Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta Salon. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta Salon. Mostrar todas las entradas
15.1.10
"Fish Tank", de Andrea Arnold (críticas)
In the first scenes she comes across a group of girls practicing hip-hop dance moves on a patch of asphalt. She taunts and provokes these apparent rivals, pushing the confrontation toward violence and delivering a nose-breaking head butt to one of them. A few minutes later Mia is in a fenced-in vacant lot trying to free a horse tethered to a concrete block. She swerves from rage to tenderness, and may not even know which is which.
What does Mia want? To be free, to be safe, to be left alone, to be loved. The contradictions of adolescence have rarely been conveyed with such authenticity and force. Though Mia is poor, unruly and obviously, in social-work parlance, “at risk”— her mother (Kierston Wareing) and younger sister, with whom she lives, are equally volatile, or even more so — “Fish Tank” is not drawn from the case files, and does not solicit pity. Rather, thanks to Ms. Arnold’s fine-grained realism and the astonishing performance of Katie Jarvis, the nonprofessional actress who plays Mia, it is a diamond-hard reflection on the peril and progress of a fragile soul in a bad situation.
A trained actor might have taken care to sort out and communicate Mia’s emotions, giving the audience a clear perspective on the girl’s inner life. Instead, Ms. Jarvis’s tentative, sometimes opaque self-presentation registers the crucial fact about Mia, which is her confusion. She is a puzzle to herself, unable to understand, much less control, her fury, her desire or her fear. When she dances alone in an empty apartment, she is not exactly at peace, but at least in a state of cease-fire in her ongoing war with herself and everything else.
Although she prefers to be alone, Mia craves connection. She develops a tentative friendship with one of the young men who keep that poor half-metaphorical horse, and a far more complicated relationship with Connor (Michael Fassbender), her mother’s new boyfriend. Mom, slightly less miserable and abusive when drunk — and therefore, perhaps luckily for Mia, rarely sober — has brought home a bit of decency as well as fun. Or so it appears. Connor is friendly, generous and easy in the company of Mia and Sophie, her prickly, foulmouthed little sister.
He takes the family fishing — his car is among his many attractive assets — and lends Mia his video camera so she can record a dance routine for an audition. More unsettling implications gather slowly, and arise partly out of the welter of Mia’s feelings about Connor. She sees him as a big brother, a father figure and an easy-going pal, but she also has a crush on him. As it intensifies, so does our unease about Connor’s response. Like Mia, the audience trusts him at first because we have no other choice, but we come to suspect a predatory, deceiving side to his character long before she does. How could she? She’s 15.
“Fish Tank,” insofar as it concerns the relationship between a restless teenage girl and an unreliable older man, bears some resemblance to “An Education,” Lone Scherfig’s much-praised recent movie. That film wraps its sexual queasiness in period glamour, fetishizing early-’60s clothes, cigarettes and cultural references as ardently as its young heroine. Ms. Arnold is no less absorbed in the details of her film’s setting — the graffiti in the corridors, the litter on the sidewalks, the trash on television — and her harsh brand of realism is no less a style than Ms. Scherfig’s wry worldliness. We find ourselves, in “Fish Tank,” in a world made familiar by the films of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and other socially conscious anatomists of British misery.
It’s a place I’m usually (perhaps perversely) happy to visit, and to locate Ms. Arnold’s work in a recognizable tradition is not to slight her particular and considerable strengths as a filmmaker. Her first feature, “Red Road,” was a tour de force of psychological insight slightly undermined by a script that relied a bit too much on late reversals and surprises. “Fish Tank” goes a little astray toward the end, in a scene of breathless pursuit across a marshy seaside wasteland. (To say more would give too much away.) The sequence is powerful and skillfully filmed, but the dread and horror it injects into the story seem superfluously melodramatic.
Otherwise, “Fish Tank” is nearly flawless. Mr. Fassbender, who was the Irish militant Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen’s “Hunger” and the suave British film critic in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” is quickly establishing himself as an actor of impressive range and skill. The slightest imprecision in his portrayal of Connor — too much overt menace, or too little — would have thrown the film off balance. (It may have helped that Ms. Arnold gave the script to her cast one scene at a time, so that they did not know what was coming next.) And Ms. Wareing, who appeared in Mr. Loach’s “It’s a Free World,” keeps her woebegone character just this side of caricature.
But the movie is Mia’s, whose life is too much for her to handle but who must learn to manage it anyway. Whether she will succeed is a big question, of course, but Ms. Jarvis’s triumph, and Ms. Arnold’s, are hardly in doubt.
FISH TANK
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Andrea Arnold; director of photography, Robbie Ryan; edited by Nicolas Chaudeurge; production designer, Helen Scott; produced by Kees Kasander and Nick Laws; released by IFC Films. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Katie Jarvis (Mia), Michael Fassbender (Connor), Kierston Wareing (Joanne), Rebecca Griffiths (Tyler) and Harry Treadaway (Billy).
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By Andrew O'Hehir/Salon
Here's what interests the supremely talented British director Andrea Arnold: ordinary people's lives, poised between transformation and despair; the dire landscapes of sub-middle-class contemporary existence; dirty, dangerous and exceptionally hot sex. Given all that, it might seem surprising that Arnold has virtually no profile in the United States: Her debut feature, the terrific Glasgow-set erotic thriller "Red Road," came and went briskly in 2007, and her new "Fish Tank," which may be even better and has piled up various British and European awards, is likely to go almost unnoticed amid the blizzard of imports on the IFC Films slate.
I'm telling you here and now to seek out "Fish Tank," either at a big-city theater or via VOD, because it's absolute dynamite. As cheesy as this is, you could say it combines the best elements of "Precious" and "An Education," and not be cheating. It's an explosive female coming-of-age story set against a dreary backdrop of poverty, abuse and neglect -- in this case the grim suburban housing developments on the working-class outer fringes of London (the title refers to a certain blocky style of glass-fronted apartment) -- with an astonishing breakout lead performance from Katie Jarvis, its teenage star. But while those two films, each of them admirable in its way, are legitimate Oscar contenders, "Fish Tank" is more likely to be a furrin-cinema footnote, too confrontational, too hardass and too implacably British -- in the gritty, contemporary, non-period sense -- for Yank art-house customers.
Perhaps more to the point, Arnold's combination of dense London-dialect slang and hand-held camerawork, along with her steadfast refusal to sentimentalize her characters or deliver an easily digestible moral or message, makes "Fish Tank" a steep mountain to climb for many viewers. But that stuff is also exactly what makes it so great. Fifteen-year-old Mia (Jarvis) is indeed a misunderstood loner, derided by her slutty boozehound mom (another tremendous performance, from Kierston Wareing) and pursued by well-meaning but moronic social workers, who dreams of stardom as a hip-hop dancer. She's also a bottomless fount of poorly managed rage and emotion, a skinny wraith clad in track suits, too much bling, bad makeup and what my mother once called (in reference to a teenage girlfriend) "that stepped-on look."
Furthermore, when Mia gets a look at Connor (Michael Fassbender), the genial, muscular Irish dude her mum has dragged home from somewhere -- well, let's just say that in her two features so far Arnold has breathed new life into those feminist film theories about the "female gaze." Arnold has an ecumenical appreciation for both male and female hotness, to be sure -- we see plenty of the curvaceous Wareing in her Frederick's of Hollywood-knockoff underthings -- but she provides Mia, and us, with a hugely lascivious serving of the impressively shirtless Fassbender, jeans barely hanging off his ass, as Connor sleepily makes tea in the kitchen.
As for the Irish-German Fassbender, previously known for playing Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen's "Hunger," he's both a fine actor and a major star waiting to happen. This movie presumably won't get him there, but this guy is going to cause spontaneous combustion among numerous women, and no doubt quite a few men too. His Connor is simultaneously a likable character and a borderline-sinister one, which is a difficult combo to pull off. His avuncular interest in Mia is genuine, at first, and innocent enough given the context of the alcohol- and estrogen-infused apartment Mia shares with her mom and younger sister. But she keeps pushing at it and pushing at it, finding opportunities to touch him, picking fights and making up, staring at him with unbridled teenage lust. Hey, what's a guy to do?
No, I'm not suggesting that what happens between Connor and Mia is her fault -- he's an adult, at least nominally, and she isn't. But the fact that it's a terrible idea to sleep with your mother's 35-year-old lover, whose provenance and background are unknown, doesn't mean that Mia doesn't want to. In Arnold's view, both in "Red Road" and here, human sexuality is an explosive device that doesn't defuse easily, and when it goes off its ripple effects can be negative, positive, surprising and devastating. (Be prepared: She's also disturbingly frank about the fact that illicit or forbidden sex is often the hottest -- however we may feel about it seconds or hours later.)
On one level, "Fish Tank" tells a familiar, even archetypal, story, one that's been told in different social settings by Thomas Hardy and Henry James -- the seduction and disillusionment of a young girl -- but once again Arnold uses this familiarity as a source of strength. While the filmmaking world is awash with low-budget hyperrealism these days, few directors at any level have Arnold's gift for mounting suspense and powerful emotion, or her flair for thrilling, immediate images. (The terrific cinematography is by Robbie Ryan.)
If what happens between Connor and Mia is in some sense predictable, it's because the mistakes they've made are so recognizable, and we understand the tragic or near-tragic territory where they're likely to lead. But I don't think "Fish Tank" is entirely or principally about that story. It's about Mia, one of the truly memorable, deeply flawed movie heroines of recent years, as she wanders across this exurban wasteland in her pose of aggrieved nobility, head-butting rival chicks on the playground or futilely struggling to free a half-starved horse tethered in a junkyard. It's about her startlingly moving hip-hop dance numbers, performed to borrowed CDs in a vacant apartment. (As in "Red Road," Arnold makes marvelous use of pop music, including Bobby Womack's heartbreaking cover of "California Dreamin'," which comes to stand for the impossible dreams Mia must give up.)
Most magical of all is the fact that Arnold believes in the possibility of deliverance, even in a life apparently as closed-down and barren as Mia's. If I can borrow another feminist-theory term, Arnold argues for Mia's "agency," for the fact that her decisions are her own and that even the worst ones -- which get pretty bad, worse than I've told you -- contain the possibility of transformation. There's a scene at the end of the movie when Mia and her sister, in defiance of all plausibility, end up dancing to Nas' "Life's a Bitch" with their mother, who for most of the film has been a bitter, drunken harridan. (One of the film's ironies is that Connor is a much better and more loving parent -- at least, you know, up to a point.) There's no way Arnold should be able to pull off such a stereotypical chick-flick move in this universe, but something about the contrast between the driving nihilism of the music and the unexpected tenderness of the image totally destroyed me.
Of course we recognize that this moment of reconciliation and female solidarity is fleeting, but it still unlocks a secret to this wonderful, challenging movie: None of these characters, as trapped by economics and psychology and low expectations as they may be, is doomed to do tomorrow exactly what they did today. What has not killed Mia -- and girlfriend is tough to kill -- has made her stronger.
"Fish Tank" opens Jan. 15 at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York, with wider release to follow. Beginning Jan. 27, it's also available on-demand via IFC In Theaters, on many cable-TV systems.
28.12.09
Top Ten de 2009 (Salon)
By Andrew O'Hehir
All I have to say about 2009 in film is that I'm sure they'll find movies to give those 10 best-picture Oscar nominations to, but it won't be any of the ones on my list. That's not a shocking development, but in this year of global recession, the distance between the massive pop-Hollywood spectacles and the little-noticed obscurities way out on the cultural margins seems to have widened into a yawning abyss.
Actually, though, this has been a pretty good year for the independent-film sector, at least in economic terms. I know, that goes against both perceptions and the headline news: the implosion of Miramax and the pseudo-indie, mid-budget bombs churned out by mini-major studios like Fox Searchlight (e.g., "Amelia" and "Whip It"). But it's true anyway.
"Paranormal Activity" took this year's Blair Witch Memorial Award for viral-marketed zero-budget hit — grossing well over $100 million to date — and "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" has defied the film industry's cumulative demographic and marketing wisdom to the tune of $40 million or so. If the major studios' Indiewood specialty arms are dead or dying, old-fashioned film-festival acquisitions suddenly look like good business again.
My problem, which may be strictly my own, is that I found a lot of this year's indie hits to be predictable, formulaic and fundamentally uninteresting. The top-grossing foreign-language film of 2009, to date, is "Coco Before Chanel," a movie I saw and declined to review because it bored me too much. (Anne Fontaine is one of my favorite French directors, but I thought she was poorly matched to star Audrey Tautou and the orthodox biopic material.) Pedro Almodóvar's movie-movie noir "Broken Embraces" may wind up giving Fontaine's film a run for the money, but while I found many of the individual elements in "Broken Embraces" beautiful — the photography, the seriocomic tone, the central performances of Penélope Cruz and Lluís Homar — it never congealed into a satisfying whole. (I've been told to see it again, and I plan to.)
One major foreign release still lies ahead: Michael Haneke's austere black-and-white period piece "The White Ribbon," already winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the best-film and best-director prizes at the European Film Awards. While it's a typically dark and enigmatic Haneke work that will surely attract some big-city viewers, it lacks the contemporary setting and the Lynchian combination of violence and mystery that made his "Caché" a surprise hit a few holiday seasons back.
One imported hit that I think is being oddly dismissed by so-called serious critics is Lone Scherfig's "An Education," a pitch-perfect pre-feminist coming-of-age fable that ought to make Carey Mulligan a movie star. It struck me as a lovely film with a depth of moral seriousness that's partly masked by its sets, costumes and charm — and I'm afraid that even in the year of Kathryn Bigelow's unexpected resurgence, "An Education" is the victim of some latent sexism.
As for Bigelow's "Hurt Locker," anointed by critics' groups from coast to coast as an Oscar front-runner, uh ... how can I put this? I liked it. I'm a Bigelow fan from way back to "Near Dark." Way worse things could happen than to see her on the stage of the Kodak Theatre clutching a statuette (and looking fabulous while her ex-husband glowers in the audience) come March. But "The Hurt Locker" just doesn't speak to me the way the films on this list do. It was terrific, visceral cinema — but I don't treasure the experience of seeing it, or yearn to repeat it. And let's face it: While the acting was excellent, the film's dialogue, what little there was of it, was Michael Bay-grade awful.
So what about the movies I did like? From the Hollywood-financial point of view, it's a whole lotta nothing. Only two movies on my list grossed more than $1 million in the United States — and only one of those made it past $2 million. I've got two films by American directors, only one of them made in the U.S. I swear, none of this was deliberate. I'm not consciously trying to come off like that snotty, unshaven alt-weekly critic from 1989, talking up Balkan-dialect movies nobody but him has ever seen. (I wasn't even that guy in 1989, or not exactly.)
I do think, however, that the aesthetic conservatism that dominates American cinema at the moment — expressed on the indie fringes by a talky, unadventurous and fatally dull strain of neorealism — has taken its toll on me. I'm like a junkie GI who's come home from Saigon and discovered to his dismay that the shit on the streets just ain't strong enough, man! Screw these movies where people with bad haircuts sit around and drone on about their relationships, humorously or otherwise! I want Filipina transgender hookers, imitation mid-'60s crime flicks, opaque Argentine class warfare, mean-spirited Jewish fables and the completely inappropriate glorification of violent British convicts! And here they are.
Seriously, though — I didn't put any movies on this list because I respected them. Fuck that for a game of darts, as my late Uncle Liam said on many occasions. These are the movies that dazzled me this year, that disoriented me and shifted my reality prism and messed with my head. If in most cases hardly anybody else saw them or liked them, if the great humming and coughing steamroller of defective late capitalism squished them flat without even noticing, that is strictly not my fault. Happy happies, everybody. I'll catch you on the flippety-flop.
"Hunger" — British visual artist Steve McQueen's debut feature, about the Bobby Sands-IRA hunger strikes of the early 1980s, is so implausible on so many levels it's a wonder it works at all. Straddling the boundary between narrative and experimental cinema, between pure visuals and talky drama, between Terrence Malick and, say, Sean O'Casey, "Hunger" is in fact one of the decade's true breakthroughs. Plus, people on all sides of the Irish-British debate disliked it, which suggests McQueen was doing something right.
"Bronson" — Another fact-based British drama that isn't anything like what you'd think when you hear that phrase. Nicolas Winding Refn's operatic, visionary work about the legendary, ultra-violent English convict who took the name Charlie Bronson shamelessly breaks all the rules and wears a pathological obsession with Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange" on its sleeve. I shouldn't rank it remotely this high, but I will anyway.
"Il Divo" — Rigorous, adventurous and explosive, Paolo Sorrentino's remarkable film takes the cinematic bravado of Martin Scorsese and the technical wizardry of David Fincher and applies them to the indecipherable story of Giulio Andreotti, the fabled "Black Pope" of 20th-century Italian politics. Part of the dazzling renaissance of Italian cinema, which may look sudden from here but has been brewing for a while. (See "Gomorrah," below.)
"A Serious Man" — I blow hot and cold on the Coens, but even their weaker films (e.g., "Burn After Reading," "The Ladykillers") reward repeat viewings — and their better films reward them even more. This utterly delicious black-comic Jewish fable, set in a middle-class Midwestern suburb in the '60s (a place that still carries buried undertones of Eastern European shtetl) is among their funniest and darkest films, both humane and ruthless in a way that's highly Coen-specific. As the last shot faded to black, I sat up in my seat and said, "Oh my fucking God!" Which is precisely right.
"The White Ribbon" — Michael Haneke's enigmatic and violent black-and-white yarn, set in rural Germany just before World War I, doesn't open until Dec. 30. I'll get to it then in more detail, but as is customary with the chilly Austrian-born director, "The White Ribbon" is a slippery fish. Ostensibly a parable about the roots of fascism, it's also a tale of faith, punishment, love and the petty cruelties of ordinary life. It's another of Haneke's unresolvable shaggy-dog mysteries, and simultaneously the most beautiful, most chilling and most forgiving of them.
"The Limits of Control" — People I know mostly either loved or hated Jim Jarmusch's stylish and surprisingly political twist on the '60s European crime film, driven by Spanish settings, Christopher Doyle's gorgeous photography and Isaach De Bankolé's iconic star presence and devastating wardrobe. Seriously, what's not to like? But then, I don't think this movie is about its conclusion (which some find dogmatic) or its reiterative-fragments-of-dialogue story. It's more like a Bach fugue, and it's about the moments, the silences, the faces and bodies and clothes, the endless cups of coffee. One of the indie pioneer's best ever.
"Serbis" — Based on the horrified word of mouth at Cannes in 2008, I didn't see Filipino director Brillante Mendoza's heartwarming family saga set in a dead-end porn theater until this year, when it had a very brief Stateside appearance. Last time I depend on gossip from a pack of prudish Europeans! Sure, the Family theater (yuk, yuk) is about the sleaziest place in the world — and the film includes one legendarily disgusting scene — but Mendoza's portrayal of the struggling family behind it, and the diverse and colorful sex trade it supports, has tremendous lyricism and compassion.
"35 Shots of Rum" — With virtually no audience outside France, Claire Denis has become that nation's leading chronicler of social change and dislocation. This hushed, minimalist portrait of an Afro-French father and daughter on the Parisian fringes may be Denis' loveliest and most challenging film. "35 Shots of Rum" builds slowly toward an enormous emotional payoff, and along the way offers one of the most heartbreaking and unlikely uses of a pop song in film history (the song in question being the Commodores' "Night Shift").
"Gomorrah" — In adapting a nonfiction book by Roberto Saviano about the Camorra (or Neapolitan mafia), Italian director Matteo Garrone draws on his nation's rich cinematic history for this big-canvas social drama that invokes Antonioni, Fellini and Francis Coppola. A spectacular big-screen accomplishment, whose gorgeous bleakness is well-captured in a brand-new two-disc special edition DVD from the Criterion Collection.
"The Headless Woman" — Argentine director Lucrecia Martel's gorgeous and deeply troubling '70s class-warfare drama was booed at Cannes, which is way beyond ironic given its themes of blind privilege and willful ignorance. Martel tries to break through the language of conventional film and show us how her central character, an upper-middle-class blond woman (María Onetto), lapses into amnesia rather than face the consequences of her own borderline-criminal conduct. Like every other film on this list, "Headless Woman" compels a second viewing — and then compels you to recognize that it's shown you things you still don't understand. (Now available on DVD from Strand Releasing.)
Honorable mentions (alphabetical): Lars von Trier's bloody, beautiful and fatally insane "Antichrist" established, in case anyone was wondering, that he no longer has an American audience; Andrew Bujalski's "Beeswax" was ignored by both the hipster audience that used to like him and the grown-up audience that should; Almodóvar's "Broken Embraces," on which see above; Scherfig's "An Education," also discussed above; Terry Gilliam's gorgeous and daring "Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus," with a wonderful last performance by Heath Ledger; Götz Spielmann's twisty Euro-noir "Revanche"; Carlos Reygadas' Mexican-Mennonite adultery drama "Silent Light"; Nina Paley's irrepressible (and uncopyrighted!) feminist take on the "Ramayana," "Sita Sings the Blues"; Pablo Larraín's demented Pinochet-era disco fable "Tony Manero"; Zack Snyder's brooding, black-comic "Watchmen."
Check in tomorrow for Andrew O'Hehir's picks for best movie of the decade.
Best Movies of 2009 (Salon)
By Stephanie Zacharek
A month or so ago, as critics' top-10 lists started trickling onto various Oscar-related blogs, I noticed that one list or another would be branded "idiosyncratic," and I started to wonder exactly what that meant. Is there a hypothetically perfect list, a list that follows some ideal template? Is the ideal list the one that's most in tune with the Zeitgeist? One that doesn't contain any foreign-language or otherwise "weird" films that the majority of the American populace hasn't seen? Considering that 2009 saw the theatrical release of some 600 movies — not that any critic comes close to seeing them all — isn't any list made by any individual human being going to be idiosyncratic in some way? The notion that there's an acceptable critical view, that certain movies must — or must not — appear on a list in order for any given critic to be taken seriously, flies in the face of what criticism is supposed to be.
The year that's just passed was a great one for movies, but perhaps not necessarily for mainstream blockbusters that whole clusters of critics automatically got behind. "Up in the Air" and "Up," both generally well-reviewed, are clearly favorites among many critics; "Avatar" may have made it onto some lists as well, although many critics had filed their lists by the time they were able to see it. But that still leaves dozens — no, hundreds — of odds and ends, smaller movies that any critic or moviegoer may or may not have seen. And unless you live in a major metropolitan area with a good independent movie theater, those movies probably won't reach you until they come out on DVD. Heck, even if you live in New York City, they may have barely reached you: One movie on my list played in New York for just a week, although thankfully, it can be seen on DVD.
The harsh reality is that theatrical-distribution problems for independent films are only going to increase. Most people will see these smaller pictures at home, although the silver lining to this particular cloud is that at least those movies can be seen, pretty much anywhere. And so I invite you to draw up your own list of favorite movies of 2009, whether you watched them in a theater or at home, with reckless disregard for what anyone thinks you should like. In other words, feel free to be idiosyncratic.
Here are my 10 favorites which, beyond the top three, are not necessarily in any particular order:
"Summer Hours" — Olivier Assayas has made a lyrical, bittersweet picture about preserving the past by letting go of it. Juliette Binoche gives a wonderful, slightly prickly performance as one of a group of siblings who can't agree on how their mother's estate should be divided. (Edith Scob, who as a young woman starred in Georges Franju's "Eyes Without a Face," plays the matriarch, superbly.)
"Fantastic Mr. Fox" — No movie gave me more pleasure this year than Wes Anderson's stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl's marvelously disreputable children's novel, a picture made with so much care and love that it practically glows. And this is the Clooney performance of the year: His elegance and charm find a natural home in the body of a handsome, wily fox puppet.
"Antichrist" — Hell hath frozen over: A Lars von Trier movie has found its way onto my list. I've always found von Trier's movies pretentious and misanthropic in a self-aggrandizing way, as if he were looking down on his audience and pronouncing them unworthy as human beings. But "Antichrist," in which Charlotte Gainsbourg gives an astonishing performance as a grief-stricken wife and mother creeping toward madness, is different. There's more raw pain in this picture than most filmmakers would dare, or be able, to express in a single work. "Antichrist" isn't easy to love, but I can't look away from it: This is the movie in which von Trier reaches out to us, instead of just looking down.
"The September Issue" and "Valentino: The Last Emperor" — These two beautifully made documentaries — by, respectively, R.J. Cutler and journalist turned filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer — are ostensibly about fashion. But really, they're both about the nature of work and of partnership, as well as the value of manmade beauty and craftsmanship in our world. In "The September Issue," Vogue editor Anna Wintour and creative director Grace Coddington channel two very different, often conflicting visions into the pages of their magazine — the chemistry works in spite of itself. And "Valentino" shows us the Designer Who Needs Only One Name and his movie-star-handsome partner (in both business and life), Giancarlo Giammetti, residing over a dying butterfly of a world, the planet of haute couture.
"Bright Star" — Jane Campion's film version of the romance between poet John Keats and literal girl-next-door Fanny Brawne is unfussy, passionate and gently erotic. It's also one of the few pictures I can think of that don't render the world of poets and poetry dead on arrival. Sturdy but delicate performances by Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw sure don't hurt.
"Coraline" — Henry Selick's stop-motion animated picture, adapted from Neil Gaiman's creepy-wonderful kids' book, is visually inventive and gloriously tactile. In a movie universe where the human touch is becoming a thing of the past, Selick champions the beauty of visible fingerprints.
"The International" — German director Tom Tykwer makes a smart, quiet, gorgeous-looking thriller for grown-ups, and — surprise! — it tanks at the box office. The cutting here is meticulous but leisurely; the mood is one of restless melancholy. Although Tykwer's craftsmanship deserves to be seen on the big screen, it at least deserves a second chance on the small one.
"Lake Tahoe" — In 2006 the young Mexican filmmaker Fernando Eimbcke gave us the strange and lovely coming-of-age tale (shot in black-and-white, no less) "Duck Season." Eimbcke's most recent picture, "Lake Tahoe," earned accolades at various film festivals, but was barely released in the United States. (It played for one week in New York.) The movie covers a day in the life of a young man who's just suffered a death in the family, and it's the kind of picture in which nothing, and yet everything, happens. Eimbcke's style of filmmaking is disciplined, serene and ultimately deeply moving, and he knows the value of keeping the camera still. Shaky-cam haters unite! ("Lake Tahoe" is available through Film Movement.)
"Broken Embraces" — Pedro Almodóvar's latest, a gorgeous melodramatic fantasy about what it means to live for movies, has the go-for-broke passion and lush craziness of early Almodóvar pictures like "Matador" and "Law of Desire." And he always brings out the best in Penélope Cruz: Here, she's a dazzling, vital beauty who shows how exhausting it is to be a full-time dream girl.
"Star Trek" — Mainstream sci-fi filmmaking, done with heart and intelligence, courtesy of J.J. Abrams. Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto, as the older and younger versions of Spock, are the tag team of the year.
But wait! There's more: Claire Denis' "35 Rhums," James Gray's "Two Lovers," Ruben Fleischer's "Zombieland," Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," James Toback's "Tyson," Steve McQueen's "Hunger," Mike Judge's "Extract," Werner Herzog's "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," Jean-Marc Vallée's "The Young Victoria," Scott Cooper's "Crazy Heart," Oren Moverman's "The Messenger," Sam Raimi's "Drag Me to Hell," Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker," Ramin Bahrani's "Goodbye Solo," Richard Loncraine's "My One and Only," and, for truly cheap thrills, Pierre Morel's "Taken."
20.12.09
Best Films of the Decade (Salon)
Link
Una interesante lista de películas de la década, a razón de una por persona, por un grupo de invitados en la nueva página Film Salon. Recomendable y muy muy discutible... De Rivette a "Jackass", de Altman a P.T. Anderson. Se irán agregando más colaboraciones en los próximos días.
18.12.09
"Avatar", de James Cameron (Salon)
The problem with taking 15 years to bring audiences the future of filmmaking is that someone else is bound to get to the future before you do. And while there are certain technical effects in James Cameron's "Avatar" that aren't quite like anything we've ever seen before, the movie is hardly a historical event, or even a grand achievement. It is a very expensive-looking, very flashy entertainment, albeit one that groans under the weight of clumsy storytelling in the second half and features some of the most godawful dialogue this side of "Attack of the Clones." Sensitive viewers will also want to note that two characters engage in tasteful sex under a special tree that bears a close resemblance to a bachelor-pad fiber-optic lamp. Clearly, Cameron has looked everywhere for inspiration -- nature, art, the Spencer's Gifts catalog -- and this tree, in particular, isn't just any old plug-in prop. "There is something really interesting going on in there biologically," says the brainy scientist character played by Sigourney Weaver, and believe you me, she doesn't know the half of it.
"Avatar" would be great fun, if only Cameron -- the picture's writer, director, producer and editor -- had a sense of humor about himself, which he clearly doesn't. Instead Cameron -- who is no longer just King of the World but Emperor of the Universe -- has to make it clear he's addressing grand themes: Characters must prove their bravery, their humility as human beings and their sensitivity to indigenous peoples. Like those "revolutionary" westerns directors kept making in the early '70s, or like the later "Dances With Wolves," "Avatar" is Cameron's "Let's be fair to the Indians" movie. And while Cameron's political stand is solidly liberal -- he takes a clear position, in particular, on the corporatization of military power -- this isn't a picture fleshed out with deep, multifaceted ideas. Cameron is less a sage than a canny bonehead. Characters signal their motives and intentions with thundering dialogue, mouthed by the actors in ways that suggest the guy at the top has a tin ear, or at least some pretty strange ideas about punctuation. "It'd be a fresh start. In a new world. And the pay is good. Very good," says the movie's hero, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), in an early scene, as he begins to explain his mission, and the movie's premise.
Jake is a wheelchair-bound Marine, injured in the line of duty, and because he happens to have the right DNA, he's been recruited to travel to a distant planet called Pandora, where a bunch of suits, along with the U.S. military and some scientist types, have set up shop. Their goal is to mine a special ore -- its name, "unobtanium," is one of the movie's only truly witty jokes -- that will allow them to solve the Earth's energy crisis. The big drag is that to get the magic rocks, they need to relocate, either by force or reason, the relatively peaceful Pandora natives, very tall blue people with pointed ears known as the Na'vi.
The atmosphere on Pandora is poisonous to humans, so the Earth bigwigs have developed something called the Avatar Program, in which human DNA is combined with Na'vi DNA to create remote-controlled half-human, half-Na'vi creatures who can safely breath Pandora air. In his avatar incarnation, Jake can walk, as well as run and hunt and generally enjoy all the physical freedom he'd been deprived of on Earth. He also meets, and falls in love with, a beautiful Na'vi named Neytiri. (Although the Na'vis are all animated via performance-capture techniques, Neytiri is played by, and even somewhat resembles, the lanky, graceful actress Zoe Saldana.) None of the other avatars have been accepted by the natives, but Neytiri recognizes something special in Jake, and before long he's been embraced, cautiously, by the local tribe. That also, of course, makes him instantly invaluable to his coarse, unobtanium-greedy fellow Earthlings, among them an obnoxious, wheeler-dealer businessguy played by Giovanni Ribisi and a devious, gung-ho Marine played by Stephen Lang.
"Avatar," as its press notes announce, is designed to "deliver a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story." That word "immersive" means that you're not just watching "Avatar" -- you're soaking in it. The movie was made, and is designed to be seen, in 3-D, and no matter what anyone -- particularly the movie's studio, 20th Century Fox -- tries to tell you, the technology and not the story is the big selling point here: If a less famous and less nakedly self-promotional director had made the exact same story with a bunch of actors in blue latex, the Fandango ticket sales wouldn't be going through the roof. And if the technology is as revolutionary as Cameron has been claiming for years now, isn't it disingenuous for the publicity to turn around and suggest that we're really not supposed to notice it? In "Avatar," the technology is everything.
And it does, at least, amount to something. Whatever the flaws of "Avatar" may be, Cameron does use performance-capture more effectively than any filmmaker has yet, and that includes el-creepo performance-capture high priest Robert Zemeckis, whose "Polar Express" has served as the basis for many of my recurring Santa-driven nightmares. While I hate to see an actress as charming as Saldana disappear into the skin of a technogimmick, looking at the graceful, stretched-out blue creature she's been transformed into, I could see traces of the same performer who so daintily stubbed out a cigarette with her pink toe shoe in the 2000 teen ballet drama "Center Stage."
On the other hand, Worthington, whose character is duller and flatter than the one Saldana plays, isn't particularly improved by technology: Both as a human and as a faux-Na'vi, he repeats the same sullen performance he gave in "Terminator Salvation." Although with all of these performance-capture characters -- no matter how much they may resemble their real-life counterparts -- it's hard to discern subtleties of expression. The Na'vis are intriguingly designed: Their faces, with their elongated almond eyes, resemble the faun in Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," although unlike that character, they also have shimmery skin and pale tiger stripes. They wear their hair in long braids that end in a cluster of tentacles with nerve endings; these anemones can be plugged into the tails of various forest creatures, forming a kind of natural circuit. When Jake, as he's being schooled in Na'vi hunting techniques by Neytiri, mounts a magnificent flying beastie, he's not just riding it, he's communing with it.
Cameron takes all this "We must be one with nature" business very seriously -- so seriously that he doesn't seem to realize that one of the sacred Na'vi communal rituals, as he's dramatized it, looks an awful lot like a Beverly Hills yoga class. Still, Cameron and his team of designers and technicians (as well as the director of photography, Mauro Fiore) have managed to come up with some lovely, fanciful details. I was particularly taken with the delicacy of the movie's color palette, especially for such a flashy, big-budget crowd pleaser. At one point Jake, exploring the wonders of a Pandora rain forest, comes upon a stand of giant, funnel-like mushrooms that shrink away from his touch and disappear, shyly, into the earth. Their color is an earthy, translucent pinkish-red, in a tone that takes more thought and consideration than the bright, hothouse color another filmmaker might have automatically gone for.
The midsection of "Avatar," in which Jake discovers Pandora's glorious flora and fauna, has some lyricism. But in the last third, when the tanks and helicopters start moving in, the picture begins to look no more innovative than a sophisticated computer game. Cameron's message may be strictly antiwar, but the second half of his movie relies on the brutalities of combat to whip up excitement: War is wrong, but at least it's dynamic, and yet Cameron doesn't stage these sequences in a particularly compelling way. There's another problem with making a two-and-a-half-hour long 3-D feature, one that that has nothing to do with pacing: 3-D movies aren't more realistic than 2-D movies; they're hyperrealistic, which means they're more physically demanding to watch, and eyestrain is no filmmaker's friend. Stiff, awkward performances don't help much, either. Weaver's character -- her name is Dr. Augustine, and she's modeled, at least loosely, on Ripley from the "Alien" films -- is most believable when, in her human incarnation, she's puffing on her nearly ever-present cigarettes. (A chain-smoking scientist: Now there's something you don't see in the movies every day. I wish Cameron would show us more of his naughtier side.) But like everyone else here, Weaver stumbles through the picture's cartoony dialogue. At one point Stephen Lang's toughie Marine, annoyed by the fact that the Na'vi won't just hand over their sacred turf, barks, "We will fight terror with terror." It's sub-comic-book prose made deadly earnest.
You can make dumb dialogue work if you're serving up a classic Saturday matinee-style entertainment. But if you're out to change the face of filmmaking, you have to work much harder at a lot of the things Cameron just shrugs off. You need well-rounded characters, and a great story that, even if it follows a familiar template, illuminates some angle of human experience in a fresh way.
And you need to give your actors something to do. Looking at "Avatar," you can see why the thing took a thousand years to make -- every frame has been fussed over. But the actors don't live in the movie so much as drift through it like zombies -- they seem to know, subconsciously, that in Cameron's grand vision, they're beside the point, obsolete. "Avatar" isn't about actors or characters or even about story; it's about special effects, which is fine as far as it goes. But for a movie that stresses how important it is for us to stay connected with nature, to keep our ponytails plugged into the life force, "Avatar" is peculiarly bloodless. It's a remote-control movie experience, a high-tech "wish you were here" scribbled on a very expensive postcard. You don't have to be fully present to experience "Avatar"; all you have to do is show up.
16.10.09
The terrifying success of "Paranormal Activity" (Salon)
How to turn a low-budget horror indie into a hit? Add Steven Spielberg, Twitter -- and scare the pants off people
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
Oct. 16, 2009 |
Taken merely as a tense, minimalist horror flick, "Paranormal Activity" would be fascinating. The low-budget, virtually bloodless little shocker with no major stars is being hailed as the scariest movie of the year -- and not without justification. But "Paranormal Activity" is also the story of how savvy marketing and carefully cultivated demand can turn a wannabe cult classic into a bona fide hit.
Last weekend, the movie, which director Oren Peli says cost $15,000 to make, earned almost $8 million in limited release, making it already one of the most profitable movies ever. In comparison, the wildly hyped "Jennifer's Body" did less than $7 million in its opening weekend -- and that was in wide release. The reviews, too, have been glowing. Though the New York Times dismissed it as only "half clever," Entertainment Weekly praised it as "freaky and terrifying," the Los Angeles Times called it "a psychological thriller of such small scale and yet such heightened effect that no doubt Hitchcock, wherever he may be, is smiling." And Roger Ebert called it "ingenious."
The plot is simple and familiar -- a young couple believes they're being haunted. The woman, Katie, has been tormented by a hostile unseen force her whole life; she's scared and wants to get rid of it. The man, Micah, thinks it's kind of cool. He buys an expensive video camera, the better to capture some spooky stuff -- and, by implication, eventually become the Susan Boyle of demonic episodes. The entire film unfolds via Micah's camcorder.
Sure enough, soon doors start squeaking and lights start flicking on and off. But the camera also captures Katie and Micah's increasingly tense dynamic, and as they argue over how to handle the activity, her fear and his stubbornness feed off -- and into -- the malevolent energy in their home. It all leads up to a climax that left the audience I watched with rooted to their seats even after the film ended, laughing nervously and exhaling deeply. As the lights came up, the man next to me shook his head and said, "Man, that was messed up."
That's a compliment, by the way. It's hard to praise a horror movie without inviting the inevitable criticism from viewers disappointed if they don't die of a fright-induced heart attack, and the film does at times beg the timeworn question -- why won't those nice dumb people at least Google "help for domestic demonic problems?" Nevertheless, it delivers satisfyingly gasp-out-loud scares.
"Paranormal Activity's" journey from camcorder quickie to Twitter-fueled sensation began four years ago. First-time writer-director Oren Peli brought his friends, actors Katie Featherstone and Micah Sloat, to his own home to make the kind of horror movie he'd always liked -- restrained, with a psychological bent. When Salon spoke to Peli earlier this week, he explained, "I respond to movies that don't show you everything right away -- I love 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'The Sixth Sense.' The first movie that freaked me out was 'The Exorcist.' That had a huge impact." The horror classic's cloven hoof prints are all over Peli's film, notably in the way it employs a demon with its sights on the heroine and the contentious use of a Ouija board. More significantly, and frighteningly, much of the action takes place in the place we feel most safe and vulnerable -- in the bedroom, in the dark. "Micah believes he can outsmart it," explains Peli. "You think you have access to all this technology, you can do anything. But it doesn't matter. In the end, this ancient, primal thing is stronger."
To give the movie a shot of authenticity, Peli opted for guerrilla filmmaking tactics. "We shot for a week," he says. "The basic outline was there, but the actors never knew what scene they would be doing or what would happen. I wanted a feeling of claustrophobia."
Peli's methods -- the documentary style, using the actors' real names, shooting mostly in sequence, the heavy emphasis on improvisation -- are familiar to anyone who followed "The Blair Witch Project" phenomenon 10 years ago, and that's no accident. "'The Blair Witch Project' and 'Open Water' were the movies that gave me the confidence to think I could do this," explains Peli.
But the comparisons don't end there. Like "Blair Witch," "Paranormal Activity" owes much of its life to the Web.
The lore goes that after languishing for two years, the movie was picked up by Paramount with the intention of turning it into a lavish remake. (Neill Blomkamp's "District 9" had a similar origin, beginning its life as an indie short.)
But then the film, in all its rough-around-the-edges glory, started winning fans in high places. And when Steven Spielberg himself, who made his first splash with the low-budget horror movie "Duel," intervened, the remake was scrapped. Eventually the only thing changed was a new version of the ending, though even that retains most of Peli's original vision of the characters' fates.
"When we first tested it, people dug the ending, but they were expecting something bigger," Peli explains. "The ending was suggested by Spielberg. I've always kept in touch with Micah and Katie, so we just brought them back and shot it."
Once the movie was completed, Paramount did something unusual. With no fancy CGI or "Access Hollywood"-ready big names to help promote it, it let the audience do the work. Peli says, "The Paramount people were very smart. They knew not to market this in a traditional way. And the fans really embraced it."
First, the movie rolled out at carefully targeted college screenings, which only made people in places the movie wasn't being shown -- places like New York -- eager to get in on the action. Paramount then aggressively stoked the buzz on Facebook and pushed to make the movie a hot Twitter trend. Most ingeniously of all, the studio created a "demand it" campaign on Eventful.com, promising to give the movie a wide release if it got a million demands. Last Friday, as if on cue, it reached its goal, and the movie opens wide Friday.
Whether the demand campaign was a clever ruse to build anticipation or a legitimate zeitgeist or a little of both doesn't really matter. Like "Paranormal Activity" itself, the campaign feels authentic. Audiences like an underdog. We like to feel connection. And it takes about 10 minutes on Facebook to figure out we really love voting for stuff.
Though the success of the movie relies heavily on its grass-roots-esque campaign, all the scrappy, can-do hype in the world doesn't mean anything if audiences don't connect with the story itself. It sounds easy to do a horror movie that riffs on the YouTube and "Ghost Hunters" generation, to have a studio tap into social networking culture. But tell that to "Jennifer's Body." Or "Pandorum." Or "Sorority Row."
But if a movie can reach over in the dark and stir our primal fear, that's an accomplishment. With just a shadow across a door, a sudden thump, or the image of a woman standing stock still in front of her bed in the middle of the night, "Paranormal Activity" manages to be chilling and deeply unnerving. Like "Night of the Living Dead," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Repulsion" and "Halloween," its urgent, lo-fi aesthetic only enhances its creepy realism. It's a hit for the most surprising reason of all: because it's very good.
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