Author: jeff

Burn After Reading

The Coen Brothers’ latest black, black comedy of errors follows a group of thick-sculled, mean-spirited, surface-obsessed, selfish, moronic imbeciles. It’s an extreme and unflatteringly hilarious portrait of America but a believable one nonetheless. In terms of plot, tone and craft, Burn After Reading‘s kissing cousin is most certainly Fargo. Critics, understandably, are frustrated that the film lacks Fargo‘s moral center, but that film takes place in a rural winterland where one can make a happy living birthing babies and illustrating postage stamps. Burn takes place in Washington DC. Therein lies the film’s vicious, misanthropic, cold hearted conceit–in Washington DC everybody is both larger than life and a douche bag (and as goes Washington, sadly, so goes the nation). Given all the political nastiness occuring 24 hours a day on LCD screens large and small, the Coen Brothers have appropriated Aaron Sorkin’s dark other, offering up a gleefully caustic evisceration of human folly (though I will admit that amid the blood, the goat cheese, the Mamba Juice and the dildo there are hints of humanity struggling to reach the surface). I loved it. Sure, Brad Pitt overacts, but he’s so much fun to watch. Clooney, Malkovich, Richard Jenkins, Francis McDormand: all are top notch. The film is tightly edited and never drags. And J.K. Simmons masterfully (and uncharacteristically) underplays three brief scenes and nearly steals the entire show. His line reading in one particular moment (“Russia?”) is worth fifty bridges to nowhere.

Teeth

I’m not sure Teeth deserves its own thread (I tried posting a comment elsewhere but Word Press wouldn’t let me) but there’s something slyly (and comically) subversive about this story of a teenager, a good Christian girl who preaches abstinence and chastity, who discovers her vagina is blessed with a bite (a nuclear power plant forever looms in the background). It is crude and crass (there are a copious number of severed penises), but the film could also be read as a post-feminist, coming-of-age, “superhero-esque” origin story of a serial killer with a code (a la Showtime’s underrated “Dexter”) who targets brutal, oppressive, sexually abusive misogynists (teenage boys, wacky gynecologists, dirty-old-men). Though a favorite at Sundance in 2006, it didn’t do too well at the box office . . . will audiences be willing to line up for Teeth II???

The Orphanage

A gothic manor house located in a particularly beautiful, particularly remote spot on the Spanish coast is purchased by a woman who lived there decades before when it functioned as a Catholic orphanage. She and her husband, along with their six-year-old son, work to restore the home and transform it into a school for mentally disabled children, but when her child starts communicating with unseen forces and soon vanishes into thin air, the past finds a way to eerily push itself into the present. This film is creepy and atmospheric and evocatively affective–perhaps due to the fact that it’s plot ingeniously appropriates and recontextualizes the story of Peter Pan. There is a set piece about twenty-five minutes in that is stunning, and the ending’s perfect balance of the uncanny and the mythic will break your heart.

Lars and the Real Girl

I was dubious and this will definitely not appeal to all tastes, but I was completely enchanted and moved by this Capra-esque fantasy firmly rooted on the planet earth by smart, unadourned, emotionally resonant acting choices. Lars (an understated Ryan Gosling in a charming and warmly human-sized performance) suffered extreme trauma as an infant and the result, twenty-seven years later, is that he severely lacks interpersonal relationship skills. When he purchases a life-sized, sex doll for companionship, literally convincing himself she is real, his brother wants him packed off to a mental institution. His sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer) takes a different tact and soon the entire town rallies around Lars’ relationship with “Bianca.” None of this should work. None of it! The potential for treacly, saccharin-laced whimsy is undermined by a no-nonsense approach and a cast of characters straight out of an E. Annie Proulx novel (the original screenplay by “Six Feet Under” scribe Nancy Oliver was nominated for an Academy Award). The first act is a bit forced (give it a little time) and the ending, befitting the genre, is telegraphed from the next state, but the plot twists keep you engaged and even surprised.

Lust, Caution

In retrospect, this suspenseful melodrama is preposterous to the extreme. Still, I savored every moment. First, it’s an exquisitely crafted work of cinematic art (though it never strives to be anything other than a romantic thriller). Just watch the first four or five minutes as Ang Lee moves the camera with dexterity and precision to dramatically enliven a game of mahjong (the editing by Tim Squyres and the photography by Rodrigo Prieto are exemplary throughout). Wikipedia tells me mahjong involves skill, strategy, and calculation, as well as a certain degree of chance, which makes the game a perfect metaphor for the film’s central character: a young, idealistic woman (Wei Tang) who goes undercover for a resistance cell to seduce and trap a Chinese official (Tony Leung) collaborating with the Japanese government during Japan’s occupation of China in the late-thirties and early-forties. Continue reading Lust, Caution

Syndromes and a Century

This is such a warm, engaging and magically entertaining film. The narrative begins in the early eighties at a hospital in rural Thailand and mostly follows a young, strong-willed female doctor as she negotiates her position in a world divided by traditional beliefs systems and late-modern efficiency. The second half seemingly takes place in the present but tells (more or less) the same story with many of the same actors, focusing mostly on a young male doctor (we meet him in the first section) working in a very modern, urban hospital. I can’t tell you what it all means–Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a kinder, gentler David Lynch–but the film has a kind of dreamy, Proustian quality as it dances lightly around such themes as time, memory, repetition, and the mystery and impermanence of beauty. Of course, Syndromes is very elliptical but not frustratingly so (its ninety-minute running time breezes by). In fact, I’d describe the tone of the film as comically effervescent. In terms of form, this may be one of the most beautifully shot films I’ve seen all year.

There Will Be Blood

Wow. I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything like it. Sure, there are echoes of Griffith, Welles, Wyler, Huston, Kubrick, Malick, and Coppola but There Will Be Blood is its own beast—a remarkably assured, unpretentious, muscular work of American filmmaking (I’ll compare it right now to Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Part II and Raging Bull). Anderson tells an epic narrative of power and providence, fathers and sons, religion and commerce, sin and hypocrisy; and he is assisted by a towering, career-defining performance from Daniel Day Lewis. Lewis is rail-thin, his shoulders hunched forward, his body askew and slightly out of balance; nevertheless, his Daniel Plainview is a determined, singularly-obsessed yet tortured maverick of a character, and Lewis fills the screen with a searing, charismatic, misanthropic intensity. He is equally matched by Paul Dano who mesmerizes as the evangelical preacher who won’t back down as well as this preturnaturally astute child actor, Dillon Freasier, who plays Plainview’s son H.W. Jonny Greenwood’s score punctuates Robert Elswit’s hardscrabbled images with scraping discordant notes. I can’t think of a thing I would want changed and can’t wait to see it again. Run, don’t walk.

Once

The premise of this little musical about an Irish street busker/vacuum repairman and a Czech immigrant is so simple you wonder why it’s never been done before. Over the course of a week or so, these two meet cute and you think, OK, indie musical rom-com, but all generic expectations get thrown out the window as the film slowly but surely evolves into something completely different–a moving testament to creativity, determination, love, loss, compromise, stasis, and the never-ending joys of a melodically infectious pop song. Noel Coward would be proud.