Category Archives: Film Reviews

Some reviews of films, recent and in the past.

12 Years a Slave

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Chiwetel Ejiofor steals the movie. With innumerable close ups of his face contorted in anguish at the indignity of not being recognized for who is truly is, Ejiofor brings enormous emotional intensity to the role of the free man who gets thrust into slavery and only escapes, not through heroic feats of daring do but through, essentially, the kindness of a stranger who is willing to risk seeing him for the man he is. It is an implication, then, that those not so recognized and not legally declared free within the United States, ought to be, but they are left behind as Solomon Northup regains freedom and returns to his home and family in upstate New York where they seem to live with a level of comfort that would put a lot of middle class whites to shame even now.
McQueen gave us the frenzied Fassbender as a sex addict completely out of control till film’s end in Shame, and here he gives us Fassbender as a not at all genteel southern plantation owner (did the rural, cotton-economy have a different ethos from the South of the cities; where did that mythic gentility reveal itself?) whose infatuation with a slave woman (Lupita Nyong’o in her first film role) exceeds his love for his wife. Infatuation is no barrier to cruelty, though. Epps, the de Sadean sadist, is always willing to see a good flogging imposed on the slowest of the cotton pickers or on any who appear insubordinate, including Patsey (Nyong’o) when she visits another plantation without his knowlege, to obtain, as she puts it so powerfully, soap. Soap to wash away the smell and grime of slavery. Soap that Epps wife, an avenging fury if there ever was one, denies her.
McQueen is no stranger to intensity. He seems to thrive on it. A hunger strike in his depiction of Bobby Sands’ hunger strike in prison; frantic sex addiction in Shame and now the horrific violence of slavery in 12 Years. There is the profound violence of having your identity stripped away, of losing all sense of dignity in the eyes of others, of that great reduction to “property,” and there is also the appalling violence of physical punishment. McQueen shies away from none of it. Unlike the jaded, clever but empty play with generic conventions that are the cruz of Django Unchained, McQueen goes to the historical heart of the matter: what slavery felt like for those who suffered its immense indignities, without cardboard heroes riding to the rescue. Ejiofor deserves enormous credit for bring it all alive with his understated and deeply human performance, a performance that denies the unalterable assumption of his “masters” that is less than they at every turn.
This is a wrenching, disturbing, deeply affecting film and we will probably hear much more about it come Oscar time.

The Counselor …needs some advice

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I almost missed this film, it seemed to slip in and out of town without ado despite Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender is leads. But that’s not why I went, nor was it because Ridley Scott directed it.
It was because Cormac McCarthy wrote the script.
There were premonitions of trouble. A fragment of the script appeared in The New Yorker and I couldn’t finish it. It was not a conventional script but a series of paragraphs describing the actions of people who had no distinct personalities and fairly inscrutable actions (in the film they are indeed minor characters).
That’s wasn’t the film’s problem. It is visually memorable and Fassbender is superb as the hero who chooses crime (a big drug deal) to head for easy street. The problem is the plot is extremely unsatisfying, with a satanic deus ex machine at every turn to make sure goes things go as bad as possible for The Counselor (Fassbender). I had thought, anyone who can open a chapter with this: “Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he,” (Blood Meridian) has to have a great screenplay in them. Not yet, I’d say.
McCarthy’s fiction invokes worlds dominated by evil, not just evil men and evil doings but characters of such epic proportion that they exceed the limits of realist plausibility. No Country for Old Men has the killer who can’t be stopped; Blood Meridian has the Judge whose powers of vengeance know no bounds; Children of God has a pyschopathic killer who survives for decades where most would perish. And The Counsellor has Malkina, with a stress on mal (Cameron Diaz), the dark angel who is able to outsmart and sabotage everthing the other characters do even though there seems no possible way she could have the where-with-all to do so.
The problem this creates is that these stories operate on two levels: one realist, one allegorical, one of plausible characters, one of implausible forces. Malkina’s powers have no credible base; she is simply capable of outwitting, destroying and conquering all. The Cohen brothers managed to tame this epic figure with humor and a wink at Bardem’s exaggerated qualities, but Scott tries to play it straight and make Malkina just part of the gang when she is anything but. That leads to a very ragged plot with enormous holes all through it.
I wish I could say this is a masterpiece. I can’t. I’d say it’s worth seeing for the stylistics and to learn from flaws and failures about what not to do, but I will be hoping for better luck on the next McCarthy screenplay.

Thanks for Sharing

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This film gets a lot more right than wrong. It’s not the first to portray 12 step programs and their members but it’s a solid if somewhat conventional effort. It lacks the visceral punch of Bill W, a documentary on the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the humor of I Am a Sex Addict, a tongue in cheek “confession” by Caveh Zahedi, the filmmaker, of his sex addiction.
Thanks follows a small set of characters, most notably Adam (perhaps a symbolic name, for the ‘after the fall’ phase of the story), who has five years of freedom from his addictive behavior (compulsive masturbation, casual one night stands, prostitutes–all of which leave him feeling empty and unfulfilled). As his mentor, Mike (Tim Robbins), notes, his sobriety has been predicated on abstinence rather than a deeper, more intimate relation. Phoebe (Gwyneth Paltrow) then comes along to provide the chance for intimacy. Adam, (Mark Ruffalo) climbs into this new role of genuine engagement with another person a bit awkwardly but with growing excitement at what it offers. His sobriety is put the test, however, when Phoebe learns more about Adam than Adam’s been ready to admit. Given that the film tries to cover a lifetime struggle against addictive behavior in some 100 minutes, the crisis lets us see how for him, and for other characters, descent to the dark side is a (futile) escape from painful feelings and the fear of loss.
Adam’s not the only one to face a crisis and falter. His mentor has never had the courage to face his grown, drug addicted son and offer amends for the harm his own drunken ways caused as the boy grew up. Robbins is superb at acting the senior mentor, the wise man of the group who has, nonetheless, his own unacknowledged shadow. Fear reigns among the addicted: fear of intimacy most of all but compounded by fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of feelinig unworthy, inadequate and incompetent. Feelings are a swampland and the addiction a route out. But a route, that as with other addictions, has its own dark miasmic underbelly.
Thanks gets much of this right, including the stories of the other characters that have similar arcs of compulsion, fear and steps toward a budding sense of intimacy. It’s right, though, inm the way melodramas are right: it runs through the anticipated emotional spectrum, throws in supportive but forgetable music, and allows to see how the characters pull themselves together without ever feeling we are at grave risk for entering a dark, forbidding world. A lightness of cinematic being provides a comforting reassurance.
And then there’s also a bit of dissonance. Gwyneth Paltrow is one of my least favorite actresses. I confess. She never seems to inhabit roles but rather to display how she would present them if only she could, in fact, inhabit them. Here she is supposed to be an assertive, humorous, compulsive, hyper-vigilant vegan and dedicated triathlete who also loves sexual role play. That these traits are not commonly found in any one person to the side, Paltrow is no more convincing as an athlete than as a seductress. Adam is clearly grateful to discover someone, anyone, can actually accept and love him although even he has a moment of lucidity when he realizes she’s addicted to her own drugs (borderline anorexia and feats of endurance) of choice, with even less control over them than Adam himself. If only Paltrow made this addictive side belieavable, or anything else about her character, Adam’s attraction would then take on denser, more dangerous connotations, but that will have to await the remake with Kate Winslett.

A Terrific Film on an Impressive Artist: Breaking the Frame (on Carolee Schneemann)

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Most film people know Carolee Schneemann as the creator of a pioneering piece of avant-garde filmmaking: Fuses (1967).  She used a hand held camera, striking color effects, expressive editing, evocative sound and her own naked body to celebrate sexuality in a direct, sensous way.  Throughout the short film she and her partner (the composer, James Tenney) make love.  Far from pornographic, it is a loving, engaging tribute to the body, the act of making love and to cinema.

Beyond that Carolee Schneemann is not very well known but now we have Marielle Nitoslawska’s Breaking the Frame ) (2012), a feature length profile of Schneemann and her massive achievements as a performance artist, painter, and filmmaker over five decades.  Schneemann proves a highly articulate guide to her own work and life.  It’s a fascinating life, based on a farm from which she simply went further, more often and more daringly than many of those in the hot house climate of the great art cities of New York, Berlin, and Paris.  Perhaps too far and too fast.  A close friend of Stan Brakhage and a generation behind Maya Deren she has been a true pioneer since the 1960s  but remains overshadowed by both of them and by the wry, far more ironic film work of someone like Andy Warhol.  Unlike Warhol, Schneemann lacked a savy business sense and clearly was drawn far more to her art than her celebrity.  She never gained the recognition she was clearly due.  But the film is far less a  lament than a celebration. Still active, the film serves as a superb introduction to her work and life on its multiple, complex levels.

The Act of Killing

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How we frame what we encounter matters enormously. Take documentary reenactments.  Reenactments say, in effect, the events being represented do not represent what the events for which they stand would represent.  They represent a retrospective attitude toward the original events, which may be that of a character or omniscient narrator. They always convey the perspective, or voice, of the filmmaker as well. Some reenactments remain disguised as representing contemporary events directly such as we find in Nanook of the North, Coal Face or Night Mail so that the irony may be lost, or, if discovered, treated as deception.  More usually, documentaries embed reenactments as acknowledged reconstructions (fictional representations) of historical but originally unfilmed events within a larger context of authentic representation. But this need not be the case, as The Act of Killing amply demonstrates.

In The Act of Killing, the mise en scène of historic but unfilmed events derives primarily from the film’s subjects—gangsters who formed, at the Indonesian government’s behest, death squads to capture and execute alleged Communists in 1965-66. The aging but unrepentant gangsters frankly recount their past exploits, demonstrate their grizzly methods, and reenact their actions through the filter of Hollywood film genres (most notably, western and gangster films). The reenactments take the form of stylized typifications. Various scenes make it clear that the government still honors and protects these men and the paramilitary group, Pancasila, to which they belong, allowing them to speak with complete impunity and minimal remorse. They may even still be doing what they did so long ago.

What is yet more unhinging for the viewer is the looming impression that a sharp distinction between reenactments and authentic documentary representation fails to materialize. The gangsters live out their own phantasmatic representations of their current state of mind, which Joshua Oppenheimer, the director, refuses to label either openly or with a wink. To what extent their speech and action in the present is another form of calculated performance becomes acutely undecidable. A lavish musical number amidst lush vegetation with dancing women surrounding and venerating the gangsters as though they were tropical deities is clearly their fantasy, but the TV talk show that praises their past exploits and celebrates the film they’re making (the one we see), and the principal gangster’s return to a place of execution to stumble and retch, as if unable to control his body’s revulsion as what he did, near the film’s conclusion, are less clearly so.  Is the TV talk show what Anwar and his buddies imagine such a show would be like or did Oppenheimer document an actual broadcast?[iii] Is the reenactment of a village massacre indeed too savage, as a government minister, who helps orchestrate it, states, or a prime example of the reason why the gangsters, and the government they serve, should be feared, as he then goes on to claim? For killers so self-aware of their image and the role of movies in shaping it, is a show of remorse near the film’s conclusion, even if somewhat genuine, not also a possible attempt to earn a little sympathy before the final fade to black? Does the fact that Anwar Congo retches but does not vomit suggest he is going through the motions of showing contrition or is it simply the best he can honestly do?

The film withholds the visible winks that would allow us to sort social from psychic reality. The killers reconstruct a past and live out a present that glorifies their crimes. The many government figures who appear in the film make it clear that these men continues to possess considerable use value for the Indonesian state. The current situation takes on the form of a phantasmatic nightmare of corruption and terror. By giving the gangsters such free reign and by depicting such a depraved social structure, the film withholds, as did, in another key, Luis Buñuel in Land without Bread, the independent, non-ironic perspective we anticipate and desire so that we may distinguish the phantasmatic from its surrounding reality.[iv]  Instead of gradually dissipating, the sense of confounding doubt that launches Man Bites Dog intensifies. The Act of Killing unhinges our grasp on social reality to a degree most films labeled mockumentary do not even begin to approximate. Like the son who withdraws at the sign of his mother’s stiffened body, do we recoil in horror at these men’s gruesome descriptions of mass murder, only to be told, by their nonchalant demeanor and boastful candor, that we ought not be afraid of our feelings of admiration and respect?

These encounters with irony involve paradox: things are and are not what they seem. Such paradox is less logical than existential. It depends on the lived relationship between filmmakers, social actors (or film subjects) and viewers; it occurs within a frame that one individual or entity, usually the filmmaker, controls. It invites the extension of belief or trust in what is said, even as it confounds us. Existential paradox involves a corporeal experience: it registers in our very bones.  Akin to what have come to be called “body genres” (pornography, horror, melodrama and the like) the ironic text, unlike the contemplative object of classic aesthetics, produces a visceral affect: it boggles the mind and unnerves the body; it confounds our sense of certainty.

This excerpt if from a forthcoming article, hence it is a bit in media res but still a fairly autonomous response to a most disturbing film.  It is definitely the most powerful film I’ve seen this year.

Note: I’ve deleted some footnotes but left a couple that clarify points in the review.

[iii] Possible winks include the presence of prosthetic heads on a table in front of the show’s hostess, presumably representing the killers’s victims, an audience composed primarily of Pancasila members, the use of English rather than Indonesian, which prevails in most of the scenes, and the completely uncritical veneration of these killers by the hostess.  It seems far too fantastic to be real, but, on the film’s website, Oppenheimer describes how the state television network learned of his production, arranged to produce the talk show and broadcast it nationally. It became another iteration of the narrative of terror and power that has supported the existing regime since 1965. “Production Notes,” http://theactofkilling.com/background/.  Accessed 8/8/2013.

[iv] In Moi, un Noir (1958), Jean Rouch invites a group of Nigerian friends to play out their own fantasies as movie stars—from Edward G. Robinson to Eddie Constantine, as they journey to Cote d’Ivoire in search of work. The blurring of fantasy and reality, though, is greatly attenuated, and interpreted, by Rouch’s voice-over commentary, a device Oppenheimer refuses to employ.

 

Ironic Documentaries

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I just had an opportunity to teach a summer course to a large group of professors and filmmakers, mainly from Eastern Europe, at the Central European University in Budapest.  You may heard of CEU as the product of George Soros’s investment in promoting democracy in the former Soviet Union after the Berlin Wall fell. CEU had its origins in that gesture and is a very successful graduate level university focused not on technology and science, as so many are, but on the humanities and social sciences as tools that assist in the understanding of others.

The course was on what the impact of documentaries is, how our belief in an underlying reality caught, in some measure, on film has much to do with the impact of most documentaries ,and how mockumentaries that pretend to have such an underpinning pull us up short. The result can be amusement or anger depending on many factors but what these films have in common is their irony. They don’t say what the mean or entirely mean what they say: they wink. And if we have familiarity with the form, we eventually get the wink, understand the irony, and process its effect.  I wanted to stress how conventions often frame the meaning of a message so that the belief in an underlying reality caught on film stems as much from the use of voice-over, interviews, reference to experts, B-roll editing that illustrates claims as if to prove them, and so on, as it does in any absolute form of reliability.  That being so, it is then fairly easy to mimic these conventions to produce irony.  it is less easy to do so skillfully but over the course of our meetings, we were able to explore the implications in a rich and rewarding way.  There’s more to say and that will probably become an article in the near future.

 

Rebels with a Cause or How to Create the World’s Most Amazing Green Belt

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Cities sprawl and drag their inhabitants into the ticky tacky world of suburbia.  The core decays and banality ensues. Then prices draw the young and restless back to the core and a new cycle of gentrification begins.  A familiar tale but not the one told by this astounding film. Rebels is about the creation of vast stretches of preserved shoreline, meadows, fields, and hills in the land to the north of San Francisco, Marin County, and around the perimeter of San Francisco itself.  Many now come to the city and marvel at the splendor of the Presidio and Crissy Field with its spectacular views of the bay and the Golden Gate bridge from ground level.  They come and revel in the beauty of Mt. Tamalpais to the north and the vast stretches of farms and untouched lands surrounding Tamales Bay.  Few realize that this was not the result of enlightened politicians acting to serve the common good but of an intrepid band of ordinary citizens who, over more than 20 years, fought corporations, developers and politicians to save what would have otherwise turned into vast stretches of houses, hotels, conference centers and shopping malls.

Nancy Kelly’s film lets the surviving rebels tell their own story but accompanies it with a treasure trove of archival footage, including Richard Nixon being convinced that there’s more political gain in backing conservation than opposing it.  One of the biggest battles was with ranchers near Tomales Bay who feared government regulation and meddling if their land were turned into a park, not the mention the loss of a way of life.  They favored development that would at least let them cash out at a handsome price.  But a brilliant maneuver saved the day: incorporate the ranches into the area to be preserved but allow the ranchers to continue to use the land for agricultural purposes.  By also forestalling the rise of concessions and hotels, attractions and stores at the periphery of the preserved land, the rebels were able to maintain the fundamentally rural quality of the area and allow farmer, ranchers and visitors to coexist successfully.

A second major challenge was a proposal for the huge city of Marincello, right in the thick of Marin County and just north of the Golden Gate Bridge where breath taking hills and valleys great the modern visitor.  Such a development carried such an aura of inevitiablity in the pro-growth, pro-development oriented 1960s that the corporate giant Gulf + Western bought a major stake in the project. The rebels went to work, arousing wide spread support from the residents of Marin and from key politicians.  After several years G + W threw in the towel and offered to sell the land to the nature conservancy that had been formed for just that sort of purpose.  A similar tale unfolded in the city where citizen leaders fought to establish a string of parks from beaches and former forts along miles of ocean and bay frontage.  With great political support from key figures, they succeeded.

Rebels with a Cause offers a great model of citizen activism.  These rebels clearly relied on vital political allies who took serious risks to back a movement that opposed growth, new businesses and jobs, rural development, and heigthened economic prospertiy at a time when such notions were a virtual mantra for many.  Nancy Kelly captures this effort with clarity and passion.  It stands as a greta model for those who are now rebels in the making.

 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist: or why can’t Mira get that Bollywood Music out of her Hair?

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Changez (Riz Ahmed, a handsome actor with limited range and modest charisma) is at home in Pakistan for a family celebration. Music plays, men sing, and we begin cross cutting to a kidnapping and the ransacking of an office.  The men sing more, the kidnapping goes on. The men sing louder and it goes on some more.  Louder and louder, to the same beat, without subtitles, although the close ups make it seem important and probably portentous.

And there’s the rub.  Mira Nair, a director of some achievement, just can’t stop the music.  it intrudes over and over in this tale of a Pakistani over-achiever who goes to Princeton, lands at a super charged investment firm, acts instinctively with a ruthless passion for the bottom  line, meets an almost unrecognizable Kate Hudson (it was shot in the aftermath of her second pregnancy) as a playful, formally inclined artist who’s of course the daughter of the firm’s top man, and then inevitably gets caught up in the racist hysteria of post 9/11 that targets him repeatedly as a national security threat based not on his custom made suits but his skin color. If this weren’t dramatic enough (though riddled with plot holes of every size), Nair tacks on the droning but hyperbolic music of Bollywood at its most stereotypical. It makes a decent film close to unbearable.

There is not only Erica’s (Hudson) sudden discovery of politics and the inflammatory 9/11 inspired installation work she comes up with, never mentioning it to her Pakistani boyfriend who had had harrassment aplenty by this point, and Liev Schreiber’s burnt out CIA/reporter character whose multiple identities and motives revolve like a crazy top around his loss of direction, except for finding his kidnapped buddy, an CIA case officer posing as an avuncular academic.  There is also the lame demonstration of Changez’s skill as a ruthless cost cutter with examples so obvioius, and implausible, that one imagines the other newcomers didn’t make them because they knew just how obvious or exaggerated they actually were.  And to top it all, the flashback structure, by which Changez tells his life story while we await, 24 style, the ticking time bomb of an imminent “extraction” of Changez from his university in Lahore where Liev tries to learn the whereabouts of his kidnapped buddy, creates completely fabricated suspense.  Without the flim flam of flashback, were it told chronologically, the implausibility would crush the film, if the music didn’t do it first.  Changez doesn’t know about the kidnapping but to reveal that would rob the film of its overwrought suspense.

Nair has definite talent but like Sidney Pollack she undercuts her material with sentimentality, something Katherine Bigelow learned to avoid in her quest to be even tougher and more right wing than the rest of the boys.

Roger Ebert

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I miss Roger already.  Whenever I go to IMDB and want to find reviews of a film, his name appears first, if it appears at all, every time.  And I usually don’t go further.  His reviews invariably gave me what I sought: a clear sense of the film’s quality and virtues, some sensitive exploration of the issues it might raise, and an appreciation of its place in the larger picture of things. Be it a trashy B movie or a prestigous Oscar candidate, a difficulty foreign film or a topical documentary, Roger had something insightful to say.  His prose flowed easily, without affect, without the incendiary quality of Pauline Kael but also without the snide, my wit is more interesting than the film I’m reviewing snideness of Anthony Lane. His passion for the cinema stood out.  His clarity of vision and consistency of voice were remarkable.  He is clearly missed by many and the obituaries that have turned up everywhere, from the White House to the trade papers, are a tribute to his success in making movie reviewing an art of real use value to so many.

I met him at the Hawaii Film Festival years ago when he gave a more or less shot by shot analysis of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe and I thought to myself, I’ve been doing shot analysis in classes for a decade or more but I’ve not turned into a story telling form the way Roger has.  He led the audience through the film with a sense of drama and suspense, as we anticipated what the next insight would be as another shot appeared on screen.  he didn’t disappoint; he invited us to enjoy and even revel in the art of discovering and appreciating what makes a great film great.  That was his gift; if only more had it, film reviewing might be in much better shape than it is today.