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.
by Bill Chambers Ben Affleck's films as a director are no longer
surprisingly good--they're expectedly good. The surprise of his latest, Argo,
is twofold: first, put a beard on Affleck and suddenly he's an actor of gravitas;
second, that this directing detour his career took may have been born of not
just self-preservation, but real movie love. You can see it in his hoarding of
genre staples for one-scene (Adrienne Barbeau) and in some cases one-line
(Michael Parks) roles, but more importantly, you can see it in the gentle
Hollywood satire Argo briefly--perhaps too briefly--becomes. Set
in 1979, the picture is suffused with a passion for filmmaking, if also a tinge
of wistfulness for that bygone era in filmmaking. Though it may be
period-authentic when Affleck shows the Hollywood sign in a state of disrepair,
I think it's meant as commentary on the present. Argo is the second
Warner release this year to revert to the golden-age Saul Bass logo--it fits better here.
En Kongelig Affære ***/**** directed by Nikolaj Arcel
by Angelo MureddaA
Royal Affair isn't
exactly Barry Lyndon,
but as period pieces go, it's surprisingly robust, the rare costume drama that
takes a genuine interest in how the unruly personalities of rulers and
politicians determine a nation's political outcomes as much as the ideologies
they represent. It doesn't seem so promising at first, beginning as it does with a title
card that sets the scene with ominous overtones. "It is the Age of
Enlightenment," we're told in the tasteful font of "Masterpiece Theatre", and while the
rest of Europe has gone through a massive philosophical and ethical shift with
respect to its perception of peasants and landed gentry, Denmark has remained
an outpost of the old, thanks in no small part to the conservative court that
pulls the strings of mad young King Christian (Mikkel Følsgaard, Best Actor
winner at Berlin). Enter his blushing new Welsh bride and our narrator,
Caroline (Alicia Vikander), a revolutionary intellect--her book collection
doesn't pass the Danish board of censors--who flounders in the country she now
rules until things are livened by Johann Friedrich Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen),
a German doctor and secret pamphleteer of the Enlightenment sent to bring sense
back to the erratic King.
by Angelo MureddaReality, Matteo Garrone's follow-up to the urban planner's nightmare of Gomorrah, is a nasty little
thing, at once an indictment of the mass delusion of celebrity culture and a
finely-wrought character study of Luciano, a fish merchant and small-town Neapolitan
crook who dreams of being a contestant on "Big Brother". Luciano is
played with wide-eyed wonder and deep sincerity by Aniello Arena, a mafia
hitman currently serving a life sentence for a triple-homicide--unlike his
modest fictional counterpart, who's involved in a baffling scheme to resell
pastry-making robots on the black market. It's a terrific performance, somehow
sweet and deranged in equal measure, and it's the reason Reality works as well
as it does when it begins to assume his warped perspective.
by Angelo MureddaThe Hunt hinges on a misunderstanding, a nasty story born of a child's bruised ego and happily seized by a pack of overeager concern trolls calling themselves adults. But there's a whole other story about misunderstanding to be spun from how the film will surely be received in different quarters as either a devastating portrait of small-town life or a grim black comedy. That one is all on director and Dogme 95 cofounder Thomas Vinterberg. While it's always dicey to ascribe authorial intent, Vinterberg seems to waffle between middlebrow tragedy and scattershot satire not out of some postmodern commitment to walking the edge of irony, but because the script can't really sustain a further push in either direction. That makes The Hunt a provocative film, sure, but also a bit of a lazy one--a conversation starter without much follow-through.
by Angelo Muredda A firm refusal of the charge that Canadian
filmmaking is unable to see much farther than its own backyard, Kim Nguyen's Rebelle tackles a complex sociopolitical situation without reducing it to
easy lessons learned. The most recent reference point for what Nguyen is doing
with this first-person chronicle of Komona (Rachel Mwanza), a 12-year-old
abducted from her home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and turned into
a child soldier for rebel forces, is probably Denis Villeneuve's Incendies. But though that film also reaches for global significance in tracing
the grim trajectory of a politically disenfranchised child, its vagueness stands
in sharp contrast to Nguyen's accomplishment here, which is to ground Komona's
story in a particular milieu.
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