Cinemania

Due to my erratic (to put it politely) updates, I’ve decided to go with an abridged review capsule format. Also, because I seemed to be handing out 9/10s to films like candy, I’ve changed my rating system to a 100 point scale. This method is a little more discerning, so bear with me if I gush over films that I give a mere 70 to. FYI, all new changes are blatantly ripped off from Mike D’Angelo’s much funnier site, The Man Who Viewed too Much, which you should probably be checking out right now instead.

The Aura: 58
Decent bookends and seductive atmosphere salvage this routine Argentinean heist thriller. Mostly harmless but the film’s motifs become increasingly obnoxious due to irrelavence; sorry, one eyed dogs, epilepsy, and taxidermy have nothing to do with existential dread.

Solaris: 85 (no, not the George Clooney/Soderbergh fiasco)
Yeah, really shouldn’t have made an adolescent viewing of the dauntingly Proustian Mirror my last judgment of Mr. Tarkovsky. Hope this is some sort of water mark for the rest of his films: masterfully unsettling camera work, cinematography that is eerily beautiful in its datedness. As psychological sci-fi goes, this is a surprisingly accessible and self consciously humane response to the sterile 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have sheepishly added Stalker and Ivan’s Childhood to my must-see list

Skip this lame Joy Division biopic and get 24 Hour Party People instead, which covers the same ground in about 40 minutes with considerable more invention and insight. Where Party People is is infectiously exhilarating, Control is plain dreary — and not in a consistently depressing way (Control doesn’t have the balls to go down that road), just in a badly paced film way. Ian Curtis was indeed a mopey bloke, but Control seems content to reduce his depression to generic marriage problems. Could we possibly get a portrayal of the man as an artist?

On the plus, Sam Riley is a dead ringer for Curtis. He’s got the doomsday vocals and bizarre stage elbow-swinging down pat. A shame the writing and direction lets him down so horribly. The script is awkward tonally, alternating between “I am so unhappy” voice over to cliche “daft wanker” quips like the flip of a switch. Director Corbijn is a photographer, so the black and white images are admittedly intriguing. Too bad his direction is sledgehammer subtle, most maddeningly exemplified in the on-the-nose musical cues. Cue the song “Control” when the wife is losing control of her husband, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” when… well you can guess. Stooopid.

Rating: 4/10

A comedy by Ingmar Bergman? Well to be fair, while Smiles is funny (the quips haven’t lost a bit of their bite), it also involves suicide, religious uncertainty, quasi-incest, unlikable characters — in sum, its still a thoroughbred Bergman film. He’s still finding his feet as a film director: some of the first act feels pretty stage bound and overly verbose. However the third act soars cinematically, Bergman guides his imperfect characters masterfully, bringing them to final destinations that are so snug they fit like lock and key. The best thing about Smiles is how little it has dated — it treats the characters and their frustrated sexuality with astonishingly human frankness. Savor the moment, this is about the best mood you’ll find Bergman in.

Rating: 8.5/10

I was never one for Almodovar’s loony, OTT melodrams, and even though Live Flesh is still a tad on the schematic side, its nice to revisit where he started the “mature” phase of his career. This phase can usually be marked by the first act involving some kind of freak debilitation or death. After this inciting incident, characters inevitably learn how to cope in nutty ways that bring out the best and worst in them. Live Flesh is a strange Noir (I tentatively label it as such — often Almodovar’s Fellini/Hitchcock suturing overshadows any strict genre) in that we are never given a subjective protagonist — do we side with the honorable paraplegic cop (played with tortured dignity by Javier Bardem) or the wrongfully imprisoned young man? The effect is disorienting but refreshingly so; we are forced into a detached perspective that lets us enjoy the irony like a macabre cartoon. Not great Almodovar — doesn’t achieve the heart-break or formal mastery of All About My Mother and Talk To Her — but vintage Almodovar and surely the first step in his marvellous career renaissance.

Rating: 7.5/10

First of all, I’ve got to tip my hat to American Cinema. I left it for dead, but my god have they bounced back this year. All the tired old Hollywood archetypes have been polished with admirable efficiency and originality: Zodiac (the most awesomely anal retentive and exhausting procedural I’ve perhaps ever seen), The Bourne Ultimatum (Hands down the best action film of the decade, ditching obnoxious one-liners and love interests for some of the leanest, most-likely-to-induce-heart-attack action setpieces out there), Ratatouille (My favorite Pixar movie since Toy Story, who’d of thought that the animated film would come full circle? Snarky, adult asides being replaced by the gooey, heartwarming Disney format of old), Knocked Up (Just laugh for laugh, the funniest damn thing to come around in a while. Judd Apatow, you’re kooky improvisatory style may just be the savior of mainstream comedies)… All this, and No Country For Old Men hasn’t even come out yet!
And then we have this… western? I suppose its a western, I mean its about friggin Jesse James. But this feels more like where director Dominik’s last film, Chopper left off: a piercing debunking of the classical notion of machismo and the way we revere icons. Sure there’s plenty of violence in the film, but there are no gunfights in the honorable, meet me at high noon sense of the word — if someone dies they are invariably shot in the back. The reason the title of the film is go great despite its unwieldiness is that everyone in the film is a dirty coward; like the movie Chopper, the mounting sense of paranoia turns everybody into savages but only the select few become notorious for it.

Ok, so who’s this guy Andrew Dominik? Well apparently he’s a first rate visualist, which the claustrophobic interiors of Chopper would have never given me reason to suspect. The cinematography and location shooting is absolutely intoxicating, the wide canvas perfectly complementing the increasingly withdrawn and edgy characters. Also, though I’ve heard many disagree, Dominik is great with structure. This is not a three act film, instead its 2 hour and 40 minute running seems to coast elegantly into one organic whole. The first hour in particular, drifting in and out of the peripheral characters’ lives as if they were hazy folk tales, giving the proceedings to come a novelish, melancholy grandeur.

But most of all this guy knows how to elicit a performance. Eric Bana in Chopper was a revelation, he created one of those really charming guys that you’d never want to be in the same room with. But the side characters were really good as well — especially the swaggering yet strangely eager to please Neville Bartoss. The same can absolutely be said for Assassination. The casting stroke of genius was defintinely Casey Affleck as Robert Ford. The performance is a symphony of tics: the fidgeting, the crack in his voice, changing between eager to please grin to abject rejection in the blink of an eye. Its one of the all-time great hyper-self conscious performances. Brad Pitt steps up to the plate as well, creating a very strange character that the audience can never really pin down. He’s alternately charismatic and grotesque, paranoid and self-destructive. Its kind of like an actor playing an actor, Jesse James’ countenance always belying some darker ulterior motive.

The two actors give career-bests and I truly believe Oscars are in both their futures (hopefully they will both duke it out for best actor, they get pretty even screen time). But its really a shame that the other great actors will be outshined. The two that really impressed me were Sam Rockwell and Garrett Dillahunt. Sam Rockwell is given the role of Robert Ford’s simple yet more likable brother Charley — he’s got an infectious laugh that he uses to break moments of unbearable awkwardness (the movie’s rife with them), and he becomes ultimately heartbreaking as his easygoing nature breaks down from the shame of notoriety. Garrett Dillahunt as the first victim of paranoia, Ed Miller, is brief yet fantastic. He kind of plays a flip-side to his role as Jack McCall in Deadwood, crude yet sympathetic and it looks like this time around he learned to be a little more deferential in the face of an iconic gun-slinger. I’ve been singing his praises for a long time now, and I think his Hollywood break out is finally nigh.

This is that rare kind of film, an intimate epic — even rarer, an American intimate epic. Lets hope the studios let more works of art like this slip through the cracks (and lets hope Dominik doesn’t wait another ten years to make his next mind-blowing biopic).

Rating: 9.5/10