REVIEW: The Act of Killing

Posted on August 25, 2013 by matterspamer

The Act of Killing
Directed by: Joshua Oppenheimer (director), Christine Cynn & Anonymous (co-directors)

More than 20 of the names on the end credits of The Act of Killing read “Anonymous,” including one of the co-directors. That the former death squad members at the movie’s center openly admit to and brag about torture, murder and rape makes that anonymity darkly tongue-and-cheek.

The U.S.-backed killing of millions of Indonesians during a military overthrow of their democratic government was never investigated, and many of the death squad members are still viewed as heroes after almost 40 years. The atrocities they committed in the mid-’60s are not only openly discussed in this documentary, but reenacted. Director Joshua Oppenheimer spent roughly eight years interviewing and filming this process after provoking them to do it.

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REVIEW: Blue Jasmine

Posted on August 23, 2013 by matterspamer

Blue Jasmine
Directed by: Woody Allen
Written by: Woody Allen
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins, Bobby Cannavale and Alec Baldwin

Two sisters; one a blonde suffering from crippling depression and the other a brunette with a fatigued understanding of how to help her. That’s the premise of Woody Allen’s latest, a bruising and mostly unsparing look at a woman who hides serious problems behind bourgeois privilege.

From that description alone, it should be fairly easy to tell just how heavily Blue Jasmine draws from 2011’s Melancholia, which is for me one of the defining films of this decade so far. It’s clear in both films that the protagonists are surrogates of their respective directors, but Allen doesn’t have the film’s world mirror his protagonist or create a distinct editing rhythm that conveys her depression. His movie rests on the more than capable shoulders of Cate Blanchett and Sally Hawkins, who deliver two distinct but masterful performances here.

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REVIEW: Post Tenebras Lux

Posted on August 20, 2013 by samtunningley

Post Tenebras Lux
Directed by: Carlos Reygadas
Written by: Carlos Reygadas
Starring: Adolfo Jiménez Castro, Nathalia Acevedo, Willebaldo Torres and Eleazar Reygadas

Carlos Reygadas has been building towards this film his entire career. His first two features, Japón and Battle in Heaven, were made by a young talent with a strong proclivity towards sex and violence and an almost spiritual worldview—films that remain impressive, but also feel like the work of a director still settling in. His next outing, Silent Light, took that spirituality even further and left behind the more provocative elements, crafting a film that was a bracing technical and emotional achievement. Post Tenebras Lux (which translates to “Light After Darkness”), far and away his best film, brings the luridness of the earlier work to co-mingle with the more religious and philosophical nature of Silent Light. It is also the director’s most personal film to date, offering a much more opaque and baffling vision than any of his previous work.

The almost unanimously cold reception says much more about the critics reviewing the film than it does about the director who helmed this vision. If we’re dealing with something that feels out of reach, intellectually or otherwise, it seems almost customary in the film world to immediately dismiss whatever is on the screen (or, in Post Tenebras Lux’s case, pan it as a “massive failure”). I offer a different assessment: this is a radical exercise, but also one that stands as easily the most inviting film Reygadas has made. It is a work of insurmountable beauty and mystery, and one that beckons the viewer inside its impossible world.

Post Tenebras Lux opens with two extraordinary sequences that could very well be the best Reygadas has ever filmed. The first shows a very young girl running through a field at dusk and naming off the roaming animals. The girl, Rut, is both actual daughter of the director and the fictional daughter of the central family here. This announces the film’s almost home movie intimacy right from the start (his son is also featured.

As she is wandering, the sky starts to darken, rain clouds gather overhead, and an air of menace seems to take over the screen. The title flashes, one word at time, over the pitch-black rain clouds and crashing thunder. On a purely technical level, it is astonishing—reminiscent and on par with the sunrise/sunset scenes from Silent Light. After this remarkable scene, another one immediately follows: an animated Devil, seemingly arriving home from work, is seen creeping through a house at night carrying a tool box, and silently peeking into a child’s room. Though these scenes do not squarely fit in with the main narrative, they still have a whole lot to do with the thematic ideas on display.

There are a few other scenes that also remain detached from the story (most notably, the English rugby match and the futuristic French orgy), but they also give the film its weight. It is deeply concerned with patriarchal domination, with family as a unit, with upper/lower class divisions as well as guilt and uncontrollable rage.

Some have labeled this as a mid-life crisis film, and I don’t think that is very far off. It is autobiographical in the most unsettling sense. The “main” story is about a family that lives in the Mexican countryside. The father is presented as a sex-starved and violent presence, brutally beating one of the family dogs to death in an early scene.

One of the things I found difficult to reconcile with in the director’s early work, notably Japón, was the animal violence. Although the scene in Post Tenebras Lux is still brutal and rightfully off-putting, it is shown off-screen. He later admits that he cannot control his violent impulses, and his wife always seems to be tip-toeing around him, estranged and uncomfortable, as if something terrible is just waiting to be unleashed.

Through all of this, there is story concerning a worker for the family that is weaved into the movie’s tapestry. It is through this character’s connection to the family that Reygadas shows a strong class divide, as well as a division on a smaller scale in both of the families. The film seems to have a large slant towards collectivism (this becomes especially clear in the cryptic last line of the film) and working together for the greater good. Unveiling much more of the plot would be doing the movie a great disservice. The best scenes come through with such a surreal vigor that the element of surprise is best left retained.

Throughout Post Tenebras Lux, Reygadas incorporates a strange fish-eye effect—apparently, a screw-up while shooting that the director and his DP Alexis Zabe chose not to correct—that is less disorienting than it is beautiful. It gives the outdoor scenes a ghostly radiance that feels at home with the dreamy atmosphere conjured up. Aesthetic decisions like this one show a filmmaker, often ridiculed for imitating one of the greats, taking bracing risks. This is a film that feels very much like something new and exciting, and if some of the ideas seem muddy or out of reach to some, it also feels like a deliberate decision and not a misstep. The negative critical opinion has lent it no favors, and it continues to be disregarded as some sort of misguided venture that is too ambitious for its own good. This further supports the unfortunate notion that cinema is meant to be plot-driven, to be easily digestible and glued to the same tired format. Post Tenebras Lux is art-house cinema at its most inspired—miss it, and you’re missing one the year’s great films.

Grade: A

REVIEW: The Butler

Posted on August 18, 2013 by matterspamer

The Butler
Directed by: Lee Daniels
Written by: Danny Strong
Starring: Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, David Oyelowo and Yaya Alafia

There seems to be a much bigger movie lurking behind this version of The Butler (I refuse to type out Lee Daniels’ The Butler every time so deal with it). With so many celebrity cameos as presidents and first ladies, it must have been a hell of a thing to cut into something that Harvey Weinstein would release. Robin Williams gets maybe five minutes of screen time as Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Jane Fonda has only one major scene for her much-hyped turn as Nancy Reagan.

And yet, for all the wishing and hoping that there was more, what’s here is powerful enough on its own. The Butler is the story of the mid-twentieth century that the movies (and Mad Men) never really have the balls to tackle. It is that of the ideological and generational feud between black domestic workers and their Freedom Riding children. Lee Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong have created a sporadic epic that, despite its flaws, packs quite the punch.

Their movie is not just the story of any black family, though. Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) is a servant of presidents and, as his wife (Oprah Winfrey) likes to brag, sworn to secrecy about what he hears. His life is based on Eugene Allen, a butler during eight administrations in the White House. Cecil provides a middle-class living for his family, which also includes sons Louis (David Oyelowo) and Charlie (played as a child by Isaac White and as an adult by Elijah Kelley).

Louis grows up to be heavily involved in the civil rights movement when he goes to college in Tennessee. The lunch counter sit-in he takes part in with other activists is the movie’s most grueling, effective sequence. Daniels places the camera at the center of the impossibly brave young men and women as they are shoved, degraded and eventually arrested. He brings the movement to vivid life through Louis’ character, and Oyelowo is terrific in the role. Louis’ fraught relationship with Cecil provides the movie with its theme, and Daniels certainly doesn’t waste any of the movie’s 132 minutes.

In fact, I would almost have preferred The Butler as a miniseries or, at the least, as a three- or four-hour movie. While everything here makes perfect sense, it’s amazing how much emotion Daniels is able to draw out of the movie when it zips through most of its history like a fifth grader trying to rush his homework. The famous names that dot the marquee (except Whitaker and Whinfrey) seem like marketing pawns, though Alan Rickman is enjoyably out of place as Ronald Reagan.

The Butler is most rushed in the beginning, when Cecil is a young boy working on a plantation where, in the span of two minutes, he hears his mother being raped and sees his father murdered by the same man. The punch of this sequence comes when it becomes clear he can just leave, he’s not a slave. Daniels orchestrates this scene with no sense of place, it could have happened a hundred years ago or fifty. This suggests that institutional racism is its own form of slavery, something that the rest of the movie echoes.

From that plantation, Cecil makes his way into servitude, which is the occupation he builds his working life around. As he says several times in the movie, he has one face for his family and friends, and another while serving white people. Though the racial policies of each president changes, Cecil still serves them the same. There is no triumphant comeuppance to Richard Nixon when says he wants to “gut” black power groups.

Whitaker is very good at channeling the conflicting pulls inside Cecil. As angry as he gets when Louis shames him for his job, he always seems to absorb it as if it’s true. Winfrey, who is certainly the biggest celebrity draw to the movie, is also quite good as his wife. This story shows us that they’ve built a life together, one that exists outside the movement even though it intersects with it unavoidably. While Louis becomes deeply rooted in the civil rights movement, their other son fights in Vietnam. All the while, Cecil must “appear invisible” to the commander-in-chief who oversees it all.

Because of its attempt at a total illustration of African American experience in this era and not just the struggles, The Butler becomes a blatant confrontation against every white-washed movie about racism, most importantly 2011’s The Help. As self-serious as the movie may sound, it is often fairly light on its feet (Liev Schreiber’s Lyndon B. Johnson rants while taking a shit). This is, after all, the same director who brought us the wonderfully trashy detective story The Paperboy last year. In both movies Daniels brings a playful, cinematic sense of the sixties while also honestly illustrating the not-so-invisible racial dividers embedded in this country’s DNA. That this movie actually has a chance of reaching a mainstream audience, though, makes it all the more thrilling.

Grade: B-

REVIEW: Prince Avalanche

Posted on August 15, 2013 by samtunningley

Prince Avalanache
Directed by: David Gordon Green
Written by: David Gordon Green
Starring: Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch, Joyce Payne and Lance LeGault

There are two sequences in Prince Avalanche, the new David Gordon Green film, that are among the best the director has ever done. The first is a quiet moment near the beginning of the film between Alvin (Paul Rudd), a highway worker that is re-doing the roads after a vicious fire, and an older woman that he finds searching among the ash and rubble. The woman explains to him that the fire destroyed her home, and she is looking for her paper pilot license that was lost in the burning. Alvin quietly suggests that the license may have burned away in the flames, and the woman looks at him with utter devastation. It is an extraordinarily moving, semi-improvised scene that finds the director returning to the warmth and poetry that characterized his early work.

The second sequence is a drunken montage concerning Alvin and Lance (Emile Hirsch), Alvin’s work partner and the brother of his girlfriend. The two begin taking shots together and are soon trashing their work site and throwing their supplies in joyous, drunken abandon. The montage is set to Explosions in the Sky, a group known for their grand bursts of emotion, and the song builds to a jovial climax over the chaotic imagery. These scenes co-existing in the same film, both masterful in their own right, is sort of why Prince Avalanche doesn’t really work. It is also what makes the film a fascinating experiment, bridging the major gap between the bromantic world of Pineapple Express and the tender honesty of George Washington.

The plot, loosely adapted from the 2011 Icelandic film Either Way, is essentially a character study on these two road workers as they re-model the streets. Lance is obsessed with getting laid (of course!), and he talks openly about his sexual frustration while at work. Alvin, on the other hand, frequently sends letters to Lance’s sister, persistently trying to keep their relationship steady. The performances here are charming enough, but the characters rarely move beyond their sketched-out archetypes—Lance is the slightly clueless, yet sincere, counterpart to the more levelheaded and serious Alvin. It is a classic odd couple, but it’s also something that we’ve seen before many times (often in Green’s own work).

This wouldn’t be a big problem if there was simply a better film here. Much of the beauty that came so naturally in George Washington all feels a bit forced. The film was shot in the breathtaking countryside of Texas, and the cinematography from Green’s frequent collaborator Tim Orr looks fantastic, especially considering the film’s remarkable $60,000 budget. But the shots of nature, of a caterpillar crawling across a log to a skunk eating a turtle (seriously), all feel quite out of place when stuck between conversations of fingering a girl at a weekend party and Alvin farting. What remains is a weird pull-and-tug between vulgarity and naturalism, and it might have been a bit too much for Green to pull off.

What we have here, instead, is an enjoyable, if very slight, film from a talent who needs to find his voice again. It has been compared to Waiting for Godot and, indeed, the film contains a hefty amount of humor and surrealism, including a weird, recurring truck driver character. The difference, though, is that Green is unwilling to breach standard comedy and aim for something larger, and so we’re left with a film that feels a bit undercooked.

Grade: C+

REVIEW: The Canyons

Posted on August 4, 2013 by matterspamer

The Canyons
Directed by: Paul Schrader
Written by: Bret Easton Ellis (screenplay)
Starring: Lindsay Lohan, James Deen, Nolan Gerard Funk and Amanda Brooks

“When’s the last time you saw a movie in a theater?” Lindsay Lohan’s character Tara asks her friend while at lunch. “When’s the last time you saw a movie you really thought meant something to you?”

Those lines are the best way to start sorting through The Canyons, a lurid, somewhat successful collaboration between director Paul Schrader, writer Bret Easton Ellis and Lohan that would be somewhat meaningful in a theater but is also available On Demand. Even when it veers into groan-inducing territory on the screenplay front, the seductively dark rhythm of Schrader’s Hollywood sustains it.

So too does Lohan’s performance, an irresistible blend of wheezy, drug-addled femme fatale and the more realistic effects of narcotic use (a la her insanely publicized personal life). It’s impossible to separate life from her acting career, which is why it’s so easy to see why she would be so drawn to a movie like this, where smartphones are weaponized and someone is always watching.

It’s clear from the beginning Tara is in the midst of a very unhealthy relationship with Christian (porn star James Deen) and his phone, which he uses to acquire a third and sometimes fourth person for their sexual escapades. Christian is Patrick Batemen with a touch more douche bag than psycho. His character is almost relentlessly one-dimensional, and Deen’s performance follows suit. He is a vindictive, controlling trust-fund baby who dabbles in low-budget slasher film production.

As a favor to Tara and his assistant Gina, he gives a big role in his latest film to Ryan (Nolan Gerard Funk). Ryan and Tara are in love, which combined with Christian’s crazy gives The Canyons half-hearted dramatic purpose. All of the characters are toxic, though, and it’s impossible and often frustrating to be on anyone’s side. They are so toxic, in fact, that this Hollywood comes with a radioactive glow. Even the trees and bushes glow in broad daylight, and almost every transition from outside to inside seems like a descent into a neon underworld.

It’s unclear whether the world mirrors their poisonous personalities, or if they are a by-product of it. Each sex scene feels unclean, and when Christian finally descends into violence, he ultimately becomes, intentionally, the cheap schlock that he produces. Deen fills him with the same unsympathetic arrogance that Christian Bale did for Batemen in the film version of American Psycho, though without the gleeful, uninhibited insanity.

Ellis’ screenplay often makes a mockery out of conversation and etiquette. The story is book-ended by two very awkward double dates, which are the weakest in the movie by far because Schrader doesn’t seem to know exactly what to do with the dialogue. In the first he cuts between all four of the principle characters, but the pacing and the timing of the looks is sloppy even if the conversation is somewhat intense. The second, though, is just sloppily-written exposition that tidies up the movie way too quickly.

It’s that kind of hit-and-miss that makes this such an interesting collaboration, though. Some of the best scenes show Ellis’ characters deliberately confronting the accusations of sexism that his previous work, notably American Psycho, has garnered. One of these is the movie’s climax, a techno-colored foursome where Tara turns Christian’s misogynistic voyeurism against him.

This scene somewhat dismantles a few others that would have made The Canyons fairly homophobic. Christian, for all his macho ridicule against Ryan “going gay” to get ahead or to keep a job, is all too eager to go down on another guy in the heat of the moment.

This is what cinema has become, Schrader seems to be saying with these deranged, narcissistic fools and their phones. Shots of abandoned multiplexes begin and end the movie and also serve as backdrops for the beginning of each day in the story. That makes The Canyons by far the most ironic movie to utilize the “Watch It While It’s In Theaters” online rental trend. Everything about it oozes with a pessimism for mainstream movie making; even the title suggests that calling it the Hollywood Hills is unearned optimism.

Grade: C+

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