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

February 14, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Esoterica, Theatrical

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


Charlesswan

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

January 6, 2013Posted in****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: David Cronenberg, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Satire

****/****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


Cosmopolis1click
any image to enlarge

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)

November 22, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Mexico, Theatrical

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


Greatesthits

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)

October 23, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Sci-Fi

**/****
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


Cloudatlas

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 &
Butthead". 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

September 19, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Esoterica, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** 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


Beyond4click any image to enlarge

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

September 12, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

Tothewonder**/****
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

September 10, 2012Posted in****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Portugal, Silent, TIFF

Tabu****/****
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."

Gray’s Anatomy (1996) [The Criterion Collection] + And Everything is Going Fine (2010) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Discs

September 4, 2012Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2000s, 2010, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Documentary, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

GRAY'S ANATOMY
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
directed by Steven Soderbergh

A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN THEATER
***½/****
directed by Skip Blumberg

AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE
****/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras A
directed by Steven Soderbergh 

SEX AND DEATH TO THE AGE 14
***/****
directed by Dan Weissman and Brad Ricker


Graysanatomycap

by Walter Chaw The first ten minutes of Steven Soderbergh's Gray's Anatomy are
obnoxious, and though there are few artists as interesting to me or as influential in my own life as Spalding Gray, the last 109 don't exactly blow my
skirt up, either. Let me back up. I tripped over Swimming to Cambodia in
English class, Freshman year, then procured my own copy at Boulder's invaluable
The Video Station so that I could go back to it and, sure, impress Liberal Arts
girls with it on a double-bill with Stop Making Sense. You might say
that Gray and David Byrne were my wing-men for a couple of years there; it's
fitting that my VHS copies of both those pieces are now and forever in the
possession of ex-girlfriends and love interests. I wonder if I would ask for the tapes back were I to run into them again. I know that one of them, after I
was married, tried to return Swimming to Cambodia, and I asked her to
please keep it. If you don't know what Swimming to Cambodia is, it's
Spalding Gray's unbelievably great performance-"monolog" about his time on set,
on location, shooting Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields. I've never
heard Joffe speak, but I have Gray's impersonation of Joffe–calling out to a
tripping-balls Gray, floating in shark-infested surf in the South China Sea–lodged in my brain. I pull it out once in a while at a party, just as a
sonar ping to see if anyone could possibly identify the echo of the echo.

Identification of a Woman (1982) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 20, 2012Posted in1980s, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Identificazione di una donna
***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras D
starring Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, Christine Boisson, Lara Wendel
screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni & Gérard Brach
directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

Identificationcap1

by Angelo Muredda When SIGHT & SOUND announced the long-awaited results of their 2012 critics poll earlier this month, the Internet was abuzz with the shifting fortunes of Citizen Kane and Vertigo–the flip-flop heard 'round the world. Less noted was the latest demotion of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, which debuted at a startling second place in 1962's poll (the film was only two years old at that point), then steadily declined with each decade before landing at number 21 on the most recent survey. What to make of this seemingly calamitous downward shift? Probably not much. Like fellow countryman Federico Fellini, who's also been increasingly received as a curio despite the continued respect for 8½ (particularly among directors), Antonioni's canonical films are stamped by their era; L'Avventura's downgraded fortune likely says as much about the limited shelf life of European modernism–which its cool classicism and intellectual rigor so fully embodies–as it does about the film itself.

Being John Malkovich (1999) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 25, 2012Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

Beingjohnmalkovichcap1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw The moment you realize that Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich is more than just another ultra-high-concept indie calling-card is right at the end, when all that quirk reveals itself as bleak, desperate, lonesome. It’s the first time most of us conceptualized the idea of Charlie Kaufman, in fact–the moment that any follow-up became a cause célèbre. It’s silly, really, to bother trying to synopsize the film, but for the uninitiated, it’s about a failed puppeteer’s discovery of a portal behind a file cabinet on the low-ceilinged floor of an office designed for the dwarf wife of a sea captain. (“Curs-ed t’ing,” he calls her.) The portal leads, of course, to the inside of John Malkovich’s skull for around fifteen minutes before expelling the interloper to the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Looking here, it’s possible to begin to trace Kaufman’s auteur obsessions with interiors, with language (in a job interview hinged on malaproprisms and miscommunications), with doubling, identity, surrealism, systems of belief, and, sneakily, science-fiction. What’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, after all, but a fairly extraordinary SF piece that just happens to be one of the best movies about love ever made?

Exotica (1994) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD

June 24, 2012Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery

Exoticacap

****/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Bruce Greenwood, Mia Kirshner, Don McKellar, Elias Koteas
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Bryant Frazer When Exotica debuted at Cannes in 1994, Atom Egoyan had already earned a reputation for curious, low-key explorations of memory and alienation. His Family Viewing, Speaking Parts, and The Adjuster leaned on video as a kind of metaphor showing how relationships become dependent on individual frames of reference that each move in only one direction–how one person’s blank tape is another’s cherished memory, or how one person’s pornographic display is another’s lifeline. Exotica represented Egoyan’s commercial breakthrough in part because he found an enticing venue for those observations. It’s one of the most fundamentally despairing movies that I know, and yet there is in the precision of its craft, the bravery of its conception, and the depth of its empathy something fundamentally uplifting.

A Hollis Frampton Odyssey (1966-1979) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 10, 2012Posted in1960s, 1970s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Esoterica, Short Films, The Criterion Collection

Hollisframptoncap

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B

by Bryant Frazer The avant-garde in film has always had an uneasy relationship with home video. Grainy old VHS tapes of works by luminaries like Bruce Conner or Kenneth Anger might have made the texts themselves available for more careful study by a larger audience, but the picture quality compromised the work tremendously. The arrival of DVD technology allowed for a better visual representation, yet brought with it certain dangers. For one thing, there’s a moral issue: Filmmakers who had objections to the commodification of art and culture were put on the spot as their once-ephemeral films were transferred to a new medium that was easy for an individual consumer to purchase and own. There’s also an aesthetic issue. No matter how close a video transfer gets to the visual qualities of a projected film–and a good transfer to Blu-ray can get very close indeed–a video image is not a film image. For avant-garde filmmakers, and especially for so-called “structural” filmmakers like the late Hollis Frampton, for whom film itself was subject, text, and subtext, the difference is key.

Belle de jour (1967) – The Criterion Collection Blu-ray Disc

March 20, 2012Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Italy, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page
screenplay by Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel
directed by Luis Buñuel

Belledejourcap2Mustownby Jefferson Robbins It's fitting that a film about a woman agonizingly balanced between sexual repression and sexual freedom depicts an inner life balanced between two different periods in history. The opening moments of Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour lead us to believe it will be a period piece. In a static wide shot, a black horse-drawn coach on a country lane leisurely approaches. Two bystanders appear to root in the hedges along the path, too distant to be clearly made out: Are they peasants? Estate groundskeepers? Our eyes are programmed now to expect something Edwardian, or, more applicable to the subject matter, Victorian. Only when an automobile makes a turn in the distance do we realize the setting is contemporary. The modernity comes as a jolt, but from this sequence we will return to some kind of imagined past again and again as the heroine–a very modern woman, one whose frightened explorations map the sexual realms of our own later decades–slips between the cracks in her own mind.

The Mill and the Cross (2011)

November 18, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Esoterica, Poland, Sweden, Theatrical

Mlyn i krzyz
***/****
starring Rutger Hauer, Charlotte Rampling, Michael York, Oskar Huliczka
screenplay by Michael Francis Gibson & Lech Majewski
directed by Lech Majewski

by Angelo Muredda The opening voiceover in Polish-American filmmaker and painter Lech Majewsi’s dry but compelling The Mill and the Cross nicely prepares us for both the fastidiousness and the playfulness that follows. “I want to do something about their clothing,” Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel, a droll Rutger Hauer, says as he surveys a handful of the 500-odd subjects that populate his bustling 1564 painting “The Way to Calvary.” At this point it’s still a work-in-progress, a living tableau of Christ’s crucifixion filtered through the artist’s critique of the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands. Depriving us of the panorama that comprises the finished artwork, Majewski offers only a limited frontal view of the wailing women in the foreground, embodied by actresses who stand in stark relief against the computer-generated backdrop of the painting. As the camera tracks alongside them, it gets snagged, in a manner of speaking, on their dresses: it halts its procession so that Bruegel himself can enter the painting as a makeshift costume designer, fussing over their fabrics and setting the gravity of the scene through his sartorial choices. It’s a smart statement of purpose, announcing Bruegel’s and Majewski’s simultaneous interest in the particular and the allegorical, and placing the film at various crossroads–between, for instance, art history lesson and dramatic recreation, and, more interestingly, between artifice and accident.

O Lucky Man! (1973) [Two-Disc Special Edition] + Never Apologize: A Personal Visit with Lindsay Anderson (2008) – DVDs

October 17, 2011Posted in1970s, 2000s, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Concert Doc, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Music, UK

O LUCKY MAN!
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Malcolm McDowell, Ralph Richardson, Rachel Roberts, Arthur Lowe
screenplay by David Sherwin
directed by Lindsay Anderson

NEVER APOLOGIZE: A PERSONAL VISIT WITH LINDSAY ANDERSON
**½/**** Image C Sound B-
directed by Mike Kaplan

Oluckymancap

by Jefferson Robbins As magnetic an actor as he is, Malcolm McDowell is often the acted-upon. Alex DeLarge of A Clockwork Orange seeks to master his chosen domains by force, but once he finds himself in the larger circuitry of the world, he's really just an implement of others' power. Is Caligula the prime mover of his vulgar Roman Empire, or merely its best expression? And so on. It was only in his later career that lazy filmmakers and casting agents made McDowell a shorthand for sinister worldliness; today, he arrives onscreen and you know who he is. Time was, he was a squirrelly, intense audience surrogate, Everymannish but beautiful in a way that was at once fragile and sharp. Asked to identify McDowell's essential quality as an actor, director Lindsay Anderson told him, "You're rather dangerous." For good or ill, the movie industry has looked no farther than that in the way it's handled McDowell for the last thirty years.

The Future is Now: FFC Interviews Miranda July|The Future (2011)

August 7, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Interviews, Romance, Theatrical, UK

MjulyinterviewtitleMiranda July reflects on The Future

THE FUTURE
***/****
starring Hamish Linklater, Miranda July, David Warshofsky, Isabella Acres
written and directed by Miranda July

In The Future, writer/director/star Miranda July indulges in the same wayward malaise of her previous film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, but, somewhat ironically, the focus on the uncertainty of "what comes next" makes this one seem a lot less scattershot. Dance teacher Sophie (July) and tech-support guy Jason (Hamish Linklater) have rescued a sickly cat from the wild and sent him to an animal shelter, and they've got a month until they can reclaim him. However, the cat will require 'round-the-clock care from them to stay alive, so they conclude that this is their last "free" month before years-long responsibilities squander their potential, and they quit their jobs in a bid to become more "spontaneous." Jason goes door-to-door selling trees for an environmental program and Sophie decides to film "thirty dances over thirty days" for a short-track to YouTube stardom. But neither one is prepared for the apathy and self-loathing that greets their cutesy little endeavours, and as they spin their wheels, they gravitate towards people who appear to "really have their shit together": Sophie becomes attracted to a single father with a small business (David Warshofsky), while Jason regularly visits an old man (Joe Putterlik) who once sold him a used hairdryer. What's important is that July quickly establishes that these behaviours are not a matter of self-improvement or jealousy–it's just a hell of a lot easier to stare at the lives of others and marvel at how organized they look from the outside. In other words, Sophie and Jason take no real "action" of their own accord; everything they do is just another bit of slacktivism to avoid the responsibilities for which they're supposedly preparing. Her self-esteem takes a hit as she views other women's "dancing" videos, so she cancels her Internet and calls it a great opportunity to focus. July makes this sheltered worldview all the more fascinating by introducing an element of surrealism–soon, her characters' paradoxical desires to move forward and stand still give them to power to bend the universe to their will, as an imminent break-up is stalled by the literal stoppage of time. (And yet, time still manages to march on.) The self-conscious obviousness of its metaphors give The Future a strong grounding in reality, rendering even July's silliest notions–such as a series of helium-inflected monologues from the cat himself (the only neglected "victim" in this scenario), waiting for his loving masters to return–deeply affecting.–IP

August 7, 2011|Miranda July is very much like the characters she plays, and they are very much like her: she stares at you with wide, intense eyes, and her responses trail off once she realizes that she's revealed all she wants to about a given subject. She's in town to promote her second feature film, The Future, for the Boston Independent Film Festival, and we both seem a little eager to discover if indeed this sophomore effort can be discussed at length. Over the course of our conversation, we shared a couple of awkward laughs–in mutual recognition, I think, of the inherent absurdity of this meeting; we had been tasked to interpret and explain an intentionally abstract piece dealing with moving on and growing older, about which the creator must refuse a "full" explanation. Still, though July insists on keeping some things secret, she comes across as utterly sincere–so much so that I felt a pang of remorse when I realized that I had unintentionally lied to her by not attending the festival's screening of The Future like I said I would. Several days later, given another interview opportunity for a different film, I made it a point to ask her husband Mike Mills to apologize on my behalf.

Bellflower (2011) + The Change-Up (2011)|Bellflower – Blu-ray Disc + DVD

August 4, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

BELLFLOWER
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Evan Glodell, Jessie Wiseman, Taylor Dawson, Rebekah Brandes
written and directed by Evan Glodell

THE CHANGE-UP
½*/****
starring Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde
screenplay by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore
directed by David Dobkin

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bellflower earns the right to its melodrama by asking what you have to live for and, more importantly, what you're willing to do to keep your life uncomplicated. Woodrow (writer-director Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Taylor Dawson) don't seem to have much of a life beyond hanging out with their friends and drinking too much–but their minds were suitably "warped" by a second-generation VHS tape of Mad Max. Now they spend their days constructing flamethrowers and muscle cars destined to fit right in with that film's end-of-the-world milieu. Woodrow hooks up with a young woman named Milly (Jessie Wiseman), and as the relationship blossoms (and breaks down), Glodell takes the opportunity to explore the unfathomable guilt and anger that drove George Miller's original road warrior–as well as what Glodell's own heroes have failed to understand about his journey. When we first meet him, Woodrow doesn't know too much about guilt or anger, so his coping mechanisms are extremely fractured. Confrontations with others are typically brief, sometimes without logical end, and the director intentionally tones down most of the violence so that his characters can wallow in passive-aggressive detachment. Sometimes the violent images are chopped out entirely, only to be saved for later in the movie, where they may or may not have been mentally re-edited by Woodrow to conform to a more favorable outcome. That's the thing about the apocalypse: it never goes quite the way you want.

Solaris (1972) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 8, 2011Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2011, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Soviet Union

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Jüri Järvet, Anatoli Solonitsyn
 screenplay by Fridrikh Gorenshtein & Andrei Tarkovsky, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

by Bryant Frazer Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Solaris, a novel by the Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, betrays the director’s general disinterest in conventional SF tropes. His film does honour the mind-blowing outlines of Lem’s concept, which deals with a manned mission to investigate a planet-sized extra-terrestrial consciousness. But where Lem speculated about the practical boundaries of human intellect in the shadow of the universe, Tarkovsky opts to explore human feelings of loss and insecurity in the face of mortality. For Lem, the failed Solaris mission is emblematic of the difficulties we humans would have comprehending and communicating with a radically different form of life. For Tarkovsky, the mission re-opens old psychic wounds, flooding us with regret that we weren’t better to the people we loved. “Shame [is] the feeling that will save mankind,” murmurs protagonist Kris Kelvin near the end of the film. In Tarkovsky’s Solaris, we have made contact with the aliens, and they want you to call your mom.

The Tree of Life (2011)

May 27, 2011Posted in****/****, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Esoterica, Palme d'Or Winner, Theatrical

****/****
starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken
written and directed by Terrence Malick 

Treeoflifeby Walter Chaw Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is his attempt in a secular way (a very Romanticist way), much like Milton attempted in a religious way, to explain the ways of God to men and, more, to further define God as something created in the heart of Man. It's immensely mysterious, and immensely grand. In scope, its only parallel might be the mysterium tremens at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but even that doesn't try to get at the heart of what made the Monolith so much as why. The Tree of Life is about how fathers disappoint their sons and how sons perceive that they disappoint their fathers, and it may along the way be about why a religion revolving around a Father who never has to explain why He disappoints His children has taken the hold that it has (the film opens with a passage from The Book of Job). But that's ancillary to the topic at hand for Malick, because really what he's interested in is the way that sons will always fail to be at peace with their relationships with their fathers and how maybe, maybe that sense of loneliness, confusion, abandonment, and shame is the true and secret mark at the centre of what it means to be a creative being in a world forever in the act of being created. The struggle against the Father, the simultaneous struggle for His approval, is the fuel that fires Man's desire to make–and excel. It's Freud, isn't it, and Nietzsche, and every German/Austrian smarter than me (Kirkegaard and Wittgenstein and Heidegger, whom Malick translated and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in pursuit of his doctorate), as filtered through Malick's naturalism, which, far from the chaos of Antonioni's relationship with nature, reflects a more harmonious, metaphorical kinship–like D.W. Griffith's. Very much, too, like the dream sequences in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, which see the past as impossibly resplendent because they are a creation in the mind of the virgin Eden of childhood.