Archive for September, 2010

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Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

September 24, 2010

For its rapturous imagery and mythical sensibilities, director Zack Snyder’s “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole” aspires to something akin to “Avatar” or the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. In fact, the attention to texture and detail that Snyder and his team have invested in depicting everything from the film’s painterly landscapes to every individual feather of its largely avian cast is downright impressive. Rendered in 3D, “Guardians” can often be a breathtaking experience approximating James Cameron’s work in his above-mentioned saga.

Writers John Orloff and Emil Stern adapt Kathryn Lasky’s popular children novels about two warring kingdoms of owls – the noble Guardians and the evil Pure Ones. From the looks of it, Orloff and Stern do their best with an overload of characters, numerous by-plays, back-story and incident, but, finally, the job of condensing the full scope of a novel into a 90-minute fantasy flick asks both too much of the form and of the audience.

“Guardians” follows two plucky young barn owl-brothers, Soren (Jim Sturgees) and Kludd (Ryan Kwanten), who find themselves on opposite sides in the story’s mythic clash of owls. While testing their fledgling wings, Soren and Kludd are captured by agents of the Pure Ones and whisked off to their nefarious stronghold. Rather than be added to the Pure Ones’ legion of brainwashed soldiers, Soren escapes the clutches of its leader, Metal Beak (Joel Edgerton) while Kludd – always jealous of Soren’s flying abilities – vows allegiance to Metal Beak and his queen, Nyra (Helen Mirren).

Soren, meanwhile, teams up with the tiny but intrepid Gylfie (Emily Barclay) and the buffoonish but well-meaning pair, Digger (David Wenham) and Twilight (Anthony LaPaglia). Together, they seek out the storied Guardians and warn them of the Pure Ones’ imminent invasion, and of Metal Beak’s vaguely explained ploy that involves bats and unleashing the destructive energies harnessed from a rare metal. Deception in the Guardians’ ranks and an obligatory final act beak-and-talon throw-down round out a script that packs in far too many emotional and expository beats for anyone unfamiliar with the source material, frankly, to care.

A game cast featuring established thespians like Mirren, LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush, Hugo Weaving together with newer talents like Joel Edgerton and Ryan Kwanten all manage to breath dramatic fire and a sincere gravity to the proceedings. That added to the story’s inherent sense of fantasy, and its genuinely felt moments of exhilaration (as when Soren discovers his perceptive gifts) and of danger (as when the “Guardians’” scrappy heroes struggle to fly through a dangerous ocean storm) keep us engaged – for a time, at least.

But one question I kept coming back to was, “Who’s this movie made for?” It’s too violent and scary for very young children. And I wouldn’t expect tweens and teens to be jonsing for a fantasy adventure about owls. For older crowds, the movie doesn’t have rich enough story and character development – though it teases with potential in both – to make the material truly involving. That leaves the fans of Lasky’s books, but they too might be turned off by Snyder’s rushed, fevered telling. “Guardians” may be trying to please all the above equally with the end result that everyone leaves the theater feeling a bit gypped.

Grade: C+

Directed by: Zack Snyder
Written by: John Orloff, Emil Stern
Cast: Jim Sturgess (voice), Emily Barclay (voice), Abbie Cornish (voice), Hugo Weaving (voice), Geoffrey Rush (voice), Helen Mirren (voice), Joel Edgerton (voice), Sam Neill (voice), Ryan Kwanten (voice), Anthony LaPaglia (voice), David Wenham (voice)

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Animation, Family, Fantasy | Leave a Comment »

Resident Evil: Afterlife

September 14, 2010

Producer-director-writer Paul W.S. Anderson’s unstoppable spinoffs of “Resident Evil,” the megahit humans vs. zombies video-game franchise, continues with “Resident Evil: Afterlife.” It offers the full grab bag of “Matrix”-y effects thrown at your eyeballs over and over again accompanied by a head-pounding fusion of hard rock and techno. In fact, during many scenes in “Afterlife,” I wasn’t sure whether to watch Milla Jovovich do leaps and somersaults in slo-mo while firing bullets and bathed in droplets of rain, or just get up and dance to the soundtrack.

Unsurprisingly, “Afterlife” is being released in both 2D and 3D versions; I saw the 3D, which adds nothing qualitatively to the experience. While if offers some genuinely clever touches initially, “Afterlife” loses steam once Anderson becomes less interested in the story at hand and more on wrapping it up, making sure to set up another sequel.

In terms of visual design, the movie’s opening set inside the expansively futuristic headquarters of the evil Umbrella Corporation (the company that perpetrated the zombie virus) impresses most. Here, Alice (Milla Jovovich), a human with all the emotional register of a mannequin, confronts the company’s CEO, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts) – he’s the one sporting the shades and the bad Brit accent – in a no-holds-barred battle that begins indoors and ends in a plane crash from which Alice escapes. Thereafter, the bulk of “Afterlife” follows Alice and cohort Claire’s (Ali Larter) attempts to lead a group of survivors, holed up in a high-rise L.A. prison, to a tanker ship believed to be a safe haven from zombies, just offshore. The sections inside the prison work best as the survivors – ranging from the rangy, Will Smith-esque ex-basketball player Luther West (Boris Kodjoe) to the reptilian movie producer, Bennett (Kim Coates). Anderson, thankfully, slows the story enough to take advantage of his premise’s horror-movie and survivalist drama tropes as issues of betrayal, trust and camaraderie boil to the surface, and suspicions arise that the zombies may be tunneling their way in.

Once the zombies overrun the prison, “Afterlife” switches to action-movie gear from which it never returns, culminating in a finale that’s a pale rehash of the opening. The occasional flashes of imagination aside, “Afterlife” epitomizes what movies written largely by software and marketing committees look like. Diehard fans of the franchise and genre enthusiasts may flock to it, but on its own merits, the movie offers little. To say it’s nothing more than a crass merchandising gimmick would be to acknowledge Hollywood’s openly cynical attitude to story telling and the film business in general. And what’s the point of that?

Grade: C-

Directed by: Paul W. S. Anderson
Written by: Paul W. S. Anderson
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Kim Coates, Shawn Roberts, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Spencer Locke, Boris Kodjoe, Wentworth Miller, Sienna Guillory, Kacey Barnfield, Norman Yeung, Fulvio Cecere

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Horror, Science Fiction, Thriller | 2 Comments »

Hideaway (Le Refuge)

September 14, 2010

“Hideaway,” director François Ozon’s study of loss, connection and renewal means to be a heartbreaking tale about the unlikely bond that develops between two drifting souls. The drama pairs up a pregnant and recovering heroin addict with her late lover’s gay half brother, who’s estranged from his wealthy, emotionally cold family. But, for all its sincere intentions, “Hideaway” is clueless in matters of human choice and behavior, as Ozon masks his lack of sensitivity to the material with his characteristic cerebral detachment and pretense to subtlety.

After her lover Louis (Melvil Poupaud) dies from overdose, his girlfriend Mousse (Isabelle Carré) learns she’s pregnant with his child. Despite the urging of Louis’ stern mother (Claire Vernet) to terminate the pregnancy, Mousse decides to carry her child to term as her way of mourning and of staying connected with Louis. She repairs to a beachside retreat – which also happens to belong to her father, the man who sexually abused her when she was a teenager – to wait out her pregnancy and recover from her addiction. But she has a conflicted attitude towards her unborn child – on the one hand, it’s a testament to her and Louis’s relationship but, on the other, it also demands an intensity of love that she doesn’t feel ready to give.

Harboring a lifetime of resentments, most recently towards Louis’s alienating family, Mousse reluctantly allows Louis’s half brother Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy) – en route to Spain – to spend a few days with her. Of course, Mousse and Paul warm to each other, sharing snippets of their past, while Paul dallies with Mousse’s groundskeeper Serge (Pierre Louis-Calixte) and Mousse keeps to herself, swigging methadone, when she isn’t having bizarre encounters such as when a demented woman, enamored of Mousse’s pregnant belly, makes urgent pleas for the expectant mother to be unconditionally devoted to her child. Even more bizarre is when a man fixated on pregnant women, takes Mousse to his room where they both find mutual, fully clothed satisfaction.

Hardly any of the “Hideway’s” conversations and episodes bring us to a close sympathy for its characters. Of their motives, we gain an academic understanding thanks to dialogue covering Paul’s family past or Mousse’s psychological repression. But Ozon’s direction and his script (co-written with Mathieu Hippeau’s script) trade on surfaces: Mousse and Paul express concern for each other, but there is no sense of unselfish sacrifice or affection between them. The one opportunity in which Ozon could have explored that idea – that is, Mousse’s evolving relationship with her child – is dealt with in throwaway fashion using that most convenient of plot devices: the letter, written in this case from Mousse to Paul, absolving herself of the responsibilities of parenting – as if a child were a pet. Mousse’s “sacrificial” gesture feels utterly false, irresponsible and the final straw in a movie that asks much of its audience but gives back so little in return.

The performances from Carré (who real-life pregnancy is in full view here) and Choisy (a pop star in France) are compelling enough, if aloof to a fault. Meanwhile, Ozon tries repeatedly to make up for his observational shortcomings with bursts of sentimentality: A sweet song, a tender gesture, a fit of sobbing, or, most obviously, an image of Mousse and Paul playing together in the ocean, all meant to appeal to our hearts but which evaporate in “Hideaway’s” unrevealing emptiness.

Grade: D

Directed by: François Ozon
Written by: François Ozon, Mathieu Hippeau
Cast: Isabelle Carré, Louis-Ronan Choisy, Pierre Louis-Calixte, Melvil Poupaud, Claire Vernet, Jean-Pierre Andréani

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

The War Tapes

September 7, 2010

Following close on the heels of Patricia Foulkrod’s The Ground Truth — a documentary that will go down as one of the finest to come out of the current imbroglio in Iraq — comes a companion piece of sorts, Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes. Like The Ground Truth, the goal of Scranton’s work is to expose the moral and psychological effects of the war in Iraq on those directly in its crosshairs, i.e. the soldiers and their families. The documentary’s most interesting departure point, though, isn’t the information gleaned from its contents — The Ground Truth covered identical terrain and, to my mind, to more incisive and poignant effect–but the technique Scranton used to gather it all. She distributed mini DV cameras to ten soldiers of the National Guard’s C Company unit, based in Iraq’s volatile Sunni Triangle. Of these, three soldiers — Steve Pink, Zack Bazzi and Mike Moriarty — managed to shoot video for the entirety of their yearlong tour, and made it into Scranton’s final distillation of the thousand or so hours of amassed footage.

There is a rough-and-ready arc to Scranton’s telling, beginning with the soldiers’ deployment, through their experiences in the war zone, then back home where they must contend with war’s domestic aftermath, arguably another war in itself. Where Scranton’s strategy really pays off is in the footage itself, as shot by Pink, Bazzi and Moriarty. There are moments here, a street ambush in Fallujah being the most striking, that have the nerve-jangling immediacy of a fiction-film set piece or a violent video game. The split-second realization that this footage is from an actual event as it actually unfolded, un-doctored by the media, makes it enormously startling. The direct-cinema authenticity that a soldier’s eye gives to this largely street-fought war, in which innocent civilians are the hardest hit, lends The War Tapes its primary strength.

Scranton devotes a lengthy segment to the activities of KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, which has a virtual monopoly on the housing and feeding of soldiers, as well as the transporting of consumer goods across Iraq. The latter involves hiring private drivers, some from poor countries, to haul these goods in semi-trucks across the country’s dangerous, devastated roadways. Moriarty’s commentary on the worth of human life relative to the contents of those trucks (“This is a war for cheese!” he proclaims) underscores the up-front nefariousness of KBR’s profit-driven tactics, and provides the documentary’s most damning, heart-rending information. Time and again, Moriarty, Pink and Bazzi (who is of Middle Eastern descent) remark on how, as long as corporations have money to make in Iraq, there will be no end to this war.

Where War Tapes badly hobbles, though, is in figuring out what to do with all this material. Long stretches of its 97 minutes feel monotonous, circling over the same ground, riddled with the soldiers’ grievances and their bullying, uncomprehending attitude towards the locals. Moriarty, Pink and Bazzi are understandably pissed off, fraught with bitterness. They can’t make sense of their situation once they’ve returned to friends and families who are equally confused. Moriarty defends Bush’s pursuit of securing Iraq for oil, because otherwise “it would be devastating to America.” Pink refuses treatment for his post-traumatic stress, and hopes, as a silver lining to all this, that someone out there, not just Dick Cheney, is profiting in Iraq. Ideologically, Scranton settles for the soldiers’ war-weary cynicism, but, after showing us all that she has, we feel short-changed. As with any documentary or work of art, we crave an insight deeper than what mere surfaces reveal–an interpretation of a maddening reality that these soldiers aren’t in a position to provide, and which Scranton can’t fully fathom in her search through the chaos.

Grade: B

Directed by: Deborah Scranton
Cast: Zack Bazzi, Duncan Domey, Ben Flanders, Mike Moriarty, Steve Pink, Brandon Wilkins

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

Walk the Line

September 7, 2010

James Mangold’s Johnny Cash biopic runs along fairly conventional lines, but it’s made with admirable conviction and clarity of purpose. Walk the Line’s script provides its actors a solid backbone, running from Cash’s rural roots during which he became forever scarred with guilt and grief over his older brother’s death, to his stardom in the 50s and 60s as a maverick country music/rock ‘n’ roll singer/songwriter melding streetwise and inspirational lyricism.

As for the leads Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, their immersion into their roles is mesmerizing. Witherspoon as June Carter is a marvel to watch; she doesn’t miss a beat, so to speak, in every moment of her performance. Her scenes performing on stage with Phoenix’s Johnny Cash are all brilliant. I found the chemistry between the two electric throughout — this is critical to our experience of what is, at heart, a love story.

Mangold uses shorthand pop psychology to anchor his characterization of Cash — a man constantly haunted by feelings of inferiority, inflicted upon him by his father (Patrick) in the wake of his brother’s tragic death. As pat as this seems, it’s still effective in anchoring the Cash we see here — a brilliant talent constantly sabotaging his own success with destructive behavior involving drugs and boozing. June Carter, then, becomes his muse, his redemption, the angel who saves him from a miserable first marriage, his devastated self-esteem vis-à-vis his father, and restores his faith in himself. More than a tribute to Cash himself, Walk the Line is a wonderful affirmation of love, of finding your soul mate, and of Cash’s spiritual strength which guided him through some bleak existential terrain.

Terrific performances and a writer-director working completely in the service of sincere material make what could’ve been a by-the-numbers biopic into a consistently engaging journey. Impressive work.

Grade: A-

Directed by: James Mangold
Written by: Gill Dennis, James Mangold
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick, Dallas Roberts, Dan John Miller, Tyler Hilton

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

Unforgiven

September 7, 2010

A terrific movie deserving of the mythic status its garnered since its release as a model for revisionst Westerns (we’ve seen its imprint on every Western that’s followed including, 15 years later, the brilliant HBO series Deadwood). On the surface, the appeal of Unforgiven lies with Eastwood’s iconic presence, and in the existential gloom that hangs over it. David Webb Peoples’ “last ride” plotline goes on to explore several important themes, each channeled effectively through the excellent performaces by Eastwood, Morgan, Hackman, Harris and Rubinek. The themes of male bravado, courage, and violence are all easy enough to spot, but most fascinating is Eastwood’s treatment of extreme leftism gone amuck, as personified by Hackman’s terrifying sheriff, Little Bill. Bill lords over the small, vulnerable town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming with an iron hand. He’s particularly insistent about his “No Firearms” policy: With all his citizens unarmed, he and his goons are free to mete out their savage brand of justice without fear of reprisal from anyone. Big Whiskey, indeed, feels like a town under the grip of fascism — a cautionary example of Big Government whose powers have gone unchecked — as told by Eastwood, the rugged individualist. Rather than espouse any political affiliation, though, Unforgiven honors love and loyalty above anything else, and the individual’s moral responsiblity to pull down any force that would obstruct our freedom to live our lives, and seek our destinies in peace. It’s a weighty subject matter, but handled eloquently by Webb Peoples, Eastwood, and his cast.

You can’t help but be awed by Eastwood’s weary, squint-eyed, rock-cut features and his laconic delivery: With this movie he really cemented his legend. His Will Munney is a guilt-burdened ex-gunfighter whose reputation as a ruthless murderer has haunted him even as he has strived to set his life straight. After his wife’s death, he finds himself unable to make a living as a pig farmer, so, reluctantly, Munney takes up his gun again to recover a bounty offered by Big Whiskey’s prostitutes in response to the mutilation of one of their own. Munney rides out with his old partner, Ned Logan (Freeman) and a gun-happy punk, The Schofield Kid (Woolvet), in search of the perpetrators and ends up in a tragic confrontation with Little Bill. The action unfolds grimly, sloppily, as we realize that Munney’s last-act run for vengeance against the ruthless Bill is all but unavoidable. Not everything in Unforgiven clicks: the aforementioned performances aside, the rest of them are uneven and, while graceful and unintrusive, Eastwood’s direction sometimes veers into the ham-fisted and over-keyed. All in all, though, this remains Eastwood’s best film — a compelling study of the shame and guilt that attends violence, of the rule of the mighty over the weak and of courage and cowardice.

Grade: A

Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Written by: David Webb Peoples
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, Richard Harris, Jaimz Woolvett, Saul Rubinek, Frances Fisher

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

Undertow

September 7, 2010

This is the best movie yet from David Gordon Green, but that isn’t saying much. Cinematically, Undertow oozes mood, quite literally as the sweat and dampness of the Southern summer drips from the pores of its characters’ and from its sodden textures. And, for a while, there is great pleasure in taking this in and in witnessing Gordon Green’s visual talent at work. But, when it comes to pacing and in establishing the very purpose of his stories, this writer-director is at a woeful loss. Even here, when he has a real genre framework and a clear storyline to work from, he manages to ditch everything at the expense of indulging his fascination for Southern squalor. Indeed, every character, every setting of Undertow (as in his previous George Washington and All the Real Girls) is spawned from some hideous dream of the downtrodden and muck-drenched South. After a while, all this becomes extremely monotonous and downright depressing. As good as its performances are (especially by the gifted Jamie Bell), it’s all smothered by Gordon Green’s obsession with contrived Southern gothic, cross-bred here with Greek tragedy, the O’Neil of Desire Under the Elms and the Hitchcockian chase formula.

The story: John Munn, a pig farmer (Mulroney) with two sons (Bell and Alan), lives in a ramshackle house. One day, he gets a surprise visit from his long-estranged brother, Deel (an effectively slimy Josh Lucas). Deel intends to steal a cache of gold coins, a legacy from his and John’s late father, that John has stowed away. After a bloody scuffle in which John is killed, Chris (Bell) snatches the coins and hotfoots it, along with his sickly younger brother, Tim. Across oppressively dank swamplands, rundown backwater towns, a junkyard and even a squatters’ colony, Deel chases the boys down. The thatch-haired Tim, as thin as a stick figure and always ingesting paints and other hazardous chemicals so as to induce vomiting, comes across as just a sad sack with no discernible motive for his self-destructive behavior. Bell does his best as the resilient older brother and so does Lucas as the venal Deel. But what’s with Gordon Green’s fascination with emotionally retarded social outcasts? The ragged urchin girl who befriends Chris seems just a tattered version of the moon-eyed and addle-brained college nitwit played by Zoey Daschenel in All the Real Girls.

A real letdown, a drag-down bore, a shame considering the promise of its mood and its style (most notably its 70s-inspired freeze frames and color schemes). Still, none of this is a surprise considering its misguided maker. Gordon Green — along with P.T. Anderson and a handful of other American filmmakers who have a penchant for style, but nothing to offer in terms of an original vision — must be jettisoned from the poop shoot of pop culture. Let us all move on.

Grade: C

Directed by: David Gordon Green
Written by: Joe Conway, David Gordon Green
Cast: Jamie Bell, Kristen Stewart, Devon Alan, Dermot Mulroney, Josh Lucas

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

The Underneath

September 7, 2010

The Underneath dates from when Soderbergh was making movies on the far edges of the Hollywood grid. This quirky noir concerns Michael Chambers, a ne’er-do-well gambler (played by a wry Peter Gallaghar) who skips town only to return still smitten with his old flame. In a bid to get her back and leave town together, he plots the robbery of an armored car, one that he’s driving, with the intention of making off with his woman along with all the stolen money, before going clean. The plan, of course, gets botched, Michael’s stepfather gets shot, and he himself lands in the hospital. Things go from bed, ahem, bad to worse when Michael finds himself abducted by Tommy, his by-now infuriated former accomplice (an icy-eyed William Fichtner), sending things into a betrayal-laced tailspin. Soderbergh wonderfully, at times hypnotically, paces this indie gem, and Elliot Davis’ photography is luminous; both director and cinematographer have a deft feel for how to meld a crime story into a character-driven melodrama. Underneath stands as one of Soderbergh’s more accomplished projects before hitting it big with Out of Sight. An absorbing, if an occasionally plodding, experience.

Grade: B

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Written by: Steven Soderbergh, Daniel Fuchs
Cast: Peter Gallagher, Alison Elliott, William Fichtner, Joe Don Baker, Paul Dooley, Elisabeth Shue, Shelley Duvall

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

Two English Girls

September 7, 2010

Two English Girls is widely regarded as one of Truffaut’s masterpieces. Likewise, let it be known that, once again, the critical response to this film is wildly out of proportion to the merits of the film itself. Truffaut is, without doubt, the most vain of the French New Wave filmmakers, a moral delinquent/movie-loving savant whose charms hoodwinked many into believing he had the humility and inner complexity to be a great storyteller. Watch anything made by India’s Satyajit Ray made between 1955 and 1975 if you want stories told by a true genius, one whose studies of love and yearning would easily put this French brat — for that matter, just about any one making movies on the world stage at that time — to shame.

Jean-Pierre Léaud, for all his appeal, is just a blank-faced mannequin standing in for the morally disingenuous and superficial exploits of Truffaut himself. To him, as ever, humans are too capricious, too much at the whims of physical love for anything lasting and meaningful. This is a fine and powerful message if Truffaut himself didn’t give it the romanticized credence that he does time and again in each of his silly, nonsensical (not to mention overrated) outings.

Why is it that Truffaut’s stories are generally so well received, considering that his characters’ exhibit little or no inner contradictions and complexities? For a viewer to sympathize with a character, that character has, at some point, to acknowledge regret, to have suffered, or compromised because of a single-minded devotion to something or someone greater than him- or herself, to express a humbling sense of purpose. Léaud’s characters exhibit nothing of this sort — they are lost, easily distracted and undisciplined, all the qualities you might readily disdain in a character, except for the fact that Truffaut chooses to make him a chick magnet who loves and leaves with no discernible feeling and with utter impunity. It’s part of what makes Truffaut’s cinema so woefully shallow, so unequal to the task of reaching a better understanding of human beings.

Also, I can’t stand flat, vapid cinematography, especially when it’s coupled with flat, vapid characters and story material. Nestor Almendros is famed for using natural light and unpretentious compositions and his aesthetic was very much in vogue in the European cinema of the early ’70s. The problem is that a filmmaker needs to enmesh this anti-glamorous style with an absolutely uncompromised dramaturgy. Truffaut, though, just wants to get laid, so to speak, to strive for anything deeper and more complex than Léaud’s high jinks.

Still, Georges Delerue’s lovely score and fine performances by Markham and Tendeter keep another one of Truffaut’s narcissistic escapades–masquerading as “high brow” and “literate” cinema–watchable, but just barely.

Grade: C+

Directed by: François Truffaut
Written by: François Truffaut, Jean Gruault
Cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Kika Markham, Stacey Tendeter, Sylvia Marriott, Marie Mansart

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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

September 7, 2010

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me boasts all the hallucinatory Lynchian touches — the perversions of domestic melodrama, German Expressionist imagery, and the staging and cutting that feel right out of ’20s silent cinema. All this is to say that Lynch is not just a purveyor of these forms, but has a knack for rendering them in nightmarish tones, bending these forms out of shape to suit his whims. I say “whims” rather than “needs” because, in a narrative sense, nothing makes much sense in Lynch-land, nor do sense or logic much matter. Lynch is a filmmaker who has no humanist or dramatic concerns: he has nothing particularly to say about human nature, at least in real-world terms. The underbelly of consciousness and the residue of memory are what continually fuel his work –it’s as if he’s using his cinema to subvert and eroticize the clean-cut American popular cinema and white bread television that he grew up with. After all, what is Hoover, the special agent that Lynch plays in Fire Walk With Me, but a grotesque spoof of the J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph MacCarthy caricatures of his television youth?

Fire Walk With Me is a prequel of sorts to Lynch’s 1990 TV mystery series. But rather than preserve the detective-story framework that sustained the TV show (“Who killed Laura Palmer?”), Lynch makes a thriller about the last days of Laura Palmer before she was murdered in the sleepy Oregon hamlet of Twin Peaks. He lays everything bare, including the identity of Laura’s killer, and thereby deadens the central question, the nerve, that coursed through and became the raison d’etre for the TV series. As thrillers go, Fire Walk With Me is about as weak and uninvolving as they get, because nothing in this narrative feels it wants to cohere into a greater whole. Lynch’s cinema doesn’t really operate on the levels of logic or causality, anyway, but rather on absurdities. You get the feeling he’s making it up as he goes, but trying to wring as much weirdness from every moment as he can.

It’s the journey not the destination that counts in Lynch’s cinema–a sentiment I greatly appreciate. And, in movies like Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, I sensed that his aesthetic preoccupations were developed rigorously enough to bind themes into an understandable whole. But here, Lynch runs out of momentum, out of ideas in the first hour, leaving us to maunder through the remaining 75 minutes, trying to pretend that Laura’s descent into her drug-addled father-fixated sexual nightmares are actually worth following.

Cokehead teenager, Laura Palmer (Lee) wants to know who’s haunting her nightmares and whether her father (Wise) has anything to do with it. Meanwhile, Agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) follows the unfolding events, psychically. There are plenty of hilarious and creepy moments here, with Lynch’s one-of-a-kind atmospherics that keep you ill-at-ease throughout yet compelled to keep watching — like passing a car wreck on the highway.

What Fire Walk With Me offers peters out eventually, and the second half feels like a pastiche of tired Lynch tropes — complete with the Dante-esque descents into madness, sexual and otherwise, set to cloying ’50s inspired music, all to ironic and disturbing effect. Without human characters of any consequence, what’s the point? Lynch really drags actress Lee through some bizarre territory — she’s game, just not terribly good. This fire dampens fast, and the results are rather dreary and nonsensical.

Grade: C-

Directed by: David Lynch
Written by: David Lynch, Robert Engels
Cast: Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Mädchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, Phoebe Augustine, David Bowie, Chris Isaak, David Lynch, Harry Dean Stanton, Kiefer Sutherland, Kyle MacLachlan, Frank Silva, Moira Kelly

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

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