A Modest Proposal: Donations for Reviews

OK, let’s try something new. Due to a number of other responsibilities, I’ve been remiss in keeping up this blog, and have seen relatively few films in general over the last six months. However, I have about three months before I throw myself headlong into school again, meaning I have some of the necessary time, if not the motivation. I don’t really want or need money for contributing to this blog, and don’t think I’ve paid enough dues to justify payment anyhow. The natural compromise, then, would seem to be a cause deserving of cash, with the promise of reviews as further enticement.

I have no idea how this will turn out, but I have time and a willingness to write in the name of a charitable institution, if anyone has the money to help out. At least to start, it will work like this: I will review one film of your choice from the Cannes or New York festivals (see pages for qualifying movies) for any donation of a minimum of $10 to the Hot Sun Foundation (more info below), a program that is using film to help foster community development, as the nation is in state of transition to a society with more civil liberties than before–including freedom of expression in media. I can’t say I have any personal connection to this cause or Kenya in general, but promotion of visual media education and aid for people in need are two causes I figure my readers espouse.

tl;dr version:

Donate at least $10 to the Hot Sun Foundation, send me a digital receipt or proof of payment, and I will watch and review any movie from the Cannes or New York film festival of your choice . These reviews will be decidedly longer than the usual capsules I post–500 words minimum, and I’ll even add some plot description if that’s your thing. You can choose a film I’ve already seen but haven’t reviewed here, or even Cannes competition films before my artificial cut-off date. Whatever. Email or leave a comment with your proof of donation and film choice, if you choose to take me up on this.  I’ll be sure to add your name to this post and mention you in the review, if you’d like.  

Below is a short video explaining a little bit of what the Hot Sun Foundation does, and the “Give Now” button links to the page with additional information and the opportunity to donate. Thanks in advance for any contributions.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)

As a portrayal of a dialectic between reactionary and reactive ideas, existential freedom and necessary restraint, A Dangerous Method is utterly, perhaps disappointingly solid. This is the fourth consecutive feature that Cronenberg has directed from someone else’s screenplay, and it’d be fair to say that his 21st-century output is markedly less sui generis than his earlier work, even as critics scrutinize these recent films for his signature. That is not to say that Method is entirely self-evident, though. Lurking under the surface of the movie’s explicitly scientific concern with psychoanalysis and its offspring is its doubling as a form of textual interpretation. Jung’s argument for a less parochial, more scientifically naive method of research looks forward to postmodernism’s distrust of reason and models which purport to be self-complete (i.e., any solitary method is dangerous), while Jung himself attempts to circumvent the fatalism of his own psychosexual hang-ups. At the same time, individual psychological reading is subverted by the economic disparity between Freud and Jung, pointing to modernism’s other critical forefather, Karl Marx. Unfortunately, these aspects generally take a backseat to staid, well-acted (Fassbender especially) period drama that feels increasingly stagey. Also, I’d be remiss to note that the first 10-15 minutes are dominated by Keira Knightley’s grotesque twitch-show, which at least functions to relativize the rest of her performance.

Grade: Worth a Look.

New York Film Festival, 2011

House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello)

Bizarrely received with relative indifference at the latest Cannes – no awards, and only a handful of vocal apologists – Bertrand Bonello’s House of Tolerance has started to develop a steadily increasing fan base since its American release in November in theaters and on demand. Regarding the latter distributive medium, House is one of the most ironic releases imaginable; not only does it boast a couple hundred of the most striking (and strikingly filmic) compositions of the year, but its last minute is essentially a middle finger to digital video’s ascendancy at the sake of film stock. Alas, most folks outside of major cities will be forced to see it on demand or on home video, but of course one of the paradoxical values of digital technology is its capacity to allow Bonello’s film to be seen by anyone who so desires – the trade-off is obviously rife with complexity.

Thankfully, so is House of Tolerance‘s fin de siècle dirge for independent bourgeois-serving brothels, pre-20th century capitalism, and celluloid – the bell frequently tolling for specific and symbolic entities simultaneously. The film’s overture is set at the twilight of the 19th century, as the eponymous brothel is ominously thrown into the 20th century with one prostitute’s face being sliced into a Joker grin. The chronologically-jumbled sequence builds up a foreboding tone through its use of repeated scenes and a sparely ambient score, pierced by aural shock cuts. The still photograph opening credit montage set to The Mighty Hannibal’s “The Right to Love You” announces the film’s intentions to draw comparisons between then and now, and the following title card’s announcement of the dawn of the 20th-century is easily suggestive of our own recent turn into a new century.

Bonello’s wacky chronology is not unmotivated, as proprietor Marie-France has contrived the women’s employment at the bordello to be essentially indefinite, as they are forever working off their debts for the ostentatious clothes and cosmetics necessary for their services. Yet the prostitutes are relatively more independent than they might be at home, and more secure than if they were to transfer to an urban brothel. These complex circumstances allow for a strange, diluted sense of nostalgia; the girls dream of bring proposed to by their clients, and yet they are deeply interdependent on one another. The near-absence of inter-female drama is almost startling, the sense of unarticulated community reaching its emotional climax in a brief revenge fantasy wherein the girls all sport lipstick scars in solidarity for their effaced friend. In fact, without implementing any obvious plot beyond the house’s looming foreclosure, Bonello elicits a number of similarly cursory moments of genuine catharsis–as when the “exotic” Algerian Samira breaks down reading a bogus phrenological study that explains that prostitutes are neurologically equivalent to criminals. In comparison, the film’s proper culmination, a manifestation of a dream in which the lacerated woman literally cries tears of come, loses a good portion of its punch by needlessly replaying a description of the dream featured in the opening movement. This mistake is easily forgiven, however, as the film’s last minute jarringly shifts from film to VHS-quality digital, a despairing subtraction echoed by one of the final, anachronistic shot of the oldest prostitute posted on the curb of a contemporary French street, turned toward the camera with an ambiguous countenance of perhaps fear, shame, or yearning. House of Tolerance captures the complexity of nostalgia in a myriad of ways, and yet neither entirely condemns nor capitulates to its attraction.

Grade: Essential.

Cannes Film Festival, 2011

The Descendants (Alexander Payne)

It’s been seven years since Alexander Payne struck middle-aged, middlebrow gold with the modestly budgeted road trip comedy Sideways. That film impressively filtered Payne’s brand of cynical satire through relatable characters and situations, balancing the neurotic Giamatti with the more immediately likable Thomas Haden Church (as Payne formerly failed to do in the grating About Schmidt). With The Descendants, Payne seems to be aiming at a similar audience, although this time pandering to one’s parental rather than bachelor self. The hiatus has not been good to Payne, though, as this movie’s balance is entirely off, as if the screenplay were a desultory amalgamation of one draft written as a comedy and a second as straight drama.

Worse yet, neither the comedy nor its sentimental depiction of familial complications are particularly good. Presumably some auds have been taken in by the “naturalistic” teen and pre-teen dialogue, which showily strives for parental nods of acknowledgement with every use of “hoe-bag” and “bro.” Struggling to improve upon his hilarious high school satire Election, Payne’s most egregious idea is the gratuitous Sid character, an implausibly unfeeling idiot who is, of course, dimly sweet by film’s end. Defending his intelligence to Clooney’s patriarch Matt King, who is inexplicably housing and paying for Sid’s travels around the islands of Hawaii, the latter boasts that he’s vice president of the chess club–and always has good weed. Payne takes an actual empirical trend–(some) teens’ increasingly blithe attitude toward adults–and augments it to the point of parody. Fine, if Sid’s not then going to poignantly reveal that he’s lost his father only a few months before. The Descendants wants both that exaggeration of contemporary behavior and earnest melodrama, which, if possible, calls for a lot defter handling than that.

In terms of Matt King’s problems, they are far more complicated than complex. The subplot regarding the property sale is either forced or underdeveloped, providing little more than a fourth quarter twist and a symbol for familial responsibility. Matt’s pursuit of his wife’s lover, meanwhile, provides both the highs and lows of the film’s attempt to balance realistic humor with sympathy. Clooney’s deck shoe scuffle to his friends’ house seems to tip the scale more toward comedy than pathetically real, confirmed by the awful decision to make the Kings’ friends the comic relief (the male friend is played by Rob Huebel, who is unable to deliver lines un-ironically). The trajectory, and film, peak with King’s confrontation with his wife’s beau. The scene is bookended by Matt’s daughter’s funny and accurate accusation of his being a “pussy,” and a spontaneous kiss with the beau’s wife that alone captures the blend of comedy and sensibility the rest of the film misfires on. That this is getting eaten up in its limited-theatre run is unsurprising; that it’s winning over critics, too, is somewhat baffling.

Grade: Dispensable.

New York Film Festival, 2011

The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar)

Something of a dream project for an auteur whose filmography is dominated by themes of gender, corporeal transgression, and convoluted family histories that might’ve been gleaned from telenovela trash bins, Almodóvar’s adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s novel Tarantula affords his most on-the-nose contemplation of gender identification–for better and for worse. Despite its evocation of Georges Franju’s classic body horror Eyes Without a Face and Hostel-esque trappings, the film carves very little new territory in the director’s work, especially with the introduction of the first flashback title card. As is typical in of his work, the plot includes murder, rape, and familial reunion; but at the film’s center more blatantly than ever is, as Lacan would surely approve, the literal phallus.

I would advise those who appreciate surprise to stop reading now, for it is imperative to mention that The Skin I Live In is about a young man’s involuntary transsexual surgery at the hands of the father of a girl who he kinda sorta raped while tripping on pills at a wedding reception. The facts of the matter aren’t entirely inferable until about halfway through the movie, after Dr. Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) has already attempted intimacy with his psychotic dermatology patient, Vera. In this case, though, the old Crying Game trick is played solely on the audience, not the characters involved, as flashbacks reveal that Vera, who looks uncannily like Ledgard’s wife, is in fact Vicente, the aforementioned rapist-cum-victim. My impatience for plot description having run its course, there is yet more to the soapy story line, but the film is at its best when focusing on Ledgard and Vera/Vicente. Banderas is perfectly cast, instilling a necessary level of urbanity into Ledgard’s sexed-up Dr. Frankenstein, whose room is dominated by an enormous widescreen TV which receives input from a camera aimed at V’s bed. The digital image of his/her body is rhymed with large-scale oils of women in Olympia poses throughout Ledgard’s mansion; yet while the doctor is a voyeur and a surgeon of the body, his own sexuality is undercut throughout the film, as it’s revealed that his first wife actually ran off with his lascivious half-brother.

The more obvious sexual consideration is that of Vera/Vicente, though, who transforms from chauvinistic yet not entirely unsympathetic male to an almost quintessentially beautiful female (played by Elena Anaya), with the help of Dr. Ledgard’s transgenetic experimentation and bottomless wallet. Vera’s reception of the procedure, which spans several years, is initially rebellious–in a particularly exquisite shot, V collects the pieces of torn up dresses with a vacuum hose–but she eventually comes to complete identification with Vera, inflected by opium and a touch of Stockholm syndrome. Vera’s memories are suppressed by yoga and sublimated into the construction of creepy straw busts pasted with fabric rippings, and she and Ledgard initiate a (pointedly never consummated) love affair until a newspaper photo of Vicente shatters her defenses. When V reunites with his unconditionally adoring mother in the final scene, the screen fades out with his/her tear-stricken, potently symbolic admission: “It’s Vicente.” Almodóvar’s metaphor comes full circle, culminating in a beautifully pithy cap to one of his more circumlocutory representations of gender dislocation.

Grade: Recommended.

Cannes Main Competition, 2011
New York Film Festival, 2011

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)

Reining in the superfluous bravura which both distinguished and inhibited his earlier features, Nicolas Winding Refn’s biggest budget and narrowest scope yet helps focus his immense stylistic talents in Drive. Conflating present-day Los Angeles with a romantically impressionist facsimile of ’80s thrillers, the film is unabashedly retro, constructed on Hollywood archetypes without calling attention to its own quaintness (save for Albert Brooks’ cursory subversion of an pizzeria as mob front for a Jew).

Of course, even expertly crafted pastiche of an imperfect source comes at a price; when tone is of primary importance at the expense of substance, the attempt to cultivate sincere human relationships comes into conflict. Ryan Gosling’s platonic romance with a mother whose husband’s in prison is portrayed in the same language as its car chases, relying on a sustained mood between crime and love with an evocative electronic soundtrack and picturesque montages.

But with a filmmaker as skilled at manipulating viewers’ viscera as Refn, the hollowness is hardly felt. The shifting rhythm between high-adrenaline car chases (of which, for all the pretense, there are about one and a half) and Gosling’s quiet self-reflection (see Le Samourai for monosyllabic source material) and passive romantic pursuit crescendoes at the intersection between those two worlds in an elevator, in which a sexy fracturing of reality segues into a stomach-turning murder.

Whereas Refn’s Valhalla Rising, which he co-wrote, boasted a similarly unabating tone, Hossein Amini’s adaptation of James Sallis’ novel keeps the viewer from suffering with menacing humor via Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, and Ron Perlman. Cranston’s serpentine performance is particularly impressive, his balance between mendacity and avuncularity injecting the necessary pathos into his tragic demise. Indeed, where Refn’s writing tends to grasp for pretentious symbolism, Amini’s reductivism allows for simply equivocal shots as in Gosling’s final killing of Brooks, wherein his wraithlike character is pruned to a shadow. Seductively superficial, Drive represents an earnest throwback to a less-is-more disposition toward action filmmaking.

Grade: Recommended.

Cannes Main Competition, 2011

The Ladykillers (Joel & Ethan Coen)

Diametrically opposed in comedic style to Alexander Mackendrick’s mild, quasi-dark original, the Coen brothers’ screwball takeoff on The Ladykillers is much more complacent than any of their coyly dubbed Idiot Trilogy. The film’s logline will claim that it’s about a casino heist pulled off with the incognizant assistance of an elderly widow, but plot plays second fiddle to the Coens’ mirthful mining of Southern dialects for all their comically mellifluous value. The plan for the heist is deliberately simple and desultory (though the criminal quintet still adumbrate it meticulously), and never seems in jeopardy of collapse from the police’s ingenuity.

The directors’ passion for the project is only fully apparent in ringleader Professor G.H. Dorr (Tom Hanks) and widow Marva Munson’s (Irma P. Hall) power-shifting exchanges and digressions. Munson is lonely, black, Jesus-loving woman who talks to her erstwhile husband’s portrait (a reference to Jean Renoir’s middle-class murder pic, The Crime of M. Lange) and spends her overabundant free time griping about hip hop, hilariously and anachronistically mocking, “I left my wallet in El Segundo, hmph!” Dorr, meanwhile, is the original picture’s Alec Guinness character re-imagined as a poetry-reciting, nihilistic intellectual whose genteel affectation is only less disguise than moral re-orientation. Hanks and Hall are both excellent with their stylized dialogue and Southern accents, his breathy bombast set against her pitifully sincere championing of Bob Jones University and the Bible.

The brothers’ try their hand at a third cultural argot, to much less success, in the hip hop culture to which Hall wags her finger at, embodied by inside thug Marlon Wayans. With this caricature, subtlety is swapped for excess, as Wayans dons a gold dollar-sign chain and repeatedly discomfits white people by addressing them as “nigga.” One could easily mistake the Coens’ authorship here for Wayans’ own, circa Scary Movie 3, sans the self-conscious self-deprecation. The nadir of their catalogue, however, is reached with J.K. Simmons’ running (ha, ha!) gag about irritable bowel syndrome, a painfully ill-advised plot device. When Hanks and Hall’s patois are dancing around and deflecting off of each other, the eccentric rhythms are beguiling; but, by the time the heist’s aftermath demand center stage, the characteristically absurdist ending reads more like a tired distillation of their other works’ philosophies.

Grade: Worth a Look.

Cannes Main Competition, 2004