SHORT REVIEWS OF NEW
RELEASES SEEN, JULY 2003
All films from U.S.A. unless
otherwise specified.
(-
seen on video; [v] video piece; [p] paracinema (installation, etc.); [s] short,
under 30 minutes; [m] medium length, 30-69 min; * grade changed upon repeat viewing)
[8]
Pirates
of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski)
Idunneau,
evnthogh I’d hrd on guduthurritty that this wzz a bettr, mur innertaining flm
thn I’d evvr havuhrrite t’expect, nothing cudduve evr puppeard me fr Johnny
Depp’s ustonushng cmeadic prrformince. Hz Jack Sparruh izza swee junnurus
creashuhn, reimagunin pirussy azzuh provinse uvthuh rum-damadged and sexshully
ambivvulunt. Huzzah! (Also, Geoffrey Rush finds the perfect can
to contain his ham, Keira Knightley’s neck should count as a special effect,
and the skeletons were bad-ass. Orlando Bloom is bland, though, and the acting
and script were so strong that often the fight sequences were a bore by
comparison. Still, a soaring, expertly crafted entertainment.)
Sleepers
(Abbas Kiarostami, Iran) [v/p]
This
is a very simple video installation, showing a young, Middle Eastern-looking
heterosexual couple lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep. There is no narrative, and it is designed as
an environmental work, with viewers wandering in and out of the room. On the surface, this is high-tech,
warmed-over Warhol – duration with minimal change in action. But given the nature of this project,
Kiarostami has actually produced a pretty brilliant metacommentary on his own work. First of all, this is far more minimal that
the narrative features Kiarostami produces, which are decried as exercises in
minimalist tedium by their detractors.
But perhaps more importantly, this project, produced for Western
museum-goers, gives us an extended look at precisely the mundane events that
Iranian censors force Kiarostami to elide from his films. We see attractive but very ordinary young
people, a man and a woman, being intimate but not sexual. They are in their underwear, and we see flashes
of skin. She rolls over and knocks over
a bedside water bottle, and sets it upright again. Men and women cannot even hold hands in Iranian cinema, so one
could see Sleepers as a real-time interlude, filling in temporal
ellipses we’d otherwise not even notice.
28
Days Later (Danny Boyle, U.K.)
Or,
England’s Dreaming and It Can’t Get Up.
Confession: I have yet to see any of the Romero zombie movies all the
way through. So Boyle’s homages are
somewhat lost on me. Still, this film
of stock characters and archetypes managed to invest all of them with genuine
human interest. (The scene in which Jim
finds his parents was unexpectedly moving.)
From the opening isolation to the gradual assembly of the team of
protagonists, to the final military showdown, this film hit its paces with
precision and grace. As some have
argued, it can be read as an allegory for just about anything. (My personal
fave: British anxiety about its own expendability, the hazards of being a
global sidekick.) But any film which conditions its viewer to accept grungy,
cruddy DV images, and then provides lush, green 35mm film as the dawn of hope,
wins points in my book.
[7]
Madame Satã (Karim Ainouz,
Brazil)
All
of the best ingredients are here. The
pageantry and (muted) politics of late Cinema Novo, the troubled masculinity
and queer / patriarchal posturing of Fassbinder, and surprisingly enough, Jack
Smith’s chintzy, unironic exotica and Kenneth Anger’s fascination with
shimmering light. Narratively, the film
never goes anywhere entirely unexpected, but it never feels predictable,
either. It’s more a case of everything
hitting its paces just so. Lázaro
Ramos’s central performance is the anchor here. He toggles between João’s feminine and masculine sides with
fluidity and grace, which is no mean feat considering how both those sides
exist at total extremes (drag performance / kung-fu ass-kickings). Some might complain that Ainouz withholds
his story’s gratifying conclusion, relegating it to some intertitles and images
during the credits. But this limited
triumph, coming on the heels of a nearly two-hour examination of João’s utter
disenfranchisement and explosive self-loathing, recalled the end of Beau
Travail. Nicely done.
Northfork (Michael Polish)
It’s
pretty easy to see why so many people despise this film, and my experience of
viewing it frequently entailed a degree of astonishment that things I was
seeing, which were so overweening and precious and clever-clever and
self-satisfied, things that should have infuriated me or annoyed me,
simply didn’t. The silly stuff, like
the angelic interludes, were never less than intriguing oddities, which
represented an intricate, loving realization of fundamentally bad ideas, ones
which any fully functioning idea-and-taste-machine would discard. In the end, the “bad” stuff transcended its
badness, because it evinced a level of sincerity which, for me, compelled
belief. (This is partly because the
angelic stuff has an obvious purpose.
The film as a whole is about dealing with death, and little Irwin,
lacking adult knowledge, can only interpret death through a fairy tale version
of religion.) And then there’s all the
stuff that works – the emptied-out landscapes, abandoned homes, the
Hopper-plus-Magritte visual logic governing the main narrative thread. Dennis Harvey’s review likens Northfork
to the Cremaster films, and going into this film with that filter made
all the difference. Like Barney, Northfork
subordinates story values to big, overstuffed, almost swaggering visual conceits, a
pseudo-mythic pageant which can at times elicit chuckles but is never less than
interesting. The script, sadly, is less
capable than the images of absorbing the brothers’ self-satisfaction – what to
do with a film so heavy-handed as to make a pun about heavy-handedness? – but
these slips were nestled against silly humor which leavened the
proceedings. And while this is not a
film which even allows for strong performances as such, James Woods’ quiet,
subtle work offers a sturdy foundation.
I would not go to the wall for Northfork. But for all its flaws, it emerges as
something honest and true, and that was quite a surprise.
[5]
The Present (Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Finland) [s/v/p]
I
have been mildly impressed with Ahtila’s work in the past, but have yet to be bowled
over by anything she’s done, The Present included. Each five minute snippet was shown on a
different monitor, and the noise from one tended to spill onto the others in a
very distracting manner. All of the
pieces allude mental illness in women, profiling individual women who perform
various manias. The best of the group was a wordless scene of a young woman
going home to her two-story shack (it reminded me of dilapidated white-trash
housing you’d see on the outskirts of Houston), but taking time to lay down in
a puddle of stagnant water in the driveway.
Others, like the one with a crawl across a bridge or the one with a
“wind” which destroys a room in a house, were over-produced and over-edited,
each shot a single striking “art” image, but truncated, developing no rhythm
across the images. Regrettably, I
missed the chance to see these fragments in Ahtila’s longer film, Love is a
Treasure. These themes would have to be better realized in the longer form,
given how clipped these pieces were, and how inadvertently glib that brevity
made them.
[4]
-Paradox
Lake (Przemyslaw Reut, U.S. / Germany)
I
watched thirty minutes of this at the Vancouver IFF before walking, and while I
realize I made the right decision that night, I must concede that the film is
very interestingly wrongheaded. Its
blend of documentary material and inept, nearly laughable fiction clearly has a
purpose. The introduction of thwarted
romance and racial misunderstanding certainly contributes to a sort of
real-world messiness, that the camp is not cordoned off from the larger world
and that autistic campers must in turn learn not to be closed off from that
world. Similarly, the genre-crossing
results in cognitive miscues for the viewer, wherein we are not sure how or why
any of what we’re watching quite fits together. Still, with all these potential justifications, it simply doesn’t
work. This is partly because the
autistic performers end up being cheap window dressing for One Man’s Journey to
Self-Discovery, and the flashy stylistic tics only underscore that
solipsism. Plus, lead actor Matt Wolff,
playing counselor Matt (Big Bad) Wolf, bears an uncanny resemblance to Michael
Showalter, making things feel like an unfunny, parallel-universe version of Wet
Hot American Summer. “Worthy,” I
grudgingly admit, but an utter misfire nonetheless.
[W/O]
Close
(Atom Egoyan and Juliao Sarmento, Canada / Portugal) [s/v/p]
You
walk into a hallway and there is just enough space for your body. A large video image of various body parts is
right in front of your face. The video
image is seen only as patterns of ben-day dots, unless you look to the far
corners. (An homage to Chuck Close?) Sadly, what we get are interminable images
of someone clipping his / her toenails into a woman’s mouth, from various
angles and distances. On the
soundtrack, an embarrassing monologue about luck and rabbit’s feet, something
Laurie Anderson might have jotted down in a spare instant and promptly thrown
in the trash. I gave it twelve minutes,
and went back to Sleepers.