Punching at the Sun follows the life of South Asian Queens teenager Mameet Nayak (Misu Khan). Mameet: (1) Lives in the shadow of his older brother, who was gunned down in his family's convenience store; (2) Falls in love with the neighbourhood sneaker salesgirl, Shawni (Nina Edmonds); (3) Identifies deeply with hip-hop culture; and (4) Feels that South Asians, due to their physical similarity to Arabs, are being unfairly mistreated in the aftermath of 9/11. The chief problem with Punching at the Sun is the sheer breadth of material it tries to cover. Writer-director Tanuj Chopra hasn't narrowed down his subject or angle--he seems to want to show us as much of what it's like to be a South Asian Queens teenager as possible. Even then, I have my doubts as to the film's anthropological validity. Attacks towards South Asians mistaken for Arabs have been rather scattered, and I have to wonder if Chopra chose to highlight them because it struck a chord of truth about the South Asian-American experience, or because it makes for a juicy movie. The generational gap between the values of the old country and the new affects South Asians especially hard, but, apparently aware that other films about other ethnic groups have already mined that territory several times over, Chopra only grazes the surface of this in his scattershot attack, and in pretty much every other way, Punching at the Sun falls short. The digital photography looks cheap; the acting is stilted; and Chopra's use of fast and reverse motion is gimmicky. The film climaxes with a basketball game where Mameet has to take the final shot, but Chopra breezes through most of the sequence more or less uninterested. When Mameet's ball does a teasing revolution around the hoop and Chopra cuts to everybody staring up in suspense, you kind of can't believe that Chopra is actually going there. After the game, Mameet and his sister yell up at the sky asking where their brother is; the film has a lot of scenes like that. The pathos Chopra reaches for is unearned and crudely abrupt--he doesn't have any idea of how to build a moment. There is no polite way to say it: Punching at the Sun is a terrible movie. But the thing is, it's not exactly an arrogant one. It's not arrogant about wanting to teach us something and it's not arrogant about not teaching us something. I think Chopra was really trying to make an honest movie about the South Asian experience, then realized he just didn't have anything to say. It's a pathetic movie, there's not much fruit in taking it down a notch. It'd be like kicking a puppy, you know?

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I actually saw director Philip Gröning's previous film at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. It was called L'Amour, l'argent, l'amour, and it was kind of awful, I guess, very long and very pretentious. But it was kind of mesmerizing, too, and the mesmerizing and the awful become inextricable--it's the sort of "bad" movie that only a true genius could make. Gröning's Into Great Silence is in the same insane tradition. I offer no intellectual defense towards either of these two movies; I don't know if I'm complimenting the Emperor on his new clothes or not, all I know is that I watch them and something...just...clicks. Into Great Silence is a documentary filmed inside the Grande Chartreuse, the head monastery in France's Carthusian Order. Gröning passively and reverently observes the monks going through their daily routine, making little comment or inquiry as to the who, what, or why of it. Title cards containing relevant Bible verses--printed in French and translated into German, which is then translated into English--surface throughout the 164-minute running time. Gröning continuously returns to a sequence where the monks stare uncomfortably into the camera for some period of time. He repeats the image of a red light burning in otherwise utter darkness and the image of an airplane flying over the monastery. The film is repetitive and there's a question as to whether or not the repetition represents discipline or if it merely represents repetition. When we see the monks looking into the camera, it's astounding how homely and imperfect they are: one eye always looks smaller, bigger, lazier, or more out of place than the other. The monks have allowed some technology into their lives, and the visual presence of electric razors, microphones, and even laptop computers clashes uncomfortably with the medievalism of their garb and housing. They're mostly silent throughout the film, but once we hear them talk, we're struck by the lack of profundity in their statements. They chat about washbasins while out in the garden one summer, and near the end of the film an aged monk gives a hollow, greeting-card version of the meaning of Christianity. Are these men fools, or does their life of asceticism serve a purpose? Is there spiritual sustenance to be found in Gröning's film or is it a crock of shit? Providing no hints, Gröning approaches this material with 110% conviction, refusing to condescend to the material or artificially inflate it with false artistry. What you see is what you get.

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A Darkness Swallowed is an experimental film consisting entirely of extreme close-ups of fossils, skins, rocks, and water droplets. There is a brief passage of voiceover in the beginning and a full-length soundtrack, but that's it as far as narrative cues are concerned. The film is supposed to be about the "nature of cellular memory" and "the physical traces that memories leave behind on and inside our bodies, and on and inside the earth." I had a considerably more banal philosophical question on my mind while watching it: I saw things in these shots, things like faces and animals and such--do I see them because they're there and I'm meant to see them, or do I see them because I'm trying to assign order where there isn't any? You go in thinking that a film like this is going to ask you to work harder, but really it's asking you to work less. It's very much a passive experience, you just look at the screen and let it wash over you; the questions are ultimately secondary to the visceral experience. A Darkness Swallowed is wallpaper, but it's very nice wallpaper. When she introduced A Darkness Swallowed to the audience, filmmaker Betzy Bromberg mentioned that she has to hold a day job to pay the bills. I have to admit, I was a little disappointed to discover that this day job is in the movie industry (she served as an optical supervisor on such films as Lady in White, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Bram Stoker's Dracula) instead of in a bank or at an accounting firm or something. Part of the pleasure of A Darkness Swallowed is in its homemade quality: Bromberg shot it in Academy-ratio 16mm and you sometimes get the feeling that you're watching "In Search of... with Leonard Nimoy". I mean that lovingly. What I like most about Bromberg's aesthetic is that she doesn't try to beautify ugly things, she thinks they're beautiful enough just being ugly. That's comforting, I think, and kind of wonderful. In the interest of full disclosure, I wouldn't want to see A Darkness Swallowed every day of my life. When all's said and done, it's still not the real thing. But I feel fortunate for getting to experience it even just this once. It's really groovy, man.

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I'm certain that William Eggleston is a real photographer; I'm a little less sure that Cédric Laty and Vincent Gérard are real Frenchmen: I can't find anything about them on the Internet not directly related to this movie. You would understand my skepticism were you to see By the Ways, A Journey with William Eggleston, which plays like a particularly bizarre practical joke. The film purports to be a study of Eggleston's life and work, but it's actually more of a Parisian love letter to American cars, the American south, Elvis Presley, Los Angeles, and cigarettes. It's like a French New Wave road documentary. To be honest, I'm not sure I can make heads or tails out of this thing--I need to see it a second time. (This first time I was too busy looking at all the doodles in the margins.) Highlights include an interview with an art critic and photographer who tells us that Eggleston only takes one shot of his subject, no more than two, and that every picture is "a keeper." David Byrne gives his account of Eggleston, saying that he was on the set of Annie, a film he seems to believe was directed by Robert Altman. (Could he be thinking of Popeye from two years earlier?) Where everybody else was photographing the production, Eggleston took stills of the empty set. There is a truly haunting montage of a development lab scored to Bob Dylan's "Desolation Road." One interview takes place entirely offscreen while the camera fixates on a birdcage. The coup de grâce is the use of Patsy Cline's "Is That All There Is?" at the end of the picture. Seriously, is somebody playing a trick on me? Producers Agnès Troublé and Nadja Romain's next project is Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely, allegedly about a colony of celebrity impersonators. Truly the world would be a darker place without movies like this populating it.

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Given that I was about halfway through a really nasty cold when I saw The Beastie Boys' Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That!, I probably wasn't in the right frame of mind to judge its merits. With that disclaimer in place, this has to be the loudest movie I have ever seen. At the end of the ordeal, I felt as though band members Mike D, Adam Horowitz, and Adam Yauch had burrowed inside my brain and gone to work with an iron frying pan. I'll cop to preferring masochistic cinematic experiences in general and getting angry and frustrated by movies that want little more than to cheer me up--but from now on, I'm going to draw the line at Beastie Boys concert films. At their 2004 Madison Square Garden show, The Beastie Boys passed out cameras to fifty audience members with instructions to shoot anything that interested them; Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That! was culled from their footage. It sounds like a pretty daffy idea, but the results are much better than you would expect--or, more accurately, they seem to reflect the vision of director Yauch (credited as Nathanial Hörnblowér). The visuals are every bit as aggressive as the music: they push you down, smash your skull against the pavement, and don't stop until they see the pink stuff. There are few moments where The Beastie Boys are not performing and there are few shots that don't underscore the music. It's cinematic, it's fast, and it leaves you bruised and wounded. Even outside of the headaches, based on what I've seen here I don't think I really care much for The Beastie Boys. Their pop-cultural references are broad and easy: Scarface, Star Wars, "Star Trek", Jackie Chan, high school proms, Nintendo, a viral video of boxing cats; they dedicate "Sabotage" to President Bush, and while the then-ten-year-old song does have a nice timeliness to it, it's still not particularly brilliant social commentary. I wish I could confirm this, but I think it was ex-Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh who said that punk rock could never take off in the States because the kids have too many toys to play with. Yeah. Hip-hop, the other half of The Beastie Boys' musical DNA, could never take off in the suburbs, either, for more or less the same reason. Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That! is a film full of empty rage borne of a toy-drunk culture made by toy-drunk children. It's a portentous act of arrogance against good music, good filmmaking, and good taste.

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Adam's Apples begins with a Danish skinhead (Ulrich Thomsen) getting off a bus at a halfway house out in the country and keying the vehicle as it drives away, immediately telling us that this isn't going to be a movie that seriously considers the economic origins and social ramifications of the Danish white-supremacist movement. The skinhead, whose name is Adam, meets the other inhabitants of the halfway house, which include an Arabic stickup-man (who speaks in adorably broken Danish and only robs stores he has a political beef with) and an obese, bearded, childlike sex offender just so the film can unfairly invite comparisons to Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor. The halfway house is run by Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen), a widowed minister who may very well be crazier than his flock! He's kind of out of it, refusing to believe that his brain-damaged son isn't able to walk or talk and always firmly turning the other cheek whenever Adam confronts him with the obvious or beats him up in frustration. Ivan requires Adam to think up a short-term goal and follow through on it. Adam rebelliously wisecracks that he would like to bake an apple pie; Ivan, the good-natured idiot, assigns Adam to take care of the church's lone apple tree. Adam's Apples is a combination of the "Loveable Crazies" and "The Reformation of Grumpy Bear" sub-genres of pandering middlebrow pap. To tell you the truth, I'm not automatically opposed to these kinds of movies, insomuch as I count One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Rain Man among my all-time favourites. But what makes those films special is that they're understated, and so our emotional response to them is an honest one. Adam's Apples is glib: the apple tree symbolizes Adam's heart and it's afflicted by crows, maggots, and, after a particularly cruel episode with Ivan, a bolt of lightning. (This is all so obvious that even the characters pick up on it.) I'm puzzled about how the violence is ultra-graphic yet leaves little lasting damage (onscreen or off), while the snickering deus ex machina ending must be seen to be believed. The whole film--skinheads, bloody beatings, unhappy endings, the casual attitude towards the Holocaust, rape, and racism--is just so dishonest: writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen (The Green Butchers) wants to shock you but then pull back and say, "Just kidding." Adam's Apples is patented crowd-pleasing pap: neutered, cowardly, and sure to be a big hit among grandmas and pseudo-punk teenagers alike.

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Everybody hates the anorexic/bulimics. It's a disease exclusive to spoiled white girls with "negative body image"--a pseudoscientific catchphrase of the pseudoscientific psychiatric community that dominated in the diagnosis-happy 1970s. While people in the rest of the world--the rest of the country, even--starve from hunger, these rich brats "restrict" themselves or "purge." Not helping matters any for Thin, the rare documentary to revolve around something other than Iraq or exotic animals, is that it's a film about an upper-middle-class disease targeted at an upper-middle-class audience. This is an easier subject for them to give their attention to, as well as an easier subject through which to vicariously enjoy victimization. In light of all that, I was very excited to see Thin: as a major in Family, Consumer, and Human Development, I'm fresh off studying the stage of adolescence where one of the chief obstacles is establishing order and direction in your life. Eating disorders are the purest form of achieving this--it's adolescence distilled to its very core. The anorexic/bulimic has a direction and a means of achieving order over her life. She wants to lose weight and will readily abuse her body in order to achieve that. Photographer-turned-documentarian Lauren Greenfield has made a compulsively watchable (and certainly professional) film, but I'm not sure that it really tells us anything about eating disorders. She's one of those objective observers, standing on the sidelines filming the girls doing their thing, which includes, yes, purging. No gory close-ups of the chucking, just an icy and tasteful medium shot through the doorway. Greenfield sidelines saying something about eating disorders by getting obsessed with the minutiae of disorder-centre politics, facilitating lots of good storytelling but little in the way of great art. It's not the lack of velocity or passion that gets to me, it's Greenfield's naïve idea of Truth. She seems to think that Truth is achieved by absolving yourself from a perspective, whereas I believe it's achieved through taking on multiple perspectives. I kept wanting to hear something like West Side Story's  "I Feel Pretty" on the soundtrack, or see anorexic/bulimics equated with the monks who forgo worldly pleasures and flog themselves. I wanted something a little nutty, something that would charge me up and get me thinking, but the film is unilateral and unblinking.

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Taking my cue from the official description in the Sundance Film Festival Film Guide, I've been referring to Cinnamon as "the black race-car driver movie." Depiction of race in the movies is a real dilemma: being black is either meaningful or meaningless. If it's meaningful, that means that the black identity is distinguished from non-blacks and is more or less alien and incomprehensible to non-blacks. If being black is meaningless, well, then why make a racing movie with an all-black cast? You see the problem. I don't know what "black" is, but whatever it may be, Cinnamon isn't black enough. The actors (despite the digital cinematography, laggard pacing, and lack of score, it's not a documentary) were cast at best out of convenience and at worst in an attempt to artificially beef up the film's esoteric quotient. (It's not just a Sundance movie about race-car drivers, it's a movie about black race-car drivers.) It doesn't really matter, though: in addition to not being black enough, Cinnamon isn't human enough. This is a film with tunnel vision: Cinnamon and everybody in it is interested in racing cars and little else. The distinct personalities of the characters blur into one another until they're one big cipher reciting shoptalk about how they need to shorten their time. Director Kevin Jerome Everson offers no psychological, sociological, or philosophical motivation for why these people race, they just do. Cinnamon is a nothing movie, and not even a particularly well-made one. Scenes don't build, individual moments don't build, and the film is disjointed and messy. What heat it has is generated by its cinéma vérité format--it's unprocessed and raw and the intentional emptiness fools you into thinking you're purging all the impurities of a diet of popular cinema from your body.

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Too often I feel that critics and audiences place documentaries at the kid's table, refusing to critique them on the same level they do fiction films. Narration from the director, sit-down interviews with the subjects--in terms of filmmaking, we let documentaries get away with a lot of really primitive shit we probably wouldn't otherwise. Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth is a pretty good rant, but not much of a movie; Foulkrod made it because she had a burning desire to say something, not because she had a burning desire to make a film. There's no excitement or joy in the aesthetics, it's all dreadfully utilitarian--just enough to illustrate her thesis without unduly affecting the audience. In part because there's no narrative, The Ground Truth doesn't have any dramatic high points, either: for the entire duration, it rumbles on the same low growl. Still, the film gets you good and angry, and because it's in that emotionally and cinematically vacant tradition of documentary-making called "objectivity," you know that you're getting angry off the ideas in it. The film is about how post-traumatic stress disorder is undiagnosed and untreated among veterans of the second Gulf War and how the media's whitewashing of the war's civilian casualties only exasperates the situation. If we were to truly "support the troops," we would have to acknowledge the damage they have caused the Iraqi people as well as the toll this has taken on their minds, hearts, and souls, to say nothing of their support for the actual war. To suppress the evil (necessary or otherwise) of the second Gulf War is an act of wilful naivety and a deflation of our troops' sacrifice. It's pitiful that a film like The Ground Truth had to be made, but it did.

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Following his father's death, Orthodox Jew Yuri quits his rabbinical training and applies for a job as a taxi driver. He's mad at God, mad at his Jewish faith, and eager to experience a world that has been denied him all his life. Jewboy is perhaps the best Martin Scorsese film Martin Scorsese never made--and by that I mean, of course, the Scorsese of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and The Last Temptation of Christ rather than the more imitated (and imitable) Scorsese of Goodfellas or Casino. This is a serious film about existential despair obviously borne of a deep religious conviction, though whatever his similarities to the prototypical Scorsese-ian protagonist, Yuri's angst is a distinctly Jewish one. With his dead father a rabbi and his grandmother a Holocaust survivor, the weight of keeping the tradition is far too heavy a burden for Yuri to carry, particularly since his Jewish identity now only touches dead nerve-endings--he no longer finds any solace in the the old rituals--and is retained (as illustrated in a scene where he pulls a prostitute out of his cab while covering his hands with his coat, careful not to violate Jewish law) solely by honed instinct and a fear of the unknown. Particularly remarkable--and a testament to the talent of Aussie writer-director Tony Krawitz--is that while the 52-minute film maintains a perpetually subjective perspective, Yuri's mindset is never externalized onto his surrounding environment: Yuri's Sydney is far from the Hell on Earth of Travis Bickle's New York. It's banal and ordinary, of particular interest to Yuri and Yuri alone. When he goes into a pornography store, the sex worker is breast-feeding under a blanket; it's just an ordinary workday. Hardly a Scorsese wannabe, Krawitz proves himself a kindred spirit working in the same key.

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In his review of Rene Cardona's exploitation quickie about the Jonestown Massacre Guyana: Cult of the Damned, Roger Ebert describes how Cardona ends the film with photos of the real-life victims while the audience is solemnly reminded "that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it," prompting Ebert to crack, "So remember, don't drink cyanide." I only wish that John Hillcoat's The Proposition were that lucid in delivering its Important Lesson. This is a movie at least as gory and brutal as Eli Roth's Hostel, the highlights being an exploding head and an extended, Gibson-esque flogging of a prisoner. And Hillcoat loves flies: they're always buzzing over the carrion, the human corpses, the gourmet meals, and the sweat of the film's grotesquely hairy Australian men. I don't have a problem with gore per se, but I do have a problem with the self-important joylessness with which it's depicted here--and frankly, The Proposition hasn't any justification for its austere tone. The proposition of the title is offered by Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) to Irish criminal Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce); Stanley has captured Charlie's 14-year-old brother Mike and is prepared to hang the two of them for the murder of a family that included Stanley's pregnant sister-in-law. If Charlie can find and kill his second brother, the truly evil Arthur (Danny Huston), then both he and Mike will be absolved of their crimes. This sounds like a fairly standard western plot, but Hillcoat treats the material like Schindler's List. While I can't readily identify who we're meant to sympathize with, the characterizations aren't particularly nuanced: Mike is a victim; Arthur is a bastard; Stanley believes in justice; and Charlie, as played by straight-arrow Guy Pearce (a persona cultivated in L.A. Confidential and subverted in Memento), is a reluctant hero. The violence is moralistically ugly and we derive no vicarious pleasure from identifying with the anti-heroes, though in light of the equally moralistic finale, violence is shown to be just, too. The Proposition, then, can't be called either anti-violence or particularly nihilistic in its viewpoint. Good guys die horribly, bad guys die horribly, neutral guys die horribly--yet the ending shows that some deserve to die horribly more than others.

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