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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Vacancy; Perfect Stranger

Vacancy (Nimrod Antal, 2007) - B+

Rating is almost even higher, actually; frightening and niftily self-reflexive, this is my favorite horror film since The Descent. It's not an entry in what I have resigned to calling the "torture porn" genre,* but it coopts certain elements of the fad and turns the camera on them, so to speak: funny how the snuff videos we glimpse through the panicked eyes of Wilson and Beckinsale, recorded on video using a few stationary cameras and haphazardly edited together, make us shrink away in horror and disgust, while much the same dynamic filled out with Hollywood pyrotechnics evokes merely conventional, conditioned "suspense." It's a neat trick, and all the more potent since the movie works like gangbusters, imagining a genuinely scary scenario and making it even scarier over 80 taut, frantic, logistics-obsessed minutes. The character dynamic at the center -- the protagonists are a wounded couple careening toward an ugly divorce, and on their way from an unpleasant family visit -- provides some emotional context without wasting a minute of screentime, and man does it ever help to have two real actors, rather than bland and anonymous teenyboppers, guiding this sort of movie. One possibility is that Vacancy is too breathlessly entertaining to be a serious examination of our own reactions to it, but I think the fact that it doesn't condemn its own audience is to its credit, and besides, just because the film is interested in what makes horror conventions tick doesn't mean it's not allowed to indulge in some of them as well.

*I'm actually in the process of penning an elaborate defense of "torture porn"; stay tuned.



Perfect Stranger (James Foley, 2007) - C-

For a while, the precise equivalent of an "airport novel" -- pulpy, dumb, and sort of indifferently engaging, it chugs along for a while generating neither disgust nor interest. Then it takes a turn toward lunacy, with a third act that turns it into some sort of treatise on the impossibility of anonymity in these, the Internet Years. (The last shot, of course, is neither here nor there: couldn't people peek out of windows before the world wide web?) Foley tries for a sort of steely, measured elegance -- lots of slow pans and tracking shots; bright, cold colors; glass galore -- but the thing winds up looking like a tv movie (the hysterical flashbacks to the protagonist's abusive childhood don't help any). The plot twists are so arbitrary as to cause physical pain, but aside from that, it's hardly a bore, just a time waster, pure and simple. Bruce Willis fans might tune in on DVD for his enjoyably slimy performance as a shameless, filthy rich womanizer.

Disturbia

Disturbia (D.J. Caruso, 2007) - B

At about the two-thirds mark, I was incredulous at the lukewarm reviews -- surely, I thought, this must be one of the great unappreciated genre films: smart, observant, witty, prizing attention to detail and character over cheap shocks and plot machinations. Then I watched the stupid, violent assault of an ending, and I understood. But though the movie deserves better than its third act, which feels like it snuck in from a different screenplay, the lengthy, patient set-up is worth the price of admission all on its own. Rather than merely using its sub-Rear Window scenario -- a teenager under house arrest begins to suspect that his neighbor is a serial killer -- to launch a conventional teenybopper horror throwaway, the movie actually cares, providing the teenager with a personality, actual relationships, and honest dialogue. Even the banter is lively and realistic; what's even more remarkable is that the movie makes time for banter, for moments that exist for their own sake, for seemingly inconsequential character tidbits that prove rewarding despite not being integral to the story. (Watch the scene when Kale's frustrated mom unplugs his cable, and tell me his reaction isn't a pitch-perfect depiction of teenage indignation, the sort of thing a basically good kid would say in a fit of pique and passive rebellion against a parent; listen, too, to Kale's moving late-film characterization of what his mom is doing over at the psycho's house.) The conclusion is an outrage, incoherent as well as inappropriate, but everything else pretty much rocks, including Shia LaBeouf's effortlessly naturalistic performance; I suggest ignoring the haters and hitting a matinee.

Time

Time (Kim Ki-Duk, 2007) - C+

But... but... She's totally nuts! Everyone's creaming over Kim's metaphorical exploration of romantic relationships and human identity, but he lost me from the first scene, where his protagonist throws a neurotic hissy fit in a coffee shop after a waitress is insufficiently polite, and her boyfriend dares to speak with a woman who nicked his car. Some suspension of disbelief is required given the film's premise -- frightened that she has become tiresome to her boyfriend, a woman decides to undergo a face transplant -- but the characters here (the woman in particular, but really the man too) are so batshit crazy in such an unpleasant way that, though I like a good metaphor as much as the next guy, I checked out. The movie's actually formally fascinating -- Kim's rhythms are utterly gonzo, and he perverts the three-act structure in some seriously fucked up ways -- but I wound up noticing these things dispassionately, as I became farther and farther removed from the actual, y'know, story Kim's presumably telling. I had a similar problem with 3-Iron to be honest -- it was audacious and beautiful to watch, but so single-mindedly focused on its concept that the things actually happening on screen became less and less relevant. People really love this one, though, so don't mind me...

Blades of Glory

Blades of Glory (Josh Gordon & Will Speck, 2007) - C-

I hate this fucking movie, but I cannot lie: the North Korean rendition of the Iron Lotus, the "ice-devouring sex tornado," and Arnett and Poehler's urban- and JFK-themed skating routines made me laugh. I kind of resented it, since this continuation of Ferrell's widlly popular Anchorman and Talladega Nights formula/saga is shoddy, moronic, and barely even a movie; it is now clear that Ferrell is making a career out of gags that get laughs precisely because they're so stupid. You get to a point, I think, where the audience starts to laugh at the movie, and Blades of Glory crosses that threshold several times. Talladega Nights, at least, had moments of wit that transcended these films' general m.o. (see, e.g., the dinner table grace scene); this one has a few random laughs, but is mostly just phoning it in. Even Ferrell's usually admirable anything-for-a-laugh energy has turned grating and stale, and the less said about Jon Heder, the better.

Dead Silence

Dead Silence (James Wan, 2007) - B

I think that people kind of missed the boat on this one -- it's an old-school, lovingly crafted little horror film that, though it sometimes seems pretty toothless, in fact contains the same gleefully nasty spirit that writer Leigh Whanell and director James Wan display in the Saw franchise. I still can't quite make heads-or-tails of the ending -- none of the several possibilities that present themselves seems adequate to explain one particular narrative leap -- but I like the way it takes the entire film to a higher plane of evil; at the very least, it's demonstrably not just your run-of-the-mill possessed-ventriloquist-dummy movie. The screenplay and direction are admirably controlled, maintaining genuine horror atmosphere with a streak of knowing goofiness ("In my hometown, a ventriloquist dummy is a sign of ill omen.") that lurks just under the surface. Ryan Kwanten is kind of a black hole, and I do wish the story made more sense, but it's gorgeously shot and never less than fun. It's certainly not the cheapo throwaway that many of the critics seem to have seen.

Shooter

Shooter (Antoine Fuqua, 2007) - B-

Holy crap! Mostly, I wish this worked better as a straight-ahead genre film, but I'm willing to forgive a movie a lot for being so angry, and political, and -- yes -- brave. No, I don't actually believe, as this film blatantly suggests, that Donald Rumsfeld ought to be shot in the head, but the fact that a big-budget shoot-'em-up has the balls to come out and say it is significant. This is an incendiary blend of '80s-style one-man-against-the-world action (think Commando) and modern political paranoia, existing in a world where every facet, nook and cranny of the state is corrupt to the core and merits absolute distrust. There's a scene late in the film where our falsely-accused protagonist enters a DOJ boardroom to plead his case, and five years ago that would have been that -- he would have presented his evidence, justice would have prevailed, and Danny Glover's sneering villain would have gotten his richly deserved comeuppance. But here the DOJ honchos can only throw up their hands, leaving Mark Wahlberg to, predictably enough, take matters into his own. The film is, sadly, kind of incompetent -- the second act sags; there are some bizarro edits and time-jumps I'm still trying to figure out; Fuqua never really seems comfortable with the action set-pieces -- but that may have worked in its favor, since were it actually good, it may have bought Fuqua and Co. more controversy than they bargained for. The last lines of Shooter are simply stunning, and the last shot suggests that the only viable option is for sensible people to leave civilization and retreat to the mountains, preferably after we hire Mark Wahlberg -- excuse me, "Bob Lee Swagger" -- to take most of the inside-the-Beltway population the fuck out.

The Host

The Host (Joon-Ho Bong, 2007) - B+

The first real appearance of the Creature -- not the brief glimpse of it hanging under the bridge, but immediately after that -- has to be the best genre film moment since... when? I don't know. Maybe ever. The way Bong lets us glimpse it -- following an ominous shot of the horrified protagonist, we see it galloping almost merrily toward him along the bank of a river, bowling over the hapless humans who don't catch on and run for their lives fast enough -- makes for a moment that's so big and so subtle at the same time that it took my breath away. Bong gets a lot of mileage of how matter-of-factly he shoots the creature -- no hide-the-ball set-up, no portentous reveals; the camera seems placed almost casually, affording unassuming, sometimes straight-up, sometimes partially-obstructed views. It's a monster movie liberated of the genre's stylistic trappings, and it's wonderful to see. As much as I hate to denigrate ambition, I do think that the film gets carried away with the political allegory that comes to dominate the second and third acts, if only because it winds up stretched a bit too thin; still, this is surely the year's best genre film to date.

I Think I Love My Wife

I Think I Love My Wife (Chris Rock, 2007) - C+

Nope, still don't like Chris Rock -- that ever-present smirk makes me want to deck him, and I wish he would stop yelling every line; he's like the live equivalent of someone who TYPES IN ALL CAPS. As a writer and director he shows more promise: his humor is unsophisticated, relying a lot on tonal contrast, repetition, and tried-and-true gags, but he can be genuinely clever, and for all his goofiness, he takes his stories seriously. My Wife is interesting for a while, mostly because of Rock's sneaky recognition of the way people perceive any interaction between a married man and an attractive woman; it's too bad that he moves away from this notion in the third act, preferring to veer toward more traditional themes of temptation and redemption. Ultimately, there's a little too much in the way of Viagra jokes and Chris Rock smugness for this to really work (the gimmicky ending, while it sounds good on paper, bombs simply because Rock is so freakin' annoying), but there are also enough laughs and surprising nuance to keep the proceedings respectable. In particular, Kerry Washington is great in a role she could have played as mindless seductress.

Zodiac, Black Snake Moan

Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007) - B+

Different interpretations abound; I think it's about the way we try to process evil, subject it to rules and regulations, then prefer to forget about it, push it aside, with the inevitable result that our hands close on air. People have complained about the last scene providing an unsolicited solution to the whodunit, but all I could think was, why couldn't they bust out that photo line-up years earlier? Answer, I take it: because of petty jurisdictional bullshit, cops fighting over territory and struggling to consolidate information, hampered at every step by egos, red tape, and the Fourth Amendment. The implication is that we set up this framework to avoid dealing with evil face-to-face, something Gyllenhaal's Robert Graysmith finally does in the film's most powerful scene; everyone else who gets uncomfortably close bails out for the sake of their lives and families. Fincher loads the 2:40 film with detail -- it's the most intricate police procedural in years -- but our knowledge that the Zodiac was never caught makes everything seem sadly quixotic. Meanwhile, what lurks behind curiously ungrammatical letters and cryptic ciphers -- the killer we never meet (or do we?) -- is genuinely scary.

Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, 2007) - B+

I'm tempted to accuse Brewer of being too willing to ditch his daring conceit for more conventional redemption story elements, but the whole thing winds up working so well that it's hard to complain: the final scene, in particular, is a rare movie moment, striking such a powerful chord of hope and sadness, regret and determination... it's just perfect. Amazingly, the story functions on its own terms, lest you think that a black man chaining a white woman to a radiator in Tennessee is only good for metaphor or commentary; the film gets a surprising amount of mileage out of its characters' sparse backstories, even while Samuel L. Jackson is literally dragging Christina Ricci back into his house, hand over hand. Noodles around too much in the second act, but rallies big time in the third; Jackson and Ricci are extraordinary.

Raising Arizona

Raising Arizona (Joel Coen, 1987) - A-

The Coens do wonders with the English language ("We got a name for people like you. That name's called 'recidivism.'") and with comedy -- they revel in contradictions, making their characters quintessential white trash bumpkins who exhibit unexpected but consistent bursts of erudition and eloquence, alternating obstinate applications of logic to the absurd (questioning the coherence of "Freeze! Get down on the ground!"; H.I. trying to reassure Ed by telling her that she resigned as a police officer before setting off to steal the baby, and thus need not worry about breaking her oath to uphold the Constitution) with non sequiturs ("They say he's a decent man, so maybe his advisors are confused."). They are masters of tone -- it is so easy for this sort of idiosyncracy to become irritating -- and even wrap up all the silliness with an epilogue that's genuinely lovely, giving substance to what had seemed like perfectly selfish characters living in a perfectly amoral universe. It's not amoral, we realize, just unfair: the Arizonas have "more than they can handle," after all, while everyone else in the film has nothing. But that's beyond the call of duty: if you haven't seen this, rent it for the Coens' effortless command of everything they do.