The Woman in the Fifth (2012)

June 13, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Mystery, Poland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

La femme du Vème
*½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Kristin Scott Thomas, Joanna Kulig, Samir Guesmi
screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski, based on Douglas Kennedy's novel
directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

Womaninthefifth

by Angelo Muredda Midway through Pawel Pawlikowski's The Woman in the Fifth, Romanian femme fatale Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas) tells glum American writer Tom (Ethan Hawke) not to worry about his writer's block. "You have the makings of a serious work now," she reassures him: "A broken life, down-and-out in Paris." Intended as a key to the film, a hint that we aren't watching real events at all but rather their translation into an American's grim European masterwork, this exchange does nothing so much as outline the limits of Pawlikowski's imagination. His first feature since 2004's unsettling My Summer of Love, this is an odd misstep, the kind of bad movie that can only be made with the purest of intentions. I don't doubt that Pawlikowski, working from a thriller by American writer Douglas Kennedy, believes in this idea that good novels are born of wretched experiences–that being a disgraced literature professor and stalled artist shaking down phantoms in run-down Paris gives you a direct line to authenticity. But it's the sort of half-baked conceit that defines countless shallow genre texts shooting for arthouse credibility, the hallmark of a Secret Window knockoff that begs to be taken as seriously as a good Paul Auster novel.

Hot Docs 2012: Summer of Giacomo (d. Alessandro Comodin)

May 5, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Italy

Summer_of_Giacomo_3by Angelo Muredda Conceptually sandwiched somewhere between Maren Ade’s terrific Everyone Else and Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Alessandro Comodin’s Summerof Giacomo is a richly textured portrait of dumb love in the grass, times two. As the lengthy credits of electric blue font superimposed on black and scored to languid birdsong suggest, this is chiefly an aesthetic experience, and Comodin delivers a gorgeously lensed (on 16mm) account of twentyish Giacomo and Stefani’s wayward hike through the countryside in search of a river by which to set up camp for the afternoon. The press notes tell us that Stefani is a childhood friend, but that hardly matters: all that we gather and need to gather is that something might have happened at some point, but outside of this hike, it’s over. What we’re left with, then, apart from their pathfinding and inevitable squabble, is a dense sensory record of the seriously goofy and – this is nicely underplayed – deaf Giacomo’s experience. His cochlear implant is briefly glimpsed in the first over-the-shoulder shot of him clanging randomly at a drum set, and you could happily read the film as an experiment in attending to the sounds, both slight and explosive, that pass through the device en route to his dufus skull.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011)

April 17, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Theatrical

Les neiges du Kilimandjaro
**½/****
starring Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Gérard Meylan, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet
screenplay by Jean-Louis Milesi and Robert Guédiguian
directed by Robert Guédiguian

by Angelo Muredda Committed leftist Robert Guédiguian's newest film The Snows of Kilimanjaro opens with a lottery. The local Marseilles shipyard is set to lay off twenty workers, and faithful union leader Michel (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) has been entrusted with carrying out the draw, eventually calling out even his own name–entered voluntarily despite his privileged position. The titular snows refer not to the Hemingway short story of the same name but to a popular song recited at Michel's premature retirement party, a paean to the middle-class luxuries of touring the world in one's golden years and a good fit for the African vacation his friends have ordered for him and his wife, Marie-Claire (Ariana Ascaride, excellent). Alas, before the couple gets its due, Michel's unionist chickens come home to roost in the form of a humiliating robbery of the travel fund later that evening, which could only have been committed by one of the party's guests–likely one of the unfortunate nineteen other names he called out earlier that week.

A Man Escaped (1956)

April 17, 2012Posted in****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, France, Theatrical

Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut
****/****
starring François Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, Maurice Beerblock, Roland Monod
written and directed by Robert Bresson

by Angelo Muredda “This is a true story. I’ve told it as it happened, unadorned. –Robert Bresson.” So begins A Man Escaped, with a handwritten statement of purpose that throws down a gauntlet to itself. Based on the memoirs of French Resistance member André Devigny (here rechristened Fontaine (François Letterier)), who escaped from Lyon’s Fort Montluc prison just hours prior to his execution, the film delivers on its ambitious promise. It stays faithful to this claim to tell the story unadorned except with the light garnish of Fontaine’s cool descriptions of the task before him–really an ever-unfolding expanse of smaller tasks like chipping away at a doorframe with a spoon over a month’s time. Its focus is almost strictly on matters technical, to the point where even its spiritual ruminations spring organically out of moments of real labour. When a fellow prisoner’s escape attempt is undone by his overeager hope for his next life to begin, he passes his knowledge of the precise spot he went wrong onto Fontaine with the solemnity of a wizened gamer delivering an annotated walkthrough to a novice. If these men are going to be reborn, we’re assured, it’ll only be by their own hands.

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.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

March 19, 2012Posted in****/****, 2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt
screenplay by Bridget O'Connor & Peter Straughan, based on the novel by John le Carré
directed by Tomas Alfredson

Tinkertailorcap1

Mustownby Walter Chaw The easy thing is to say that Tomas Alfredson has followed up his tremendous vampire flick Let the Right One In with another vampire flick, a story of Cold War British Intelligence as men in shadows, exhausted, living off the vibrancy of others. Yet Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the Swedish director's adaptation of John le Carré's seminal spy novel, is something a good deal more than a clever segue from one genre film to another. Less a companion piece to the latest Mission: Impossible than a bookend to Lars Von Trier's end-of-the-world Melancholia, it's a character study, sure, but more accurately it's an examination of a culture of gestures and intimations, where a flutter of an eyelid causes a hurricane in another part of a corrupt, insular world. Naturally, its timeliness has nothing to do with its literal milieu (all Russian bogeys and '70s stylings)–nothing to do with recent world events that have an entire CIA cell blown up in Iran and Lebanon–and everything to do with its overpowering atmosphere of feckless power and utter resignation. It's a spy thriller that Alfred Lord Tennyson would've written–the very filmic representation of acedia.

Hugo (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 27, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Family, Fantasy, France, Mystery, UK

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz
screenplay by John Logan, based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
directed by Martin Scorsese

Hugocapcap

by Walter Chaw Channelling Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Robert Zemeckis to numbing effect, the once-vital Martin Scorsese follows his elderly Shutter Island with the honest-to-God borderline-demented Hugo, in which the titular French urchin helps Georges Méliès reclaim his cinematic legacy. It's a shrine to the birth of cinema, blah blah blah, the kind of thing someone as involved as Scorsese has been in film preservation was destined to make, I guess, at least at the exact moment that the ratio of working brain cells gave over the majority. It's heartbreaking to see someone as vital as Scorsese used to be end up in a place as sentimental and treacly as this, resorting to retelling the Pinocchio story with little Hugo (Asa Butterfield) as a clock-fixer (really) whose life's mission is to repair an automaton his dead dad (Jude Law) found in a museum attic–and who dreams one night that…wait for it…he himself is the hollow, broken automaton. I wish I didn't have to go on. Did I mention that it's in 3D? And that it's two-and-a-half hours long but feels like a slow seven or eight? Seriously, Shoah is a breezier watch.

The Rules of the Game (1939) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 30, 2012Posted in****/****, 1930s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Jean Renoir, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, Satire, The Criterion Collection

Rulesofthegame

La règle du jeu
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Nora Grégor, Marcel Dalio, Mila Parély, Roland Toutain
screenplay by Jean Renoir and Carl Koch
directed by Jean Renoir

Mustownby Jefferson Robbins One political cue most firmly plants Jean Renoir’s masterwork in pre-World War II France, and it doesn’t come amidst the posturing of the elegant rich at La Colinière country manor. Rather, it’s in the kitchen, where the domestic staff breaks bread and gossips about the master of the house, the Marquis Robert De La Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), outed by the help as a “yid” whose family made good with money and a title. The gossipers turn for confirmation to the huntsman who’s just materialized on the stairs, and the combination of words is chilling: “Isn’t that right, Schumacher?” The italics are mine, and despite the fierce Teutonic consonants of his name, the Marquis’s game warden (Gaston Modot) is Alsatian. He remains metaphorically sticky, though, since his home state was variously French or German for 200 years, and his dress and cap bespeak armed authority. He’s rough and field-hardened, arguably ignorant, and looked down upon by his fellow servants, who see him as a thing apart from their world. Cuckolded and exiled from his wife, the housemaid Lisette (Paulette Dubost), he’s also the most prone to physical violence as he seeks to control her and eliminate all rivalry. On the matter of La Chesnaye’s Jewishness, Schumacher demurs: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But the point is made, the knife already twisted.

The Artist (2011)

January 25, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, Silent, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell
written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius

by Walter Chaw It’s tempting to dismiss Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist as fluff. It’s tempting to take the side of Kim Novak when she complains about this fluff using Bernard Hermann’s Vertigo score in vain, and a few critics and Internet memes have done exactly that. Yet The Artist is more than a passing fancy precisely because it uses the Vertigo theme correctly in a sentence. Indeed, it even has its way with film preservationists and other snobs (the kind who champion Hugo, for instance) by suggesting that obsessive movie love to the exclusion of all else is the same sort of illness, ultimately, as necrophilia. In the fluffy course of its runtime, in fact, The Artist manages to be as subversive and scabrous a Hollywood artifact as Sunset Blvd., finding its monkey funeral towards the end instead of at the beginning but presenting a close-up Mr. DeMille at its conclusion almost as ambiguous and doomed. It’s popular because it keeps its edges carefully sheathed…but they’re there. And I think people are offended once they realize–most of them long, long after the fact, and through other avenues–that Hazanavicius had the temerity to peanut-butter a little obsessive, consumptive, solipsistic love in there to gum up all the crevices. I’ll be honest: I think that if you don’t believe The Artist is correct in its use of Vertigo, you probably also thought that Vertigo was a love story.

Carnage (2011)

December 23, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Theatrical

***/****
starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, John C. Reilly
screenplay by Yasmina Reza and Roman Polanski, based on Reza’s play “God of Carnage”
directed by Roman Polanski

Carnageby Angelo Muredda It’s tempting to read Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s celebrated play God of Carnage as a doodle, the cinematic equivalent of one character’s pet name for his wife. Unlike, say, Chinatown, nothing much is at stake, and unlike last year’s The Ghost Writer, there are no doe-eyed innocents for us to coddle. (“He can’t drown two ghost writers, for God’s sake; you’re not kittens!” might go down as the sweetest line in Polanski’s tart career.) Yet Carnage, set in an antiseptic Brooklyn residence that’s decked in coffee-table books begging to be sprayed with vomit, is vintage if minor Polanski, from its claustrophobic environment and precise compositions to its droll flirtation with nihilism.

Tomboy (2011)

December 7, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Theatrical

***/****
starring Zoé Héran, Jeanne Disson, Malonn Lévana, Sophie Cattani, Mathieu Demy
written and directed by Céline Sciamma

Tomboyby Angelo Muredda “It suits you.” So Lisa (Jeanne Disson) tells her new crush, Mikael (Zoé Héran), after she’s given him a lipstick-and-rouge makeover. What Lisa doesn’t know is that Mikael is nominally Laure, a 10-year-old girl who’s just moved into the neighbourhood and is more interested in donning baggy pants and stretched shirts to play soccer with the local ruffians than in wearing the feminine outfits her mother (Sophie Cattani) hangs in her closet. Tomboy, director and screenwriter Céline Sciamma’s poignant and sharply observed follow-up to 2007’s more acerbic Water Lilies, smartly downplays the precarious position Laure is in: trying on a new identity in this foreign environment could be disastrous today, it suggests, but there’s always tomorrow. Sciamma mostly steers clear of the prescriptive aphorisms about girlhood that Catherine Breillat’s recent output trades in. Instead, she gravitates towards the more mundane ambiguity of moments when adolescents who are already in a highly transitional state grow wise to the arbitrary way their identity gets decided for them by accidents of birth and other people’s coercive gestures. You get the sense that Laure is all too conscious of how innocent gifts of dresses–or, for that matter, lipstick–might actually be gender-normative roadmaps, but until an unfortunate last-act revelation, the film doesn’t reach for the polemic; any revelations come only through cinematographer Crystel Fournier’s tight hold on our protagonist.

Attack the Block (2011) + Super 8 (2011)|Super 8 – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 21, 2011Posted in2011, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, France, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

ATTACK THE BLOCK
***/****
starring Jodie Whittaker, John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh
written and directed by Joe Cornish

SUPER 8
***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso
written and directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw Joe Cornish’s low-budget creature-feature Attack the Block is a charmer, a delight, the kind of rare film–like Jack Sholder’s The Hidden, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, or Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile–that devotees will latch onto, and for good reason, with the fervour afforded genuine cult classics. It has energy to burn, a strange affinity with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and a super-cool monster that looks like a cross between Ira from the “Moonshadow” comic and a grizzly bear. That most of it was carried off with practical effects is a shot in the arm for practical effects and a bearer of the nostalgia banner that seems to be popular lately, what with our dreams and memories fodder again for the celluloid couch. Better still, it introduces a new star into the future pantheon in John Boyega, who has charisma to burn as gang leader-cum-saviour Moses. The movie’s tale of a group of street toughs has drawn comparisons to The Warriors, but I think the better analogy is Spielberg’s E.T., not just in that alchemy between the fantastic and the absolutely mundane (South England’s Lambeth neighbourhood), but also in the crafting of a living youth subculture alive with its own language, ritual, and custom. It’s not too much to say that, at its best, Attack the Block makes you feel the way you did when the guys took things into their own hands to deliver the flying, omniscient, omnipotent E.T. to his landing site. It taps into the irrational cool. Which doesn’t happen very often.

Mysteries of Lisbon (2010)

November 11, 2011Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Mystery, Portugal, Romance, Theatrical

Mistérios de Lisboa
****/****
starring Adriano Luz, Maria João Bastos, Ricardo Pereira
screenplay by Carlos Saboga, based on the novel by Camilo Castelo Branco
directed by Raúl Ruiz

Mysteriesoflisbonby Angelo Muredda "It would be long and tedious to explain," Adriano Luz's mysterious man of the cloth Father Dinis offers shortly before the intermission point of prolific Chilean director Raúl Ruiz's staggering Mysteries of Lisbon, the fleetest four-hour-plus spectacle you'll see this year. It's not the first time characters promise to explain things later (nor is it the last), their second favourite activity after explaining things now. As promised in an unattributed statement in the title credits, what follows is an amiably digressive "diary of suffering" stuffed with such deferrals and explanations. And a beautiful diary it is. Ruiz, who passed away earlier this year, is perhaps best-known stateside for his lyrical Proust adaptation Time Regained–a nice warm-up, in retrospect, for this even more sprawling and melancholy saga of childhood and loss, an adaptation of Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco's 1854 novel of the same name. The fruit of his labours this time is astonishing: an adaptation that's at once deeply reverent towards conventions of nineteenth-century fiction and attuned to their radical possibilities. Ruiz, in other words, finds nothing tedious about these stories, and sees in their mysterious doublings, crude disguises, generational secrets, and grand unmaskings an opportunity to dwell on the nature of storytelling, both its revelatory potential and its artifice.

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.

Unknown (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 26, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras D
starring Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones, Frank Langella
screenplay by Oliver Butcher & Stephen Cornwell, based on the novel Out of My Head by Didier van Cauwelaert
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Ian Pugh Knight and Day, Salt, and The Tourist failed as '60s spy throwbacks because they constantly reassured you that everything would be all right; if there was something about their various intrigues we didn't quite understand (or weren't supposed to know before some big third-act twist), we could rest assured that someone was pulling the strings to keep the world from falling apart. Unknown finally removes that safety net, and from there it approaches the fear and uncertainty that so fascinated Alfred Hitchcock and Terence Young about the Cold War–this sinking feeling that whatever conspiracies may be driving the plot, there will never be a way to extricate yourself from their tangled webs. True, Unknown's primary attraction is the dissection of identity, and it's simply incapable of stunning you in the same way that the Bourne trilogy stunned you with its own methodical examinations of the self. (If the picture feels derivative of that series, that's because it is.) But at the end, you're left feeling uncomfortable, because you just know you haven't uncovered all its secrets yet.

The Mission (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

June 13, 2011Posted in1980s, 2011, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, France, Palme d'Or Winner, UK

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, Ray McAnally, Aidan Quinn
screenplay by Robert Bolt
directed by Roland Joffé

by Jefferson Robbins Career arcs fascinate and depress me. The Mission finds Roland Joffé at his early peak on just his second movie, making what amounts to a $25 million art film starring one of America’s best-known actors. Did Joffé change beyond this point, or did he refuse to change while the ecosystem altered around him? A bit of both, I suspect, after Fat Man and Little Boy and The Scarlet Letter. These epics went unembraced, and Oscars or no, the financiers weren’t always going to settle for contemplative examinations of people caught in the turning of historical tides. Yet that’s where Joffé was at his best–and maybe he couldn’t get beyond it. Spalding Gray had him pegged early on: “Leave it to a Brit to tell you your own history,” he advised in Swimming to Cambodia. Sure enough, as in The Killing Fields, Joffé’s The Mission examines pangs of conscience at a critical moment of political, religious, and cultural upheaval.

The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

June 7, 2011Posted in1970s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Directors: Dario Argento, DVD, France, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, West Germany

Il gatto a nove code
**½/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring James Franciscus, Karl Malden, Catherine Spaak, Pier Paolo Capponi 
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Nicknamed "The Italian Hitchcock," Dario Argento is more aptly classified "The Italian DePalma": a director with his own set of stylistic excesses who, especially early in his career, borrowed many tropes from the Master of Suspense en route to crafting his own distinctive thrillers. Again like DePalma, Argento of late has fallen on hard times, creating a series of clunkers that have blundered from the brilliant homage of his nascence to the tired and derivative garbage of his twilight. Indicated by somewhat straightforward mystery plots that elaborate death scenes and gory climaxes serve to punctuate, the giallo (so named for the colour of the covers–yellow–that enshrouded Italian penny dreadfuls) genre of thriller reached its stylistic apex with Argento's 1975 Deep Red, just prior to the director experimenting in the "supernatural" sub-genre of Italian horror with his masterpiece, Suspiria. Argento's first three films, the so-called "animal trilogy" (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o' Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet) deepened the giallo as introduced to cinema by the late, great Mario Bava.

The Silent House (2011) + Rubber (2010)

May 24, 2011Posted in2010, 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.

Midnight in Paris (2011)

May 20, 2011Posted in****/****, 2011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Fantasy, France, Romance, Spain, Theatrical

****/****
starring Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, Carla Bruni, Marion Cotillard
written and directed by Woody Allen

Midnightinparisby Ian Pugh Midnight in Paris begins with a Manhattan-esque montage of the titular city, and after so many consecutive duds, Woody Allen has finally rediscovered (and relocated) the vital essence that traces back to his very best films. Don't mistake his latest for a nostalgic throwback, though–in fact, it's something of an essay on the dangerous intoxication of nostalgic throwbacks. Take it, too, as fair indication that Allen has shared our frustrations with his recent output and knew that the only way to get out of his rut was to confront the spectre of his earlier work. While he probably hates himself for it, it was bound to happen sooner or later: The pull of the past is simply too great to resist. Here, Manhattan becomes Paris, Paris becomes Manhattan, and we're left to wonder what, exactly, that's supposed to mean in the long run. Allen projects himself onto a younger avatar, who in turn projects himself onto the artists who came before him, who in turn have their own projections to deal with. As usual, Allen stops the action cold to explain his theses in a brief monologue, but for the first time in a long time, it feels necessary. It feels like legitimate self-criticism.

The John Frankenheimer Collection – DVD|French Connection II (1975) + The Manchurian Candidate (1962) – Blu-ray Discs

May 17, 2011Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, 2011, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, DVD, France, Italy, Thriller, UK, War

THE YOUNG SAVAGES (1961)
**/**** Image B Sound C
starring Burt Lancaster, Dina Merrill, Edward Andrews, Vivian Nathan
screenplay by Edward Anhalt and J.P. Miller, based on the novel A Matter of Conviction by Evan Hunter
directed by John Frankenheimer

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)
****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
BD – Image A Sound C+ Extras B+
starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury
screenplay by George Axelrod, based on the novel by Richard Condon
directed by John Frankenheimer

THE TRAIN (1964)
****/**** Image C- Sound C
starring Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Michel Simon, Jeanne Moreau
screenplay by Franklin Coen and Frank Davis, based on the novel Le front de l'art by Rose Valland
directed by John Frankenheimer

FRENCH CONNECTION II (1975)
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B+
starring Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey, Bernard Fresson, Philippe Léotard
screenplay by Alexander Jacobs and Robert Dillon & Laurie Dillon
directed by John Frankenheimer

RONIN (1998)
**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Natascha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgård
screenplay by J.D. Zeik and Richard Weisz
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw There weren't many American directors who enjoyed a hotter streak in the Medium Cool '60s than John Frankenheimer. He had the pulse of the mid-decade sea change from the relative conservatism of the '50s, having clearly been cognizant of the long burn of the Civil Rights conversation and the constant, fraying wear-and-tear of HUAC and the Cold War. He rubbed elbows with the Kennedys, hosting Bobby at his house in Malibu the day before/of Bobby's assassination at the Ambassador, whereupon it's fairly inarguable that Frankenheimer began to lose his way. He'd continue to helm interesting films and damned impressive ones, too, like The Iceman Cometh and 52 Pick-Up, but none would have the urgent subtlety of his mid-'60s output. Instead, they'd become increasingly…remote? Detached, at least, if not occasionally outright embarrassing for everyone involved. (Prophecy, for instance–a film that tries to ride the contemporary-issue train but shows its fatigue and desperation in every ridiculous, strained minute.) In a way, Frankenheimer's Seconds, with its alienation and bodily remove, presages his own artistic transformation. I wonder whether he lost the nerve to surf the edge of the zeitgeist, leaving the low arc of our collective tendency towards self-destruction to its own shrinking concentric hells. It's possible that after The Manchurian Candidate's dead-eyed paranoia and Seconds' alarming prescience about the impotence of the American icon-as-hero, Frankenheimer was tired of being right. If it sounds like I'm ascribing something supernatural to his artistic acuity, maybe I am. Frankenheimer in this period is that rare filmmaker who works half in technical perfection and half in the unconscious, in the thrall of what Coleridge used to refer to as The Artist as Aeolian Harp. He was an instrument at the caprice of the winds of the age. He was, that is, until about 1968, when being the vessel of portent became, should we conjecture, painful enough that he tried drowning himself in booze and regret.