Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Once

Once (John Carney, 2007) - B+

I'm not quite on board with all of the raves, since I think the movie tries so hard to be unassuming and low-key that it becomes sort of overbearing and also kind of moment-to-moment predictable (e.g. the bored studio engineer cursing to his friend about having to spend the weekend with a bunch of wankers before hearing the music and nodding meaningfully). But nor can I deny its charms: the music is actually good, for one thing (Glen Hansard is the frontman for the better-than-Coldplay Irish pop band The Frames); for another, the movie staunchly resists becoming the sort of sappy love story I kept expecting. It's more in the vein of Before Sunrise, and by the end, the film's advertising tagline -- "How often do you find the right person?" (the answer ostensibly being "Once") -- seems more cruel than wistful. Last shot is a real heartbreaker.

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Day Night Day Night; Brand Upon the Brain!

Day Night Day Night (Julia Loktev, 2007) - B

The minor hubbub about Loktev allegedly asking us to "sympathize with a suicide bomber" is largely a red herring, since the picture she paints is, at least to my mind, consonant with the sort of religious fanaticism that can drive someone to detonate a nail bomb in Times Square. Portraying the terrorist as an attractive 19 year-old girl who is wracked by fear and doubt and carries a picture of her baby brother in her purse strikes me as noncontroversial, and preferring to think of these people as barely sentient ogres seems unproductive. Indeed, what makes the film crackle for over an hour is its verisimilitude -- as with United 93, the suspense is in the mundane details of something so awful and huge (though what with Day Night Day Night being fictitious, the ultimate effect is quite a bit different). The movie is so unflinching for a while that it's disappointing when Loktev wimps out with a last-act contrivance that allows for some convenient thematic point-making but breaks the terrifying spell -- the ending is kind of akin to the compromise in the 1998 disaster flick Deep Impact, which tried to have its cake and eat it, too, by averting the apocalypse but breaking off a little piece of the comet hurtling toward Earth and having it make a big splash in the Atlantic Ocean.

Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, 2007) - C-

This joker is supposed to be the Canadian answer to David Lynch? Please. What made "Twin Peaks" such an awe-inspiring masterpiece is its utter devotion to its story even as it descends into the nightmarish and bizarre; what makes Mulholland Drive one of the finest films of the decade is the way it coalesces both narratively and emotionally even as Lynch mercilessly fucks with your head. Maddin's stuff -- self-consciously baroque plots in late-era silent film pastiches -- doesn't do it for me because it's so damn insincere: I kept expecting a rim shot after every damn chapter break and title card. Sad part is, I really want to see a movie about a teenage mystery-serial detective who comes to an island to discover the true nature of a mysterious orphanage where, it turns out, a mad scientist is piercing holes in children's necks to extract their life essense. It's just not Brand Upon the Brain!, which unloads such a barrage of visual and aural tricks and quirks that it becomes oppressive and no fun at all. What's the point of inventing a story so mysterious and strange if you're not going to take it seriously?

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Versus; Shrek the Third

Versus (Ryuhei Kitamura, 2000) - C-

Tone's all wrong -- I like these movies to take themselves a little bit seriously, you know? -- but for a while I thought there might be something here anyway, due to Kitamura's eye for unadorned martial arts brawls and a really fucking cool performance from then-newcomer Tak Sakaguchi. Then the film descends into full-on absurdity, and Kitamura's entertaining kineticism mysteriously disappears; he's both too invested in the incomprehensible plot, burning a lot of celluloid on expository flashbacks and the like, and not invested enough, since everything's a hip joke and nothing seems to matter. I can see why this is a cult hit, I guess -- zombies! yakuza! "the forest of resurrection!" -- but there's no content, and sorry geeks, but the style just ain't that impressive (though Sakaguchi has the whiff of stardom about him). The last hour is pure tedium.

Shrek the Third (Chris Miller, 2007) - B+

Makes sense that the reviews are lukewarm -- we were weaned on Shrek being the realm of grandiose satire, coming in big, uproarious set pieces complete with an ironic pop score and an unending stream of pop culture references. Perhaps realizing that the franchise could convincingly keep this up for so long, the people behind the second sequel changed tacks: the comedy is almost low-key, if you can believe it; the jokes smaller, more verbal; gags more dependent on editing than elaborate choreography ("Someone better be dying," yells Shrek when a knock interrupts a touching heart-to-heart with Fiona; cut to the cast standing around the Frog King's deathbed as the latter croaks "I'm dying"). It's actually the funniest of the films and the most consistent, though it's also less emotionally engaging, and the message -- "the only thing standing in the way of your being who you want to be is you" -- ultimately seems pulled out of thin air. It also makes sense that the trailer wasn't funny: the great jokes keep coming, but each individual one is too little and context-dependent for a gag reel. Not for kids at all, though slightly older ones should dig it, The Third is the rare sequel that lives up to its predecessors by toning down the franchise.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Away From Her

Away From Her (Sarah Polley, 2007) - A-

Wrenching -- tantamount to watching a man's heart break in slow motion for two hours -- but wonderfully rewarding; the biggest problem, actually, is the way Polley somewhat dulls the film's impact by working so aggressively to make it into a tone poem, fracturing the chronology and writing self-consciously "literary" dialogue. But the movie works as a tone poem, too, and maneuvers that sound like they'd be insufferably clunky -- e.g. cross-country skiing as a metaphor for life; repeated shots of characters walking away from the camera in slow motion, bathed in the copious "natural sunlight" of the nursing home/"care facility" Julie Christie's Fiona enters upon an Alzheimer's diagnosis -- function as grace notes even when they can't quite cut it substantively. And that seems kind of appropriate: "the most we can aspire to in this situation is a little bit of grace," says Julie Christie's Fiona, and that's precisely what Polley accomplishes with Away From Her, a melancholy, elegant film about a difficult subject. A more direct approach may have packed a stronger punch, but Polley's screenplay isn't chopped liver either: Fiona's transformation after entering the home -- an utter, unforgiving, incomprehensible withdrawal that we see through her husband's eyes -- is brutal, believable, and incredibly moving.

Monday, May 7, 2007

The TV Set; Year of the Dog

The TV Set (Jake Kasdan, 2007) - B

Ricky Gervais recently covered this territory to somewhat funnier effect in Extras, but Kasdan's movie is worth a look too. It's a bit mean-spirited in the way it caricatures selectively: Sigourney Weaver's single-minded tv executive is a complete horrorshow, if a funny one ("He's not coming; he had an emergency and had to go to the hospital." "He's not coming?"), while Ioan Gruffud is humanized despite being painted as a similarly ratings-minded tv business superstar; the male and female leads of the show respectively exhibit the same dynamic. It's as if Kasdan took his cast of characters and pitted them against each other, with half being put-upon artists trying to eke out a career in a brutal industry and having to navigate their way around a gaggle of tin-eared buffoons (the other half). Still, great to see Weaver and David Duchovny doing comedy (both are terrific), and though the movie is mostly a blunt instrument, it has some first-rate zingers. Query: If I'm actually curious to watch "Slut Wars," am I part of the problem?


Year of the Dog (Mike White, 2007) - C

I feel kind of bad about this one, actually, as I understand what it's trying to do and am very sympathetic to it; I just wish White had taken a less irritating tack. The film does finally make sense of the protagonist's animal rights kick in the final scene, and even makes the whole thing kind of affecting, but alas this follows forty-five minutes of Molly Shannon acting like precisely the sort of detestable "activist" that has made PETA such a PR disaster. We simply don't have a strong enough connection to the protagonist to get us through, and I spent much of the movie wanting it to end, as Shannon goes about stealing money from her employer to donate to animal rights causes, threatening to take her niece to a factory farm, being outraged by furs, etc., etc. It doesn't help that the movie feints, playing at first like it might be a a Sideways-style dramedy about someone middle-aged and unlucky in love forming an unexpected bond with someone like-minded and lovely, before cutting off this line and sending Shannon off the PETA deep end. White ultimately makes sense of this about-face, too -- different kinds of love, and all that -- but again, that doesn't make the film any less actively unpleasant in the meantime. Almost worth watching for some of the performances -- Laura Dern, in particular, is note-perfect as Shannon's aggressively suburban sister-in-law -- and the finale undeniably works, but the movie is one big emotional miscalculation.

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Pathfinder; ATHF

Pathfinder (Marcus Nispel, 2007) - F

Hey, remember when I put the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake on my top ten list? That was awesome.


Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters (Dave Willis & Matt Maiellaro, 2007) - B-

The only movie I have ever seen where a line like "Daddy, you've grown up to be a beautiful woman!" can sort of just vanish into the ether rather than stopping the show. I had never seen an entire episode of the series, but warnings prepared me for the weirdness, and I must admit I kind of dug it: it's utterly, unapologetically inexplicable, which is kind of refreshing, although its best moments aren't really the aggressively weird ones. I loved the title cards, which declare that we're in Egypt, a long time ago, before announcing that we're in 2004 and in New York, and of course the heavy metal take on movie theaters' idiotic pre-feature jingle reels is some sort of brilliant. Nearly ninety minutes of this is more than I bargained for, but I definitely appreciate that this movie exists, if you get me.