Category: likey

Two-Lane Blacktop

I’m surprised how much I liked this film; its fanciful reification of American myths as played out by three car jockeys and a hippie drifter girl on the homosocial backroads of early-seventies America is both nostalgically evocative and comically addictive. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson can’t act their way out of paper bags, but the script doesn’t really ask much from them. They eat, sleep and shit car-talk; the scenes they occupy are so pure, generically speaking, they’re apt to put you to sleep. The film’s heart and soul, however, belongs to the trickster/mythmaker “G.T.O.” As played to perfection by Warren Oates, this character is a slippery, mercurial, American original, and Oates races away with the film. While Oates’ iconic character may attempt to steal fire from the gods, he’s also haunted by a nagging rootlessness. “If I’m not grounded soon, I’m going to go into orbit” he cautions himself. It’s a moment both touching and ludicrous, yet Oates makes you believe.

Johnny T—just kidding. Lift

DeMane Davis and Khari Streeter’s low-budget Lift never quite escapes the gravity well of certain over-determined conflicts or plot dynamics, but that’s the only negative thing I’m going to say about it. After reading about this in some article (I think at Slate) about indie films that slip between the cracks, I stuck it on my Netflix queue and found it pretty damn rewarding. Niecy (an excellent, excellent Kerry Washington) is a young woman trying to move past service to more leadership roles at a department store, grappling with a complex relationship with her demanding mother (Lonette McKee), and struggling with a relationship with her trying-to-go-straight (off the pot, off the game) boyfriend (Eugene Byrd). Oh, and she makes a real good living by stealing the very finest of designer products. Continue reading Johnny T—just kidding. Lift

man push cart

i have no idea, now, how i got onto this film. i wish i knew. ramin bahrani visits some of the same haunted post-traumatic territory touched upon in red road, and it seems to me he may possibly do it with even greater focus. ahmad is a young pakistani man with a push cart and a stack of porn dvds in nyc. very early every morning he takes his push cart from the depot where it’s housed to his allotted spot on the sidewalk, by hand. after work he sells his dvds to people he meets on the street. the pulling of the cart in the liminal area between the large, heavy trafficked, still nocturnal new york avenue and the sidewalk is harrowing and, on occasion, heartbreaking, especially because bahrani puts it squarely at the center of his film and shows it to us over and over and over (it also puts one in mind of those films one has seen about subcontinental streets, full of lawless traffic and the constant threat of being run over: except, wrong time, wrong place). the light is orange-brownish and there are mostly taxis about. ahmad looks like the loneliest man in new york. Continue reading man push cart

Two great Tilda Swinton performances

Or–maybe a better post title–The Return of the Excellent Issue Film. Saw in theaters the superb Michael Clayton, which has a first half begun with a voice-over monologue by Tom Wilkinson and follows up with a pitch-perfect succession of rants, debates, and asides that struck me as the richest dialogue I’d heard at the movies in some time. The second half softens the impact, becomes more conventionally a conspiracy-of-corporate-malfeasance thriller, and the dialogue fades more into the background… but hoo boy does it roar when it begins. A shout-out for the egoless and yet compassionate portrayal of a corporate-lawyer baddie by Tilda Swinton: she turns what could be a cartoon villain, and potentially a misogynist depiction of the icy castrator, into a detailed and generous portrait of a complex woman as torn by divisions as the protagonist. Everyone in this is good, and the writing whistles, and the film races along–and comes to a conclusion that offers us the kind of meat-and-potatoes closure we want while also keeping us hungry, uncertain, concerned. It’s a damn good film.

Swinton is equally strong in the small wonder Stephanie Daley, about a young girl who hid her pregnancy and then either killed or suffered the loss of her infant at birth. Swinton is the psychologist grappling with her own pregnancy, a prior stillbirth, and confusions over her self and her relationship with husband Timothy Hutton. Amber Tamblyn is excellent as the accused young girl. For the first half, it felt too often like the winner of a short-story competition, all these carefully-drawn parallels between the protagonists, a slew of complications which felt like sincere issue-picture problems to be resolved (gender, power, choice)… but by the second half I was glued to the set and the emotional repercussions, underplayed and entirely earned, ripple out with no clear sense of closure or completion. I really dug this film, too.

la cienaga

i’d wanted to watch this argentinean film when it was released in los angeles back in 2001, but it disappeared before i could get my lazy ass off the couch. a friend mentioned watching it recently and so i put it at the top of the netflix queue and watched it last night. netflix lists it as a comedy but it didn’t feel like one to me. it is a claustrophobic portrayal of an upper-middle (?) class family going to seed, in which humidity and heat and lassitude are not just metaphors but almost characters in their own right. a large family is gathered at their decrepit country estate for the summer, and are visited briefly by cousins from the city. family secrets and shame slowly bubble out and much more is hinted at. the story of an indian maid, who may or may not be fired soon (by the casually, viciously racist mother, mecha), winds in and out, seen largely through the ambivalent gaze of a teenage daughter of the house who has a crush on her. the possibility of catastrophic violence seems always very close, and the film sustains this pregnant sense of imminent release quite effectively.

nonetheless, i found the film frustrating in parts–it took me too long to sort out which characters were in which family, for example–and i think because it is so effective in making the oppressive, sluggish atmosphere of the principal characters’ lives palpable, you might need to be in the right state of mind to watch it: it may not be the best choice of film to watch at the end of a long day. that said, i do think the film meanders a little. there’s a parallel narrative with a sighting of the virgin mary that didn’t quite fit for me, and the class/race critique could have had a little more bite. the more interesting characters for me were the indian maid, isabel, and the poorer city cousin, tali, but the director (lucrecia martel) seems more interested in mecha’s family. it didn’t finally come together for me, and i found the ending somewhat arbitrary. but it is an interesting film (and the performances are all great), and i’d be interested in reading others’ takes on it. and i’m going to watch the other film by martel that netflix has: the holy girl.

I’d’ve shot Marvin Gaye if I was Marvin Gaye’s dad

Kris is watching “The Office,” episodes I saw late last night, so I wandered upstairs and decided to see what Netflix might offer for instant queuing. I fancied the moment akin to me old college days, when I was green in judgment and grateful for whatever hack horror film I could muster up on cable, so I consciously sought out some crap I would probably never allow myself to actually have sent to my home, simply because it’d seem too much like paying to see them. (And, for any of you who’ve questioned my judgment, you can imagine what someone with my almost degree-zero lack of taste might prefer not to pay to see.) So I found a little early-nineties horror-satire called Satan’s Little Helper, the work of one Jeff Lieberman who various very interesting fan blogs call an unsung hero of indie popcorn horror. (Check out the fantastic final girl blog.)

That all said, and I’d be wasting your time if you had anything worth doing, which you don’t, Little Helper wants to be a satire of our love of violence, always a tricky move best attempted in a genre other than brutal-killers-on-the-road or slasher flick. It’s intermittently interesting, but shot on a budget that would be pleased to be called shoestring, with atrocious acting especially from the terrible eponymous kid Helper, but I did think the thing had some pizzazz and style in its almost classical framing, editing, and development. I enjoyed a little of its manic violent (‘though actually fairly non-graphic and muted violent) wit. Still, it’d have been a lot more fun at 2 a.m. on Cinemax, me half in the bag.

But now I had this itch. What to do? And I remembered, since Jeff recently taught the film and wondered what I’d thought of it, that I had yet to watch my downloaded copy of Martin McDonagh’s academy-award-winning short film Six Shooter. It’s outstanding–funny, vicious, strangely moving. Continue reading I’d’ve shot Marvin Gaye if I was Marvin Gaye’s dad

Andrea Arnold’s Red Road

An intense character study of loneliness and mourning, tucked into a CCTV-p.o.v. portrait of grimmer Glasgow, disguised as a white-knuckled surveillance-age thriller, Andrea Arnold’s film follows a camera operator for the Scottish city’s string of public eyes, charged with tracking potential–and reporting actual–crimes. Borrowing neatly from Rear Window and The Conversation alike, the film also escapes its influences, wears them lightly on its sleeve. And I’m going to be cagy about what else happens in the film–burying it under the “more” and a big SPOILER tag–because the film is often quite surprising. Don’t want to undercut those pleasures.

Even as I tout this film, though, I want to first rave about one of the extras, the director’s short (and apparently Academy-Award-winning) Wasp, which in 23(ish) minutes packs a helluva wallop. Following a young single mom, trailing her three girls and lugging her infant boy, from an opening fight to their cluttered project flat to a night out on the town, the film seems to be both brilliantly composed and edited and yet caught on the fly–there are scenes in a bar that seem impossibly real, as if she had to be in there just filming. Yet it’s a gorgeous picture of dilapidated people and places, and edited with a virtuoso control–precisely crafted. This is a classic. Red Road is simply really damn good. Continue reading Andrea Arnold’s Red Road

bow wow wow

year of the dog is very good. probably the weakest of white’s major films but still very good. it treads more on chuck and buck territory than on that of the good girl (the other two major films–the others seem like films he writes to be able to make these films) and doesn’t evoke either the discomfort of the former or the existential melancholy of the latter, but shares with both its comic generosity and refusal to judge or even take up predictable positions on the idiosyncrasies of its characters. as you may remember from the ads, this is about a woman who has few human relationships and all but falls apart when her dog suddenly dies. i’m not going to say too much more about the plot at this point except to note that, among other things, it functions as an antidote to the world view of films such as notes on a scandal which cannot imagine the single, sexually inactive woman as anything but a sociopath in waiting. the protagonist here too engages in some fairly questionable behaviour, but its source is located elsewhere, in an over-abundance of love, not the lack of it.
Continue reading bow wow wow