Avatar

January 10, 2010 by Jay Antani

Avatar is the quintessential Hollywood blockbuster. It operates on Big Effects, Big Action, Big Emotions, and Big Themes. By keeping things Big and borrowing on universal notions of myth-making, writer-director James Cameron has created an archetypal action-adventure with broad appeal. That might be understating it as, at this writing, Avatar has cracked the billion-dollar box office ceiling and continues to soar beyond The Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man flicks and on towards heights reached only by Cameron’s previous epic Titanic.

The film draws on very elemental emotions — one’s love and loyalty for heritage and personal history, one’s love of family and instinctual bond with children, family, and nature and, conversely, our mistrust of technology and any motive founded on industrial and imperialist ambition. Hence, identifying with its themes is a knee-jerk reflex, and you can’t help but feel used because of it; being a work designed to appeal to the largest possible audience, Avatar’s moral universe is rigorously black and white.

The story here is a variation on the Dances with Wolves template (or Pocahontas template, depending on your cinematic recall): A soldier from an encroaching civilization spends time with the members of the enemy, i.e. the people indigenous to the land, and, through the course of his interaction, gains not only respect and sympathy for them, but falls in love with one of their women (Avatar digresses from the Wolves example in that the woman in question is an actual, true-blood native). Meanwhile, the advancing forces to which our soldier belongs invade, and the soldier fights alongside his adopted brethren as they face the annihilation of their race. Visually, the film also bears more than a few echoes of Lord of the Rings, but, to Cameron’s credit, it also contains a wealth of texture and detail, both natural and technological, that Avatar can claim entirely for itself.

Avatar replaces Wolves’ Old West frontier for a futuristic milieu set on the lush and fantastical landscapes of Pandora — a moon on which humans have discovered a rare and much-prized mineral (Unobtainium, a MacGuffin if there ever was one). The deposits are detected directly below the settlement of the Na’vi — a race of highly intelligent, super-tall, blue-skinned beings that co-exist harmoniously with all living things on their world. Into this utopia arrives Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-Marine back in service to infiltrate the Na’vi culture and gain their trust so that the humans can negotiate their re-settlement before blasting apart their land to get at the Unobtainium. But the more Jake spends time among the Na’vi, particularly with the headstrong and beautiful Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the more he knows he cannot take up arms against them.

To be clear, it’s not Jake’s physical self that interacts with the Na’vi but his Avatar, a synthesized Na’vi-like extension of himself that he controls via a system of neural link-ups. Capable of manipulating his Avatar is exhilarating to Jake, not least because it gives him the sensation of having working legs again, and he revels in his Avatar’s superhuman movement, flight, and agility. Together with a scientific team led by the no-nonsense Dr. Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) — the leading expert on Pandora and its inhabitants — Jake becomes immersed into the Na’vi culture and customs, and, thanks to Neytiri’s conditioning, he becomes quickly adapted to the Na’vi’s spry lifestyle of scaling treetops and cliffs effortlessly, and taming dragon-like creatures which serve as the Na’vi’s aerial consorts.

When the humans do launch their inevitable invasion, Jake, Neytiri, and their comrades take to the skies or attack on their steeds, showering bows and arrows against all manner of fire-blazing military hardware. And this being an environmental sci-fi/fantasy, Pandora itself becomes a character, a living organism with a capacity for vengeance that cannot be ruled out. All of the above provide ample opportunities for Cameron and his production team to give us a feast of eye-popping panoramas, action scenarios, and bravura conceptual imaginings.

In broad strokes, Cameron paints an allegory of American expansionism — think 19th-century Manifest Destiny applied to an alien planet 150 years from now — with daubs of anti-corporate indignation thrown in. Avatar’s themes and sentiments are impossible to deny however thickly Cameron spreads it around because, in watching the plight of the Na’vi, we link what we see directly to atrocities in our own past and in our own world right now. What keeps us rooting for the movie — and what was also the case with Titanic — is the chemistry between its two disparate but fierce-hearted souls who genuinely fall in love with each other. Worthington and Saldana provide enough wattage to keep the film’s human center alive and beating, while Cameron wraps their story in an armature of generally impressive 3D attractions as well as a righteousness that’s touching yet all too simplistic.

Grade: B

Directed by: James Cameron
Written by: James Cameron
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Dileep Rao, Laz Alonso

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Fantasy, Science Fiction | Leave a Comment »

The Hurt Locker

January 2, 2010 by Jay Antani

My guess is that Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker will be henceforth taught in cinema courses as a masterly illustration of how one stages and pieces together an effective action sequence on film. There are several of them to choose from throughout this riveting Iraq War drama, each one demonstrating Bigelow’s shrewd command over the manipulation of space, time, and rhythm. Her battle scenes reap the maximum of suspense and terror in this story about a bomb disposal unit serving amidst the firestorm of the Iraq War in 2004.

One of Bigelow and writer Mark Boal’s riskiest gambles is that they essentially have a protagonist — the unit’s leader, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) — who undergoes little to no change in the course of their story. In fact, James resists any change to his manner and attitude towards war. His men see him as a reckless thrill-seeker, a man obsessed with cheating death if there’s an adrenaline rush to be had. The two in James’s charge, Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) spend a great deal of the film clashing with James, questioning his sanity, but, in the end, performing courageously — though resentfully — alongside him. James is really a ball of manic, destructive energy roiling beneath an assured facade. On the other hand, James has a conscience: Bigelow shows us as much when he has a nervous breakdown following the death of a young Iraqi boy whom he’d befriended. Just as quickly, though, James is back on the job, eager for another set of ticking bombs that must be defused, another firefight in which he could narrowly skirt death.

Renner plays James unflinchingly, only rarely giving us a glimpse of the damaged soul lurking beneath the soldier’s bastion of toughness and professionalism. At the risk of alienating his audience, Renner stays true to James’s cool exterior, delivering an unforgettable depiction of how war can warp and distort a man’s spirit. Matching him scene for scene is Anthony Mackie as Sanborn, James’s moral opposite. Baffled, even horrified, by his commanding officer’s matter-of-fact attitude to a high-risk assignment, and his readiness to expose himself and his men to danger, Mackie calls out James time and again; he, along with Geraghty’s Eldridge (another excellent performance), stand in as our moral counterbalance in a crumbling state where life has lost its value.

In an otherwise apolitical film, Bigelow provides a poignant sociopolitical critique with one single cut. Late in the film, we see a traveling shot of Iraqi children, seen through the window of a Humvee, running along the roadside. A cut retains the camera movement but now, instead of children, we’re looking through the glass doors of a supermarket freezer section, staring at an endless row of pizzas of all varieties. We’ve cut from Iraq to America, a place of deprivation to one of plenty. But, more than that, in cutting from children to meaningless products, Bigelow juxtaposes a gross disparity in values: In a single cut, we’ve shunted from a place whose future hangs in the balance, from faces of children who may not live to see it, to one with arguably no future at all, or whose values can be summarized by a vision of a supermarket freezer section.

The Hurt Locker is a top-notch suspense picture in the old-school mold, fashioned after the B-movie masterpieces of Robert Aldrich and Sam Fuller. Boal’s script can feel episodic to a fault — it’s essentially a series of battle scenes with time-outs for conversation and for providing the grim details of the soldiers’ off-duty lives in the barracks. But what saves his and Bigelow’s film, ultimately, are the deeply etched characterizations, the sense of evolving relationships between soldiers and between Americans and Iraqis, that make each successive battle not just an action scene but a crucible in which these relationships are tested. Perhaps most startling of all the film’s accomplishments is how it approximates the soldiers’ feeling of utter anxiety as they fight a war on foreign soil: This isn’t Iraq so much as a completely different planet, hostile and hateful of their presence, in which everything and everyone is a potential enemy, and even the ground before you can explode and swallow you whole.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
Written by: Mark Boal
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce, David Morse, Ralph Fiennes, Evangeline Lilly, Christian Camargo

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Best of 2009, Drama | 1 Comment »

Up in the Air

December 29, 2009 by Jay Antani

Polished, neatly packaged, and wrapped tightly in a shiny bow, Up in the Air is Hollywood’s gift to Oscar voters in 2009. While being of perfectly adequate quality with professional grade writing, directing, and acting, Up in the Air is also a tedious chore of a movie to write up. Why? Because there’s nothing challenging here, no choice in storytelling, performance, or style that wavers outside the path of convention and normalcy.

As a movie, it’s…fine. If you like a slick drama with dashes of clever social commentary and human interest elements thrown in, this is the movie for you. Up in the Air has PRESTIGE MOVIE emblazoned across it in large, gold letters. It’s the movie with the full-page promotional ads in your local paper’s movie section trumpeting its selection in numerous categories in this season’s dizzying array of awards. It’ll be hard to miss.

Jason Reitman’s recession-era romantic dramedy is themed (among other things) on the existentialism of job loss but it seems to have been made by people who’ve never been fired or laid off. What they do know is that getting laid off can be really, really hard on a person. Scenes of employees reacting to the news that they’ve been let go drip with such heavy sentiment that, as a viewer, you can feel Reitman and Company working overtime to wring tears and heartache from you. It’s only one of the many disingenuous qualities about the movie.

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) shunts around the country, reporting to company bosses who’ve hired his services as an ace corporate downsizer and charged him with the task of firing redundant employees. As unsavory as it is, Bingham enjoys the sense of transience his profession gives him. Afraid to put down roots, to commit to anything, Ryan thrives on his synthetic lifestyle of living in airplane cabins and hotel rooms, rental cars, and executive lounges.

Up in the Air finds Ryan faced with twin crises. The first is the imminent extinction of his here-today-gone-tomorrow lifestyle thanks to a go-getter who’s convinced Ryan’s boss, Craig (Jason Bateman), that firing people via an internet connection is far cheaper than the face-to-face method, which requires flying personnel all over the country. And the second is his sister’s wedding, an event that demands that he visit his family, from whom he’s long kept his distance.

These wrinkles in Ryan’s lone-wolf existence are, in turn, perpetrated and complicated by the arrival of two women: One is the aforementioned go-getter, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), the other is fellow professional transient, Alex (Vera Farmiga), the woman he falls for and whose carefree attitude to their relationship only draws him closer to her.

When Craig orders Bingham to take Natalie with her on his next run, it signals the movie’s second act in which Bingham tries to school his naive, precocious, high-strung companion on the finer points of firing people — not to mention, luggage selection. One of the movie’s butter knife-dull attempts at humor has Natalie arriving at the airport with a clunky, over-packed suitcase. It’s a device meant mainly to prompt a demonstration by ace traveler Bingham on flying light, never mind that a sharp, shrewd woman would know better in the first place. Yes, the comedy doesn’t aim much higher than that.

Of course, Natalie’s tough outer shell quickly begins to melt away after her boyfriend leaves her via text (a moment riddled in an over-the-top breakdown by Kendrick that would be better suited to a bargain-basement rom com), prompting her to mourn her romantic disillusionment (honestly, an ambitious, professional woman dreaming of marriage and kids in her mid-20s seems like a stretch in the 21st century but, okay, I’ll play along). Turns out, Natalie is an old-fashioned gal, a woman who places high value on love, loyalty, and relationships — the very things that Bingham reserves special contempt for. Much witty banter on the subject ensues.

Still, the theme of lasting companionship swirls in the film’s undercurrents and surfaces at every major plot point. When Bingham attends his sister’s wedding, for instance, he’s called upon to pep talk the dithering groom-to-be on the joys of marriage; a scene whose real function is irony since Bingham doesn’t know the first thing on the subject, and, in contemplating them, it’s the change stirring in his own heart that matters here. Bingham’s affection for Alex is what’s at stake in Up in the Air, and their relationship comprises the movie’s most organic quality. Reitman handles Bingham and Alex’s scenes together with a decidedly looser touch, and, truly, these characters share a genuine chemistry with a humor that feels natural. A major reason for this is that Clooney and Farmiga are two talented actors whose work transcends the limitations of the material. In their scenes together, we can enjoy the building dynamic of two talented actors working their craft, reaping as much from a stilted screenplay as possible.

However packaged and artificial Reitman’s concoction may feel, the star of the show, thankfully, is George Clooney. He is the film’s emotional center of gravity, due largely to the warm, natural appeal the actor exudes on screen. Clooney is the closest thing Hollywood’s got to an old-time movie star, namely to Cary Grant. Like Grant, Clooney has the sophisticated demeanor and easy, dapper charm that endear him to his audience, regardless of whatever cad, heel, or crook he happens to be playing. And, like Grant, time and again, Clooney is really playing variations on the same cool, elegant persona, whether it’s Danny Ocean or Michael Clayton or Ryan Bingham. Each role requires him to fine-tune his comic and dramatic temperatures, but, at the end of the day, all the above characters could easily sit together in some smoky club room, enjoy drinks, and understand one another.

Up in the Air is a well-intentioned Hollywood product with a message about the value of human connections. But it mistakes glibness for wit and charm for irreverence. What’s missing from the engine of his screenplay is a more razor-edged sensibility, in which things don’t feel so cute and tucked-in at every turn. It’s a movie of missed opportunities, wherein Reitman could have plumbed the dark depths of the betrayal, loneliness, and denial that make up the core of Bingham’s wounded self. He could, thereby, have made the moral payoff of his conclusion feel well-earned and satisfying. As it is, he’s got the right actor for the job, but his movie lacks the guts.

Grade: C+

Directed by: Jason Reitman
Written by: Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner
Cast: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman, Amy Morton, Melanie Lynskey, J.K. Simmons, Sam Elliott

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Comedy, Drama | 15 Comments »

Sicko

December 27, 2009 by Jay Antani

Reviewing Fahrenheit 9/11, I described Michael Moore as the P.T. Barnum of documentarians. His polemics have all the subtlety of a carnival barker’s shtick, but, you have to admit, there’s little arguing with what’s at the heart of his movies: the portraits of working class individuals who’s circumstances illuminate the festering inequities allowed to thrive in America, inequities that enable the rewarding of the rich and the marginalization of the poor. He’s a master showman, a populist muckraker, to be sure, but his moral outrage against the greed-driven excesses of corporations and the corruption of government is palpable, infectious, and, I think, much-needed in a society that too often feels under the thumb of shareholders, lobbyists, and politicians.

In Sicko, Michael Moore dissects the American health care system and doesn’t come up with very good news. He examines a cross-section of American families and individuals, all of whom are suffering in some way by the bottom-line profiteering and ruthlessness of our major health care companies. Some of his subjects have gone bankrupt, others forced to face serious illness on their own after their carriers abruptly dropped them for getting sick in the first place. Moore investigates the conditions in hospitals where the more “burdensome” (i.e. uninsured, costly, and mentally ill) are regularly thrown out, and left to the mercy of shelters. We also get firsthand accounts of the relatively more compassionate forms of health care that’s the norm in other countries; Moore travels to Canada, the UK, and France to dig up the “dirt” on the socialist modes of care, and finds that their populations live longer and healthier than America’s. Most affecting perhaps is his portrait of several 9/11 rescue workers, all of whom suffer from a range of conditions, from respiratory ailments to PTSD, who’ve all either gotten by mountainous health care bills or gone bankrupt by the same, meeting only apathy from a government that professes to care so much for them.

As is the case with even Moore’s best efforts (and Sicko ranks among his best), the man’s showboating and penchant for staging silly, attention-getting stunts undermines the powerful and poignant message at their roots. In Sicko, the director wields his megaphone and tries to gain his group of 9/11 workers entry into the Guantanamo detention center, a gambit that, no surprise, goes nowhere. But, for the most part, Moore the prankster is muzzled in favor of Moore the social chronicler, and that works to Sicko’s benefit immeasurably. This is a polemic, for sure, but, in uncovering the realities of people — all of them not too different from the rest of us — foundering in a broken system, the movie’s imperative for change, spiked with ironies and salved with sly humor, gets a vital, impassioned dose of urgency.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Michael Moore
Written by: Michael Moore

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Documentary | Leave a Comment »

Capitalism: A Love Story

December 27, 2009 by Jay Antani

Michael Moore casts his gaze at the institution of Capitalism and the wreckage of bankruptcy, corruption, disillusionment and broken lives it’s left across America. The financial meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent propping up of the banking industry inform much of Capitalism: A Love Story’s outrage and Moore’s questioning of a system that’s devoted predominantly to fattening the wallets of CEOs, boardroom suits, bankers, and the politicians who serve as their functionaries in Congress. Moore’s overripe sentiments and silly showmanship — at one point, he enters a financial institution and declares he’s there to make a citizen’s arrest of the company’s CEO for pillaging Americans’ tax dollars and, shortly after, he covers the perimeter of the building in police tape — all work to undermine the inherent power of Moore’s subject. Such antics don’t fool anybody, and, as viewers, we become impatient, anxious for this activist-filmmaker to get past the gags and on to the heart of his story, and to what he does best: Bring into vivid relief profiles of ordinary, embattled Americans. Here, Moore singles out poor families evicted from their homes, striking union workers, and overworked airline pilots, creating portraits of lives ruined by the mortgage crisis and jobs threatened by companies eager to cut corners, while baring for view the nexus interconnecting America’s corporations and its government. By exposing the dirty underbelly of American Capitalism, Moore doesn’t necessarily tell us anything new, but it’s his gung-ho pursuit of accountability and compassion for working-class victims and crusaders that make his movies — and Capitalism: A Love Story among them — worthwhile inquiries into how we live today.

Grade: B

Directed by: Michael Moore
Written by: Michael Moore

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Documentary | Leave a Comment »

The Last Station

December 6, 2009 by Jay Antani

Overwrought direction and a muddled screenplay make writer-director Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station, centering around Leo Tolstoy’s last days, a difficult film to parse out and to appreciate. But thanks to the presence of Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren as Tolstoy and his wife Sofya, the core ideas of the messy and imperfect nature of love can still find flashes of clear expression. Read it here…

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Drama | Leave a Comment »

Diary of a Country Priest

December 1, 2009 by Jay Antani

An incredibly beautiful film by Robert Bresson about a young, dying priest who arrives at his new parish in rural France and struggles to maintain his spiritual faith, his love for others even as those around him are venal, bitter and harbor vindictive thoughts, both towards him and each other. In every way, this is a flawless piece of work and my second favorite so far of Bresson’s films (tops on the list for me is A Man Escaped). Pretty much everything Bresson made is worth watching–he’s one of those filmmakers who infused so much thought and vision, uncompromised and clear-eyed, into each film that he redeems Western cinema of all its indulgent garbage. Bresson worked outside any larger movement–he wasn’t part of the French studio system nor of the New Wave–but the fact that he was embraced by both shows just how universal his greatness was. There isn’t a false note or dramatic stumble throughout Diary — all of it needs to be and appreciated exactly as it is. The Criterion DVD of this movie is, true to form, gorgeous, doing ample justice to the movie’s shimmering cinematography. A lovely and profound masterpiece.

Grade: A+

Directed by: Robert Bresson
Written by: Robert Bresson
Cast: Claude Leydu, Jean Riveyre, André Guibert, Rachel Bérendt, Nicole Maurey, Nicole Ladmiral

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Drama | Leave a Comment »

The Departed

November 30, 2009 by Jay Antani

A letdown, then, that for all its stylistic fireworks, The Departed feels like Scorsese on auto-pilot. Unlike his previous forays into the lives of anti-establishment, morally conflicted men — Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas in particular — The Departed feels strangely antiseptic, an intricate music box of cinematic flair but utterly hollow as a personal statement. The movie’s plot is so overwrought, crammed with so many angles through which it seeks to tell its story, that Scorsese’s role here is really that of a fevered traffic cop. The Departed remains watchable because, in spite of itself, there’s so much talent on display. But what lingers long after sitting through it is that, in terms of a point-of-view, Scorsese’s fingerprints are nowhere near this film, apart from his customary use of rock ‘n’ roll tunes on the soundtrack (including his rather heavy-handed use of the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”). The Departed is Scorsese as a brand: the crime cinema he cultivated is trotted out, its bag of tricks out on display, but the soul is absent. That is reason to mourn, because this movie, the least representative of all in his cinema, represents his best shot at Hollywood acceptance.

In Scorsese’s place are the tiresome hambone antics of Jack Nicholson as ganglord Frank Costello. If it weren’t for the gallery of standout performances by DiCaprio, Baldwin, Sheen and others, Nicholson would’ve brought The Departed down in the crash and fury of a performance that feels like a variation on his already stale Witches of Eastwick schtick. Nicholson’s meant to exude evil, but there’s nothing remotely threatening about the guy; he’s so busy hamming it up, all wide-grinned mugging and clowning around, that he forgets that true evil resides within a cool, composed, largely silent exterior. Consider, for instance, the marvelous Ray Winstone as Mr. French, one of Costello’s right-hand men, who, merely with a glance, can get a guy to tremble and piss his pants. In all his films (Sexy Beast, Cold Mountain, The Proposition are highlights), Winstone’s imposing stature quietly eclipses their lesser qualities. Unfortunately, Winstone is too marginalized a performer here, and time and again I wished that the role of Costello had gone to him. If Nicholson were ditched and Winstone cast as Costello, The Departed could easily have been one of Scorsese’s most fascinating treatments of evil (and one of this year’s best films).

Nicholson notwithstanding, there’s enough in The Departed to keep us involved. The movie’s a reworking of a sleek, sexy 2002 Hong Kong thriller, Infernal Affairs. Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan move the action from Hong Kong to the red-brick patina of Boston, but more or less keep the original’s plot concerning the criss-crossing of informers inside the city’s law enforcement and criminal organizations. On the criminal side, we have Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), Costello’s protégé, snaking himself into the higher eschelons of the Massachusetts state police. The police suspect there’s a mole in their ranks sabotaging their efforts to nab Costello. So they recruit Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), an ace rookie with a troubled background, to wile his way into Costello’s favor. Both Sullivan and Costigan try to keep their respective organizations one step ahead of the other’s, and, ultimately, to narrow in on each other’s identities. It’s a crackerjack setup, but all that made it so fluid and inviting in the original is thrown out in favor of the baroque operatics of Monahan’s screenplay and Scorsese’s own high-pitched directing strategy. It makes The Departed a needlessly restive and stifling experience, instead of a carefully modulated and suspenseful crime story.

Vera Farmiga’s psychiatrist, Madolyn, and the love triangule that develops between her, Sullivan and Costigan are among The Departed’s smarter variations on the original. Scorsese’s always been weak when it comes to portraying women, and The Departed would be no exception were it not for Farmiga’s sharp, honest turn as a woman torn between DiCaprio’s vulnerable Costigan, fighting for survival inside a nest of vipers, and Damon’s Sullivan, a capitol liar who’s so immersed in his own deceptive lifestyle that his involvement with Madolyn and with the police force eventually blur as one.

Monahan’s dialogue, thankfully, is barbed with hilariously profane, self-consciously “male” dialogue and actors like Baldwin and Wahlberg take full advantage, milking maximum humor from the paradox between their characters’ professional roles and their war-weary, embittered attitudes towards them. In fact, Wahlberg’s cop Dignam, more than any other character, is The Departed’s moral compass. Dignam acts according to his principles and has nothing to hide. Maybe for those reasons, Wahlberg’s is finally the most charming, the least show-offy performance of the lot. In Dignam, we find something of a conscience in a movie where conscience is compromised at every turn. His voice hardly registers above the fray here, offering the faintest signal from a director trying to say something.

Grade: C+

Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Written by: William Monahan, Siu Fai Mak, Felix Chong
Cast: Leonard DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Dalton, Anthony Anderson

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Crime | 1 Comment »

Detour

November 18, 2009 by Jay Antani

This low-budget noir (the production truly looks held together by spit and string) from bargain-basement maestro Ulmer involves sad sack musician Al (Neal) caught in a web of circumstance while thumbing his way cross-country to L.A. to reunite with his girlfriend. Al’s luck goes from bad to worse when, after assuming a dead man’s identity, he gets tangled up with a femme fatale (Savage) who blackmails him into doing her bidding. Well-paced and forthright, Detour doesn’t boast a particularly sharp protagonist (Neal’s pouty-faced Al, in fact, is about as a resourceful as a kid lost in a carnival) nor a robust storyline–the events precipitate from one shouting match between conniver and victim in a connect-the-dots fashion. But, with its fatalism and conflating of sex and danger, this is quintessential noir territory. For fans of the genre, it’s a dark and lovely landscape that Detour hitchhikes through.

Grade: B

Directed by: Edgar G. Ulmer
Written by: Martin Goldsmith
Cast: Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Noir, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

The Decline of the American Empire

November 18, 2009 by Jay Antani

At the beginning of The Decline of the American Empire, an author, in discussing her latest book, talks about how the decline of a civilization is marked by people becoming more individualistic and selfish. The drive for communal health and harmony sputters out as these newly “civilized” people crave greater personal satisfaction, whether it’s through materialism, sexual freedom, etc.

Well, the mark of the decline of good cinema is when the filmmaker begins to confuse intellectualism for emotionally rich storytelling. Arcand wants to dissect the shallow, sexually frivolous lives of a bunch of bourgeois, intellectually smug friends and lovers. The first half is segregated: the men gather around a kitchen, preparing a meal, and pontificate to each other about the finer points of debauchery, the sex drive and cheating on your wife. It’s essentially a bunch of ugly, narcissistic, shameless men chortling and guffawing about who they fucked and how, like it’s a bawdy church sermon. But instead of being wickedly funny, it’s repellent before becoming a total snore.

The same holds for the women who are “working out” at a nearby gym, swapping stories about what kind of men make the best lays, holding forth on their litany of affairs and cheating, and so forth. It’s fifty tedious minutes of circular conversation. Arcand thinks he’s making a profound and funny satire of sorts about the moneyed class in 1980s French Canadian society. Whatever it is, he has failed miserably. I would liken these moments, as I contained my growing contempt for these vapid, pampered snot-heads, to medieval torture.

Rapidly, while still in the first half, we come to simply hate these characters: They’re all selfish, insecure and flat-out boring (the last being the worst fate a character can suffer). When the men and women convene over wine and dinner, the movie picks up some steam and even becomes momentarily involving. A woman despairs in realizing the true extent of her husband’s pathological cheating; the gay member of the group–an inveterately promiscuous cruiser–finds himself worried about the blood in his urine; the swinging bachelor-professor contends with the love he feels for his young, emotionally more mature girlfriend; and one woman finds herself taken with the brutish charms of her thuggish new boyfriend. These are potentially compelling stories, but Arcand, the pompous social philosopher and inept storyteller, drains the lifeblood out of them.

We feel nothing for these characters because they themselves don’t seem mature enough to feel anything for themselves. They’re so wrapped up in the indulgent individualism of the age, that their very humanity has been sold in the bargain. Perhaps this is Arcand’s point. But rather than make a movie about it–a form which demands emotional engagement–he’d been better off taking a cue from his own snobbishly academic characters, writing a book instead, and sparing the rest of us.

Grade: F

Directed by: Denys Arcand
Written by: Denys Arcand
Cast: Dominique Michel, Dorothée Berryman, Louise Portal, Pierre Curzi, Rémy Girard, Yves Jacques, Geneviève Rioux, Daniel Brière, Gabriel Arcand

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Drama | Leave a Comment »

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