Month: January 2011
Enter the Void
Gaspar Noe’s film is shot almost entirely in p.o.v., the protagonist a young guy doing and dealing drugs in a seedy, emphatically-neon Tokyo. Early voiceovers–where he tells himself things that no sapient creature would ever need to say, or even think, as the camera watches from his vantage, hands fumbling forward into frame to unlock a door, to grab his stash, to burn a pipe.
And yet–even early on, with some of this stilted narration, and the artifice of the p.o.v. ploy, there are cluttered rushes of image:
The Mechanic (2011)
This remake of the 1972 film of the same name is entirely predictable, including its choice of a different ending to the Bronson original. This version stars Jason Statham as Arthur Bishop, the long time assassin from whence the movie gets its name, Ben Foster as the apprentice, Steve, and Donald Sutherland as Steve’s father, who is targeted for assassination early in the movie. The action sequences are generally well choreographed, and there is more emphasis upon making the killings look like accidents. Statham plays this role as he does every role – taciturn, almost wincing at having to engage in conversation, not a trace of humor or twinkle – while Foster buries himself in the role; he always seems on the verge of losing control, a combination of resentfulness and exhilaration as he is initiated into the assassin’s trade. It is a perfectly acceptable action flick. Continue reading The Mechanic (2011)
“Pretty soon, your mother will give birth to two children and a dog.”
Giorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth is one strange, nearly inexplicable film – a polymorphously perverse comedy about paranoia and control set in a suburban, Greek enclave which functions as something of 21st century Skinner box with a swimming pool. What unfolds plays out like some weird, cinematic feral child fostered by David Lynch and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In brief, Father and Mother have created a false paradise in their back yard, raising their children (Oldest Daughter, Younger Daughter, and Son) in a space far removed from the chaos of civilization (Father leaves for work on a daily basis as a manager of some sort at an urban factory; occasionally he brings back a female security guard to have sex with his Son). As far as the kids know, however, the world outside their compound is dangerous and taboo, subject to malevolent, killer kitty-cats who destroyed their brother years ago (it is unclear if the brother ever existed but such are the intriguing ambiguities at play in the text). Furthermore, Mother and Father have assigned their own arbitrary meanings to certain words; a zombie is a little yellow flower, a cunt is an overhead lighting instrument, the sea is a comfortable piece of furniture upon which one sits, and so on. Continue reading “Pretty soon, your mother will give birth to two children and a dog.”
Four Lions
I am constitutionally primed to enjoy a film which yuks it up around subjects that terrify or infuriate, and when I heard about Chris Morris’ slapsticky take on radicalized English Muslims, intent on joining the jihad through suicide bombing… well, damn. How fantastically inappropriate–perhaps it would be a more vigorous bit of tomfoolery than Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Moslem World. It was. And it was even better yet: Morris uses familiar conventions (the hapless schmoes, on a foolish quest) which amplify our identification, and the film’s final moments had a surprising emotional edge.
