrospective; it’s a rescue effort for film culture. Kurosawa has gone from preeminent mastery as Japan’s best known filmmaker to near obscurity, overshadowed by passing vogues for artier directors like the great Mizoguchi and Ozu and the lesser, in fact minor, Naruse. That’s what makes Kurosawa’s 1949 police drama Stray Dog the perfect series opener; relatively unknown, it confirms why Kurosawa was, for so long, top dog. Its example should inspire the new decade. [Read more]
Loss of a Teardrop Diamond
January 8, 2010
Who can forget Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire rushing into a man’s arms and exclaiming with desperate relief, “Sometimes there is God, so quickly”? Who will remember Bryce Dallas Howard reciting Tennessee Williams’ own variation on that epiphany in The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond? The variation—too good to repeat here—only lacks a comparable dramatic tone, which isn’t Howard’s fault. Director Jodie Markell’s fidelity to Williams simply isn’t enough to makes his tropes sing. [Read more]
Bad Lieutenant
December 31, 2009
Every negative review for Police, Adjective strikes a blow against film movie fascism. Because it’s a Romanian film purportedly exposing fascism, we’re supposed to embrace its paltriness as an anti-Communist virtue, but such political bias is itself a form of fascism. This film about a cop’s linguistic indoctrination exemplifies the cultural indoctrination critics are expected to swallow without question—and certainly not critique.
Primarily a series of pursuit sequences, Police, Adjective watches Cristi (Dragos Bucur) follow a fellow citizen around the city, setting him up for a sting operation to spend several years in prison for smoking a joint. [Read more]
The White Ribbon
December 31, 2009
Trendy filmmakers like apocalyptic messages that say the end is near. Austrian Michael Haneke, being an artiste, likes to tell us it’s already happened. His latest tale of post-apocalyptic purgatory, The White Ribbon, is set during a new millennium in a small Eastern European town where blond-haired townsfolk—including school-age kids who ought to be out singing and gathering “Edelweiss”—variously abuse each other. Think Children of the Damned, Children of the Corn, Children of Men. Think childishly in order to believe that Haneke’s rip-offs of Carl Dreyer atmosphere and Ingmar Bergman sexual hysteria are at all original. [Read more]
It’s Complicated
December 23, 2009
Meryl and Alec sitting in a tree...
No film school teaches about the Phantom Hollywood genre: mainstream movies that sneakily validate the personal foibles of film industry professionals. These movies—usually about divorce, infidelity, broken homes, power-and-sex addictions—are contrived to look like they’re about average folk. Nancy Meyers’ It’s Complicated is the latest. Its story of a middle-aged divorced couple—Jane and Jake—who get back together despite other new attachments, bears little connection to actual human behavior or recognizable lifestyles. [Read more]
