Theatrical Archives - Page 27 of 65

Payback (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Theatrical

***½/****
written and directed by Jennifer Baichwal, based on Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood

by Angelo Muredda Midway through Payback, Jennifer Baichwal's fifth feature documentary, we're given an alarming overhead view of the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill. At first, all we see is a dark pool of water, but before long a sickly orange substance starts tracking left through it, nearly filling the frame. The orange stuff, we're told, is chemical dispersant, and its job is to both break up the oil slick and push it below the surface, whatever the cost to the animal and plant life that happens to already be there. Not least for the way it suggests a scale that's been thrown out of balance, it's a striking visual metaphor for Baichwal's subject, which is the impossible work of translation we undertake whenever we try to square intangible debts with material payouts–in this case, dispersing oil with toxic chemicals. As one commentator points out, it'll be decades before we know just how large the ecological debt we've amassed as a result of the Gulf spill is–and even then, to think of it in terms of dues paid is to forget that dead fish can't cash cheques.

Being Elmo (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

**½/****
directed by Constance Marks

My 2-year-old nephew's favourite YouTube video is a "Sesame Street" clip where Elmo's birthday card to fellow monster Rosita is swept away by the wind. It's a bizarre little skit, devoid of anything like closure or uplift, but the nephew gets caught up in it every time. He narrates, tearing up and saying, "Oh no!" as Elmo does, and asking where the card went, though he already knows. Then it ends, and he promptly demands, "Again." I didn't know what to make of this at first, but my sense, watching Constance Marks's Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, is that the titular red guy is a sort of Everykid for preschoolers, feeling what they feel. The film charts Kevin Clash's impressive rise from inner-city Baltimore puppeteer to one of Jim Henson's trusted collaborators. It's a straightforward and strictly chronological account, beginning with his preteen years of making puppets out of his dad's trench coats and following him through to his work on "Captain Kangaroo," Labyrinth, and most importantly "Sesame Street." Long-time Muppet ally Whoopi Goldberg is our throughline, narrating in her sweetest story time voice and telling us things like, "One of Kevin's first characters was Hoots the Owl!" as we see, well, Hoots the Owl.

Project X (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Thomas Mann, Oliver Cooper, Jonathan Daniel Brown, Dax Flame
screenplay by Matt Drake and Michael Bacall
directed by Nima Nourizadeh

by Angelo Muredda With Bridesmaids, Judd Apatow made the case for the producer as auteur–a spiritual godparent to screenwriters' Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumulo's every deferred comedic beat. It's only taken one try–the perfunctorily- titled, written, and staged Project X–but Todd Philips can now claim the same, to everyone's great detriment. Late in the game, protagonist Thomas's dad surveys the wreckage of his vanilla son's soiree and says, with something like pride, "I didn't think you had it in you." It's a callback to the strained thematic machinations of The Hangover Part II, where straight-laced Stu (Ed Helms) recognizes he has a "demon" in him, and if that makes him a horrible spouse, then so be it. While Project X is suffused with the same deep misogyny and awe before Dionysian dickishness as its producer's directorial work, it's also a testament to Helms's grounded performance as those films' mild-mannered demon-in-wait–and proof of how unsustainable Philips's poisonous alchemy is in the hands of the truly useless. That would be first-time director Nima Nourizadeh, who has no instinct for narrative, characterization, or composition, and whose licentious camera unfailingly roves up the skirt of every 18-year-old extra lassoed in what the press notes eerily call a "nationwide talent search." Woe and hilarious Taser gags to anyone who searches for talent here.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011)

April 17, 20122011, 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, 2012****/****, 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.

Chronicle (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Teen, Theatrical

***/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan, Michael Kelly
screenplay by Max Landis
directed by Josh Trank

by Walter Chaw Josh Trank and Max Landis’s Chronicle is so good for so many extended stretches that its flaws are all the more frustrating. It’s too smart for its own good, presenting a superhero origin story without allowing any of its characters to ever once even whisper the word (a lot like “The Walking Dead” making everyone look like assholes by avoiding the term “zombie”) and spending too much time letting its teen titans drop names like Schopenhauer before making it clear that the character who most embraces the philosopher’s theories of aesthetics and self-abnegation ultimately takes up the mantle of one of Schopenhauer’s offshoots, Nietzsche. Boring, I know. And not smart enough, as meta-introspection goes, to bridge the gaps in Chronicle, like a badly under-developed “hero” and an equally under-developed “villain,” their relationship to each other, and, at the end, an emotional coda that feels unearned and tacked-on. Compare Chronicle to what history is vetting out as the only good M. Night Shyamalan flick, Unbreakable: it’s missing that film’s sense of awe, sense of (what has come clear as exceedingly rare in Shyamalan’s pursuits) respect for what the hero mythology of comics means, and has always meant, to 98lb. weaklings indulging a fantasy of largesse and empowerment and thus primed to order the Charles Atlas Workout off the ads on the back page.

Albert Nobbs (2011)

April 17, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Glenn Close, Mia Wasikowska, Aaron Johnson, Janet McTeer
screenplay by Gabriella Prekop, John Banville & Glenn Close, based on the short story by George Moore
directed by Rodrigo Garcia

by Walter Chaw On the one hand, Rodrigo Garcia’s Albert Nobbs is a patently ridiculous science-fiction tale set in a Victorian England run amuck with drag-king transvestites just looking for an opportunity to scrape out the same hardscrabble Dickensian existence as their male counterparts. On the other, it’s a star-in-her-dotage’s suffocating vanity piece excruciatingly bloated from a more comfortable one-act scale into full-blown awards-baiting period-piece virulence. If you discount Glenn Close-as-Bicentennial Man’s freakish appearance, it’s still impossible to believe that all of her/his co-workers have afforded him/her the same courtesy. It’s an issue not ameliorated by the appearance of house painter Hubert (Janet McTeer), who, in one of the more terrifying scenes of nudity in the history of cinema, reveals that he is also a she, and married, I guess, to the oddest-looking one from The Commitments (Bronagh Gallagher). It’s that moment of horrific, aggressive, obscene (?) sexuality (stoked by her pairing with another oddity) that briefly clarifies what Albert Nobbs should have spent the rest of its time being–the one moment that hints at what David Cronenberg would have done with this material. Alas, the horror of the body is relegated to just this moment and later only ancillary to a breakout of typhus, while a flat, useless subplot involving a young handyman (Aaron Johnson) and the grasping maid Helen (Mia Wasikowska) he’s banging takes centre court. Albert wants Helen for his own, you see, because he’d like to open a tobacco shop.

Tyrannosaur (2011)

January 27, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman, Eddie Marsan
written and directed by Paddy Considine

by Angelo Muredda Spielberg defenders who insist their master hasn't lost his grisly touch post-E.T. often point to the dead dog in The Lost World: Jurassic Park as proof of life. If dispatching a pooch is still the fastest way to collect a certificate of edginess, props to Paddy Considine, who's surely earned a gilded plaque for getting the unseemly job done before the opening credits of his first feature. (Not that animal lovers should take the title card as a cue to uncover their eyes.) Actor-turned-director Considine immediately stakes his claim to Ken Loach's British underclass miserablism, casting My Name Is Joe star Peter Mullan as the dog-stomper in question. But there's miserable…and then there's Tyrannosaur. Loach's best films have an incendiary quality, a direct line to the political, that Considine buries under a fast-mounting heap of dead dogs. Certainly, there's no requirement that directors who train their eyes on such bleak social milieus mitigate the darkness and usher us out the door with sunshine: comparable films like Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher stay successfully mired in the mud without collapsing into nihilism. That said, what we might expect of a project so invested in the stultifying effects of poverty is a better sense of what's eating its characters, rather than platitudes arguing that to be poor and male in Northern England is to be a bat-wielding tyrant whose empty rage extends even to canines.

The Artist (2011)

January 25, 20122011, 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.

Coriolanus (2011)

January 20, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Shakespeare, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

***/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox
screenplay by John Logan, based on the play by Edward de Vere
directed by Ralph Fiennes

by Angelo Muredda Ralph Fiennes has been building up to Coriolanus for some time. Whether as a scarred or just nervous exile in The English Patient and The Constant Gardener, respectively, or as the noseless ghoul of the Harry Potter movies, he's served as the embodiment of human refuse for a long stretch of his career–the English go-to for wanderers, burn victims, and miscellaneous banished men. It's a treat, then, to watch him take relish in the part of the ultimate cast-off, a Roman general chewed up and spit out by the city for which he earned his war wounds. The actor's hyphenate debut, Fiennes's adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus is a curio, to be sure: It isn't so much directed as cobbled together from the source and fed through CNN-style reportage of armed fighting in the Balkans. But as a star vehicle, for both himself and the incomparable Vanessa Redgrave, it's a powerful match between actor and character. While the general-turned-politician's fine suit hangs awkwardly on the brute it houses, for Fiennes, Coriolanus is a good fit.

A Separation (2011)

January 13, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Iran, Theatrical

Jodaeiye Nader az Simin
***½/****
starring Peyman Maadi, Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat, Shahab Hosseini, Sarina Farhadi
written and directed by Asghar Farhadi

by Angelo Muredda In Armond White's latest "Better-Than" list, the champion of surreal juxtaposition pits Asghar Farhadi's A Separation against Joe Cornish's Attack the Block and finds the former wanting. "Action vs. Talk," he summarizes, in the poetry of tinyurl. Apart from the arbitrary matchup he stages between two very good films about getting to know your neighbours under the harshest of circumstances, White isn't completely off the mark. I won't defend his trite claim about A Separation's alleged "Iranian didacticism," but the film certainly is voluble. Farhadi wears his dramaturgy on his sleeve, opening with a carefully trained two-shot of middle-class couple Nader (Peyman Maadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) at divorce court, parked in adjacent chairs as if settling in for a parent-teacher interview. They face us directly as they make their respective cases to a bored, unseen auditor: Simin wants to emigrate to the West; Nader refuses to leave his dementia-suffering father behind or grant his wife permission to leave with their eleven-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director's own daughter)–more an effort to stall their separation, it seems, than an arbitrary flexing of his patriarchal muscle. Voluble, as I said, but not verbose. It's a provocative and deceptively straightforward setup, promising naturalism via Maadi's and Hatami's easy rapport while undercutting it with the artifice of their situation. Though the judge is unmoved by either side in this rhetorical showdown–"My finding," he tells Simin, "is that your problem is a small problem"–the stakes of this "small" quagmire, which is also a national and a gendered one, are made painfully clear to us by the couple's impassioned performances.

Carnage (2011)

December 23, 20112011, 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

by 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, 20112011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Theatrical

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

by 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.

The Descendants (2011)

November 30, 20112011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Beau Bridges, Judy Greer
screenplay by Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw George Clooney is great, Alexander Payne is great, it’s all very predictably great, and it’s all so very predictable. The Descendants, Payne’s fifth film, is an edgeless and anti-satirical adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings’s novel that has its moments, all of them involving Clooney’s Matt King shouting at his vegetable wife (Patricia Hastie, in the most thankless non-Michael Bay role of the year) in articulation of the mid-life emasculation opera in which Payne specializes. Armed with a voiceover to better seduce Oscar voters and awards-season audiences, The Descendants opens with Matt promising his comatose spouse that he’ll be a better man and commit to a normal life with her, and then it proceeds to be nothing much more than a sitcom about what happens when a confirmed bachelor is forced to become the primary caregiver to his two sassy daughters. Eldest is reform-school girl Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), who used to have a drug problem and currently has a stupid boyfriend, Sid (Nick Krause). Her younger sister is little Scottie (Amara Miller), who says things like “motherless whore” because it’s funny when a 10-year-old says things like that–even funnier when the matinee idol playing her bumfuddled dad does the dimwit surprise thing he did in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. That’s the theory, anyway.

Elite Squad – The Enemy Within (2010)

November 25, 20112000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Brazil, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Tropa de Elite 2 – O Inimigo Agora É Outro
***/****
starring Wagner Moura, Irandhir Santos, Andre Ramiro, Milhelm Cortaz
screenplay by Bráulio Mantovani & José Padilha
directed by José Padilha

by Angelo Muredda Early in Elite Squad – The Enemy Within (hereafter The Enemy Within) José Padilha’s blustery follow-up to his 2007 hit Elite Squad, deluxe cop Lt. Colonel Nascimento (Wagner Moura, Brazil’s answer to Mark Ruffalo) promises to give us a history of Rio that happens to coincide with his life story. It’s a tall order, but Padilha and co-screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani are ambitious and foolish enough to undertake it, returning to the favelas they brought to boot-stomping life in the first Elite Squad while shifting focus this time from drug lords to corrupt cops. No one would call their work subtle, but they strike a surprisingly watchable balance between Goodfellas-type insider confessional and incendiary political exposé, ditching the tight timeframe and local scope of the original and going for a more sprawling survey of Rio as Hell on Earth. Yet as much as The Enemy Within deserves solemn back-pats for its anaesthetized, everybody’s-guilty project, it really takes off in brutally violent set-pieces that forgo neutrality. Cut loose from his earnest ambitions to tell an ambivalent political fable that clucks its tongue equally at anti-poverty activists and conservative law-and-order types, Padilha shows his directorial hand in testosterone-charged gunfights where either all the right people get shot or all the good ones go down as martyrs, and it’s the hand of a vigilante sympathizer drawn to the romance of man-to-man violence. Fascist? No doubt. But as ideologically suspect apologies for rogue justice go, this one’s pretty well-executed, and at times just plain more fun than the hemming and hawing of The Dark Knight.

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

November 21, 20112011, 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.

The Mill and the Cross (2011)

November 18, 20112011, 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.

Mysteries of Lisbon (2010)

November 11, 2011****/****, 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

by 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 Rum Diary (2011)

October 28, 20112011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Johnny Depp, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Rispoli, Giovanni Ribisi
screenplay by Bruce Robinson, based on the novel by Hunter S. Thompson
directed by Bruce Robinson

by Walter Chaw Sad, solipsistic hagiography of a hero painted by a child, Johnny Depp's passion project The Rum Diary reveals the actor to be not only dedicated now to delivering selfish shtick in place of interesting characters, but also apparently completely in the dark as to what it is that was dangerous about his idol. This adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's long-shelved first novel–written in 1960 during a quintessential fit of hubris in which Thompson jetted to Puerto Rico to become Ernest Hemingway and published in 1998 after being discovered as paper booty in a trunk by Jack Sparrow–has at its misbegotten helm Withnail & I auteur Bruce Robinson, jerked out of retirement to reimagine a piece-of-shit novel as a piece-of-shit movie. So, mission accomplished.

Anonymous (2011)

October 28, 20112011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Germany, Shakespeare, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, Derek Jacobi
screenplay by John Orloff
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Angelo Muredda Anonymous comes out swinging against the Shakespeare industry with all the force of a midsummer night’s fart in the wind. If director Roland Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff–a match forged in Mordor–had their way, the film would upend university curriculums, supplementing every Shakespeare syllabus with an elliptical “…but what if…” written in invisible ink on the last page. To that end, they’ve taken their baby on a tour of college campuses, and scheduled Facebook-webcast debates in which they’ve stunned Shakespeareans like James Shapiro with wise nuggets comparable to Adam Sandler’s astonishingly incoherent address at the end of Billy Madison. It hasn’t been clear sailing all the way, mind: popular historian Stephen Marche recently took to the NEW YORK TIMES to debunk such “prophets of truthiness”–Emmerich and Orloff are but a new, high-profile strain of Oxfordians, a group who name nobleman Edward de Vere as the true author of Shakespeare’s texts, even the ones dated after his death–for advancing a lunatic conspiracy theory based on little more than class snobbery. Shakespeare scholar Holger Syme was even less charitable, proposing in a blog entry that has since become an Oxfordian recruitment camp fronted by Orloff himself that the film’s chief sin is not historical inaccuracy but its filmmakers’ posture as courageous iconoclasts, railing against established wisdom. Anonymous, then, has had a fairly storied pre-release career.