by Angelo Muredda Awards season does strange things to
American filmmakers in search of gold hardware. Last year, Alexander Payne
delivered his James L. Brooks movie inThe
Descendants, toning down his tartness for a family drama both more palatable and significantly shoddier than usual. There's a comparable transformation in
the cards this year for David O. Russell, who showed signs of mellowing with
2010's The Fighter but was still miles from the Cameron
Crowe job he's now pulled off, to surprisingly strong effect, with Silver Linings Playbook, a Jerry Maguire for manic depressives.
****/**** directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
by Angelo Muredda What is there to say about Leviathan, a nearly-wordless
maelstrom of ravenous seagulls, blood-red waves, and severed fish-heads piled
to the horizon? Colleagues at Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, directors
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel take the sensory as seriously as the
ethnography here, producing a truly singular documentary account of a
commercial fishing vessel off the New Bedford coast that puts the so-called
immersive quality of 3-D baubles like Avatar to shame. Their work more than lives
up to the biblical title, delivering what might be described as a fish-eye view
of the Apocalypse.
by Bill Chambers Jason Buxton's Blackbird is an
important film but a primally engaging one that doesn't feel at all like
medicine or, God forbid, an Afterschool Special. The destined-for-greatness
Connor Jessup is Sean Randall, a broody but essentially sweet teen who lives
with his divorced dad (Michael Buie) and loves from afar the popular Deanna (Alexia Fast).
Sean's a modern-day Boo Radley, an artistically-inclined goth kid stranded in a
passive-aggressive sports culture: His father operates the Zamboni at the local
rink where Deanna's boyfriend--Cory (Craig Arnold), natch--practices hockey.
Cory torments Sean at school, and a guidance counsellor suggests that rather than retaliate Sean vent his
spleen on paper--which he does, via a hypothetical revenge scenario ("It's
a story") he stupidly cross-posts to the Internet. The torch-wielding
villagers show up at his subsequent court hearing like it's a town-hall
meeting; in this post-Columbine world, he's never going to get a fair shake.
by Angelo Muredda Michael
Winterbottom makes projects more than he makes films, and happy are the rare
few that bridge the gap. Everyday comes close at times, with no thanks
to the unnecessarily tricked-out structure, which picks up with a young British
family at holiday satellite points spread out over a five-year period and
watches them cope with separation anxiety in between. In theory, this
narrative-by-checkpoint strategy most resembles 2004's dismal 9 Songs, where Winterbottom
watched a dull relationship bloom and die over the course of nine dull concerts
and miserable sex scenes, but the film can't help but be improved by the
material this time.
by Angelo Muredda There's a lot to love in Frances Ha, but the highlight
is surely a tracking shot of star, muse, and co-writer Greta Gerwig clumsily
bounding through the streets of Brooklyn to the sounds of David Bowie's "Modern
Love." (In a daily
dispatch for mubi.com, Fernando Croce astutely toasts her "galumphing
radiance.") You could read this moment as either a joyous corrective to
Michael Fassbender's miserable NYC jog in Shame or a direct lift, down to the song's
abrupt stop, from Leos Carax's Mauvais
sang--think of Gerwig as the
Ginger to Denis Lavant's Fred. Or you could just accept it as the clearest
expression of the film's ambling structure: a lovely headlong dive through
traffic en route to somewhere safe but rewarding.
by Bill Chambers Although The Iceman proves that a movie cannot get by on Michael Shannon's dark charisma alone, Shannon has reached that point in his
career where his casting supplies the lion's share of subtext. Hence, a line like
"I dub cartoons for Disney"--uttered not two minutes into the film,
before there's enough context for it to be a joke or a lie--induces titters of
recognition. Of course, most will know going in that Shannon's playing
real-life contract killer Richard Kuklinski, who's thought to have dispatched
over 100 people, professionally-speaking. In The Iceman, the film
version of his life, smut-bootlegger Kuklinski starts a family with winsome
Barbara (a baby-talky Winona Ryder) at the same time mobster Roy DeMeo (Ray
Liotta) makes him an enforcer. He keeps Barbara in the dark about his new
profession (his old one, too), telling her he's a stockbroker to explain the
conspicuous infusions of cash; by the time their angelic daughters are in
middle-school, he's settled comfortably into the schizoid role of
suburban-dad-slash-serial-killer. Eventually, he sub-contracts himself out to
Pronge (Chris Evans, so skeevy I mistook him for Bradley Cooper), a free agent
who operates out of a Mr. Softee truck and gives Kuklinski the idea to freeze
his victims, and thus his eponymous nickname.
by Angelo Muredda For a long time, it
seemed like Terrence Malick would vanish altogether before he made a serious
misstep, but for better or worse, he's now delivered To the Wonder, the bum note
that forces you to warily retrace a major artist's career. A muted
greatest-hits compilation of Malick's oeuvre, To
the Wonder borrows whole
apostrophized lines to God from The
Tree of Life, nicks The
Thin Red Line's trick of meting out disembodied humanist voiceovers across
the cast (including an underused Javier Bardem), and re-stages Pocahontas's
carefree romp through the palace gardens in The
New World via a young girl's
joyous dance through the aisles of a supermarket. It's all here, in a manner of
speaking, but as the little girl tells her mother at one point, "There's
something missing."
by Angelo MureddaTabu opens, fittingly enough, at
the movies, with an old melodrama about an explorer who's just been turned into
a brooding crocodile. That's the first of many transformations in a protean
film that shifts gracefully from ironic postcolonial critique, to essay on the
cinema as a means of appropriation and reincarnation, to thwarted love story.
While those layers may seem impossible to navigate, take heart: Director Miguel Gomes's
great coup is to let this complex material flow instinctually from its
emotional core. Fluidity is key to Gomes's aesthetic, which pairs the
breathless momentum of a page-turner with the non-sequitur progression of a
dream. Case in point, a moment when Pilar (Teresa Madruga), the first half's
protagonist, sees a movie with the stuffy man who loves her. Pilar is visibly
moved by what's on screen, but we never see it, hearing only a Portuguese cover
of "Be My Baby" on the soundtrack--a thread left dangling only to be
gingerly picked up in the second half. "You know what dreams are
like," as one character tells us: "We can't command them."
*½/**** written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg
by Bill Chambers Featuring more
close-ups of needles piercing flesh than a booster-shot training video, Antiviral,
the debut feature by Cronenberg offspring Brandon, takes place in a world
evolutions ahead of TMZ, where fans pay to have themselves infected with
viruses extracted from their celebrity crushes. ("Biological
communion," the film calls this process--a phrase that links father and
son filmmakers as efficiently as a paternity test.) The slightly repulsive Caleb
Landry Jones is Syd March, a rogue technician for The Lucas Clinic who breaks
protocol by contaminating himself with the disease that is rapidly,
unexpectedly killing superstar Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), making him a target
of Hannah's family--who figure he'll be useful in their search for a cure--and fans, who want to watch him
expire as a proxy for their beloved Hannah. Yes, it's pretty silly.
by Angelo Muredda The feature debut of Indian playwright (and
occasional soap writer) Anand Gandhi, Ship of Theseus puts its dramaturgical
origins up front. Gandhi's film begins with a philosophical conceit from
Plutarch--the question of whether a ship that's been repaired using parts
from other vessels can be considered the same ship at all--and workshops it
through three seemingly-disconnected stories set in modern-day Mumbai. All
three strands, which unfold like a series of one-act plays, are preoccupied
with the biological analogy of Theseus's broken-down ship, a leaky body that
needs an organ transplant to survive. And while the finale that brings them
together is unnecessarily tidy, the individual segments strike a fine balance
between humanism and intellectual rigor.
Recent Comments