Post-Punk Cinema Club

2012-01-18T18:11:00.000-08:00

Orgasm Inc. (2009)

2011-12-29T09:35:00.000-08:00

Orgasm Inc. is a wonderful documentary pulling together the big issues of Big Pharma and feminism. It explores the medicalization of female sexuality, and the intense race by pharmaceutical companies to get FDA approval for a "Viagra for women" that will "cure" them of female sexual dysfunction (FSD). Whether FSD is a real illness, or the "hysteria of the 21st century", is still hotly debated - but Big Pharma plows on, preparing pills, patches and nasal sprays aimed at helping women achieve orgasm.

The documentary is brief (80 minutes), informative and fun. It swings from hilarious (the San Francisco Museum of Antique Vibrators was particularly wonderful) to tragic (the women who've undergone vaginoplasty or invasive procedures where a tiny vibrator is put in their spinal chord (seriously, W.T.F.)). And, overall, outrage. Outrage both at the medicalization of everything in America (America and New Zealand are the only two countries where pharmaceutical companies can run ads), and at the punitive gaslighting of a culture that tells women they're not "normal" and need to be "fixed" if they don't always orgasm during sex. Indeed, the tragedy is hearing how often the "bad guys" (those scrabbling to find a corrective pill/patch/spray to "cure" women) invoke "normality" - and how internalized that language is. Consider the poor clinical test subject of Orgasmatron-inventor, Dr. Stuart Meloy. This woman, happily married in her 50s, describes "humiliation" at feeling like she's not "normal" because of her FSD diagnosis. Dr. Meloy tells her that "over 80% of women" have FSD. (And did we mention that the original academic article from 1999 basically asked women if they ever didn't feel like having sex? Or didn't enjoy sex?) Just this contradiction was astounding: something that, purportedly, a majority of women have, and it's still classified as abnormal? Something that needs to be labelled and chemically altered?

The amount of misinformation regarding female sexuality is also, we think, outrageous - and a glaring symptom of our patriarchal, sexist culture (yes, in America). When the Vibrator Museum's curator mentions little old grannies not knowing where their clitoris is, we wanted to laugh and cry. Or the scene where the filmmaker pays a visit to the Dr. Berman's Chicago clinic, where - for the modest price of $1,500 - you too can be shown a porn film while a medical assistant uses a vibrator on you, and then they tell you what you did wrong. For the love of God! Arghhh!

The documentary's narrative eventually culminates in an FDA hearing over a new testosterone patch by Procter & Gamble - a patch that found, in a clinical study, to increase sexytimes and orgasms for its test subjects. Leaving the issue of publication bias aside, the study was performed on a select subsample of the general female population. When the FDA makes its decision, in the final minutes of the doc, we almost whooped for joy. But we would have appreciated some of the focus to shift more to the sex-positive talking heads: people like Dr. Tiefer and New View, who work to combat both FSD and its products; or the hilarious and wonderful Good Vibes (with a shout-out to Toys in Babeland); or Ray Moynihan and Dr. Kim Wallen, who just talked a lot of plain sense about the whole pseudo-science of it all.

As it was, the doc was infuriating - but, showing more of the work of these people, we think it would have been inspiring. (We also wanted more on the history of vibrators, since that was hilarious - oh well, onto Sarah Ruhl and Jonathan Pryce now!) A must-watch.

Michael Collins (1996)

2011-12-28T18:55:00.000-08:00

The best bit in Neil Jordan's quasi-hagiographic Michael Collins is the final scene: a black and white coda featuring archival footage of the real Collins' funeral. This is, sadly, one of the rare moments when the film really hits its stride: what with the transcendental, thrusting bombastery underlain with leaping violins... well, it's all very transcendental, mystical and Neil Jordany. That is, bordering on the fantastical, while still deeply relevant to gritty reality. Is that a PPCC tear? Yes. Yes, it is.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film isn't quite so consistent. Director Jordan traffics in a very special, wonderful kind of weirdness: his films often feature gender-bending sexuality, coupled with Irish Troubles and a dash of the surreal. In Michael Collins, Jordan tones it down - or tries to, anyway - in telling a relatively straightforward biography of early freedom fighter, "Minister of General Mayhem" Michael Collins (played by a vivacious Liam Neeson). The problem is, we think, that Jordan can't quite keep his natural tendency to weirdness in place, and so the film is a jagged mess of episodic, clunky narrative and awkward shifts in tone. One moment, we're in a giggling, carefree love triangle between Michael, his best friend Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn), and the one-dimensional "Irish rose" Kitty (Julia Roberts, in an accent that comes and goes). The next moment, Michael is instructing his foot soldiers on which arsenals to set fire to, and which British collaborators to shoot in the head.

It's all a bit jarring, and it never quite comes together. The film begins with the 1916 Easter Rising, and we're quickly introduced to Michael, Harry and the whole band of Irish Republicans. The most notable of which is Eamon De Valera (Alan Rickman, not really doing the accent), President of the Irish Republic and a character who appears and disappears to America and then appears again, only to ruin everything by complaining too loudly about the Irish Free State. Okay, maybe Ebert was right and this movie isn't terribly balanced (or even informative) regarding the bloodshed that followed the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The relatively ignorant PPCC certainly didn't exactly follow why De Valera was in such a stitch. And that sort of undermines the tragedy of it all. Trying to make the love triangle become a parallel for these state-level schisms also just felt... weird.

Furthermore, we lost a bit of faith in this film's balance since Michael Collins, as played by Neeson, seemed so superheroic, so larger than life. He has brio and panache and a kind of Gerard Depardieu-as-Porthos joie de vivre. Everyone worships him, Kitty goes glassy-eyed when she sees him, and he seems ballsy and noble and true. That's fine. Okay. But what was he really like? Moments of a rounded personality, or even just a dash of doubt, would have been more effective in fleshing Collins' out. Especially since his work, being so violent, carries a sinister quality - some darkness, or at least more seriousness (!), would have been merited.

As it stands, the film is diverting, but almost cartoonish. When comparing it to Ken Loach's stern, stately The Wind That Shakes the Barley (a film about the same period), it inevitably comes up short. Sorry, Mr. Jordan! We love you, otherwise!

The Four Season (1981)

2011-11-13T19:14:00.000-08:00

Alan Alda's The Four Seasons is a typically Alda-y trip through comfortable, bourgeois domesticism. It's homey, almost to the point of blandness, and there's nary a plot to be found. But that doesn't necessarily make it unappealing.

Following three middle-aged married couples (a very sweet Alan Alda and Carol Burnett; Len Cariou and Sandy Dennis; Jack Weston and Rita Moreno) over four vacations (hence the title), the film is mostly about all the tiny quirks and peccadillos that make up very intimate friendships and marriages. The tone of affectionate annoyance is widespread; even as the audience, you feel like you've already lived a life with these people, and you kind of hate them (and love them). The only plot point with any real narrative drive is Nick's (Len Cariou) divorce from his first wife (Sandy Dennis), a spacey, inscrutable photographer, and marriage to his second (Bess Armstrong), a bouncy blonde half his age. Yet even this - a relatively tired tale of midlife crises - is upended by Alda's warm, humane treatment of the characters. As much as they're all neurotic, 1970s Me generationists, they're still three-dimensional and capable of surprise.

Indeed, while some of the climactic moments feel like inorganic set pieces for stereotypically Freudian breakthroughs, some were still quite engaging: Bess Armstrong's grief at everyone's resentment, Alan Alda's unexpected meltdown. And the gimmick of seasonal check-ins was nice. That said, another 1970s Alan Alda film does this much better: Same Time Next Year, in which a pair of lovers meet every year for an adulterous tryst, and we live the 50s, 60s and 70s with them. That film had the same amount of cheese, but often felt truer and more urgent.

Margin Call (2011)

2011-10-26T14:41:00.000-07:00

Margin Call is a satisfying, humane film about the financial crisis of 2008. It hits all the usual bases - the absurdity of Wall Street salaries, the social cost those salaries impose by wooing our best minds to work on making up new financial products, the bloated complexity of the products themselves, and the fact that no one often has any idea what they're selling. What it also does is humanize (even satirize) the very imperfect beings that got us all into this mess.

Briefly, the plot centers around a single, enormous Wall Street firm (a stand-in for Lehman Brothers) over one hectic, harried night. At the close of business, all seems well. But then, MIT (!)-educated rocket scientist (!)-turned-financial underling, Peter Sullivan (a divinely beautiful Zachary Quinto), discovers that something is amiss. Actually, that's putting it lightly. He discovers that the company's books are rotten to the core: its risk position exponentially more awful than anticipated, the firm - which thought itself nestled deep in the trunk of glorious fortune - is actually hanging out on a limb. A limb that's just about ready to snap. News travels up the chain of command - from Peter's immediate bosses, Will (Paul Bettany) and Sam (Kevin Spacey), to the very top of the food chain, billionaire CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons). In hasty 3AM meetings, they plan to liquidate everything - despite serious misgivings that this will both end their careers and kill the market.

The rest is, obviously, history. And you can read about it in wonderful books such as Diary of a Very Bad Year, Too Big to Fail, The Big Short and a number of others (which seem to be still coming out - e.g. Griftopia).

A.O. Scott likens Paul Bettany's character to a sergeant in a war film - and it's a brilliant stroke of insight (then again, everything A.O. Scott think/says/writes/does is a stroke of brilliance; we love you, A.O.!). The war film metaphor could be extended to the entire cast: from the thoughtful protagonist-grunt (Zachary Quinto), to the naive/cheeky grunt (Penn Badgley), up to the war-weary and possibly demented colonel (Kevin Spacey) and further up to the definitely demented, corrosively corrupt king-general (a crusty and wonderful Jeremy Irons). It just feels like a war film. This is a man's world: unreconstructed, macho, predatory. (The only female character, Demi Moore, is pilloried - both by the film's narrative, and by the firm itself.) The lines of computers spouting complicated, intimidating graphs could be trenches; Wall Street, a battlefield for the conquering. This isn't the bright, bubbly business whizzing of Working Girl (interestingly, a feminist film) - oh no, the heady, halcyon days of those 80s are over. As are the even headier, halcyoner 90s. It's now a post-2008 world, and watching this house of cards collapse feels both painful and inevitable.

A note about the performances: the film doesn't try to curry sympathy for these people, instead portraying them as over-ambitious, fallible and sometimes even silly. The only noble man is the recently-fired, genius Eric Dale (a self-pitying Stanley Tucci), but he's off-screen for much of the film. Yet, despite the general vibe of soul-sucking David Mamet-style corporatism, you eventually come to feel for these people. There's a lot of absurdity in their office culture, and there's an obvious vulnerability in their idiocy and/or guilt. Indeed, Paul Bettany does his usual swing from swish and sleazy to red-eyed and harried. Kevin Spacey plays along the ambiguity of his character's grief: his dog dies, and he murders the market, and then he cries. But about what? (Note: movies where Kevin Spacey cries can sometimes be God-awful or just barely tolerable. This was the only time where it worked quite well. Cry on, brother!)

Even the cameos are great. For example, Mary McDonnell - Roslin!!! - appears very briefly as Kevin Spacey's ex-wife, and her steely-eyed compassion is a perfect coda: yes, times are hard. And yes, you are allowed to cry about it - for a bit. But then it's time to buck up! Seriously, if anyone can save us, Roslin can. We felt better already.

Allonsanfàn (1974)

2011-09-18T17:24:00.000-07:00

Allonsanfàn is a wry, strange look at the absurd tragedy of radical Italians. It technically takes place in the early 19th century, but it could be just as home in the 1860s, 1920s or 1970s. In fact, especially the 1970s - a decade in which domestic terrorism killed Aldo Moro and laid bombs in Bologna's train station. A decade where the idealism of 1968 had ripened into a hyper-violent, extreme nihilism (both on the Left and the Right), where killing became a currency of discourse. (Thanks, Paul Ginsborg, by the way, for teaching the PPCC about modern Italian history! Seriously, readership, A History of Contemporary Italy is wonderful.)

Anyway, in Allonsanfàn, we follow a disillusioned, weary and aging radical, Fulvio Imbrani (Marcello Mastroianni), as he repeatedly tries (and fails) to extricate himself form his former revolutionary life. This is often to grotesque or comedic results (such as when he makes a suicide pact with one fellow comrade, only to let the other guy go first), though - as is the usual style of 1970s commedie all'italiana - it's also very sad, beneath everything. The aristocratic Fulvio stumbles out of prison one day, feverish and exhausted, narrowly avoiding a grim fate at the hands of the state. His revolutionary comrades likewise almost behead him, thinking he had spilled all their secrets. When this is proved false, he is left to mend in the comfort of his big fancy bed in his big fancy mansion. And big fancy mansions - they are hard to say no to.

Indeed, Fulvio's ideals - which were already a little brittle - now crumble under the weight of this material comfort. Of course, this gnaws at him - aren't those big fancy chandeliers just symbols of oppression? And his poor nanny, still making his bed and doing back-breaking agricultural labor outside? Fulvio's strength of opinion, though, has been broken out of him. Or maybe he's just tired of being indignant and sure of everything, because he proceeds to embark in a misguided, frequently half-assed adventure to cut his old ties. We found ourselves snickering, sometimes with disgust, sometimes with glee, at Fulvio's silliness, selfishness and pitiable state - and we found ourselves constantly grafting this story onto the wider meaning of 1970s Italian politics, messy and unfortunate as they were. "How can we live in this world?" one earnest revolutionary laments. "When everyone seems asleep, and we're the only ones who seem to have woken up?" It's a sad, slightly delusional statement, and Fulvio's in the unfortunate position of recognizing the idealists' misguided attempts to (for example) free the Southern peasants, while not having the courage or ability (or good luck!) to get free of their grasp. He's made his bed, and now he's going to LIE IN IT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

Allonsanfàn himself turns out to be a character, a young revolutionary (Stanko Molnar), who is the most dedicated, the grimmest, and, ultimately, the most delusional. A stand-in for the young, violent Red Brigades? Allonsanfàn is also, oddly, named after the first two words of La Marseillaise ("Wake up, children!") - indeed, the strains of revolutionary France are an important reference for the revolutionaries of this film. (In the way that the Paris Commune inspired the 1968 Italian idealists?)

Marcello Mastroianni is, as usual, wonderful in this, aging charmer that he is. Indeed, he channels that same world-weariness that we saw in Una giornata particolare, as well as the sense of a man trapped in an almost Kafka-esque surrealist nightmare, much like his role as the doomed bricklayer from Dramma della gelosia. The music by Ennio Morricone, particularly the theme of the revolution, was also incredibly catchy and wonderful: this scene, where an embittered Fulvio meditates on his former comrades, was just wonderful. "I've healed. I've changed." Brrr, lovely!

Pane e cioccolata (1974)

2011-09-11T15:50:00.000-07:00

The popular Italian classic, Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate), is incredibly uneven. But it occasionally works as a weird, tragically farcical Odyssean tale of one Italian immigrant's misadventures in a cold, uncaring Switzerland.

Its gags are hit and miss, and its tone veers around a little wildly: in the opening ten minutes, we witness some social satire, some slapstick, and then a murdered child. It sounds strange, and, in the hands of a ballsy director like Lina Wertmuller, it might have worked as a sort of chaotic, provocative, politicized film. But director Franco Brusati is much tamer in comparison, and his aesthetics just feel sort of muddled and indistinct. Mostly, it just felt like a slightly maudlin proclamation for the inherent tragedy of immigrant lives. Yes, it's sad. But… huh? How are we supposed to feel about a ribald-turned-depressed drag show?

The immigrant.

Nino (Nino Manfredi) is a southern Italian immigrant making his way as a waiter in a posh Swiss restaurant. At night, he yearns for his family back in Italy - but his pride won't let him return, and his wallet won't let him bring them up to be Swissified (his ultimate wish).

The Swiss setting, meanwhile, is cold, uncaring, and fundamentally hypocritical: the lawns may be perfect, the etiquette air-tight, but there are dead kids in the bushes and stolen fish in the toilet bowl. Even the immigrant success stories - such as the ruthless millionaire who briefly employs Nino - end in embezzlement and suicide.

After getting fired from the restaurant, Nino faces trial after trial - and his problems just get more and more surreal. In a way, the film improves with this surreality, because that's when it makes its point most brazenly: for example, at one point, Nino ends up huddled in a chicken coop with a family of half-crazed, stunted, ignorant Italian immigrants. This madhouse increasingly appalls Nino until, exasperated, he says, "Look at us. You're Italian. I'm Italian. Does that mean we have anything in common?" The family shushes him and runs to the chicken wire window. "Look!" He joins them, and, all crouched and huddled together, the Italians watch through the chicken wire as a troup of young, naked, Aryan supermodels frolic through an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. The way this scene is directed - with lingering, objectifying shots of perfect blond hair glittering in the sunlight, and soft pink flesh - is just wonderful. It's scathing, hilarious, surreal and awful - very Lina Wertmuller! The next sequence, which opens with Nino having dyed his hair blond, is just as painful and wonderful. Indeed, the last twenty minutes of this film are uncharacteristically pitch perfect: it makes its point and hammers it home. Too bad the rest of the film wasn't like that!

Frolicking Aryans...

"Look how beautiful they are."

Our previously reviewed Café Express is indeed a spiritual sequel to this, covering much the same territory of Italian pessimism and decrepitude, embodied in the aging, tired Nino Manfredi and his sorrowful smiles. We don't know if we'd necessarily recommend these films, though, neither for their social point (which was better made by, for example, Wertmuller's Mimi metallurgico ferito nell'onore) nor for Nino Manfrediness (which is better enjoyed in C'eravamo tanto amati).

People singing in Nanni Moretti films

2011-09-10T07:05:00.000-07:00

As a commenter on this vid said, "I love people who sing out of key. It's expressionist."

Palombella Rossa (1989)
Silvio Orlando and some swimmers singing Bruce Springsteen's I'm On Fire.

Palombella Rossa (1989)
Nanni Moretti and the crowd singing Franco Battiato's E ti vengo a cercare.

La messa è finita (1985)
Nanni Moretti singing Bruno Lauzi's Ritornerai.

La stanza del figlio (The Son's Room, 2001)
Nanni Moretti, Giuseppe Sanfelice, Laura Morante and Jasmine Trinca singing Caterina Caselli's Insieme a te non ci sto più.

Caro Diario (1993)
Nanni Moretti dancing to Silvana Mangano's Anna.

Has anyone seen Habemus Papam yet? And, if so, is there any singing? The PPCC hopes so.

Café Express (1980)

2011-09-04T09:08:00.000-07:00

Like a number of commedie all'italiana, Café Express is a tragedy dressed up as a comedy. Also, like other picaresque Neopolitan Odysseys (e.g. Mi manda Picone), dissembling, poverty and surreality factor heavily.

Michele Abagnano (Nino Manfredi) is an illegal coffee vendor riding the night train between Naples and Rome. With his broken shoe and wooden arm, he cuts a sorry figure. Though, since he's played by the charming Manfredi, he's also wonderfully lovable, always ready with a joke and sympathetic ear. The film ambles along, dropping in with Michele as he visits the various characters in the various cars. In this way, and the fact that it takes place overnight, the film resembles an episodic, nocturnal, ensemble piece like Jagte Raho or After Hours: that is, it mixes the strange with the immoral with the funny, all steamed up with some schmaltzy philosophizing on the nature of man.

With each car, Michele's story changes: in one, his wooden arm is a war wound, in another, an injury received as he saved children from a burning home. Even if he's a warm and gregarious presence, he's also evasive and, thus, mysterious. The only thing we know for sure is that he has a 14-year-old son, Cazzillo (a very cute Giovanni Piscopo), with a congenital heart defect - we know this for sure because we actually meet Cazzillo, as rascally as his father, when Michele finds him shaving in the train's bathroom. (Okay, that whole scene was adorable.)

Things take a very sour turn after Michele pisses off a small gang of thieves, and the film swings from a sentimental Italianate tragicomedy to an enraged screed against an unjust society. As well as a plea for magic(al) realism as a weapon against (Anglo-Saxon? oligarchic?) hegemonic notions of "reality"? Maybe. As Obi-Wan Kenobi would say, "So what I said was true. From a certain point of view." Similarly, Michele - and, to his horror, his son, Cazzillo - live by this creed of a malleable reality. It certainly feeds the stereotype of Neopolitans as knavish story-spinners, and it certainly makes for great surrealist cinema. What is the truth? We'll never know for sure. And, even if we did, would it change the tragedy (or funniness) of the situation?

Props to the final shot, with the self-posessed, urchiny Cazzillo making his way through a 1970s Rome, a little hawk in search of prey. That was fabulous. And props, as always, to lovely Nino Manfredi, our favorite interpreter of Romanness (even though, in this film, he's Neopolitan - and whoa! that accent!).

(Though Italian speakers can watch the movie here.)

In nome del papa re (1977)

2011-09-01T00:35:00.000-07:00

In nome del papa re (In the name of the Pope-king, though it could also be In the name of the father-king) is a fraught, strange, charming film. It's also a breath of fresh air in its portrayal of the clergy - long stereotyped as corrupt pedophiles or one-dimensional bigots. Quite the contrary, In nome del papa re's worn, frazzled anti-hero, Monsignor Colombo (a wonderful, as always, Nino Manfredi), seems more like an ancestor to the partisan-priests of WW2 neorealism than anything else. His tangled, unfortunate position - as reluctant collaborator to a reactionary Papacy, as reluctant father to an arrested revolutionary - is wonderfully charged, tragic and bizarre. His mannerisms also - cigar-chewing, Roman-slanging - recall the tinted glasses, smoldering cigarette and whiskey tumblers of the old SNL character, Father Guido Sarducci. In other words, the PPCC loves him and would totally go all Catholic for him. "What do you want from me?" Colombo demands, impatient. "A benediction? Want me to give you a benediction? You'll have to make it last!"

In the name of the Father (and father)...

...and son...

...and the Holy Spirit (of revolutionary Italia!).

But enough of priests, let's get to the plot. The year is 1867, and Rome is in full-on Risorgimento-style turmoil. (For those that don't know, Italy was created in 1861. The period of unification is called the Risorgimento, and featured a lot of bloody conquering of the various kingdoms and principalities - principal among them, of course, being the Papacy and its repressive reign over Rome.) Bombs are falling, Italian revolutionaries are hiding in the houses of the sympathetic bourgeois or getting their heads chopped off, and Monsignor Colombo (Nino Manfredi) is drafting his resignation letter as a Papal judge. "I just want to be a priest," he laments. "Which is hard enough, as it is." In other words, the good monsignor's lost faith in the Papacy's legitimacy as a secular authority. He's basically a closet Garibaldista, even though he won't admit it to himself. (Garibaldi being the general who led the armies which unified Italy.)

Meanwhile, across town, three revolutionary youths - among them the stormy, arrogant Cesarino (Danilo Mattei) - have learned that they're to be arrested and beheaded by the Papacy, following a terrorist bomb they (or someone) left under a barracks (killing dozens of Vatican soldiers). Cesarino's mother, the well-to-do gentlelady, the Countess Flaminia (Carmen Scarpitta), despairs - and flies immediately to Monsignor Colombo's house. And there she lays the bomb (no pun intended) of the Bestest Plot Device Ever on him: "Now you have two reasons to save him. One, because he's my son. And, two, because he's also yours."

Ah, yes. Yes, back in those heady, halcyon days of 1849, amid musket fire and the clash of armies, when the Vatican's foundations first shook under Garibaldi's assault, as she tended the wounded and he administered last rites to the dying, and they were so tired, and all they needed was a warm bed, and so on and so forth. Okay, we actually found that whole idea very romantic. But then, disrobing priests while battles rage around us in Garibaldi-era Rome - mm mmm!

One of the most badass scenes: the mother of one of the other condemned revolutionaries confronts Colombo. "You saved your son. You didn't save mine." When he tries to give her the Holy Communion, she leans back, "No. Not from you." BAM! Go, lady!

Anyway. Monsignor Colombo is clearly in a bind now, and the schmaltzy music which forever hounds his brooding bluntly announces the heartbreaking choices he must make. HEARTBREAKING, in case that's not clear. VIOLINS MUST BE PLAYED. How will he get Cesarino out of the clink? When guillotines fall with such ease, and "there are spies everywhere", and Cesarino announces that there are two things he hates in this world: "Absent fathers, and priests!" What's a guy to do?

The film is most effective when it's not REALLY ALL CAPS BLUNT - and certain schmaltzy moments could have been lessened if only the music track had been changed. But we can't complain. We even loved the soap opery final plot twist, if only because the lovely Nino Manfredi underscored everything so well with his restrained, effective performance. Manfredi's schtick - as he did so well in C'eravamo tanto amati - is the easy-going, sarcastic, vulnerable Roman with a heart o' gold. He lays that down as his main melody, and basically improvises around it - in this performance, peppering Said Roman with telling moments of weariness, worry and grief. Never is he explicit in these things, everything is turned into a joke. It's like his protective exoskeleton. And, of course, that makes it all the more touching. An example: one of the most poignant scenes is when his servant, a grizzled, Obelix-ish Serafino (Carlo Bagno), comes downstairs at dawn to find him sleeping, collar askew, at his desk. As Colombo grumbles himself awake, clearly exhausted, he laments the night before: freeing Cesarino, but not the other two revolutionaries, and thus doing a pretty half-assed good deed. As he hunkers down to eat his breakfast, he sees bite marks in it. "Did you eat this?" Serafino is aghast: "You think I'm giving you my leftovers? It must be the rats in the kitchen, they must have got to the pantry by now and given it a nibble." And Manfredi just looks at him, looks at the biscuit, eats, and then sighs, "They're God's creatures." Ha! Okay, maybe you had to be there.

Ah, 1860s Rome! Is that Trastevere that my eye detects?

Don't legitimize a false authority!

What's interesting about this film - a tame example of a 1970s Italian film, despite all the sexytimes on and off screen, with and without priests - is how, yet again, political engagement is portrayed as complicated, messy and doomed. We saw this in Lina Wertmuller's incredible Love and Anarchy, a film which explored a would-be assassin of Mussolini in the days before the deed. Both films, which follow the "good" guys (pro-Unification priests, anti-Fascist anarchists), essentially end badly. It's very sad. And both films offer an apologetic coda, promising the good things that actually did occur to those movements post-movie timeline: i.e. the eventual unification of Italy and demise of Papal power; the eventual liberation of Italy by the Americans in 1945, and the death of Fascism. Which makes us wonder. Why are these films, both about real periods and real movements that "won", so pessimistic? Is it just commentary on extreme political activism per se? The inevitable fall of the zealous anarchist/partisan/Garibaldista? Hm.

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011)

2011-08-14T11:08:00.000-07:00

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (You won't meet life again… right?) is another glam, modernist Hindi film, similar in style to Dil Chahta Hai - but thankfully much less irritating. Okay, we may be the only ones who hate that film.

Moving along! BFFs Kabir (Abhay Deol), Arjun (Hrithik Roshan) and Imran (Farhan Akhtar) run the usual gamut of Nice Guy, Moneyzilla and Comic Relief. Nice Guy Kabir is getting married to (incidentally the Tamil-French girl from Dev D with an interesting name!) Natasha (Kalki (!) Koechlin) and the boys go on a long bachelor party through Spain. Along the way, aided by periodic jolts of adrenaline rushes (scuba diving, skydiving, bull… running) and emotional outbursts of tears, shouts and hormones, the boys grow up and grow closer. The moral of the story: marriage is optional! Also, money is nice but also optional!

The film's heart is in the right place - by which we mean it's gauged the pulse of a common (or certainly common-feeling) trend among young, modernizing Indians: the anxiety of marriage, the difficulty in reconciling traditional obligations with Western notions of romance, freedom, individualism, blah blah. Generally, the earnest, if unimaginative, narrative is fine. But there are definite sections that drag - to whit: Hrithik Roshan puts in a nice, jagged performance as the dark, tormented London financier Arjun. His slow emergence from the shell of Scrooge into the sunlight of Zen scuba diver Laila (a tolerable Katrina Kaif) is a nice, poignant narrative arc. But if the PPCC saw one more shot of a brooding, troubled Hrithik… oh my God.

OH. MY. GOD.

Similarly, Kabir's pre-marital woes and Imran's "missing father" angst were dragged out way beyond acceptable limits of storytelling discourse. Incidentally, Imran's missing father was NOT played by Javed Akhtar, which would have been meta and cool. Instead, he is played by a great pillar of Hindi actingdom, one of the PPCC favorites, and a veteran of Missing Father roles. We'll give you a hint, his name rhymes with Sameer Loudon Bah.

Like the rest of the film, the song/dance stuff was anemic and largely unnecessary, though there was a surprisingly nice flamenco-Hindi fusion bit. Olé! Another unexpected treat was the final Adrenaline Rush of Character Development - Pamplona's running of the bulls - which was filmed with great skill. A further notable sequence, filmmaking-wise, was the boys' skydive: a meditative, enchanting bit.

In other news, Akhtar's Don 2 is in post-production (joy) and we have finally found a lovely fat tome about Vedic India (The First Spring by Abraham Eraly, apparently not out in the US yet? wtffff).

As a kid in our theater cried out upon sensing the incipient final credits: KHATM!

PPCC + Masala Zindabad podcast = Shashi Kapoor

2011-07-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

PPCC readership - especially those of you that pine for the days of a Hindi-saturated PPCC - take a blast from the past and hear the PPCC wax poetic about our three favorite topics (Shashi, feminism and Shashi) on Beth and Amrita's excellent podcast, Masala Zindabad:

click on the shashi for podcast fun!

The Endless Summer (1966)

2011-06-18T21:20:00.000-07:00

The charming, hypnotic documentary, The Endless Summer, features a lot of surfing. Surfing. Surfing Surfing.

It also features a pair of globe-trotting 1960s Californian surfers, Mike Hynson and Robert August, as they paddle their way out from Senegalese, Ghanaian, South African, Australian, Kiwi, Tahitian and Hawaiian beaches: always and forever in search of the "perfect wave". In the meantime, director/writer/narrator Bruce Brown provides a Beach Boys-esque commentary: sly asides, self-deprecating humor, complete political incorrectness ("Sharks and porpoises in South Africa," Brown notes while filming a pod of porpoises behind the surfers, "have yet to integrate."). The boppy 1960s music, mixed in with some questionable stuff meant to sound "tribal", along with Brown's cavalier painting of surfers as hubris-filled daredevils to be revered - all of this sounds like it would make the 1.5 hour film excruciatingly narrow and kind of annoying.

Instead, thanks largely to those soothing shots of surfer after surfer after surfer, as well as those meditative, lingering shots of a slow sunset, or those beautiful moments using a camera on the board, or the smashing waves in Tahiti: it's all very beautiful. And fascinating. Fascinating because of the sheer adventure of Mike and Robert, as they paddle around, always in a boppy good mood, assessing the water temperature and perfection of the curl. In Lagos, Nigeria, Brown notes that the air and water are so hot, it almost "melts the wax off the boards". Near Durban, South Africa, the boys find the "perfect wave" - little "pipelines" of water, curling smoothly and perfectly from a promised seven miles away. Brown notes that these waves provide surfing so lengthy that you have a "nervous breakdown". "It's the kind of wave," Brown says, "that makes you talk to yourself."

The physicality, naturalism and pop mysticism of the sport bubbles under the surface throughout this film, perhaps explaining its status as an enduring classic. What is it about surfers? Why do we all like them? Why are they so Zen? They always seem to have predilections towards spirituality, especially the really laid back kind. Or did we absorb that awful-yet-nostalgically-wonderful surf spirituality feel-good teen flick, Airborne, way back in the day? And is that why we can forgive them anything?

Suffice to say, despite the grating treatment of poverty by Brown (Africans are "natives", ready to "massacre" each other; Australians are "local residents"), as well as the increasingly dodgy boasting (Brown jokingly emphasizes all the various ways surfers can die), this film is... well, definitely appealing. It's also a perfect little gem of American history: what it was like to surf in the 1960s; what that south Californian landscape that The Beach Boys later immortalized (and Weezer later post-modernified, or proto-hipsterized, or whatever) looked like, as described and shot by people from that place. Gnarly, man.

Recommended.

Strange Days (1995)

2011-04-22T10:47:00.000-07:00

The pulpy, B-grade cyberpunk film, Strange Days, is sleazy. Very, very sleazy. It's also completely hypocritical, or completely meta, we're not sure.

It's Los Angeles, and we're gonna party like it's 1999. Except, in this 1999, LA is a cesspit of near-constant rioting, corruption, sweaty grime and limp confetti. Clearly, it's only twenty years away from this LA.

Into this cyberpunk fest steps our usual anti-hero, the excellently named Lenny Nero (an excellently maned Ralph Fiennes), who indeed fiddles his way while the city burns. Which, in this story, means he peddles cortex-bending mindtrips (mindfraks, really) that latch onto your brain stem and make you really feel it, man. Our introduction to Lenny also outlines his strict ethical regulation: no snuff trips.

Which is all fine and well, as Lenny is just barely hanging on in his dingy apartment, pining away after his ex, Faith (Juliette Lewis, she of the 90s grunge), mostly by cradling bottles of vodka and re-living (literally) past happy times. This sad excuse of a life is casually destroyed by the arrival, into Lenny's hands, of a snuff trip produced by a deranged killer - perhaps the most horrible snuff trip ever produced. Lenny, a disgraced cop, is immediately sucked in - he must track the killer down, especially when the killer sends creepy mindtrip videos of himself creeping around Lenny's apartment and holding exacto knives at Lenny's throat.

Employing the help of his badass lady friend Mace (a wonderful Angela Bassett), Lenny soon realizes that there are nine rings in Dante's Inferno, and the evil killer is only a couple down. As the tension builds, the explosions become louder, and we descend further into the decay, a ticker periodically appears on our screen to remind us that the stroke of a new millennium is a mere X hours away. This creates a sense of BLUNT FOREBODING.

There are some things in Strange Days which are done very well: at its best, the film is a kinetic, lively, silly cross between Philip K. Dick's drugged-out vision of urban sprawl and alienation, and Frank Miller's pulpy pessimism. (Indeed, Angela Bassett would make a wonderful Martha Washington!) The feeling of fluorescent filth and universal corruption and decay was just lovely (and a little pleasantly nauseating). And Ralph Fiennes performance - a very against-type role - unexpectedly hit all the right notes. Lenny's nasally American accent; his vanity (he can afford awful paisley futuristic Armani, but not soap, it seems); and his clammy vulnerability - everything was as it should be. Another unexpected (well, not totally unexpected) hit was Angela Bassett's woman of steel - it's always relieving for the PPCC to (finally!) see strong women; and here, Mace was very, well, physically strong, often saving Lenny from the clutches of burly henchmen by beating the hell out of them. Huzzah! Mace's obvious tenderness towards Lenny was also strangely touching. They made quite a pair.

The movie tried to insert some obvious parallels to LA's realities of the 1990s, with a subplot of race rioting. This was not totally effective - each step and each character was too much a stereotype. But we appreciated the attempt.

And then the film had some awful bits: most particularly the gratuitous violence against women and the salacious way this violence was depicted. Others have already noted how lurid tales of rape and humiliation are often breathlessly portrayed in film, where our hero can be properly horrified and thus we can feel OK about watching it all. Ugh, spare us. This was one of those films: it rubbed our face in the awful, terrible, sick, twisted, etc., completely unnecessary scenes and - even more disturbingly - everything was eroticized. This was the male gaze on steroids: we only see men take the mindtrips (women are only ever performers), and these men unanimously experience orgasmic states of heavy breathing, moaning, twisted faces, etc. as they watch terrible things happen to women in their brains. "Oh, how horrible!" Lenny cries after one such ride. Right. Sure.

This aspect was all kinds of horrible, and confusing, to boot, since the director is a woman: Kathryn Bigelow! What the hell, Kathryn Bigelow? Not only is this completely ridiculous and harmful to women, but isn't this whole movie also supposed to be about how our pornographic pursuits lead to general societal decay?!

This is why we think this film's either totally hypocritical, or some sort of meta commentary that's beyond our comprehension. Either way, we could have done without all those shots of razors cutting into women's underwear; the movie would have been much improved.

In the meantime, the trailer is excellent - particularly 1:54 on. It's excellence exceeds the film's by a long shot (as sometimes unfortunately happens). The music of the film (particularly all that Skunk Anansie and Juliette Lewis and PJ Harvey and other angry young woman stuff) was also very 1990s and fun. Not really recommended, unless you have an obligation to watch all cyberpunk/New Wave science fiction ever committed to film (as we do).

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

2011-04-17T09:48:00.000-07:00

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as with many classics, is reliably well-done. In fact, so perfect is its execution that it was almost too perfect - like a Kenneth Branagh movie, where everything exhibits a glowing, slightly alienating polish.

Which is not to say this is a pretty film. Instead, like many films of the 70s (what is it about this era, btw? GENIUS was in the air, in India, Italy and the US), it is gritty, totally up our alley and ultimately very sad. It feels, in many scenes, like the other American classics of that era: Easy Rider, MASH (the movie), Bonnie and Clyde… That is, scenes drift over naturalistic conversations; the setting is rough, the characters misfits; and there is an underlying, cynical sense of humanity getting crushed under near-dystopian circumstances. The 70s were, after all, the "Emergency" period in India, the "lead years" in Italy and the OPEC crisis for everyone in the world.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest begins with one typical protagonist of the times: petty criminal R.P. McMurphy (a young, electric Jack Nicholson) who tries to con his way out of a work camp by joining an insane asylum. (Much like Pasqualino Settebellezze!) What McMurphy finds in the asylum, though, is a soul-crushing, dehumanizing atmosphere where the obviously vulnerable are regularly humiliated and everyone is too traumatized to speak up about it. It all feels very grandly symbolic about the dangers of too much civilization (McMurphy being the obvious free spirit/libertarian stand-in) or the banality of evil (especially via collaboration! lots of gut-wrenching shots of characters looking at each other for help, and being unable to give any!).

The motley crew of "lunatics" are the clear ancestors of characters like those in The Dream Team or Awakenings or that one season premiere of House (where they basically grafted this movie scene for scene) or, well, many other Hollywood films featuring mental illness. There's the hot-headed Taber (a very young Christopher Lloyd!), the stuttering lamb-like Billy Bibbit (an incredibly young Brad Dourif! continue singing his praises!), the vacantly smiling Martini (an unrecognizably young Danny DeVito), the AWESOME and anxious Cheswick (Sydney Lassick), and the stiff, enigmatic Harding (William Redfield). And then, of course, there's the embodiment of pure evil: Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). The film, which begins as a meandering pastiche about the highs and lows of the asylum inmates, soon evolves into a war of attrition between Good (McMurphy) and Evil (Nurse Ratched). And, need we remind you again, it's the 70s. You can guess how it all goes down.

Jack Nicholson's performance is a charismatic, iconic one: he is heroic in an almost mythical sense, with the added quirkiness of his jackal-like grin and rascally humor. Everyone else is very strong too; with William Redfield and Sydney Lassick being especially compelling, and Brad Dourif hitting the perfect pitch as the shy Billy, all wrapped up in himself. And that hair! How tender and enormous and adorable.

Ken Kesey, who wrote the book on which the film is based, apparently sued the filmmakers and refused to see the film (so said our in-flight entertainment trivia box). We don't know how this compares with the book, but what could Mr. Kesey have to complain about? It's a near-perfect film! "Near" only because, as usual, it hates women: shrewish virgins (Nurse Ratched) combat whores (Jack's friends) for control and attention of men's manlinesses. BIG SIGH OF TIRESOME DISAPPOINTMENT.

Deadwood (2004): Season 1

2011-03-03T16:39:00.000-08:00

Deadwood is one of those things that defies description. Ostensibly a lurid Western with cable TV swearing and cable TV nudity, it is vast and strange and powerful. We think it's about the rise of America's Americanness, the Henry Ford-inspired winners and Howard Zinn-lamented losers as they hack, drink and scrabble their way "from sea to shining sea". It's really difficult to review long form TV shows such as this, but we'll give it a go - if only to spread word of its magnificence!

Hu-fucking-zzah!

Deadwood aired on American TV from 2004 to 2006. Three measly seasons, two pitiful years! Anyway. The brainchild of the fascinating David Milch, whose previous credits include NYPD Blue, the show is an ensemble piece centering on the violent lives in the lawless, frontier town in what is now South Dakota. The Western genre staples are all present: the noble, handsome and reluctant hero, Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphaunt), his reliable buddy and fellow hardware salesman, Sol Starr (John Hawkes), his arch-nemesis, the vile, exploitative pimp (and informal town chief), Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), the hooker with a heart of gold, Trixie (Paula Malcolmson, from Caprica), some snobby New York opium-addicted lady, Alma (Molly Parker), and her Scandinavian-Minnesotan semi-mute ward (Bree Seanna Wall), and the cranky old frontier doctor, Doc Cochran (a brilliant Brad Dourif). Oh yeah, and historical figures such as Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) and Calamity Jane (an excellent Robin Weigert) show up too.

The point of Deadwood, though - and we're not entirely sure this is the point, or the only point, at least - is to challenge, subvert, reinforce and then smash up these Western movie stereotypes while exploring some of the darker historical currents of America's cultural heritage. In particular, capitalism, expansion, exceptionalism and a can-do attitude! Huzzah! Throughout Deadwood, you can't be entirely sure if it's praising or criticizing these American foundational myths; it's certainly giving us a much more ambiguous West, where racist and sexist exploitation are used as regularly traded economic chips. Where power is ad hoc and maintained via brute force and sweaty-palmed corruption. Where everyone needs a bath and a change of clothes, as they dream bonanza gold rushes while wallowing in filth and poverty.

The characters are divided into two camps: the damaged and the damaging. The former - Doc Cochran, Calamity Jane, Trixie, the preacher - are variously healers and helpers, each deeply vulnerable and almost childlike because of that. Life is especially hard on them. Early in the first season, the preacher (Ray McKinnon), with his beatific, vacant, yellow-toothed smile, develops a brain tumor. His long, slow, ugly decline is harrowing. The various cobbled-together attempts to contain and aid this suffering - Al Swearengen kicks him out of the saloon with a sad look in his eye, Calamity Jane hectors him about hiding his symptoms from the Doc, the hookers mock him - only emphasize the setting's ability to strip away all dignity. Get thee back to civilization, for the love of God! This sense of helplessness - both existential (i.e. the Nietschzean "God is dead" symbolism of having your preacher die!) and practical (dude, it's 1871 in the middle of nowhere) - is acute.

The damaging characters, instead, are the driving forces of the town - and, by allegory, the expansion of America. Embodied in Seth and Al, they play out the conventional narrative of good and bad - mostly by both being very ugly. (OKAY, IT'S A WESTERN REVIEW, WE HAD TO MAKE THAT JOKE.) That is: just like the Jedi and the Empire, what, exactly, is the difference between these two? They both have nasty tempers. They both bully and coerce, when they need to, and exhibit great tenderness and conviction as well. They make hard decisions, usually involving killing or beating someone up. They exact justice. They build the town - Seth as its work, Al as its play - and leave various victims along the way. Presumably the only existential difference between these two is that Seth feels bad about all the bloodshed; but even that could be attributed to his youth. As Al says, you learn to fucking move on!

A blunt Janus shot: the "good" side.

And the "bad".

So the founding pillars of Deadwood/the West/America - Seth and Al - pretend to be in tension, because it's part of the standard story we tell ourselves about Luke and Vader, Clint Eastwood and that other guy (OK, we never actually saw that movie), the post-Enlightenment landed gentlemen in Philadelphia in 1776 and the post-Enlightenment landed gentlemen in London at the same time; but they're really just two sides of the same coin. And they could stand in for any number of such false dichotomies: the Republicans and the Democrats, for instance! What matters is that they are the hegemony. And, in Seth and Al's case, they thrive in the lawless pre-Hobbesian setting where everyone's lives are "nasty, brutish and short". Mostly because they're macho men. And this is a setting that rewards testosterone.

Of course, for we at the PPCC, our sympathies lie with the underdogs, the alternatives, the non-hegemonics. The ones who get churned up in Seth and Al's machinations and who don't fit in. In particular, we are inordinately fond of Calamity Jane and Doc Cochran. Calamity Jane, brilliantly performed by Robin Weigert, is an enigma: a gender role-breaking, child-like misfit who gets drunk (OK, everyone gets drunk in this show) and then naps by resting her forehead against a wall. She is hilarious, endearing, bizarre, contradictory and difficult to understand. The real Jane was similarly enigmatic; especially her manufactured (?) relationship with Wild Bill. What was that about? Tell us more, history!

For the good doctor, we have a soft spot for him because he ticks all of the boxes - grumpy humanist frontier doctor a la our beloved Doctor McCoy (or Hawkeye Pierce!), sci-fi pedigree (dude, Brad Dourif was in Duuune) and, we have just learned in these last few episodes, a Civil War vet. Not many know that we at the PPCC are something of a Civil War nut. And this new fact of Civil War veteranship, coupled with the Doc's total meltdown re: the preacher's awful, moribund state, confirms his victimhood - another person damaged by the great machine of American progress. The other side of the brave new world, that has such people in it!

Sing the praises of Brad Dourif! He is so good in this show. We haven't been this unexpectedly impressed with a sci fi actor knocking it out of the park in a long form TV series since David Warner blew our socks off in the Wallander series.

And this is barely scratching the surface! Season one is complete, now onto seasons two and three. We haven't even mentioned all the other magnificent creations of this show - the vile toady-turned-mayor Farnum (played by another sci-fi vet, William Sanderson), the buffoonish media rep/paparazzo, Mr. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones) - because they merit blog reviews of their own. Suffice to say that this is fantastic, stimulating fun. Strange, sad, touching. We often found ourselves laughing, then crying, then even getting that rarest of movie-evoked emotions: tears of joy! Don't be put off by its vulgarity or its Westernness or its whatever. To quote a period poet, Walt Whitman: "O I say, these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul, O I say now these are the Soul!"

Highly recommended.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

2011-02-21T09:45:00.000-08:00

Beneath the Planet of the Apes is slow going at first, but it picks up by the end, eventually letting its story careen away into madness and chaos and Charlton Heston once again on his knees, shouting "Oh, the humanity!" Which is to say: it gets a lot better.

We return to the titular planet only moments after the original left off: "Damn you all to hell!" Taylor (Charlton Heston) cries, on his knees, beating at the sandy beach. Not long later, Taylor and his mute ladyfriend, Nova (Linda Harrison), encounter all manner of strange things in the so-called "Forbidden Zone", a desert wasteland where none dare go. Taylor and Nova dare, and are met with random walls of fire, sudden spurts of pesky lightning, and Land Before Time-esque splits in the earth. When they come upon a rocky outcropping, Taylor walks into it and vanishes.

Meanwhile, astronaut Brent (a tanned, macho James Franciscus) has crash-landed on the Planet in search of the missing Taylor. After coming upon a distressed Nova - okay, admittedly she's always distressed - he hops on Taylor's horse and goes through much of the same terrain (pun intended) we covered in the original: the stumbling upon ape civilization (yay Cornelius! yay Zera! yay sympathetic chimpanzees!), the numerous (and now dull) scenes of flight and capture, the paper-thin allegory to a segregationist, racist society of the 1960s on the verge of social revolution, with gorillas standing in for military hawks/goons, orangutans as the Christian Right and chimpanzees as the intelligentsia.

Things really pick up when Brent eventually finds his way to the title: beneath the Planet. Here, we find remnants of a post-nuclear Manhattan, complete with a crumbling (but intact) subway system and a sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-creepy cult of humans who worship the last, remaining (?) atomic bomb. The plot now starts coming fast and thick, with a conclusion that is as jarring as it is pulpy and paranoid.

This sequel to the 1968 hit is a much paler copy of the original, though it does have its moments. Cocooned in the flash and spectacle of a Saturday sci-fi matinee (George Lucas must be proud!), there were also some very dark scenes of terror and doomsday paranoia. These punctuating bass notes were unexpected, powerful and not altogether welcome to us (especially since we were eating at the time): the ape army coming upon a mirage of their deity on fire, weeping blood, surrounded by apes crucified upside down. The sweaty, desperate, humiliating Spartacus-style fight between mind-controlled Taylor and Brent, for the amusement of the freaky human cult. The freaky human cult, and their freaky Anglican-style service from hell. And the masks! Oh God, the masks!

Una vita difficile (1961)

2011-02-15T17:21:00.000-08:00

Una vita difficile (A difficult life) is the frustrating, Odyssean tale of Silvio Magnozzi (Alberto Sordi) as he navigates the post-war Italian landscape, trying to balance his partisan ideals against the harsh pragmatism that the poverty-stricken surroundings engender.

Essentially covering the same ground as C'eravamo tanto amati (which we much preferred), Una vita difficile starts with the same nostalgic romance of partisan fighting in WW2. Silvio, suffering from bronchitis as he treks through the Lake Como countryside, narrowly escapes being shot by a Nazi when Elena (Lea Massari), a local girl, kills the Nazi with her iron (whoa). Thus follows their brief three-month affair, after which Silvio flees to join his partisan band and, once the war ends, moves back down to Rome to pick up his pre-war journalism job for a left-wing daily.

A work trip up north reunites Silvio and Elena, who decide to get married. They return to Rome, where they live in borderline starvation. A son is born. Silvio is offered a position which contrasts with his left-wing morals; he refuses. Eventually, his unrestrained idealism lands him in jail, and Elena takes their son back up north.

This basic tension - Silvio's ideals versus cynical reality (often embodied by Elena); the poor, proletarian South of Silvio versus the bourgeois, industrialized North of Elena - is played out throughout the film in a variety of ways.

And all of this stuff was covered in the later, better C'eravamo tanto amati. Certain scenes - the happy crowds following Rome's liberation, the working-class trattorie with the wandering trumpet player - are even identical. Yet while Una vita difficile seems as well-remembered as C'eravamo tanto amati, we prefer the latter. It approaches the same subject with greater grace and more equanimity. Silvio's inability to let go of his idealism (and his indignant righteousness), to the point of driving away his family, is akin to Professor Palumbo's extremes - except Palumbo is articulate, off-kilter, hilarious and a sympathetic caricature. Silvio, instead, alienated us: he seemed an unlikable combination of entitlement and self-pity.

Of course, despite the identical setting, it's a harsher version of the same world that these characters live in, compared to C'eravamo tanto amati. Compare the trattoria scenes: in C'eravamo, the characters struggle by with half-portions, in Vita, they can't even pay for anything and are kicked to the curb. The requisite sell-out scenes, when Silvio succumbs to becoming a vile commendatore's underling, are full of humiliation and corruption. This extreme view just cements Silvio's righteousness, but it doesn't tackle the real issue: what if selling out does lead to a better life? The character of Gianni from C'eravamo also sells out, but his trials and tribulations are largely existential: materially, he is comfortable and happy.

Another reason we didn't particularly enjoy this film is that here, the treatment of women is just terrible. Elena, for however objectively rational and selfless she is (when Silvio implodes, she finds a way to provide a comfortable life for their son), is presented as unimaginative and frosty because she doesn't "get" the cause. Silvio abuses her regularly and, when she leaves him, she is presented as having "abandoned" him.

One of the reasons we love Lina Wertmuller's films so much is that she takes these stereotypes of Italian sexual mores - the frosty northern girl, the lusty southern man - and completely subverts them, most often via Giancarlo Giannini playing an extreme version of southern machismo. Consider, for example, Swept Away, where another left-wing, poverty-stricken southerner humiliates and dominates a bourgeois Milanese ice queen. In Swept Away, that relationship is presented as fundamentally ridiculous: compelling in its absurdity, ultimately false. Una vita difficile, maybe because it was made almost fifteen years earlier, is still earnestly enamored with Silvio's status as a man, from Rome, who is poor.

This is not to say this film isn't good. It's considered a classic, and it is indeed very well-made. The scene when the starving Silvio and Elena are invited into a royal lady's house for dinner while the republic/monarchy referendum results are announced was surreal and powerful, akin to the "lifestyles of the strange and wealthy" scenes from La dolce vita or Signore & signori. It's not a bad film, from a technical point of view. We just don't agree with its underlying philosophy. As the other northern beauty says to the other left-wing Roman in C'eravamo, "You're the first likable Roman that I meet."

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That being Nino Manfredi, who is indeed very likable and who we'll take over Alberto Sordi any day.

Ricordati di me (2003)

2011-02-10T18:33:00.000-08:00

With the allegretto pacing, semi-satirical tone and superficial beauty that is characteristic of all of director Gabriele Muccino's films, Ricordati di me (Don't forget about me, though the US title was Remember Me, My Love) explores and generally eviscerates the modern Roman yuppie.

The family of characters in Ricordati di me run the gamut between limp lettuces and egotistical jerks. Must be hereditary! Parents Carlo (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) and Giulia (Laura Morante) are suffering from the usual cinematic marital ennui. Their teenage children, the insecure Paolo (Silvio Muccino, the director's younger brother) and the predatory Valentina (Nicoletta Romanoff), are in the same predicament, restless and unsatisfied. All four seek external validation and gratification. All four repeatedly seek confirmation that they are still attractive in the eyes of "those outside".

Indeed, solipsism and selfishness run deep in this family. And each cultivates a private ego project: Paolo via an affair with an old flame (Monica Bellucci), Giulia by dusting off her amateur acting career, Paolo via an old crush on the shrewd Ilaria (Giulia Michelini), and - most troublingly - Valentina by becoming one of those awful TV starlets on Italian variety shows (if you're not familiar with these girls, BE GRATEFUL).

As in Muccino's other work, this film is fundamentally a satire of these people, even if it flirts with sympathy for them. But these are the most unlikable of Muccino characters - worse than the philandering 20somethings in L'ultimo bacio or the superficial rebels with adopted causes in Come te nessuno mai - mostly because these are yuppier, superficialer and pettier than all those other people. They're also living in an apathetic, post-political vacuum - something the film hints at by indicating, ever so briefly, at the Fascist heritage of the yuppies' neighborhood and the right-wing whitewashing of the Italian political landscape. These aren't the politicized, concerned citizens of C'eravamo tanto amati or Love and Anarchy; instead, they are as complacent as they are self-centered.

There's better versions of all these things: Signore e signori was a more cutting and more satisfying portrayal of bourgeois moral corruption; Revolutionary Road a better portrayal of a dissolving marriage; and Come te nessuno mai a more fun Muccino film. Plus, this film suffered from vague misogyny in portraying the women as either spineless lumps or sluts: then again, we couldn't tell if the cynicism of Valentina's Becky Sharp storyline or the eventual triumph of limp dishrag/sobbing mother into self-assured theater artiste were subverting the misogyny or condoning it.

The performances were notable, if only because they were all pretty likable or impressive, despite the horribleness of their characters and the meh-ness of the plot. Nicoletta Romanoff was phenomenal as the femmbot from the abyss, Silvio Muccino was his usual laconic slacker, Laura Morante was a pack of nervous energy (in great contrast to her usual roles), and Fabrizio Bentivoglio is our great discovery as the man born to play Lorenzo il Magnifico! Someone get that man a doublet!

Profumo di donna (1974)

2011-02-08T18:41:00.000-08:00

Profumo di donna (Scent of a woman) is a darker, crueler version of the later Americanized adaptation starring Al "HOOAH!" Pacino.

This version - the original - stars Vittorio Gassman as the blind Captain Fausto, a lecherous old goat who travels down the length of the Italian boot, drinking from his flask, heckling his minion - the resentful, boyish Giovanni (Alessandro Momo) - and sniffing the air in search of a "tall blonde with a big ass". While Giovanni huffs and sighs, Captain Fausto wields his cane like a weapon - slashing the air for obstacles or, well, passersby. As Giovanni creeps under Fausto's nose and discovers a pistol and the photo of a girl (Agostina Belli) in the latter's suitcase, their journey down to Naples begins to take on a new, ominous meaning.

While that strange combination of tenderness and raunchiness - "You think I miss seeing the Sistine Chapel?" Fausto shouts. "A big ass! That's what I miss!" - is still present in the Italian version, as is its slightly maudlin conclusion, this version also boasts a much thornier, less likable blind captain and a much frostier relationship between him and Giovanni. The relatively prudish American version - with Al Pacino as the Captain Fausto (now "Frank") and Chris O'Donnell as the Giovanni (now "Charlie") - emphasized the captain's disability as a strange sort of wild wisdom. Through Al Pacino's "HOOAH!"-ing, his classy tango dancing (just to compare, the same scene in the Italian version had Fausto tongue kissing Giovanni's girlfriend and calling her a "whore") and his general vitality, the anemic preppie Chris O'Donnell learns via the rascally blind man to live life to the fullest. Blah blah.

Fausto's quality of societal jester - i.e. his disability places him outside of society's "norm" bounds, and so he is free to break rules and thereby comment on them - is much harsher. And indeed, his hypersexuality, heavy drinking and unvarnished cruelty (think House) seem more like the desperate acts of a very angry man rather than the gentle insights into "really seeing" the world around you. That's not to say the Italian Fausto is any less a Trungpa Rinpoche-style holy fool than the American Frank. Indeed, there's a stunning scene when Fausto asks his priest cousin to bless him - his cousin then admits that he actually envies Fausto his blindness, since that "constant suffering" affords him special status in the eyes of God. He likens him to "the stupid, the ill, the innocent children".

Kind of patronizing, we thought. And kind of interesting, since the entire movie builds up this holy (tom) foolery and then offers that foolery's pearl of wisdom: that life is essentially meaningless suffering, whether you can see or not. Rather than rebelling against that suffering, once Fausto resigns himself to his complete vulnerability (emphasized ghoulishly via a clumsy, exaggerated fall) does he seem to get peace. He stops resisting. (And remember that Faust is the guy who, for ambition and knowledge and worldly stuff, exchanged any chance of everlasting peace with the devil. So this sentimental finale basically unFausts Faust.) Frank's message (apart from "HOOAH!"; did we mention we love that phrase? HOOAH!) seems to be much less existential nothingness and much more "Carpe diem!". Much less Italian, much more American.

Vittorio Gassman disappeared into this role; we could barely recognize him going all Dionysian and such when we knew him so well as a fallen bourgeois. Alessandro Momo and Agostina Belli didn't really register, both were too generically young and pretty. The priest cousin - whoever that actor was - did a great job, but he also had a great scene. Director Dino Risi used light interestingly; often blinding us or filming things in deep shade or at twilight. Great commentary on Italian regionalism, as always (the first scene in Rome has a moped driver scoot by screaming the stereotypical local slang, "Aoh! Ma va' a mori' ammazzato!" ("Go die in a homicide!")).

I girasoli (1970)

2011-02-05T16:34:00.000-08:00

I girasoli (Sunflowers) is one of those epic WW2 love stories that spans decades and several countries. While hinting at stories like Doctor Zhivago, what with the sense of massive European history pulling and pushing lovers together and apart, it's not quite as good - but it is pretty decent. Its triple pedigree - De Sica, Mastroianni, Loren - makes sure that, while not great, it's good.

Early in the war, Neopolitan Giovanna (Sofia Loren) and not-Neopolitan Antonio (Marcello Mastroianni) are lovers on the beach. They decide to get married, since that'll give Antonio - who's convinced he'll soon be sent to the African front - twelve days of delay. "Who knows," Giovanna says brightly. "Maybe the war will be over by then!" Once the twelve days are up, however, the war is far from over (indeed, one of Giovanna and Antonio's honeymoon frolics is interrupted by a bridge-bombing on day 10) - and so they try to make Antonio seem insane. When that doesn't work, they resign themselves to the inevitable: Antonio is sent to the Russian front.

Years pass, the Italian soldiers return, but still no word from Antonio. Yet more years pass - Stalin dies (!), so it's 1953 (!), so (pencil scribbling) that makes it about ten years apart - and Antonio's mother gives him up for dead. But Giovanna, convinced he's still alive, decides to travel to Russia herself, armed only with her steely determination and an ancient wartime photograph of him. What she finds there (which you can probably Google, but we'll endeavor to be at least a little spoiler-free) is sad.

The film is soaked in shared history between Italy and Russia, and the rest of Europe, as both sides pick up the pieces after the war. De Sica emphasizes this common humanity and common heritage by using visual parallels repeatedly throughout the film: the train that Antonio leaves on, the train that brings news of the front, the train that backgrounds their post-war reunion. Antonio's limp, Giovanna's colleague's limp. The near frost-bitten Antonio collapsing in the Russian snow, becoming just one more fallen comrade as the army moves ahead. And, of course, the sunflowers of Russia ("Each sunflower represents someone who died here - an Italian soldier, a Russian soldier, a German soldier, civilians, men, women, children," a character helpfully explains) and the yellow mimosas of southern Italy. Or whatever those flowers are.

Anyway, the point is that this story is supposed to be a drop in a rainstorm: in Giovanna and Antonio's tender heartbreak, we're supposed to see all the thousands of other Giovannas and Antonios that were ripped apart by the war.

Generally, it works. Okay, yes, we cried. But it's not quite as magnificent as it aspires to be. The cinematography is glorious and large - many of the scenes are impressively enormous, capturing rolling fields, thousands of graves, the pristine blue sky. But we were also constantly distracted by De Sica's overenthusiastic use of the dolly. Had he just bought a new one or something? The jumpy zooming and ambitiously long takes (watch for one where a family moves all their furniture in a pick-up truck, and the camera manages to get all the way around the truck while, presumably, both truck and camera car are in motion). A story of this scale also warrants a richness of characterization which is lacking. While Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are everybody's favorites, and we certainly like them too, we felt that Giovanna and Antonio weren't clearly-enough defined, apart from their love story narrative. The mother-in-law was the barest sketch of a character.

So, all in all, a decently moving large-scale wartime story. Not mind-blowing, but not terrible. Kinda tearjerking. Like, tearnudging.

Groundhog Day (1993)

2011-02-02T18:20:00.000-08:00

Seasonal PPCC is seasonal!

Yes indeedy, folks, it's Groundhog Day! And what better film to review than the wonderful Groundhog Day! One of those Perfect Films that is not only technically perfect, but also tremendously lovable.

Groundhog Day, for our non-American readership, is the peculiar American festival that takes place every February 2nd. On this day, the groundhog - "Prognosticator of prognosticators!" - crawls out of his hole and either sees or doesn't see his shadow. Based on this, we know whether we'll be getting six more weeks of winter or not.

Groundhog Day, the film, is a relentless avalanche of wit and wisdom, as misanthropic weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray, in one of his best performances. eva.) gets stuck reliving the same Groundhog Day over and over... and over... and over again. And again. And again again again. While everyone else seems to be experiencing the day for the first time, Phil is stuck in a time loop: he moves forward, time does not.

At first, Phil runs wild. He gorges on sweets, punches the annoying insurance salesman Ned (Stephen Toblowsky), picks up ladies and has zany car chases with the police. He spends an indeterminate - but no doubt inordinate - amount of time trying to pick up his gorgeous producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell, in a fresh, light performance). When tiring of all that, Phil despairs. He stops shaving, stops getting dressed for work, starts killing himself day after day after day. But it's only when Phil starts shedding his cynicism and helping others that things start to look brighter for him.

This film has been claimed by various religious groups - most often Buddhists. The cyclical story with its spiritual overtones certainly lends itself to such an interpretation. And the writing by Danny Rubin is clever enough - with layers upon layers of symbolism and parallels and just plain puns - that there certainly must have been an ulterior, philosophical motive.

But the genius of the film is its wit: it is deep message bottled up in a light and frothy champagne. The comic timing is perfect - just watch the repeated sequences as Phil perfects (and perfects and perfects) his pick-up lines. In fact, Bill Murray's performance is notably good here as well: lots of laugh-out-loud moments. It was also zany and meta to watch the actors repeating their lines; a commentary on filmmaking, perhaps? Or our own chats at work? OR LIFE?!

Whatever way you want to take it - as a deep dharma text or as a bubbly comedy to brighten up dreary Pennsylvania Februarys (or Massachusetts Februarys, for that matter) - this is a great film. Highly highly highly recommended, regardless of the time of year.

Boy A (2007)

2011-01-31T19:37:00.000-08:00

Boy A is an emotionally charged, gritty film about redemption and the inability to escape the past.

It follows the life of Jack (Andrew Garfield), a young man recently released from prison for a murder he committed as an adolescent. Under the wing of his protective, gruff case worker, Terry (Peter Mullan), Jack takes on a new name, a new job, new friends and a new life. For a while, things seem to be going great: his assertive, gorgeous coworker, Kelly (Siobhan Finneran), courts him, his friends introduce him to the time-honored English tradition of going down the pub, and even, by a twist of fate, he manages to save a young girl from a car accident. Everyone is very forgiving of his mumbling shyness or his embarrassed insecurities, and everyone - the characters, the film, us - is quickly charmed by his shaky vulnerability.

Of course, Jack is vulnerable. Despite Terry's proclamations that the "past is moot" and "we only look forward", Jack's past is constantly threatening to submerge his present. Wracked with flashbacks and nightmares, Jack is constantly dodging a limelight that feverishly searches for him. "EVIL COMES OF AGE," a local newspaper headline screams, touting a picture of Jack as a child on the cover.

The film does a nice job of portraying Jack as innocent and damaged, building up - both in flashbacks and in the present - Jack's essentially gentle nature. We can't help but feel incredibly forgiving of whatever it is he did. Indeed, we were already inventing excuses for him. Then, just as things are turning sour for Jack's present, we flash back to the murder itself, and our slowly-fermented sympathies are given a good jostle.

An unexpected and tenuously successful parallel is drawn between Jack and Terry's biological son, a mediocre loafer who hangs around the house watching TV and cradling beers. Filial jealousy and paternal bewilderment hinted at classical themes - King Lear-ish? - but it felt forced and inorganic. The best thing about this part of the film was its portrayal of a vigilante society using ex-convicts as scapegoats for its own failings.

Andrew Garfield and Peter Mullan were perfect in their roles. Andrew Garfield's wispy boyishness struck us in the otherwise awful Never Let Me Go, while Peter Mullan likewise made an impression as the crusty, psychotic guard, Sid, from Children of Men ("Sid doesn't want to know. Sid doesn't care."). The filmmaking style was low-key and evocative, similar to Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 in tone and Dead Man's Shoes in the portrayal of a disaffected rural England where horrible violence bubbles under the surface. Recommended.

Love and Anarchy (1973)

2011-01-29T22:32:00.000-08:00

Good God. Careful with Film d'amore e d'anarchia, ovvero stamattina alle 10 in via dei Fiori nella nota casa di tolleranza... (A film about love and anarchy, that is, this morning at 10 o'clock in Fiori Street, in the well-known whorehouse...; but more often, Love and Anarchy) - it's intense as hell.

It's also very good, and probably Lina Wertmüller's most gripping, gut-wrenching film. Stripping away all the bizarre humor that lightened and spiced up her later hits, Film d'amore e d'anarchia is a straight, sober look at one of Italy's most terrible periods: the rise of Fascism in the 1920s. We follow a few days in the life of the freckle-faced, wide-eyed country boy, Tonino (Giancarlo Giannini), who has come to the big city with plans to assassinate Mussolini. He's taken in by an anarchist prostitute, Salomè (Mariangela Melato). The whorehouse is a bawdy circus, full of sex jokes and impromptu guitar singing. Tonino, visibly out of his depth, is taken in by the prostitutes, who protect him and bicker over him and mock him. Eventually, he falls in love with the equally young Tripolina (Lina Polito).

But, even amidst this atmosphere of fun and frolic, the clock is ticking. The long shadow of Fascism looms, and things become increasingly edgy as the date of the assassination approaches. This slow crescendo of tension builds and builds, creating a sense of terrible foreboding.

A number of films have shown the quotidian nightmare of Fascist Italy: Una giornata particolare explored the day Mussolini and Hitler met in Rome, as seen via two "outsiders", played by Marcello Mastroianni and Sofia Loren, stranded in a deserted suburban apartment building. Roma città aperta and General della Rovere explored wartime, occupied Italy. Film d'amore e d'anarchia fits neatly into this subgenre, in that - like Una giornata particolare, we experience the city under Fascist rule: and it's alien, ugly, oppressive. We see extensive shots of Mussolini's planned communities, such as EUR, with their enormous, repressive architecture. The streets are all empty. Everyone seems unfriendly and on edge.

Also, like Roma città aperta and General della Rovere, Fascist power seems unconquerable, terrifying. The feeling of initial resistance followed by deep fear ("I'm shitting myself," Tonino repeatedly quails. "You can't imagine how scared I am.") followed by absolute desperation is perfectly captured in these films. Indeed, we spent much of the film anxious and upset, almost unable to watch it to the (inevitable) sorry conclusion. This isn't the post-war world of C'eravamo tanto amati, where the partisan fight - having been won - is suddenly seen as nostalgic and noble. Instead, this is narrow, terrifying insecurity. Indeed, that feeling of pervasive terror lingers - we still feel it now, having just finished the film, and we're reminded of another Antonio, the relatively luckier resistance fighter played by Nino Manfredi in C'eravamo tanto amati, who has a great few lines about it:

Listen, Luciana: when you've risked your life with someone, you remained attached to them. It's as if time doesn't pass, and that person could still save you. As if we're not out of danger yet.

Highly recommended. Follow with the lightest chaser you can find - something like this or maybe this or maybe just a glass of water and a nap.

Dramma della gelosia (1970)

2011-01-25T19:09:00.000-08:00

First thing's first: we loved Dramma della gelosia (tutti i particolari in cronaca) (Jealousy drama (with all the details), though its international title was The Pizza Triangle). It was everything we loved about Ettore Scola's other masterpiece, C'eravamo tanto amati, coupled with the zany, sexualized, politicized, over-the-top commedia all'italiana story akin to our favorite Lina Wertmuller movies. In other words, the perfect 1970s Italian film.

The story begins with the fidgety, disheveled Oreste (an amazing Marcello Mastroianni) being asked by the police and lawyers how it exactly happened. Aided by a sad-looking Nello (Giancarlo Giannini), Oreste, Nello and an older man reenact the accidental murder of Adelaide (Monica Vitti) - Oreste and Nello's former lover. There's a bittersweet pageantry to watching everything slow down and seeing the absurdity of this very human drama unfold.

The rest of the film makes us retrace the steps - via Rashomon-like courthouse interjections - of when Adelaide the florist and Oreste the bricklayer met, fell in love, and then met Nello the pizza chef, and fell in love with him too. This love triangle, and the three's extremes of ultimatums, aborted polyamory, attempted suicides and - yes - lots of jealousy and hurt feelings, make up the rest of this strange, touching film. In the vein of Ettore Scola's other PPCCed film, there is a heavy air of surreality (lots of fourth-wall breaking) coupled with compassionate humanism. It all seems so silly and forgivable in hindsight. Also, as per C'eravamo tanto amati and Lina Wertmuller's films, the Italian Left is a prominent supporting character, and the downtrodden, working class Oreste and Nello even meet after getting beat up by the police at a march. Like the bourgeois "padrone" in C'eravamo…, the rich Roman is again portrayed as fat, dull-eyed and very ignorant (played here by the hulking Hércules Cortés).

What was interesting about this film - and called to mind Giancarlo Giannini's later golden years in skeezy picaresque tales like Pasqualino Settebellezze and Mi manda Picone - was its high levels of "zozzeria" - that is, scumminess. The setting is Rome, but the city looks disgusting, and the characters frequent dumps, housing projects and ugly highways. Oreste is hounded by an enormous fly, and his entrances are signaled by loud buzzing. He twitches, his hair is greasy and his clothes are mismatched. In one of the most hilarious scenes, Adelaide attempts to list his pros and cons; when she gets to the cons, she admits, "And you're not very hygienic. Remember that one night? You even made a sound." Oreste and Adelaide meet when he falls asleep on a pile of paper and debris. They frolic on a polluted beach, have a picnic at the dump.

The script successfully juggles tenderness with a sharp wit; we found ourselves laughing often, even if it was so sad. And some of the lines were great! Example: when Adelaide first spots Oreste snoozing on a trash heap at a Communist fair (they have those, I guess?), she hops off the swings and goes to wake him with a kiss. They're both a little drunk and unsteady, and when he wakes, he looks at her, thinks for a bit, and says, "You lost a bet." What a first line! Or a wonderful scene when Adelaide seeks the aid of a therapist: "So what's the diagnosis? I'm traumatized, I've had a shock? It's a neurological disorder? Or am I a whore?" The therapist cuts in quickly: "Let's not get into scientific jargon!"

The most impressive of the cast was Marcello Mastroianni, who was playing heavily against type. We wouldn't have believed that Mastroianni would have been able to shed his dashing, Everyman persona to become someone as decrepit and bizarre (and Roman) as Oreste. The details of his performance - the tic around his eyes; his stubbed, broken fingernails; the general air of decay and hobo-ness - was amazing. In fact, we were so amazed that we had to check if he won anything for this; and he did! Best Actor at Cannes!

Giancarlo Giannini, our other favorite, was also playing heavily against type. Whereas he usually occupied the role of the wild-eyed, unhinged and in love laborer (see Wertmuller's Mimi metallurgico ferrito nell'onore), here he was young, upbeat and oddly tween heartthrob-esque. He was also playing a Tuscan, and the accent was awesome.

Monica Vitti's best moments were definitely the swings between carefree, joyous hedonism and the wracks of self-doubt. In fact, the latter almost seemed satirical of typical soap opera femininity (as was much of this film's treatment of sexual mores and gender norms in general). Yet, as with the writing and everything else, even when things bordered on satirical, they never lacked sympathy.

Highly recommended.

The Company Men (2010)

2011-01-23T19:32:00.000-08:00

The Company Men is a fairly sober, paint-by-numbers portrayal of America's economic crises, as experienced by three recently-layed off upper middle class corporate suits. Its main value is less in its execution - which is straightforward bordering on bland - than in its peculiarity: you just don't see economics in Hollywood very much these days.

Indeed, that's endemic to American culture: a complete purging of labor issues and economic strife from the collective cultural consciousness. Whoa, did we just sound like Gramsci? Anyway, this film's novelty value, along with the strong cast, merits a viewing. And it's an interesting follow-up to the much more class conscious Look Back in Anger; here too, class is an issue, particularly the appearance of it. A common statistic (fact!) is that Americans tend to over-identify with the middle class: everyone seems to think they're in it, even when many are not.

In The Company Men, the facade of upper middle classness hides crumbling decay as three mid- to upper-level managers are progressively laid off from their cushy corporate jobs. Bob (Ben Affleck) is young and cocksure, but even his budding symbols of success - the huge house, the Porsche, the golfclubs - become a liability when he can't compete with fresh MBA grads, eager and able to work for lower salaries in a race to the bottom. Phil (Chris Cooper) is the old timey American Dream incarnate; a Vietnam vet who worked his way up from the factory floor to the six figure salary. And then there's Gene (Tommy Lee Jones), the heart and soul of the business and, it seems, the only honest businessman left in America (or Boston, at least).

The film's structure and sympathies mark it as very similar to the Italian film, Il posto dell'anima - except the latter, being, well, Italian, focused much more on working class issues in an explicitly Socialist light. But both films explore the decline and decay of manufacturing jobs in a post-industrial West, and both use the triptych of young - middle - old (which could just as well stand for brash - vulnerable - wisdom) characters. Indeed, in both films, the middle character - Silvio Orlando in Il posto dell'anima, Chris Cooper in The Company Men - is set up as society's sacrificial lamb; the guy who did everything right and yet still lost. "My life just ended," Chris Cooper laments, "and nobody noticed." Indeed, Silvio Orlando was the Ideal Comrade Worker - selfless, honest, hard-working, good-humored. He was like a natural extension of Nino Manfredi's Worker Ideal in C'eravamo tanto amati (OK, we just watched that again yesterday, so we had to find a way to get it in here). And yet he still lost. Similarly, Chris Cooper fought for his country, worked in its factories and climbed the ladder, sending his daughter off to a destiny of Ivy League intelligentsia. But in the end, he gets screwed. (That's not to say the film's ending isn't inherently upbeat, promoting the hard-work can-do attitude of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.)

This focus on the pain of the upper middle class is restrictive, in some senses, but also very contextual; as we said above, most of America identifies with this class. The common laborer - here embodied with a pleasantly low-key, sardonic wit by Kevin Costner as Jack the Carpenter, Bob's brother-in-law - is given a much reduced role. He appears - and is decent, hard-working and honest. But his story is never really told, or even acknowledged.

The cast is uniformly appealing and strong, even if the narrative doesn't allow them much nuance. It was great to see Chris Cooper, who we are most fond of; especially since we've been cultivating a fantasy film in our head starring him as a 1900s Chicago union organizer, David Strathairn as a slaughterhouse laborer and Paul Giamatti as a driven, exploitative yet compelling beef baron. Best movie evar?! You bet. And this one? Decent. Wait for DVD. Cultivate your fantasy Upton Sinclair adaptation instead.

eventually, you will be able to buy the movie here...

Look Back in Anger (1989)

2011-01-23T06:51:00.000-08:00

There's something perversely compelling but ultimately tiresome about Look Back In Anger, the classic "kitchen sink drama" about an Angry Young Man. In fact, the protagonist's name, Jimmy Porter, has become something of a shorthand for "the Angry Young Man" - or, if you're like the PPCC, "self-important misogynistic asshole".

What's amazing about Look Back in Anger is how autobiographical it purportedly is. John Osborne, the playwright, was also notoriously horrible to his loved ones - after repeatedly insulting her, he threw his teenage daughter out of the house and never spoke to her again. Like Jimmy Porter, the cruelty of his language was infamous. And what's amazing is that someone so, well, self-involved and dick-ish, could have been able to write anything remotely three-dimensional at all. It's a wonder he managed to create characters other than Jimmy Porter - especially Jimmy's long-suffering wife, Alison, and friend, Cliff.

Anyway! Jimmy Porter (Kenneth Branagh) is a working class candy shop owner somewhere in an anonymous English town. He seethes at the unfairness of it all, particularly classism and, uh, the existence of women. His hatred for these two things he takes out with relish on Alison (Emma Thompson), his passive, upper class-slumming wife. A diarrheic talker, Jimmy hates the complacency, the conformism, the hypocrisy of modern English everything. He rails and rails… and rails… and rails some more, for good measure. His (only remaining?) friend, the adorable puppy-like Cliff (Gerard Horan), tries to keep the peace between Jimmy and Alison. Eventually, Alison's childhood friend, the righteous and churchy Helena (Siobhan Redmond), comes to visit and attempts to bark back at Jimmy.

All of this building tension - a tension that goes from being pleasantly coiled to excruciatingly awful to watch - is punctuated by rare moments of sweet, almost needy, affection: when they're not screaming at each other, Jimmy and Alison cuddle and coo about being a "bear and a squirrel", Alison and Cliff cuddle and coo ("My lovely!" Cliff always exclaims), and Jimmy and Cliff wrestle and rough-house like schoolboys. It's a strange, compelling roller coaster of ups and… well, not so much downs, as when the roller coaster breaks off the tracks and goes flying away.

Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson are always reliably good in theater-driven stuff. Judi Dench directs, but it's a limited, anemic direction, still speaking theater language when it should be speaking movie.

The play itself has been lauded for bringing realism (and, we guess, nihilism and rebellion) to the English stage back in the 50s. It is certainly shockingly gritty by even today's standards - again, not so much because of the poverty or unwanted pregnancy stuff, so much as the cruelty of Jimmy and Osborne's relatively sympathetic treatment of it. It's as if Osborne is trying to tell us Jimmy is a prophet, someone who (as the "citation needed" intro of Osborne's wiki tells us) "argued for the cleansing wisdom of bad behavior and bad taste, and combined unsparing truthfulness with devastating wit." Now, we have a personal bone to pick with such a philosophy: mostly because we think compassion is the only universal wisdom, and behaving like an asshole isn't so much shaking off the shackles of a hypocritical, stifling society, as it is, well, being an asshole.

If we may go a bit Tiger Beatdown on Osborne and Jimmy for a moment, as well, we've always heard this ultra-individualistic, pessimistic philosophy proselytized by, well, angry young men. Angry, desperate egotism and self-pity of this sort, when coupled with disenfranchised young white men (as Jimmy and Osborne are), always makes us think of (1) misogyny! and (2) racism! And, indeed, you can read Look Back in Anger as a post-colonial play: Jimmy as a broken-down, post-imperial UK, with nothing else to conquer, wallowing in ennui and feelings of low self-worth. (Hey, Laurence Olivier, who was all about injecting patriotism into theater, thought Look Back in Anger was an offense to his "sense of patriotism and theatre".) In that respect, as a self-aware sympathetic satire of wounded, post-imperial British pride, Look Back in Anger is almost acceptable - but we're wary of giving Osborne too much self-reflective credit, especially since he was kinda right-wing and it smells throughout that he agrees with Jimmy. He certainly seems to think Jimmy's categorical hate of anyone upper class or female (or, worse, upper class and female!) is righteous and true. And he wasn't totally self-aware: as demonstrated in the completely ridiculous moment when another character, the father-in-law, listens to Alison describing Jimmy's various abuses and then compliments Jimmy on his "way with words" (?!). Why doesn't he just say, "Good heavens, that Jimmy fellow should become a playwright! He could revolutionize the stage with his witticisms!" Dude, he put a sockpuppet in his own play. What a troll...

Shakespeare in Love (1998)

2011-01-17T18:37:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare in Love is a grand celebration of the creative drive and the pleasure of fiction. It's also what we consider a Perfect Film - much like Rashomon or Ladri di biciclette.

Fictions layer over each other in Shakespeare in Love - and the way we approach this fundamental deceit is explored. Are we like the enraged, indignant preacher, waving his hat at the fact that "vice is in the show!"? Or are we like the passionate theater-goer Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), who admits that her love affair with William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) "is not life - it is a stolen season", or, even better, is a "flattering dream - too sweet to be substantial", but revels in it nonetheless?

Because fiction abounds - fiction as the transformative, cathartic, passionate release for our transcendental drive. The fiction of Viola as "Thomas Kent", an actor for the down-on-his-luck Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) and his struggling theater company. The fiction that Shakespeare is writing Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter - no, Romeo and Rosalind - no, whatever - and that this play is for Henslowe… no, his competitor, Burbage (Martin Clunes). The fiction of Viola and Will's love for each other - she, already bound to the blunt, unimaginative Lord Wessex (Colin Firth); and he, exiled from his wife and children in Stratford. The fiction of the final play - Romeo and Juliet - and how it interweaves with the stolen romance Viola and Will enjoy.

You could call it lies or deceit, but everyone is definitely living in a fantasy in this film - deception, masks, costumes and dissembling abounds. Yet - just like in the Neopolitan underworld and its circus-like, surreal atmosphere in Mi manda Picone - this essential non-reality is accepted by everyone. It's like structured play. Everyone agrees that this isn't real, and everyone still operates within these bounds of non-reality.

The result is priceless: whimsical, funny, heartfelt and, ironically, very true. Early in the film, Queen Elizabeth (Judi Dench) accepts to judge a wager between the hard realist Wessex and the dreamer Shakespeare that true love could never be captured in a play. In the end, even though everything on which that love was built was a lie, we see that the love indeed was true. It's a cunning meta turn. And, just like Will and Viola or the audience of the play, the audience of the film - i.e. the PPCC - suffers a big letdown when we leave Narnia and return to reality. The dreamscape was so much… realer. At least, it felt so! (Ironically?)

Of course, the strength and intelligence of this film relies almost entirely on the strength and intelligence of the script by Tom Stoppard. The actors are all uniformly strong; it's a veritable tour of RADA talent. The music and direction support and give accent to what is essentially an emotional story (much as dreams have their own emotional logic!) and, of course, it's great as just a celebration of Shakespeare (expect lots of puns and references). It also does something which is rare, but delightful, to behold: it shows us the creative process at its most fluid and prolific. Like Amadeus, this film captures the verve and alive-ness of producing something creative, especially when that something just pours out of you. As if you were a conduit to something greater. The best part of being human? We'd wager Wessex his fifty pounds on it.

Highly recommended.

La cagna (1972)

2011-01-11T18:26:00.000-08:00

Ugh. What a piece of misogynistic pap.

Other reviews of La cagna (literally, The Bitch, though the international title is Liza) have mentioned it being "highly symbolic" - but surely the director, Marco Ferreri, could have made these same symbolic points using a less rubbish story.

Liza (Catherine Deneuve) and Giorgio (Marcello Mastroianni) are directionless misfits, fleeing from society in an ad hoc, haphazard way. They both end up on a tiny, remote island in the Mediterranean - Liza having swam away from her friend's yacht, Giorgio having established himself as a hermit there with his dog, Melampo. Shortly after Liza's arrival, they "fall in love" - or something, at least. Giorgio then drives Liza back to civilization in his motorboat. Liza then promptly returns, kills Melampo, and takes the dog's place.

There are obvious, striking similarities between this and Lina Wertmuller's far superior Swept Away - the remote island setting, the sadomasochistic love affair, even the actors' looks. But what Wertmuller achieves is a subversion and criticism of La Cagna's central conceit: bourgeois ennui, and how men and women react to it by retreating into primal roles of dominance and submission. Heck, even the uneven Adam Resurrected, which featured a similar nurse/patient, dog/master-roleplaying love affair, was more subtle than this. Both Wertmuller and, to an extent, Adam Resurrected satirized this patriarchal fantasy of "natural"/"savage"/"in the wild" gender roles - La cagna instead embraces them, presenting them as the real thing, as enviable, even.

La cagna also unfortunately relies on lobby room jazz muzak coupled with moody shots of Mastroianni and Deneuve to denote profound philosophical depths. But honestly, Ferreri's not fooling anyone: the characters are paper-thin, the attempts at backstory sloppy and unconvincing ("Ludwig is wrong! No, Ludwig is wrong!" Liza insists - sparing us who Ludwig is or what he's wrong about; the blunt flashback to Melampo as Giorgio crouches over another dead dog - how much more obvious do you need to be? WE GET IT). There's no sense of how much time is passing, no investment in the relationship, and no build and release of dramatic tension. Instead, we trudge along with inane dialogue and, at its worst, tediously stupid gender politics. And those sunglasses! Self-described "Robinson Crusoe" Giorgio springs for Yves Saint Laurent sneakers, but not sunglasses? Oh, come on.

No, we're sorry, but we really don't care about Giorgio's deep guilt over his abandoned, unstable family at home and their bourgeois restrictions on his creativity. Melampo - Pinocchio's dog - may indicate that Giorgio is Pinocchio, but Peter Pan might be more appropriate.

The King's Speech (2010)

2011-01-03T20:36:00.000-08:00

The King's Speech is a solid film which never attains the greatness to which it aspires. By choosing the easy route, and smothering the darker, crueler core of its story under a tidy triumph, it ends up a good film, where it could have been a great one.

The King's Speech is essentially a sports film, and sports films are usually the same. They start with our hero, the underdog, undergoing a humiliating defeat. After licking his wounds (and it is usually a 'he'), the underdog discovers the key to his reformation and success - usually an inspiring mentor or coach. After a rousing training montage, we build up to the inevitable denouement - usually a rematch with the earlier opponent - which, after some tense last-minute uncertainties, ends in (inevitable) glorious victory.

The best sports films are those that bend the genre - films like Eight Men Out, that open with victory and end with the abyss. Director Tom Hooper is no stranger to such films - just see his work from last year, The Damned United, which used the harsh clarity of defeat to really examine our ambition to win. The King's Speech should have been such an innovative sports film - a film that let our character, King George VI (Colin Firth), wallow in his misery and explore it. Instead, we get the trials and complexities of England's waning royalty under the gathering storm of World War 2 shoe-horned into a feel-good movie complete with Disney-style pop psycho-analysis.

Behold:

Our hero, underdog Duke of York, is second son to King George V (a spot-on Michael Gambon) and an embarrassment to the family. In an age of the radio, where the royal family has been "reduced to ingratiating" themselves into England's living rooms via the "Pandora's box" of wireless technology, the Duke - Bertie to his wife (Helena Bonham Carter) and family - is a terrible public speaker. He suffers from a stutter and paralyzing stage fright. The film's opening defeat shows him giving a cringe-worthy speech to the crowds at Wembley (?) in 1925.

Ten years later, Bertie meets his mentor and coach - the unorthodox, transplanted antipodean Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush - nice to see you again!). Logue insists on equality in the counseling room, and couples his speech therapy with some pop Freud as well. Bertie's stutter will never improve, Logue reckons, if we don't unearth some of the anxieties which eat away at him from the inside. Bertie - clinging to the formalities and automatic distance that his title engenders - rebels. But then comes around. Then, after his father dies and his older brother abdicates in favor of a Baltimore divorcee, becomes king. And then war breaks out. And then he gives his speech.

The best parts of The King's Speech, as we've hinted at above, are the darker parts. Logue's non-speech therapy might be a bit Good Will Hunting, but there is a real edge to seeing the surreal, dehumanizing effect royalty has on everyone involved, not just Bertie - the cavernous palace rooms, the stiff ritualism of family affairs, the easy bullying. Bertie is, of course, the most obviously wounded of the lot - his stutter a paper-thin disguise to the deep insecurities he has been raised to feel. In one harrowing scene, Logue - ever awkward in reconciling his everyman conviviality with the formalities required in dealing with Bertie - attempts to console Bertie shortly after the latter's father's death. Bertie then haltingly describes his gruesome "personal affairs" - up to this point, taboo - and we hear of abuse, neglect, alienation. It's ironic that Geoffrey Rush's performance in this scene - that is, his reactions - almost outshines Colin Firth's. Another excellent detail is the tempestuous anger which Bertie exhibits - and how he explains away his sudden explosions as "one of my many faults".

It's these hints at dysfunction and decay that round out both the character of Bertie and the story of England's royalty under the war. And as war brews and Bertie is faced with his most important public speaking event yet - a cry to rally the troops - we can't help but feel like forcing the complicated private and public issues into one mishmash of "Hurrah for perseverance!" is facile.

Phew.

Anyway, on the purely movie front: Timothy Spall's spot-on Winston Churchill impression was stunning in the lengthier scenes and distractingly funny in the shorter moments, where it began to feel like a caricature. Turning the Archbishop of Canterbury (Derek Jacobi) into a thorny old guard antagonist was uninspired, as were the easy jokes about snobbish, stiff upper lip English royalty looking down on Australians. That said, it was nice, in a meta way, to have Australian actor Guy Pearce, as the dandy older brother and very-briefly-King Edward VIII, speak in the poshest accent ever. Helena Bonham Carter was wonderfully sympathetic as, well, the Queen Mother (what are these people's names, anyway?! Bertie said his at one point and it had, like, ten names in there), while Geoffrey Rush was his usual Geoffrey Rushy self. Colin Firth is a dreamboat as ever, and of course we felt a great rush of tenderness for him, as he was indeed incredibly vulnerable (and often humiliated!). Trivia: He played a WWI vet with a stutter in the glorious A Month in the Country.

Other movie stuff: Tom Hooper's direction was reminiscent of his work in Damned United - canned saturation, geometrical compositions emphasizing dizzying wallpapers, symmetrical perspectives and a tendency to use off-center close-ups. It was nice in Damned United, but we were distracted this time. The use of Beethoven's 7th was DIVINE, I tell you - but then, that music is divine. There was a whole 'nother movie in there. And hearing Bertie describe Hitler as advocating the "primitive doctrine that Might is Right" threw us right back to The Once and Future King - so that's what T.H. White was referring to: Bertie's speech! Oh my God, ARTHUR IS BERTIE, WE SEE IT NOW. Well, that is just something.

So: see it? Yes, definitely, but perhaps wait for DVD.

Dead Again (1991)

2011-01-02T11:44:00.000-08:00

Dead Again is a fun, weird romp through reincarnation, melodrama, and Kenneth Branagh-Emma Thompson's Greatest Hits. A fluffy murder mystery dressed up in classical Hitchcock-style aesthetics with a dash of Branagh-style theatricality, it is whimsical and not too gory and very silly. Expect much intentional and unintentional humor.

One day, detective Mike Church (Kenneth Branagh, in an American accent) agrees to help his old orphanage out with a bag lady problem they're having: a mysterious mute woman (Emma Thompson), suffering from amnesia, has wandered onto the grounds and keeps having screaming nightmares. Mike takes the lady in and tries to find out where her memory went; his friends, Pete (Wayne Knight (!)) the forensics guy and Dr. Carlisle (Robin Williams, in a very good beefed-up cameo) the former psychiatrist quack, try to help. But the biggest help comes when the dapper, take-charge hypnotist Frank (Derek Jacobi) enters the scene. After just a few sessions with Frank, the woman - now called Grace - has regained the ability to speak and is busy reliving her past life as Margaret Strauss (Emma Thompson, again), eminent pianist and wife to the dashing European composer, Roman Strauss (Kenneth Branagh, in a (sexier) German accent this time), way back in post-war LA. The same Strausses who ended up all over the 1940s newspapers after Roman was convicted of murdering Margaret with a pair of scissors. What does it all mean?! Will Mike and Grace fall in love as per their predetermination? Or will karma catch up with them, as Dr. Carlisle insists it will, and they'll just murder each other all over again?! And what is Grace's real name anyway!?!?!

It all comes together in a delightful, unexpected conclusion that we'll not spoil here. But suffice to say it includes jarring cross cuts (our favorite filmy thing ever!), blood-pumping choral music (our favorite Kenneth Branaghy thing ever!) and lots of gasps and close-ups and unexpected laughter (from us, that is).

The charm of Dead Again is that it doesn't take itself too seriously, even though everything is played straight. Everyone looks like they're having a rollicking good time swaning around the 1940s black-and-white scenes (all white tie events, mind you) or engaging in some earnest, cringe-worthy 1980s rom-com-style flirting ("I can read tea bags, you know?" Mike schmoozes; OH GOD). Robin Williams' glorified cameo is a great performance filled with hilariously vulgar dialogue; it's worth it just to see him in this cross between The Fisher King and Good Will Hunting. Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson are at their charmingest peak (this was their period, after all!), and the whole film is like a tribute fest to their past and future work: the masked ball which we'll see again in Much Ado About Nothing, the domestic horrors reminiscent of Look Back in Anger and Patrick Doyle's rousing, bombastic score straight out of the goosebump-inducing St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. Andy Garcia has a nice role as the tobacco-addicted journalist, while Campbell Scott's cameo made us laugh and laugh and laugh.

Our conclusion? Definitely see it. And then write Kenneth Branagh and tell him he is and always will be King Arthur.

La tête en friche (2010)

2011-01-01T04:43:00.000-08:00

La tête en friche (My Afternoons with Margueritte) tries to be a charming sketch of bittersweet village life, but instead it falls flat. It was just embarrassing.

In a small town somewhere in France, the stout Germain (a gone-to-seed Gérard Depardieu) unwillingly occupies the position of village idiot. Slow to read, slow with numbers and painfully conscious of this, Germain spends his days trying to find simple pleasures - his vegetable garden, his girlfriend, drinks with the mates - and trying to keep at bay the ridicule and disdain of the other villagers and, most especially, his indifferent, shrewish mother (Claire Maurier). Things take an upturn when he befriends the coquettish, patient, 95-year-old Margueritte (Gisèle Casadesus), and they spend their lunches sitting on the park bench, reading Camus to each other. Under Margueritte's loving care, Germain gets (1) the mother he wanted, and (2) the confidence to blossom like a little intellectual flower.

The core of the story is sweet enough, and might have made a charming piece. Instead, things are handled so bluntly that we wondered if the film wasn't trying to go all meta on Germain's bumbling, clumsy ham-fisting. Example: the distracting and unnecessary flashbacks, where a school-age Germain - in the same outfit! and the same haircut! - is regularly mocked by his teachers and mother for being slow. Or Margueritte and Germain's execrably banal conversations. Or the fact that Depardieu, bless him, is about thirty years too old for this part, and his relationship with the beautiful bus driver, Annette (Sophie Guillemin), strains credulity. Or their awful (AWFUL) pillow talk. Or the Italian stereotype, Gardini (François-Xavier Demaison), complete with oily hair and hands flying around.

French films about the honest, humble "la vie est belle!" glory of the village have been done before - and, presumably, there must be some good ones. But all the ones we've seen - this, Chocolat, Amélie - rely on a sort of maudlin sentimentality, as well as a romanticized notion of the rich, golden-toned Frenchness of living in France, that we can't stand. Let Nanni Moretti glorify the mundane and the good life.

La messa è finita (1985)

2010-12-29T10:16:00.000-08:00

La messa è finita (Mass is finished) is an early Nanni Moretti film that exhibits many of Moretti's trademark moves: domestic bliss and domestic hell (both filmed enticingly), a counsellor distracted by his own anxieties, long shots of Moretti from behind as he wanders through his comfortable apartment and an easy-going, bourgeois sensibility.

Moretti's thinly veiled alter-ego is, in this case, Giulio, a young priest. We follow Giulio as he moves to a new parish, closer to his parents in Rome, and mingles with the community. People come to him with all sorts of problems - generally, heartbreak - and, as things strike closer and closer to home, it begins to weigh on Giulio. He lashes out, an angry young man, and (as usual, in Moretti films) gets no closer to the elusive truth. We suffer - all his movies seem to say - but it can still be beautiful. "My life is beautiful," Giulio declares, even as he cries about all his problems.

La messa è finita is guided by thin threads of plot, but it's not as completely impressionistic as Moretti's later (and stronger) film, Caro Diario. Nonetheless, it's filled with the same abrupt cuts and vignette-style scenes as his other later (and much stronger, if not best) film, The Son's Room. Its meandering, circling style may bore or alienate some viewers, but we love it - in fact, it fills us with a deep, soothing contentment, similar to a Morandi painting; the beautiful in the mundane.

The film's conclusion doesn't leave as much of an impact - Moretti achieves that feeling of fraying, tender relationships with much greater clarity in The Son's Room - but it's always nice to spend a couple hours walking behind him. Recommended.

The Tempest (2010)

2010-12-21T09:35:00.000-08:00

We had been hearing about Julie Taymor's The Tempest for nigh on two years now, ever since Helen Mirren was announced to be playing the role of a female Prospero (called Prospera - catchy!). Imagine our delight and excitement when we learned that they were also adding some of our favorites - Chris Cooper! Djimon Hounsou! DAVID. STRATHAIRN! - to the mix.

However, The (girl) Tempest is a big mess; incoherent and over-the-top visuals coupled with a chopped-up Shakespeare that's barely recognizable. Most people agree (statistic!) that Shakespearean plots don't resonate with modern audiences anymore - twins, shipwrecks, fairies, love at first sight, those wretched proletarian comedy subplots, people being deceived by masks or a pair of pants - ha! We are not so easily duped as those Elizabethan yokels. And that's not why us modern folk usually watch the Bard - we watch it for his epic, fancy talking (so Elizabethan! so complicated! so fancy!). So when you remove the talking, you're left with a lot of silliness. And when you amp up the ridiculous elements with Xena: Warrior Princess-style CGI and loony, masala-style close-ups, the audience (or, at least, the PPCC) feels overwhelmed and eventually alienated. Nothing really could resonate in all that bombastic mishmash.

The plot: Prosper(a) (Helen Mirren), the exiled Duchess of Milan, is living on some random island with her daughter, Miranda (Felicity Jones). She is a great magician, and she uses her dark arts - along with the help of her enslaved fairy, Ariel (a gender-less Ben Wishaw) - to destroy a passing ship in a passing thunderstorm. Onboard are none other than all her political rivals: her conniving brother Antonio (Chris Cooper), King Alonso of Naples (David Strathairn), his brother Sebastian (Alan Cummings) and the kind-hearted consigliere (or somesuch) Gonzalo (Tom Conti). They are all shipwrecked together on one side of the island. On the other side emerges Alonso's son, Ferdinand (Reeve Carney), and - from a third angle - the dim-witted shipmates, Trinculo (a mighty Russell Brand) and Stephano (Alfred Molina). Add the controversial character of Calaban (Djimon Hounsou, in burnt, peely skin) to the mix, and you have the cast. Mostly, the story is about all of them bumping into each other and eventually bumping into Prospera, where they all apologize and Miranda says, "O brave new world! That has such people in it!" The end.

Hacking the text to pieces was really a shame, since so much was lost or garbled - ultimately appearing superficial and daft. Ferdinand and Miranda see each other and are immediately smitten. It's idiotic! OK, that always happens, but here, it's idiotic and inarticulate. This is also a shame, since the cast is really top-notch, and they do quite well given their muted, over-simplified dialogues: Helen Mirren is, of course, amazing in her role, and yes, there is some ephemeral interest in seeing the Prospero-Miranda dynamic become a mother-daughter thing. (It makes the Ferdinand treatment make a bit more sense, at least.) Similarly, Chris Cooper and Alan Cumming do well; while David Strathairn just mopes. Alfred Molina and Russell Brand basically do slapstick, and Djimon Hounsou's interpretation of Calaban is bravely, troublingly close to slave stereotypes. (We've seen productions where Calaban was played as a ghoul-buffoon; here, he's a proud, dignified, angry slave.) Ben Wishaw was fine, though his occasional breasts and lack of genitals distracted.

There were some strange moments, when the music and imagery came together to produce scenes from Dune; we half-expected Helen Mirren to declare, "Yes! For he is the Kwizatz Haderach!" Think fuzzy, reverb-heavy electric guitar slamming down on minor power chords, coupled with epic shots of Prosper(a) standing on cliff precipices.

It's a shame this movie emphasized its million visual ideas (much to its detriment; like the over-stuffed Daywatch) rather than its story or text. Even genuinely striking visuals were lost in the mush; one great moment, for example, was when Ariel explains to Prospera that all the nobles - while given a good scare - emerged scratchless from the shipwreck. In that moment, we see David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, Alan Cumming and Tim Conti suddenly emerge, fully upright, in the rocky ocean, as if the water level itself was decreasing. A quirky, fun visualization of being unharmed! Alas that it was just a brief gem in a messy sea of good, bad and ugly.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode "Genesis" (1994)

2010-11-29T21:03:00.000-08:00

Image source. Yeah, FYTNG!

Oh man. Sometimes we expect the Enterprise crewmembers to look up at the camera, break the fourth wall and just scream, "OMG AM I IN THE BEST EPISODE EVER?!"

Star Trek: The Next Generation's season seven episode, Genesis, is one of those Best Episodes Ever that made us squeal and squawk with pure delight. And it just goes to show you that, for every awesome and hilarious sci-fi idea that you can possibly think of, there's probably already a Star Trek episode for it.

One day, one of the Enterprise's torpedoes went shooting off into an asteroid field, irritating Lieutenant Worf (Michael Dorn) and Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) immensely. While Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Data (Brent Spiner) took a shuttle to go retrieve it, everyone back on the Enterprise starting acting very, very bizarrely. Worf suddenly feels hot all the time, while Counsellor Troi (Marina Sirtis) starts to feel cold and parched. Riker can't focus on anything, and hypochondriac Lieutenant Barclay (Dwight Schulz) becomes manic. What could possibly be going on?! Is it the flu or something?

Well, sort of! They're all DE-EVOLVING! Because it's the best episode of a TV show ever!

Amphibian Troi. Most hilarious ever?! POSSIBLY. Pic courtesy Wikipedia.

When Picard and Data return to the ship, they find it a steamy, Amazonian mess of jungle shrieks and predatory roars (that would be Worf, who de-evolves into the Shrike - shout out to Dan Simmons!). Picard immediately contracts the virus, and it's only another twelve hours before - according to Data - he will de-evolve "into either a lemur or a pygmy marmoset."

Let's take a moment to let that sink in. This man, Picard,

= A

LEMUR.

OR A

PYGMY MARMOSET.

.....

!!

Of course, leave it to Picard to become the most squirrelly and adorable of primates - while beefy, seven-foot Riker turns into a Neanderthal (okay, australopithecine). While he goes all anxious and twitchy (and kudos to Patrick Stewart's Royal Shakespearean training - who else could so fully encapsulate Terrified Lemur Man? With such pathos?), Data saves the ship. Again.

Ahh, this was the best of a very strange show. We've been overdosing on Next Generation for the past few days, ever since discovering WatchTrek.com, and we've often found episodes so overstuffed with insane ideas that the audience (or characters, for that matter) has no time to fully digest what the hell just happened. Soul-sucking aliens from another dimension… your accidentally-created double wooing your ex using tai chi-inspired interpretative dance… finding out someone amputated your arm and reattached it while you were sleeping?!! It's all in a couple episodes' work for Commander Riker, for example. And that's just one character! The show is packed with this sort of stuff. We love it.

A gratuitous shot of a typical TNG episode, wherein everyone is jumping around and falling over. Pic courtesy FYTNG.

We loved this episode because it captured that atmosphere of bizarreness, hilarity and horror - an intoxicating cocktail, and not something that's easy to do. When Picard and Data run into their former crewmates who are, one by one, presented as a gaping amphibian, a roaring australopithecine, and, well, the Shrike - it's hilarious, weird, and scary. It's like Slither, or The Fly, or the Evil Dead series. That is, sort of disgusting - but in a really awesome way. And the cat-lizard! THE CAT-LIZARD!?

Buy this now. Buy it.

Starman (1984)

2010-11-25T19:56:00.000-08:00

This year, we are particularly thankful for Netflix. Gobble, gobble!

Starman is a 1970s feel-good sci fi road trip movie. It's not mind-blowing, and its ultimate message of peace, love and good vibes is a pretty dull platitude. But director John Carpenter's color palette - with its vibrant hues and amazing (AMAZING, I TELL YOU) use of lighting (REALLY BRILLIANT) - makes up for what the story lacks in excitement.

Before Voyager became V-ger, it crash landed on a sparkly planet in the system Whatevs. In response, said planet sent a tiny spaceship to crash into the brisk Wisconsin countryside. There emerges Alien Blue Orb who, after drifting into the log cabin of one grieving widow, Jenny (Karen Allen), assumes the form of Jenny's dead husband, Scott (Jeff Bridges).

AlienScott, after stretching out his new legs and testing out his new vocal chords, promptly telegraphs a message back to his planet (using his eyes and some bizarre camerawork) before kidnapping Jenny, appropriating her Mustang and gunning it for a crater in Arizona (his pick-up point, apparently). All this happens while the Feds - led by the belligerent Fox (Richard Jaeckel) and the sensitive ex-hippie Shermin (Charles Martin Smith, from American Graffiti!) - are hot on their trail.

Much of Starman is, as it sounds, pretty ridiculous. It's also not a terribly inventive take on the worn tale of a stranger in our strange land. Pointing out humanity's idiosyncrasies and contradictions through the lens of an alien traveller can sometimes be illuminating and fun ("double dumb-ass on you!"), but Starman takes it a little too easy. The caricatures Scott and Jenny meet on the road - from the diner waitress to the deerhunter (!) to the cook - are cute, if not terribly memorable. Scott and Jenny themselves are likewise meh - Jeff Bridges's foxy foxiness hidden beneath his layers of Weird as AlienScott (he walks like a pigeon) and Karen Allen's usual pluck and ass-kickery dulled and mellowed by the constant grief.

In the end, neither the alien nor his final message of loving your brother really struck us as much as that stark change in lighting when the spaceship passes over Karen Allen's face. How did they do that? No, seriously, how? It was incredible, and very beautiful.

Star Trek: Generations (1994)

2010-11-23T17:46:00.000-08:00

Star Trek: Generations exhibits all the fun of the zaniest of the Star Trek episodes - temporal nexuses (nexi?), Freudian projections, ships crashing into planets - with the best of Battlestar Galactica's Ronald D. Moore - layered emotional complexity. We loved it!

The story starts with an aging Kirk (William Shatner) - alongside crusty old favorites Scotty (James Doohan) and Chekov (William Koenig) - visiting the second USS Enterprise for its christening and first flight. At the helm is Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Alan Ruck) - weird! - and, when Cameron was in Cameronland, let my Camerons go. That is, they encounter trouble (surprise).

Trouble comes in the form of a rippling wave of temporal nexusness (nexilism?) - a big, sparkly blanket in space that destroys stuff. Kirk, helping to save the Enterprise, is blown out into the void. Mourning ensues.

Eighty years later, Picard (Patrick Stewart) and his crew - on the Enterprise's descendant spaceship - run into some trouble with a broken science station and some marauding Klingons. It turns out Dr. Saren (Malcolm McDowell) is in cahoots with the crooked (and possibly lesbian? or were they twin sisters?) Klingon pirates to catch the next wave of nexus again. The nexus will make your wildest dreams come true! So the all-knowing Whoopi Goldberg explains. And Saron plans to hit that gnarly curl at the expense of an entire solar system, and this is something up with which Picard will not put!

Other interesting emotional highs and lows are weaved in - a-motional android Data (Brent Spiner) gets a new emo-chip implanted into his circuitry, causing him to guffaw and weep and generally act ridiculous and hilarious; Picard suffers from a personal tragedy that makes him distracted and grieving. If it sounds slightly farcical, it's not - it works really well, since these themes (mortality making us human; the bittersweetness of that mortality; the courage in controlling emotions) are explored via diverse, believable experiences (well, sort of; cf. Data). Everything is also played relatively straight, which helps.

They say that odd-numbered Star Trek films (such as this one) are categorically inferior to the even-numbered ones. While four and six are indeed the best Star Trek films we've yet to see, we actually preferred this one (which is seventh) to the more popular First Contact (which is eighth, and features the "The line must be drawn HEAH!" line). What can we say, we're suckers for the emo.

Such a Long Journey (1998)

2010-11-15T19:34:00.000-08:00

Such a Long Journey is humanism, fatalism and mysticism all mixed up in one big, chunky mess that looks like an impressionist's painting and smells like pee. It's not particularly coherent, but that seems to be its aim: a pastiche of life, in all its warty glory, from a cross-section of a Bombay shawl in paranoid 1970s Emergency India.

Based on the book by Rohinton Mistry, it carries the flavors of Mistry's other works (e.g. A Fine Balance): Indo-nostalgic, riotous, deeply humanistic. There is the dysfunctional Parsi family, led by Gustad Noble (Roshan Seth) - a middle class bank clerk who is at times infuriatingly self-pitying, at other times gloriously heroic. His wife, Dilnavaz (Sona Razdan), struggles to keep the balance between Gustad and their eldest son, Sohrab (Vrajesh Hirjee), who has just had the (mis?)fortune of being admitted to one of the prestigious IITs. One day, Gustad gets a letter from his charismatic, prodigal friend, Jimmy Bilimoria (Naseeruddin Shah), a military man who spins tall tales about funding Bangladeshi/"East Pakistani" resistance forces.

The strength of Mistry's story, and this adaptation, is how the fine line is juggled - or, shall we say, a FINE BALANCE is maintained - between what is real and what is fantasy. This isn't stereotypical post-colonial magic(al) realism (though that would have been nice too), but rather it's a sort of unreliable narrator - is Jimmy really a big-shot spy? Do the magical potions Dilnavaz concocts really what keep everyone safe? The film leaves these things ambiguous - sometimes frustratingly so. But that ambiguity, like the incoherence, is all part of the package. Look at this! Life is crazy! Just as the chawl's wall to the street goes from over-frequented public urination spot to religious mural and ad hoc shrine, things often just don't make sense. And you're not even sure how to feel about it.

Indeed, religion is shown to be a fragile, important shield against the urine of life. When Gustad, in a slightly Groundhog Day way, becomes the holiest, shiniest, forgivingest (and, if you'll forgive us the Judeo-Christian default, the Jesusiest!) humanist we've done ever seen, he is shown to finally make some progress. Suddenly, he can laugh. He can cry. He has emotional breakthroughs. The wall doesn't smell like pee anymore.

Poor Roshan Seth was never really used as much as he could have been - we still recall, with great fondness and awe, the subtle genius of his performance in Gandhi (particularly when he confronts Gandhiji after one of the fasts) and the wondrous, dreamy texture of his take on a displanted Ugandan in Mississippi Masala (maybe the only movie where he gets his due). That man could be soulful, people! Such a Long Journey is a rare chance for him to play the lead, and it's intriguing and, ultimately, very satisfying to watch his complex, whiny, miserable, redeemable Gustad. Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri - the usual stalwarts - have very little to do, but it's nice to see them (especially Om Om Om Puri!). Soni Razdan did what she could, given that - yet again - the ladies get relegated to being concerned mothers, shrewish crones, whores or sexualized secretaries. Oh yeah, or Indira Gandhi.

So, to conclude: domestic, lightly mystical (featuring the Sitars of Transcendentalism), and endlessly interpretable, this is a rare glimpse into middle class workaday urban India, when most other stuff tends to be Orientalist poverty porn or Karan Joharified NRI luxury fests.

Igby Goes Down (2002)

2010-11-14T15:32:00.000-08:00

Igby Goes Down fancies itself a Catcher in the Rye-style exposé of old money immorality. It centers around the coming of age of young Igby (Kieran Culkin), a 16-year-old trustafarian misfit who can't seem to not flunk out of his prestigious northeast prep schools. Like Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Igby flits in and out of New York's glittering squalor - drug dens of failed artists, mansion parties at the Hamptons - doing designer narcotics, slumming it in the Upper East Side and getting his heart broken again and again.

Unfortunately, Igby is no Holden. Persecuted by bad memories surrounding his charismatic, schizophrenic father (an unexpected Bill Pullman) and his shrewish, pill-popping mother (Susan Sarandon), he can find no comfort in the world - and so he's angry, a rebel without a cause. He falls for the lower class (which, in this story's hierarchy, means upper middle class) Sookie (Claire Danes), he works for the slimy, powerful D.H. (Jeff Goldblum), and he angsts at his older, successful brother, Ollie (Ryan Philippe). The moral of the story seems to be that people are evil and money makes them eviler. And this is presented as a satire.

It doesn't really work. The central misanthropy is naive, cliche and unrealistic (military school beatings are one (albeit tired) thing, but lacrosse girls pummeling themselves in Central Park? when does this even happen?). The writing is full of affectations and name-dropping - see how smart and well-read these characters are! See how intellectual and bourgeois! Yes, yes, yes. We get it. But we aren't really impressed, and we certainly don't care - mostly because the tone is so uneven. How can we be angry or sad when everything is painted like a dark comedy? The rare sad bits - a flashback to the father's breakdown - are jarring. The funny bits - usually, revelations of how a character is a hypocritical reptile - are tiresome.

This is a shame, since Kieran Culkin, Jeff Goldblum, Susan Sarandon and (again, unexpectedly!) Bill Pullman can be really charismatic. Ryan Philippe puts in a strong performance and Claire Danes we've loved since My So-Called Life. Some of the song selections were fun flashbacks to 2002 indiedom. But the writing was just too blah, trying to make up for a lack of depth by inserting stereotypical dysfunctions. For better "coming of age in New York City" stories, see A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints and The Squid and the Whale.

Country Life (1994)

2010-11-08T17:57:00.000-08:00

When we were younger, we thought Chekov's Uncle Vanya was a bittersweet domestic farce. As we've aged, we've come to see it as vice versa: a terrible tragedy dressed up as comedy. A difficult emotional pitch to achieve but, when you get it right, boy, it's a zinger.

Country Life explores the terribly farcical tragicness of being deeply in love with Sam Neill when he has no idea that you exist. Le sigh. It's also about other stuff - such as a depressed uncle - but the existential jist is really captured in this love non-affair. Because, forsooth, we all have our broken flowers, our expired dreams, our Sam Neills. And this sense of lost opportunities, of waning vitality and fuzzy regrets, remains lodged in our hearts forever - how can we but look back to the halcyon days of Jurassic Park to the tragic detour of Event Horizon, and on into the gloomy twilight of... what has Sam Neill been in recently? Oh yeah, Under the Mountain. Anyway, how can we not look back on this, here now in gloomy twilight, and pine for those majestic days of golden yore, when Sam Neill sailed the high seas and punched Billy Zane in the head and was really, really awesome and hot?

When Alexander Voysey (Michael Blakemore, who also directs) and his much younger wife Debbie (Greta Scacchi) return from England to his Outback birthplace, they throw the family home all askew. Voysey - a pompous lecher and waning art critic - annoys everyone with his high falutin', limp-wristed snobbery, while his wife - a melancholy waif - beguiles all the ruddy Australian men. In particular, the volatile, flamboyant Uncle Jack (John Hargreaves) and the hard-drinking, idealistic pacifist Doctor Askey (Sam Neill!!!). This, while Uncle Jack's hard-working niece, Sally (Kerry Fox), harbors an intense crush on the good doctor. Things get complicated when Askey, by the sheer brilliance of his Sam Neilliness (and a charming sequence where he gets punched in the nose for his pacifist troubles), beguiles Debbie back. Meanwhile, this all happens in 1919 Australia, the first summer after the war, against a backdrop of a wounded generation (literally) limping back home.

There are parts of Country Life that work really well, and parts that clang and plod. It also suffers from that weird problem when not all the actors are on the same page about the tone of the film. Blakemore is great as the fussy, infuriating Voysey, but - if his pitch is anything to go by (and we guess it is, given that he directed) - he seems to lean heavily towards comedy. John Hargreaves gives an intense, almost maniacal performance that can best be described as slapstick tragedy. Kerry Fox is understated and gut-wrenching as the "ugly duckling" Sally, and Sam Neill... well, just acts like he's in a Sam Neill movie.

This all comes together quite nicely in some sequences - such as when Sally half-confesses her love to a half-drunken Askey and gets a heartbreaking half-rejection in reply - but it falls apart more often than not. The characterizations are a bit too flimsy to get a good emotional depth going, and gesturing towards archetypes or caricatures isn't enough. This is the sort of story that requires a Jeff Daniels-esque feat of a rich, warts-and-all portrait.

So, ultimately, the strength of the story is driven mostly by Chekov and our particular Sally-like love of Sam Neill, rather than any innovation or brilliance in this adaptation. Also, be warned: the soundtrack is so, so bad. It's like MIDI elevator music or something.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

2010-11-03T18:38:00.000-07:00

Star Trek: First Contact is a glossy, mediocre-ishly OK film featuring Picard et al. as they battle the mindless, roaming Borg. It's not as fun as Kirk et al.'s Adventures (particularly this one and this one), but it is decent.

The story begins with Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), chillin' out on the starship Enterprise, havin' nightmares of becoming yet another brain-dead Borg drone - a fate he narrowly eluded six years ago. For those who are unfamiliar, the Borg - or, as we prefer them to be called, the Borg Collective - are basically a beehive in space. There is the Borg Queen (Alice Krige) and there are her cybernetic slave drones who share a single consciousness and build stuff or kill things in order to advance their common Borgly cause. The cause is a simple one: the Borg Collective (which is now starting to sound like an art movement) roams the galaxy in search of civilizations; when they find one, they absorb it into the Collective, adapting that civilization's best offerings into theirs and assimilating its members, until everyone becomes one big soupy convoluted mish-mash of the culturally Darwinnist-defined best. (See?) Picard is totally not down with them. The PPCC sort of is (what! we think they make a lot of sense!).

When the Borg attack the United Federation of Planets, Picard has a flip-out and drives the Enterprise straight into battle, where he blows up a Borg space cube (did we mention the Borg have cool design ideas too?), and then pursues a fleeing Borg space sphere into a time-traveling wormhole, which takes everyone all the way back to the 21st century. This is the same century in which Earth was a dump and Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell, kinda looking like Brianosaurus+20 years), famed physicist who discovered warp technology, launched his first warp drive and made first contact with a passing alien race. To ensure that (1) Earth doesn't go Borg ("Sounds Swedish," one character notes), and (2) Earth warps and meets aliens, Picard kicks Borg ass up in space while foxy second-in-command Riker (the foxy Jonathan Frakes, who also directed) befriends and inspires Zefram to continue along the thing history says he was supposed to do anyway. Oh yeah, and Data gets kidnapped into an extensive Pinocchio S&M sex fantasy with the Borg Queen - it was very green porno (hey, it's just WHAT BEES DO), even including the whole parts-falling-off bit!

So. Convincing scientists to use a warp drive is definitely less funny than trying to steal a whale from the San Francisco aquarium, and, for that reason alone, this film suffers. Second, while Picard's unhealthy obsession with being totally Not Borg is likened to an Ahab-style quest, and he even goes on to (mis-)quote OUR FAVORITE PASSAGE from the book itself - bursting hot heart mortar shells and all - the perverted drivenness isn't really captured in Patrick Stewart's admittedly fine acting. As fine as his acting was, it still lacked that off-center passion that drives men like Ahab (and, to an extent, Kirk or McCoy) - Picard may roar and rage and smash up his starship trophies (what was up with that trophy case, by the way?), but he's terribly predictable.

So the film lacks heart, to sum it up. Oh well! Anyway, it was crazy to see John Sayles alumna Alfre Woodward shoving Picard back into line, much in the same way she whipped the wheelchair-bound alcoholic ex-soap star played by Mary McDonnell back into shape in Passion Fish. And it was always a delight to see foxy Riker's sparkling blue eyes, or Geordi's (LeVar Burton) sparkling cyborg blue eyes - though, again, they don't hold candles to McCoy's sparkling blue eyes, which burn with the fire of indignance and the flames of righteous humanistic hard-edged passion. These new kids just have no personality, in comparison!

And now - Internet memage! The (in)famous original "The line must be drawn HEAH!" scene, one spin-off and the delightful Brandon Hardesty version! And the ten million DVD versions.

Speakeasy (2002)

2010-10-27T17:05:00.000-07:00

We were kind of hoping Speakeasy would be a hidden gem, something demonstrating the grassroots screenwriting talent that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's Project Greenlight was supposed to uncover. Unfortunately, Speakeasy - the runner-up for Project Greenlight's first year - demonstrates only how mediocre and uninspired screenwriting can be.

Failed magician Bruce (David Strathairn) lives a monotonous, suburban existence with his wife, Sophie (Stacy Edwards), and scrappy black labrador. One day, he gets in a minor traffic accident with Frank (Nicky Katt), a pawn shop owner, and they become friends. Sophie's father (Arthur Hiller) is deaf and Sophie doesn't like this - in fact, she's not on speaking terms with him. Frank's daughter (Gage Golightly) is also deaf, but Frank is OK with this. One day, a former classmate of Sophie's, now a successful psychiatrist, Dr. Addams (Christopher McDonald), starts flirting with Sophie and giving her informal therapy sessions at the local coffee shop.

The writing and direction, both by Brendan Murphy, crawl along with amateur aimlessness - the tone is indistinct, the point mysterious. At times, we sensed that it was going for an American Beauty-type vibe of quirky, semi-philosophical cynicism. But we really can't be too sure, since the music was so campy and the writing so full of lazy clichés. Some melodrama is weakly injected via Sophie's "therapy" - where she relates the various traumas of her youth, and Dr. Addams becomes a caricature of jealousy - but it's forced and inorganic.

Such a shame! That moody, red-lit poster deceived us - we had imagined all sorts of grimy, exciting storylines full of envelope-pushing, slightly surreal ideas. You know: David Strathairn is a unicorn hunter addicted to magical space glitter; his ladyfriend is only one incarnation of a hive mind. Music by The Mars Volta. Dystopian. SOMETHING LIKE THAT. ANYTHING. Not this unimaginative pap.

Talk Radio (1988)

2010-10-24T14:23:00.000-07:00

We don't know much about freedom of speech. Which probably sounds funny, given that we regularly air our views on a globally visited website for fun. But seriously - we don't know much theory about it. We know there are rules against hate speech, and there are rules against yelling "Fire!" in a crowded movie theatre, but we've never really explored it.

Talk Radio, the classic play-turned-movie written by and starring Eric Bogosian, directed by Oliver Stone, explores one of America's most frequently used self-descriptions - a land where free speech exists. Misanthropic, self-loathing, sarcastic and genius Barry Champlain (Eric Bogosian) is a "shock jock" on a local Dallas, Texas, radio station. He periodically belittles and humiliates his late night callers - and indeed his callers run the gamut of society's detritus: rapists, neo-Nazis, drug addicts and idiots. The show - Night Talk - is insanely famous, if only for being provocative, Barry is very rich, and now, thanks to the efforts of his eager exec (a young Alec Baldwin), Night Talk is about to go national. Barry receives this news with a mix of outrage, horror and elation - frantically, he calls his ex-wife, Ellen (Ellen Greene), to come to Dallas to visit him.

Talk Radio reminded us, in tone, of Frank Miller's visions of America: it is a post-industrial wasteland in every sense of the word. It is morally bankrupt, alienating, sinister, dystopian, disgusting and very, very vapid, populated entirely by stupid sheeple who subsist entirely on pornography and violence. Homosexuals, feminists and non-whites are periodically bashed by the multitudes of narrow-minded bigots (minions of the Man, I guess) - and those bigots are in turn hated by Barry (or Frank Miller's gloomy superheroes), who acts as a sort of court jester.

This sort of high-minded gutter porn is, normally, not really our thing.

It's not really how we see things in America or elsewhere, and we even have some beef with this sort of mainstream misanthropy (which we'll discuss in more detail below). For now, suffice to say that we can take it in small doses and only if done in certain ways - e.g. by telling ourselves this must be what it's like in Dr. House's brain. And like all good Angry Young Misanthropes, Barry is funny. His jokes are scathing and rapid; they yoked shocked barks of laughter from us, or else they just left us bewildered by the sheer audacity. "How do you dial a phone with a straitjacket on?" he demands of one caller. "I don't care what you think!" he tells another. "No one does!" Often, he just hangs up on the person mid-sentence, mid-sob, mid-scream.

The ultimate message seems to be about the inherent dangers of free speech - evil bigots might try to violently shut you up, after all - and, therefore, the inherent disappointment we should have in ourselves with wasting our precious right by filling our minds and airwaves up with vapid nonsense. "What do you want to talk about?" Barry demands, spittle flying. "Baseball scores? Your pets? Orgasms?" When people in America, China, Cambodia and everywhere have fought and died for free speech shouldn't we honor that by… well, not wasting it all on pap? (Okay, we did feel a pang of this disappointment when we saw someone mention on a tech blog about how all our bandwidth gets choked up by Lindsey Lohan videos being e-mailed around.) Even as Barry claws towards success (and there's a great extended flashback which shows his meteoric rise as a shock jock), he is horrified that he should be so popular: in one memorable monologue, he rages at this popularity.

Yes, the war is coming! Yes, the world is shot to hell and you're all goners! Everything is screwed up and you like it that way!

This may as well be Barry talking directly to us. "You're fascinated by the gory details!" he screams. And it's true, we are. This movie is full of gory details - and you couldn't help but watch it.

In fact, this ironic/not-ironic hypocrisy of making a film about free speech's importance where the main speech freer meets a sorry end is endemic to the entire history of the play. There's a weird, Brechtian interplay between Barry versus his listeners, and Barry versus us. He is criticizing us; we may be nodding in sage agreement that bigots are bad and we shouldn't waste our airwaves on them, but here we are… wasting our airwaves on hateful people getting humiliated.

But the weird interaction between reality and the play goes deeper than that. This was a play based on a real event which was based on a fictional novel. It gets even stranger. When the play was revived on Broadway in 2007, several of its advertisements were censored. The feedback loop between Life and Art never seemed so narrow.

(A more detailed explanation of why we don't like Mainstream Misanthropy, as exemplified - to an extent - by this movie and - to a larger extent - by Frank Miller's and Alan Moore's graphic novels, such as "The Life and Times of Martha Washington" and Watchmen: why are homosexuality and feminism always equated with the end of society? This is almost always spouted sarcastically by, we are meant to believe, an indignant hero who is not homophobic and patriarchal. But we think that just by normalizing this language as "one of the typical reasons 1980s society was seen to be going down the tubes" is even dangerous in itself. You can't always expect people to detect the facetious!)

Anyway, this is definitely recommended - it's a challenging, electrifying piece.

Time Stands Still (2010)

2010-10-23T21:41:00.000-07:00

For however powerful and intriguing the play Time Stands Still was, it left us unsatisfied. Alas.

Ostensibly dressed up as a topical drama about a traumatized photo-journalist, Sarah (a graceful, fiery Laura Linney), freshly returned from Iraq, it covers instead a much larger issue of postcolonialism, justice and white guilt. It doesn't go into the nitty gritty surrounding the politics of Iraq or Afghanistan (as we had expected it to), nor the debates around humanitarian aid; its scope is less political and much more philosophical and, to its detriment at times, vaguer. Sarah and her partner, James (Brian D'Arcy James), are both damaged adrenaline junkies - forever chasing the next war zone, the next famine, dancing with death and flirting with notions (delusions?) of grandeur. Does their work mean anything? Does anyone back in the "developed" world actually notice Sarah's pictures or James' essays? When they turn Sarah's latest visit to Iraq into a glossy coffee table book, are they "profiting from the suffering of others"? (Sarah's words.) They are a dark, brooding pair given to an epic sense of significance: even as their romantic lives get mixed up and similarly scorched by their war zone wanderings, it's something they have great difficulty living without. They are, they feel, doing something very important.

Laura Linney and Brian D'Arcy James.

Which is not the case for their close friend and photo editor, Richard (a rakish Eric Bogosian), who - while admitting to "living vicariously" through the duo's adventures - feels likewise shaken by their breakdowns and near-death experiences, eventually swinging around the spectrum to a philosophy of embracing vitality and comfort, debauched West or not. His new love, a young event planner naif named Mandy (Christina Ricci), is both a point of derision between the three old friends and a testament to Richard's dedication to his new life. No more hunting for suffering.

There's no doubt that Time Stands Still is very good - the interplay between the characters is dynamic, energetic and smart. While they risked becoming caricatures - especially Mandy - the writing respected their various positions, and they all played important roles in presenting these "options" for the liberal mentality. How guilty are we supposed to feel for the suffering of those in absolute poverty? Or in war? How responsible is the West for these disasters? These are thorny topics, and the play does a great job of, for example, establishing an uneasy (and funnily Brechtian!) parallel between the escapism of Hollywood horror movies and the "escapism" of going into a land of suffering and documenting it (and the escapism of watching a play about these escapisms). There's this sense of intrusion - Sarah has a great monologue about this, when she describes a PTSD flashback about a market bomb in which she was urged by a wounded woman to "Go away! No pictures!" - and there's a concurrent sense of detachment, of hiding behind a lens (or a coffee table book), all in the (noble?) name of atonement for past geopolitical grievances.

Is it wrong that (1) we think Eric Bogosian looks like Anthony Bourdain, and (2) this renders him hot?

We felt unsatisfied, though, because the play spent so much time setting up this complex, layered look at the effects of living in a powerful white hegemony on white people - just how guilty should white people feel, as humanitarians? as liberals? etc. - but then gave essentially no answers. There was even a scene in which James and Sarah have a raging fight about each other's "imperialist" attitudes, and how even their romantic entanglements carried tinges of exoticism and Orientalism. This is a scathing remark - and it's a very valid argument. Yet it is never pursued; the writing backs away from really damning Orientalists, or damning people who damn Orientalists. We think partly this had to do with the playwright (Donald Margulies) never criticizing Sarah as much as he could have - and perhaps should have. Despite the writing's nominal criticism of Sarah's less virtuous motivations - her trust fund baby guilt, her romanticizing of "adventures", the obvious, self-important pride - it never really undermines her. As a result, the audience never gets an opportunity to really question her role in the same way the other three are questioned. A little more subversion would have gone a long way in challenging us to think more deeply about these issues. At the moment, we were left only with the questions, and no options given as answers.

Nonetheless, it was an amazing opportunity to see the absolutely lovely Laura Linney on stage! She was really fabulous, and gracious to her adoring legions who waited by the cast door later. Christina Ricci did a great job keeping the humanity in her borderline cartoon character; and we may have a crush on Eric Bogosian now (BUT WHATEVS MOVING RIGHT ALONG). Brian D'Arcy James had some strong moments, but we had a hard time finding consistency in his performance. Time Stands Still is playing at the Cort Theater in New York.

Also, we think Saviors and Survivors might be an interesting companion to reading/seeing this play.

Lone Star (1996)

2010-10-21T18:24:00.000-07:00

Back in high school, the PPCC was taught that the old "melting pot" aphorism of American culture was considered passé, insensitive even, since it implied a homogenization of the diversity of immigrant cultures. Instead, we were supposed to say America is like a "tossed salad" - everyone jumping around together, joyous, distinct, fresh and crispy.

John Sayles' ballad about Texas, Lone Star, brings the "melting pot" idea back - and with a vengeance. A story about a Tex-Mex border town on the Rio Grande, it is all about intermingling - of the past and the present, of cultures and ethnicities, of legend and fact. Ultimately, the movie concludes that we're all a big family. But don't begin vomiting at the sight of such a Disney-style simplification: when Sayles says family, he means FAMILY. Angst-ridden, constantly clashing, unwillingly linked and reluctantly dependent on each other. The kind of family that stresses you out at the holidays. Not the kind of family that seems like a good idea when you're living alone in your apartment, independent of them and stress-free.

Ah ha! I have found a single star in a state of the lone star!

A visual triangle. The inner film nerd approves.

Rio County Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) sighs and snorts his way through sheriff life - he is tired of the realpolitik surrounding his job ("I'm a jailer," Sam laments. "I run a sixty-room hotel with bars on the windows."), he is tired of living forever in the shadow of his legendary father and previous sheriff, Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey, in flashbacks), and he is tired of pining for his high school sweetheart, schoolteacher Pilar (Elizabeth Peña). One day, when two of the local army guys (an excellent Stephen Mendillo, Stephen J. Lang) uncover a human skeleton and charred sheriff's star (a… LONE STAR, GET IT!) in the desert by their base, Sam is called in to figure things out. And he, and everyone else, just assumes it was the deed (!) of Buddy Deeds finally taking vengeance on the evil sheriff of yore, Charlie Wade (a vile Kris Kristofferson). Sam's investigation into this 40-year-old murder pulls in all the tangled history (and tangled present, for that matter) of the town - particularly the race and power relations between the African-Americans, Mexicans (and Mexican-Americans), "Anglos" and Native Americans.

Fathers and sons.

And epic longing. (Yay for Chris Cooper, btw!)

To this end, there are some great subplots which run tangential to the Deeds crime investigation - such as the Payne family, which have not one but two pairs of tense father-son battles: that between bar owner Otis (Ron Canada) and his military son Delmore (Joe Morton), and that between Delmore and his resentful teenage son Chet (Eddie Robinson). The Payne scenes manage to talk about militarism, estrangement and disappointment, and changing race relations. Then there is the Cruz family, with matriarch Mercedes (Miriam Colon), who runs a Mexican restaurant, insisting that everyone speak English ("Speak English! This is the United States!") and promptly calling border patrol every time she spots illegal immigrants sneaking through her property (she lives next to the river), and her daughter, the very same Pilar for whom Sam yearns.

Overall, it's a rich tapestry - a soup, even! definitely not a salad - with a variety of perspectives and emotional tones. The final, very American message of tabula rasa (which could be another way of saying cutting ties or turning away from heritage when it gets too complicated...) is delivered effectively and uniquely. As Otis comments, "Blood only means what you let it." Yeehaw!

Adam Resurrected (2008)

2010-10-19T18:09:00.000-07:00

Adam Resurrected is a bizarre, hypnotic tragedy about one German-Jewish circus performer, Adam Stein (Jeff Goldblum), in the years immediately following the Holocaust.

Essentially a character piece, we meet Adam one day in 1960s Tel Aviv when he is - apparently not for the first time - sent to an insane asylum for Holocaust survivors. He is charismatic, loopy and flamboyant - so, basically just Jeff Goldblum. And everyone loves him - the patients, the wry head psychiatrist (Derek Jacobi), the sexy nurse (Ayelet Zurer) and (as always) the PPCC. During this introductory sequence, we get scratchy, black and white flashbacks to pre-war days when Adam was even more Jeff Goldblumy - we learn of his zany cabaret-vaudeville standup routines, his adoring family, and, ominously, his almost magic(al) realist ability to read the mind of one near-suicidal young German, Klein (Willem Dafoe). We should pause here to note that Jeff Goldblum doing his schtick can be very loopy indeed, and his German-Yiddish-English "Ja-haaa!" jokes were genuinely very funny. Ja, ja, ja!

Adam swiftly falls apart, figuratively and literally, when he meets a mysterious patient at the institute - a young boy (Tudor Rapiteanu) who is convinced he is a dog. This sends Adam reeling back into his own private hell, and we relive his trauma of being taken to the concentration camp, re-meeting Klein - now a Nazi Commandant - and being forced to live as Klein's dog while his family suffers in the camp. Here, both Adam and the filmmaking go off the rails - drunken ranting (and drunken camera angles), extreme close-ups and the previously whimsical imagery turning nightmarish. Think Pan's Labyrinth for the same mix of surrealism, magic(al) realism, fantasy and horror. The restoration, or titular "resurrection", of Adam takes the form of healing the boy who thinks he is a dog, whom he names David ("King of the Jews! Descendant of Adam!"). A number of Biblical allusions follow, as well as expected "weeping clown" archetypes.

This film really surprised us. First, because the reviews for it had been so lukewarm (the New York Times called it "flat"!). We were expecting something earnest but dull. Instead, we got something screwy and challenging and, often, gut-wrenching. Second, this is a Holocaust Movie that still manages to remain a Jeff Goldblum Movie - that is, the weird, highly potent charisma that Jeff Goldblum seems to chug out from his pores isn't stifled for this very serious topic, but is instead channeled in an ingenious and powerful way. We were very skeptical of him playing straight and serious - he's never really been a heavy; his performances seem to subsist entirely on bubbles and glitter and airy good humor (the Guardian once called him the "Buddha of Hollywood", likening him to a "unicorn"!). We were even skeptical of his German accent. So it was a real shock to see how entirely believable, and yet entirely himself, he was. It was brilliant casting and a brilliant performance: using that very same jester quality which is Goldblum's brand to flesh out the character of Adam Stein. And the characterization was so varied, with rich highs and devastating lows. It was powerful in ways we weren't expecting at all. Did we mention we had to take a breather about halfway through? Our heart was taking a pounding.

It's not a perfect film - we didn't agree with some of its choices, and especially found Klein uninspiring (despite Willem Dafoe's best efforts to infuse Klein with his own kind of nightmarish instability) - but it is an adventurous and imaginative one.

California Split (1974)

2010-10-17T08:17:00.000-07:00

California Split should really be called California Existential Vacuum of Woe, but that probably isn't as good a card trick.

An intimate, bleak film, Robert Altman's California Split is the gambling addiction under a microscope. Two serial gamblers, Charlie (Elliott Gould) and Bill (George Segal), meet cute over some low-stakes poker drama and become friends. But, like drinking buddies or heroin buddies or any other type of bad-influence buddies, their raucous, drunken, blazing friendship just makes them spin closer to the abyss that always threatens to consume them. While Charlie lives in a run-down house with two low-level prostitutes, Barbara (Ann Prentiss) and Susan (Gwen Welles), Bill is a yuppie struggling to stay afloat.

Like Altman's other film, MASH, California Split is less about narrative, and more about atmosphere and mood. Here, the mood is grim - almost oppressively so, since there's a facade of 24-hour partying which never honestly admits the deep, psychic cracks that lay beneath the surface. We follow the troupe of four on their picaresque, bohemian adventures - full of chaotic, boozy, grimy locales, dollars flying, the thrill of victory and the crush of defeat. But things just get worse and worse, the stakes climbing ever higher, good humors evaporating, until Charlie finds Bill pawning off all his possessions for one last-chance do-or-die high-stakes gamble in Reno.

Gambling together, beat up together.

Winning and losing togeeether.

Segal really carries the film as Bill's fall is really the most cataclysmic, breaking even Charlie's heart. We didn't realize George Segal (1) ever did drama, (2) ever was young, and so it was a happy surprise to see him young, and delivering such a powerful performance. Elliott Gould was his usual charming, "all cheap and debonair" 1970s persona. And this movie is your pretty standard 1970s American indie about deprivation, depravity and really awesome fashion.

Passion Fish (1992)

2010-10-16T15:47:00.001-07:00

John Sayles is a great director. He sets up clever symbols or reassuring stereotypes and then gleefully subverts them. Passion Fish is not his strongest film (we liked Limbo more), but it is another interesting, atmospheric look at a broad philosophical question set within a particular American niche culture.

In this case, it's about the painful, crucial clash between harsh realities and dreamy fantasies, and the setting is 1990s Louisiana. May Alice (Mary McDonnell) wakes up one morning to find herself paralyzed from the waist down. A successful soap opera star, she has just been in a car accident. With his wonderful economy of storytelling, Sayles shows us shots of May Alice the Misfit of Rehab. She falls further and further into depression, eventually retreating to her childhood home in rural Louisiana, where she spends her days drinking, watching daytime television and scaring a series of caretakers away.

Soap opera as Greek chorus and weird Freudian fantasy projection of our own harsh realities.

The restorative properties of fine Louisiana flora.

That is, until Chantelle (Alfre Woodward) arrives. Chantelle is quiet, evasive even, but also straightforward and steady as a nurse. She provides May Alice the support she desperately needs to get her life back on track and, as the physical therapist constantly chides, build her strength.

Both damaged, both on the road to recovery.

Meanwhile, a parade of characters troop through the family home. There is May Alice's hard-drinking dandy of an uncle (what shoes!). There are her former childhood enemies and her vapid New York City friends. And then there are the men. In a rare subversion of typical gender norms in film, this film not only passes the Bechdel Test (with flying colors!), its only two recurring male characters are sex objects. One is Sugar LeDoux (Vondie Curtis-Hall), a Frenglish-speaking Creole (or is it Cajun?) strutting peacock who flirts and charms Chantelle relentlessly. The second is Rene Boudreaux (David Strathairn), a Frenglish-speaking Creole (or is it Cajun?) sweaty handyman who flirts and charms May Alice relentlessly. While Chantelle of the Harsh Reality proceeds into sexy manfriendship with caution, May Alice of the Crushed Fantasy falls hard and fast into thick, soap operay, David Strathairny love. LOVE, she says.

Chantelle and Sugar.

May Alice and Rene.

There are two reasons we didn't heart this movie as much as Sayles' other work. First, he has a tendency to be really, really strong on the fast-paced, spare storytelling style - when the Black Sox are setting up their paydays, when Alaskans bemoan their self-inflicted purgatory - and, in Passion Fish, he gets bogged down with the whole cycle of self-pity/self-healing. Given that the restorative properties of soulful, rural areas is already well-established in cinema, a lot of this could have been sped up. (Though having Mary McDonnell use the Yank accent for moments of self-pity, and the drawling Louisiana one for moments of clarity and equanimity was a nice touch.) Second, we were disappointed that he didn't push some of the envelopes further. For example, mixed ethnicities are an integral characteristic of modern Creole and Cajun cultures, so it was a let-down to see the two couples pair off along racial lines. (By the way, did you know that David Strathairn is of mixed heritage? Pacific Islander and Scottish. Yeah.)

(By the way, when David Strathairn said "bon chance!": sexy mantimes!)

Gratuitous David Strathairn shot. Yes, he pwns this blog these days. Deal with it!

But don't let these mild criticisms deter you. This is still another strong entry by our current favorite director. Can we call him an auteur? Or, perhaps a more urgent question: why is there no John Sayles Box Set?! Why is it not in our hot little hands!?! Right now?!!?!

The Rivalry (2009)

2010-10-14T20:34:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this isn't a movie, but whatever.

We finally got our hands on the audio recording of The Rivalry, a play that was performed at the LA Theatre Works in 2009. Written by Norman Corwin, The Rivalry examines the legendary marathon debates between incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas and a young(ish) Abraham Lincoln for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858. It stars Paul Giamatti (!) as Douglas and David Strathairn (!!!) as Lincoln. Holy mother of God.

So we haven't reviewed it yet, but the HBO miniseries, John Adams, was something of a Big Event here at the PPCC, and it rekindled the flame we have in our hearts for American history. Gosh, we do like our American history. And Civil War stuff is one of our favorite topics. Hence our nerdgasm upon seeing Paul Giamatti, of John Adams fame, and David Strathairn, of glorious John Sayles movies and, of course, Good Night and Good Luck, in a play about that fertile, fascinating period.

The play does a great job of capturing the character of Lincoln (we're not as familiar with Douglas - shamefully). Apart from being, well, really tall and vaguely noble, not many know that Lincoln also had quite a high-pitched voice, suffered from recurring bouts of serious depression, and was famous for telling good jokes. This is all (wonderfully) exploited in the play, what with Strathairn's wry, drawling debate style and - typical for Strathairn roles - underlying sense of the dignified yet damaged. Giamatti brings his John Adams-the-firebrand passion to the role of Douglas - indeed, the story is told from his point of view, and it really raises the historical figure of Douglas out of his "racist guy who lost to Lincoln" hole (well, in our heads) to someone much more complex and intriguing.

Mostly, we just follow the debates - the main argument between the Democrat Douglas and the Republican Lincoln was over slavery, and whether states had a right to maintain their slavery-enabling status quo, or whether the Federal government was justified in abolishing slavery on a nationwide scale. The debate over this issue was eventually one of the things that split the country in two - something both Douglas and Lincoln are anxious to avoid during these debates, even if both are pessimistic. And the debate itself is passionate, if unnerving - they debate over the relative inferiority of races (and if such a hierarchy exists), over the Declaration of Independence's interpretations ("…that all men are created equal…"), over the rights of the state versus the rights of the nation. Everything is done with great passion, debating cleverness and respect. The arguments are exhilarating and maddening.

Woohoo!

There are also brief, revealing interludes - the "backstage" moments between the two men and, occasionally, Mrs. Douglas (Lily Rabe). In fact, one of the best bits is when Mrs. Douglas runs into Lincoln on the train; their candid confessions and respectful disagreements are touching. Is it time for shameful, totally inappropriate yet totally awesome historical fanfic? WHAT?! I'M JUST SAYIN'. It's probably out there already, knowing the intertoobs. (If you find it, tell us.) (Actually, maybe I'll just get down to writing it myself.)

Now, if they only turned these debates into an anachronistic, ironic, Jon Stewart-flavored punk rock musical, life would be complete.

Evidence of Blood (1998)

2010-10-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

Evidence of Blood is a B-movie mystery that aims low-middle and hits pretty squarely. The only real reason to watch this film is for the charming and attractive David Strathairn and Mary McDonnell, who mostly do what they usually do (dazzle us with their raw physicality).

Set in wintry Georgia, with southern accents that come and go, this is a land of jeans, diner coffee and pick-up trucks. Crime novelist Kinley (David Strathairn) returns to his hometown after the death of his childhood friend. While there, he uncovers fresh evidence on a 40-year-old murder mystery that still haunts the town to this day. The convicted murderer's adult daughter, Dora (Mary McDonnell), is also busy with bringing her deceased father to justice.

There are some of the usual noir trappings - mysterious car headlights following the hero at night, explorations down wells (also at night), nightmares and lots of sexy sweating into bedsheets, the parallel between serial killers and the crime fighters and their perverse obsession with violent acts, and lots of people going, "Just let it go, ya hear!"

But this is like Diet Mystery, and even the southernness is lightly done. At least, David Strathairn can't seem to decide whether to do the accent or not. Whatevs! That's OK! He and Mary McDonnell are so lovable regardless of what they do or how hard they try. They have a nice chemistry as well, what with Mary McDonnell's Laura Roslin-style searching stares of warmth and goodness coupled with David Strathairn's Jumpin' Joe-style evasiveness. Nice "jelly roll", guys. PPCCkapow!

Never Let Me Go (2010)

2010-10-08T20:53:00.000-07:00

Never Let Me Go, the anemic adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's famous book of the same name, puts all its money in a sort of fuzzy, idyllic, Cotswold-saturated nostalgia, and unfortunately it's a waste. Much like the protagonist who waits for people to break up or die, we waited… and waited… and waited for this movie to end.

Ostensibly a dystopia, though we'll remain spoiler-free, the tale is set in recent-past England, and it's a typical look at lost love and wistful childhood memories that abound in other films about the English being bad at love: Atonement springs immediately to mind, with the same country manor setting for a love triangle that goes on for the characters' entire lives. Though another Ishiguro adaptation, Remains of the Day, is also very similar.

Kathy (Izzy Meikle-Small as a child, the cute Carey Mulligan as an adult), Ruth (Ella Purnell as a child, Keira Knightley as an adult) and Tommy (Charlie Rowe as a child, Andrew Garfield as an adult) are students at your Standard English Boarding School - where they frolic in the fields, hide buttons in their little tin boxes, and play deadly amorous games with each other. This could be any other film about the posh and heartbroken, what with their inhibited half-confessions and epic yearning. They grow up, they pine. Some slightly sci-fi stuff happens, but the movie isn't too concerned about it - it's essentially just another way to drive the same point home. And in case you still had any doubts about what, indeed, the point of all this is, Kathy helpfully TELLS YOU THE MORAL OF THE STORY in the end. Thanks, K!

Few films accurately capture the poignant, impermanent transcendence of an English countryside - our recently reviewed A Month in the Country is one of them. Few films know what to do with love too, it seems, and Never Let Me Go presents us with the same fairy tale we've been watching since Disney: pre-pubescent "true love" that lasts a lifetime, the virgin vs. whore (with the whore meeting her usual end), people who are static, unchanging and yearning, YEARNING, so painfully, ALL THE TIME.

Which is not to say that statically yearning unreconstructed romantics aren't occasionally fun. But when their Truly Tragical Romanticness is driven home with a hammer by the director (here, Mark Romanek), we get bored and a little insulted. We get it! We can't help compare Romanek unfavorably to our recent worshipee, John Sayles: in John Sayles's Limbo, there is a stock "nightmare torment angst" scene when tragic fisherman Jumpin' Joe comes awake with a gasp, causing lounge singer Donna to awake and ask what's wrong. A shaken Joe comments only that you can't always save people. END SCENE. DONE. We got it! Great! In Never Let Me Go, there is a stock "sensitive boy has tragical rage angst" scene, which is long, and detailed, and milked for all its juicy tragicalness. We get it! We get it already!

THIS REVIEW WAS ABOUT THE MOVIE NEVER LET ME GO AND HOW WE DIDN'T LIKE IT VERY MUCH. BUT IT'S NOT REALLY A REVIEW ABOUT A MOVIE AT ALL; IT'S ABOUT LIFE. PERHAPS IF ONLY WE HAD VALUED THE PRECIOUS MOMENTS WE HAD ON THIS EARTH WE WOULD NEVER HAVE WATCHED IT/WE WOULD HAVE LIVED LIFE MORE COMPLETELY/LESS TRAGICALLY. SO MANY REGRETS!
(the book!)

Eight Men Out (1988)

2010-10-03T14:55:00.000-07:00

Man! Make it John Sayles Week at the PPCC, this guy is on fire. New favorite rediscovered director!

So much is going on in Eight Men Out, the layered look at the 1919 Chicago "Black Sox" Scandal, but the first thing we thought of was: has any economist written a paper about this? Because this whole story is just screaming for a game theory model.

It's also, like any really good sports movie, an allegory for something much bigger - here, pragmatism versus transcendentalism/faith - and, like our other favorite sports movie, The Damned United, it is fundamentally about defeat. Heck, this movie could be called The Damned Divided.

Back when anyone really cared about baseball - that is to say, back in 1919 - the best team in the country - the Chicago White Sox - were enjoying a powerhouse season, and they were shoe-ins for the upcoming World Series. Betting on baseball games had also become a strong undercurrent to the sport's culture, and this film follows the story of the White Sox's notorious choice to throw the World Series in exchange for $100,000 per player (about $1.3 million in 2010 terms).

The eight players "out" came from a variety of backgrounds and did it for a variety of reasons. Sayles, ever the efficient storyteller, weaves their stories together and gives us fully-fleshed out characters even in one or two scenes. "Shoeless" Joe Jackson (D.B. Sweeney) is the team's star and an illiterate innocent. "Buckie" Weaver (John Cusack) is the team's passionate heart - he plays for sheer love, and is the only player to hear of the conspiracy and refuse to take part. Pitcher Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn) is - as usual for David Strathairn characters - an older player, and a sympathetic, damaged has-been who is struggling to make ends meet for his family.

When the slimy-in-a-strangely-adorable-way gamblers, "Sleepy" Bill Burns (Christopher "1.21 Gigawatts!?!" Lloyd) and Billy Maharg (Richard Edson), approach the more crooked player (and by that, we mean the one that should have been an economist), "Chick" Gandil (Michael Rooker, of Slither!), the conspiracy to throw the Series is hatched.

"I always figured it was talent made a man big, you know, if I was the best at something. I mean, we're the guys they come to see. Without us, there ain't a ballgame. Yeah, but look at who's holding the money and look at who's facing a jail cell."
-Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn) commenting on risk exposure - he may as well be talking about the financial crisis of 2007

As in Sayles' other film, Limbo, a Greek chorus is present in the form of two reporters, Ring Lardner (John Sayles himself!) and Hughie Fullerton (Studs Terkel!!!! The Pultizer Prize-winning historian!!! OMGWTFBBQ!!!). You can think of Ring and Hughie as a number of things: at the meta/Brechtian level, they are Sayles and Terkel, real-life commentators watching history happen. They are also the Statler and Waldorf of the film (whimsically cynical), and the C3P0 and R2D2 (OK, well, Sayles is really tall and Terkel really short). Honestly, it was just so amazing on so many levels to have them in this film.

What's great about this film is how it clearly and carefully examines the tangled complexity of the scandal - the exploited, underpaid players, the team warring against itself (John Cusack's role was particularly poignant in this regard), the multiplication of risk and the invention of wealth as the conspiracy goes up the ladder to Big Money (God, it's the mortgage-Wall Street-entire American economy crisis all over again!). But a nice theme that kept popping up throughout the film was the impermanent transcendence of a gloriously good ball game. Like Michael Sheen's doomed ~~Henry V~~ Brian Clough in The Damned United, these players hanker at immortality - and they're on the edge of it. There's a touching scene when Buckie talks about the pure bliss of playing a good game. And indeed, some of the younger players - and their young fans - still dream these dreams. The older wash-outs like Eddie Cicotte and Abe Attell (Michael Mantell), a crooked boxer-turned-crooked gambler, have given up on these dreams and chosen to embrace mammon instead.

The film doesn't demonize mammon, though - instead, largely through David Strathairn's role as Cicotte, the need for financial security is given great weight and sympathy. It's practical, he has a family with young children, he's at the end of his career, and the "straight" path is exploiting him. The film really questions whether the transcendental can put food on the table, and it agonizes with the characters. There's a great exchange between Big Money, as embodied by the investor Rothstein (Michael Lerner), and boxer Atell:

Arnold Rothstein: Look, champ. I know guys like that. I grew up with them. I was the fat kid they wouldn't let play. "Sit down, fat boy'. That's what they'd say "Sit down, maybe you'll learn something." Well, I learned something alright. Pretty soon, I owned the game, and those guys I grew up with come to me with their hats in their hands. Tell me, champ, all those years of puggin', how much money did you make?
Abe Atell: The honest fights or the ones I tanked?
Arnold Rothstein: Altogether, I must've made ten times that amount betting on you and I never took a punch.
Abe Atell: Yeah, but I was champ. Featherweight champeen of the world!
Arnold Rothstein: Yesterday. That was yesterday.
Abe Atell: No A.R. you're wrong. I was champ, and can't nothin take that away.

The terror of becoming a has-been is real: it's on Abe Atell's face when he sees Rothstein's waning interest in him. It's in Eddie Cicotte's strained right arm. Money lasts.

Sayles lets us tread the ambiguity for a while, but ultimately, the film sides with transcendentalism. There's another great exchange between the two crooked pitchers, Cicotte and "Lefty" Williams (James Read), when, after a string of thrown games, a listless Cicotte confesses he doesn't care about the money anymore. Lefty agrees: "Peculiar way of finding that out."

Another highly recommended one.

Limbo (1999)

2010-10-02T10:36:00.000-07:00

Oh man. We forgot how incredibly good this movie is.

Limbo, a moody, intelligent film by John Sayles, is set in present-day Alaska. The state stands in for Limbo itself - if you define Limbo as a state of in-betweenness that goes on forever and ever. Because Alaska is struggling between its past and its future (with a present that tries to market one to the other), between being a frontier to the existential vacuum (visiting retirees and drifting non-people populate the state, and murder-suicides occur regularly "when people get too bored") and being a real home, a place to settle. What it most certainly is not is definitive.

This state of floating, anxious in-betweenness extends to the characters as well. Donna de Angelo ("woman of the angel", an excellent Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) is a lounge singer living in her own purgatory - too good for total obscurity, not good enough to make it big, she lives a non-life traveling around the country and singing in anonymous bars. Her dark, teenage daughter, Noelle (Vanessa Martinez), grudgingly accompanies her. When the de Angelos meet "Jumpin'" Joe Gastineau (David Strathairn), both are smitten. And we learn that the perpetually cautious and, well, jumpy Joe is drifting along as well - wounded from long-festering survivor guilt, he broods as a dark fixture at the town's main bar.

Limbo, the film, is presented in two distinct acts. The first act is a complex, layered (and often very funny) introduction to the characters and the world they live in. Sayles layers cross cuts over each other, playing with dialogues to create one strange, cohesive monologue about the State of Alaska (which might as well be the State of Being, considering how existential the story is). The scene in the bar, with all the seemingly unrelated conversations, is a great example of this. Also weaving in and out of this noise is a tour guide, who serves as a Greek chorus. When Joe's half-brother, Bobby (Casey Siemaszko), and his dubious drug dealing past show up, the tour guide walks by telling her retiree audience (and us) about "desperate men" that come to Alaska, ready to kill and be killed.

The second act has its own Greek chorus as well - now embodied in the mysterious, 19th-century frontiersgirl diary that Noelle finds, once she, Donna and Joe end up stranded on a remote, uninhabited islet after a very, very bad mix-up between the Gastineau brothers and some other drug dealers. Noelle reads from this diary every night, and the parallels between the previous inhabitants - a family of three, scraping out a frontier life by fox pelting - and the current trio are obvious to the point of being blunt. That bluntness is OK, though, because of how poignant and universal the feelings are. Joe, Donna and Noelle may be literally stuck in a suspended state of existence, a no man's land, but we are all prone to existential angst and asking the big questions. Why? What?

The movie is ultimately philosophical, but it can easily be enjoyed as a quasi-satirical, Altman-esque character piece of America's forgotten corners, as a touching romance between Joe and Donna, and as a Cast Away-type survival adventure. The three leads are very strong. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is charming, vulnerable and, frankly, amazing when she belts out those bar tunes. David Strathairn's "tall, dark stranger" persona is very well-used - he seems perpetually uncomfortable, visibly tormented. And Vanessa Martinez was great - it's so rare to see teenagers (and teenagerdom) portrayed intelligently and realistically, without caricature.

Highly recommended.

Racing Daylight (2007)

2010-09-30T20:30:00.000-07:00

If NPR ever decided to start making movies, Racing Daylight would probably be their first box office smash. (Or flop, actually.) Because Racing Daylight - a tweedy, low-fi look at a small, East Coast town's past and present - is very, very NPR. And it stars David Strathairn! You can't get more charmingly "this American life" than that. Cape Cod ho!

Sadie (Melissa Leo) lives a dead-end life on ~~Sesame Street~~ whatever street she lives on in Cedarsville, New York. Death and life are a bit blurred here in Cedarsville, since Sadie's been receiving spectral visitations from Civil War vets. When not seeing ghosts, she tends to her catatonic grandmother (Le Clanche du Rand) and pines mutely after the dashing handyman (and adorably nerdy Civil War freak), Henry (David Strathairn, looking pretty dashing indeed!). The ghosts meanwhile creep in and take over Sadie's life, flinging her back to the high romance of Cedarsville during the Civil War, when she - now named Anna - was pining much more vocally for the dashing soldier, Harry (David Strathairn, now with facial hair and even more dashing!), and her young, slightly dodgy "killer inside me" husband, Edmund (Jason Downs).

Filmed on a shoestring budget, with costumes and props seemingly from the Dollar Store, Racing Daylight has some moments which are adorable and quirky and charming, and many other moments which are scrape-out-your-eyeballs awful. Relatedly, the tone swings wildly around - is it a Gothic horror-romance? Is it a whimsical What's Eating Gilbert Grape?-ish look at the weird and wonderful of American's forgotten poor? Is it a David Strathairn/Civil War broad comedy gush fest? Any of these options would have been great. Unfortunately, Racing Daylight has shrieking violins in one moment and dueling banjos the next. It has some very good acting - such as David Strathairn's pitch perfect weirdness as Henry the Nerd, with his "Do you like facts?" non sequiturs - and some very bad acting - such as Melissa Leo going a bit too broad on the coy girlishness of Sadie-infatuated. The writing is rough. And, overall, everyone is very, very earnest - which earns some points, at least. Hey, we wouldn't mind sitting in a classroom or a museum and watching this while someone explained the threading work in Union uniforms. Hey, so we're earnest Civil War buffs too - sue us!

But should YOU watch it? ("Wait, wait, don't tell me!" we hear you cry.) Well... if, like us, you get your kicks from American history and, especially, facts, then yes. There just aren't enough Civil War movies out there, and it's always nice to see a smart Union uniform. Be warned, though, this is not by any measure a "good" movie. It's clunky, clumsy, awkwardly filmed and very cheap. If you want fancy, polished filmwork on the era, go for Glory (to cry), Gettysburg (to learn, and then cry), Cold Mountain (OK, we haven't actually seen this one) or Shenandoah (to Jimmy Stewart). If you don't need to focus on the Civil War, but instead would just appreciate a handheld tour through history with David Strathairn, preferably in a state of romantic poverty, then you can watch any number of excellent John Sayles films - Limbo (Alaska!), Matewan (West Virginia!), Eight Men Out (daaaa Bears!). If you don't have any of those at hand, this will do.

Oh yeah, and if you like Tom Waits' experimental industrial music with saws and banjos and other hard-to-identify instruments, you can watch this. The intro music is crazy!
<=== and what is that cover about?!

A Month in the Country (1987)

2010-09-28T20:49:00.000-07:00

If there is one movie that is terribly, tragically underrated and unknown, it is A Month in the Country.

It's ironic because J.L. Carr's novel of the same name, on which the 1980s movie is based, is also terribly, tragically unknown. It just missed a Booker back in 1980, and instead won the Guardian Fiction Prize - a lesser trophy and, it seems, a punishment to anonymity. The movie, in the meantime, stars everyone's favorite English actors, Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh, as young World War I veterans struggling to cope with their traumatic experiences in the first, Elysian summer after peace is declared. It's great. Really beautiful. And there's no DVD for it!?!!

Colin Firth as Tom Birkin and Kenneth Branagh as Moon, both so young!

It's terrible, tragic and ironic, but it also makes sense - in a weird, double-agent-ironic way - that this small, understated story of remembering and loss should be on the verge of falling into the vacuum. The story is, after all, an extended meditation on nostalgia, grieving and renewal. It's about preserving yourself against the abyss; carving a space of light in a world where all seems dark. When Tom Birkin (Colin Firth) arrives in the tiny Yorkshire hamlet of Oxgodsby, he suffers from a stammer, a facial tic and terrible nightmares. He's also freshly divorced and still pining for his ex-wife, Vinnie (never shown on screen). He arrives in Oxgodsby in rainy twilight and makes his way to a gloomy church. His job for the coming summer months is to restore a decrepit, hidden 14th-century fresco from the church's ancient walls.

The pace is slow, matching the drift of motes in sunlight. Birkin meets another young vet, Moon (Kenneth Branagh), who has been paid to dig up the lost grave of a rich townie's ancestor. Moon is, like Birkin, still damaged from the war, though the quality of his suffering becomes an unexpected parallel with the mysterious artist's life. Birkin, when not drinking tea with Moon or brushing turpentine onto plaster, falls into quiet, intense love with the vicar's wife, Alice Keach (Natasha Richardson).

Love with the vicar's wife (Natasha Richardson)! The bit when she explains her apple savantness is so good.

Colin Firth recently waxed nostalgic about director Pat O'Connor's confidence in making this film: the story was allowed to breathe, actors were allowed to be silent. Indeed, the whole point of the film is the profound, emotional intensity that underscores this pleasant facade, and the uselessness of words. The trauma of World War I still lingers like a ghost in the landscape: and O'Connor does a brilliant job of never gazing directly at the war, but rather coming at it sideways. The most explicit war scene we see is the opening shot of Birkin struggling through the mud and barbed wire: the camera is zoomed tightly on him, we have little sense of context, and there's a sense of claustrophobia and horror. The haunting church hymns underscore the usual aphorism: war is hell (in the religious and literal senses). Similarly, Birkin and Moon's PTSD is a smothered suffering that we see only through the cracks of Birkin's twitch or Moon's nighttime howling.

But this story isn't about dwelling in the horribleness of World War I - rather, it's a realist, poignant look at slow healing. Oxgodsby's warm fuzziness is the perfect restorative for the broken vets, even if that healing is fragile and tentative. And the narrative is a looking back, so nostalgia is thick. The greatness of this story is the way it captures ephemeral beauty, a feeling that is vibrant and impermanent. Quite spiritual. And, like all art that does what it's supposed to, it captures and transmits an emotional quality.

We should probably mention that this film is, actually, in color.

The film is also a marvelous companion to the book - they both really enrich each other. And experiencing either is like breathing in purified rural gold. People, get thee to this film - or rather, get thee to preserving this rich work! We can't let gems like these disappear. Ahh, Angleterre. Where's good ol' William Blake when ya need him?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

(the book!)

Caos Calmo (2008)

2010-09-26T19:51:00.000-07:00

Caos Calmo (Quiet Chaos), the weirdly derivative film starring Nanni Moretti as yet another grieving parent, is bad, people. Just bad.

It's also weird. Weird because it is so derivative - essentially a lesser, paler, crappier copy of the far, far superior The Son's Room, a film directed and starring Nanni Moretti, and the film for which he won the Palme D'Or back in 2001. In Caos Calmo, Moretti returns, seven years later, with much the same parlor tricks: a sudden death of a loved one leading to warmly nihilistic despair, meandering through the comfortable Italian bourgeoise, Silvio Orlando wringing his hands in anxiety, some unexpected pop tunes, and some sex (not with Silvio Orlando).

All these things came together to form a cohesive, bright, beautiful thing in The Son's Room, a film which left us in a sheen of brilliance for years and years. Yes, it was that good. It makes you love humanity, for the love of… humanity. And it makes grief something dignified and heroic, something tragic and pure. It made us cry so, so much.

Caos Calmo, instead, nearly bored us to tears. After Pietro's (Nanni Moretti) wife dies unexpectedly, Pietro - a top man in some sort of fancy film distribution company - spends his days sitting on the bench outside of his young daughter's school. There, he makes flimsy connections with the local characters. Let the healing begin?

Nanni Moretti's father figure here seemed selfish, vapid and whiny - quite a feat considering how naturally charismatic Moretti normally is for us. But his ordeal is nebulous and ill-defined: a loved one has died, but he doesn't feel bad? He didn't love her and he feels guilty? She was crazy? No wait, his sister-in-law was crazy? …What?

It's all a big, unfocused mess, without a single redeeming feature. Like The Son's Room, it clocks in at under 90 minutes, but - unlike The Son's Room - these 90 minutes feel like a plod. If you're looking for charming, humanistic, recent-ish Italian films, steer clear of this one, skippers, and point your vessels to other, better fare such as The Son's Room (DID YOU GET THAT? THE SON'S ROOM, RIGHT HERE), Caro Diario or The Best of Youth.

Dirty Filthy Love (2004)

2010-09-20T18:57:00.000-07:00

It's unfortunately very rare to see a responsibly-made, informative and entertaining film about mental illness. Dirty Filthy Love, which covers obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and Tourette's Syndrome, is just that: educational without sacrificing narrative, touching without sacrificing realism.

Mark's (Michael Sheen) life is falling apart. He just lost his job at a prominent London architecture firm and his wife (Anastasia Griffith) has filed for separation. Worse still, he seems to live in a prison of irrational tics and ostracizing habits: every day is an uphill battle with the stairs, chairs, shaving, the metro, and other people. When Mark asks his (NHS?!!) psychiatrist (John O'Mahony?) for help, the psychiatrist tells him again that it's just "clinical depression", and surely if he ups his anti-depressant dosage, he'll be fine. Mark knows that it isn't depression, he knows that the drugs aren't working, but he's not quite sure what it could be either: at the moment, he's narrowed it down to a brain tumor, meningitis or early-onset senility.

That is, of course, until Mark meets Charlotte (Shirley Henderson, "Moaning Myrtle" from the Harry Potter series) - a fellow OCD sufferer and the Beatrice to his Dante as she leads him out of the Inferno. And it is a pretty harrowing inferno indeed - be prepared for some shockingly awful stuff as Mark crashes down to the bottom.

OCD is one of those things that isn't normally presented realistically; the cinematic shorthand we have for OCD is Jack Nicholson dancing over pavement cracks in the dreamy fairy tale that is As Good As It Gets, or Tony Shalhoub's latex-glove wearing detective in Monk. That is, "pop OCD" is all about washing your hands repeatedly and being a sort of old-fashioned, Woody Alleny type of quirky urban neuroticism. It's about as helpful a representation as the "hysteria" label that women would get slapped with on their foreheads back in the day. In other words, not very helpful and basically made-up.

Dirty Filthy Love, thankfully, keeps it real. It represents. Mark's fears, compulsions and tics aren't cute and filmi - they're awkward, painful and, often, baffling. When Mark hits bottom, it's not rock star glamorous, it's ugly and uncomfortable to watch. Tragically, Mark is fully aware that he is suffering from some deep problem, but he has a terrible time pinpointing what, exactly, is wrong - a characteristic of OCD. In the sea of anxiety that Mark navigates every day, everything seems threatening. And Mark's "cure" isn't a miracle drug or a cuckoo's nest (sorry, Jack) or love (sorry, Jack) - it's not even a cure at all, but more of a management technique. Shout out for cognitive behavioral therapy!

Michael Sheen is great in these sort of modern edutainment roles, what with his Tony Blair looks and Every(British)man versatility - so we don't know why he spends his time taking loony bit parts in big-budget fantasies (Tron, Alice in Wonderland), or taking big parts in morally dodgy B-films (Beautiful Boy, Unthinkable). As a friend of ours said, Michael Sheen should be playing BP's Tony Hayward (seriously, they're identical) or Lancelot or some other modern British docudrama thing. Or a Zadie Smith film adaptation.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

2010-09-18T20:09:00.000-07:00

What a classic! And what an underrated work of genius.

Like all good sci-fi, Planet of the Apes is an imaginative and entertaining commentary on major parts of our current society. Or, in this case, 1960s American society. Segregation, anti-intellectualism and creationism are all dissected via the lens of one unlucky space explorer, Taylor (Charlton Heston), and his misadventures in a civilization where apes enslave humans.

Taylor, along with his two cosmonaut friends, Landon (Robert Gunner) and Dodge (Jeff Burton), are heading to Earth after a brief mission to space which has dilated time over seven centuries for the Earthlings. But after they bump something in the ship, they end up way off course: thousands of years wrong, and crash landing into a planet where the few humans are primitive mutes who are rounded up by troops of gorilla soldiers wielding muskets and flash photography.

Things quickly spiral into the surreal as Taylor and the others end up imprisoned by the apes. Already we see clear segregation: the orangutans are the scientists, the gorillas are the soldiers, and the chimpanzees are just trying to get by (especially after the "quota system" has ended - Affirmative Action?). After a wounded Taylor regains his voice, all hell breaks loose. He befriends two chimpanzee progressives - Dr. Zira (Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) - who liberate him and send him off to discover the truth about this crazy planet's great mysteries.

The setting is rich and vivid. There's a great moment, for example, when Taylor is fleeing the guards and he ends up in a natural history museum - taxidermied humans are exhibited in various scenes "from the wild". The characterizations are also fascinating; Taylor and his astronauts chat at length about their old habits as misanthropes and lotharios. And we just loved the cheeky nudges to 1960s (counter)culture - at one point, Taylor shaves and tells a young sympathetic chimp that where he comes from, "only kids your age wear beards". The kid cocks his head, "Beards? I don't go in for fads." Cornelius chimes in: "Somehow, [clean-shavenness] makes you look less intelligent." Later on, Taylor jokes with the young chimp, "Remember: never trust anyone over thirty!"

A lot of a fun (and a lot better than the 2001 remake); it was clearly made with passion and intelligence. And some of the dialogue - especially Taylor's liberal use of "Damn you, damn you to hell!"s - is delightful. Now get your stinking paws off me, your damned dirty ape, and watch this damned film!

Il generale della Rovere (1959)

2010-09-10T19:28:00.000-07:00

When the Nazi prison commander is telling you you're the scum of the Earth, and everyone's agreeing with him, you've got to wonder just how scummy you really are.

And Emmanuele Bardone (Vittorio de Sica) is pretty scummy. I mean, even the Nazis think he's a spineless dick. Because what's worse - and possibly more dangerous - than explicit malice? Deception. Bardone is a con artist; he exploits the vulnerable. He tells the weeping mothers who come into the Nazi administrative office in Rome that, if they just shell out fifty or a hundred thousand lira (to him), they can get news of their imprisoned sons. While some of the money lines the pockets of corrupt German officials, most of it is just gambled away by Bardone himself.

What's even worse about this already unsavory mess is that Bardone really, sincerely, authentically believes he's a good guy. He doesn't see it as springboarding from one evil (Nazism) to another (his own selfishness) - he sees himself as a guy just trying to get by, as a man who is far too kind to tell the sobbing, weeping families the sordid, unhappy truths of their loved ones: that they're in prison, in a concentration camp, dead.

This painfully self-deluded confession Bardone sweats out in one of Il generale della Rovere's (General Della Rovere) early scenes, when he's outed as a con artist by the crafty Colonel Mueller (Hannes Messemer). Mueller, who is also pretty evil but at least abides by some internal code of honor, decides to use Bardone as a mole. Before being sent to a prison in northern Italy, a sort of way station for Italian political prisoners meant for the concentration camp, Bardone is equipped with a new name - General della Rovere - and a new identity: he is now a legendary resistance fighter. Mueller hopes that Bardone will be able to extract some juicy info from the other, nobly suffering political prisoners, who instinctively trust "General della Rovere" and seek to protect their hero. Bardone is happy to get the perks of being everyone's favorite partisan leader and eager to get out this jail ASAP.

But this is a mess. A frightening, hairy, ugly mess - and Bardone is right in the middle of it. This film - which is not as tight as Roberto Rossellini's masterpiece, Roma, città aperta, but is as gut-wrenching (if not more so!) - is a doozy. If this was 1970s Italian cinema, Bardone would have been played by Giancarlo Giannini and this would have been directed Lina Wertmuller - the whole thing would have been a pitch black comedy in the style of Pasqualino Settebellezze. Indeed, Bardone shares much of Pasqualino's (and other seedy Giancarlo Giannini characters') most notable characteristics: cowardice, vanity, a tendency to stand in bureaucratic lobbies and promise salvation.

But Rossellini - and de Sica - are much more earnest and much less cynical than Wertmuller - who, in cinematic terms, is their descendant. After all, Rossellini and de Sica come from the generation that lived the war. Roma, città aperta was made just months after Rome, actually, was opened up to the world - thanks to the Allied forces liberating it from Nazi occupation. We think that Rossellini and de Sica and the audience of that era just wouldn't have been ready for the shocking, provocative, mind-blowing razor wire satire that Wertmuller would provide their children and grandchildren. The wartime generation needed to believe that Bardone - even scummy, vulnerable, stupid Bardone - would have had an eleventh hour conversion and grow a spine. They needed to see the heroism and nobility of the other prisoners. (Compare these prisoners to Pasqualino's cohort - at least these guys have a code!)

This is not a perfect movie. Roma, città aperta and Pasqualino Settebellezze are, from a technical and artistic standpoint, better films - they're sharper, cleaner, smoother. In this film, we still see the rough edges: Vittoro de Sica's so-so moments of acting, the awkward side swipes, the clunky music. But the story is strong, and it propels the viewer forward, and it makes you care in a deep, intestinal way. Make no mistake: Bardone is an anti-hero, but you care about him - big time. He's conned himself into an impossible corner, and he's miserable, complex, ambiguous and deeply flawed, deeply human. You can't help but feel awful, riding the lows with him. Vittorio de Sica - who, tangentially, was a marvel to see, if only because of how much his son resembles him! - was, in many instances, really beautiful. Not just looks-wise (though he also was that; gosh, that shock of white hair… those eyes!), but also for sheer intensity: the sweat when he's under pressure, the despair when Mueller drags his face through the figurative shit and he has to come to terms with the reality and the horror of Nazi-occupied Italy. Overall, it was a real tour de force. Highly recommended.

The Dish (2000)

2010-09-08T19:58:00.000-07:00

The Aussie faux historical The Dish is a sweet, wholesome movie exhibiting much of the usual irreverent humanism that characterizes the region's more enduring comedies (think Strictly Ballroom or Muriel's Wedding).

The Dish centers around the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and Australia's involvement via its satellite communication and televised broadcasting of Neil Armstrong's legendary first steps. In the usual style, a motley crew of gently quirky scientists are assembled - led by the wry Cliff (Sam Neill), with the young, spaced out Glenn (Tom Long) and the puckish Mitch (Kevin Harrington) in assistance - and advised by the boorish Yankee NASA representative, Al (Patrick Warburton, Elaine's boyfriend from Seinfeld). The tone is one of ad hoc genius and cobbled-together solutions for the curveballs these scientists encounter in their job to track and broadcast the Apollo 11 communications.

The humor is gentle, the history a bit tweaked and the vibe generally warm and bittersweet. It's a great movie for chilling out with tea (and maybe a blanket), and it leaves you with a warm fuzzy feeling inside. There's also - as with all mainstream films that deal with the Apollo missions - a lot of celebration of man stuff, a relishing of our technological achievements. Think long, loving shots of the satellite. Couple this with some Australiana nostalgia - doo-wop and flower power acoustic guitars feature heavily in the satellite-fetish shots - and the viewer is lulled into a comfortable, warm zone of easygoing optimism.

Sam Neill, one of the gods of our idolatry (OK, our pantheon is pretty big), is his usual craggy, sardonic self - and we love him for it, as we always do. This time we even get the bonus of sweaters and pipes! Oh, our hearts - be still! The people who are not Sam Neill are also fairly decent, but they suffer somewhat from the fact that they're not - in fact - Sam Neill.

We should also note that one character - the comical mayor's comically angry feminist daughter - was a little ruffling to our feathers. Every line Feminist Girl spouted was meant for ridicule, even though some of them were, well, pretty good points. Poverty alleviation or space exploration? It's a good point! And mocking the poverty of India - which was, essentially, the punchline of one of the jokes at her expense - wasn't very funny. Oh, Sam, why did you laugh? For money? We'll give you money!

The Deal (2003)

2010-09-05T20:21:00.000-07:00

Screenwriter Peter Morgan does it again for modern British history in the excellent BBC movie, The Deal. For anyone unversed in British politics, it's a brief, fascinating primer of the Labour Party's ascendancy in the 1997 elections.

We've already noted Morgan's work in The Damned United - our pick for best film of 2009 - and Frost/Nixon. As always, Michael Sheen is his preferred actor, and Sheen carries himself well as the whippet upstart Tony Blair. But the core of The Deal is really Gordon Brown (David Morrissey), and Brown's relationship with Blair. As in The Damned United, this relationship carries romantic and epic undertones - there's a Shakespearean, archetypal quality to the friendship and strains between the boorish, "saturnine" Brown and the wily Blair.

Some excellent details from Stephen Frears' direction.

Michael Sheen as whippet Tony Blair, the Early Days.

The imposing David Morrissey imposing some imposingness in one of the great Parliament scenes. I SAY!

The story begins in Thatcherite Britain, when the Tory Party is well in power and the Labour Party struggles, seemingly endlessly, in Opposition. Brown and Blair both join in the late 80s and, sharing an office, form a friendship despite their differences. And the differences are notable: Brown is an "old Labour" type, with his working class vibe and party loyalty, whereas Blair is posh, Oxford, English and seen as something of a cultural usurper. Indeed, this tension between the old, working class (and largely northern) order and Blair's southern, posher, politically correct "New Labour" movement is directly embodied in Brown and Blair. When Thatcher resigns, the Tories begin coming apart and well-loved Labour leader, John Smith, dies unexpectedly in 1997, a vacuum of power opens up - one in which Blair ambitiously moves in.

Not unlike a similar shot from The Damned United.

In the meanwhile, within this film, great visual paralleling.

A movie about politics, with no action, assassinations or violent intrigue, may seem like a bore, but trust us - all that other stuff is just distracting fluff. This is the good stuff. The core of this film is Blair's emotional treachery of Brown in the name of politics - and it is intriguing, gut-wrenching and absolutely compelling. The actors do a great job capturing their real-life counterparts and infusing them with the Shakespearean grandeur that we mentioned before: David Morrissey's scowling, bent-over Brown, his gait and his cadence, were great, as was Michael Sheen's slightly saccharine, artificial good humor. (In fact, their juxtaposition was not unlike the Nixon-Kennedy debate!)

More visual parallels between Blair/Brown here and Blair/Brian Clough.

And Brown.

And between this film...

...and reality!
We worry that this is one of those great little films that will get lost in the miasma of time. It is, after all, a brief 80-minute BBC docudrama thing. Please rescue it from the abyss! It is too good to be forgotten so soon.

Wallander: The Fifth Woman (2010)

2010-09-04T13:05:00.000-07:00

Ah, the Wallander series, where ace Swedish detective Kurt Wallander (Kenneth Branagh) relentlessly picks at the scab that is his life.

We can't help but think constantly to a description Kenneth Branagh gave of Wallander: the man's like an "open wound". And every episode features the same key scenes to show us just how psychologically wounded this teddy bear is: he sleeps only in awkward sitting positions (he broods himself to sleep, every. single. night. people!), is always awoken by the harsh siren call of his detective colleagues, who then take him to see someone who was murdered in some horrible way (in this episode: with spikes!), wherein Wallander becomes even more moody, irritable, depressed and fatalistic.

Kurt: historiam calamitatum.

Sweden is a sad place, apparently.

In this third installment of Kurt's Angst, The Fifth Woman, Wallander is busy trying to figure out who killed the birdwatcher (with spikes!) while - on the personal side of things - his father, Povel (the excellent David Warner), deteriorates even further into frailty and old age. In fact, the entire episode is about aging parents, vulnerable adult children, and the ancient wounds we leave on each other. And, in its usual style, it tells us about these scars and hesitant catharses with moody shots of a sagging, exhausted Kenneth Branagh as he drives through the desaturated Swedish landscapes. The murder mystery turns out to be just a convenient thematic parallel for Kurt's familial turmoil, and on the personal side - well - Kurt finally cries in front of someone and lets himself be hugged (thank God).

The genius of this show - the genius of Branagh's interpretation of Wallander - is, as we've mentioned before, his social awkwardness. Because while watching Wallander churn silently in his own self-loathing is compelling (to a point), watching Wallander try to mask this is much more poignant. Of course, he fails every time as his tense explosions or brittle unhappiness are obvious and, well, really out there. But he tries to cover it up - and that's just sad. Also, is it just us, or does Wallander's sympathetic friend, Nyberg (Richard McCabe), solve every mystery only moments after seeing the corpse? "Oh yes, it was Colonel Mustard with the wrench. You can tell by that piece of lint there. Ta!"

Pale and miserable.

Meanwhile: Kenneth Branagh's performance. Ah, Kenneth Branagh. There's something unique about his style of acting: a combination of naturalism with theatrical vulnerability. It worked so well in Henry V. Heck, it worked really well in that reincarnation movie with Emma Thompson which was, btw, totally fun! In Wallander, his pain is obvious - and his attempts to smother it, or hide it, or beat his way through it, are likewise obvious. It's not necessarily subtle, though it is… calming? What's the word? There's a comfortably sympathetic quality to it. An earnestness. That's it! Kenneth Branagh is terribly, terribly earnest. And that's awfully nice.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

2010-08-14T07:24:00.000-07:00

Transferring a beloved graphic novel to the screen can work, or not work, or sort of work, or whatever. Uh, stuff. And Scott Pilgrim, and all his six volumes, is well-beloved by the PPCC. We don't remember how he came into our life, but one day, he was there, and we were in love. Scott Pilgrim!

A lot of people love Scott Pilgrim, actually, and his Canadian exploits full of indie bands and Mortal Kombat and the archetype of the 20something quarter-life-crisis-ing slacker. Such as Brianosaurus or the director of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright. Wright's well known to us as the director of the Simon Pegg (another SP!) classics, Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, though the style he uses in Scott retains only the deadpan portrait shots and super-rapid cuts of his previous hits. The rest of Scott Pilgrim's aesthetic is very much... Scott Pilgrim. That is, the Bryan Lee O'Malley graphic novel version of Scott: pixelated, 8-bit, abstract, absurd and very ADHD.

The story: Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a 20something slacker, going nowhere. He lives in a basement flat in Toronto with his gay roommate, Wallace Wells (a glorious Kieran Culkin). Scott's dating a 17-year-old Chinese Catholic school girl, Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), who, after hearing Scott jam with his stereotypically bad-in-a-charming-way band, Sex Bob-Omb, gets sparkles in her eyes and falls in love. Meanwhile, Scott's starts falling for a rollerskating American girl with kaleidoscope ~~eyes~~ hair, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).

What begins as a standard adolescent love triangle soon becomes a multi-level Nintendo game: Scott must defeat each of Ramona's seven evil exes in order to continue dating Ramona. These battles are much like scenes from Mortal Kombat or Naruto: defeated exes explode into jingling coins, the soundtrack is 8-bit techno, and opponents mostly power up, run really fast towards each other, and then explode away from each in melodramatically slow motion while a bass-voiced narrator bellows, "K.O.!" And it's all a clever parable for the emotional baggage we bring to relationships blah blah blah. OK, we actually read that somewhere else, but it makes sense so we're repeating it.

For the most part, the film is a super-faithful reproduction of the graphic novel: scenes exactly mimic frames, the narrated "SO ANYWAY..."s float above the actors, pages from the actual comic book are used in the flashbacks, and sounds are often emphasized with floating closed-captioning ("RIIIIIIING"). For this reason, for a lover of the graphic novel, the movie just feels rushed, superficial and unoriginal. The only novel ideas which the movie can provide are: (1) Broken Social Scene provides the music for Sex Bob-Omb, and that's great, and (2) the climactic final duel with Gideon (Jason Schwartzman), the Big Evil Ex, turns very annoyingly, boringly Hollywood, and that sucks. This is kind of a shame. A new medium (movies) could have built up some cool stuff, if only Edgar Wright had been a bit less slavish to Bryan Lee O'Malley and the Standard Hollywood Narrative and had branched out a bit more. It's a very conventional take on a story which broke, and teased, conventions.

That said, this movie is also pretty much required viewing for hip, young 20somethings suffering their own quarter life crises, as seen through the prism of Super Mario Bros. The graphic novel is hilarious, and, if you've never read it, the movie will probably be eye-popping and very funny (did we mention it's very funny? thank Kieran Culkin and the vegan police for that). So watch it! Read it!

Daybreakers (2009)

2010-08-02T14:48:00.000-07:00

What is it with vampires these days?

Daybreakers is the logical conclusion of our current pop obsession (popsession?) with vampires. Told from their viewpoint, they are the mainstream, the norm, the mundane. They are the bureaucratic drones and the police force. In other words, they are The Man.

The year is 2019, and it's been ten years since ~~this film's release~~ the outbreak of vampiritis. Since then, most people have turned into yellow-eyed undead with prominent canines. The blood of humans is quickly running out, and the few humans left are farmed in big Harkonnen-style warehouses owned by the Sam Neill Corporation of Exploitation. In other words, The Man.

Into this dystopian setting we thrust the usual bureaucratic minion, Edward ~~Cullen~~ Dalton (Ethan Hawke and his cheekbones). Edward is a sensitive, thoughtful pacifist/feminist/insert your sensitive, thoughtful cause here, and he's gone vegetarian. Unfortunately, not drinking human blood makes you turn into a ye olde vampire, the silent film kind, complete with no hair and horrible wings. Edward's brother, police force Frankie (Michael Dorman), severely disapproves of this counterculture tendencies. Edward himself feels pretty lost, until he bumps into the Requisite Female Emancipator, this time a human named (apparently) Audrey (Claudia Karvan), who introduces him to the man (did you read that, right? MAN. it's a MAN, people! the ladies get no love anywhere, it seems) who purports to have found the "cure" for vampiritis. By the way, this man is played by Willem Dafoe.

So there you have it! Is it worth the price of admission or the price of a DVD? Not really. It's a popcorn-churning, bloodgushing B-movie that delights in itself with some self-aware levity (did we mention vampires explode when a stake goes through their hearts? THEY EXPLODE.), though it never manages to break into truly eye-opening weirdness or truly coherent satire. What oppressed class are the humans supposed to be? We thought they were tuna or salmon for much of the film.

Ethan Hawke is a boring hero; imagine Keanu Reeves on a lot of Valium. Our beloved Sam Neill is his usual glorious self, though he does get involved in a very questionable sequence involving his human renegade daughter (Isabel Lucas), Policeman Frankie and a sort of Medieval "I sell you my daughter's virginity" prison rape. Was this eroticized vampirism and dodgy morals supposed to stick it to the Twilight people? Maybe.

Actually, the whole movie feels like an un-Twilight: a reaction to and play against the tired old vampire tropes that seem so pervasive in our fantasy genre these days. While it doesn't take itself as seriously as Twilight, and therefore is slightly less ridiculous, it still takes itself way too seriously: it is, after all, about a brooding vampire anti-hero stuck in the grind of a desaturated life. A little more sparkly color and slapstick might have been a better choice (or a little more feminism/postcolonialism; just sayin'). Overall, it's a C+: not as crafty and clever as other, better B-horrors (Shaun of the Dead, the almighty Slither), but not horrible either.

Inception (2010)

2010-07-17T12:42:00.000-07:00

"He woke up, and it was all a dream."

The most hackneyed of conclusions, unless of course you build an entire story around it.

If Philip K. Dick, Freud, Escher and Solyaris had a baby, it would be Christopher Nolan's Inception. And a visually arresting baby it is! There were moments during Inception when our breath caught in our throat. We felt the rest of the (packed) moviehouse gaping with us, and we felt the collective gasps and exhalations when director Nolan allowed us a moment's breathing space within his universe of operatic awesomeness.

Filmed with the same dark, urban grandeur of Dark Knight, Inception follows a team of dream predators. Led by the haunted Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), they do corporate espionage via shared dreamscapes. (Almost) anything is possible in this surreal space where the subconscious manifests itself as a seething, threatening crowd (how Andrew Lloyd Webber!), or warping, shifting city blocks. When one corporate giant, Saito (Ken Watanabe), makes Cobb an offer he can't refuse - a chance to return to America, his record unsullied by mysterious charges which we learn more about later - Cobb leaps. He gathers his finest team - and a fine bunch they are (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Dileep Rao, Tom Hardy) - and devises an elaborated, layered scheme to get one industrial scion (Cillian Murphy) to willingly break up his dying father's (Pete Posthelwaite) empire.

That, basically, is inception: to plant an idea in someone's head and let it grow. What the film goes to great (and gorgeous) pains to show is how some ideas, fertilized by the unwieldy ids at our core, can ferment into wild destruction. We can't control what we create in the mindspace. Cobb's wife (Marion Cotillard) knew that all too well, and Cobb is still trying to make amends for it. And the hypnotic, unexpected twists of Inception's dreams provide further evidence: trains charge unexpectedly through downtown streets, characters change their appearances, the center of gravity swings wildly. Subjective reality is insane. Quotes by Frank Herbert become appropriate: "The sleeper must awaken." (How Buddhist!)

In the end, it's all about solipsism and - because of that, as well as Hans Zimmer's brassy, thundering score and the general notion of mind>matter reality-bending - we imagine Inception could be this decade's Matrix. It's basic philosophical premise, that we can't be sure about anything beyond our subjective experience, that this could all be a deep, multilayered dream, is Descartes and Morpheus all over again. Also, much like the Matrix, Inception features some eye-popping fight scenes which make visionary use of dimension and gravitational pulls. No doubt, like Neo's backbending bullet-dodging, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's tumble through the spinning hotel corridor will become legendary. (And it deserves to!) It is filmmaking at its best.

While Nolan isn't presenting any terribly new ideas - Cobb's wife is a straight lift from Solyaris' Lady Kelvin, for example - he is presenting them in his lovably Nolany way. The mood is somber, brooding and enormous. He is still enamored with depopulated urban boulevards - the same streets in which the Joker sprayed with manic machine gun fire - and he still loves the sound of creaking, groaning infrastructure that's being upended by anarchic forces. He still knows how to slow everything down, drawing out the elegant arc of the sleeper's limp arms as they float away from him. Most of the dialogue is straight exposition, but those moments of payoff - that creaking street, that droplet splashing on a sleeping face - are epic indeed. We recommend you see this one on the big screen.

Kin-Dza-Dza (1986)

2010-07-15T06:39:00.000-07:00

Guest blogger Brianosaurus strikes again!

There’s nothing worse than being out of the loop on something you love. In my case, I love sci-fi. L O V E it. So recently I was a little distressed when I checked out IMDb's list of top 50 sci-fi movies and noticed that not only were there a few I had not seen, but more than a few I had not even heard of! (Note: see the bottom of the list to learn how IMDb calculates its ratings.) I had no choice: I had to start watching some movies.

Nestled at #34 on the list (between Night of the Living Dead and Solaris) sits Kin-Dza-Dza!, a fabulously funny bit of dystopian Russian social parody. The reader must take note that I’ve always had a soft spot for Russia. But Russian cinema (and literature) is often as bleak as a Siberian work camp. Kin-dza-dza!, directed by Georgi Daneliya, is refreshing in both its originality and clever humor.

Lots of sci-fi gets caught up in trying to explain itself. Kin-dza-dza! gets started so brilliantly that no explanation as to the who-what-when-where is required. Trust me, you’ll be hooked in the first 5 minutes like I was! All the viewer needs to know is that Vladimir (Stanislav Lyubshin, a Russian Roger Moore) and Gedevan (Levan Gabriadze) have wound up unwillingly on the planet Pluke (in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy).

Gedevan and Vladimir meeting the locals.

The story follows Vladimir and Gedevan as they try and make their way back to Earth. In order to do so they must navigate a bizarre and barren world which they know nothing about. On Pluke there is a seemingly nonsensical system of social hierarchy that, like many things in the film, isn’t explained because it simply cannot be. This is one of the reasons the movie works and I liked it so much. Just think about how much senseless racism and other social norms exist in our culture that can’t be explained. Unfortunately our travelers are on the low end of the totem pole and must, amongst other things, give homage to superiors in an amazing ritualistic display! (Unless said superior is wearing yellow pants, then they must do it twice!) Below is Wef and Bi (Evgeni Leonov and Yuriy Yakovlev, Russian Danny DeVito and John Cleese respectively) performing said display!

"Koo! Koo! Koo!"

Our protagonists wander the deserts of Pluke with the innocent misdirection of unprepared tourists. This allows the viewer to follow along and learn as they do. Not only is there a language barrier (for a concise Plukanian dictionary go here), but the entire planet is on a different system for EVERYTHING! For example, matches appear to be the most valuable item, and if you don’t wear your tsak (nose bell) you’ll get in trouble with an ecilop (police officer). Basically imagine you got dropped in the middle of Mos Eisley without Obi-Wan to cut off dudes' hands when things didn’t go right.

"...is a society without purpose."

Kin-dza-dza is a great movie. It’s simple and fun and pokes fun at (and makes us consider) our own society. I highly recommend it.

Note: This film is not currently available outside of Russia (where it was a hit). In order to watch it, you might be able to click here and here for a fan-subbed version of the film.

Mystery Train (1991)

2010-06-25T01:31:00.000-07:00

Guest blogger Brianosaurus returns with another wacky tale, this time set in Memphis.

Jim Jarmusch has been making indie movies since 1980. That’s at least 15 years before it was cool. In fact, ‘indie’ is the only kind of movie he makes. And he’s damn good at it.

His moody films have a melodramatic, meandering pace. The sets are usually broken-down bits of America inhabited by broken-down bits of people just passing through. We usually only get to see a glimpse of the character’s personalities. Their dialogue is that cracked conversation old friends have on long trips: Lots of looking out the window. Friendly silence. Most directors would run from such long, silent, nothings of a scene. Certainly most studios would! That’s were Jarmusch’s success is born. By working outside major studios for his entire career, he has developed a candor in his storytelling that is unique and yet intimately familiar to us all; it’s just the way we are.

Mystery Train is slightly less bleak than Jarmusch’s other efforts. Set in Memphis, Tennessee, this story follows the unrelated yet intertwined journey of three groups of people. Although these stories are slightly more sequential than, say, Pulp Fiction, you could take that film as a reference. All three of his stories center on an old, seedy hotel in the bad part of Memphis. Most of the story takes place late at night, when "normal" people are in their homes. It’s when the rest of the city, the seedy side, is awake.

The first act, Far From Yokohama, follows two young Japanese lovers on a quest to see Elvis’ home, Graceland, and Sun Studios, where many of the great blues legends made their first recordings.

Endlessly happy Mitzuko and her boyfriend, the tiresome stoic, Jun.

Our Japanese travelers, Jun (Masatoshi Nagase) and Mitsuko (Youki Kudoh), can’t seem to agree on anything; what to see first (Sun Studios or Graceland), who’s the best musician (Carl Perkins or Elvis Presley), etc. Despite their differences, it’s Jarmusch’s direction that makes them feel so close to each other, and us so close to them. It’s in the way they walk, sharing the load of their suitcase, keeping step with each other perfectly. The way they work together in simple things like closing the suitcase. It’s in the things unsaid. These two are a pair, no doubt about it. After a quick tour of Sun Studios, they end up at Arcade Hotel, where the film is centered.

The second act, A Ghost, follows Luisa (the always pretty Nicoletta Braschi, Life is Beautiful) as she wanders the streets of Memphis trying to kill time before she catches her flight out of town the next day. Jarmusch gives us a brief introduction to Luisa, and it’s enough to propel her character’s innocent journey through the nighttime streets.

“Elvis Presley?”

Luisa also eventually winds up at Arcade Hotel. After bumping into Dee Dee (Elizabeth Bracco), another lone traveler, on her way to the hotel, she ends up sharing a room with her. It’s here in this room where she has the encounter that gives name to this act.

“Jiffy Squid?” Cinqué Lee and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins play Bellboy and Nightclerk of the Arcade Hotel.

The last act, Lost in Space, is by far the most melodramatic. It follows the night of three men, Johhny, Will Robinson and Charlie the Barber (Joe Strummer, Rick Aviles and Steve Buscemi respectively). Will and Charlie try to keep Johnny (nicknamed Elvis) under control after he loses his job and breaks up with his girlfriend, Dee Dee. They fail and Johnny needlessly shoots a liquor store clerk. The guys ride around town trying to figure out what to do before ending up at Arcade Hotel to lay low.

Danger Will Robinson!

Although each act is thematically different from the next, Jarmusch does an excellent job tying them all together with the Hotel Staff (Lee and Hawkins are fantastic) and with a synchronous DJ (Tom Waits) spinning late nights tracks heard throughout the film. Each story is its own thing; yet tied to the next just enough to carry us through. The middle act, A Ghost, carries slightly less weight than the other two, but gives a bit of whimsicality to an otherwise bleak film.

The music of Memphis is like another character in the film. Classic tracks are performed by Elvis, Junior Parker, Roy Orbison and Otis Redding. These men are the soul of Memphis and lend their story to Jarmusch’s. Original music composed by John Lurie (another Jarmusch veteran) is also very good.

Mystery Train fits nicely into Jim Jarmusch’s record of pleasantly melodramatic indie films. It’s a wonderful film and another intimate look at the lives of travelers and strangers as they cross paths on the streets of broken-down America. Recommended.

**If you want to know more about Jim Jarmusch, John Lurie and Tom Waits, I suggest you have a look at Fishing With John!

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

2010-06-22T04:53:00.000-07:00

Ghost in the Shell blasts onto the screen with haunting, Melanesian-esque choral music, post-human spinal tubing and lots and lots of arching breasts. We were kind of terrified in the first few minutes, but eventually settled down to really enjoy this innovative, brilliant, bizarre cyberpunk anime.

They say there are no new stories to tell, but surely all that 1980s early Internet sci-fi and Singularity stuff was new! Designing our own evolution for a transhuman future, etc. Because while Ghost in the Shell is talking about ancient Descartesian problems of defining consciousness in a world of epistemological doubt, it's also approaching those 17th-century questions with very 21st-century post-human answers. In particular, in a world of networked computers and biological augmentations, the division between meatspace and cyberspace is blurred. And this redefines everything - as Battlestar Galactica's philosophizing Cylon, Caprica Six, put it: "Are you alive? Prove it." Because, for all you know, you're a machine brain living in a virtual reality. Everyone thinks they're human.

Major Motoko Kusanagi (voiced by Atsuko Tanaka), she of the arching breasts which we will be seeing a lot of throughout the film, is a fully cyborg, detective-type badass killing machine (literally). She works for the Japanese government's Section 9, a sort of cyberpunk police squad. Their current target is the criminal hacker, the Puppet Master, who hacks into people's "ghosts" - that is, their consciousnesses, which these days are often embedded in brains permanently connected to the Internet. The Puppet Master's motives are nebulous, and some havoc is wreaked on the garrish, dilapidated, rainy downtown streets. That is, until a rogue cyborg claiming to be housing its own ghost appears. And then everything - especially the definition of life - is thrown into question.

But not before we squeeze in some evocative, meditative sequences. Even in moments of crisis, such as during a high-tech/high-speed car chase across nighttime Tokyo, director Mamoru Oshii slows the emotional pace down with somber, spacey music and lingering shots on the details of this very strange, brave new world. Though there are some grisly moments of violence (is this rated R? it should be!), the tone of the film is more cerebral than action-oriented. Characters often spend their time expositing the themes and ideas. This is excusable as they are running an investigation, and so explaining things to each other makes sense. It's also excusable because those ideas - do you grant human rights to a thinking machine? how did that ghost appear? - are so clever.

We really enjoyed it. We liked that, while there is the token human male character (sporting some very 1980s hair and shoulder pads indeed!), the film is brave enough to keep our focus on the non-human female protagonist, Motoko. Motoko's existential angst is resonant. It feels real (point of the movie, maybe?). When she talks about how being some biomachine superlady with access to infinite bits of data only makes her realize her limitations, we were moved. Oh, Pinocchio! Or as Rudyard Kipling once said, in a quote which has already been pilfered by sci-fi people for post-human themes, "Let them fall, Mowgli. They are only tears."

Is this THE cyberpunk movie of all time? Can it be topped?! We don't think so. It's more cyberpunky and smart than the oft-cited Father of the genre, Blade Runner! Highly recommended.

Pioneer One: season 1, episode 1 (2010)

2010-06-20T21:15:00.000-07:00

Pre-Internet business models are quickly becoming outdated in today's networked world, where data can be copied and transferred at near-zero marginal cost. Anti-piracy campaigns try to liken downloading movies to walking out of a store with a DVD: you'd never have the guts to do it in "real" life, so why are you so brave online? But this is a false comparison. You might feel a little more gutsy if you could walk out of the store and leave an identical copy behind.

No Macs in space?

So. Pioneer One is a torrent-only sci-fi show which premiered for download a few days ago. You can download the first episode here and, if you like it, donate to the cause. Wethinks a substantial portion of the Pioneer One's target audience will just be happy to stick it to the man, and put their money where their fingers type. That's all fine. As Cory Doctorow and Rudy Rucker and Radiohead have shown, good content pays for itself. In the uber-democratic Internet, you don't need the advertising campaign. Let content speak for itself, become viral, and voila! Fame and fortune. Sort of.

Unfortunately, Pioneer One's content doesn't measure up.

Beginning with grainy, handheld shots and a mumbling, thoughtful overture reminiscent of the voiceover in Primer (an indie sci-fi flick that worked), Pioneer One takes place in Helena, Montana, where a piece of space junk has just fallen from the sky and given everyone radiation poisoning. The Feds - scruffy Tom Taylor (James Rich) and angular Sophie Larson (Alexandra Blatt) - show up and, after retrieving a severely malnourished man from the space pod, realize that they've stumbled onto something very weird indeed. As Soviet cosmonaut helmets, cancer and secret Cold War space programs are unveiled, the episode ends with a big revelation and cliffhanger.

Her.

Him.

Them.

The filmmaking is amateur indie, with shaky cameras and shaky acting. That's forgivable. What's less forgivable is the tired writing and trite story. We're trying to break down outdated business models and reinvent media and culture... with a pair of rehashed Mulder and Scully drones stumbling into the plot of Stranger in a Strange Land? It's cliché after cliché - from the designer stubble of the weary, cynical Fed agent, to the perfect make-up and witty 1950s rom-com banter of his assistant (and yes, what is she but his assistant?). "The best and the brightest. Which one were you?" she asks. Come on, people! Secret government programs regurgitated from the Cold War? Bland, unimaginative jokes? Let me guess: does Tom Taylor have a drinking problem? And really: is a female protagonist so mind-bogglingly weird?

We hate to say this, because we agree with the idea of it: new stories for a new medium, made in a new way. But this just doesn't cut it. We've already seen this story done by Hollywood; yes, we had to pay the man. Why would we want to see it again now? It's regressive content in a progressive package.

If you want to see innovative, non-Hollywood sci-fi, take a look at Primer. Primer's budget was $7000, and it managed to shake things up and become a new cult classic. Pioneer One's first episode budget was $6000, and it was about as exciting as a mediocre X-Files fanfiction (without the sex!). If you want to give your money to the alt culture, support the underground and stick it to the man, we'd recommend you join the crowds on the Cory Doctorow bandwagon or check out Therefore, Repent!. Skip this one instead.

Xin jing cha gu shi (2004)

2010-06-17T02:35:00.000-07:00

Now that Jackie Chan's getting older, he's going for the darker, more serious characters. We remember seeing - with shock! - the grizzled, unhappy Jackie of The Shinjuku Incident in those grim trailers. Could our favorite kung fu muppet - he of the bubbly hopping around, bumbling martial arts, he the happy drunk - pull off serious?

Well, sort of.

2010's The Karate Kid is one example, and 2004's Xin jing cha gu shi (New Police Story) is another. Both are pretty good, if not the usual roundhouse double-jab madness and the reason we like Jackie Chan in the first place.

Appropriate color, since Jackie will be in some serious mourning for most of this film.

But what movie does THIS guy think he's in?!

New Police Story - a continuation of the highly popular 1980s Police Story films - finds Senior Inspector Chan Kwok-Wing (Jackie Chan) drowning his very evident sorrows into shot after shot of liquor. After collapsing into his own vomit in a nearby alley, we're treated to an extended explanatory flashback: Back in the day, Chan was an upright and noble police officer, everyone's buddy, a leader, and about to get engaged with the pretty Ho-Yee (Charlie Yeung). But then all his plans were ruined at the hands of a gang of infantile, animal mask-wearing video game sadists, who - driven by their passionate cop-hate - killed every single member of Chan's team, slowly and painfully (and often embarrassingly), in an elaborate Doom-style reality RPG thing.

Since then, Chan has been unable to forgive himself. Alienated from the force and his ladyfriend, he nows spends his nights boozing and his days recovering... for more boozing. Until, of course, a bouncy muppet named Frank (Nicholas Tse) pops into his life.

Of all the gin joints!

Okay, maybe a little too much gin.

Frank makes Kermit the Frog look somber and morose, and his complete inability to JUST CALM DOWN initially irritates, well, everyone. Frank hero-worships Chan and is all about fixing his life, both romantic and professional. And, well, emotional. And because Hyper Kermit and the gamers are cut from the same cloth - the one kept aside for MAN-CHILD - it all works out in the end.

The problem with this movie is twofold. Fold one is: everyone seems to have radically different ideas about the type of film they're making, and for this reason, we have to endure a wild ride of mismatched tones. Is it an Infernal Affairs-type cop tragedy? Or is it a Saturday morning action cartoon? Jackie seems to think the former, while the actors playing the villains, the girlfriend and the buddy, think the latter. As does the director, really, what with his whiplash-inducing swoosh cuts and so on. It's hard to get a grip on this, hard to build up an emotional investment - since the emotional core of the movie, Jackie's grief over all his buddies, doesn't really work. The villains are just too ridiculous.

Guns?! What about some furious fists?!

Argh, are you gonna let him talk to you like that?

Fold two of the problem is that the kung fu is very toned down. It's not Shanghai Noon-toned down, where it's hardly recognizable as martial arts at all, but the fights are slower and shorter than, say, the visual extravaganzas of Drunken Master 2. Jackie Chan has incredible talent when it comes to physical expression, and he usually uses this for clownish, exciting stunts. Get his character drunk and voila! Fun! New Police Story's fight scenes are, ironically, much more sober and, well, boring. Apart from a chaotic romp on a careening, out-of-control bus (reminiscent of the bit in Blues Brothers), or a very long plug for Lego (okay, we love Lego too), there's not much to feast the kung fu lover's eyes on. Alas.

In short: Jackie Chan is cool. Hong Kong is cool. This movie isn't very cool.

The Karate Kid (2010)

2010-06-14T02:17:00.000-07:00

everybody was
kung fu fighting. those cats
were fast as lightning.

bow-legged jackie
in need of a hug (or two)
ass kicks sparingly

jadan smith, munchkin
of doom, he will rain kung fu
hell-fire on all you

1980s chic
nostalgia-thick revival
happy on, sad off

grade: A

Code 46 (2003)

2010-06-11T04:56:00.000-07:00

Code 46, the troubling, moody dystopian romance, initially charmed us, then baffled us, then kinda freaked us out, and then surprised us (Coldplay? Really?). But we are so terribly partial to dystopias filmed in atmospheric indie fuzz that we could overlook even the uncomfortable Oedipal kinks and the too-mainstream pop bookend: we liked it.

Kind of like the (incestuous!) love child between Blade Runner and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Code 46 is about love in the time of being almost-post-human. The film pushes special PPCC buttons by also being post-colonial: it acknowledges the Rest of the World, and what its position would be in a freaky future. But best of all: it's just a sweet, heady, doomed romance full of brooding darkness and two very weird people.

Some scene setting.

Living in an Escher world (where are Godel and Bach?!).

William (Tim Robbins, who is apparently a giant) is - like all good dystopian anti-heroes - a bureaucratic drone. This drone's particular job is investigating "papelles" fraud. The world has been divided into the Inside - buzzing metropolises full of light, drugs and technology - and the Outside - underdeveloped, poverty-stricken deserts. Movement across this so-familiar-it's-alien world is heavily controlled, and you need "papelles" to get anywhere. Interestingly, the axis of geopolitical influence has shifted from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean - most characters circle around India, the Middle East and China.

Let the Om Puri Lovefest begin! We love you, Om Puri!

You're so cute and great, Om Puri!

Oh, Omnomnom Puri!

William has now been sent to Shanghai (looking remarkably like Hong Kong) to investigate a possible fraud at the large Sphinx company. While the anxious manager (Om Puri!!!) is eager to keep things quiet, William - tripping, William Gibson-style, on an "empathy virus" that spikes his intuition - easily identifies the culprit using only one, quick meeting with all the employees. That culprit, unfortunately, is the sexy, alluring Maria Gonzalez (Samantha Morton, still in Minority Report buzzcut mode). Maria is so totally awesome that William has some other, less attractive person arrested (whose only line announces that he was born in Hyderabad!), then follows her into a karaoke club where Mick Jones sings Clash songs. And so begins their very inappropriate, kinda gross but also fascinating romance.

Her.

Him.

Them.

It's been a long time since we've seen a believable future presented, but Code 46 was the most evocative, grimy and convincing future since Gateway. Everyone speaks a babel of world languages - their chatter is peppered with Spanish, Italian, Urdu, Arabic and Mandarin. Familiar cities - Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seattle, Delhi (?) - are filmed in ways which render them otherworldly. The whole territory is strange, yet its links to our present are easily traceable. The whole film's look is very mysterious and beautiful.

Big Brother is watching you. As usual.

This sort of story also encourages us to THINK in capital letters, and it does raise some interesting questions about gene pools, designer babies and the "Third World". But we were much more refreshed by the interpretation of this as an updated Greek tragedy, full of yearning and elliptical consciousness and DOOM in capital letters (also). It is forbidden love at its most primal, and the modern spin to the tragedy is that it was technological drive which set William and Maria up for their Sophocles-and-Aeschylus-style fall. Are all dystopias cautionary fables with a Luddite bent? Maybe. But only some of them are as classy (and classical) as this one, and even fewer let the softest of human emotions take center stage.

Children of Men (2006)

2010-06-10T20:51:00.000-07:00

Back when Children of Men came out, a lot of people took it as an incoherent parable for the modern day problems of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib; Western paranoia of encroaching terrorist agendas leading to a Big Brother lockdown, etc. We were surprised that what we considered to be the driving symbolism of the movie - that is, orthodox Christianity - was instead downplayed or ignored completely. Did no one get it!?

The year is 2027 and Britain is a dark, crummy dystopia that no one likes. It's still better than the Rest of the World, which lies in literal ruins - fire, rubble, AK-47s. "Fugees" - i.e. non-British - are detained in filthy prison colonies on the southern coast of England, and meanwhile a terrorist organization calling itself the "Fishes" is planting bombs in downtown London coffee shops. What a mess.

Various scenes of wreck and ruin and... Bansky?

But the main problem is humanity's sterility. For 18 years, not a single baby has been born. The film opens then on Theo (Clive Owen), a rumpled bureaucratic drone, never too far from some liquor, who lives a wretched half-life in this childless purgatory. One day, Theo is contacted by his former flame, Julian (Julianne Moore), who asks him for some rare "transit papers" to help a friend get off the isle (and the Casablanca bell goes CLANG! hooray!). Theo reluctantly agrees to help, even though Julian is mixed up with the Fishes and their charismatic (well, we think so) leader, Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor, always great). Of all the gin joints! Theo is then shocked to learn that Julian and the Fishes are secretly protecting none other than the World's Only Pregnant Woman, Kee (Clare Hope-Ashitey), who is in her eighth month (she thinks - everyone's sort of forgotten how this pregnancy thing works). Theo, Julian and the Fishes are now all competing to help Key get to the "Human Project" - a rumored Eden where humans aren't stuffing each other's heads into black bags and pushing them into detention centers. Insert also one extremely off-the-grid, pot-growing, old hippie Jasper (Michael Caine, always lovable) and shake well.

Clive Owen and Danny Huston, in a brilliant "brick in the wall" scene. We're starting to think no one on Earth appreciates Danny Huston the way we do. The man is AMAZING. Just watch The Proposition and you'll see.

Much of the film is, as you would expect, an exercise in dystopian misery. The tone is perpetually bleak, and the slightest levity is only the cynical, sarcastic kind. This film is also very self-aware; i.e. it knows its roots. For example, a brilliant scene featuring the brilliant and underrated Danny Huston as a "Noah of the arts", living alone with his deranged 20something son in a revamped Tate Modern, manages to throw in a Pink Floyd cover. And there are the obvious allusions to 1984 or Brave New World, what with the government-approved suicide rations and overbearing bureaucracy.

But the film is mostly about the Bible. We think. This is a very classical, orthodox Christian story, stuffed full of allusions: Theo, underground fish and miracle babies. Director Alfonso Cuarón is only using these Abu Ghraib-type aesthetics in the same way he uses the 1970s acid rock (King Crimson!): as a familiar, modern idiom to get across a very ancient story of miracle and saviors. When Kee reveals her pregnancy to Theo, she's in a manger. Theo's last words in the film are, "Oh, Jesus." Danny Huston's character could be Pilate. And one of Jesus' titles was the Son of Man - just pluralfy that and you get the title. Indeed, it's a very fun story to pick apart, as the Christian symbols are layered everywhere. Personally, we felt like Indy at the end of The Last Crusade (remember: there is no "J" in Greek).

Ahem, "Theo", meets the, ahem, "Fishes".

Another notable feature about this film is Cuarón's use of really, REALLY long takes. There are three in particular, each lasting as much as ten minutes (!). That's ten minutes of a single shot. The most impressive of these, by far, is the one in the car. This is an early climax in the film, and it begins when Theo wakes up from a nap, the camera slowly zooming out from him. Watch out for it. The entire thing is filmed on a single camera, spinning deliriously within a cramped, cluttered car. And from that single shot, we manage to witness the build-up, climax and after-effects of a chaotic action piece. It's a testament to everyone involved - Cuarón and the actors, especially - for making such an impressive, uninterrupted piece of movie magic.

Oh yeah, and it's based on a (waay more obviously Christiany) book by P.D. James.

Capitaine Achab (2007)

2010-06-09T20:41:00.000-07:00

Capitaine Achab is a total snooze during the childhood scenes, but totally picks up when the titular character grows up, loses his leg and is played by the short, demon-like Denis Lavant.

We want to call this film "weird" because... well, because we can't think of any other description for it. It was completely bewildering, and, even worse, not intentionally so. Part of this is our fault: we are so ignorant we had no idea Moby Dick even takes place in America, so when the French characters started saying "Nawn-too-kett" and "Zjhonneee LarhSON", we went, "Waiwaiwait, they're in the US?!" Laugh at us, if you must. But some of the blame also lies with the filmmakers, who give us such a slippery, elusive story (much like an albino sperm whale!) that we had a lot of trouble figuring out its tone. With the random shots of genitalia interspersed with meditative voiceovers over the nature of wandering eggs (uh, chicken eggs) mixed up with stock footage of whale harpooning, periscope-style camerawork and Tim Buckley covers... man, what is going on here!?

The story is told in five distinct chapters. At the beginning of each chapter, we learn the narrator's name - Ahab's grizzled dad (Jean-François Stévenin), his pious aunt (Mona Heftre), Mulligan the stoic priest (Carlo Brandt), Anna the lover (Dominique Blanc), and finally Starbuck the First Mate (Jacques Bonnaffé). Each chapter is, we suppose, meant to illustrate a particular characteristic of Ahab's - how he picked up his legendary single-mindedness, obsessive determination, you know, the whale thing. But none of it is really interesting until we get to the adult Ahab, with his craggy, angry visage and whale bone stump for a leg, and then the payoff for that long, boring backstory is pretty awesome. If the story had followed just the adult Ahab, we would have been well chuffed. But then, we guess that would have just been the book.

Hot hearts, mortar chests and whale bone legs.

Because Denis Lavant is a rollicking good Ahab, compelling and unstable where the child Ahab - Virgil Leclaire - was just blandly cute. You can't really get behind the child Ahab, even if the narrator (Mulligan, in this scene) is calling him a "four-foot ten-year-old little badass" (okay, we paraphrase, it was more like "le petite badass"). But you can definitely get behind Lavant's Ahab, with his squirrelly, sinister energy. Beware, that man is a badass.

So: a very lopsided movie, with random moments of awesomeness spiking out of a sea of weird. Featuring also a large white whale and NO ONE says, "Thar she blows!" (Alas.)

And now, if you've never read Moby Dick but kinda want to now that you saw such a compelling performance of Ahab, in other words, if you feel like us today, join us in admiring this excellent passage about Ahab from the book (freely lifted from Wiki):

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

Goosebumps, people!

The trailer, since we can't find the DVD.

Primer (2004)

2010-06-08T21:35:00.000-07:00

As whoever narrates the English version of Hyderabad's Birla Planetarium show says in that magnificent way of his, some things are just "mind... BOGGLING."

One of those things is Primer. Yes! It was/is/will be Time Travel Weekend at the PPCC! Except Primer's really good.

Made on a shoestring budget by unknown mathematician/engineer Shane Carruth, Primer is a Blair Witch-style (forgive us the comparison!) low-fi look at some young engineer-hobbyists who manage to accidentally build a coffin-like time machine, which they call "the box". While initially driven by patents and cash and maybe fantasies of Bill Gates-style Nirvana, the two buddies, Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan), quickly fall into a tangle of mind-melting paradoxes, as they accidentally and intentionally manufacture timelines, copies of themselves, stock market scams and basically try to out-Groundhog Day each other. As one character notes, "The permutations were endless."

The film, shot like a homemade video or particularly scratchy episode of Cops, has little use for the usual cinematic devices. Actors mumble, wander and speak in tecchy jargon which often means all of nothing to the viewer. The film also flutters back and forth and around the timeline, so that we never quite understand which "version" of which day we're watching. This was apparently done intentionally to heighten the sense of confusion Aaron and Abe experience as they tumble further and further into the rabbit's ~~hole~~ box.

The whole thing is like a creepy, neverending, self-replicating Rubik's cube, but one thing remains clear: the tense relationship between Aaron and Abe. Aaron, ambitious and a family man, is quick to see the commercial uses for a time travel box. Abe is more boyish, almost slacker-like, but he is also the more cautious and possibly more ethical of the two. A mysterious voiceover narrates the action from a distant, third person view - enriching the sense of mystery and tension. By the end, you'll probably have a lot more questions than answers. This graph can help with some:

And this can help with all the others:

Or you can just do what we plan to do: watch it again and again and again. Recommended.