Culturazzi

Departures - Yôjirô Takita

Daniel Montgomery — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:27:56 +0000

Departures is nakedly manipulative. Its director, Yôjirô Takita, doesn’t show any sensitivity to tone or character. He aims to wring tears out of us by any means necessary, underlining every emotion with a blatancy that borders on shamelessness. Not content to let a scene play out, he cues big musical swells on the soundtrack and directs his actors to over-emote. Lots of tears flow. Lots of characters give longing looks. Scenes that might have been greatly moving if handled with restraint collapse under the weight of his heavy hand. He attacks you with feelings.

The opening scene is an unfortunate indication of what is to come. It starts beautifully, showing us Daigo (Masahiro Motoki) and his mentor Ikuei (Tsutomu Yamazaki) performing the meticulous ritual of preparing the deceased for burial: the careful cleaning of the body, the modest covering of the skin, the gentle dressing, and the application of makeup. The film holds its distance as it observes the reverence of the funeral rite.

But then it takes an unwelcome turn. Daigo feels something strange on the young woman’s body. She has … “a thing.” “A thing?” asks Ikuei. “A thing!” Ikuei reluctantly approaches the family and asks their wishes regarding the deceased’s gender, and the scene turns into a jarring comedy routine. It’s too abrupt to be particularly funny and no longer sensitive enough to work as drama.

Is Takita setting up a farce? For a while he seems to be. Many early scenes feature Motoki mugging in exaggerated reaction shots, as when Daigo, at the time a professional cellist, learns that his orchestra is being disbanded. And when he visits a public bathhouse to clean off the smell of a decomposed body, he fumbles the soap with overwrought slapstick gesticulations.

But eventually Takita settles on a style he likes: forced melodrama. He manufactures a conflict to create dramatic tension. Daigo, needing a change after the disappointment of his musical career, moves with his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) to his hometown, where he responds to a vague classified ad in the newspaper seeking an inexperienced employee for work with “departures.” Thinking it’s a travel agency, he responds to the ad and is hired on the spot, but when he learns what the job really involves, he hides it from his friends and family.

Perhaps there are Japanese cultural taboos I am not privy to, but this feels like a false problem. Though a discomfort with death is universal, I’m hard-pressed to believe the reactions shown in this film. Upon learning the truth, an old childhood friend warns his daughter not to speak to Daigo. “People are talking,” he warns Daigo scornfully. Daigo has, it seems, created quite a scandal, but if death is sacred enough to require such a special ritual, why would those who perform the ritual be held in such contempt. “Don’t touch me! You’re unclean!” screams his wife, who up to that point had been loving and supportive. When did she become such a shrew? As soon as the screenplay required her to be.

The writer of the film is Kundô Koyama, who plots out every emotional beat so formulaically that the story feels calculated, artificial. He establishes a sad backstory for Daigo. His father left him when he was six-years-old. He can’t remember his face, but he’s held on to his last “stone-letter,” which is a rock whose texture is meant to convey the feelings of the giver. I wonder if the father made up that tradition because he couldn’t afford a real gift. I bestow unto you this rock, which is much more valuable than toys.

This isn’t a story. It’s the setup for a payoff. The stone, the father, and the new career will be resolved on cue before the film is over. Will Daigo’s friend and his wife Mika learn the importance of his vocation? Will Daigo be forced to confront his abandonment by his father? He wasn’t present in his son’s life, but is it possible that he … cared all along? You know the answers to these questions. You can predict the way Takita will try to pluck your heartstrings almost shot by shot. The film is a drinking game waiting to happen.

Departures won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, upsetting France’s The Class and Israel’s Waltz with Bashir. I have not seen all the nominees, but I’ve seen The Class and Waltz with Bashir, and they’re vastly better films than this one, which also includes a montage that intercuts Daigo’s developing career with shots of him playing cello against a picturesque backdrop that lacks only Julie Andrews singing “The hills are alive …” Death is like a gateway, we’re told. If it’s a gateway to another movie, consider it a blessing.

Watch a trailer for the movie here:

Kwaidan – Masaki Kobayashi

Leonora Pinto — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:27:24 +0000

Ghost stories. They have haunted many genres – horror-slash-supernatural, comedy, romance, fantasy. They have been told to us by friends and parents around campfires, or during blackouts, with “Ooooo” sound effects and torch-lighting. They have been around almost as long as we have been writing stories. (The ancient Epic of Gilgamesh – one of the earliest ever pieces of literature – is probably the first ghost story ever told). So, the question is, while ghost stories are always entertaining, can they ever be something new? And would we really want them to be?

Enter Masaki Kobayashi’s eerie 1964 masterpiece, Kaidan (‘Ghost Stories’ in Japanese), aka Kwaidan. This Oscar and Palm D’Or nominated and Cannes Jury Special Prize winner is a collection of four ghost story shorts that manage to do both – lift themselves ethereally outside the genre, and simultaneously stay ensconced in its beloved traditions.

The film begins with the segment The Black Hair – the tale of a young samurai who, tired of poverty, deserts his wife to marry into money. He soon regrets his decision and returns to his true love. What begins as a joyful reunion turns into an anything-but-happily-ever-after ending.

Then comes The Woman in the Snow, where an eerie ice spirit sucks the life out of an old woodsman trapped in a snowstorm, and spares the life of his young apprentice on the condition he never tell anybody about her. He keeps his promise – first out of fear, then because the memory of the night has snuck way back into the recesses of his memory. Another snowy night ten years later brings it back, and he confides in his wife. Big mistake, but not one that produces the expected outcome.

The third – and finest – segment, Hoichi, the Earless, tells of a blind temple attendant who has a beautiful musical gift. His specialty is his rendition of the epic battle of Dan-No-Ura, fought between the Genji and Heike clans. His gift attracts the attention of a mysterious and powerful family who beckons him to play for them in the middle of the night, but warns him not to speak of his moonlighting. With very literal blind trust Hoichi complies, and eerie consequences ensue.

Wrapping up the portmanteau is In a Cup of Tea, in which a writer invites us to speculate why certain stories are left unfinished by their authors. Like the story of a guard that is haunted by a face in a teacup.

Each of these tales has been adapted from a story in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things – a short story collection that – like much of Hearn’s work by his Japanese-citizen avatar, Koizumi Yakumo – is drawn from the folklore of the land. In fact, Hearn claimed that the story of Yuki-Ona (The Woman in the Snow) was told to him by an old farmer, and his was, as far as he knew, the very first telling.

Where western horror movies rely heavily on big scares and in-your-face gore, Kwaidan depends on a gradual increase in atmospheric tension that may or may not lead to a release. It unfolds languidly, giving you the feeling of having a nightmare about walking in treacle. It isn’t a film that jumps out at you and yells, “Boo!” It is more like someone – or something – that creeps stealthily behind you, and when you turn around to look what’s causing the prickle on your neck, there’s nothing there, and when you turn back you are trapped in some dimension not your own.

The themes in Kwaidan are familiar – clichéd, even – with the otherworld punishing those who step out of the line of human decency, or dabble in things they shouldn’t. But the way they unfurl on screen makes them seem like something fresh and new, even nearly half a century after their first appearance. It manages this because Kobayashi doesn’t take his ghosts and plonk them in your world; he drags you into theirs – and you don’t even realise he’s doing this till you’re already there.

This eerie illusion is created and fed by uncanny scenes that are painted with a surreal mix of the real and the otherworldly. The real world is moulded out of sparse settings that mimic minimalist stage props, and set against surreal backgrounds evoking expressionist paintings. There are giant eyes-in-the-sky and pink suns in The Woman in the Snow. In Hoichi, the Earless, flashbacks to the battle scenes are formed by dreamlike ships and an ocean only hinted at by movement, juxtaposed with paintings of the battle scenes set at disorienting angles. In The Black Hair, the close-ups of the long black hair of the samurai’s new wife shimmers with preternatural foreboding.

Kobayashi also uses sound masterfully. The ingredients – creaks, banshee music, thumps and bumps, high ‘pling’ tones – have, once more, been used many times before and since. But never quite like this. The filmmaker orchestrates these sound effects with impeccable timing, rather than relying on the sheer effect of volume.

The effect of this amalgamation is striking, beautiful, wondrous, creepy, arty, and unsettling all at the same time. And it is proof positive that Kobayashi deserves the same lofty artistic plaudits usually reserved for Akira Kurosawa. Like Kurosawa, Kobayashi, too, was a formal student of Japanese painting and fine arts, and it shows. Every frame could be plucked from the screen and hung in an art gallery.

The characters and stories are really a supporting cast to the visual intensity of the film. While this would have been a flaw in lesser hands, in this instance, it is the film’s real strength. Its undiluted atmosphere seeps out of the screen like a mist from some other world leaking into yours. It crawls under your skin, and into your mind, forcing you to stop watching, and just start feeling.

Indeed, this isn’t really a film you see. It is one you experience.

Watch a trailer for the movie here:

Hot Fuzz - Edgar Wright

Stephanie Lundahl — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 15:48:37 +0000

Hot Fuzz is the type of movie that offers up something for just about anyone, though unlike many such films it excels at multitasking. Easily classified as a comedy, an action movie, a mystery and a satire, it is an exceptionally well-rendered film and an instant classic.

The film centers on supercop Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), a London police officer who is so proficient that he puts the rest of the department to shame. As a result (and despite his vehement protests), his superiors reward him by transferring him to Sandford, a small village with a seemingly non-existent crime rate. For Angel, one so dedicated, that he follows the law to the letter even when it comes to minor things like jaywalking, such a transfer is a major blow to his morale, leaving him with a sinking sense of purpose.

The moment he sets foot in Sanford, Angel attempts to clean up what little crime he sees, amounting mostly to underage drinking and public drunkenness. Unfortunately, he quickly discovers that Sanford’s Police Inspector, Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent), subscribes to a more easy going enforcement style which calls for letting a lot of things slide. He also discovers that one of the men he arrested for public drunkenness is a police officer himself and Inspector Butterman’s son, Danny (Nick Frost). Danny, who is obsessed with Hollywood action movies, develops a sort of hero worship towards Angel, who finds him annoying at best and incompetent at worst.

Not long after Angel’s arrival, a series of bizarre deaths claim the lives of several Sanford residents. Though the circumstances of the deaths are incredibly suspicious, Inspector Butterman insists on writing them off as mere “accidents” – even after Angel spots the killer, clad in a disguise, in the act and gives chase, only to lose him or her. He is convinced that the culprit is Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton), the shady manager of the village’s supermarket, but when Skinner is able to provide an airtight alibi for the time of the murder, everyone becomes convinced that Angel has tricked himself into believing that there is a killer on the loose simply because he misses the action and excitement of being a big city police officer. Determined to prove that he’s not crazy, Angel ends up uncovering a secret he never could have anticipated and that is much darker than he ever suspected.

Written by Pegg and Edgar Wright, Hot Fuzz is the second entry in the “Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy” which kicked off with Shaun of the Dead. It is a sharply written piece of work that cleverly plays on Hollywood action movie conventions and directly parodies certain scenes from other films. The film Point Break, in particular, is revered by Danny, especially a scene in which Keanu Reeves dramatically fires his gun multiple times into the air to express his frustration at finding himself unable to bring Patrick Swayze to justice. Although you know as a viewer that that scene will eventually be recreated here simply because it’s mentioned so many times, it nevertheless manages to be delightful when it finally happens. Hot Fuzz echoes a number of well-known films but it manages the impressive feat of seeming fresh while doing so.

Even though Hot Fuzz is an incredibly well-written film and very well-acted, it is not without a weakness. At 121 minutes, it is overlong for a comedy and the third act sort of lumbers along and offers up several potential endings which then give way to yet another scene. It’s only a slight debit to what is otherwise a great comedy (one of the best of the last decade, I’d wager), but it is a very pronounced flaw.

Watch a trailer of the movie here:

Fish Tank - Andrea Arnold

Stephanie Lundahl — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:38:34 +0000

“Are you my friend now?” Connor (Michael Fassbinder) asks Mia (Katie Jarvis) about mid-way through Fish Tank. It’s a fair question, given how turbulent her emotions are, particularly where he’s been concerned. One moment she likes him, the next she’s lashing out at him; she’s 15, it’s a tough time. Making it tougher is her less than ideal home life. Her mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), is more concerned with partying than with Mia or her younger sister (Rebecca Griffiths), has been expelled from school and may be taken away to a progressive school; her only solace seems to be in drinking and in dancing, which she does in one of her tenement’s abandoned units. And then, of course, there’s Connor, too.

Connor shows up in her life as her mother’s most recent boyfriend. He’s nice to her and takes an interest in her desire to become a professional dancer. One day he breaks up the family’s routine - which seems to consist entirely of watching television and fighting - by taking them on a trip to a river, where he and Mia wade in and catch a fish. Mia cuts her foot and he carries her back to the car and in the moment that she lays her head on his shoulder, the tension that has been simmering between them seems to blossom into more.

Mia is constantly shifting back and forth between being nice to Connor and verbally attacking him. She’s attracted to him, of course, but she’s also jealous of his relationship with her mother and confused by the situation in general. Sometimes it becomes so intense that she erupts with anger for seemingly no reason and, given what we know about her, it’s an understandable reaction. She’s spent 15 years believing that no one really cares about her and then she finds someone who does, but the situation is all wrong. She doesn’t possess the language to properly express what she’s experiencing, so instead she just acts out blindly, never stopping to think about the potential consequences.

Connor’s motivations are never entirely clear. He’s a shadowy figure who appears to be one thing but turns out to be another. There’s something he’s desperate to keep hidden and when Mia discovers it, she reacts by doing something horrible. The sequence of scenes which follow her discovery grows increasingly frightening because Mia is such an impulsive character, an absolute slave to the intensity of her emotions. We don’t know what she’s going to do, how far it will go or whether she’ll be able to pull back and keep it from escalating into a genuine, irreversible tragedy. Writer/director Andrea Arnold does an amazing job building the tension throughout this sequence; it is almost unbearable to watch as it progresses towards its conclusion because there is so much at stake and the film has already demonstrated its willingness to go to the darkest possible place.

At the centre of all of this is Katie Jarvis in what is amazingly her first film performance. She is completely natural and at ease in the role and the fact that she never takes a false step is all the more incredible given not just the heightened level of emotions, but also how many emotions compete for dominance in any given scene. The character is out of control, free-falling through feelings that she doesn’t fully understand, but Jarvis is in control of the performance from beginning to end.

Fish Tank is not the type of film that will leave you feeling uplifted. It is about a girl living in poverty who dreams of being a dancer, but it is about as far from a rags to riches story as you can get. It is grim and gritty from beginning to end, its ambiguous finale suggesting merely a perpetuation of the cycle of poverty and neglect rather than an escape that will open up new possibilities. At the same time, however, it also feels somewhat hopeful: Mia and her mother have shared a moment of true happiness and Mia is now a bit wiser and is literally leaving behind a place that has caused her much pain. It’s an ending that is open to interpretation, that leaves you wondering where Mia will end up and if she will finally find some kind of stability and happiness. It is sad and it is perfect.

Watch a trailer for the movie here:

Women Without Men - Shirin Neshat

Daniel Montgomery — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:38:22 +0000

From its title, you’d immediately expect Women Without Men to be a feminist tract, and that’s what you get — sort of. Set amidst the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in the early 1950s, it tells the story of four women, each oppressed by men in some way, and how they find respite. But the film, written and directed by Shirin Neshat from a novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, is structured so loosely that it’s all but formless, unable to draw its disparate characters, stories, and themes together into any kind of cohesive whole. What is the film about? A little bit of everything, and nothing.

It starts straightforwardly enough. In a dreamy introduction, a woman falls from a roof, presumably to her death, and continues to narrate as the camera floats into a hidden garden that evokes Eden. Next, we meet four women who will be drawn to this place from their unhappy lives: Munis (Shabnam Toloui), the woman from the roof, who is politically aware despite the discouragement of her strict brother, Amir (Essa Zahir); Faezah (Pegah Ferydoni), Munis’s friend, who is saddened that Amir has chosen another woman to marry; Farrokhlagha (Arita Shahrzad), the wife of a decorated military officer, who regrets not waiting to marry her former lover, an artist with Western sensibilities; and Zarin (Orsolya Tóth), a prostitute with an emaciated body and sickly pallor.

They’re introduced in perfunctory establishing scenes. Munis listens defiantly to news of the revolution on the radio against her brother’s wishes. Zarin lies with a sad, faraway look while men take their pleasure on top of her. Farrokhlagha has an overly soap-operatic scene where she tells her domineering husband how little she cares for him; later we meet her artist friends, who discuss Albert Camus in a way that is less like conversation and more like the screenplay establishing their intellectual cred. Faezah’s backstory is more vague; there’s the suggestion of a gang rape, but unless I missed a crucial scene — or the film was missing a reel — I’m not sure where this revelation came from.

The men are standard-issue examples of cultural chauvinism; they warn their women to know their place and do as their told, but otherwise don’t exert much influence over the plot. Farrokhlagha’s husband, ostensibly an abusive military man, shows no agency at all, disappearing shortly into the narrative and having apparently no opinion about his wife suddenly leaving him to buy a cottage in the countryside.

Neshat is an esteemed visual artist, born in Iran but in exile since 1996 for her depictions of gender politics, and her artistic background is evident. Her camera moves with ethereal grace, and with cinematographer Martin Gschlacht she creates beautiful, painterly compositions. They make the garden refuge lush and otherworldly, an exalted paradise removed from the political tumult all around, and the women in it like Eves without Adam, and doing just fine without the militaristic control of men.

Sadly, Neshat shows much poorer command of story. Things begin to fall apart upon the “death” of Munis, and I put “death” in quotes because she’s shown dying three times and I’m not sure any of them take. At one point she seems to be revived, but how? This touch of the supernatural clashes awkwardly with the film’s prevailing realism, leaving us confused instead of enchanted. Making matters worse is a possible doubling back of the time line, which further obscures an unnecessarily elliptical narrative.

A lot of interesting ideas emerge, but don’t pay off. Munis becomes a Communist, but it’s not clear why. The sociopolitical upheaval, which at first seems like it will reflect and contextualize the feminist theme, at last seems completely divorced from it. We don’t learn much about the revolution, which if you’re not already familiar with the conflict will be difficult to follow. Neshat demonstrates a strong eye, and I’d be interested to see what she could do with a firmer script, but here she left me adrift, and I thought fondly back to a great film from just three years ago that also dealt with womanhood in a fascist Iran: Persepolis, which you should seek out no matter your opinion of this one. Sometimes the best critique of a movie is another movie.

Watch a trailer for the movie here:

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

Shubhajit Lahiri — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:54:47 +0000

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.

“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.

Let me start with the obvious – Catch-22 is the kind of book I have never read ever before, and in all probability, will not get to read since. It is a mad, crazy, insane, hilarious, acerbic, brilliant book brought forth through Joseph Heller’s mad, crazy, insane, hilarious, acerbic, brilliant writing. Okay, now that that’s out of my system, let me get down to the point.

Author Joseph Heller joined the U.S. Army Air Corps at the age of 19, shortly after graduating from high school. He was sent to Italy, where he few 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier in World War II. Not unsurprisingly, the celebrated novel’s central protagonist, Captain Yossarian, known as Yo-Yo among his friends, is also a bombardier with the Air Corps, is stationed in Italy, and has flown around 60 combat missions when the novel starts. But, where Heller got to return home after completing the said number of missions, Yossarian doesn’t get to do so. The “military bureaucracy” of the unit he belongs to keeps raising the number of missions one must fly, and always finds one way or another to keep Yossarian from returning home. His deep unwillingness to fly more missions makes him more and more defiant and rebellious, propelling him on a darkly comic collision course with the powers that be.

The Kafkaesque book is infested with a host of the most wacky, neurotic and unforgettable characters to complement our tragi-comic hero. And not to mention, their names are as unique as Yossarian’s. Thus there’s his friend Dunbar who too, like Yossarian, wants nothing else but to remain alive; there’s the paranoia-laden Colonel Cathcart, Yossarian’s commanding officer, who desperately wants make the frontpage of newspapers, and thus keeps extending the number of missions; there’s the self-serving Doc Daneeka who gets officially recognised as dead even when, behold, he’s still alive; there’s mess officer Milo Minderbender, literally the human personification of laissez-faire, who bombs the squadron he belongs to for the sake of the complex syndicate he runs which the Americans are as much the part of as the Germans are; there’s Chaplain Tappman, a kind and sensitive man forever tormented by his assistant Corporal Whitcomb; there’s Nately’s Whore, who keeps making outrageous efforts to kill Yossarian for informing her that Nately got killed in a mission; there’s Major Major Major Major, whose strict instruction to his assistant is that people be allowed to meet him at his tent only when he’s not there; there’s Lieutenant Schiesskopf, who’s only interest lies in parades, parades and more parades – these are just some of the most extraordinarily singular and absolutely hilarious characters populating the book, playing enormous roles in elevating it to a work of such high farce and making it a part of the pantheon of great nonsense literature.

The book abounds in humour – both slapstick and darkly comic, wit, ironies, wordplays, satires, deliberate logical fallacies, flashbacks and forwards, parodies, irreverence, idiosyncrasies, absurdism, literary paradoxes, pejoratives, solipsism, and cynicism. It has everything that the world of literature can offer, and more – and Heller must have had a delirious time composing the novel. Yet, for all its circular narrative, iconoclasm and seemingly “nonsense” humour, there’s also a subtle layer of grim humanism that runs through the book, which becomes more and more palpable as the story nears its climax. Because, one must realise, that at the end of the day, Catch-22 wasn’t merely a fun book; it was, and still remains, a devastating indictment against everything that bureaucracy stands for and signifies, and the absolute craziness, madness and insanity of the act of waging war.

The novel promptly and sharply divided the critics upon its publication in 1961. However, before long the Vietnam War started, and as it turned out to be one of the most insane and craziest wars that there could be, the book quickly captured people’s imaginations and was transformed into a cultural icon and a beacon for the anti-establishmentarian movement that defined that era. The book stood for everything that the bureaucrats, the political establishment, the military high command and the plutocrats didn’t, and vice-versa. It was a fierce and no-holes-barred blow right into the guts of anyone and everyone who belonged to the so-called higher echelons. In fact, an American cineaste I’ve been acquainted with over the blogosphere, who toured Vietnam on active duty, once told me, “Catch-22 is my favourite novel of all-time; I even took a paperback copy with me to Vietnam to help cope with the insanity of the whole situation”. That was the kind of power the book has and the intoxicating beauty of its prose and its “illogical logic”. For the record, the book has been rated as one of the 100 greatest novels of all time by The Observer, one of the 100 best English language modern novels by Time, and ranked 7^th in its list of the greatest English language novels of the 20^th century by Modern Library, among others.

Catch-22 is a not an easy read by any stretch of imagination. And if you’re a sensitive soul, it can also be extremely distressing in the way it seamlessly pokes fun at even the most sacred of aspects – religion, death, patriotism, love, despair – to the extent of even dehumanizing them. And in one of the chapters during the last leg of the book, Yossarian’s harrowing walk through a dilapidated, damaged, destroyed and demolished Rome can be as gut-wrenching as anything one might come across. Further, the elliptical narrative and the bravura, avante-garde writing style might seem an insurmountable wall to many. Yet, for all the difficulty that the book brings onto the table, it sure turned out to be one of the most exhilarating reads of my life.

“I’m cold,” Snowden said again in a frail, childlike voice. “I’m cold.”

“There, there,” Yossarian said, because he did not know what else to say. “There, there.”

Please Give - Nicole Holofcener

Daniel Montgomery — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 06:00:12 +0000

I wish I could write the way Nicole Holofcener writes. I wish I could write the way she directs too. It’s sometimes difficult to articulate the feelings and motivations of her characters in Please Give — they contain layers of often contradictory emotions — but they elicit our immediate empathy. There is a scene, and others like it, where two sisters sit together on a couch watching television and one lays her head on the other’s shoulder; without a word of dialogue, we feel their longing, regret, and self-doubt.

Holofcener previously directed 2002’s Lovely & Amazing and 2006’s Friends with Money, and with this film cements herself as the best filmmaker I’ve encountered on the subject of female neuroses. She’s tough but compassionate, funny without indulging in Ally McBeal-like eccentricity or the casual condescension of many romantic comedies. All three films have starred Catherine Keener, who may have given a bad performance in her career but I haven’t seen it yet. In Please Give she plays Kate, a vintage furniture seller in New York City who gets her merchandise from the families of the recently deceased; she can get valuable pieces for less than they’re worth because surviving relatives are too preoccupied with grief to haggle over prices.

Kate is stricken with guilt over the way she does business, but not enough to stop. Her ambivalence is the heart of the film; we watch her pulled between self-justification — if she doesn’t do it, someone else will — and charitable overcompensation. She gives money to the homeless on her street (twenty-dollar bills, not spare change), and when she tries to volunteer at a school for special-needs children she ends up crying in a bathroom stall and asked by a girl with Down’s Syndrome if she needs help; she’s so warped by liberal guilt that she needs more comforting than she’s capable of giving.

This is a film for the recession era far more than Up in the Air was. Kate is a product of our current capitalist conflict, divided between the dog-eat-dog cynicism of the free market and the impulse to share with others, but because she is wracked with self-loathing she’s unable to help anyone, least of all herself or her family. Her teenage daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele), wants a pair of $200 jeans, but her mother refuses — not because she can’t afford them, but because she’s ashamed that she can afford them.

A parallel story follows altruism of a different kind, motivated by obligation instead of guilt, but no more satisfying to the giver. Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) is a lab technician who administers mammograms and in her free time dotes over her 92-year-old grandmother Andra (Ann Guilbert), whose apartment has already been bought by Kate and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt); they live next door and plan to expand their apartment after she dies.

Andra isn’t simply cranky or lovably crabby — she’s mean. She’s lived a hard life, someone says later; because she’s elderly, no one wants to say what everyone is thinking. Rebecca’s mother committed suicide when she was fifteen, and though it would be overly simplistic to draw a direct line between her trauma and her doting, we can see its influence over her. She doesn’t want to admit how little she likes Andra. Taking care of family is what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it?

Rebecca’s sister, Mary (Amanda Peet), takes the opposite approach. She’s almost as mean as her grandmother, blunt to others because the hard truth is better than a kind lie, and bitter to Andra for several reasons. One she doesn’t say but we perceive is a protective impulse; though they bicker frequently, Mary sees that her little sister is being exploited, so she gives to their scornful grandmother as good as she gets.

Holofcener is an impeccably subtle filmmaker and inspires from her actors some of their best, most perceptive performances. Her narratives are loosely structured, free-flowing, but she has a note-perfect understanding of her characters and observes with an unintrusive eye, letting us read the complex emotions on their faces instead of rigidly imposing her ideas onto them. This is only her fourth feature film, but she demonstrates confident grace behind the camera and in her scripts. Her resume also includes directing work for television series with strong female characters like Six Feet Under and Gilmore Girls, as well as four episodes of Sex and the City, a good show that went astray in its first transition to the big screen. The first Sex and the City movie, and from its promotion I fear its sequel as well, is about women reduced to frivolous trend-setters and reductive personality types. A Holofcener film is the antidote.

Watch a trailer for the movie here:

The Descent - Neil Marshall

Stephanie Lundahl — Mon, 31 May 2010 04:06:27 +0000

Neil Marshall’s The Descent is the kind of movie that makes converts out of people who don’t normally gravitate towards the horror genre. It not only delivers on the scares but does so by constructing a compelling story around its gory set pieces. It is truly a film that transcends the boundaries of genre and can simply be called “good” rather than “good for a horror movie.”

The film opens with a brief prologue, introducing Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), Juno (Natalie Jackson Mendoza) and Beth (Alex Reid), three thrill seeking friends. On the way home from their latest adventure, Sarah, her husband and their daughter are involved in a car accident that only Sarah survives. It is an emotionally and psychologically shattering event and a year later Sarah is still deeply grieving. In an attempt to help her reconnect with life, Juno has arranged a spelunking expedition in the Appalachian mountains where they are joined by Beth and their friends Rebecca (Saskia Mulder), Sam (MyAnna Buring), and Holly (Nora-Jane Noone).

The six set off for their latest adventure but shortly after descending into the caves things begin to go horribly awry. A cave in blocks their exit and Juno reluctantly admits to the others that not only did she not alert authorities to their plans, but she’s brought them to a different cave than the one they thought they were going to – one that no one else has ever explored. Knowing that the clock is ticking on their flashlights, the six quickly put aside the allocation of blame to focus on finding a way out, a task which becomes increasingly desperate once Rebecca and Holly succumb to injuries.

As they make their way deeper into the cave system, Sarah is convinced that she sees someone else down there. Juno initially writes the sighting off as a delusion borne of panic but when the group stumbles across a large collection of bones they realize that they’re in much more danger than they had ever suspected. In horror movie fashion the culprit – culprits, in this case: a population of man-sized creatures that are not unlike bats – is soon revealed and the members of the group start to get picked off one by one until finally it’s down to Sarah and Juno to battle their way back to the surface.

Though the main draw for horror fans might be the creatures and the carnage, The Descent is a psychologically rich film that can satisfy the cinematic tastes of just about anyone. The title refers not just to the physical act of the six friends going down into the caves, but of the necessity that Sarah descend to the very depths of her unconscious in order to see things clearly, specifically Juno’s character. Juno, while admirable in certain respects, is unquestionably a selfish character who consistently fails to register the effect her actions have on others. In her desire to bolster her ego by “discovering” the cave, she has led her friends into a death trap. In a way she is responsible for all of the deaths; in a more concrete way she is responsible for Beth’s death. It is not the means of Beth’s death (which is certainly an accident) that further clouds our view of Juno but the fact that she refuses to take responsibility, leaving Beth to die slowly from her wounds and then refusing to acknowledge her wrongdoing. Juno is not someone who can be counted on and discovering that is a crucial part of Sarah’s personal journey.

Following Sarah’s realization of who Juno really is, she undergoes a baptism of sorts that is reminiscent of the scene in Apocalypse Now when Willard, finally prepared to do what it is he must do, emerges from the water a true warrior. Sarah is a different person when she rises from the lowest depths, no longer scared, now fully in control of herself and prepared to do whatever she has to in order to survive. The film develops Sarah and Juno as contrasts, their actions in some instances mirroring each other, and this works well, allowing for them to become fleshed out in an efficient way that eliminates the need for a lot of exposition (the downside to this, however, is that Sarah and Juno are the only two of the six characters who have really distinct personalities).

What makes The Descent so particularly effective is the firm direction by Marshall. The atmosphere he creates is very nearly a character in its own right and intensifies the action, making it all the more memorable. The lighting inside the caves is kept to a minimum – headlamps and flashlights, flares, and the occasional shot through an infrared camera – as a means of replicating for the audience the experience of the characters. It is a sound decision and a mark of Marshall’s skill that he can limit the visuals but still tell such an engrossing and engaging story. I would highly recommend this film even to people who don’t normally watch horror movies because it’s such a fine work of craftsmanship that the genre itself becomes secondary to the product on the screen.

Watch a trailer for the movie here:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Niels Arden Oplev

Daniel Montgomery — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:30:03 +0000

Perhaps because I know Sweden mostly as the home of Ingmar Bergman and Let the Right One In, I was expecting something different from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It shapes up as an old-fashioned Agatha Christie-style mystery about two dogged, mismatched detectives going through a cold case to uncover hidden family secrets and a killer still on the loose; but for the graphic sexuality and macabre violence it would be at home on Masterpiece Theater. At first I was disappointed at its conventional nature, but then I went with the flow. I like Masterpiece Theater.

It opens with Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a crusading journalist falsely convicted of using forged evidence to libel businessman Hans-Erik Wennerström (Stefan Sauk). He’s sentenced to three months in jail but has six months before he must serve his time. In the interim, he’s hired by wealthy magnate Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), who wants to get to the bottom of the disappearance of his niece Harriet forty years ago. The Vanger family is overburdened with dark secrets, and Henrik thinks one of them is her killer.

Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace), the title character, joins the case from afar. She’s hired by Henrik to investigate Mikael, to find out whether the beleaguered journalist is worth his time, but after her vetting is done she persists, hacking into Mikael’s hard drive and providing a vital clue that prompts Mikael to officially bring her on to the case. It is when they begin working together that the film begins to resemble a more traditional detective story; there’s even a scene where one of them scours records in a basement archive and makes a crucial discovery in the nick of time.

Lisbeth is interesting the moment we meet her, and hard to miss. Director Niels Arden Oplev introduces her in a corporate office where the suits and ties markedly contrast with her multiple piercings and goth-black hair, eyeliner, and attire. She’s an outsider, but a tough and savvy one, able to make a living and protect herself.

There is a subplot that demonstrates Lisbeth’s resilience, though apart from that it doesn’t entirely work. She must report to a probation officer for reasons that become clearer over time, and her latest is corrupt, exploiting his authority to procure sexual favors. He’s not subtle about it; in their first meeting, he asks about her sexual history and preferred positions. He’s the kind of twisted movie pervert who makes a special point of his twisted perversion, and that’s a problem for two reasons: (1) because this probation officer in the real world might have had trouble avoiding consequence for so long with such up-front lechery; and (2) because playing up his mustache-twirling villainy sensationalizes the violence in a way that exploits the exploitation, turning it into spectacle. Do such acts really need to be played up for effect?

A “romance” develops between Lisbeth and Mikael, and I put “romance” in quotes because it doesn’t really play like one, though it’s not clear whether Oplev, screenwriters Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, or the author of the popular source novel (which I haven’t read), Stieg Larsson, intend it to. What is clear is that Lisbeth is a traumatized but self-possessed young woman, whose assault at the hands of the probation officer doesn’t seem to have been her first, and whose sexual protocols now revolve around control. Their first encounter is a surprise to Mikael and the audience alike. Rapace, in her gritty, brittle performance, suggests no affection or even lust. For her, the sex is an assertion of physical and emotional dominance, perhaps even a preemptive strike against an anticipated attack. Whether they’re romantically compatible I greatly doubt, but the film plays it ambiguously.

The director makes great use of old photos, which are among my favorite devices in cold-case stories like this one. There’s an inherent mystery in them; they capture a moment in time, but there’s an unknown world outside the frame, and before and after it, and speculating about their hidden context makes them ominous. There is an excellent sequence where Mikael discovers an old roll of film from a newspaper archive; he digitally scans the images, and they were shot in such quick succession that they play like a flip book — an eerie animated record of a few short moments that might be the key to solving the crime.

The film can’t resist the temptation of a silly Talking Killer scene, that familiar device defined in Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary as the moment when the killer has our hero right where he wants him, only to talk and talk and talk about his fiendish plot, giving the hero enough time to escape or be rescued. The point of such scenes is not to give the hero time to escape — the screenwriter can rescue the protagonist whenever he wants — but to give the killer time to deliver exposition the film has no other opportunity to reveal. These scenes stand out negatively because they force the characters to step outside of themselves to perform the function of the screenplay.

It’s during such plot-intensive moments that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is least effective. But then you have dark, observant character scenes like Lisbeth witnessing a car accident and choosing a course of action. Afterwards, she visits someone she hasn’t seen in years and we learn more about a crime she committed in her youth. I suspect more details are forthcoming; Stieg Larsson wrote two sequels, both of which have been made into films that were released throughout Europe last fall and winter and are expected to hit the United States this fall. I look forward to the mysteries they contain, but more so I look forward to seeing the girl who solves them.

Watch a trailer for the movie here:

The Stoning of Soraya M. - Cyrus Nowrasteh

Stephanie Lundahl — Fri, 14 May 2010 18:25:06 +0000

The Stoning of Soraya M. begins with a quote: “Don’t act like a hypocrite, who thinks he can conceal his wiles while loudly quoting the Koran;” and then proceeds to explore a situation in which the Koran becomes little more than a tool to oppress and punish. It is a film with a strong point of view that nevertheless fails to effectively dramatize its message. Guided by a heavy hand, the film’s failings far outweigh its achievements.

The story begins with the arrival of French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam (Jim Caviezel) in a small village after his car breaks down. He is immediately approached by Zahra (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who is dismissed by the mayor (David Diaan) and the Mullah (Ali Pourtash) as a “crazy woman” out to make trouble. Sahebjam, however, agrees to hear her out and sits down with her to record her story, which involves the horrific events of the day before when her niece, Soraya (Mozhan Marno), was stoned to death in the village square.

Soraya’s position in the days and weeks leading up to her death conveys the vulnerability of women in a culture that is essentially, blatantly, and even proudly, misogynist. Her husband (Navid Negahban) wants to dissolve their marriage so that he can marry a young girl and move away from the village with their two sons. Their two daughters he proposes to leave behind with Soraya, and he has no intention of giving them any support to keep them from starving. When Soraya won’t agree to his terms, he enlists the help of the Mullah, blackmailing him with knowledge of his criminal past. The Mullah proposes to make Soraya his mistress but she refuses him, which only serves to align him further with her husband.

When Soraya begins working as a housekeeper for a recently widowed neighbour, her husband lights on plan, making sure that rumours are spread throughout the village and then accusing Soraya of infidelity. The men are gathered together to determine her fate and inevitably find her guilty – a foregone conclusion given how worked up they all are before being formally gathered together. She’s taken into the street, buried up to her waist, and killed in one of the most horrific death scenes ever filmed. The stoning sequence lasts for approximately 20 minutes and makes for an almost unbearable viewing experience. It is also where the film is at its strongest because it presents the event in an unflinching way that truly brings the horror of it home to the viewer. There are no convenient cutaways, no creative camera work that leaves it to the imagination. It is simply brutal and the brutality speaks for itself.

Unfortunately, this is just about the only part of the film where director Cyrus Nowrasteh, who co-wrote the screenplay with Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh, lets the events speak for themselves. The Stoning of Soraya M. is a film with good intentions but like many such films it goes overboard in its attempts to convey its message, hitting the audience over the head with it and taking no chances with subtlety. The people in Soraya’s village are practically cartoon characters, drawn far more broadly than is actually necessary. It undercuts the effectiveness of the story because it pushes the narrative into a corner where all it can hope to do is preach to the choir. To add insult to injury, Nowrasteh then tacks on an ending out of the worst kind of feel good, Hollywood schlock which sees Sahebjam trying to escape the village with his taped interview of Zahra intact and his newly repaired car stalling before starting again and allowing him to get away as the score swells and Zahra stands triumphant. It is amateurish at best, insulting at worst.

That being said, there are nevertheless things that make The Stoning of Soraya M. a film worth seeing. One is Aghdashloo’s performance, which is strong and manages to hold the film together even when it is slipping off the rails. Zahra is a woman old enough to remember what life was like for women in Iran before things became so rigid and uncompromising. She speaks her mind even though her words fall on deaf ears and she is unfailing in her attempts to help her niece, even when the situation is at its most hopeless. She is the emotional core of the film and without her it would not work at all.

Another element to the film’s credit involves one of its few touches of subtlety. Before the stoning, the mayor, who has been plagued with doubts as to whether the sentence is right and reasonable, prays and asks for a sign to stay his hand. Arguably he receives two signs but ignores them both in order to remain submissive to the rule of the mob, which insists that it is doing God’s work. This element brings the film back to its original point, that invoking religion as a mask for self-interest is the worst and most dangerous form of hypocrisy. It is the quietest, but also the most stinging indictment the film is able to make and demonstrates how much better and more effective it could have been if only it had had more faith in the audience’s ability to put the pieces together without having to have everything spelled out and underlined. The Stoning of Soraya M. is unquestionably a film with its heart in the right place but it is a deeply, deeply flawed piece of work.