Author: reynolds

Hunger

I rented this almost out of obligation — oh, critical acclaim, some kind of prominent artist behind it all, the Troubles, Bobby Sands. Yes, sure, sounds good for me, let’s scan through it quickly. But I found this film astonishing, powerful and beautiful and brutal and unexpected in its force and aesthetics. I can’t recommend it more highly.

And, yes, it is about the group of Irish prisoners leading the blanket [no uniforms accepted, prisoners naked but for woolen blankets] and dirty [urine spilled into the halls, shit smeared all over the walls] protests, demanding political status from Thatcher’s government, and about Bobby Sands, more centrally, deciding upon a hunger strike and then slowly, painfully whittled away. But Steve McQueen’s focus is on the body, as a complex site of political and aesthetic will. Continue reading Hunger

House of the Devil

No matter what the genre, there’s something wonderful about watching a filmmaker so absolutely certain of her methods, so attuned to generic conventions, so confident in his every shot and edit. Ti West has been making low-budget horror films for a couple years, and each was good (the very low-budget The Roost an effective sort-of-meta creature feature, the equally low-budget Trigger Man an even more idiosyncratic and utterly unnerving sniper film). But with House of the Devil, West pulls out his old video library of late-’70s/early-’80s horror films and doesn’t just wholly inhabit their tricks and tone, he recreates and exceeds their pleasures. Manna from horror-fan heaven.

Set in that time period, House gets all the details right: walkman and cheesy AOR rockpop songs, feathered hair, the elaborate teasing exploration of a big old small-town Edwardian home. College student (Jocelin Donahue) strapped for cash, takes against her best friend’s advice (Greta Gerwig) a babysitting gig with Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov. Shit, even *I* know never to take a babysitting gig with Tom Noonan (in full eccentric creep mode, and PERFECT).
Continue reading House of the Devil

Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off

I very much enjoyed Armando Iannucci’s film In the Loop (buried after nattering on about The Hurt Locker), but the original series which spawned the film–The Thick of It–is even better.

In the interests of sweeping characterization of national identity, let me say that no one does the comedy of viciousness like the British. There are some great American satires, but such comedies here often counterpose the brute nasty with a sense of sentiment or meaning. Or just soften the blows in other ways — no one is totally ruthlessly mean, or if they are, then someone around them is a counterbalance, a Candide-like innocent protecting the audience from the caustic. But a great vicious British comedy (Waugh, Amis–father or son, Cleese’s Fawlty) mocks everyone and everything. There are no heroes.

Continue reading Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off

Damn, pretzel man.

Spike Lee’s well-choreographed record of the last performance of the musical Passing Strange may have a (very) familiar narrative arc–young alienated man, seeking true expression and self and art, misses the reality of relationships and love. Yet it has this rock-(and-r&b-and-soul-not-to-mention-cabaret-and-a-little-Kraftwerk-and-a-thousand-other-eclectic-musical-allusions-)operatic vigor that made me forget I’d ever seen a musical before. Narrated by singer/writer Stew and his greek-chorus band, this movie is as funny, moving, and deliriously melodically gorgeous as any I’ve seen in some time. The cast is sweaty and superb; Stew is a fucking wonder; the songs are as lyrically twisty as Sondheim, and there are moments of thumping keyboard and percussive soaring guitar and choral chant that almost had me, alone in my living room, on my feet.

Big Fan

I wasn’t. Robert Siegel’s film, a relentlessly-focused study of an obsessive Giants fan, has gotten a lot of love, for its nods to ‘seventies character studies (or at least its writer/director’s and star’s respective desire to emulate those studies) and for its central performance. Patton Oswalt is properly pouty and arrogant and vulnerable. The film follows Paul from Staten Island through some of his pitiful daily rituals (he doesn’t even go in to the games, but sits in the parking lot and watches on tv with his even more pitiful buddy Kevin Corrigan); when Paul and mate spy their hero QB in their neighborhood, they follow him into Manhattan, and into a strip club, and then eventually wheedle up the courage and go see him. And he figures out they’ve been following him, freaks, and beats the crap out of Paul. Cue the next hour’s sluggish commitment to Paul’s commitment.
Continue reading Big Fan

Daybreakers

In its first 10 minutes (after a brief, somewhat pointless prologue), the Spierig brothers’ Daybreakers revels in a dizzying, dialogue-free rush of world-building — here we are maybe 10 years from now in a night-time late-capitalist gloom, all bluish lighting and rainy reflective streets, shadows and fedoras. A plague of vampirism turned things on their heads, humans are hunted, and the world is on the brink of fiscal and social collapse as the blood supply (ahem) thins out. I thought this was gonna be brilliant.


Continue reading Daybreakers

The Chaser

Insert interesting post here. Damn good–often nerve-wracking, strangely silly at times, blackly sarcastic, then horrifying, then a gut-punch emotional wallop. This is a serial killer flick, of sorts, out of South Korea — a corrupt ex-cop (a sweaty,sleazy, superb Kim Yun-seok) now a pimp, finds that some of his “girls” are going missing. He’s pissed — they’re running away, or some asshole’s selling them, after all the money he paid himself. . . and the film opens with him sending another escort out, only to realize that it’s to the same john who was the last customer for the long-gone women. . . And the film bites down hard on your nerves, razor-blade editing slicing us back and forth from potential victim and killer to angry seeking pimp, but it is (really) very familiar, and then: boom. It shifts. Suddenly the film hangs an abrupt left and it’s going in directions you hadn’t expected, and it begins to slowly ratchet up the tension again.

The performances are strong, the editing superb, director Na Hong-jin shoots with plenty of unobtrusive style… it’s like a great Sam Fuller film, pulpy and histrionic yet smart and then smart-ass and then sincerely melodramatic.

I got a region-2 disc, and I don’t think it’s out here yet–but keep an eye on Netflix. Pretty damn good.

No subtitles needed, nor subtext….

…yet lest I seem less than enthusiastic, let me be clear: Mike Judge’s Extract may be a little too this or a little too little of that, but I enjoyed the film as much as any comedy this year. Judge has a masterly sense of structure–the film is a well-oiled (if a little over-determined) farce machine, but played with the kind of subtle dialogue-driven character focus for which he doesn’t often get enough credit. Jason Bateman plays the newly-middle-aged owner of a chemical-flavoring company, finding himself at a loss in his relationship with wife Kristen Wiig and unexcited by his job. Mila Kunis’ temp (who we know to be a con artist) catches his eye, but he feels too guilty to do more than dream, until his bartender friend Dean (a shaggy, invested Ben Affleck) gives him a horse tranquilizer and a plan: get a gigolo to seduce your wife, then you can cheat with guiltfree abandon.

That summary seems so busy, so hyperbolic, and the film does get stuck in some obvious bits, almost a necessary by-product of what is at base a reliably conventional comic plot. There’s hints of other stories bubbling up: a read on the workspace that complements his cult hit but doesn’t develop too substantively here; some space opened up but never explored for the two very interesting women (and two strong actors). A shame–the film could have been perhaps great. Instead, it’s just really, really, really enjoyable. What makes it work is how Judge’s style–a kind of deadpan minimalism–so perfectly fuels that silly plot; instead of getting lost in leers and exaggerated tics (his side characters are usually at base cartoonish buffoons), the film takes its sweet time listening to these people talk, even the loonies, gives the actors room to evoke and emote. And if he wraps up with a lot of sentiment, he’s earned it–as well as mocking it, by a late-film plot development that is so blithely derisive that it underscores the empathy Judge creates for (most of) these characters.

La Mujer Sin Cabeza/The Headless Woman

Lucrecia Martel’s oblique thriller (or “thriller”?) has made many critics swoon–not just end-of-year lists but leaping into decade round-ups, too. I kinda agree…. ‘though it is the kind of knotty, imagistic film that pushes against the viewers’ (or this one’s) desire for narrative even as Maria Onetto’s brilliant performance as the bourgeois Vero Lala suggests deep wells of story that keep sucking us back in. Continue reading La Mujer Sin Cabeza/The Headless Woman

Welcome to Nollywood

Jaime Meltzer’s documentary on the Nigerian film industry is not a whole slew of things I would love to see about the Nigerian film industry. It is, for instance, only glancingly attentive to the history of the industry (a few title cards letting us know that film production really began there a scant 20 years ago, ‘though the industry now accounts for an astonishing amount of very profitable product). It is inexplicably inattentive to the social and political landscape of Lagos, of Nigeria, even of Africa (‘though, again glancingly, there is some intriguing stuff about Liberia bubbling up in the account of one particular production). It is only an hour long, not nearly enough time to spend ….

Yet as a snapshot of a few filmmakers–exuberant, prolific, very (very, very, very) self-confident filmmakers–and their work on projects now, it’s a suggestive, rewarding little blast. Meltzer interviews three directors/producers, then starts more directly following two as they work on their latest productions. Along the way, you get a few intriguing details about the marketing of these films (30 or so films rushed to dvd or vcd each week, often within a month or so of shooting) and about viewing habits (a tendency to dismiss Hollywood blockbusters in favor of the local product, after years of dominance by Indian film)… and some snippets of the films themselves… and it’s just a fascinating glimpse of real extra-corporate filmmaking, of local production and consumption habits.