Film Freak Central

Sundance '11: The Woods

*/****
starring Justin Phillips, Toby David, Nicola Persky, Brian Woods
written and directed by Matthew Lessner

by Alex Jackson A bunch of twentysomething idealists go out into the woods to get away from civilization, lugging plasma-screen displays and a refrigerator full of Capri Suns along with them. That's basically the one joke of Matthew Lessner's The Woods. It's a pretty good joke. The image of these pseudo-hippies playing "Wii Sports" in the middle of a forest is evocative in a way that cannot be readily communicated with words. Wyatt Garfield's cinematography effectively parodies the look of a Land's End or L.L. Bean catalogue, demonstrating how anti-consumerist sentimentality has essentially become another product to be consumed. Consumerism is part of our national identity; even in rejecting it, we are viewing ourselves in consumerist terms. The folly of these faux-naturalists isn't just in their hypocrisy, it's in their belief that they could exorcise the influence videogames and social media have had on their lives. Alas, aside from that one good joke and Garfield's aesthetic prowess, there's really not much to differentiate The Woods from that shot-by-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark those kids from Mississippi made in the '80s. It's a textbook example of a film that was probably a lot of fun to make but isn't much fun to watch. Although Lessner seems to have encouraged his cast to improvise and come up with new variations on his central theme, he himself never builds upon it, and the movie meanders in a lateral direction. We quickly grasp everything The Woods has to say, at which point all there is to do is wait for it to end. It appears that everyone was so engrossed with the filmmaking process they forgot to actually make a film.

Sundance '11: Incendies

****/****
starring Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girard
screenplay by Denis Villeneuve, in collaboration with Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Alex Jackson There are two incredible images in Denis Villeneuve's Incendies. The first of these is during a preamble to the main story. A small Arabic boy is having his head shaved. We push in on his face as he stares contemptuously at us. Everything childlike has been gutted out of him and he's been filled back up with rage. I can't recall the last time I saw the aftermath of child abuse concentrated so concisely and with so much potency. This shot feels vaguely invasive, as though we're seeing a part of him we weren't meant to see. The second incredible image is of childbirth. The mother is Palestinian and her lover, the father of her baby, was just recently murdered by her brothers as part of an honour killing. Her grandmother is keeping her protected until she has the child. This baby looks like an actual newborn: wrinkled, veiny, bloody, covered with waxy vernix. The infant embodies all those romantic hopes for a better future, but there's a bodily horror to it, too. By having this child and bringing it to term, the mother has essentially assured her own demise, or at least the complete rejection of the only family she knows. I don't see ambiguity like that very often. It's thrilling. While I'm not convinced that Incendies would work without these two images, with them Villeneuve proves ready and willing to reward our emotional investment. I'm a little disappointed that Incendies was Canada's official submission for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award this year and is now one of the five final nominees, as this indicates that backlash--particularly, I fear, towards the picture's unabashedly sentimental climax--is just around the corner. This is, quite simply, one of the best films of this year or last.

Sundance '11: Uncle Kent

**/****
starring Kent Osborne, Jennifer Prediger, Josephine Decker, Joe Swanberg, Kev
screenplay by Joe Swanberg & Kent Osborne
directed by Joe Swanberg

by Alex Jackson Despite having recently celebrated his fortieth birthday, children's-show cartoonist Kent Osborne is no closer to leaving young adulthood behind. Never married and not a father, he finds himself too embarrassed to date anyone. Every single woman his age feels her biological clock ticking and asks, on the first date, whether he's ready to have children. With no greater purpose outside of his work, Osborne wastes his days smoking pot, frequenting Chatroulette, and trolling craigslist. You would think that Joe Swanberg's Uncle Kent was made as a reaction to Greenberg (particularly as that film stars Swanberg expatriate Greta Gerwig, of Hannah Takes the Stairs fame), but I can find nothing within the picture that would support this conclusion. Uncle Kent has a lot less bite than Greenberg; Osborne's callow self-absorption is considerably more benign. There are none of Greenberg's petulant tantrums or scenes that remotely correlate with his semi-predatory seduction of the family employee Gerwig plays. I sort of doubt that Uncle Kent is any more truthful than Greenberg, though it's certainly a lot less interesting. As in Hannah Takes the Stairs, these characters have a tendency to talk around things, coding every communication with irony and a gracious unwillingness to offend or concretely state any affirmation of feeling or value. They rarely let themselves get angry or sad, as they wouldn't want you to think that you're the cause. The most they'll show is frustration or discontent. This is probably why the film's sex and nudity fail to truly shock, much less titillate. Nudity is paradoxically used as a means for the characters (and, I think, the actors) to avoid exposing themselves. If somebody pulls his dick out in front of you or demonstrates how he masturbates, you'll mistakenly believe that he's being frank and be reluctant to probe deeper. This is all very novel (or at least it was three years ago; I admit to kind of avoiding these Mumblecore movies), and it successfully rationalizes Swanberg's lo-fi minimalism. But inert characters make for an inert filmgoing experience--and after Uncle Kent, I was still hungry to watch a real movie.

The Mechanic (2011)

**½/****
starring Jason Statham, Ben Foster, Tony Goldwyn, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Richard Wenk and Lewis John Carlino
directed by Simon West

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT FOR BOTH THIS FILM AND THE ORIGINAL THE MECHANIC. Michael Winner's The Mechanic (1972) is nominally an action film, but it gets its point across with moments of extraordinary discomfort. As its primary attraction, it features Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent as contract killers with literally nothing to do, bored to tears as they stand around waiting for people to die. It's a weird and disturbing scenario, but with modern box-office expectations being what they are, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that it's been effortlessly transformed into an average Jason Statham vehicle. The particulars remain the same: Hitman Arthur Bishop (Statham) is forced to kill his mentor, Harry (Donald Sutherland), under a contract from his employer (Tony Goldwyn); perhaps feeling a pang of guilt, he takes Harry's wayward son Steve (Ben Foster) under his wing to teach him about the rules and tools of his trade. But it's all presented in a much sillier light. There's no other way to put it. When one of our assassins is instructed to poison his quarry, the characters (and the movie) deem this plan much too boring, and the whole ordeal ends in a gory brawl in which both parties stab each other with whatever they can get their hands on. It's ridiculously over-the-top, sure, and although that's to its credit, there are still too many moments where the viewer is left wanting something more substantial.

Sundance '11: I Saw the Devil

Ang-ma-reul bo-at-da
***½/****
starring Lee Byung-hun, Choi Min-sik, Jeon Gook-hwan, Jeon Ho-jin
screenplay by Park Hoon-jung
directed by Kim Ji-woon

by Alex Jackson The rape scenes in Kim Ji-woon's I Saw the Devil are the most blatantly eroticized and sadistic I've seen since Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, but they're countered by the hilariously gory revenge scenes against the rapist (Choi Min-sik) by his victim's boyfriend (Lee Byung-hun). The film isn't trying to rationalize the rape with the revenge or the revenge with the rape. Rather, it regards women and the men who rape them as equally undeserving of our sympathy. One is tortured for thrills, the other tortured for laughs. There doesn't appear to be any kind of coherent moral perspective here, it's just Kim pushing our buttons and taking whatever strong reaction he can get. What makes I Saw the Devil so very good is that he pushes them exceptionally well. I kind of agree with Bret Easton Ellis, who said, "If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you're screwed. I think that's not a way to look at movies." I suppose you could dismiss I Saw the Devil as superficial or even immoral, but that seems to minimize how viscerally stimulating it all is. There's the shocking first attack, a tour-de-force multiple stabbing in a taxicab, witty homages to Blue Velvet, Kill Bill, Vol. 1, and Se7en, and the strangely poignant image of the rapist-killer playing guitar over the body of his latest conquest. If the film has anything substantive to say about vengeance, it might actually be saying it through its length. After two-and-a-half hours of revenge and counter-revenge, we're just plain exhausted. More than the idea that the boyfriend has essentially changed roles with his girlfriend's rapist, or that he's doing this more for himself than for her, what ultimately comes across is that neither the rapist nor the boyfriend will ever stop on his own accord. It's perfectly noble to ensure that evildoing is ultimately punished, but you reach a point where you simply have to let it go and get on with your life.

The Killer/Hard-Boiled [Blu-ray Double Feature] - Blu-ray Disc

THE KILLER (1989)
****/**** Image C- Sound C Extras B
starring Chow Yun-Fat, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh, Chu Kong
written and directed by John Woo

HARD-BOILED (1992)
***/**** Image C Sound B Extras A+
starring Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung, Teresa Mo, Philip Chan
screenplay by Barry Wong
directed by John Woo

by Walter Chaw It's possible to try to detail the history of John Woo at the beginning of the Heroic Bloodshed movement in Hong Kong--how, with the first two A Better Tomorrows (the second of which features a genuinely astonishing amount of violence and the infamous subtitled malapropism "don't fuck on my family!"), he created in buddy Chow Yun-Fat a fashion/role model in the James Dean mold, and how he eventually left for Hollywood's golden shore at the service of Jean-Claude Van Damme and John Travolta (twice) and Nicolas Cage (twice). It's possible--but Planet Hong Kong, City on Fire, Hong Kong Babylon, and on and on have done a pretty fair job of it already. Better to say that Woo's group of films from this period--the A Better Tomorrow pictures, his acknowledged masterpiece The Killer, his flawed but undeniably bombastic Hard-Boiled, and his ambitious, deeply felt Bullet in the Head--meant the world to me as a Chinese kid growing up in a predominantly white area in predominantly white Colorado. I saw a devastated 35mm print of The Killer at a midnight show in CU Boulder's Chem 140 auditorium in the early-'90s. It was dubbed (a mess), the screening was packed, and I, for maybe the first time in my life (and still one of the only times in my life), felt a genuine kinship with my countrymen and a certain pride in being Chinese. Here, after all, was the best action film I'd ever seen, and it wasn't John McTiernan's or Robert Zemeckis's or Steven Spielberg's name above the title, but someone called John Woo. And he was directing not Bruce Willis nor Arnie nor Sly nor any of the tools he would eventually work with in the United States, but a handsomer version of me with the same last name. As existential epiphanies go, it wasn't bad.

Sundance '11: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

****/****
directed by Göran Hugo Olsson

by Alex Jackson Goran Hugo Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 begins with a disclaimer explaining that this film is not intended to categorically define the Black Power movement, but merely to represent a few Swedish filmmakers' impressions of it. This seemingly innocuous statement raises more questions than it answers. Why would Swedes want to tell this story in the first place? Do they have the right to tell this story? And what's the point of looking at the Black Power movement of the late-Sixties and early-Seventies in 2011? It seems the moment you make a film about the Black Power movement, it becomes a commodity to be consumed, at least in part, by a white audience. I believe that whites are attracted to stories of the black experience and to the icon of the black militant for a number of reasons, perhaps least among them liberal guilt. On an individual level, the white may feel disenfranchised and see the black militant as a kind of romantic ideal. Or maybe he believes himself to be relatively lacking in cultural identity and looks upon the strongly defined culture and identity of African-Americans to satisfy this need. The Black Power Mixtape is a compilation of direct documentary footage shot by Swedish journalists in the United States from 1967 to 1975. Olsson has mildly contextualized what we're seeing via several contemporary audio interviews with major figures like Angela Davis and Melvin Van Peebles, and he scores it to songs by The Jackson Five and The Roots; the film is a coherent and edifying history of the Black Power movement tightly wound into an efficient 96 minutes. But in unabashedly indulging our taste for nostalgia, and in preying on the fundamental emptiness of the "white experience," it's also a rollicking entertainment. (The spell is broken, briefly but provocatively, by a lingering shot of a heroin-addicted infant.) By consciously underlining the fact that he and his fellow countrymen are essentially outsiders interpreting this material, Olsson introduces a tension between the revolution-as-revolution and the revolution-as-pop. The film exists as one, the other, and everything in-between.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) + Secretariat (2010) - Blu-ray Discs + Conviction (2010)

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER
**/**** Image A Sound B
starring Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones
written and directed by Woody Allen

SECRETARIAT
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Diane Lane, John Malkovich, Dylan Walsh, Scott Glenn
screenplay by Mike Rich, suggested by the book Secretariat: The Making of a Champion by William Nack
directed by Randall Wallace

CONVICTION
**/****
starring Hilary Swank, Sam Rockwell, Minnie Driver, Juliette Lewis
screenplay by Pamela Gray
directed by Tony Goldwyn

by Ian Pugh You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger represents the apotheosis of what shall now be called the New Woody Allen Average--those perfectly competent nothing movies that never rate more than two, two-and-a-half stars. I say that without a hint of sarcasm, and I say that as someone who considers Allen's work a primary influence--and as the guy who regularly defends Scoop. But I have to be honest: the New Woody Allen Average has become so predictably mediocre that I just can't take it anymore. The director's latest surrogate is another novelist, Roy (Josh Brolin), who's struggling to complete his latest book. It's putting a strain on his marriage to Sally (Naomi Watts), so he looks into the window of his pretty next-door neighbour (Freida Pinto) for romantic respite. Sally, an art curator, feels the same pressure, and casually drifts closer to her boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas). Sally's father Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) has left his wife for a prostitute (Lucy Punch), while his ex, Helena (Gemma Jones), retreats to spirituality, consulting a medium to find out where she stands in the great cosmic plan. It's a matter of "what you want" versus "what you take" in a race to see which floundering/philandering idiot can make the most tragic mistakes in the span of 90 minutes. Is it any different from Vicky Cristina Barcelona? When you break it down to its most basic components...no, not really.

Sundance '11: Hobo with a Shotgun

**½/****
starring Rutger Hauer, Brian Downey, Gregory Smith, Molly Dunsworth
screenplay by John Davies
directed by Jason Eisener

by Alex Jackson Director Jason Eisener and screenwriter John Davies must have been left in the care of a particularly negligent babysitter throughout the 1980s. Their Hobo with a Shotgun, an adaptation of a fake trailer the two made for Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse contest back in 2007 (it won, and was subsequently attached to Canadian prints of the film), not only cites Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Robocop, and probably Cobra among its myriad references but also pays what I think is an incontrovertible homage to Tinto Brass's infamous 1980 debacle Caligula. The villain's preferred method of public execution greatly resembles Caligula's "lawnmower" and he has no shortage of naked bimbos to shower in the blood or join in on the torture. Hobo with a Shotgun is essentially in the Troma tradition--there's a rather studious contempt towards anything resembling introspection or sincerity, much less good taste, and there's a very deliberate amateurishness at work here. Perhaps nothing demonstrates this more than the garishly oversaturated cinematography; Hobo with a Shotgun isn't upstaged by its look, though it is defined by it. This isn't a real movie so much as the kind of X-rated cartoon that pedophiles keep in the basement for the purpose of grooming young boys. Similarly attention-grabbing are the villain's two sons, Tom Cruise parodies who sport Ray Bans, drive a DeLorean, and whoop and holler like they're in The Color of Money. They mutilate homeless men for sport, placate the townspeople with Tony Montana-sized mounds of cocaine, and recite dialogue like, "The only thing I'm going to let slide is my dick in your pussy." Somehow, the joke of this '80s rich-kid douchebaggery never grows stale.

Barney's Version (2010) + No Strings Attached (2011)

BARNEY'S VERSION
***/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Rosamund Pike, Minnie Driver, Dustin Hoffman
screenplay by Michael Konyves, based on the novel by Mordecai Richler
directed by Richard J. Lewis

NO STRINGS ATTACHED
**/****
starring Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher, Cary Elwes, Kevin Kline
screenplay by Elizabeth Meriwether
directed by Ivan Reitman

by Ian Pugh It's easier to accept Barney's Version once you realize it doesn't have much to say. Little more than a series of vignettes, the film surveys in piecemeal fashion the life of one Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti), a Jewish artist who endured three tumultuous marriages (the wives are played by Rachel Lefevre, Minnie Driver, and Rosamund Pike) and the mysterious death of best friend Boogie (Scott Speedman, whom I initially mistook for Hugh Jackman) along the way to producing a popular soap opera. Giamatti doesn't do outstanding work here, but he's reliable in that familiar Giamatti way: perpetually locked in a state of concentration, trying to understand the subtext of whatever fortunes or misfortunes befall him. Seems like we're all trying to figure things out, doesn't it? The film doesn't know whether to focus on life as a comedy or as a drama, and for that reason alone, it feels incredibly disjointed. It should be. It's supposed to be.

The Pacific (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

Image A Sound A+ Extras A-

by Jefferson Robbins The Greatest-Generation worship that Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks share is appreciable and understandable, but by the close of their latest collaborative HBO miniseries, "The Pacific", you sort of hope they've got it out of their systems. That's not to say the story encapsulated here didn't warrant telling--the flash conceptualization today is of World War II as a European war, where "rules of combat" may still obtain. The fiercely bloody Pacific campaign--very much a gazing-into-the-abyss kind of conflict, making monsters of men--has become a near-afterthought. So a big-budget TV treatment, in line with the star producers' 2001 "Band of Brothers", seems natural.¹ But by remaining "true" to the experiences of the U.S. Marines who fought their way from Guadalcanal to the doorstep of Japan, the story comes across as a thing of half-reconciled parts, periscopic views of the larger picture. I mean, more than a miniseries usually does--like it's two miniseries grafted onto one another.

Inception (2010) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw I dunno, the wordiness of The Dark Knight didn't bother me that much. I suppose it has something to do with it being a comic-book movie and plot-driving pronouncements seeming the order of the day. I find it impossible now to think of The Dark Knight without seeing it as a corollary to No Country For Old Men: the one composed of broad, garish strokes, the other of grace notes you hesitate to call delicate, but that's just what they are. With Inception, Christopher Nolan's correlative piece is Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY, and the comparison in this instance doesn't prove mutually evocative so much as devastating to Nolan's film, exposing his shtick as reams of deadening exposition interrupted by the occasional virtuoso set-piece. It is, in other words, aggressively nothing-special, save for a few astonishing zero-g sequences. As it happens, saying the best part of Inception is its weightlessness is a pretty pithy criticism of the whole damned enterprise. For a film about dreams, it's distinctly light on possibility: Armed with the power to shape reality, our erstwhile dream-weavers fold a city in half in a dorm-room Escher shout-out but decline to, you know, fly and stuff. More, Inception doesn't confront archetypes of any kind, instead retreating into some basic stuff about projections and the architecture of the unconscious being a freight elevator while relying overmuch on the built-in gravitas of father and dead-wife issues. And in case you miss any of that, Nolan crams it into the dialogue like one crams elephants into elevators. Rule of thumb: if a movie uses the word "deep" as much as this one does, it probably isn't.

The Color Purple (1985) [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD | Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook) + Eve's Bayou (1997) [Lions Gate Signature Series] - DVD

THE COLOR PURPLE
***/****
DVD - Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
BLU-RAY - Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, Adolph Caesar, Margaret Avery
screenplay by Menno Meyjes, based on the novel by Alice Walker
directed by Steven Spielberg

EVE'S BAYOU
**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, Vondie Curtis-Hall
written and directed by Kasi Lemmons

by Bill Chambers In the prologue to Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple, black sisters Celie (Desreta Jackson) and Nettie (Akosua Busia) play patty-cake in a field of blue-pink flowers. Celie, the ugly duckling, is pregnant with her second illegitimate child, and when she has the baby, her father (Leonard Jackson) cruelly whisks it away to a new home, as he did her firstborn. Later, her father disposes of Celie, too, betrothing her to Albert, a.k.a. "Mister" (Danny Glover), a vicious stranger on horseback seeking Nettie's hand in marriage. Concerned with more than just lonely Celie (Whoopi Goldberg as an adult) summoning the confidence to defy Albert (less through her own sexual awakening, as in The Color Purple's source material, than through a cultivated sisterhood with the women in her orbit), the picture examines a generation of emancipated African-American men who, poisoned by the slave mentality, treat their women like Cinderella in a misguided salvo to independence. Shit rolls downhill, in other words.

The Green Hornet (2011)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christoph Waltz, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
directed by Michel Gondry

by Walter Chaw Lenore Case (Cameron Diaz) asks chauffer Kato (Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou) out on a date in Michel Gondry's excrescent The Green Hornet, and then, once on that date, acts surprised when Kato makes a pass at her whilst tickling the ivories. It's the only thing of mild interest in a film that's otherwise the obvious front-runner for a few worst-of-2011 lists--a fate it'll probably avoid only because no one will remember the benighted thing an hour or two after screening it. Give The Green Hornet this, though: it's the first mainstream American film to even flirt with the idea of Yellow/White miscegenation since maybe the 18-year-old Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Rob Cohen's biopic about Chou's hero and the true antecedent to the Kato role. It's funny to me that men from one of the most populated places on the planet have, in the American cinema, been reduced to hilarious, impotent sidekicks or wise old men who know kung fu--or is there some kind of Little Richard image-castration going on here to protect delicate Caucasian egos from bedroom Yellow Peril? No, more likely the instinct that makes it funny to cast someone like Jackie Chan as Chris Tucker's bitch in the United States is the same one that fuels Chou's eventual rescue in this piece of shit by the titular lummox, played by Seth Rogen (make that rescues--the first coming when The Green Hornet tosses poor, dumb Kato a lobster-shaped inflatable to save his drowning ass). It's the same one that casts Mexicans as chulo drug-dealers hanging out on the East Side and poor Christoph Waltz, Oscar still warm, as an insecure crime lord given to monologues and bemoaning his mid-life crisis. The Green Hornet is bad stand-up, all improvisation and flop sweat you get to endure for over two full, agonizing, distended hours.

The Amityville Horror (2005) - Blu-ray Disc

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras F
starring Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Jesse James, Jimmy Bennett
screenplay by Scott Kosar, based on the novel by Jay Anson and the screenplay by Sandy Stern
directed by Andrew Douglas

by Walter Chaw When filmmakers leave nothing to the imagination, you're left with the product of their imaginations, which almost without exception is an arid thing born of equal parts imitation and an eye to the bottom line. Innovation is frowned upon when it comes to big-budget horror (terms that mix together uneasily at best), leaving whatever was subversive about the premise to get blunted by this need to rake in a lot of money from a timid public looking for a rollercoaster instead of sociology. So it is with the latest instalment in the worst horror franchise in history, a remake of The Amityville Horror directed by commercial hack Andrew Douglas (who at least seems self-aware in interviews) that professes to be "truer" to the "true"* source material--meaning, essentially, that no one is going to die and that it's going to be poorly written. (I snuck a peak at the 1979 film when I was in the care of a horrible babysitter, only to experience one of my earliest instances of realizing that something sucked.) It tacks on some crap about the house in question being built on the site of an old Indian mental hospital/Abu Ghraib, replacing the innocuous little red room of the original film with a chamber of flash-edited horrors à la Thir13en Ghosts. In so doing, it introduces a little flaccid White Man's Guilt subtext into this Wonder Bread wonderland that it studiously refuses to examine.

Trash Humpers (2010) - DVD

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Paul Booker, Dave Cloud, Chris Cofton, Rachel Korine
written and directed by Harmony Korine

"To me, there is only one form of human depravity--the man without a purpose."-Ayn Rand

by Alex Jackson My last job was as direct-support staff in a group home for adults with autism and severe mental retardation. The grave and morning staff, I was basically responsible for getting them bathed, dressed, and fed for the day. In one of our training sessions, the instructor told us that all behaviour has some kind of payoff or reward. Of course, I had to challenge this. "What about pica?" I asked. More precisely, I wanted to know why one of our clients ate his own shit. The instructor politely scratched his chin and replied, "The behaviour must be rewarding unto itself."

Eat Pray Love (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras D
starring Julia Roberts, James Franco, Richard Jenkins, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Ryan Murphy & Jennifer Salt, based on the book by Elizabeth Gilbert
directed by Ryan Murphy

by Walter Chaw It's a little tempting to not take the piss out of this latest instalment of How Julia Got Her Tube Packed, but the sins of Ryan Murphy's unwatchable Eat Pray Love are such that it's nigh impossible for any sentient human to resist. More interesting might be to chart the route America's sweetheart has taken to becoming one of the most irritating and hateful personas in the modern pantheon--how the once top-earning female star is lately this pinched, drawn, graceless thing trying her best and in vain to recapture the sociopathic sprightliness of her early successes. It could simply be the natural process of aging that makes it harder for her wronged-woman act to cull any sympathy: a 43-year-old woman making pouty lips and acting out is a much different animal than her 23-year-old self doing same. If she were to poison her husband or steal her best friend's bridegroom now, it would play very differently. And play differently it does as she dumps her non-descript/non-character hubby (Billy Crudup, typecast), buys an Italian phrasebook ("Every word in Italian is like a truffle!" the moron says), and travels to Bali in search of wisdom at the feet of adorably helpful minorities who only exist in movies like this to help coddled, rich, white people be content with their unimaginable privilege. If On the Waterfront was Kazan's apologia for singing like a canary, then Julia's late career seems an apologia for buying someone else's husband and getting away with it, for the most part, in the court of public opinion.

Film Freak Central's Top 10 of 2010

The last year of the first ten or the first year of the next ten, 2010 finds the state of our motion pictures as an awkward, yearling thing, finding purchase in the aftermath of the fear and nihilism of the post-9/11 state in something as dark but perhaps now more purposeful than despairing. If the best films of the immediately-after are represented by stuff like No Country for Old Men and Synecdoche, NY, the best films of this liminal year are pilgrims in search of a (doomed) idea of perfection and the dreadful cost of its pursuit. Is that explanation in part for the rise of geek culture (The Social Network, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, It's Kind of a Funny Story, Kick-Ass), this gradual empowerment of the weaker position? While examinations of vengeance and solipsism continue to be tough themes to shake, they've begun taking the form of marginal uplift as opposed to mostly-undiluted nihilism.