Archive for June, 2009

The International (2009)

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

the-international-movie-posterOne awaits the new revolution. With do-it-yourself filmmaking/distributing technology growing more and more accessible, with theatre prices, environments, and product, yes, product, becoming less and less tenable, with the zeitgeist approaching combustible levels of consumption and frustration, one can’t help but wonder when everything will, in a movie sense, explode – ideally spawning a pop-art movement comparable, in its way, to the 1960s-1970s American movie movement. It hasn’t happened yet – the only trends I’ve noticed, on a broad level, are: the populace indulging their narcissism to previously unfathomable degrees, and pop/Oscar profile pictures becoming more self-conscious and less fun, laboring to “reflect the times” while failing to actually penetrate the times (all pretense to the contrary, these pictures are too beholden to formula) or to even politely provide diversion. These pictures are wet blankets – the worst of both worlds, food that doesn’t taste good and that isn’t good for you. The biggest of these movies is undeniably The Dark Knight, which is already beginning to show its age, but there’s also the over-praised Children of Men, and, on a smaller scale, pictures like Michael Clayton (which I enjoyed), The Visitor, and the awful Babel. Here’s the key: provide honest diversion, or risk alienating your audience trying to forge something new, or use formula as a structure to contain honest sentiment (not sentimentality) and feeling (a few from last year: Rachel Getting Married, Shotgun Stories, Happy-Go-Lucky; a few from this year: Adventureland, Coraline, Tyson).

The International is another formula picture with a contemp-gloom wax job, where two dull leads – in this case Clive Owen and Naomi Watts – ping-pong laughably earnest exposition back and forth for the better part of two hours. There’s one nifty moment, a gunfight in the Guggenheim, that doesn’t have much of anything to do with anything beyond rewarding the audience for its patience. One almost forgets that the director, Tom Tykwer, once made a marvelous movie called Run Lola Run – in which action momentum became a character of its own and more nimbly reflected the anxiety of its heroes than this picture. (Tykwer must have exhausted his sense of pace with Lola, he’s since made The Princess and the Warrior, Heaven, and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, all ambitious, none particularly successful).

The International would normally be adequate-forgettable, but the waste of Tykwer, Owen and Watts raises frustration. I’ve read a number of “Why Isn’t Owen a Star?” pieces, and the answer is that a movie-star has to be above-human with just enough human left to allow you to project yourself onto them, to wear them as a surrogate for most of the picture. Owen is above-human, and that’s it, no one can hope to meet or be him, and, to be fair, I’m not sure many, besides certain women briefly, would even want to; he’s a movie-god in a smothering, unsurprising way. In the right role, Owen can be effective, such as in Croupier, Gosford Park, and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, but those pictures played on his resentment and channeled it as something electric and mysterious. In most American movies, Owen’s just a good-looking prick, and the resentment is a black-hole of charisma. Sadly, Owen reflects the new movie-star, which aligns with the joylessness of most mainstream movies – the new star is lifelessly set on being a “star” or a “star/actor” and these stars, partially through over-exposure through the new omnipresent media, come off as too calculating (the calculation was always there, of course, we just didn’t see it) and strained, there’s no debauched sense of simply being, of embodying our movie fantasies, and this self-pitying impression is insulting to those of us on the outside looking in. The stars, living this life, can’t, or won’t, at least share it with us in their movies – they want god glamour and power and everyman pity, and that’s too much (though Owen doesn’t, refreshingly, strive for pity). Beyond the gunfight, there are two other noteworthy exchanges in The International, and both are memorable for the wrong reasons, they deflate Owen’s image: Owen growling “I want some fucking justice” with so much venom it becomes parody; and Watts telling him that he “looks awful”. The latter, Watts’ only moment of any discernable spark, is so on-the-nose with what the audience is thinking (and he looks awful in that wonderful, masculinity-accentuating fashion that insults people who authentically look awful) that you can’t help but laugh.

Naomi Watts gave one of the strongest, most original performances of the decade in Mulholland Dr., and she was rewarded in the usual new-Hollywood way: to suffer through hot-but-not-twenty Girl Friday roles in high-budget, high-prestige B movies or through hyperventilating, miserable-because-she-has-money housewives in have-it-both-ways art-fare (we can call this the Lane/Madsen/Moore/Connelly/on-and-on syndrome). The International gives Watts the most glaringly besides-the-point role I’ve personally seen her play, she has nothing to do but tell Owen he looks bad and just-narrowly miss the few scenes that marginally move the picture forward. The International tries to plumb the terror of the human-obliterating rise of big business as hidden dictator, but we don’t feel any loss or threat – the humans have already been obliterated.

Posted in 2009, Action, Drama, Reviews | 2 Comments »

Tyson (2009)

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

tyson21The number of writers and filmmakers befriending/aligning themselves with beautiful/dangerous surrogates is never-ending (Mailer, Capote, Von Sternberg, Hitchcock, Godard, etc, etc) and filmmaker James Toback, most frequently linked to Mailer and known for his hubris and self-promotion and gambling and consumption, is another in the tradition. A collector of novelty accomplices, Toback seems to have found in the ex-heavy-weight champ Mike Tyson the most succinct and perfect embodiment of his own world view, his part fantasy-lit world of ironically wounded, existential masculine poetry. Tyson looks to be the ultimate stereotypical white-man nightmare: built, vicious, painted for war, with a speed (seen in footage here) that remains startling, with that little-boy lisp that tempts one to chuckle – to forget the ferocity of the caged animal. It’s no mystery why so many writers get off on these types of symbiotic relationships: their subjects have on the outward – the danger, the mystery, the conflict, the paradox – what is primarily for them limited to the inward, what they compensate for in their power of their writing. And the subjects’ attraction to the writers is driven by an equal yearning – the writers lend them the complexity and glamour of the writer – the writer gives them the inward that everyone else perceives, perhaps correctly, not to exist at all. These two half public-beings, probably everything they are because of their resentment of missing the other half, manage to find one another.

I have a limited taste for Toback’s brand of willing art into existence, which I see more as a tending of reputation than any particular drive to create a great picture. There are moments of chaos in the pictures, which more recently include Two Girls and a Guy, Black and White, and When Will I Be Loved, that seem to point toward something legitimate -a prodding of social pressure, such as some of the racial combat in Black and White. And one respects, to an extent, Toback’s knock-a-script-out-in-two-hours carelessness, because the work, when it connects, has a tinge of danger – there is no self-censoring (Toback’s sex-race gymnastics are braver than, say, Spike Lee’s, the latter having cultural guilt and self-righteousness to fall back on, though I find most of Lee’s work more racist); but the lack of self-censoring is a shield in itself, a badge of honor to deflect from the sloppiness, and the price for every earned moment is that every other moment is almost entirely unwatchable or falls back on typically manly-man intellectual (the intellectual who desperately wants to be the manly man, and vice-versa) sexism.

Tyson is far and away the best James Toback picture I’ve seen; his obsessions fuse with his star’s seamlessly, effortlessly, and the picture has a humanity that is new to Toback’s work – that’s cleansing. Tyson satisfies Toback’s taste for extremity-as barometer-of-existence. Off the bat, Toback has the metaphor he wants, and so he eases back, simultaneously more focused and leisurely (opening split screens, which initially appear show-off, come to be justified – we’re seeing the slightly contradictory Tysons in conversation). There are maintenances of rep here too; one senses a certain self-congratulation from Toback for taking an unbiased portrait of such a divisive (at best) figure on, but that’s minimal, and is probably more from knowledge of Toback’s prior movies than anything else. The method here is simple and oft-used: several long takes of Tyson sitting on a couch talking of the various moments in his life with which you are primarily familiar. The prolonged exposure to Tyson’s iconic-defensive sing-song voice, a baby’s rasp if a baby could rasp, is jarring at first, we’re used to only hearing him in little clips from movies and in bits and pieces on ESPN, and Toback seems to have had that in mind, because something shocking happens: the voice becomes authentically beautiful, self-revealing in a way that is probably partially, but not totally, calculated (either that or Tyson is a powerful/resourceful actor, and needs to be contacted for more than self-parody).

Toback manages the most important feat of a documentary: to capture the nature of the subject and to reveal in that subject a larger meaning without compromising the subject or the meaning; without perverting non-fiction material to fit the more traditional/rational confines of fiction filmmaking. This unforced universality eluded the filmmakers of last year’s well-regarded Man on Wire; it was pleasurable, well-made with a number of the little art-film tricks that we enjoy – but the ultimate point of the picture, that we were supposed to glean some sort of carpe diem meaning from an egotistical showboat disinterested in anyone’s welfare apart from his own, was absurd and borderline offensive to the other people involved in the story. Toback puts us in his Tyson’s head, and remains there for the better part of ninety minutes, without letting us forget that this view is Tyson’s and Tyson’s alone – the monologue allows the fighter dignity, while still allowing that he is disturbed, and this points towards one of Toback’s favorite writer-ly themes: the man alone, trapped in his head, the man who attempted to purify and atone with indulgence left with nothing but the wreckage of the indulgence. Tyson paints himself as continually scared, vulnerable, and Toback contrasts him with early footage of a reaction to a heckling reporter, who he threatens to “fuck up the ass”. The cutting from past-to-present Tyson could have been glib, but Toback’s structure is subtler than he will probably get credit for – we’re seeing how we see Tyson and how Tyson sees Tyson, and this understanding comes to signify larger societal disconnections: race, class, sex.

Tyson is a refute to most documentaries, and to most broad mid-class pictures that feign empathy with another only to project their sensibility onto said other (such as the “magic negro” movies oft ridiculed). Toback’s white-upper-class envy/idolization of Tyson’s blunt power fuels both the curiosity and the energy of the picture, and steers it from pat sentimentality. I’ve heard concern, and was concerned myself, with Toback’s potential approach – one that could cheapen and trivialize events in Tyson’s life such as the rape conviction, but the director is true to the conceit of the picture and to the picture’s central object – you walk away believing that he probably thinks he’s innocent and, just as you accept that, Tyson blindsides with the hauntingly throw-away admission that he “took advantage of other girls”. This is, of course, a common ploy to the abuser, to admit just enough to allow the other side to forgive you – to understand that you understand, but Toback – a-manipulative sensation-junkie himself, doesn’t let Tyson off; this picture reaches an understanding of its subject by allowing the subject to grapple with himself in a public forum more controlled than the press, to use the justifiably derided media as a method of recovery. Many, accustomed to more pat/apologetic American views of film and media, will think Toback’s picture a cop-out, but it reaches toward something larger than apology, it strives towards a merging of those halves, a blurring of all the personal demons and limitations that hold us back – that keep us trapped, in unyielding mid-howl.

Posted in 2009, Documentary, Reviews | 2 Comments »

Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine 3-D (2009)

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

friday_the_13th_movie_posterWhy is Jason Voorhees, hero of the Friday the 13th series as well as murderer of hundreds of people world-plus wide, thought of as…cute? Familiarity is a partial answer, breeding not only contempt but irony (the same thing in this context) but there’s also the rock star thing. Jason, the drowned (sometimes deformed, sometimes retarded) boy, dead from camp counselors getting theirs – personifies that dweeb-to-badass fantasy that powers quite a bit of particularly 1980s rock-n-roll and movies; Jason even looked like a rocker, taking inspiration from them and giving it back to the next generation (Slipknot, etc). Jason, impaling and chopping people to-and-fro, normally somewhat sympathetic when contrasted with victim, was, yes, just another 1980s go-go, be-all-you-can-be fantasy. In the 1980s, Jason had the slight befuddlement of the Frankenstein monster, with several crucial differences, the most important being: he.got.shit.done.

The Friday the 13th pictures were junk, but they were a certain generation of sexual frustrated boy’s junk, they were our junk; and the barely-competent production values and incompetent direction only enhanced their appeal and approachability (and, yes, the pictures looked like cheap music videos). It’s probably generational, but one of the more depressing things about the new junk is the impersonal, new-video polish, these remakes – looking like Diet Coke commercials – are still largely incompetent, even visually – but they rely on different, less appealing tricks. The blood is usually computer enhanced, the cutting accelerated to mask an inability with, indifference to, spatial specifics (the old movies didn’t bother covering up for themselves, another appreciated honesty). Marcus Nispel, the director, also of the best-forgotten The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remake, announces his botching of the old Jason pictures from the get-go: ruining a potentially bravura opening (the end of the original movie) with smooth fake effects and momentum-killing splices in between the opening credits. The original picture is a slog – but it has a moldy, mucky atmosphere – we feel stuck in a deranged, stank summer-camp (yes, that passes for a compliment in this series); the new picture is clearly sets, and the hot girls and clueless hunks are too clearly groomed – their sex having the robotic, impersonal rodeo-tantrics of the new post-Basic Instinct era sex (when there is any sex at all these days). Remaking Friday the 13th in this fashion is like hearing that that restaurant on 5th Street you hated but went to anyway for the coffee and chicks is being closed and that another higher-end, still impersonal, more-expensive, still shitty, restaurant is being opened in its place, and you still go for the hot chicks and coffee; but this time you hate not only the restaurant, but yourself for submitting to the hypocrisy in addition to all the other compromises your frequenting of the original restaurant represented. And, yes, the kills are boring.

I haven’t seen the original My Bloody Valentine, now reborn as this year’s My Bloody Valentine 3-D, blame that oversight on the video store I frequented growing up. If they’d had it, I’m sure it would’ve been among the titles of negotiating that my dear, wonderful mother had to weather every weekend growing up (including the original Jason movies, the Freddys, and The Fly remake and The Exorcist). If you can accept that ignorance, then maybe you can buy that the new My Bloody Valentine is far more fun and involving than the new Friday the 13th. Directed by Patrick Lussier (of Dracula 2000), the new Valentine is better paced, funnier, and has a few legitimately inspired kills (look for the missing jaw) as well as Tom Atkins, a staple from pictures such as The Fog, Halloween III and Lethal Weapon. Valentine still has a disturbing, unintentional, context: the picture opens with Atkins as the Sheriff of Smalltownsville, Random State, USA, only to flash forward ten years to reveal Dawson’s Creek pretty-boy Kerr Smith (who, despite his actual age, barely looks old enough to pass for even a victim) as his replacement. The Starbucks-ing of something once (kinda) naughty continues, and the men recede into the background. The counselors always win Jason.

Posted in 2009, Horror, Reviews | No Comments »

Momma’s Man (2008)

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

mmMany movies, high-profile, low-profile, good, bad, big-budget, low-budget, have a habit of making people’s quarter and/or mid-life crisis look more fun than most people’s actual fun. The movie crisis tends to be hip – the characters’ emotions choked in a way that’s extremely photogenic and chic – normally as they try to start a band or settle for teaching sophomore English in a small college, while juggling a wife and a curvy, new, usually younger, thing. The typical middle-class American person, the person who probably resented those band and drama guys in school, now has the added insult of watching as their disappointments and confusions are transferred to those folks; the movies confirming that the sexy, the glamorously tortured, truly have it all. This can be seen in the “mumblecore” movies, which, excluding Bujalski, usually play as sitcoms without the dialogue or pace, and in Wes Anderson’s movies: Bill Murray’s misery is too damn cool to count as real misery; and The Darjeeling Limited, which is one of Anderson’s most pared, disciplined, even movies, still presents us an ideal: depression and ennui as a French New Wave playground. (This can also be seen, in far, far worse instances, in movies such as Failure to Launch and Step Brothers.)

True middle-American confusion is rarely played straight, because it’s depressing and potentially boring and, as subjects for ninety or more minutes go, doesn’t sound all that appetizing. But it should be. There’s comfort in having your most intimate feelings of inferiority confirmed, and hopefully explored, as universal, particularly by an artist with perspective and vision. This taps into the cleansing quality of movies. There are times, especially in the generation just now graduating into adulthood (I’m 29), in which we, conditioned by our parents and society to expect to be special, feel so anonymous and crushingly pointless that we, to be oddly specific, want to crawl into a cardboard box and have someone close to us tape it up and stuff us in the closet for a few days – that closed in cocoon constriction feeling shockingly comfortable and just about right – reducing our world to just the immediate problem – us. This is why we’re the biggest generation of mama’s boys yet – feeling that we’re meant for more, we settle for nothing for longer, living with our parents, staying out of commitments to significant others, we keep our lives in a much longer “pause” cycle, because nothing meets our fantasy of ourselves, a fantasy largely confirmed by the movies.

Momma’s Man may make you nervous at first, it opens on one of those protracted, pregnant pauses that all but define a certain class of independent movie, but you should stick it out, this is one of the rare pictures that presents that “who.the.fuck.am.i?” panic in a fashion that’s truer to many more people than the pictures discussed above. Our hero here, Mikey (Matt Boren), startles us immediately, because we’re so brainwashed by movie conventions to expect a more sterile, handsome stand-in; we’re taught to expect disconnection right off the bat. Its not that Mikey is overtly unappealing, it’s that he looks like most of us – a little chubby, kinda anonymous, authentically self-pitying and terrified. So terrified, in fact, that he decides to visit his parents, Mom and Dad (Flo and Ken Jacobs) while on a business trip, and, after a bit, finds it impossible to ever actually leave – resorting to increasingly desperate lies to justify his continued presence.

P.S., the movie with Laura Linney and Topher Grace, was largely forgettable, but there was a moment, post-coital, between the two, with Linney explaining to him the pain of casual life that will eventually come to enrich his art (she asks him to picture standing in the mirror, putting on a suit, for a thankless job, buttoning his sagging mid-section up) that stuck – and Momma’s Man ruptures the same nerve. There’s a quiet suspense to the picture that keeps it humming (how long will Mikey keep this up, when will his family, including a wife and child, eventually turn on him? When will his job swallow him?), but the real appeal is in writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ (Flo and Ken, the filmmaker, are his parents) confidence with setting and tone – he captures wanting to wrap yourself in a blanket (or that box – which admittedly has a creepy Poe vibe) and hide in the corner of a place you’ve known all your life. Momma’s Man is an attempt to go home again, a re-exploration of the cocoon.

The cocoon, as it’s been written elsewhere, is a character in itself. The Jacobs couple’s home outside of the movie as well, the place is one of those humane, bohemian wonderlands that seem to only belong to acclaimed, obscure indie/experimental filmmakers; except that it lacks the self-righteous elitism that can characterize those environments. One of the strengths of Momma’s Man is that we grasp Mikey and his parents’ yearnings equally: his parents are fiercely caring yet tentative – we, particularly in the mother, see her question the effect of the extent of her devotion on her son. The father is more remote, but the usual points aren’t scored on him for this, we sense his attempt to counter-balance the mother – we see his kindness. The home, part art-gallery, part warehouse, part loft, reflects these sensibilities – a paradise of clutter that we fantasize about in our down-out moments, that’s alienating and bracing at the same time. This picture understands the soothing quality of bric-a-brac, and plays, on a micro-level, as a gentle, sad, refute of the currents of privilege that have left us more and more defenseless. Azazel Jacobs could have made a satire with this material, and we still need one, but what he’s done with Momma’s Man is braver and more admirable: he asks us to look, to understand, and to give a damn.

Posted in 2008, Drama, Reviews | 1 Comment »

He’s Just Not That Into You (2009)

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

hes-just-not-that-into-youThere is a self-fulfilling ignorance that many moviegoers inflict upon themselves: movies as more expensive TV – something to numb the head while drinking a beer after a typically deflating day at work. Why put yourself in for more of that spit-shine and delusion on your own time? Why continually consume movies in which a complicit agreement is made between the audience and the producers: “we won’t challenge you, we won’t present anything that resembles, or attempts to clarify, how we win and lose our lives on a daily basis; and, to avoid entirely insulting your intelligence, we’ll drop a dollop of irony so as to mutually remind ourselves of how effectively we’re wasting your time”. Too many of the movies have this issue: a refusal to comment on or engage in life (or to even try something new for the sake of fun), perpetuated by the myth that engagement isn’t entertaining, its work. Many of us are rarely engaged at work, that’s why its work.

There’s a depressing impersonality in most movies that’s even more galling in the typical romantic comedy; because these pictures are, in general, failing so badly to capture an aspect of life that’s vulnerable and confusing, instead of empathizing, these pictures continue to drive a myth that continues to make us feel worse. Our real romances are characterized by unexplained attractions and contradictions, mistimed emotion, lust, desperation, groping, affection, touching, comfort, unexpected communication, etc – and all most romantic comedies can give us is the all-important pursuit of the “one”, with pratfalls in case we get uncomfortable. What’s at stake is rarely established, because the pictures are too skittish – these movies have barely progressed beyond the separate beds of 1950s TV shows. I think of that wonderful scene in the first third of Live Flesh where Javier Bardem, taking a bath, squeezes his wife’s ass and goes down on her, hungrily; later on, when her loss is possible, we feel that threat, we feel how much Bardem wants her, and we understand his connection to her. Or, more recently, the love scene in the wonderful Happy-Go-Lucky: we’ve spent over an hour with Sally Hawkins’ Poppy and we know her courageous refusal to throw away her right to happiness; and that makes her love scene, with a man who looks at her with more authentic feeling than any Hollywood hunk would bother to muster, actually mean something – we feel these two touching, reveling in one another. Can you name any such moment in a Zellweger/Hudson/Wilson/McConaughey/Vaughn/Aniston movie? These pictures deny us the pleasure of what these characters claim to be pursuing, in favor of frantic, faux-energy.

The new Jennifer Aniston-featured movie, He’s Just Not That Into You, co-starring seemingly everyone 25-40ish of a certain physical appeal with a career of any kind of reward or promise (Drew Barrymore, Scarlett Johannson, Jennifer Connelly, Bradley Cooper, Justin Long, Ginnifer Goodwin) is okay on its terms, but it those terms that I object to – it can’t help but be corrupted by this hive approach that’s thoughtlessly dominated so many movies. All the characters get in a hissy over the “one”, and any real feeling of connection is sidelined for endless talk and pursuit and miscommunications, for a zaniness that cheapens actual longing. He’s Just Not That Into You is all surface, the characters saying exactly what they’re thinking at any given time, all to move forward to the next crack-wise or bit of frivolous angst; it’s a sitcom structured around several couples – meaning it turns the channels for you.

But the cynicism has been mercifully turned down; we sense, to an extent, good intentions. The picture is occasionally charming, and at least makes overtures to acknowledging hypocrisy and how blossoming technologies have complicated contact that was already complicated enough for many of us (Barrymore, a gifted comedienne underused here, has a funny line about her gadgets). He’s Just Not That Into You also has an unexpectedly moving, sexy performance from Goodwin: stuck as the shrew in Walk the Line, she gets to have fun here. The role, the geeky one who “feels” so she can redeem the player, isn’t too much, but Goodwin doesn’t, refreshingly, project awareness of that; she dives headfirst, she giggles and stutters and her eyes have a need that the movie eventually shortchanges; you feel protective toward her, and wish her more.

Posted in 2009, Comedy, Reviews | 3 Comments »

Killshot (2009)

Friday, June 5th, 2009

killshotIt’s tempting to underestimate the task of making an Elmore Leonard novel, which is nearly always driven almost entirely by dialogue, a movie. He essentially wrote a script to begin with right? Right and wrong; Leonard, maybe the most purely enjoyable great writer working, is trickier than he may at first seem. Leonard’s work moves like greased lightning, but there’s pit stops and diversions and room for plenty of bullshitting (his books are life disguised as genre); and those elements tend to conflict with one another in a movie – you either have to go with the pace or the bullshit. More recently, (Leonard has been inspiring movies for fifty years) the Get Shorty movie went with the pace, and would’ve gotten away with it too if it hadn’t sanded the characters’ viciousness down for a cartoon-balloon effect. Leonard’s characters are funny, but in an offhand, incidental way, to get that humor, and the malevolence, you need to keep the bullshit. Jackie Brown, Tarantino’s film of Rum Punch, comes pretty damn close; but, in closely heeding the bullshit quality, he loses the Leonard pace – the picture, which I love, dawdles, and plays more like Tarantino (who has taken as much from Leonard as any of the European directors critics name). The movie of Out of Sight comes closest – written by Scott Frank, of Get Shorty, and directed by Steven Soderbergh, who keeps the thing moving, keeps the violence, and allows the characters the wrinkles and contradictions that seem so natural and effortless in Leonard’s books.

The easiest way to totally the miss the point of a Leonard book is too strip-mine it for plot. Plot, which Leonard casually subverts all the time, is beside the point – he writes comedies of manners, where failing to read the signs and be hip to the scam and lingo get you killed. I don’t know how much the new-to-DVD Killshot, which has been delayed and monkeyed with for four odd years, represents director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) and screenwriter Hossein Amini’s intentions, but the end result is the worst kind of way to miss the point: it’s competent, well-meaning, and dry as a bone. Even the movie of Be Cool, which is as embarrassing as you’ve heard, at least has some sort of train-wreck quality that could almost be called energy. Killshot is a polite USA network movie that hits most of the book’s plot beats in a tidy, ninety minutes and fades. If you do something somewhat stressful after watching it – yoga, a phone call, clipping your nails – you might forget you’ve ever seen it. The cast – Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Thomas Jane, Diane Lane, Rosario Dawson and Mickey Rourke – stranded without any detectable sensibility behind the camera – falls back on their convenient, water-proof personas. Gordon-Levitt does the livid, Ben Foster, method-alien psycho routine that young actors favor in these sorts of movies – it’s his worst work. Thomas Jane and Diane Lane are husband-n-wife in peril, no more, possibly less. Rosario Dawson, whose character, in the book, bed-hopped between the Rourke and Gordon-Levitt characters, is a cheerless casualty here – Leonard has never been this stingy with character. Rourke? He does that autopilot version of neo-Rourke: every line pregnant with penance, studliness, and droop-doubt – he, even in off stuff, which this most certainly is, could make an instance of eating Cheerios more absurd, and dangerous, than the entirety of this Killshot.

Posted in 2009, Reviews, Thriller | 3 Comments »

Women Torn: The Girlfriend Experience, Drag Me to Hell (2009)

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

the-girlfriend-experienceThere’s a spark in Steven Soderbergh’s good movies, a friction between the filmmaker’s sensibility and one that’s more conventional to the material. Soderbergh is one of the few American directors who distrusts sentiment, and that alone distinguishes him from most of his peers. Many (especially American) filmmakers wallow in sentiment, offering nothing else – they’re usually terrified of leaving the audience to their own impression: they push you in the shallow feelings like one might push their dog in a mess on the rug. In good Soderbergh pictures, you feel the emotions and the heat in an offhand way – the (typically wonderful) performances rub up against the more formalist intentions and that, without straining, reflects and enriches the forces opposing the characters in the picture. (We, for example, feel the lovers’ conflict and uncertainty in Out of Sight, because Soderbergh, as the filmmaker, is just as unsure of those beloved “types”.) It may not be fashionable to say this, but Soderbergh’s mainstream-aimed pictures are, normally, with exceptions, stronger; because that tension doesn’t usually exist in his lower budget, ostensibly more personal films; in those films (Bubble, being the most recent) we are in an inflexible, unyielding zone; one note, over and over: a vague, occasionally smug, self-conscious wandering, a search for some new form that never materializes; the characters trapped in the director’s fiddling pre-determination.

In The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh and his protagonist, Chelsea (Sasha Grey), are simpatico in a way that I’ve never quite seen in his work. Chelsea is an ambitious, presumably high-priced escort haunted by the kind of self-consciousness that informs Soderbergh’s films; she wants to be good, and she wants to be acclaimed, and every scene of the film is somehow built around what she wants and how she veils what she wants so as to project the air of already being what she wants. Sharks – journalists, insider-wannabes, clients – are in constant circle, nipping, wanting a piece without paying for it. Soderbergh has worked miracles with actors before, particularly with Debbie Doebereiner in Bubble, and his touch is just as sure with porn star Grey – who has an air, of being plucked straight from her habitat, that’s almost impossible to achieve, especially in more neo-real intended pictures. Grey, a stunner (she looks a bit like Anna Paquin, if Paquin was a sexually striking figure in a Godard movie), has a voice that doesn’t quite match her, and that mismatch, the lower, tentative sound with curves the stuff of fantasy, deepens the illusion of the performance; we see her vulnerability, her naiveté, and her calculation, without one cheapening or rationalizing another.

The Girlfriend Experience is the companion piece to sex, lies, and videotape that Soderbergh pretended Full Frontal to be. sex, lies, released in 1989, was an intimate chamber piece with characters distracting themselves from their hurt and uselessness with infidelity, and, upon losing that novelty, seeking comfort in something even more transparently artificial and anonymous; the picture punctured the depressing, inhuman, yuppie go-go crap of the 1980s, and is oddly, chillingly, prescient of the new decade, only with the internet as the new remove. The Girlfriend Experience, released a month or so ago, in 2009, is an intimate chamber piece, set before Obama’s election, with characters distracting themselves from economic panic, as well as, of course, the usual, dependable feelings of uselessness, with sex divorced from the illusion of attachment. Sex paid for, sex tied to money, connects the elite to the something they tangibly know and fear to be losing. But the attachment, illusory or not, lingers – the characters, of sex or Girlfriend, can never quite dehumanize themselves to their satisfaction. Chelsea’s clients give one the impression of beetles scrambling once a rock has been lifted. Money is the current, the means of communication, and the threatened diminishment of that current bleeds into every other aspect, true and false, of the characters’ lives, sending them all, including Chelsea, into a tailspin.

And this setting, and context, drains the inevitable “client who might be the one” device of its usual convenience. Soderbergh spends all of possibly ninety seconds on that development, the lover having disappeared, via Soderbergh’s chronological splintering, before we even know he had appeared. The lover is an intrusion of self-delusion, acknowledged thusly, and forgotten, and this lends Chelsea poignancy (though this is undeniably a male movie, removed in a male way, a picture that can’t help but put you in the position of the clientele, wanting more! of the central object). The final pre-credits image is one of the strongest in Soderbergh’s career, and one that could have been imported from or to sex, lies, and videotape: a man holding Chelsea, still partially clothed, and already coming – he can’t hope to penetrate her.

I could’ve lived without Soderbergh’s showier, consciously-art, repetitions, which occasionally court the judgmental stupidity of prior pictures. We understand, for instance, by about the tenth juxtaposition that we’re meant to see Chelsea’s profession as not all that different from the journalists pestering her, or from the ambitious boyfriend angling for a raise from his gym. The comparisons with the journalists lack subtlety, and remind you why Soderbergh can be problematic when left entirely up to his own devices; and the boyfriend’s inclusion in this parallel is unfair, as he seems to be striving for what any person of any reasonable ambition would be, after a time. (This goes to show that it’s always easier to decry money when you already have it.) But The Girlfriend Experience is a haunting achievement; Soderbergh’s empathy with Chelsea transcends the moralizing.

The Girlfriend Experience, a low-budget respite from big-budget obligations, would make an ideal pairing with Drag Me to Hell, another big director’s low-budget leave, as an “ambitious girls as victims and/or symptoms of our diseased culture” double feature. Drag Me to Hell is the new horror picture from Sam Raimi, his first since hitting the big time with the Spiderman movies. Horror nerds, myself included, had probably written Raimi off after the one-two disappointment of seeing the uneven, bloated Spiderman 3 and reading that the potentially redemptive Drag Me to Hell, after goading us with that great title, would be “only PG-13”. I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it – Hell is as tonally screwy as anything Raimi has made since his original Evil Dead: the win-win wedding of the old crazy splatstick Raimi spewing blood and pus everywhere with the polished craftsman who made the overbearing but wrenching A Simple Plan and the underrated The Gift. Raimi has learned to twist you in knots without the blood, what he’s devised here, with his brother Ivan, splits and subverts sympathies to get at something chillingly close to the discord one would imagine of a Chuck Jones cover of a Val Lewton picture. After turning down an old crone’s loan extension request to curry favor with her boss, Christine (Alison Lohman, in a warm, endearing, wonderfully not-quite-there performance that’s essential to the picture) is left scrambling to undo a curse that threatens the titular end. Raimi has made an old-school funhouse, leave-it-mostly-to-your-imagination “spook-a-blast” with a disquietingly new-school giddy/cynical streak. Raimi, under the guise of tongue-in-cheek, drives home that major anxiety that powers horror movies: it don’t matter if you deserve it, you’re getting it.

Posted in 2009, Drama, Horror, Reviews | 5 Comments »