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Film Review

Woodyland

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Woodyland

YEAR IN FILM The defining adjective for Woody Harrelson is hard to pin, but I’d nominate … limber. Not just because he’s a deft physical comedian — in The Late Henry Moss, a star-encrusted but not very good Sam Shepard play that premiered in San Francisco in 2000, he stole the show from the likes of Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, and Cheech Marin with a 20-minute bit as a cabbie stuck in a front door. But also because he undergoes gymnastic changes from one screen role to another without ever seeming to break a sweat, or lose

his essential congeniality.

He appears to be a laid-back guy, and he’s a certainly a laid-back actor — one never sees the heavy Actor Man gears rotating (unlike with Sean Penn). It all seems to be pure pleasure and/or instinct. Maybe because he makes it look so easy — and because he’s so good a goofball — Harrelson has seemed kinda taken for granted, a guy who lucked out in TV (Cheers), then movies. He’s had a haphazard career by the usual upwardly-mobile standards, mixing leads, support parts, cameos, mainstream and indie projects, network guest spots, heavy drama and low comedy. One suspects he takes work because he likes the people involved or it sounds like fun. No wonder he’s not the possessor of a screen image as carefully calibrated (and, at least until recently, lucrative) as Tom Cruise.

I’m sure there was no intentionality involved — dig the randomness of his 2008 output — but 2009 turns out a year that insisted attention be paid. Closet Harrelson fans (why would you hide that love?) emerged. How could they not? His conspiracy theorist was the sole spontaneous note in humungous idiot’s-delight 2012. He gave the sublime Steve Zahn a run for his scene-owning money in undervalued indie flop Management, as principal rival for Jennifer Aniston’s affections.

More significantly, he ruled as brokenhearted macho blowhards in two wildly different films. In Zombieland, his joyriding undead hunter has gorgeous comic rapport with Jesse Eisenberg’s shambling teen coward, improving their material considerably. That surprise box-office triumph was followed by underachiever The Messenger, in which Harrelson plays the officer who trains-partners Ben Foster in the terrible task — considered by many the military’s worst job — of informing home-front families their loved ones

have been killed.

Harrelson’s role in that was sarcastic, hostile, loutish, hilarious, tender, tragic — a tribute to director-coscenarist Oren Moverman, for sure, but especially to the actor he rightly figured as best possible choice. It’s a beautiful performance. But in a toss-up between that and Zombieland, I’d be hard-pressed to choose a favorite.

Yet even those movies don’t let Harrelson dominate as in Defendor, a 2009 Toronto International Film Festival premiere not due theatrically until next year. In that, he plays a near-homeless schizophrenic who imagines himself a superhero. That tricky role brings out nearly all his colors, especially the loopy, athletic, and pathos-driven ones.

It’s another small film in a career whose highlights are often under-the-radar, like his gay Southerner escort to Manhattan socialites in 2007’s The Walker; the quiet hired gun in 2007’s No Country For Old Men; guess-who in 1996’s The People vs. Larry Flynt; the grenade recipient in 1998’s The Thin Red Line; and so forth. Not to mention such funny-farm swerves as Natural Born Killers (1994), Kingpin (1996), Wag the Dog (1997), and (in drag) Anger Management (2003).

To his credit, Harrelson has also been a high-profile spokesman for hemp, veganism, and overall greening. At his Mill Valley Festival tribute in October, he was charmingly abashed by his own success and serious about attributing achievement to others. All this overcoming a most unfortunate familial background fictionalized in fellow-Texan-turned-local-playwright Octavio Solis’ brilliant Santos & Santos.

Will he age out? Unlikely — already straddling Steve Buscemi and Matthew McConaughey terrain, he can be our next Jeff Bridges for another 30 years.

Pure war

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Pure war

YEAR IN FILM As the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq nears its second decade, the question of its influence on modern American cinema has been redoubled by this year’s sampling of seminal combat films. Not only were Quentin Tarantino’s epical Inglourious Basterds and Kathryn Bigelow’s anti-epic The Hurt Locker two of the best releases of 2009, they represented a startling mutation in the zeitgeist’s popular narratives of geopolitics, absenting the requisite leitmotifs of nationalism, ethic, and archive. The disappearance of a moral imperative in Inglourious‘ Holocaust revenge parable and Locker‘s chronicle of an adrenaline junkie flummoxed numerous critics who admonished them for a dangerous aestheticization of war. Having accentuated the alternative fantasies and ecstasies of military violence, Tarantino and Bigelow committed the cardinal sin of privileging the inner experience of war over its ancillary politics, or, rather, made them one in the same.

Most of the putatively titled “war on terror” pictures, solidified as a genre in the aftermath of 9/11, fulfilled one of several bog-standard paradigms: the preening, ideological propaganda of Michael Moore (2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11) and Errol Morris (2003’s The Fog of War and 2008’s Standard Operating Procedure), with its leftist moralizing thinly camouflaged as real “documents” of war; the quasi-jingoist paeans to American imperialism in Black Hawk Down (2001) and We Were Soldiers (2002); and the grid-skipping, pan-global tourist thrillers Syriana (2005), The Kingdom (2007), and Body of Lies (2008). Regardless of their ideological positions, all of these war on terror films linked cinematic politics with moral engagement and the need for historicizing the truth of combat.

But Inglourious and Locker fail to follow any of the necessary formulae and are thereby excluded from the generic privilege of the modern war film. In its attempt at a sui generis retributive fantasy, Inglourious details a vicious gang of Jews who collect Nazi scalps and immolate Hitler in a third-act ejaculation as cartoonish as it is intertextual. Treading in a Pynchonian zone of alternative history, the film not only lampoons but seeks to rewrite the archive of the 20th century.

But Tarantino’s violence is not ballasted by any of the ruminative “what ifs” (what if the Holocaust could have been prevented? What if you could kill Hitler?) that have become the ethicist’s fundamental paradox. He obviates such moral concerns in favor of bloody spectacle and, in so doing, risks erasing the last, sacred vestiges of the Holocaust — namely, that it occurred. In Tarantino’s comic-book universe, fiction-making refuses to be caught in the crossfire between truth and engagement. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek alludes to as much in his recent treatise on violence when he claims “the threat today is not passivity, but the pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active,’ to ‘participate.’ Those in power often prefer even a ‘critical’ participation, a dialogue, to silence. Sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.” Such valuations are a disturbing reproach to the oft-repeated Holocaust maxim, “Never again.”

Similarly, Bigelow’s film pivots on the saga of American IED fatalities in Iraq, but celebrates as heroes morally dubious outlaws playing in the postmodern desert of the real. Locker‘s insidious epigram, “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug” — lifted from Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning — sums up a picture that is as much about the sensory pleasures of combat as its horrific ugliness. While Bigelow turns to the hard-boiled Americana of Samuel Fuller and Howard Hawks for her inspiration, she has translated them through what French cultural theorist Paul Virilio might term “dromocratic” consciousness, where traditional cinematic politics have disappeared and been replaced with a hyperreal “logistics of perception.”

The result is an apolitical pleasure dome of sensory overload; guns become canons, explosions appear as living sculpture, urban war zones are makeshift playgrounds. Like Inglourious Basterds, The Hurt Locker delights in its own ethical and political vacuum, generating fantasies of immolation without sourcing it as either a psychological grotesque (e.g. PTSD) or an ideological other (i.e. Nazis or Iraqis). When the IED experts finally reach the end of their tour, the tedious suburban lives that await them are a pathetic denouement. Is it possible, Bigelow seems to muse, that the real American dream lies on the battlefield and not the home front?

 

The Dobler Effect

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The Dobler Effect

YEAR IN FILM If 2008 was the year of the bromance, 2009 likely sounded its death knell. (The title alone of the March release I Love You, Man proves the genre blip has said everything it possibly could.) This can only mean one thing: confused hetero men-children have returned to their first loves, idealized pretty-girl ciphers who fulfill their wanton need to worship and be “understood.” This year in particular has seen a resurgence of those impossibly sensitive, crush-worthy romantic misfits. Sadly, as in the past, they usually spurn flesh-and-blood females for unattainable pseudo-goddesses.

Call it the Dobler effect, in honor of every indie girl’s sigh-inducing Valentino, Lloyd Dobler. The raw heart of Cameron Crowe’s gushy-earnest 1989 romantic dramedy, Say Anything, Lloyd (John Cusack) falls for Diane Court (Ione Skye), a brainy, humorless beauty who eventually succumbs to his potent weirdo charms. But Lloyd puts Diane on a pedestal so high it’s a wonder she can even hear his proclamations of undying devotion. For me at least, Say Anything has always posed a conundrum: if the awkward, goofball guys are all going for the gorgeous ice princesses (and getting them), who’s left for all of us — I mean, those — awkward, goofball gals?

At least Crowe made Diane a complex character in her own right, unlike Mark Webb’s creation of Summer in his clever yet ultimately trite breakout hit, (500) Days of Summer. Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his lovelorn protagonist, embarks on a love affair with Summer (Zooey Deschanel), a free-spirited, haughty, and (according to omniscient voice-over) spellbindingly hot woman who tears out Tom’s heart like so much ribbon from the mixtape of a hated ex.

While Tom decides his idealization of Summer is the product of insidious pop romanticism, that’s not entirely the case: Summer herself is its product. She simply transforms from the personification of Tom’s need to be needed to that of his need to be free of that need. (Did I mention Tom is pretty needy?) A disingenuous apparition, she’s as workshopped as any of the insipid, sentimental slogans Tom conjures at his day job for a greeting card company. Perhaps that’s the point, but it doesn’t make her, or rather the idea of her, any more palatable.

The movie may be emblematic of the Dobler effect, but 2009 did offer some light at the end of this tunnel of one-sided love. Released early in the year and largely overlooked, James Gray’s romantic drama Two Lovers offers a stinging rebuke of the Pedestal Girl in a way (500) Days of Summer only pretends to. But in terms of romantic trope blow-ups, Charlyne Yi in Paper Heart outdoes them all. A quasi-documentary love story, the film’s meta-conceit might be wobbly, but that doesn’t make its message any less refreshing. Yes, the weirdo goofball finally gets her man. It seems in 2009, we can finally chalk one up for all the real girls.

Raison ritual

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Raison ritual

YEAR IN FILM “We could live like this forever.” Josephine, the serious young woman in Claire Denis’ gorgeous chamber drama 35 Shots of Rum, whispers this line to her father while they’re camped out on the beach. It’s unclear, however, whether she’s referring to this particular sandy spot or the rituals of home and work that structure the film. As with Chris Chong’s remarkable short, Block B, 35 Shots of Rum (a ritual in the title itself) is set in a superficially unattractive apartment complex. Beyond the concrete is an intricate network of human relations. In the republic of cinema, the Denis film descends from that great poet of routine life, Yasujiro Ozu. Daily rituals dilate exposition and emotion; the safe enclosure of home unfolds in time.

Many of the most indelible, mood-lifting moments of my sporadic year of film-going arrived in the deepened presence of ritual: two shots of espresso, in separate cups; dismantling a bomb; shaving radishes; sheering sheep; the ecstatic sweat of a Lightning Bolt concert; the murderous talk surrounding a stand-up act. The Limits of Control cracks a zen joke out of those scenes that take us to edge of plotlessness; The Hurt Locker posits them at the lip of death. Every genre has its rites, but ritual is roped off by an extraordinary and transformative act of concentration: not so much a slice of life, as the heart of it.

To begin with an imperfect example, take Funny People. The informal joke workshops are the best thing about Judd Apatow’s chef-d’oeuvre by some distance — a romantic plot is deathly flat next to the backstage lollygagging. Likewise, for all The Hurt Locker‘s amazing mappings of harm’s way and its rigorous equation of work and action, Kathryn Bigelow’s film sags in the bland passages earmarked for character development. However momentarily, both movies put the blockbuster through paces.

Rituals, as I’ve described them, give us time to think and feel, and thus crop up with greater frequency in experimental work (ritual makes the documentary-fiction divide matter less). In Heddy Honigmann’s Oblivion, political history flows from her interview subjects’ ingenious livelihoods. Representatives of the service class relay personal and national narratives at work, their gestures embodying resilience and wisdom beyond the bounds of political rhetoric.

A clarifying admiration of labor also animates Sweetgrass, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s near-wordless immersion into a final sheep drive across Montana. Recorded with ethnographic grit and uncommon lyricism, the film counterpoints detailed sound recordings with monumental, temporal landscape photography. A peculiar mix of estrangement (the implacable animal stare) and intimacy (the last cowboys’ muttered curses), Sweetgrass packages a dying way of life as a wayward phenomenological experience — the ritual as haunting.

Rendered as cinema, there is every possibility that ritual will make for a trance. Ben Russell actively cultivates this state in his Black and White Trypps series. Excerpts of all six of these shorts, as well as a 10-minute slice of Russell’s acclaimed feature debut, Let Each One Go Where He May, are available on his Vimeo site, but seeing the third installment in 35mm at the Pacific Film Archive raised the stakes considerably. In it, Russell sends a beam of light into the teenage sprawl of a Lightning Bolt show, creating a visible field barely broad enough for one or two wild faces. The crowd’s pulse makes for an ephemeral, twisting portrait. Projected on the big screen, the baroque expanse of sound and black gave the mined portraits a distinctly transcendent aura. Russell’s Warhol-worthy idea locates solitude in collectivity and authenticity in performance. The 11-minute film also invites us to reconsider the coordinates of that other common ritual that brings us alone together in the dark — cinema.

2000 and gone

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2000 and gone

YEAR IN FILM I will follow him. The opening moments of Pablo Stoll’s Hiroshima convey that sentiment’s dedication in a single shot, a lengthy behind-the-shoulder look at Stoll’s brother Juan Andres as he traverses a suburban street in Uruguay. Such a simple film, Hiroshima: a day-in-the-life structure; silent film intertitles instead of spoken dialogue; “only” one brother’s look at another. Yet there is passion beneath Juan Andres Stoll’s mute detachment, and grief beneath Pablo Stoll’s at times humorous familial portrait of a half-somnambulant with dark circles around his eyes. The passion is revealed in the final scene, when the film’s potent and unconventional use of music reaches a climax. The grief floats around the edges of the screen, and is locked within the closing dedication to Juan Pablo Rebella, Stoll’s co-director on 2001’s 25 Watts and 2004’s Whisky, who killed himself with a gun three years ago, at 32.

Mapping infinite negative space within the movie maze, I can’t help but see Stoll’s brother as Rebella, and connect Hiroshima’s opening shot with the last major shot of Whisky: an uncomfortably extended look at forsaken Marta (Mirella Pascual), tears streaming down her face, in the back of a taxi going who knows where. When Whisky was released, that scene might have seemed like a pale descendant of the notorious 10-minute crying jag at the end of Tsai Ming-liang’s 1994 Vive l’amour. But as time goes on, the increasingly arch Tsai’s vision of isolated sorrow seems less genuine, if not potent. In contrast, Whisky‘s farewell is some kind of transformation, a baton, both end and beginning.

Wherever he may go. Last week, rummaging through a drawer, I came across Alexis Tioseco’s card. My heart hurt more than usual. I remember when I first saw Alexis, at a screening of Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 in Vancouver. During short breaks between segments of Rivette’s 12-hour opus, I’d wonder who he was, recognizing he was important to me before we’d even said hello. A few days later, after we’d met, I remember him walking out of an obnoxiously provocative film, and how his wasn’t an empty or dramatic gesture, just an honest decision. At the end of the festival, Alexis, the filmmaker John Torres, Chi-hui Yang, and I had dinner, and over the course of close conversation with knees touching, I realized my nascent crush was actually a matter of meeting someone extraordinary whom I admired. A month or two later, Alexis let me excerpt part of one of his best essays for the type of year-end Guardian film issue you’re reading now.

On Sept. 1, Alexis and his girlfriend and fellow writer Nika Bohinc were shot to death in their apartment in Manila. There are tributes to them online, many written by people who knew him far better than I. I’m trying now, but I can’t pay respect to Alexis yet. When I’m not feeling rage about his killing, I’m haunted by the purity of his commitment to film and his culture, and how I fall short of it. (As for most U.S. film critics, don’t get me started. The entertain-me imperial indulgence typical of them is especially disgusting in the context of Alexis’s death, a context it now lives within for me.) My failure is something I think about daily, and aim to change.

This is not sentimental. Alexis wasn’t faultless, but he was that special. I remember coming across a short entry on one of Alexis’s sites that not just pointedly but also poignantly exposed the colonialism of a Bruce Baillie film. That little piece of illustrated writing provided a counterpoint to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s valuable appreciations of Baillie. I thought about it this year through tear-blurred eyes while watching Apichatpong’s For Alexis. “The Letter I Would Love to Read to You In Person,” Alexis’s essay for Nika, is a great piece of film writing. Its title is downright painful to behold. Revolutions happen like refrains in a song, he wrote. I will follow him, wherever I may go.

 

Watching the detective

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Watching the detective

FILM Like many movies to come before it, and surely many to come after, Sherlock Holmes is completely misrepresented by its trailer. The producers were understandably eager to get butts in the seats on Christmas, and for modern audiences, butts in the seats means fists in the face during commercial breaks.

There is some perfunctory ass-kicking in director Guy Ritchie’s big-ticket adaptation of the venerable franchise, but old-school Holmes fans will be pleased to learn that the fisticuffs soon give way to a more traditional detective adventure. For all his foibles, Ritchie is well-versed in the art of free-wheeling, entertaining, London-based crime capers. And though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary characters have been freshened up for a contemporary audience, the film has a comfortingly traditional feel to it.

Ritchie is lucky to have an actor as talented as Robert Downey Jr. in the title role, and the pair make good use of the American’s talents to create a Holmes resplendent in diffident, pipe-smoking, idiosyncratic glory. Though the film takes liberal creative license with the literary character’s offhand reference to martial prowess, it’s all very English, very Victorian (flying bowler hats, walking sticks, and bare-knuckle boxing), and more or less grounded in the century or so of lore that has sprung up around the world’s greatest detective.

Jude Law’s John Watson is a more charismatic character this time around, defying the franchise’s tradition, and the byzantine dynamics of the pair’s close friendship are perfectly calibrated. Holmes and Watson join forces with Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), a Yankee femme fatale who has also been fleshed out from between the lines, and take on the sinister Lord Blackwood, played menacingly by Ritchie veteran Mark Strong.

The script, by Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham, and Simon Kinberg, suffers a little by borrowing from other Victorian crime fictions better left untouched, but they get the title character’s inimitable “science of deduction” down pat, and the plot is rife with twists, turns, and inscrutable skullduggery. Holmesians have suffered since the death of Jeremy Brett (whose portrayal of the sleuth Downey can rival, but never outstrip), and it is a pleasure to inform them, along with the rest of the nation’s holiday moviegoers, that the game is once again afoot.

SHERLOCK HOLMES opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters.

Bridges abides

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Bridges abides

FILM “Oh, I love Jeff Bridges!” is the usual response when his name comes up every few years for Best Actor consideration, usually via some underdog movie no one saw, and the realization occurs that he’s never won an Oscar. (Unlike, say, Roberto Benigni.) It is often said with a guilty-sigh undertone otherwise reserved for neglected relatives or loyal but inconvenient friends — people you know you shouldn’t keep forgetting about.

The oversight is painful because it could be argued that no leading American actor has been more versatile, consistently good, and true to that elusive concept “artistic integrity” than Bridges over the last 40 years. When you think about more conspicuous “great” screen actors of his generation — DeNiro, Nicholson, Pacino, Hoffman — it’s hard to deny that they’ve long since fallen into shtick, caricature, and somnambulism in mostly unworthy vehicles, occasionally showing a flash of prime alertness.

Whereas Bridges never rested on his laurels, or lack thereof. Of course he had a great ’70s — who didn’t? — in movies widely acclaimed (1972’s Fat City, 1971’s The Last Picture Show), fascinatingly quirky (1976’s Stay Hungry, 1975’s Rancho Deluxe and Hearts of the West, 1974’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, 1979’s Winter Kills), or just lucky to have him (the ’76 King Kong, 1978 Farrah Fawcett vehicle Somebody Killed Her Husband).

But while other stars caved to the more formulaic commerciality of the 1980s and onward, Jeff Bridges managed his career as before, mixing rare commercial hits (1985’s Jagged Edge, 1991’s The Fisher King, and 1984’s Starman — in which he’s an alien sweeter and surely sexier than E.T.) with mainstream bunts (1996’s The Mirror Has Two Faces, 1996’s White Squall, 1982’s beloved TRON). Not to mention the many, variably unpopular, cult-accruing smaller films he’s spectacular in: Cutter’s Way (1981), American Heart (1992), Fearless (1993), The Big Lebowski (1998), Simpatico (1999), and The Door in the Floor (2004). All Oscar-worthy performances, but Oscar seldom embraces flops, sleepers, and critics’ case-pleadings — the latest of which would be Crazy Heart.

It’s rumored this movie was slotted for cable or DVD premiere, then thrust into late-year theater release in hopes of attracting Best Actor momentum within a crowded field. (It’s a much more paltry year for actresses, as usual). Lucky for us, this performance shouldn’t be overlooked. Bridges plays “Bad” Blake, a veteran country star reduced to playing bars with local pickup bands. His slide from grace hasn’t been helped by lingering tastes for smoke and drink, let alone five defunct marriages.

In Houston he meets Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), freelance journalist, fan, and single mother. They spark; though burnt by prior relationships, she’s reluctant to take seriously a famous drunk twice her age — even if he charms both mom and four-year-old tyke (the improbably named Jack Nation). Can Bad handle even this much responsibility?

Meanwhile, he gets his “comeback” break in the semi-humiliating form of opening for Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) — a ponytailed, stadium-playing contemporary country superstar who was once Bad’s backup boy. Tommy offers a belated shot at commercial redemption; Jean offers redemption of the strictly personal kind.

Bridges and Farrell can both really sing. (The former has long been a singer-songwriter-guitarist, though a pretty dull one.) Robert Duvall can’t, but then as producer and excellent support player (Bad’s old barkeep friend), he’s allowed some self-indulgence.

There’s nothing too surprising about the ways in which Crazy Heart both follows and finesses formula. You’ve seen this preordained road from wreckage to redemption before. But actor turned first-time director Scott Cooper’s screenplay honors the flies in the windshield inherited from Thomas Cobb’s novel.

As does Bridges, needless to say. Here he’s fleshy, hairy, wheezy — well-intentioned, but charming and untrustworthy at once. He rules an otherwise ordinary film like Mickey Rourke did 2008’s The Wrestler. But here’s guessing the relative lack of flamboyance (or salvation from the skids) won’t do Jeff Bridges similar favors. Again.

CRAZY HEART opens Fri/25 in San Francisco.

Peeping Tomás

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Peeping Tomás

Pedro Almodóvar has always dabbled in the Hitchcockian tropes of uxoricide, betrayal, and double-identity, but with Broken Embraces he has attained a polyglot, if slightly mimicking, fluency with the language of Hollywood noir. A story within a story and a movie within a movie, Embraces begins in the present day with middle-aged Catalan Harry Caine (Lluís Homar), a blind screenwriter who takes time between his successful writing career to seduce and bed young women sympathetic to his disability. “Everything’s already happened to me,” he explains to his manager, Judit (Blanca Portillo). “All that’s left is to enjoy life.” But this life of empty pleasures is brought to a sudden halt when Judit reports that a local business magnate Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) has died; soon after, Ernesto Jr. (Rubén Ochandiano), who has renamed himself Ray X, visits Caine with an unusual request. Judit’s son, Diego (Tamar Novas), who is also Caine’s secretary, is a witness to these strange circumstances and inquires into the mysterious past of Caine.

To wit, the action retreats 14 years when Caine was a young (and visually abled) director named Mateo Blanco. In the classic noir set-up, Blanco encounters a breathtaking femme fatale, Lena (Penelope Cruz) — an actress-turned-prostitute named Severine, turned secretary-turned-trophy wife of Ernesto Martel — when she appears to audition for his latest movie, Girls and Suitcases. As Lena’s marriage with the aging Martel is one of convenience, she quickly engages in a torrid off-camera affair with Mateo. But their tryst is compromised by the constant presence of Ernesto Jr., who has been tapped by his father to shoot a behind-the-scenes “documentary” of Lena and Mateo for his own private consumption. When the secret is exposed with the help of a freelance lip-reader (in a classic Almodóvarian scene), the fates of Mateo, Lena, Ernesto, and Judit collide with tragic consequences.

If all of the narrative intricacies and multiplicitous identities in Broken Embraces appear a bit intimidating at first glance, it is because this is the cinema of Almodóvar taken to a kind of generic extreme. As with all of the director’s post-’00 films — All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002), Bad Education (2004), and Volver (2006) — which are often referred to as Almodóvar’s “mature” pictures, there is a microscopic attention to narrative development combined with a frenzied sub-plotting of nearly soap-operatic proportions. But, in Embraces, formalism attains such prominence that one might speculate the director is simply going through the motions. The effect is a purposely loquacious and overly-dramatized performance that pleasures itself as much by setting up the plot as unraveling it. So, throughout the overlong 127 minute film, two distinct types of scenes become readily apparent: those which are Almodóvar at his best — arriving with a striking visual and musical style and leaving one nearly breathless; and Almodóvar at his worst — those which are purely convention, lumber about far too long and veer into dialogic minutiae. If the audience can withstand these long-winded asides, the cinematic prize is great indeed.

For a obsessive appropriationist, Almodóvar has never been so blatantly referential as he is in Broken Embraces. Apart from the most obvious nods to Hitchcock, the director has included scenic love-letters to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1954), and Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950). Those fans of Almodóvar’s 80s comedies will even recognize the director’s send-up of his own oeuvre in Girls and Suitcases, a potpourri of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) Whether or not this confirms that the young iconoclast Almodóvar has, in his old age, become an unashamed nostalgic merits some debate. But, regardless of the verdict, Broken Embraces proves itself to be an impressive lexicon.

Broken Embraces opens Fri/18 in San Francisco.

Life out of balance

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Life out of balance

arts@sfbg.com

FILM At the start of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, its titular character is toasted as a perfect enigma-cum-hostess, "the very icon of an artist’s wife." She accepts this with public graciousness and private dismay. Because now, with two kids grown (but still whiny) and a famous publisher spouse retired yet self-absorbed as ever, the praise only underlines a sense that she’s always served others’ needs while never quite figuring out her own.

Ergo Rebecca Miller’s latest is that seldom-produced thing, the female midlife crisis movie. Miller is daughter to playwright Arthur Miller, a titan of Big Theme manly guilts. Writing and directing for another medium — one differently scaled from dad’s own twilight-of-the-gods project The Misfits (1961) — Rebecca unsurprisingly falls some yards from the tree. Her projects are indie-scaled, about troubled domestic minutae, with whimsical twists of fate that methodical realist Arthur would never have countenanced.

They’re all flawed. But Rebecca Miller has been consistently interesting since 1995’s striking Angela — first among many narratives from the viewpoint of a child struggling in the shadow of an overwhelming and/or unstable parent. In 2002, triptych Personal Velocity‘s best segment had Parker Posey cowed by her celebrity father. In 2005’s The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Miller’s husband Daniel Day-Lewis was a dying hippie so close to his teenage daughter she lacks social skills for anyone else.

In Private Lives, Pippa (Robin Wright Penn) has her own monstrous parental past, revealed in 1970s flashbacks with Maria Bello as a minister’s wife wired to explode on Dexedrine. Like many people hailing from chaos, Pippa has turned self-conscious model citizen. In drifting early adulthood, she glommed onto the first man who respected her mind — or did he just recognize a rudderless, much younger woman susceptible to flattery? Ever since she’s been ideal consort to Herb (Alan Arkin), as well as doting mother to their variably grateful children.

Three heart attacks have forced Herb to retire — more or less — and move to a Connecticut retirement-community condo located near friends Sam (Mike Binder) and Sandra (Winona Ryder). Actually, they’re Herb’s friends; it’s Pippa’s job to smilingly endure Sam’s overtures and provide Sandra a shoulder to cry on. Barely 40 in an old folks’ village, Pippa is starting to think her life a tad ridiculous. Such nagging but inchoate doubt is underlined by the return of a widow neighbor’s shaggy, somewhat surly son (Keanu Reeves) to Chez Mom after his latest failure at adulthood. Opposites attract, though it’s more complicated than that.

Miller’s cluttered canvas also makes room for teensy-to-major characters played by Shirley Knight, Blake Lively, Robin Weigert, Julianne Moore, and Monica Bellucci. As is her wont, she piles on both invigorating insights and a few too many whiplash narrative left turns.

But The Private Lives of Pippa Lee has charm and idiosyncrasy to spare. Wright Penn is a deft actress who’s spent too much time as cinema’s Agony Aunt — pall-bearer for so much worry, dismay, tears, and suffering from Forrest Gump (1994) to Hounddog (2007). Here, she’s immaculately poised yet leavened by the comingling of desire and comedy. She’s larky, witty, even goofy at times. It looks good on her.

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE opens Fri/11 in Bay Area theaters.

Citizen Welles

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Citizen Welles

FILM It’s 1937, and New York City, like the rest of the nation, presumably remains in the grip of the Great Depression. That trifling historical detail, however, is upstaged in Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (adapted from the novel by Robert Kaplow) by the doings at the newly founded Mercury Theatre. There, in the equally tight grip of actor, director, and company cofounder Orson Welles — who makes more pointed use of the historical present, of Italian fascism — a groundbreaking production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar hovers on the brink of premiere and possible disaster.

To a layperson, that might not seem like the best time to sub in a player, but luckily for swaggering young aspirant Richard (High School Musical series star Zac Efron), Welles (Christian McKay), already infamously tyrannical at 22, is not a man to shrink from firing an actor a week before opening night and replacing him with a 17-year-old kid from New Jersey. Particularly one who (says he) can play the ukulele. Finding himself working in perilous proximity to the master, his unharnessed ego, and his winsome, dishearteningly pragmatic assistant, Sonja (Claire Danes), our callow hero is destined, predictably, to be handed some valuable life experience.

McKay makes a credible, enjoyable Welles, presented as the kind of engaging sociopath who handles people like props and hails ambulances like taxicabs. Efron projects a shallow interior life, an instinct for survival, and the charm of someone who has had charming lines written for him. While Richard’s seemingly limitless bravura is amusing, the resultant adventures and mishaps don’t seem to elicit much reaction within; what we witness is mild and momentary and bland. Still, he and Welles and the rest are all in service to the play, and so is the film, which offers an absorbing account of the company’s final days of rehearsal, including the hair-pulling frustrations that the cast, the crew, and Mercury cofounder John Houseman (Eddie Marsan, from 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky) undergo for the sake of working in close quarters with genius.

Absent are the naturalistic talking jags with which Linklater made his name; here it’s largely banter and smooth talk and gossipy stage whispers. But just as the teenagers of Dazed and Confused cruised through a sludgy stoner soup of ’70s rock, the players of Me and Orson Welles flirt and prank and strut the streets of Manhattan with the atmospheric backing of Gershwin crooners and snappy big band numbers. The one jarring moment, both sonically and in the film at large, is the sound of Efron singing mid-production, earnest and plaintive and incapable of banishing that poppy HSM tremble from his delivery.

Me and Orson Welles opens Fri/11 in Bay Area theaters.

They were expendable

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They were expendable

“Camera movement” doesn’t even begin to describe the orchestral coordination of tracks, pans, tilts, zooms, and compositional dimensionality comprising Miklós Jancsó’s boldly vertiginous 10-minute takes. The Pacific Film Archive screens a quartet of the Hungarian director’s influential but rarely shown films from the late 1960s and early ’70s, each a kinesthetic rumination on the awful coordinates of martial law — and perhaps the closest cinema has ever come to the epic poetry of The Iliad.
Raymond Durgnat’s account of Jancsó’s “calligraphic” camerawork helps distinguish the director’s style from formalist theorizations of the long take. From Touch of Evil (1958) to Children of Men (2006), thrilling tracking shots have come to stand as the summit of cinema’s realist plenitude. With Janscó, like Stanley Kubrick, omniscience itself is held in doubt. In The Round-Up (1966), a distressing parable of interrogation set during an 1848 campaign against insurgent outlaws, Jancsó’s free-floating camera paradoxically registers the blinkered confusion of imprisonment. The volatility of view calls attention to the partiality of witnessing. Simultaneously, the repetitive movements of degradation and violence signal a repertoire of human evil surpassing any single individual, nation, or war.
In Jancsó’s dialectical form, a Marxist apprehension of the enduring structures of power jostles against the individual’s frightened namelessness. As with Jean Renoir, the long take is not at odds with montage’s multiplication of meaning. Take the first scene after the opening titles of The Red and the White (1967). The camera glides after two Bolsheviks in flight from the counterrevolutionaries — slowly, as if in foreknowledge of the coming reversal. As they wade into a narrow river (the geography of the scene bears curious resemblance to one in 2007’s No Country for Old Men), the composition opens up terrain where another band of cavalrymen are mounting a charge. The two men beat a retreat, and now the recessing camera leads them on. One man hides behind a tree, becoming a surrogate for our own position; the other is not so lucky. An ushanka-clad counterrevolutionary soldier bullies the Bolshevik into the shallow water. The shot cues the man’s final movement: like a felled tree he topples into the drink, the first of many searing images worthy of Goya’s The Disasters of War.
Unlike most combat films, time does not bend to the casualties of war in this scene. The shot proceeds after the man is shot, the seconds flowing over crime and banality alike. You can watch one of these films a dozen times having only seen it once.
Jancsó’s durational use of Cinemascope means that actors cover a lot of physical ground in his shots. The cracked Martian expanse of the Hungarian steppe is their mortal stage, a no-place that pictorially undoes the idea of historical setting. Jancsó’s early films are often linked to the crushed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but in truth they offer no such comfort of specificity. To the contrary, the films demonstrate how state-sanctioned violence vanquishes particularization, making them more relevant to our Guantanamo-Abu Ghraib era than anything coming to a theater near you.
It was only while watching Red Psalm (1972) that I realized the utopic possibilities of Jancsó’s reanimation of historical space. The film, composed of 28 shots in Van Gogh color, stages a late 19th century confrontation between peasant socialists and nationalist conservatives as a series of concentric rings in which the Marxist call for an alternative course of history is richly imagined, if still damned. Twelve-minute takes notwithstanding, any talk of “real time” in such film is preposterous. Serge Bozon’s 2007 film La France broached a similarly musical vision of armed struggle, but Jancsó’s swirling analysis of fate, theatre, ritual, song, idealism, God, grain, and horror is something uniquely sublime.

FOUR BY HUNGARIAN MASTER MIKLÓS JANCSÓ
Dec. 5–18, $5.50–$9.50
Pacific Film Archive
2757 Bancroft, Berk.
(510) 642-5249
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Triumph of the underdog

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Triumph of the underdog

In Frazer Bradshaw’s Everything Strange and New, Wayne (Jerry McDaniel), wears overalls too large and a look of pained, dazed acquiescence. It’s as if not just his clothes but his life were given to the wrong person — and there’s a no-exchange policy. He loves wife Reneé (the writer Beth Lisick) and their kids. But those two unplanned pregnancies mean she’s got to stay home; daycare would cost more than she’d earn.
So every day Wayne returns from his dead-end construction job to the home whose mortgage holds them hostage; and every time Reneé can be heard screaming at their not-yet-school-age boys, at the end of her tether. Sometimes he silently just turns around to commiserate over beer with buddies likewise married with children, but doing no better. Leo (Rigo Chacon Jr.) is in the middle of a very messy divorce, while Manny (the late Luis Saguar, in a beautiful performance) pretends to be maintaining better than he really is. (He has a surprising secret escape valve, and in one great late scene we realize Leo has one too.)
Wayne’s voiceover narration endlessly ponders how things got this way — more or less as they should be, yet subtly wrong. He might be willing (or at least able) to let go of the idea of happiness. But Reneé’s inarticulate fury at her stifling domestication keeps striking at any nearby punching bag, himself (especially) included. Something’s got to change. But can it?
Cue deus ex machina happy ending. Or so one would in another movie, like Katherine Dieckmann’s supposedly gritty recent Motherhood. But veteran local experimentalist and cinematographer Bradshaw’s first feature, which he also wrote, never stoops to narrative cliché. Or to stylistic ones, either — there’s a spectral poetry to the way he photographs the Oakland flats (few movies have captured ordinary landscapes so vividly). The spinning-in-place sense is underlined by Dan lonsey and Kent Sparling and Dan Plonsey’s score, which melds Philip Glass, Irish folk, and noise-rock caterwaul to externalize all Wayne’s suppressed tumult.
The ordinary wear, tear, and occasional rending of relationships you and I might actually know is portrayed infrequently enough onscreen that when it does turn up, the recognition factor is a little startling. Everything Strange and New seemed a tonic at the Sundance Film Festival this year precisely because it was the kind of indie — quiet, serious, intimate, void of stars and buzz — people complain can’t get made, or even into Sundance, anymore.
Seen again, Everything Strange and New is even better — a film about very small (except to the afflicted), banal (ditto), everyday problems that manages to be mysteriously exhilarating.

EVERYTHING STRANGE AND NEW opens Fri/4 at the Roxie.

Pray tell

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Pray tell

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Oh My God? took the words right outta my mouth about 10 minutes in. It was then clear this "multicultural spiritual quest" about religion worldwide illustrated the three worst trends in contemporary nonfiction filmmaking: the gratuitously first person vanity project; the Koyaanisqatsi (1982) school of globetrotting coffee-table pictorialism; and the "These are important questions. Let’s ask a celebrity for answers!" tactic.

Shot in 23 countries, God?‘s luxury do-gooderism might not compensate for its carbon imprint in any judgmental afterlife. The opening montage of Stuff ‘Round the World is meant to dazzle with the breadth of human experience. Instead, such expensive flash raises a red flag: who funded this? De Beers? Exxon Mobil?

Perhaps writer-producer-director Peter Rodger did himself, being maestro of "numerous car, clothing, and cosmetics companies’ print and commercial campaigns in over 40 countries." That explains a lot. The world is so cluttered with striking images — MTV, advertising, and computer graphics have rendered mere visual brilliance trivial. What’s rare now is the providing of context that makes a picture meaningful.

"Truth is being diluted by too many voices all keen to reference the name of God. But what exactly is God? I decided to go around the world and ask people what they think," Rodger says at the start. Albeit not before Hugh Jackman has brushed his chestnut mane back to announce "God is unexplainable!" Whoa. Why is he here? Rodger presumably lives in that fabulous A-list bubble where success is understood to impart wisdom. Because what can’t money buy?

Oh My God? also includes philosophic two cents from Baz Luhrmann, Seal, Ringo Starr, HRH Princess Michael of Kent, and Sir Bob Geldof. (What, no Bono?) These celebs have zero special to say, but are top-billed — unlike the spiritual leaders, leading academics, and mere proles whose profoundities were likely left on the cutting-room floor.

The movie does have plenty of time for Peter Rodger, our intrepid host for no obvious reason. Surely it doesn’t require his onscreen presence to ask questions like "If God really does exist, why does he permit so much suffering in the world?" We certainly don’t need him to call lingering Katrina devastation "pretty sad," a sentiment as trite as the quick cutaway from some New Orleans kids’ very moving statements is offensive.

Shooting with a real eye for travelogue imagery (sometimes at actual tourist events), Rodgers reduces animal-sacrificing African Maasai tribalists ("very colorful people"), Arizona Native Americans (tribe unidentified), Balinese Hindu priests, and more to exotic dress extras in a 93-minute music video scored by Alexander van Bubenheim as one long world beat mixtape. Tonal slants are predictable: born-again Texans = funny/bad; Tibetan monks = serene/good. OMG indeed.

As in so much human history, the use and abuse of religious ideas now urgently affects us all. Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein notes (in a rare moment of permitted garrulousness), "The problem with religion today is that there’s just enough of it for people to learn to hate each other, but not enough to learn to love each other."

Yet Oh My God?‘s Babel of glancingly sampled opinions is just more contradictory noise — a pu pu platter of empty-calorie pictorialism and half-formed big questions at no risk of meaningful exploration. Like that modern lit classic Eat Pray Love, it wrassles eternal issues of being and meaning into the feel-good hollow address of rich people’s problems.

OH MY GOD? opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

21st Century ‘Fox’

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21st Century ‘Fox’

FILM A lot of people have been busting filmmaker Wes Anderson’s proverbial chops lately, lambasting him for recent cinematic self-indulgences hewing dangerously close to self-parody (and in the case of 2007’s Darjeeling Limited, I’m one of them). Maybe he’s been listening. Either way, his new animated film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, should keep the naysayer wolves at bay for a while — it’s nothing short of a rollicking, deadpan-hilarious case study in artistic renewal.

While the movie’s gorgeous autumnal color palette of saffron, ginger, cinnamon, and pomegranate recalls the Indian location of Darjeeling, Fox explodes that film’s stagnant complacency. A kind of man-imal inversion of Anderson’s other heist movie, his debut feature Bottle Rocket (1996), his latest revels in ramshackle spontaneity and childlike charm without sacrificing his adult preoccupations.

Sporting a double-breasted corduroy suit and velour pullover, Mr. Fox (George Clooney in full suave mode) is the essence of the old duality of man-fox conundrum. The ultimate impish rogue, what he might lack in competence, he makes up for in self-assured, foxlike élan. But Mr. Fox’s true animal nature has been compromised by domesticity. Forced to give up his chicken-stealing and killing ways by his wife (a subtly sly Meryl Streep), he’s also stymied by his only son (Jason Schwartzman), an attention-starved, Max Fischer-esque oddball with a penchant for sporting a towel as a cape.

Based on Roald Dahl’s beloved 1970 book, Fantastic Mr. Fox captures the essence of the source material but is still full of Anderson trademarks: meticulously staged mise en scène, bisected dollhouse-like sets, eccentric dysfunctional families coming to grips with their talent and success (or lack thereof).

And then there’s that pesky, romantic death obsession. Sure the animals are cute, but at times the stop-motion animation lends them a singularly creepy subtext. Fur routinely flits around in scattershot directions, seemingly independent of body movement. The effect weirdly evokes those time-lapse shots of animals in rapid decay.

As Mr. Fox himself points out, these are "wild animals with true natures and pure talents" — talents that often involve killing one another. After a fatal showdown with a malevolent rat (Willem Dafoe), Fox waxes philosophic. "In the end, he’s just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant," he intones. It’s possibly the most contextually stupefying, hilarious moment in a film teeming with them.

When Mr. Fox finally embraces his essential foxiness once again, ultimately succeeding in gaming the system (more or less), it feels like a victory for Anderson as well. After all, he’s concocted a family film as slyly subversive as its titular character, and done so on his own terms. Let’s hope it’s in his nature to make more movies like this one.

FANTASTIC MR. FOX opens Wed/25 in Bay Area theaters.

What’s hate got to do with it?

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What’s hate got to do with it?

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Like so many recent it’s-true-if-we-say-so slogans, "A Republican is a Democrat who’s been mugged" is smugly, fundamentally misguided on more levels than can be addressed here, suggesting that only conservatives have the horse sense to grasp that it’s a big, scary world out there. Interpreted another way, however, this catchphrase contains a grain of truth: the sense of victimization can be blindsiding. When you begin to perceive all criticism as persecutorial, you might forget it’s possible to be wrong.

That’s the worry driving Yoav Shamir’s Defamation, which opens Friday following a stormy reception at July’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. The documentarian (2003’s Checkpoint) says that as an Israeli Jew he’s never actually experienced anti-Semitism. So he sets out to explore that prejudice’s status quo — or so he claims, somewhat disingenuously. Because Defamation‘s real agenda is positing anti-Semitism as a distorted, exploited, propagandic bludgeon used to taint any critique of Israeli government policies or the foreign lobbies supporting them.

This is a theory bound to inflame angry emotions, not least the "self-hating Jew" accusation. It must be said that Shamir lays himself at risk — à la Michael Moore — of selectively gathering only evidence that supports his agenda. Anti-Semitism certainly does exist today, in many different forms, around the world. But the only folks Shamir finds to spout negative stereotypes are some African American Crown Heights youths — whose complaints about their insular neighbors seem reasonable enough until they cite Nazi best seller The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an important ethnic expose — and his own granny. (Bizarrely, she opines that Jews are indeed money-hoarding shirkers of "real" work — albeit only foreign Jews, not industrious Israelis like herself.)

Yet if Defamation‘s deliberate omissions and occasional snarky tone hamper its case, Shamir nonetheless makes legitimately troubling points. He views Israeli media as obsessing over any incidents of global anti-Semitism (and ignoring decreases) much as the U.S. media endlessly dwells on certain lurid crime stories — because their public loves to feel indignant.

More than 30,000 Israeli high schoolers now go on field trips each year to European Holocaust sites. But their experience is heavily stage-managed, with Secret Service guards ensuring they have no contact with locals — in Poland a group is kept sequestered in their hotel because (they’re told) this "relatively hostile country" is rife with neo-Nazis.

No wonder when two girls briefly try to bridge the language barrier with some old men in a park, they instantly assume they’re being insulted. (They are not, as the exchange’s subtitled translation reveals.) This thrilling experience of actual, or at least assumed, anti-Semitism reinforces what one student calls "what makes us special: that no one can stand us, but that we are proud of it."

"Everyone knows the Jews are hated. We are raised that way," another proclaims.

Getting ample cooperation (now regretted) from its Manhattan H.Q.’s staff, Shamir suggests the Anti-Defamation League also inflates anti-Semitism’s modern-day realities to exert political muscle, and to dismiss any criticism of Israel as simple Jew-hating "in disguise." When a British academic at an ADL conference rather mildly asserts anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism can indeed be separated — is it racist to think the West Bank settlements and occupation of Palestinian lands unjust? — he’s denounced as an outrageous provocateur.

The most controversial interviewee is Norman Finklestein, whose book The Holocaust Industry got him pilloried as a Holocaust denier (untrue) and quite likely cost him his teaching position. The son of Shoah survivors, he thinks "the Nazi Holocaust is now the main ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression" and that "pathological narcissism" desensitizes many American Jews to other people’s sufferings. (One U.S. rabbi here theorizes that the sense of ongoing historical persecution has replaced religious observance as many Jews’ primarily source of ethnic-cultural identification.)

Finklestein can be persuasively reasonable. To Defamation‘s credit, however, it doesn’t yell "Cut!" when he whips himself into a crank-case frenzy that masochistically self-destructs his credibility. Absolute righteousness ain’t pretty, anywhere on the political spectrum.

DEFAMATION opens Fri/20 at the Roxie.

The call of the weird

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The call of the weird

Consider that ridiculous title. Though its poster and imdb entry eliminate the initial article, it appears onscreen as The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. That’s the bad lieutenant, not to be confused with Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant, starring Harvey Keitel as a nameless New York City cop who gambles and grubs drugs until one harrowing case nudges him in a less wretched direction.

The bad lieutenant has a name: Terence McDonagh, and he’s a police officer of similarly wobbly moral fiber. McDonagh’s tale — inspired by Ferrara and scripted by William Finkelstein, but perhaps more important, filmed by Werner Herzog and interpreted by Nicolas Cage — opens with a snake slithering through a post-Hurricane Katrina flood. A prisoner has been forgotten in a basement jail. McDonagh and fellow cop Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer) taunt the man, taking bets on how long it’ll take him to drown in the rising waters. An act of cruelty seems all but certain until McDonagh, who’s quickly been established as a righteous asshole, suddenly dives in for the rescue. Unpredictability, and quite a bit of instability, reigns thereafter.

A smidge of The Bad Lieutenant actually concerns police work, as McDonagh investigates the slaying of a Senegalese family. Everyone knows who did it, but there’s no evidence, only a teenage eyewitness who’s reluctant to testify against the neighborhood kingpin. But this is hardly a standard-issue procedural drama. Mostly it’s a journey to the edge and back, multiple times, with an unhinged addict who prowls the streets of New Orleans "to the break of dawn, baby!" The storm-battered city provides an uneasy backdrop — this ain’t The Big Easy (1986), and Herzog keeps his N’Awlins cliché-o-meter in check. He does allow for certain Herzogian indulgences, like an extended close-up of an iguana that may or may not be the product of McDonagh’s drug-frazzled brain.

In a movie like The Bad Lieutenant, where every scene holds the possibility of careening to heights both campy and terrifying, Cage proves an inspired casting choice. Lately he’s become more famous for his hair (which has its own Internet meme) and financial troubles than for his talents. His Oscar (for 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas) capped years of cult success (1990’s Wild at Heart), but after a brief late-’90s reign as action star and his success in the (lame) National Treasure films, he’s kinda been off his game. Who, besides the people he owes money to, thought 2006’s The Wicker Man was a good idea?

Basically Cage has nothing to lose, and his take on Lt. McDonagh is as haywire as it gets. McDonagh snorts coke before reporting to a crime scene; he threatens the elderly; he hauls his star teenage witness along when he confronts a john who’s mistreated his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes); he cackles like a maniac; he lurches around like a hunchback on crack. But he’s not entirely monstrous — he cared enough to save that drowning convict, remember? Not knowing what McDonagh will do next is as entertaining as knowing it’ll likely be completely insane. With Herzog behind the camera and Cage flailing in front of it, The Bad Lieutenant is the most fiendish movie of 2009. That’s a recommendation.

THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS opens Fri/20 in Bay Area theaters.

Clean freak

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Clean freak

Chilean writer-director Sebastián Silva’s newest "house" film, The Maid, swaps customary debates of bedroom politics for the upstairs/downstairs relations of domestic labor. In an upper-middle class subdivision of Santiago, 40-year-old maid Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), perpetually stony and indignant, operates a rigorous dawn-to-dusk routine for the Valdez family, her employers for 20 years. Although Raquel rarely behaves as an intimate of her longtime hosts, she remains convinced that love, not labor, bonds them. Whether the family shares Raquel’s feelings of devotion is highly dubious: father Mundo (Alejandro Goic) often ignores or avoids her except when giving orders; daughter Camila (Andrea García-Huidobro) actively despises her and lobbies for her dismissal from mother Pilar (Claudia Celedón), whose sense of noblesse oblige is a patronage bound by a mix of affection and pity.

When a rotating cast of interlopers is hired to assist Raquel, the paranoid domestic stoops to machinations most vile to scare them away. She dispatches young Peruvian maid Mercedes (Mercedes Villanueva) by cruelly disposing of her adopted kitten and forces the gruff and hot-tempered Sonia (Anita Reeves) into a violent confrontation before she resigns in disgust. But third comer Lucy (Mariana Loyola) is an altogether different challenge. Her unpredictable influence over Raquel sets the narrative of The Maid on a very different psychological trajectory — from moody chamber piece to eccentric slice-of-life.

If Silva’s film taunts the viewer with the possibility of a horrific climax, either as a result of its titular counterpart — Jean Genet’s 1946 stage drama The Maids, about two servants’ homicidal revenge — or from the unnerving "mugshot" of Saavedra on the movie poster, it is neither self-destructive nor Grand Guignol. Rather, it it is much more prosaic in execution. Filmed almost exclusively in the narrow hallways, bathrooms, and parlors of a Santiago McMansion, Sergio Armstrong’s fidgety hand-held camera captures Raquel’s claustrophobic routine. It also accentuates her Sisyphean conundrum: although she completely rules the inner workings of the house, she remains forever a guest. The more she makes the house into a home, the more it becomes a prison she refuses to escape from.

But while Saavedra’s title role is an interesting case study in the political and emotional complexities of the Latin American domestic, her character’s motivations often evoke as much confusion as wonder. In the absence of some much needed exposition, The Maid’s heavy-handed silences, plaintive gazes, and inexplicable eruptions of laughter feel oddly sterile, and a contrived preciousness begins to creep over the film like an effluvial whitewash. Its abundance makes you aware there is a shabbiness hiding beneath the dramatic facade — the various stains and holes of an unrealized third act.

THE MAID opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

Hell yeah!

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Hell yeah!

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Before the Halloween and Friday the 13th series made slasher cinema’s top instruments of unstoppable evil, and after Frankenstein, Dracula, and Werewolf pretty much had their day, there was a brief sunny window of opportunity for Satan. Or rather, Satan and his Satanists — sounds like a garage band, yes? — who dominated horror for a few years highlighted by Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976). Not to mention 1975’s Race with the Devil, that same year’s The Devil’s Rain (Ernest Borgnine as Satan’s acolyte? Credible!) and 1973’s Satan’s School for Girls.

Ah, those were the days. Who gives much screen time to Beelzebub now, when the multiplexes are cluttered with routine slasher sequels and Japanese horror remakes?

Somebody called Ti West evidently does. Bringing it all back with extra hugs, his new The House of the Devil is a retro thrillfest quite happy to sacrifice that babysitter to the Dark Lord. Without even a tip for her labor.

"Based on true unexplained events" (uh-huh), the buzzed-about indie horror has fanboy casting both old school (Dee Wallace, Mary Woronov, Tom Noonan — all performing seriously rather than campily) and new (AJ Bowen of 2007’s The Signal and mumblecore regular Greta Gerwig). Its heroine (Jocelin Donahue), a 1980 East Coast collegiate sophomore desperate for rent cash so she can escape her dorm roomie’s loud nightly promiscuity, signs on for a baby- (actually, grandma-) sitting gig advertised on telephone poles. For tonight. During a lunar eclipse. Bad move.

The House of the Devil takes its time, springing nothing lethal until nearly halfway through. Even then, things escalate ever-so-slowly. Its 1980s setting allows for ultratight jeans, feathered hair, rotary dialing, a synth-New Wavey score, and other potentially campy elements the film manages to render respectfully appreciative rather than silly.

All freakdom doesn’t break loose until very late, at which point writer-director West effectively abandons all restraint (and hope), much assisted by The Last Winter (2006) composer Jeff Grace’s suddenly panicked score. The best contemporary horror has understood that potency of waiting. Prolonged development of relatable characters, agonizing our dread for their fates, amplifies standard terror to no end in movies like 2005’s Wolf Creek or Paranormal Activity.

House isn’t significantly better than various fine indie horrors of recent vintage and various nationality that went direct to DVD. (Quality, let alone originality, aren’t necessarily a commercial pluses in this genre.) But it is dang good, and that cuts it above most current theatrical horror releases. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t be watching 1977’s Suspiria, 2005’s Satan’s Playground, 1994’s Aswang (a.k.a. The Unearthling) or 1981’s Possession instead of this deft throwback: now those surreal visions truly gave the Devil his due.

THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL opens Fri/20 in San Francisco.

Cary Cronenwett

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Cary Cronenwett

Cary Cronenwett first heard the cinematic call in 1998. He was volunteering at Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, and caught an experimental film, Dandy Dust, by Austrian director A. Hans Schierl. "That made me think, ‘Wow — I could make a film.’ I think it’s a natural reaction that everybody has after watching a shorts program. I was like, ‘I’ll make something five minutes [long] — it’ll be really cool!’"

As Cronenwett soon realized, nothing is easy when it comes to filmmaking. In 2003, after more than a year of work, Phineas Slipped, a 16-minute short about daydreaming schoolboys, screened at Frameline. One of Phineas Slipped‘s main characters is played by Stormy Henry Knight, who also stars in Cronenwett’s debut feature, Maggots and Men. Earlier this year, Cronenwett described Knight to Guardian writer Matt Sussman as "the transgender Matt Dillon" — and the principle Maggots cast is composed of similarly hunky FTM actors, along with a handful of women and biological men (including a Lenin lookalike). The story is based on the real-life Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921, in which a group of sailors organized an ultimately unsuccessful revolt against the Bolshevik government. The style is reminiscent of Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s most famous film, a chapter of which gave Maggots its title.

"I hadn’t seen Battleship Potemkin [1925] when I had the idea [for Maggots and Men]," Cronenwett admits. "My interest was making a sailor movie and playing with the masculine icon. I wanted to do something that was really romantic and took place in a different time and place."

Five years in the making — including time spent studying filmmaking at City College of San Francisco — the work was first seen by Bay Area audiences as a short film at Frameline 2008. The final, 53-minute version unspooled at Frameline 2009; Cronenwett credits San Francisco’s vast DIY and artistic networks with helping him get to the finish line: "Different people got excited about the project for different reasons. Some people were drawn because they’re interested in Russian history, [or] Super 8 special effects. And then we had trans guys who were interested in working with other trans guys on an art project, which was exciting."

The film’s revolutionary ideas extend beyond historical reenactment. "The film contextualizes the movement for transgender equality in a larger social justice movement," Cronenwett wrote in a post-interview e-mail. "It’s about hope, a vision. It’s about the corruption of power and a system that crushes its opposition. It’s about wanting more from society."

www.homepage.mac.com/gowithflo/krondweb

>>GOLDIES 2009: The 21st Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery awards, honoring the Bay’s best in arts

Know the unknown

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Know the unknown

Straight-to-DVD bio-doc Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (Cinevolve, $24.95) is stylistically pretty ho-hum, especially for a film about one of the most creative minds in supernatural horror fiction. Talking heads and slow pans over illustrations do most of the heavy lifting, since the author, who died in 1937, apparently didn’t leave behind much in the way of photographs, recordings, diaries, or relatives. Still, the film offers an informative experience. For a guy obsessed with Old Ones and tentacled beasts, H.P. Lovecraft’s life was a fairly prim and stuffy affair: raised by a smothering mother whose old-guard family had fallen on hard times, he rarely strayed from his beloved Providence, R.I. He was a social misfit, a known xenophobe, a lousy husband, and too proud to take a pay-the-bills job (ghostwriting was as low as he’d stoop).

His imagination, however, was anything but ordinary. An early interest in paleontology and astrology informed his later work, which usually ended up being published in Weird Tales magazine for paltry sums ("The Call of Cthulhu" is said to have netted $165). Though his baroque, adjective-happy writing is gently mocked by the doc’s contributors (Neil Gaiman pokes fun at Lovecraft’s overuse of words like "gibbous"; Guillermo Del Toro calls his style "incredibly anal-retentive"), his use of mood is highly praised (John Carpenter notes that the narrators of Lovecraft’s tales "start terrified and end terrified.") In life, he may not have reached a wide audience — as the film points out, in the early 20th century science fiction was far more marginalized than it is today. But the eagerness of Gaiman, Del Toro, Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, and other celebs to chime in here — along with Lovecraft‘s shots of fan-friendly merch, including Cthulhu bedroom slippers — suggests the author of "The Outsider" has forever transcended the fringe.

www.wyrdstuff.com

Into the wilds

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Into the wilds

arts@sfbg.com
One painful component of the ever-escautf8g government service cutbacks, particularly in our own endlessly explorable state, has been the threat to parkland access. The notion that the national park system Wallace Stegner (and Ken Burns’ current PBS documentary series) called America’s "best idea" might someday be sold to the highest bidder seems blasphemous — unless, of course, you’ve never been (like most of the nation’s vacation-hobbled poor) or are in a position to make that buck.

Unintentionally assuaging that unfortunate final-future despoiling is new indie quasi-horror The Canyon, which asks the unmusical question: why, stupid humankind, did you ever think you belonged in wild country? "We don’t belong here," its hero realizes when camping misadventures have gone from rad to worse. Yeah, people should never intermingle with nature. That’s why we are born from robots, plastic afterbirth spilling into a soft cushion of Styrofoam curls then recycled into spin-off products for the Transformers films. "Soylent Green is PEEEEOPLE!!!" Actually that has no relevance here. Just thought I’d drop it in.

A first feature for director Richard Harrah and writer Steve Allrich, The Canyon falls firmly within that vacation-from-hell subgenre recently capped by the very clever, funny, and fairly freaky A Perfect Getaway. (None of which adjectives apply here, alas.) Other examples of late include the supernatural off-trail hazards of 2008’s The Ruins, several organ-harvesting horrors (2006’s Turistas), and numerous more films suggesting it’s best to stay the fuck home — this being a movie world, psychos and predators are everywhere.

The Canyon sports minor novelty in sticking to mainland U.S.A. terra firma, albeit a world-famous landmark — if a 227-mile long, 5.4-million-year-old, mile-deep gorge can be considered mere "landmark." Introduced in blandly nice/cute terms they never really recover from, swarthy Nick (Eion Bailey from HBO’s Band of Brothers) and perky blonde Lori (Yvonne Strahovski from NBC’s Chuck) are eloped newlyweds anticipating a mule-ride down to the Grand Canyon’s bottom that she’s not too keen on. She’s even less keen once it turns out Nick didn’t get the necessarily permits and their only option is signing on with "guide extraordinaire" Henry (Will Patton), whom they meet at a local bar and who doesn’t look so much a friend of nature as somebody freshly rolled in its excrement.

Nick’s enthusiasm wins out, though. It’s not spoiling too much to reveal that traveling with a slightly creepy guide fast proves better than having none at all, as one nasty incident leaves the trio sans mules, food, water, and worse. Things devolve from there, as our ill-skilled, mapless protagonists find themselves increasingly pressed for survival strategies. Stress (let alone inevitable stress-induced bickering) doesn’t reveal anything more interesting about our dull protagonists. But the eventual vigor with which body parts suffer and wild wolves inflict injury does juice this empty Canyon up, unpleasantly if more memorably. Do they deserve it?

Straining, the filmmakers suggest so. "You screw with Mother Nature, she’s gonna find a way to screw ya right back," Henry portentously intones — the message being that city folk have no business in the all-outdoors. Baby, please: the Sierra Club knows we get along just fine on those trails, leaving no carbon footprint besides.

THE CANYON opens Fri/30 in Bay Area theaters.

Once upon a time in England

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Once upon a time in England

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Some roles wring from an actor something they never had before, or might again. Who now recalls Eric Bana’s Aussie sketch comedian startlingly reinvented as bulked-up Chopper (2000), that native continent’s most notorious psychotic extortionist-killer-jailbird-celebrity autobiographer? Bana killed — more vividly than in any part serving his subsequent, slightly bland Hollywood leading-hunk status.

Tom Hardy is another handsome bloke at risk of looking competent and versatile without fully impressing. Yet here comes Bronson, a film (and role) highly analogous to Chopper — offering up a dramatized "Man. Myth. Celebrity" (as per its ad line) of actual "worst prisoner in Britain." The real Michael Gordon Peterson, better known as "Charles Bronson" (a PR-minded friend fitted the Death Wish star as nom de notoriety), was an extreme anger-management case whose working-class struggle ended when he robbed a post office in 1974.

As the film details, prison spectacularly agreed with the then 22-year-old "Bronson." (At one point he was briefly released because his in-house mayhem was simply costing the government too much.) He enjoyed the tension and violence — between himself and fellow inmates as well as guards — so much that he got sent to a high-security psychiatric hospital. Worry not: even drugged to the gills, he managed to create ruckuses that won national attention. Shaved, tatted, and ‘roided (OK, maybe it was just hard work) up for the part, Hardy has a field day.

This is the second English-language directing effort by Dane Nicolas Winding Refn, of the crime-drama Pusher trilogy starring the formidable Mads Mikkelsen. His next film, Valhalla Rising — again with Mikkelsen — is a Viking survivalist tone poem, less action-adventure than Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972).

Bronson is, by contrast, utterly revved up in a way that’s showy but not at all dumbed-down. Hardy’s prankster-rageaholic portrayal emerges amid several flavors: ironic Pulchinella à la contemporary music-theatre sensation Anthony Newley (Stop the World — I Want to Get Off); Tom of Finland bad-muscle-daddy fantasy (complete with nervously "gay" undercurrent); and adrenaline exercise of mainstreamed, po-mo directorial testosterone.

The frequently full-frontal Bronson (here definitely a shower, dunno about the growing) is a protagonist of scarifying ingeniousness and overpowering egocentrism. He’s a diamond-polished metaphor — miscreant, clown-star, possible bipolar case, all that and less. But Refn’s film itself is pure cinematic inspiration at least half-transcending even a case of snarkish homophobia (Bronson’s most insidious foes are his most snarkily friendly) as you haven’t seen since … well, Chopper maybe?

The elements theatrically winking at themselves lowline a package whose self-conscious dazzle betters any Brit crime flick in decades — not at all excluding anything by that flash pony Guy Richie (whose forthcoming Arthur Conan Doyle desecration we will never speak of again). It’s perhaps the most nastily great, stylish English gangster-type movie since Sexy Beast (2000) or Gangster No. 1 (2000), with an equally, heedlessly past-ordinary-pharmaceutical-help id as protagonist.

BRONSON opens Fri/30 in San Francisco.

Lars loves lars

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Lars loves lars

Will history judge Lars von Trier as the genius he’s sure he is? Or as a humorless, slightly less cartoonish Ken Russell, whipping images and actors into contrived frenzies for ersatz art’s sake? You’re probably already on one side of the fence or the other. Notorious Cannes shocker Antichrist will only further divide the yeas and nays.

Seriously: why does von Trier’s particular misanthropy and misogyny make him an auteur with something to say about the human condition (as opposed to a neurotic whose particular hangups — fear of sex, for starters — might better work out in therapy)?

His endlessly violated, saintly, often pea-brained victims — previously played by Björk, Nicole Kidman, and Emily Watson — embody phony innocence to hammer home indictments of horrible humanity dependent on cartooned melodrama. Dogme 95’s "rules" briefly enlivened international cinema before becoming a tiresome fad. Less liberating than puritanical, their restrictions painted all other cinema decadent.

Antichrist does offers perhaps the most formally beautiful filmmaking von Trier’s bothered with since 1984’s The Element of Crime. Grieving parents Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe retreat to a forest primeval enabling widescreen images of poetic succulence. Yet that beauty only underlines Antichrist‘s garishness. One film festival viewer purportedly barfed onto the next row — and you too might recoil, particularly if unaccustomed to gore levels routinely surpassed by mainstream horror.

Does Antichrist earn such viewer punishment by dint of moral, character, narrative, or artistic heft? Like slurp it does. What could be more reactionary than an opening in which our protagonists "cause" their angelic babe’s accidental death by obliviously enjoying one another? Shot in "lyrical" slow-mo black and white, it’s a shampoo commercial hard-selling Victorian sexual guilt.

Later, Dafoe’s "He" clings to hollow psychiatric reason as only an embittered perennial couch case might imagine. Gainsbourg’s "She" morphs from maternal mourner to castrating shrike as only one terrified of femininity could contrive. They’re tortured by psychological and/or supernatural events existing solely to bend game actors toward a tyrant artiste’s whims.

There’s no devil here — just von Trier’s punitive narcissism. His fuzzed point is finally just old-school, arted-up revulsion toward that gender that both engulfs and births the male member. Antichrist offers the punitive sound of Lars’ one hand, slapping.

ANTICHRIST opens Fri/23 in San Francisco.

Is the truth out there?

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Is the truth out there?

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Habitual attendees of documentary films in San Francisco might be surprised to see so many familiar titles in this year’s SF DocFest lineup. At least one (American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art, which played the Red Vic a few months back) is skippable. Others — like I Need That Record: The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, Off and Running, and especially Johnny Weir portrait Pop Star on Ice — make welcome returns. But the standout film is brand-new to these parts, and since it’s the closing-night film, it screens only once. Fans of true crime, urban legends, twisted suburbia, and serial killers won’t want to miss Cropsey.

For kids growing up on Staten Island — including codirectors Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman — "Cropsey" was the name given to the faceless boogeyman who lurked in the woods, slaking his bloodthirsty urges with disobedient children. (The name spread into popular culture with 1981 summer-camp slasher The Burning, featuring a bad guy named "Cropsy.") Sure, logic dictates that boogeymen aren’t real, but kids of Staten Island might’ve had trouble believing that. First of all, the husk of Willowbrook State School, subject of an infamous 1972 TV expose by a young Geraldo Rivera, loomed nearby; it closed in 1987, years after the horrible conditions within were exposed. Then, that same year, a 12-year-old girl with Down syndrome disappeared, and was found dead a month later. Suddenly, the Cropsey legend no longer felt like fiction.

A multilayered doc that’s clearly the product of a genuinely curious filmmaking team, Cropsey digs into Staten Island’s history to explore the community’s reaction to the tragedy, and to the man eventually charged for it: Andre Rand. Rand’s wild-eyed, drooling perp walk was enough to convince the general public, police, and media (the New York Daily News called him the "Hannibal Lecter of Staten Island") of his guilt. And he was a shady character, a former Willowbrook employee who’d taken to camping out among its abandoned buildings. He also had a history of sexual crimes against children. But, as Brancaccio and Zeman discover, there was no evidence, beyond unreliable eyewitnesses, that tied him to the girl’s disappearance. As Cropsey unfolds in true crime-drama style, fact and folklore become increasingly tangled; the viewer is openly encouraged to consider every angle with equal gravity.

Just as disturbing, but in a marginally less sinister and more overtly entertaining way, is the Johnny Knoxville-produced The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. Fans of Jesco "Dancing Outlaw" White, take note: Wild follows White’s entire family, all as quotable and lawbreaking as he is, for a year, chronicling births, deaths, jail ins and outs, pill-popping, pill-snorting, public drunkenness, gunplay, DIY tattooing, and questionable parenting (and grandparenting). Fortunately it’s not completely exploitative, though the above description may suggest otherwise.

SF DOCFEST

Oct 16–29, $11

Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF

www.sfindie.com

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