Esoterica Archives - Page 9 of 17

The Silent House (2011) + Rubber (2010)

May 24, 20112010, 2011, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, Uruguay

La casa muda
***½/****
starring Florencia Colucci, Abel Tripaldi, Gustavo Alonso, María Salazar
screenplay by Oscar Estévez
directed by Gustavo Hernández

RUBBER
½*/****
starring Stephen Spinella, Roxanne Mesquida, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser
written and directed by Quentin Dupieux

by Walter Chaw Billed as being filmed in a single shot (though the skeptical–and those taken in by the "unedited" long takes of Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men–should wonder why an editor is credited), Gustavo Hernández's zero-budget conceptual experiment The Silent House (La casa mudi) has found a way not only to suggest a gimmick successfully carried through, but also to weave that gimmick into a richer thematic tapestry. Here, the digital camera isn't carried by a protagonist, Blair Witch-like, but instead floats around the victim of the movie's horrors, one Laura (Florencia Colucci), who's endeavouring with father Wilson (Gustavo Alonso) to clean up an old abandoned house in preparation of its sale. The camera does take on the point-of-view of someone at some point, then jumps back to an objective place, then plays that trick Evil Dead II plays with perspective in the scene where Ash wakes up in a clearing and looks around in a panning 360-degree take, only for the audience to discover that the camera eye is both character and commentator, more physical in its way than a first-person point-of-view could ever be. In a genre dependent on cutting for its scares, in fact, The Silent House's accomplishments are all the more impressive. It's suffocating (I'd never considered how liberating edits were from a complete immersion into a film) and at times unbearably tense–and though some will point to the airlessness of Hitch's Rope or the fluid choreography of Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark, The Silent House is a different beast altogether.

Source Code (2011) + Certified Copy (2010)

April 1, 2011****/****, 2000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

SOURCE CODE
****/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright
screenplay by Ben Ripley
directed by Duncan Jones

Copie conforme
****/****
starring Juliette Binoche, William Shimell
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

by Walter Chaw The one part of Source Code that isn't duck-ass tight poses so many questions about the nature of our hero's heroism and the aftermath of the film that it opens up what initially seems a hermetically-sealed conceit into something of real depth and fascination. Far from the solipsism of failures interesting (Timecrimes) and not (Primer), different from marginal successes like 12 Monkeys and Déjà Vu, Duncan Jones's sophomore feature (after the similarly thorny Moon) plays most like a child of Last Year at Marienbad and a companion piece to Abbas Kiarostami's contemporaneous Certified Copy. It speaks in terms of quantum physics and string theory, but without pretension, achieving the almost impossible by introducing difficult concepts at the same pace with which its characters–not a dummy among them–are able to understand them without gassing (or worse, falling well behind) the audience. That it presents itself as a mainstream, popular entertainment is more to its credit, giving lie to the notion that Hollywood is bankrupt of ideas. Rather, it's the destination for gifted filmmakers–some of them smart enough, and resourceful enough, to hold fast to their idealism and intelligence for, if not an entire career, then at least long enough to set a bar.

Alice in Wonderland [The Masterpiece Edition] (1951) + The Lion King 1½ (2004) – DVDs|Alice in Wonderland – Blu-ray + DVD

February 1, 20111950s, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, Musical

ALICE IN WONDERLAND
**/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
story by Winston Hibler, Ted Sears, Bill Peet, Erdman Penner, Joe Rinaldi, Milt Banta, Bill Cottrell, Dick Kelsey, Joe Grant, Dick Huemer, Del Connell, Tom Oreb, John Walbridge, based on Lewis Carroll's The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass
directed by Clyde Geronimi & Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske

THE LION KING 1½
The Lion King 3: Hakuna Matata
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by Tom Rogers, Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi and Bill Steinkeller and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Bill Chambers It's not like Alice in Wonderland is necessary and The Lion King 1½ isn't–they're both unnecessary. The two latest animated Disney films to hit DVD, they have little in common formally save that they're jointly inessential; and yet, because of their proximate release windows, parents are likely to pick them up as a pair, and kids are likely to associate them as such. Bright, sophisticated children may arrive at the hypothesis that this is the day that animation died.

Trash Humpers (2010) – DVD

January 10, 2011****/****, 2010, 2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Paul Booker, Dave Cloud, Chris Cofton, Rachel Korine
written and directed by Harmony Korine

"To me, there is only one form of human depravity–the man without a purpose."-Ayn Rand

by Alex Jackson My last job was as direct-support staff in a group home for adults with autism and severe mental retardation. The grave and morning staff, I was basically responsible for getting them bathed, dressed, and fed for the day. In one of our training sessions, the instructor told us that all behaviour has some kind of payoff or reward. Of course, I had to challenge this. "What about pica?" I asked. More precisely, I wanted to know why one of our clients ate his own shit. The instructor politely scratched his chin and replied, "The behaviour must be rewarding unto itself."

Fight Club (1999) [10th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 29, 20101990s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Esoterica

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf Aday
screenplay by Jim Uhls, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. My on-again/off-again love affair with David Fincher began with a PREMIERE article I read about how much of an asshole he was on the set of Alien³, dumping a few-hundred baby crickets on a pretty surprised, pretty pissed, pretty skivvies-clad Sigourney Weaver. But I didn't really prick up my ears until his urban/ecclesiastical serial killer masterpiece Se7en revealed to me a key to unlocking the Coens' Barton Fink–being, as they were, thematic doppelgängers. Soaked in wet and Hemingway, Fincher declares the world a scam and appoints himself the snake-oil barker shilling from the proscenium on the wagon; Barton Fink, also stained sepia brown, also ostensibly engaged in the pursuit of a serial killer and the excoriation of deadly sins, is the spirit to Se7en's flesh. Even as he flounders at the heartbeat, Fincher finds the headlong of his carnal lather again in his adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, establishing his mission statement as subterranean explorations of masculine aggression and explaining to me my tendency to confuse Fincher's films with those of Michael Mann. Focusing on the testosterone in Fincher's pictures offers partial explanation of the movies in his oeuvre that don't work (and, within those failures, the parts that do). Too, it's explanation of why it is that Fight Club's ending is so jarringly unsatisfying–"You met me at kind of a strange time in my life" the nancy punchline to two-plus hours of quintessential asshole cinema.

THX 1138: The George Lucas Director’s Cut (1971/2004) – Blu-ray Disc

October 20, 20101970s, 2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Don Pedro Colley, Maggie McOmie
screenplay by George Lucas and Walter Murch
directed by George Lucas

by Walter Chaw THX 1138 is the only film George Lucas ever wrote and directed that will and should be remembered as a mostly artistic triumph rather than a largely financial one (recalling that the best of his Star Wars films, The Empire Strikes Back, was neither written nor directed by Lucas). The fact that he's now tampered with it in much the same manner as he's tampered with his original Star Wars trilogy seems, then, an almost bigger crime against posterity, even if it makes a kind of ironic sense within the thematic framework of the film. THX 1138's preoccupations with dehumanization, an abhorrence of imperfection and humanity in favour of machine-tooled precision, and the corruption of human perception and emotions with mass-produced opiates find sympathy with this new stage of its own existence as a film that hasn't been just restored, but enhanced, too, by CGI that serves the same basic function for the audience as the drugged milk does for the protagonists of A Clockwork Orange. When Lucas made THX 1138, he was the prole toiling (stealing from Aldous Huxley and N.I. Kostomorov is toil, yes?) in obscurity; when he retooled the thing and went to Telluride with a streaming digital feed of it thirty-three years later, he completed his transformation into the faceless machine-priest of the film, sanctifying his zombified acolytes as good pods and ladling upon them the questionable bounty of blessings by the state.

Warner Bros. Presents Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1980s – DVD

September 22, 20101980s, Animation, Authors: Alex Jackson, Esoterica, Family, Television

Image B- Sound B- Extras B-
Goldie Gold and Action Jack: “Night of the Crystal Skull”
Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos: “Deadly Dolphin”
The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley: “Tall, Dark & Hansom”
The Flintstone Kids: “The Bad News Brontos/Invasion of the Mommy Snatchers/Dreamchip’s Cur Wash/Princess Wilma”
Mister T: “Mystery of the Golden Medallions”
Dragon’s Lair: “The Tale of the Enchanted Gift”
Thundarr the Barbarian: “Secret of the Black Pearl”
Kwicky Koala Show: “Show #1 – Dry Run/Robinson Caruso/High Roller/The Claws Conspiracy/Hat Dance/Dirty’s Debut”
The Biskitts: “As the Worm Turns/Trouble in the Tunnel”
Monchhichis: “Tickle Pickle”
Galtar and the Golden Lance: “Galtar and the Princess”

by Alex Jackson

“Portions of original film elements from certain programs contained within no longer survive in pristine condition. As a result, archival elements of varying quality have been carefully assembled to provide you with as close an approximation of the original program as possible.” –Actual disclaimer on the “Warner Bros. Presents Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1980s” DVD collection

From the sound of that, you would think they discovered these episodes of “Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos” and “Monchhichis” in the basement of an Argentinean mental hospital. Certainly, “Warner Bros. Presents Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1980s” holds genuine appeal as a cultural artifact. I was born in 1981 but have vague memories of watching an episode of “The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley”, which might have featured a clip from the 1933 Fay Wray horror film The Vampire Bat. I have a better but still hazy memory of putting a cartoon “Mister T” temporary tattoo on my mom’s guitar case. If nothing else, this collection is irrefutable evidence that I didn’t imagine these programs.

I’m Still Here (2010)

September 22, 2010****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Esoterica, Jack Nicholson, Music, Satire, Theatrical

****/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Antony Langdon, Casey Affleck, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs
screenplay by Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix
directed by Casey Affleck

by Ian Pugh It’s far too easy to believe that Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here hinges on whether or not its subject has perpetrated a hoax. Joaquin Phoenix grows a lunatic’s beard, declares he’s quitting acting, and starts planning a hip-hop career? Surely, he can’t be serious. But here’s how it ends, kids: yes, I guess you could call it a “put-on” in the strictest sense of the word–yet at the same time, he is deadly serious. What needs to be understood about Phoenix, and this film, is that there was a kernel of truth to everything the man mumbled through that maniacal persona. I do believe that Phoenix is tired of acting (or, at least, tired of stardom), and, for his farewell performance, he’s blurred the line between actor and role so completely as to obliterate all our preconceived notions of who he is and what he is supposed to represent. The false Phoenix–the bedraggled, abusive prophet spouting non-sequiturs–is, for all intents and purposes, the “real” Phoenix, the iconic artist who pulls a disappearing act by forcing the art and the iconography to consume his entire being. You can’t call I’m Still Here a mockumentary, exactly, because, inside and outside of the “act,” that is precisely what happened. And what came out of it is a harrowing thought exercise about artistic failure and the baggage of celebrity.

Animal Kingdom (2010) + Valhalla Rising (2010)

August 11, 2010****/****, 2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

ANIMAL KINGDOM
***½/****
starring Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Luke Ford, Guy Pearce
written and directed by David Michôd

VALHALLA RISING
****/****
starring Mads Mikkelsen, Maarten Stevenson, Gordon Brown, Andrew Flanagan
screenplay by Roy Jacobsen & Nicolas Winding Refn
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

by Walter Chaw David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom respects its audience, a rare commodity during the best of times. The film flatters us by leaving exposition and backstory to our knowledge of anthropology–in fact, Animal Kingdom is best indicated by its unwavering reserve–a reluctance, almost–to say too much when slow, fluid tracking motions and static, medium-distance establishing shots may suffice. Consider a frankly gorgeous tableau late in the film as three people meet in Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria: framed against an open space, Michôd allows an extra beat, then another, before continuing with his family gothic. The story isn’t an afterthought, but the dialogue, however minimal, seems to be. The picture’s told through its actions and its images and, in that way, reminds of a Beat Takeshi film, of all things, what with its focus on criminality and its enthralling slowness. If there’s another indie demiurge to which Michôd pays obeisance, it’s Michael Mann–and the success of the picture (as shrine to masculinity, as introspective character study) suggests that cribbing from Kitano and Mann, if it’s as successful a larceny as this, can be successful in no other way.

Jonah Hex (2010)

June 17, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Superhero, Thriller, Western

*/****
starring Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Shannon
screenplay by Neveldine & Taylor
directed by Jimmy Hayward

by Walter Chaw Distilling a fairly popular Weird West comic series down to a tight little 80-minute ball that plays like another adaptation of the Max Payne videogame, ex-Pixar animator Jimmy Hayward’s Jonah Hex is a whole lotta boom-boom executed in a borrowed, curiously flat style that has one pining for the days when Sam Raimi was making stuff like Darkman and The Quick and the Dead–those two films, incidentally, the ones Jonah Hex most wants to be. The eponymous Jonah (Josh Brolin) is a disfigured Confederate hero gifted–through hatred, a near-death experience, and healing from mysterious Injuns–with the ability to withstand point-blank shotgun blasts, briefly reanimate the dearly departed, and suffer Megan Fox’s typecast performance as a really popular whore. Her Lilah keeps weapons all over creation, natch, because she might be an oft-visited saloon girl but she ain’t nobody’s bitch. Well, except Jonah’s, I guess. But Jonah is too busy trying to kill evil Col. Quentin Trumbull (John Malkovich) to make an honest woman out of her. Jonah Hex may not know much, but he knows he’s no fucking magician.

Easy Rider (1969) [40th Anniversary] – Blu-ray Disc

June 15, 2010****/****, 1960s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Jack Nicholson, Road Movie

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Luke Askew
screenplay by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern
directed by Dennis Hopper

WATCH IN iTUNES

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's not easy to mark the beginning of the Sixties as an idea. Me, personally, as it's the way I'm wired, I like to use as the starting gun the trilogy of dysfunctional pictures–Psycho, Eyes Without a Face, Peeping Tom–that literally inaugurate the decade, but I'd also accept that 1962's Cuban Missile Crisis was enough for many of the nearly-disaffected to become completely what-the-fuck disaffected. And if you go with that, then what happens at the end of 1963 with the assassination of JFK is that Zapruder places film as the end-all of Truth. A lot changed with those 26.6 seconds of film–or, should we say, a lot changed back, to a period where the newsreel, no matter how doctored or fabricated, was the primary mass means of information-gathering before television began to encroach on it. A lot of ink's been spilled about the extent to which movies in the mid-to-late-Fifties tried to outdo the boob-tube with grand Technicolor visions; comparatively little has been written about Zapruder's 486 colour frames, which stole the thunder of television's hold on vérité–remember, in 1960, Hitch wanted to shoot Psycho in a televisual style for its implicit realism–as elegantly as a shell fired from a mail-order Carcano. TV achieves a stalemate by broadcasting Vietnam during the dinner hour, yet it doesn't win outright until the '90s when it embraces shakycam and film unveils itself once and for all as a magician's medium: smoke, mirrors, Forrest telling LBJ he needs to piss, and the Titanic going down again to the tune of a tween tearjerker.

The Age of Unintended Consequences: FFC Interviews David Russo

April 20, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Interviews, Theatrical

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF LITTLE DIZZLE
*** (out of four)

starring Marshall Allman, Vince Vieluf, Natasha Lyonne, Tygh Runyan
written and directed by David Russo

The scion of a constipated generation, Seattle tech worker Dory (Marshall Allman) is sampling religions like grab-bag candy when a sealed bottle floats past during his lunch-hour Bible study. The message within could be either from God or from the famously polluted Puget Sound itself, but it sets Dory on a career-destroying spiral that ends with a new job on an office cleaning crew, scrubbing johns alongside renegade "artist" OC (Vince Vieluf). One of their clients is product lab Corsica Research, where a young exec (Natasha Lyonne, long missed but giving the least authentic performance here) decides the trash-scavenging janitors are perfect test subjects for an awful but addictive new cookie. The active ingredient impregnates men first with an altered consciousness (whole concepts break loose from language and float free in the air, in electrically beautiful F/X sequences), and finally with what can only be described as an incandescent blue lungfish. But it's not so much an Alien-esque affliction as an epiphany, with each man finding peace and even enlightenment in this scatological process of "childbirth." No longer adrift, they're vessels for a new life–the only kind that can survive, it's implied, in a world where Zoloft flows from the kitchen tap and breakfast just isn't a meal without Yellow Dye No. 5. Allman and Vieluf play perfectly off each other under Seattle writer-director David Russo, whose jitter-editing and hallucination segments recall Darren Aronofsky and whose screenplay references Philip K. Dick. Russo's deployment of soundtrack music skillfully twists the knife where it counts–witness the lo-fi but enchanting version of the Carpenters' "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" (by The Langley Schools Music Project, fascinating in itself) that closes the film, as Dory deposits a new message in the water and contemplates, as all new fathers must, a future for his children.–JR

April 21, 2010|The films of David Russo have a distinctly handmade feel, and often the hand becomes visible. A largely self-taught filmmaker and animator, he makes no pretense that he's not manipulating the action. When he sets his models into neon time-lapse against backdrops that strobe from sky to sea to blackness, he almost always winds up in the shot. In Russo's short creations and in his first feature film, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, bespoke art objects–or even just words–make long, looping journeys in search of some answer. But like most philosophical quests, the journey is more important than its endpoint.

While he developed his craft Russo carried on an eleven-year career as a janitor, a vocation that sharpened his sense of the things society values: what we keep, what we cast away, what we flush. His short art films Populi (2002) and Pan With Us (2003) (viewable here, along with most of the artist's other work) gave him his first wider exposure, competing at the Sundance Film Festival in consecutive years. More recently, his hand-wrought animation lent texture to the video for Thom Yorke's "Harrowdown Hill" (2006).

Dizzle's path from script to screen was fraught with financing issues and a slender production window. It wasn't bought for distribution after its Sundance debut in early 2009, and by the time it reached Russo's hometown Seattle International Film Festival the same year, its hopes for release were no better. Finally, Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film picked up Dizzle for a brief 2010 New York theatrical engagement and a video-on-demand run that starts today. Russo's renegade janitors, chemically enlightened and midwifing the birth of a new species, might manage to swim free of the sewers after all.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

April 5, 2010****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Max Records, Catherine Keener, Lauren Ambrose, Mark Ruffalo
screenplay by Spike Jonze & Dave Eggers, based on the book by Maurice Sendak
directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are is the product of an artist who may only be able to assimilate art and the creation of it through the filter of celluloid and the music that animates its flickers. More, there’s the suggestion in its depth of emotion that this may be the only way Jonze knows to communicate at all, and so he tasks it to capture the breadth of human experience. If the “film brats” of the New American Cinema were the first reared on a diet of the French New Wave and critical theory, this new post-modernism to which Jonze belongs consists of artists reared on the entire panoply of popular culture…and maybe nothing else. What other explanation is there for the elasticity and strangeness of films by people like Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino? They create works that strive towards the ineffable, seemingly unaware of film’s limitations and therefore undaunted by ideas of what’s possible.

Sundance ’10: Double Take

January 25, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Alex Jackson, Belgium, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Germany, Netherlands, Sundance

***/****starring Ron Burrage, Mark Perrywritten and directed by Johan Grimonprez by Alex Jackson Johan Gimonprez's Double Take imagines an instance where Alfred Hitchcock is interrupted from filming 1963's The Birds to talk to his "double." This doppelgänger is from 1980--the year, you may remember (or reasonably guess), that Hitchcock died--and not his "double" at all, but rather his wraith, a vision of himself on the eve of his death. Hitchcock asks him who wins the Cold War and the wraith dismisses the question as unimportant. He wants to talk about how television is destroying cinema. The bulk of Double Take…

The Young Victoria (2009) + Antichrist (2009)

December 4, 2009****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Horror, Italy, Poland, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE YOUNG VICTORIA
**/****
starring Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend, Paul Bettany, Miranda Richardson
screenplay by Julian Fellowes
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

ANTICHRIST
****/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg
written and directed by Lars von Trier

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As the beginning of an emotional history for Queen Victoria, Jean-Marc Vallée's The Young Victoria makes for an interesting bookend to John Madden's Mrs. Brown. A lavish, romantic depiction of the monarch's courtship with future husband Prince Albert (Rupert Friend), it's the very definition of a quotidian costume drama, skirting over the major issues of the early years of Victoria's reign to speak in broader terms about her idealism, the problems presented to her by her youth, and the manipulation of her affections by courtly politics. It's something like the older sister to Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette: less hip, but still in love with its naivety, its evergreen youth. It says something to me that in 2009, there's a film about Queen Victoria that's less interested in the stuffiness for which the Monarch is probably most popularly known than in her liberalism, her progressive attitude towards the humanism inspired by first the Colonies, then the French Revolution, then Britain's own Reform Act, enacted just five years before her coronation. An early film churned up in the wake of the optimism engendered by an Obama presidency? It's tempting to read it as such, not simply because you do hope this administration is better than the last, but also because, as the decade of the aughts draws a curtain on nine years of increasing outer and inner dark, there's at least the faint hope for some cloudbusting in the cinema, too.

The Prisoner: The Complete Series (1967-1968) – Blu-ray Disc

November 17, 20091960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Prison, Sci-Fi, Television, UK

Image A Sound A- Extras B
"Arrival," "The Chimes of Big Ben," "A, B, and C," "Free for All," "The Schizoid Man," "The General," "Many Happy Returns," "Dance of the Dead," "Checkmate," "Hammer into Anvil," "It's Your Funeral," "A Change of Mind," "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling," "Living in Harmony," "The Girl Who Was Death," "Once Upon a Time," "Fall Out"

by Walter Chaw The closest television came to true surrealism until the inception of "Twin Peaks", Patrick McGoohan's remarkable, landmark brainchild "The Prisoner" is the headwaters for a dizzying array of modern genre confections. It's audacious in its ironclad refusal to provide the happy ending; in its determination to bugger expectation with every complex set-up and sadistic resolution, the show effectively honours the surrealist manifesto of defeating classification. The fact of it is the function of it–the delight of it being that the series functions as a tonal sequel to Antonioni's Blowup, using the disappearance of that film's photog protag as the launching point for its hero's imprisonment in his Welsh oubliette. Colourfully, quintessentially mod, it even looks the part, after all, acting in 1967 as prescient post-modern (po-Mod?) commentary on the elasticity of this genre model (Bond films in particular, the lead in said franchise McGoohan was offered, er, once upon a time) as allegory for the plastic-fantastic of a progressively absurd world. In its setting of a small town, isolated and beset by what seems a common psychosis, find a connection to Robin Hardy and Anthony Schaffer's claustrophobic The Wicker Man (1973), John Frankenheimer's similar-feeling Seconds (1966), and, yes, Godard's structuralist textbook Alphaville. Of all the ways to approach "The Prisoner", in fact, the most fulsome–if also potentially the most obscure–is that, like Alphaville, it establishes itself as a structuralist (as in Claude Levi-Strauss) exercise while predicting through its execution the post-structuralism/deconstructionism (and eventually surrealism) of, say, a Jacques Derrida.

A Serious Man (2009); The Invention of Lying (2009); Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

October 7, 20092000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Esoterica, France, Romance, Satire, Theatrical, UK

A SERIOUS MAN
***½/****
starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick
written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

THE INVENTION OF LYING
*½/****
starring Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, Tina Fey
written and directed by Ricky Gervais & Matthew Robinson

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY
**½/****
directed by Michael Moore

by Ian Pugh The appropriate, even inevitable capper to a loose nihilist trilogy following No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man is so utterly dark and dire that it almost plays like self-reflexive parody–an adaptation of Barton Fink's "beautiful" wrestling script, perhaps, or an honest-to-gosh realization of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? Preston Sturges imagined once upon a time. Even the title is sarcastic. This is a scenario whereby life-altering misfortunes fall with ridiculous timing and precision; the dismal tides and the coming storms are now damningly literal, such that it's nearly impossible to take it with any semblance of seriousness. In making time during the game to explain Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, our hapless Job, physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), offers, if you haven't surmised, a fairly concise metaphor for everything that happens in this film. Why are the Coens being so on-the-nose about themes they've lately approached with a legitimately intimidating brilliance? Maybe it's because their mordant philosophy has amassed unprecedented critical and commercial acceptance over their last two pictures. Maybe the idea that anyone could actually commiserate with them strikes the Coens as so terrifying that the time has come to cast such notions aside in the most punishing way possible.¹ For now, anyway.

2009 TIFF Bytes #2: A Single Man; Trash Humpers

September 18, 2009Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

originally published September 18, 2009
Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:

A Single Man (d. Tom Ford)
I can't speak for Christopher Isherwood's novel, which seems like it must be a pre-emptive eulogy for the relationship documented in Chris & Don. A Love Story, but the movie made from it is pretty embarrassing. For better or worse (worse, if you ask me), A Single Man is precisely what you'd expect from fashion designer Tom Ford, even if you can't quite picture that sensibility as applied to a movie set in the world of academia circa the early-'60s. (Cue much "Mad Men" envy.) I don't think I've ever seen digital colour-timing so serially abused, or so hammily: Colin Firth is an English professor trying to go about his routine after the recent death of his long-time companion (Matthew Goode, better than he was in Watchmen), whom he can't publicly mourn; every time he sees something 'sublime,' like a pretty little girl in a dress who asks him why he looks sad, the image goes from washed-out pastel shades to near-blinding Technicolor. Lee Pace, Ginnifer Goodwin, and Elisabeth Harnois are squandered inasmuch as one can squander those actors and Julianne Moore is cringe-inducing as a go-go lush hoping against hope that Firth will start to swing both ways, but the pièce-de-resistance is Nicholas Hoult, all grown up but still disconcertingly sporting the same head he had in About a Boy. Hoult's character, a student of Firth's who stalks him like a lost puppy, is ascribed an emotional clairvoyance Hoult himself is utterly incapable of conveying authentically. Indeed, he's matured into such a terrible actor that it's actually disturbing to watch him in scenes with Firth (solid here), as though he's some theatre geek who's cut himself into the film with iMovie. */4

Across the Universe (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

August 14, 20092000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Musical

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs
screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais
directed by Julie Taymor

by Bryant Frazer Long considered sacrosanct, in recent years the catalogue of music recorded by The Beatles has become fairer game. The success of a 2000 CD reissue of #1 singles may have greased the wheels for Beatles-related projects, including a 2006 Cirque du Soleil extravaganza based around the group’s songs and mounted in Las Vegas, a comprehensive four-year-long digital remastering project involving all the original albums, and even a Beatles-only edition of the hit videogame series Rock Band. In this context, Across the Universe feels like a cog in a much bigger marketing machine. To some degree, it’s impressive that director Julie Taymor managed to build a period-romance-cum-rock-musical entirely around Beatles songs, although the film never manages to answer the question of why such a project might be worth undertaking in the first place.

Paper Heart (2009)

August 6, 20092000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Charlyne Yi, Jake Johnson, Michael Cera
screenplay by Nicholas Jasenovec & Charlyne Yi
directed by Nicholas Jasenovec

by Ian Pugh The twain where mainstream comedy conventions and a certain vogue-ish indie aesthetic meet, Paper Heart is desperate to be seen as an earnest exploration of love but done in by an almost suffocating desire to please. Any emotion or profundity to be taken from this hybrid documentary is rendered irrelevant by its attempts to increase its entertainment value through cheap laughs. Comic Charlyne Yi (Knocked Up) is touring the nation asking passersby from all walks of life their thoughts on the nature of love when a chance encounter with young gadabout Michael Cera (Michael Cera)–more or less Yi's ideological soul mate–convinces her documentary's director, Nick Jasenovec (played on camera by an affable Jake Johnson), that they've found the perfect opportunity for romantic skeptic Yi to experience love first hand. It's a prefab narrative scenario meant to complement the documentary footage, though it's not exactly a "standard" love story since it casts doubt on whether anyone is actually in love. The problem is that it employs the worn-out tactics of pretty much every lame juvenile laffer from the last four years: bad jokes are told, then let out in the air to die–and everyone stares at each other for longer than is deemed socially acceptable. Because even the documentary aspects aren't enough to stand on their own, each story of true love is recreated by one of Yi's intentionally-amateurish puppet shows/third-grade dioramas, with the major players represented by Popsicle-stick people and every metaphor literalized to the point of ridiculousness.