Author: reynolds

Meek’s Cutoff

Kelly Reichardt’s compelling anti-Western is almost like Gerry but with a wagon train instead of Damon and the more talented Affleck. I half-kid. She sets up some glorious but static shots of size and distance: clouds moving quickly in silhouette against the stars; the forlorn convoy trudging in miniature on the horizon. But despite the scope–even because of the sweep of the empty Eastern Oregon high plains–the visuals don’t “thrill,” don’t convey a sense of majesty or myth, but rather the opposite. It’s a big, flat, unmarked Empty–with muted colors. Continue reading Meek’s Cutoff

Crazy, Stupid, Love

CSL‘s title has commas to spare, suggestive of a zaniness the film circles ’round but generally doesn’t care so much about. It’s missing a key modifier central to its impact: sad, painful, lonely.

And that is determinedly NOT a complaint. First, sure, yes: this is a really well-crafted romantic comedy, with much care and attention given to the plot structure (a few moments inflate with the giddy helium of farcical perfection, and only one or two fall deflated to the ground), to the complexity and thoughtfulness of its characters. Carell’s Cal Weaver is a man suddenly, surprisingly dislocated from his life; Julianne Moore’s wife Emily is no less surprised and confounded about her own indiscretion and where it leads the couple. The film’s packed with interesting, knotty characters–who start as the cartoonish Types of a raunchy comedy but, with a smart line, excellent direction, and pitch-perfect performances, attain a gravity that heightens both the comedy and the compassion.

I haven’t a lot to say. It does occasionally enthusiastically embrace convention, and there’s (as with much farce) the occasional strained suturing of plot strands. (There are also, though, some genuine surprises and delights.)

But I wanted to throw out to Brunsy, in particular, a question about its comic force. Where so much comedy derives from roots in rage- and shame-inflected desire, Crazy is resolutely concerned with sadness. The characters collide–and occasionally fight–but even these conflicts are inflected by a compassionate attention to the pain motivating them. What makes the film more than just a reasonably-smart comic romance is this deep wellspring of hurt — and I have been trying to think if there was another comic actor who could do this as well as Carell, or a film so attuned to same, particularly in this era of the never-wanna-grow-up character-driven comedy.

Super

James Gunn’s version of the superheroes-are-really-pathetic-losers film didn’t, on paper, seem to cry out for my attention. People said it was a lot more Travis Bickle than Kick-Ass, which was less deconstructive than delirious about the silliness of certain genre set-ups. And while most of its cast made my eyebrows go up (Andre Royo! Michael Rooker! Nathan Fillion! Kevin Bacon as the baddie? Ellen Page as a lunatic sidekick?) I was a little nervous about star Rainn Wilson. It is hard to displace Dwight Schrute’s high cheekbones and fake hard smile. But Super, while hitting a lot of familiar notes, also hits them with a wrench, repeatedly and confidently bashing expectations, shifting tones.

It manages a level of emotional engagement and complexity that is impressive, largely because of Wilson and Page, who are each excellent at turning from outsized insanity and mayhem to a pervasive sadness; their actions almost seem a continual surprise to themselves, and at heart the film isn’t troping the creaky superhero trope about good and evil (and the thin line, ye innocents!, between the twain); Super (like Taxi Driver) is about alienation and loneliness.

Which makes it sound grim, when it is often quite funny; bloody in a manner that teases a Troma-like eccentricity but also critiques the comic-book indifference to consequence; cautiously hopeful despite its dark worldview. I thought it was really pretty darn good.

Don’t squeeze the chairma…. ah, hell.

That a mysterious spiderlike executive called the Chairman circles around behind the scenes, spinning (and respinning) the Plan, while minions dressed like castaway extras from The Thin Man run around, turning peoples’ phones off like so many stiff-shouldered well-coiffed gremlins, should not put you off this film. Nor should the fact that the Chairman is not, as I had begun to hope, Frank Sinatra. Nor the relentless humbuggery of its metaphysics.*

For 3/4 of its running time, who cares? Continue reading Don’t squeeze the chairma…. ah, hell.

Transfo… ah, the hell with that — The Unjust

I did see the latest Baypalooza, notable only for being somewhat more visually coherent than the last two robots-bashing-robots films. Alas, that’s still only about 3 or 4% overall coherence. It was reasonably entertaining; the 7-year-old with me was itchy for much of the first half and then rapt for the last. This 43-year-old went away wishing he’d cared more.

But tonight I watched Seung-wan Ryoo’s 2010 pitch-black noir The Unjust, a film that’ll eventually show up on Netflix, but probably won’t make it to any theaters near any of us, except maybe Mauer. It’s scripted by Hoon-jung Park, who wrote I Saw the Devil, and if I say this latest film is a wee bit less nihilistic, that’s like saying Steve Jobs has less money then Bill Gates. One of the dark pleasures of this latest is the almost gleeful skipping down a steep slope of people behaving unethically. It starts with a montage of people in public settings watching various newscasters recount the great social anxiety around a series of rape-killings of young children, and then cuts into surveillance footage of a footchase between two police and a suspect. Ryoo zooms in and the film kicks into high gear.

But the serial killer’s a mcguffin, and much of the action is psychological — two protagonists (well….)–a lead detective (the stoic, ever-more-tightly-wound Jeong-min Hwang) and a public prosecutor (the frequently unwound Seung-beom Ryu) are charged with resolving the kid case, while also tussling over dueling dirty developers. The film plays out like Sidney Lumet via Takashi Miike, with a lot of high-wire editing which keeps your pulse high. But what really sold me were the performances — always two or three steps over the top, but carefully modulated; it’s a wicked, entertaining thriller, as good as I’ve seen this year.

Hanna

Joe Wright’s trippy little “action film” seems to have begun as a straightforward high-concept no-brainer — teen girl, raised by father just inside the Arctic circle, is a survivalist wunderkind with a backstory just waiting to be booted up. And, sure enough, a few minutes in dad (Eric Bana, with a German accent) digs up a transponder, asks his daughter if she’s really ready, and she flips the switch to transmit.

Cue their rapid departure, the arrival of secret super-spy teams led by twisty clearly-evil Marissa (Cate Blanchett, with an American-Southern accent), and set things running. There’s an awful lot of running, which even the Chemical Brothers can’t fully justify. Hanna (Saiorse Ronan, playing in a bunch of languages) is Candide via Jason Bourne. There are some great action set-pieces–many pastiches of various of Wright’s influences, but all filmed with joy and wit and aforementioned thumping techno soundtrack, even if it’s a bit long, not terribly tight.

Wright gave the genetic blueprint for this story–all too familiar–some great goosing from Grimms’ fairy tales, and it’s filmed with all kinds of digressive style, too. I loved Ronan, loved the energy of the film, enjoyed its willingness to play by the rules and its equally firm commitment to perverse dislocations. It’s a bit too quilted–there’s a Kubrick fetish I kind of dig, but you can see a lot of the stitching, and the film could probably have used another script revision, or even better a willingness to go a lot more strange. (There’s an aggravating subtext about the evils of the childless witchy Marissa that could go away. Let her be the wolf; Blanchett doesn’t need to be saddled with the tired trope of the barren feminine.) But mostly the film is a sign of filmmakers in love with all kinds of genre films, and it’s definitely worth a look.

Drive Angry

There’s not a lot of driving, and the anger tends toward the pissy, snotty, glowering. Obviously I didn’t expect this to be good, but so unrelentingly dull? Why did Nic Cage play it muted? Why don’t more people hire William Fichtner? Why am I posting on this? This film needed more bee-cages, iguanas, and/or crack pipes.