The Cottage…

…won’t win hearts or minds, but it’s a dandy little nasty entertainment with enough wit and style–and a kick-drum wonder of a final shot–and I think it’s worth a look. Andy Serkis and Reece Sheersmith (familiar to many of us from “The League of Gentlemen,” whose name itself seems a product of said League) star as brothers involved in low-level criminal thuggery, a foolish kidnapping of a boss’ daughter, and the film opens somewhere north-northeast of nastier comic noirs by the Coens or Ritchie. They’re imbeciles, if relatively likable. And then the film takes a left turn toward those Hills with eyes, and things get violent, genuinely creepy and suspenseful, and still generally likable and funny. Again, nothing spectacular–the director, one Paul Andrew Williams, is coming off a well-received and annoyingly-unavailable-in-the-States thriller called London to Brighton, and he displays far more patience, visual wit, and structural clarity than the aforementioned Ritchie. This may be more my cup of joe than Gio’s, or most of youse, as I remain a sucker for homicidal mutant hicks and needless chopping and spurting, but the leads are funny and fun to watch, and … well, there you have it.

Quantum of Solace

James goes rogue like Sarah Palin
I sat through 100 minutes and man I am a ailin’

But seriously . . . noisy and incomprehensible, the new Bond film can’t be recommended. It seems to have something to do with South American water futures and a clandestine shadow organization–a nefarious agency of evil hitherto unknown to MI6, the CIA, and, for good measure, the KGB. It’s a cold, impersonal film without a jot of wit or humor or even, god forbid, joy (Bond is in full-tilt revenge mode and the Bond “girl” is surly not sexy). Still, it moves at a fever pitch, and most (Chris) won’t mind suffering through the swift ninety-nine minutes. There was a cool sequence that took place during a mammoth, postmodern production of Puccini’s Tosca, and I did appreciate Forster’s eye for catchy architecture, but that’s about all I got.

Elite Squad, with a hat-tip toward some prior debates about Brazilian crime films

Jose Padilha’s 2007 crime film pivots from the ground traversed in the excellent Bus 174 (see comments 3, 4, & 5), turning away from the criminal trapped and interpellated within a rigid, pervasive system of inequality toward cops, just as trapped. The film got a lot of love in Brazil, and certain international festivals, but my plot summary seems more cogent–and a lot more thrilling–than I found the film. I liked its thesis, and disagree entirely with Manohla Dargis’ critique of its politics, even as I fully accept her critique of its aesthetics. It perfectly defines “lugubrious,” trudging through the mechanics of a crime & corruption thriller, without any of the dynamics. And this makes me bring up, for the 100th time?, Fernando Meirelles’ superior (and I think superlative) City of God.

War, Inc.

My apologies if someone has already posted on this movie.  War, Inc. is a blast, the most fun I’ve had watching a movie all year. It is an absurdist take (clearly indebted to Dr. Strangelove) on the corporatization of war and nation-building. A fictional Halliburton (the Tamerlane Corporation) has an exclusive contract to rebuild, privatize and generally rape the central asian country of Turaqistan, and every aspect that we have seen in recent years in Iraq is ramped up to 11 to comic effect. The politics of the movie are crude and brutally funny, with moments of real power and poingancy. In particular, a scene in a bombed out town at night, as assorted military contractors and local militias fire blindly at each other, explosions rake the landscape and refugees flee, bring to mind the bridge-building scene in Apocalypse Now.

John Cusak is the corporation’s hit man with a heart of gold, and the movie elicits hysterical performances from Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei and a host of minor characters. The story of redemption for John Cusack is hardly original, but the movie still pulls very few punches, and occasionally hits you right in the gut. The choice of eschewing ernest characters offering their critiques of American imperial power and instead relying upon images and humor makes this even stronger. I suspect that there will be less of this kind of movie in the next couple of years as the afterglow of Obama’s victory lingers. This one is well worth watching, if only as a reminder of the world Obama has inherited.

Paranoid Park

This is the latest little gem from Gus Van Sant, consistently my favorite American director. It follows a few days in the life of Alex (Gabe Nevins), suburban teenager in Portland and part of what a cop refers to as “the skateboarding community.” There is a murder mystery that forms the spine of this short (84 minute) movie, but it is neither important nor terribly interesting. As always, Van Sant wants to explore the peculiar, affectless, forms of alienation (which in this case are pretty mild) in American teenagers, and to do so while giving us a series of breathtakingly beautiful images. Continue reading Paranoid Park

Rachel Getting Married

HTM!!! Imagine Robert Redford’s Ordinary People–hopped up on steroids—colliding into a three-day “One World” music festival (you know: Peter Gabriel, Amadou and Mariam, Beausoleil, Damon Alburn, Jorge Ben, Clube Do Balanço, Manu Chao, Daft Punk, Toots and the Maytals, Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba, and, yes, TV on the Radio). I’ve grown highly suspect of movies about white people living in seven million dollar Connecticut estates; all this east coast, upper-class, boho bonhomie starts to scratch away at my spleen. No matter how many virtuous, upstanding people of color Jonathan Demme pours into the frame, Rachel Getting Married is still an over-the-top American tragedy about white people in carefully appointed rooms. That being said, Anne Hathaway gives a stunning, transcendent, raw and emotional, career-changing performance. It’s the best acting I’ve seen on the big screen since Daniel Day Lewis drilled for oil. If only Jenny Lumet had toned down the dramaturgical dead ends and shrill histrionics and Demme had exiled the great majority of his buddies and family members to the catering tables (I kept expecting Spalding Gray to return from the dead), the film might have settled in on a potentially lacerating evisceration of family dysfunction . . . but no, this is a world where Robyn Hitchcock sings songs in the backyard during a reception best described as a coalition of rainbows . . . I’ll take Margo at the Wedding, thank you.

Blindness, or: afraid of the dark

In one scene from the latest film by Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardender), the lead character (played wonderfully–did you expect anything else?–by Julianne Moore) descends into darkness in search of the most basic of human needs: food. The darkness is actually the basement storage of a grocery store. The power has been out in the city for weeks, and everyone has been forced to fend for themselves. Why? Because everyone is blind, that’s why. No one knows how it happened, but thousands (if not hundreds of thousands worldwide) have lost their sight and are wandering the streets, directionless and without hope. Except our unnamed heroine. Continue reading Blindness, or: afraid of the dark

Helloween. Hello mean. Holy ream.

My semi-annual festival of horror films has begun. Aren’t you excited? Can’t you smell the garish red corn syrup? Hear the resounding echoes of the tortured shrieking? Envision the amputated limbs, wriggling as they hit the shag carpeting? ‘Tis the season!

I began the other evening with a Swedish vampire flick called Frostbitten, and as the title suggests, it relentlessly plays to the sort-of-funny, nerdy-teens-going-vampy, hip-slash-gory low-budget conventions of eight thousand Hollywood versions. Yet there’s something there, for the fan. Continue reading Helloween. Hello mean. Holy ream.