Slacker (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

Slacker1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Richard Linklater, Rudy Basquez, Jean Caffeine, and a whole bunch of people
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Jefferson Robbins Before it became a lazily-applied shorthand for my generation in particular, Slacker was a film about doom. It’s pervasive throughout this seemingly casual, meticulously constructed, 24-hour baton-pass through bohemian Austin, Texas, in which characters confront intimations of death, their own or that of the species in general, and respond with rhetoric, bemusement, a fatalistic shrug, or a joyride. Writer-director Richard Linklater awakens from vivid dreams on a bus in the opening scene, then unspools his vision to a Buddha-silent cab driver (Rudy Basquez). His most memorable dreams, he reports, often feature sudden death: “There’s always someone gettin’ run over or something really weird.” Fair enough to wonder if we’re not dreaming along with him, in some dress rehearsal for Waking Life, when he quickly happens upon a mother (Jean Caffeine) sprawled in a residential Austin boulevard, freshly driven over by her disturbed son (Mark James).

TIFF ’13: Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

Posted in2013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, TIFF

Whydontyouplayinhell_03

***/****
written and directed by Sion Sono

by Angelo Muredda Two of the funniest films at TIFF were, of all things, elegies. Like the doppelgänger duo of The Double and Enemy and the misdirected-revenge double-bill of Bastards and Prisoners, Raya Martin and Mark Peranson’s La última película and Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play In Hell? seemed to be sharing a direct line, commiserating over the demise of celluloid while huddled together in an abandoned cinema, bracing for the digital apocalypse in mock terror. Tonal and thematic overlaps aside, however, the films diverge in their cases for the relative importance of filmmakers at this moment of crisis. La última película directs its satirical energies towards Alex Ross Perry’s self-satisfied hero, a director on a mission. Sono’s by turns delirious and sentimental film goes the other way, all but deifying its energetic schlockmeister, who prays to the Movie God as a teen that he might one day make something worthy of 35 mm and finds his prayers answered ten years later, when a pair of warring yakuza clans commission him to turn their grand battle into a cinematic time capsule, to be screened at the homecoming for one of the mobster’s jailed wives.

TIFF ’13: The Strange Little Cat

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Esoterica, Family, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF

The_Strange_Little_Cat_Das_merkwrdige_Ktzchen

Das merkwürdige Kätzchen
****/****
directed by Ramon Zürcher

by Angelo Muredda In his essay on the origins of the uncanny, Freud looks into German etymology to find that heimlich is one of those words that means a given thing as well as its opposite–that which is, on the one hand, familiar, and also that which is kept out of sight. The unheimlich, or uncanny, is by that token always latent within the ordinary–it’s the thing that should have stayed hidden away but has instead come to light. People in Ramon Zürcher’s marvellous debut are always calling the familiar things around them uncanny, and no wonder, given the alien eye with which Zürcher observes them. Set in a bustling Berlin apartment that houses a reserved matriarch, her visiting twentysomething children, her adolescent daughter, her ailing mother, and a pair of pets (including the ever-roving orange tabby that supplies the title), The Strange Little Cat has the ingredients of a multi-generational melodrama about a family coming together and splitting apart in an uneasily-shared space–an August: Osage County for the arthouse set. But Zürcher happily forgoes such narrative dead ends in pursuit of something more playful and unsettled, working with the weird formal properties of the objects that fill this domestic space, from a child’s misspelled grocery list to a glass bottle that spins around a bowl in the sink as if propelled by its own volition.

Telluride ’13: Under the Skin

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2013

Undertheskin

****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Krystof Hádek, Jessica Mance
screenplay by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Michel Faber
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw Trouble Every Day and The Man Who Fell to Earth as directed by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing Under the Skin marks his return to feature filmmaking after a nine-year hiatus. The loosest of adaptations, cherry-picking from Michel Faber’s strong novel of the same name, Under the Skin is home to a trio (at least) of indelible images and a style and presentation that function as shunts into a thicket of thorny existential questions; it’s the best film I’ve seen this year and among the best films I’ve ever seen. Stripped to the bone, as capable of viciousness as it is tenderness, it achieves what seems impossible by creating a sense of the mysterium tremens in the body of a human-looking alien. When it works, it’s a stunner worthy of mention in the same breath as Blade Runner, but more significant than its immediate impact is its lingering afterimage. I liked it initially. In the six days since I saw it, scarcely an hour’s gone by that I haven’t thought about it. Under the Skin, not to be flip, burrows exactly there, and nests.

Computer Chess (2013)

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Theatrical

Computerchess

****/****
starring Patrick Riester, Myles Page, James Curry, Robin Schwartz
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

by Walter Chaw Sneakily, the best science-fiction film of the summer is Andrew “Godfather of Mumblecore” Bujalski’s decidedly lo-fi Computer Chess, shot with a late-’60s, made-for-home-video Sony AVC-3260 analog tube video camera that approximates the very look and feel of something you’d find in a box in someone’s garage. It endeavours to tell the story of a weekend tech convention where proto-hackers engage in mortal combat over who will be the first to create a computer chess program that can defeat a human master (Gerald Peary (!)) and, incidentally, collect a $75k booty. The money, though, is incidental to the glory of scientific discovery, of being the first to push the limits of artificial intelligence to the point of…what? Aggression? Sentience, perhaps? It’s telling that Bujalski, at the forefront of a specific DIY subgenre of independent cinema reliant on largely improvised performances with no budget nor, theoretically, affectation (it’s like the American version of the Dogme95 movement), has produced the most affectless, genuine artifact of the dogme philosophy through his greatest feat of affectation: he’s created a time capsule of an era in a film about the eternity of the human instinct to create simulacra first and deal with issues of functional equivalence later. In its way, Computer Chess works like a sprung, found-footage diary of the birth of Skynet. It’s Mary Shelley, and Blade Runner, and it gets to being about what it’s about without being an asshole about it.

Naked Lunch (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection, UK

Nakedlunch

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Roy Scheider
screenplay by David Cronenberg, based on the book by William S. Burroughs
directed by David Cronenberg

“A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.” —William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

by Walter Chaw “Sexual ambulance, did you say?” asks Bill Lee (Peter Weller), erstwhile exterminator of rational thought (and cockroaches) and stand-in for William S. Burroughs (who used the nom de guerre himself in Junkie) in David Cronenberg’s impenetrable, impossibly complex, surprisingly funny, curiously pleasurable Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch. Bill is responding to a statement–an introduction, really–to a creature called a “Mugwump,” named after a political group that split from the Republican party in 1884 to support Grover Cleveland in protest of their own candidate James Blaine’s financial corruption. Those Mugwumps were members of a social elite; these Mugwumps, Cronenberg’s, are reptiles or insects (or should I say “also reptiles or insects”?), each voiced by Peter Boretski in his insistent, Columbo-esque rasp, asking just one more clarifying question. This Mugwump declares itself to be a master of sexual ambivalence, leading to Bill Lee’s miscomprehension of it as “sexual ambulance”–which, as mondegreens go, is a fairly loaded one. Naked Lunch is, after all, invested in language and corruption. Describing to Bill what it’s like to get high by injecting the toxin Bill uses to kill roaches, Bill’s wife Joan (the great Judy Davis) says, “It’s a very literary high–it’s a Kafka high, you feel like a bug”–the processing of which provides by itself a kind of literary high.

Hot Docs ’13: Fuck for Forest

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

Fuck_For_Forest_1.470x264

***½/****
directed by Michael Marczak

by Angelo Muredda “Don’t you think we’re already fucked anyway?” a twentysomething European reveller bathed in neon light asks an environmentalist recruiter early on in Fuck for Forest, Michael Marczak’s gorgeously-lensed and strangely resonant nature documentary about a very strange pack of wild animals, the titular porn collective-cum-NGO. It’s a decent question, but you don’t get the sense that the sweet young Berliners to whom it’s directed have much of a clue about how to answer. Their approach to saving the world, which Marczak never openly laughs at but never quite endorses either, is to turn the surprisingly good coin they make from their vaguely nature-themed amateur pornography into angel investments towards causes they believe in. A gently detached observer who drops in on the audio track only for occasional Jules and Jim-inspired backgrounders on our daffy leads, Marczak is an ideal mock-tour guide for the group’s journey to Peru, where they scope out a group of locals who want to preserve the Amazon.

Hot Docs ’13: Shooting Bigfoot

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Mystery, UK

Shooting bigfoot trailer

***/****
directed by Morgan Matthews

by Angelo Muredda There's a Weakerthans song called "Bigfoot!" about a Manitoba ferry operator who was harassed by local media for disclosing his alleged encounter with the furry legend. It's an oddly affecting little thing, especially around the chorus, where the man insists–likely just to himself–that he won't go through it all again "when the visions that I've seen will believe me." If nothing else, Morgan Matthews's genre-crossing Shooting Bigfoot confirms that the loneliness and hermeticism of the poor Manitoban's life after Bigfoot–defined by a vision he can't possibly share, for obvious reasons–is pretty standard stuff in the cult of sightings. Mixing Werner Herzog's eccentric profiles with both Christopher Guest's institutional satire and an unexpected but not unwelcome helping of The Blair Witch Project, the film starts as an arm's-length survey of Bigfoot culture before fully immersing itself in its manic compilation of signs and wonders. 

Hot Docs ’13: Downloaded

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

Sean_parker_downloaded_large_verge_medium_landscape

***/****
directed by Alex Winter

by Angelo Muredda Who would have expected both Bill and Ted to become a pair of slick documentarians about media revolutions? Just last year there was the Keanu Reeves-produced Side by Side, and now, Alex Winter’s Downloaded, an engaging if overly twee sort-of prequel to The Social Network about the formation and early death of Napster. Downloaded moves at a good clip, establishing early on both the company’s miraculous birth over a bunch of IRC chats between nerdy cofounders Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker (interviewed in a ridiculous penthouse suite that Facebook built) and the larger systemic changes in information management that produced their baby, the first major decentralized file-sharing system. Winter gets utopian about the spirit of exchange that ensued when campus-dwellers started trading their Nirvana concerts and Sugar Ray singles in the late-Nineties, but you can forgive him for getting misty-eyed: It’s easy in retrospect to forget just how easy and inevitable library consolidation through downloading became when Napster took off.

Hot Docs ’13: Interior. Leather Bar.

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

Franco_J-640x359

*/****
directed by James Franco and Travis Mathews

by Angelo Muredda Whatever goodwill James Franco built up with his mesmerizing turn in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is bulldozed by Interior. Leather Bar., his second infuriating Hot Docs appearance in as many years. Ostensibly a recreation of a lost 8-minute sequence from William Friedkin’s Cruising that was to show Al Pacino’s undercover detective intimately crowdsourcing a gay S&M bar for a serial killer, this is nothing short of an incompetent lecture on queer theory and the importance of being a heterosexual ally to the community from a vain graduate student and, even worse, a tourist.

Tristana (1970) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, France, Spain

Tristana1

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Catherine Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Franco Nero, Lola Gaos
screenplay by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Julio Alejandro, based on the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós
directed by Luis Buñuel

by Angelo Muredda You might not think it from overdetermined schlock like Simon Birch, but disability is a tough trope to wrangle, an errant bodily signifier that doesn’t always play nice. Just think of Million Dollar Baby, which tries and fails to use Hilary Swank’s impairment as a narrative shortcut for Clint Eastwood’s transformation into a tender father, troubled Catholic, and euthanizer-turned-agent of transcendence all at once. Eastwood the director has to stumble over the mechanics of his scene partner’s newly-maimed body and horizontal status, fudging the timeline so that her bedsores appear to sprout within minutes of her injury and puzzling over how to frame her, whether as a head poking out of a hospital bed in the background or a wheelchair-sporting cyborg parked in dead centre, staring out her hospital window like a forlorn puppy. That representational awkwardness is so common that in disability studies, it even has a name: Ato Quayson calls it “aesthetic nervousness,” meaning a text’s tendency to collapse in a fit of nerves before the matter of how to represent a disabled body.

Holy Motors (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica

Holymotors1

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue
written and directed by Leos Carax

by Angelo Muredda It’s no great shock that Holy Motors is innovative, coming from the same headspace as The Lovers on the Bridge and Mauvais Sang–movies that seemed fashioned out of whole cloth despite their indebtedness to names like David Bowie and Herman Melville. What’s most surprising is that beneath the formal variety and cheekiness, mainstays of Leos Carax’s freewheeling cinema, is a moving and altogether serious exploration of what it means to be an actor, in both a professional and a metaphysical sense. Carax’s films have been ranked among the boldest aesthetic manifestos since the 1980s for good reason, yet the ineffable quality that distinguishes them from the superficially similar grandstanding of nascent stylists like Xavier Dolan is their deep sincerity and unabashed adoration of the eccentric city-dwellers who cross paths on the loneliest roads in urban France. If Holy Motors is even wilder in presentation than its predecessors, then, it’s also perfectly legible within a body of work that’s always found a human streak in the avant-garde.

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (2013)

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Esoterica, Theatrical

Charlesswan

**/****
starring Charlie Sheen, Jason Schwartzman, Katheryn Winnick, Bill Murray
written and directed by Roman Coppola

by Angelo Muredda Bill Murray’s sad-clown deadpan is so ubiquitous now that it’s hard to remember a time before he was the face of hipster melancholy. Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola had a lot to work with in Murray’s cracked mug, so you have to feel for Coppola’s brother Roman, whose own project of redeeming an iconic face hits a snag right from the casting sheet. If A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III really is a tour through the psyche of star and one-man band Charlie Sheen, then the major takeaway is that there isn’t much to see unless you’re into incorrigible man-children on their best behaviour. It isn’t that post-meltdown Sheen lacks the charisma to anchor a picture, but that Coppola, on rockier ground with his second feature after the much more aesthetically bold and thematically rich CQ, is serving two masters: his own whimsy; and his obvious desire to stage a career intervention for his friend, recasting the actor’s overexposed mania as hangdog sadness–probably the last thing anyone wants to see Sheen embody.

Cosmopolis (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: David Cronenberg, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Satire

Cosmopolis1

****/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by David Cronenberg, based on the novel by Don DeLillo
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw David Cronenberg’s North by Northwest, his adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis functions as a difficult, arctic précis of the Canadian filmmaker’s career-long obsession with the insectile nature of, and indulgence in, hunger. Cronenberg’s proclivity for parasites, after all, is essentially the admiration of creatures defined by their hunger. His latest is Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a voracious sexual predator who lives in the dark cocoon of his stretch limo as it inches its way across Midtown to a barbershop that would be more at home in the bucolic small town of A History of Violence than in the metal canyons of Manhattan. Its existence, like a little diner along the way, like a bookshop with paper- and leather-lined walls, is further evidence of infestation–pockets of disease on the glistening skin and sterile surfaces of industry. No wonder the filthy rabble protesting in Gotham’s streets have as their unifying symbol the rats that are the true inheritors of man’s work. Cronenberg recalls his own Crash in these ideas–and not just in his desire to adapt literary properties considered unadaptable. He recalls his Naked Lunch in the idea that language is a neurological contagion, and he recalls most of all both his Videodrome (in his identification of screens with every intercourse) and his eXistenZ (in the erasure of any meaningful line between our interiors and exteriors). Cosmopolis is dense and multifarious–the absolute pinnacle of pretentious, too, in its desire to explain not only its creator, but all of the world at this moment in time in our age of missing information.

Greatest Hits (2012)

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Mexico, Theatrical

Greatesthits

Los mejores temas
***½/****
starring Gabino Rodríguez, Teresa Sánchez, José Rodriguez López, Luis Rodriguez
written and directed by Nicolás Pereda

by Angelo Muredda Odd as it might seem for a 30-year-old director to get a retrospective, you can see the logic behind TIFF Bell Lightbox’s series on Nicolás Pereda, whose six features demonstrate a remarkably consistent vision stemming from Pereda’s interest in gently setting an audience’s narrative expectations on their side. Pereda, who’s been relatively unheralded in his adoptive home of Toronto (despite his sturdy international reputation and his 2011 feting at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, to name just one laurel), brings the sophistication and focus of an old hand to each of his formally rigorous but unassuming projects. Although it’s his most recent work, there’s perhaps no better starting point for the uninitiated than the aptly titled Greatest Hits, which sees Pereda gathering his cast of players for a twist on the family reunion.

Cloud Atlas (2012)

Posted in2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Hong Kong, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Singapore, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Cloudatlas

**/****
starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski, based on the novel by David Mitchell
directed by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski

by Walter Chaw It speaks to the extraordinary hubris of the tripartite godhead behind Cloud Atlas (the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer) that in the middle of a 172-minute film composed of interminable exposition and multiple timelines, they would invoke long-winded Russian prisoner Solzhenitsyn without fear of ironic reprisal. More, it speaks to their hubris that they would make a film this sprawling and messianic about the Disney maxim that you’re never too puny to change the world, so don’t stop trying, tiger! If you’re at all offended by white people doing the “ah, so” thing in yellow-face, by the way: relax, because there’re also white people doing the evil Fu Manchu thing in yellow-face. What there isn’t is white people doing blackface, suggesting that if you’re about to make the argument that Cloud Atlas is about how we’re all the same under the skin to the extent that we could have been different races in past and future lives, then don’t bother. That doesn’t stop the movie, though, from talking about the evils of slavery with a super-duper, plantation-attitudes-changing Magic Negro, or from positing a future-Korea that clones wage-slaves before paying off never-accidental post-modern self-referents. If you were to take Cloud Atlas remotely seriously, in fact, you’d have to address it as an attempt to create a completely post-modern artifact in a world that didn’t already have “Beavis and Butt-Head”. Quick, look, the author of that manuscript the old editor in the 2012 timeline is reading was written by the kid from the 1973 timeline who had a crush on one of the black versions of Halle Berry (the one playing Pam Grier)! Did I mention that Berry has a timeline in whiteface? Or that Hugo Weaving and Ben Whishaw have ones in drag?

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Esoterica, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Beyond4

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras F
starring Michael Rogers, Eva Allan, Scott Hylands
screenplay by Panos Cosmatos, inspired by the book Be Your Self by Mercurio Arboria
directed by Panos Cosmatos

by Angelo Muredda Panos Cosmatos claims he wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies as a kid and had to make do with the lurid box covers he saw on video store shelves. Rising above those less-than-ideal conditions, the first-time helmer and son of famed Cobra and Rambo: First Blood Part II director George P. Cosmatos makes an auspicious debut with Beyond the Black Rainbow. As befits its retro title, this is a bravura pulp homage that recreates the feeling of a preteen creeping down the hall to catch a sidelong glance of the bygone genre cinema pulsing out of the living-room TV and painting the walls orange. Still, it’s best approached not as a found object from that time, but as a mood piece–a sustained exercise in atmospheric nostalgia for what LCD Soundsystem eloquently called the “unremembered ’80s.”

TIFF ’12: To the Wonder

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**/****
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Angelo Muredda For a long time, it seemed like Terrence Malick would vanish altogether before he made a serious misstep, but for better or worse, he’s now delivered To the Wonder, the bum note that forces you to warily retrace a major artist’s career. A muted greatest-hits compilation of Malick’s oeuvre, To the Wonder borrows whole apostrophized lines to God from The Tree of Life, nicks The Thin Red Line‘s trick of meting out disembodied humanist voiceovers across the cast (including an underused Javier Bardem), and re-stages Pocahontas’s carefree romp through the palace gardens in The New World via a young girl’s joyous dance through the aisles of a supermarket. It’s all here, in a manner of speaking, but as the little girl tells her mother at one point, “There’s something missing.”

TIFF ’12: Tabu

Posted in****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Brazil, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Portugal, Silent, Spain, TIFF

****/****
directed by Miguel Gomes

by Angelo Muredda Tabu opens, fittingly enough, at the movies, with an old melodrama about an explorer who’s just been turned into a brooding crocodile. That’s the first of many transformations in a protean film that shifts gracefully from ironic postcolonial critique, to essay on the cinema as a means of appropriation and reincarnation, to thwarted love story. While those layers may seem impossible to navigate, take heart: Director Miguel Gomes’s great coup is to let this complex material flow instinctually from its emotional core. Fluidity is key to Gomes’s aesthetic, which pairs the breathless momentum of a page-turner with the non-sequitur progression of a dream. Case in point, a moment when Pilar (Teresa Madruga), the first half’s protagonist, sees a movie with the stuffy man who loves her. Pilar is visibly moved by what’s on screen, but we never see it, hearing only a Portuguese cover of “Be My Baby” on the soundtrack–a thread left dangling only to be gingerly picked up in the second half. “You know what dreams are like,” as one character tells us: “We can’t command them.”