Film Freak Central

A Ghost Story (2017) - Blu-ray + Digital HD

***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara
written and directed by David Lowery

by Alex Jackson All forms of an afterlife are kitsch. You can't even conceptualize Heaven, Hell, reincarnation, or spiritualism without turning it into a greeting card or a joke. Kitsch is built into the concept. There was a point in my life where I felt that while it was kitsch, kitsch was all we had. The only other option was to confront the vast nothingness and indifference of the universe and acknowledge how little time and space we take up in the grand scheme. Maybe our belief in a life after death is the equivalent of Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and not falling because he doesn't look down.

Detroit (2017)

**½/****
starring John Boyega, Will Poulter, Algee Smith, Anthony Mackie
written by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Alex Jackson Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit is painfully afraid of controversy. It's as though Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were given the assignment to make a film about the 1967 Algiers Motel incident and cringed their way through it, trying their best to alienate neither black nor white audiences. Hilariously, the end result has now become one of the most controversial films of the year. An essay by Jeanne Theoharis, Say Burgin, and Mary Phillips (a trio of academics in political science, history, and African American studies, respectively) recently published on the HUFFINGTON POST denounced it as "the most irresponsible and dangerous movie of the year." Angelica Jade Bastien of ROGEREBERT.COM states that she left the theatre in tears, not because of the violence so much as the "emptiness" behind the violence. And, of course, Armond White had to get his licks in, concluding, "Watching black people being brutalized seems to satisfy some warped liberal need to feel sorry." Looks like I was wrong! Black film critics, at least, seem to fucking hate this movie.

The Slumber Party Massacre Collection - DVD|The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) - Blu-ray Disc

THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (1982)
**½/****
DVD - Image C+ Sound C- Extras C+
BD - Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Michelle Michaels, Robin Stille, Michael Villella, Debra Deliso
screenplay by Rita Mae Brown
directed by Amy Jones

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II (1987)
**½/**** Image C+ Sound C Extras A-
starring Crystal Bernard, Patrick Lowe, Kimberly McArthur, Atanas Ilitch
written and directed by Deborah Brock

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE III (1990)
*/**** Image C Sound C Extras A-
starring Keely Christian, Britain Frye, M.K. Harris, David Greenlee
screenplay by Catherine Cyran
directed by Sally Mattison

by Alex Jackson 1982's The Slumber Party Massacre isn't a film so much as a work of film criticism. It was produced and directed by Amy Holden Jones, perhaps better known today as the screenwriter of Mystic Pizza and Indecent Proposal, and written by established Lesbian Feminist poet and author Rita Mae Brown, who is perhaps best known for the 1973 book Rubyfruit Jungle, typically considered one the earliest coming-of-age lesbian novels.

Friday the 13th: From Crystal Lake to Manhattan [Ultimate Edition DVD Collection] + Friday the 13th [Uncut]|Friday the 13th Part 2|Friday the 13th Part 3 3-D - Blu-ray Discs

FRIDAY THE 13^TH (1980)
**½/****
DVD - Image B+ Sound B-
BD - Image A Sound B Extras B+
starring Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram
screenplay by Victor Miller
directed by Sean S. Cunningham

by Alex Jackson

"Do you think you can get through the summer?"

"I don't think I can get through the week."

One look at the teenagers in Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13^th and we can see they're displaced, without religion or identity. Shallow, dim, they don't have any past and they don't have any future. Their existence is entirely ephemeral and half-developed. Their lives consist solely of pot, sex, and menial work. We know that they're really talking about life in the above-quoted exchange--life as a biological process that will come to an abrupt stop for most of them by the end of the week, if not by the end of the summer. They think they're just talking about work and boredom.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) - Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Ermey
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, based on Hasford's novel The Short Timers
directed by Stanley Kubrick

click any image to enlarge

by Alex Jackson One of the most noticed Stanley Kubrick trademarks is a scene in a bathroom. I haven't read too much about why there is always a scene in a bathroom, but rarer still are comments related to what goes on in the bathroom. Different activities have different meanings. Urination (A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut) is a sexually arrogant act. It's the one bathroom activity in Kubrick's films that is done with the door open. Bathing (Spartacus, Lolita, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange again, The Shining) is a hedonistic, bourgeois indulgence and an escape to a safe place. Kubrick is not beyond exploiting the bath's mythological, symbolic connotations as the unexplored subconscious (the subversion of Aphrodite iconology in The Shining) or the womb (Star Child Alex in A Clockwork Orange); bathing is largely a private activity, you see. It is sometimes interrupted, but when that happens the invasion of privacy has significance. (James Mason's interrupted bath in Lolita, for example, had purely narrative- and character-based implications. He regarded it as just another humiliation to add to the pile.) Defecation is even more private, so private that a Kubrick character has never interrupted it. To defecate (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey) is human, you see. Everybody has to take a shit, but to shit is shameful. The perfect human being would not shit, would indeed be beyond shitting. The HAL computer doesn't shit, does it? Does the Star Child shit? I sincerely doubt it!

Rain Man (1988) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, Valeria Golino, Jerry Molen
screenplay by Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow
directed by Barry Levinson

by Alex Jackson From its opening shot of a Cadillac craned across the smoggy Los Angeles skyline as The Belle Stars' iconic cover of "Iko Iko" plays on the soundtrack, Barry Levinson's Rain Man announces itself as one of the very best films of the 1980s. The ultimate high-concept movie, it has a fashionably icy Adrian Lynne/Michael Mann/Ridley Scott aesthetic that's semi-parodied by way of an absurdist, non-sequitur twist. Pauline Kael called Rain Man "a piece of wet kitsch" while paradoxically impugning its "lifelessness." In terms of content, it certainly sounds like sugary glurge, but as rendered in the emotionally-detached lexicon of '80s advertising, all the irony, all the junkiness, has been bled out. The film equates Yuppie materialism with autism, and in a subtle, underhanded way, this humanizes the alien while undermining the film's own pretension. Once we see this hip disengagement in terms of pathology, we're no longer attracted and/or repulsed by it.

The Final Destination in 3-D (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

The Final Destination
**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten, Nick Zano, Mykelti Williamson
screenplay by Eric Bess
directed by David R. Ellis

by Alex Jackson It's the summer of 2009. I arrive at the movie theatre, a multiplex twenty miles from home (making it the closest one), to discover that while Rob Zombie's Halloween II has already started, I'm just in time to catch The Final Destination in 3-D. Thinking that I didn't really care which one I saw, that's good enough for me, and so I buy a ticket for the fourth (and, we were led to believe, last) entry in the Final Destination franchise.

Lolita (1962) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A
starring James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers, Sue Lyon
screenplay by Vladimir Nabokov, based on his novel
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson Who is Lolita? There seems to be no independent, cognizant life to the character. She exists purely to be desired or despised. Certainly, she is seen as neither a tragic figure nor a victim--Lolita is always in control. She always has a tight grasp on what her needs are and understands how she's going to meet them. But simply being clever and conniving doesn't make you a real person. Humanity could be defined as our ability to experience pain and Lolita lives a practically pain-free existence. Double entendre intended, if you prick Lolita, she isn't going to bleed. In her eyes, sex doesn't have many drawbacks. Men lust after her and this gives her power over them.

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

½*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sean Patrick Flannery, Norman Reedus, Clifton Collins Jr., Billy Connolly
written and directed by Troy Duffy

by Alex Jackson The first thing I did when I got a FACEBOOK account was look up Travis, my best friend from gradeschool, whom I hadn't seen or heard from in the last twenty years. Looking at his profile, I saw that he listed "extensive" under music and "way too many to list here" for books, but under movies he had just one title: The Boondock Saints. The bands and books he loves are too numerous to mention, but there is a film that, in his mind, towers above all others. There is only one film that bears mentioning. And that film is Troy Duffy's The Boondock Saints. Is it petty of me to not put in that "friend" request? This seems to be all the update I need. Twenty years is a long time. The only things we really had in common were that we both went to the same school and both liked Nintendo and The Monster Squad. That's hardly enough to inoculate a friendship against The Boondock Saints.

Barry Lyndon (1975) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson If The Shining has dated the most of Kubrick's films, Barry Lyndon, which immediately preceded it, has dated the least. In 1976, Barry Lyndon was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award alongside Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, and Nashville. I have some reservations about a couple of those, but there's no arguing that these are a few of the most revered American movies of the last four decades. And yet, they're all inextricably linked to the year 1975. Certainly, they still work on their own terms, but today there's an unspoken contract that we will acknowledge and accept them as something produced thirty-five years ago. We don't have to make any such concessions with Barry Lyndon; there isn't anything vintage about it.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) + Kramer Vs. Kramer (1979) - Blu-ray Discs

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY
****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Charles Laughton, Clark Gable, Franchot Tone, Herbert Mundin
screenplay by Talbot Jennings, Jules Furthman, Carey Wilson, based on the novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
directed by Frank Lloyd

KRAMER VS. KRAMER
****/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Jane Alexander, Justin Henry
screenplay by Robert Benton, based on the novel by Avery Corman
directed by Robert Benton

by Alex Jackson Frank Lloyd's 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty and Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer don't have much in common other than that they both won the Oscar for Best Picture and that they are both totally fucking awesome. I know it sounds weird for me to apply fanboyish hyperbole to such conventionally middlebrow fare, but I love these films in much the same way I love Star Wars or the Indiana Jones movies. One is a lavish, two-million-dollar literary adaptation starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton; the other is a minimalist Issue Movie about divorce (apparently aiming to do for the dissolution of marriage what Gentleman's Agreement did for anti-Semitism) starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. Evidently, they represent what the Academy believed was quality cinema at the time.

Sundance '11: If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front

**/****
directed by Marshall Curry

by Alex Jackson I have officially reached the point in my life where when I see a cop beating up on a hippie, I identify with the cop. There's a shot in Marshall Curry's If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front in which the police spray two ELF members directly in the eyes with mace during a peaceful sit-in. Some audience members behind me interjected, I think by pure reflex, "That's not fair!" But I found myself feeling considerably less enraged. Yes, these protesters were being entirely non-violent, but what alternatives have they left the police? The cops are there to break up the protest and allow loggers to cut down trees. If the loggers can't do their job, it means the police haven't done theirs. And if these people can't do their jobs, then that means they can't make their mortgage payment or feed their kids. With all that at stake, conceding to the protesters isn't exactly a viable option. If a Tree Falls doesn't really rise above the level of a generic direct-to-HBO/PBS/Netflix Instant issue documentary; I was never fully sold on the validity of the ELF's cause. The Earth Liberation Front appears to be predicated on the notion that our forests should be protected simply because they're aesthetically pleasing, or because they've been on the planet for hundreds of years. Logic like that is shaky at best. The bulk of the film deals with ELF member Daniel McGowan, who was charged and eventually convicted of helping set fire to Superior Lumber Company and Jefferson Poplar Farms in 2001. After 9/11, his case fell under a new "terrorist enhancement," which would mean a harsher sentence. I get the feeling that nobody involved in the Earth Liberation Front sees the liberation of the Earth as a cause worth going to federal prison for. These acts of arson are depicted as the dumb actions of a dumb kid several years ago and not the work of a real "terrorist." It all strikes me as incredibly disingenuous: if Curry isn't going to romanticize McGowan as a martyr for his movement, it seems to me he should be more proactive in exposing the underlying naiveté of his cause.

Sundance '11: Salvation Boulevard

*½/****
starring Pierce Brosnan, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Greg Kinnear
screenplay by Doug Max Stone & George Ratliff, based on the novel by Larry Beinhart
directed by George Ratliff

by Alex Jackson What a waste. The cast assembled for George Ratliff's Salvation Boulevard is one for the ages. You have Pierce Bronson as super-evangelist Reverend Dan Day, Jennifer Connelly as infatuated housewife Gwen Vandeveer, Ciarán Hinds as Gwen's hard-ass Naval vet father Billy, and Ed Harris as pompous, bearded intellectual Dr. Paul Blaycock. These are traditionally serious dramatic actors in roles that lend themselves to caricature, yet they invest these characters with history and a point-of-view, providing substantive depth to the most basic of outlines. There's a real sense of professional pride to the performances here; Bronson, Connelly, Hinds, and Harris love these people and believe in them. Instead of coasting their way to their next paycheck, they're fucking earning it by doing some real fucking acting. But it's all for naught, as these great actors are completely squandered by a writer-director who doesn't care nearly as much about his chosen craft. (I'm reminded a bit of Matt Zoller Seitz's brilliant review of Sphere.) I'm obliged to report that not every performance in this film is created equal. Greg Kinnear stars as Carl, an "ex-Dead Head"/current member of Day's flock who's married to Gwen. Kinnear is not in the same league as the other four I mentioned. The only time he ever impressed me was in Paul Schrader's Auto Focus, and, of course, that's because the part was tailor-made for his shallow amiability. It's not that he's bad in Salvation Boulevard, he just reliably does whatever it is that Greg Kinnear does. Marisa Tomei, on the other hand, is very bad indeed as stoner security guard Honey Foster, who knew Carl back on the "Dead Head" circuit. Tomei goes for the cheap and easy laughs, but even then I don't blame her as much as I do a screenplay that hasn't given her the luxury of one dimension to play. Tomei doesn't do the work that Ratliff couldn't be bothered with, but she at least has enough courage to make a total fool of herself. What is there to say about the picture itself? It's Satire with a capital S, taking on that easiest of pickings: Christian fundamentalism. I won't bore you with plot details or analysis. Suffice it to say that believers will feel insulted, non-believers will feel coddled, and neither will feel particularly challenged to consider the other's perspective.

Sundance '11: Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles

*½/****
directed by Jon Foy

by Alex Jackson I'll admit that I can't readily imagine anybody ever making a better film on the subject of the Toynbee Tile phenomenon than Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. The problem isn't that it's done poorly--it's that anybody thought it should have been done at all. Filmmakers Justin Duerr, Jon Foy, Colin Smith, and Steve Weinik worked on this project for five years, but I don't really understand why. Were they actually hoping to solve the mystery? And if they solved it, well, what then? Insofar as the Toynbee Tiles hold any interest for us at all, it's as a non sequitur, and what's the point of making sense of a non sequitur? Doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose? As explained by WIKIPEDIA, the Toynbee Tiles are a series of messages embedded in asphalt across approximately two dozen American cities and four South American capitals. The message on each tile is essentially always the same: "TONYBEE IDEA/IN MOVIE 2001/RESSURECT DEAD/ON PLANET JUPITER." Sometimes "movie" is substituted with "Kubrick's" and oftentimes this main inscription is supplemented with paranoid asides about Jews, journalists, and the Mafia. Toynbee Tile enthusiasts believe that the "Toynbee idea" refers to a passage in historian Arnold Toynbee's Experiences that describes the possibility of the deceased coming back to physiological life rather than being resurrected in an immaterial supernatural dimension. Apparently, the tiler believes that Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is suggesting this rebirth will occur on the planet Jupiter. Duerr, a Philadelphia-area artist and musician who first became interested in the tiles in the mid-nineties, spearheads the investigation into their origin. It's an obsession over an obsession. What kind of person would make these tiles and what kind of person would be interested in the person who made these tiles? When ironic detachment is held onto long enough, it ceases to be ironic but doesn't exactly become sincere, either. Anybody who devotes five years of his life to a film about the Toynbee Tiles hasn't just wasted it--he's affirmatively stated that the deeper questions of human existence are no more material than a perverse preoccupation with kitsch. This is a profoundly obnoxious film.

Sundance '11: Benavides Born

All She Can
**/****
starring Corina Calderon, Jeremy Ray Valdez, Joseph Julian Soria, Julia Vera
screenplay by Daniel Meisel & Amy Wendel
directed by Amy Wendel

by Alex Jackson Amy Wendel's Benavides Born is throwing me for a loop, and I'm getting a little frustrated about it. I understand that this film isn't trying to be Step Up 4 or the female weightlifter version of Rudy--but it's not really giving us a viable alternative to that kind of programming, either. On a very basic level, I don't know what this movie's about. The small town of Benavides, Texas has only three industries: fast food, an oil rig, and the military; high-school senior Luz Garcia (Corina Calderon) is disenchanted with all three. Outside of school and her customer-service job at Whataburger, she devotes her life to competitive weightlifting. What's driving me nuts is that Garcia doesn't lift weights because she's seeking relief from her humdrum working-class existence and that's the only time she feels truly alive, as in Saturday Night Fever. No, Garcia doesn't even like lifting weights. She's only doing it because she's aiming to get a college scholarship and leave Benavides without incurring any student debt. What does she want to study? What does she want to be? If weightlifting isn't her dream, then what exactly is? Co-writer/director Wendel never gets around to asking these questions. She admires Garcia for her pragmatism and perseverance but is sheepish about the way her college goals are born almost exclusively out of a desire to distance herself from her working-class Mexican-American family. This culminates in an awkward plot development late in the film where Garcia helps a family of illegal aliens into San Antonio and then drives to confront the Admissions Dean at the University of Austin. Does this mean she's saying goodbye to her Mexican self? Coming to terms with it? It feels like superficial action cooked up by a filmmaker who's let political correctness sterilize all the tension organic to the material. The result is a piddling, rambling film that broaches social issues more than it explores them.

Sundance '11: Crime After Crime

***/****
documentary; directed by Yoav Potash

by Alex Jackson From 1983 to 2009, Deborah Peagler was incarcerated at the Central California Women's Facility for the murder of her boyfriend, Oliver Wilson. Wilson battered Peagler, forced her into prostitution, and molested her daughter from a previous relationship, but because he took out an insurance policy before his death naming Peagler as a beneficiary, and because the actual murder was carried out by two Crips she went to for protection, the district attorney at the time presented this as a hired killing. All evidence of abuse at the hands of Wilson was suppressed. In 2002, encouraged by a new California law giving battered women a second chance for a hearing if the original court did not consider evidence relating to the abuse, land-use lawyers Nadia Costa and Joshua Safran took Peagler's case pro bono and spent the next seven years fighting for her release. Crime After Crime rather preciously argues that battered women who kill their abusers are victims, too. I mean, no shit, right? The case of Deborah Peagler is a pretty easy one to get indignant about. Accordingly, Crime After Crime is neither incredibly intelligent nor particularly challenging. It is, however, wonderfully entertaining. Director Yoav Potash was there from the very beginning, and the intimacy he developed with his three subjects during that time lends the picture genuine warmth that cuts through the sermonizing. And I like how Wilson kind of fades from memory as the film progresses. This is not at all a depressing documentary and only superficially an angry one. Twenty-six years is a long time (Peagler ends up spending more of her life in prison than she did as a free woman)--much too long to stay angry or resentful and much too long to go without establishing some sort of personal identity and purpose. While incarcerated, Peagler directed the prison gospel choir and earned two associate's degrees. Potash additionally includes the testimony of a former drug addict who credits Peagler with helping her to earn her bachelor's degree. The last thing you could feel while watching Crime After Crime is pity for a wasted life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

The Player (1992) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg
screenplay by Michael Tolkin, based on his novel
directed by Robert Altman

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In the opening scene of Robert Altman's The Player--an uninterrupted tracking shot lasting 7 minutes and 45 seconds--chief of studio security Walter Stuckel (Fred Ward) discusses long tracking shots with mailboy Jimmy (Paul Hewitt). Stuckel talks at length about Rope and Touch of Evil and says directors back then knew how to shoot a film. Jimmy mentions Bernardo Bertolucci's then-recent The Sheltering Sky and Julien Temple's Absolute Beginners as having terrific long shots, but Stuckel shrugs and mumbles that he hasn't seen them. It appears that Altman and screenwriter Michael Tolkin (adapting his novel of the same name) are illustrating a point about the insularity of the studio system and how the studios have no reference point outside their own past. Today, a complaint like that seems positively churlish. I honestly would not expect any of the newer executives to know or appreciate Rope or Touch of Evil, much less any current chiefs of security! In my view, anybody familiar with American cinema to that extent is already distinguished from your typical capitalist.

Warner Bros. Presents Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1980s - DVD

Image B- Sound B- Extras B-
Goldie Gold and Action Jack: "Night of the Crystal Skull"
Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos: "Deadly Dolphin"
The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley: "Tall, Dark & Hansom"
The Flintstone Kids: "The Bad News Brontos/Invasion of the Mommy Snatchers/Dreamchip's Cur Wash/Princess Wilma"
Mister T: "Mystery of the Golden Medallions"
Dragon's Lair: "The Tale of the Enchanted Gift"
Thundarr the Barbarian: "Secret of the Black Pearl"
Kwicky Koala Show: "Show #1 - Dry Run/Robinson Caruso/High Roller/The Claws Conspiracy/Hat Dance/Dirty's Debut"
The Biskitts: "As the Worm Turns/Trouble in the Tunnel"
Monchhichis: "Tickle Pickle"
Galtar and the Golden Lance: "Galtar and the Princess"

by Alex Jackson

"Portions of original film elements from certain programs contained within no longer survive in pristine condition. As a result, archival elements of varying quality have been carefully assembled to provide you with as close an approximation of the original program as possible." --Actual disclaimer on the "Warner Bros. Presents Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1980s" DVD collection

From the sound of that, you would think they discovered these episodes of "Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos" and "Monchhichis" in the basement of an Argentinean mental hospital. Certainly, "Warner Bros. Presents Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1980s" holds genuine appeal as a cultural artifact. I was born in 1981 but have vague memories of watching an episode of "The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley", which might have featured a clip from the 1933 Fay Wray horror film The Vampire Bat. I have a better but still hazy memory of putting a cartoon "Mister T" temporary tattoo on my mom's guitar case. If nothing else, this collection is irrefutable evidence that I didn't imagine these programs.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 XVII - DVD

Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B-
2.1 "The Crawling Eye" (1989), 5.15 "The Beatniks" (1992), 10.10 "The Final Sacrifice" (1998), 11.5 "Blood Waters of Dr. Z" (1999)

by Alex Jackson I know it's loony, but I watched "Mystery Science Theater 3000" (or "MST3K") mostly for the movies. Oh, I liked the jokes. There were some episodes I laughed so hard at I had to turn off the television because I couldn't breathe. But I saw the riffing as a bonus, a way to make a good thing better. I didn't really watch the show just because it was funny, and its ironic appreciation of "bad movies" didn't strike me as all that different from the sincere appreciation I had for the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space as a child. In fact, I don't think it's all that different from the deeper appreciation I have for those movies today. Mocking them doesn't necessarily detract from them. Their sensually visceral aspect always shines through. You can easily tell if something is any good regardless of who is talking over it. Besides, there's something amiably homey and relaxed about the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" approach. If you like a film, you should be able to enjoy it on your sofa. You should be able to converse about it in the moment. And you should even be able to laugh at it. If you can only love something with reverence, I'm not sure that's love.

Blackboard Jungle (1955) - DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Glenn Ford, Anne Francis, Louis Calhern, Margaret Hayes
screenplay by Richard Brooks, based on the novel by Evan Hunter
directed by Richard Brooks

by Alex Jackson There are a few scenes in Richard Brooks's Blackboard Jungle that hold up, legitimately, as a thoughtful and fruitfully provocative investigation of the "inspirational teacher" genre. And when the film isn't working, it's often valuable as a time capsule of the 1950s and can be appreciated in a detached, archaeological way. But there are also times when you just can't help but condescend to it, and I'd hate for Blackboard Jungle to become a camp object. Blackboard Jungle may not be worthy of praise simply for dealing with issues of race and class, but the fact remains that some fifty years later, its subject matter continues to touch a raw nerve. By treating it ironically and laughing at it, we're absolved of the responsibility to fully engage with the issues it raises.

Big Love: The Complete Second Season (2007) - DVD

Image A Sound A Extras C+
"Damage Control," "The Writing on the Wall," "Reunion," "Rock and a Hard Place," "Vision Thing," "Dating Game," "Good Guys and Bad Guys," "Kingdom Come," "Circle the Wagons," "The Happiest Girl," "Take Me As I Am," "Oh, Pioneers"

by Alex Jackson There's definitely something cheeky and slyly subversive at the core of HBO's "Big Love". The show is the brainchild of Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, an openly-gay couple who've been together since the early-'90s. That single fact opens up some interesting connections when it comes to polygamy. The standard argument religious groups have against homosexuality is that it's unnatural: Two men or two women cannot naturally procreate and therefore it's deviant, godless behaviour. By contrast, polygamy is possibly more natural than monogamy--you could argue that males are hardwired to spread their seed with as many females as possible and it is not cost efficient, evolutionarily speaking, to restrict yourself to one woman. And if the ability to procreate is what makes heterosexuality more moral than homosexuality, then we have to admit that polygamists are able to procreate "better" than monogamists and so polygamy should be embraced as the morally superior lifestyle.

Commando (1985) [Director's Cut] - DVD

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rae Dawn Chong, Dan Hedaya, Vernon Wells
screenplay by Steven E. de Souza
directed by Mark L. Lester

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I first saw Mark L. Lester's Commando as a young boy and even then I was rather surprised that Arnold Schwarzenegger's eponymous hero, John Matrix, didn't get together with his reluctant sidekick, Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong). She's set up to be the love interest, but the filmmakers never pull the trigger. I was similarly baffled by the saccharine relationship between Matrix and his daughter, Jenny (Alyssa Milano). In my youthful naivety, I frankly thought this was too hokey for an R-rated movie, i.e., a movie intended for grown-ups. What audience of adults would buy into this? And I couldn't believe that the film would be about her kidnapping and Matrix tracking down and rescuing her. It's just the hero invading the castle and saving the damsel-in-distress? Hell, Star Wars wasn't that basic. There had to be some socio-political nuance to the situation I simply wasn't old enough to grasp.

Sundance '10: Skateland

***/****
starring Shiloh Fernandez, Ashley Greene, Heath Freeman, Taylor Handley
written and directed by Anthony Burns

by Alex Jackson Anthony Burns's Skateland honours the hoary conventions of the "summer-after-high-school" genre (notice I'm not even bothering to explain what the movie's about), plays everything by the book, and never takes you too far out of your comfort zone. I think the film's power lies in Burns's willingness to allow for a cliché or a saccharine moment so long as it is truthful. Skateland closes with the hero kissing the girl to the accompaniment of Modern English's ubiquitous "I Melt With You," and I felt as though I was seeing this ending for the very first time. Burns makes the smart move of establishing them as best friends at the beginning of the film and then having them transition into lovers. Because there has already been a great deal of intimacy between the two, their kiss stems organically from the material and the emotions it provokes are genuine. More inexplicable are the subtle nuances (in the performances? The writing? The direction?) that manage to depict teenage horniness without ever lapsing into sexism or misogyny. Perhaps it could be attributed to the fact that the guys here are as gorgeous as the girls, essentially levelling the playing field. (I'll admit to feeling somewhat alienated by all these beautiful people, but I adapted fairly easily.) Extra points for the scene where the hero finally assaults the archetypical bully and the results are not cathartic, but frankly a little scary. The violence is crudely explosive, and while the film minimizes the consequences of this attack, it does nothing to excuse or justify it. Although Skateland doesn't re-invent the genre, it does it well and believes in the material. And wouldn't you know? That's all the re-invention we really need.

Sundance '10: Boy

**/****
starring Taika Waititi, James Rolleston, Te Aho Eketone-Whitu
written and directed by Taika Waititi

by Alex Jackson Taika Waititi's Boy has one thing to say and spends 87 minutes saying it. Its message is basically that best friends are poor substitutes for fathers. Eleven-year-old New Zealander Boy (James Rolleston) idealizes his absentee dad Alamein (writer-director Waititi), who has spent the past seven years in prison for robbery. Returning home to dig up the loot he buried before getting caught, Alamein casually re-establishes a relationship with Boy by feeding him beer and initiating him into the world of "men." In exchange, Boy helps him look for his money and gives him marijuana stolen from a classmate's illegal farm. There's admittedly something very slippery about Boy. It's cute and quirky and even fun. Waititi is too adventurous a filmmaker to make a boring movie. Among the many tricks and gimmicks he employs, I particularly liked a sequence where Alamein paints with light to entertain his son. But gradually, without any change to the tone of the film or the nature of the character (he never becomes abusive or cruel towards Boy), we go from seeing Alamein's immaturity as charmingly anarchic to seeing it as repulsively irresponsible. Boy never really proselytizes, but it doesn't develop or deepen, either. Waititi's strategy is to give us so much of the comically buffoonish man-child Alamein that we grow to kind of hate him. This is problematic for a number of reasons. First and foremost, perhaps, is that it renders Boy too superficial to be a satisfying filmgoing experience. Secondly, it overly minimizes the horror of adult irresponsibility. There's a shot late in the film where Boy sips on a beer and smokes a reefer, yet the movie effectively denies that Boy is being corrupted and losing his innocence in this moment by suggesting he's only copying his father, whose lifestyle he will ultimately find wanting. Finally, while I admire that Boy is attempting to dismantle the "cult of childhood" genre by taking it to its logical end, I think Waititi underestimates the awesome power of pop culture. Boy's hero is "Thriller"-era Michael Jackson and he often fantasizes his father dancing like him--but Waititi fails to adequately evoke the irony of Boy idolizing a man with such a public Peter Pan complex. In the end, Boy doesn't challenge our love of pop culture so much as simply pander to it.

Sundance '10: Me Too

Yo, también
***/****
starring Lola Dueñas, Pablo Pineda, Antonio Naharro, Isabel García Lorca
written and directed by Álvaro Pastor & Antonio Naharro

by Alex Jackson Daniel (Pablo Pineda) is a 34-year-old man with Down Syndrome who has recently graduated from college and gotten a job as a social worker connecting persons with disabilities with home- and community-based services. (I served my internship at a state-run agency like this.) There he meets and grows infatuated with the blonde, slightly older, sexually provocative Laura (Lola Dueñas), who does not have Down Syndrome. They find themselves developing a strong friendship, with Daniel trying to push it towards something more and Laura wading very cautiously, worried about exploiting him. I'll grant you: Me Too is kind of a Down Syndrome version of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. I didn't realize how bizarre that sounds until I typed it, which should indicate that the film serves some kind of legitimate, socially-redemptive purpose. The college-educated Daniel is an outlier, made as unthreatening as possible, and we're ambivalent as to whether or not he should be aspiring to join the ranks of "normal" people instead of just accepting himself for who he is. But to its credit, Me Too neither ignores nor dodges any of these complaints--though it's very gentle in the way it triggers and then assuages our liberal guilt. Following a point-of-view close-up of Laura's cleavage, I became terrified that Daniel was going to assault her. Of course he doesn't. The filmmakers seem to be telling me I was wrong for feeling that way, to relax and not get too embarrassed about it. Daniel treats people's assumptions about him with great patience and humour; he appears to believe that we all mean well. Complicating things wonderfully, the film sources Laura's promiscuity to childhood sexual abuse by her father. Her attraction to Daniel is then explained by the fact that she doesn't think of him sexually. Not only that, she has an additional vested interest in not sexually exploiting him. But as Laura's abuse has rendered her, in a very real and unironic way, possibly more retarded than Daniel, the line between who is exploiting whom becomes significantly blurred. Would he be attracted to her were she not excessively sexualized as a result of her past? Remembering that something like ninety percent of pregnancies with the diagnosis of Down Syndrome are terminated, I'll admit that my eyes watered a little when Daniel details that he's come as far as he has because his mother read and talked to him as a child and essentially treated him as a normal, perfectly intelligent person capable of understanding her. The simple, effortlessly humanist message of Me Too is that nurture matters more than nature. And nurture is something we can actually do something about.

Sundance '10: I Am Love

***½/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Pippo Delbono, Alba Rohrwacher
written and directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Alex Jackson What to make of the ending to Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love? It's not that it's inexplicable, exactly. I believe I understood what "happened" perfectly well. The issue, really, is with John Adams's score. It builds and builds and grows louder and louder until we half believe that wealthy Milan housewife Emma Recchi (Tilda Swinton) will be dragged down to Hell by a gypsy curse. The audience I saw it with struggled to stifle giggles. They were emotionally manipulated to have a strong visceral response, but nothing within the film warranted it. It was an orgasm by prostate massage--pure meaningless reflex. What can you do but giggle? For years, Emma's existence has consisted of a quiet but comfortable series of rituals. Confronted with the knowledge that her daughter Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher) has fallen in love with another woman while away at college and is now a moderately radicalized lesbian, she realizes how empty her life has become. Her son, Eduardo Jr. (Gabriele Ferzetti), is having a similar crisis. He's being groomed to take over the family business, but he'd rather open a restaurant with his chef friend, Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini). When Emma tries one of Antonio's creations, she finds herself sensually overwhelmed. The two begin an intense love affair, culminating in perhaps one of the most pretentious sex scenes ever committed to film. Early reviews of I Am Love place it in the tradition of Douglas Sirk. I see it as more Luis Buñuel masquerading as Ingmar Bergman. That's similar to Sirk, I suppose, but quite a bit more savage. It suggests tragedy elevated beyond melodrama into the realm of absurdist surrealism. I Am Love is filled with lingering shots of furniture, artwork, and food preparation. Guadagnino is establishing a world where our emotional connection to objects is more powerful than our connection to each other--and there's a thin line between that and the French landmark porn in Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty. Guadagnino keeps pushing us and pushing us until our identification with the Recchis completely runs out. These people are Martians. The trap they're in isn't tragic, it's ridiculous. Just as ridiculous, perhaps, is their hopelessly bourgeois escape from it: college lesbianism; the restaurant business; and sexual escapades with the working class. By the time Adams's score peaks, we can no longer pretend this is a serious film. Our alienation from the material has come to a head.

Sundance '10: Winter's Bone

**/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahunt
screenplay by Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini
directed by Debra Granik

by Alex Jackson Those who loved Courtney Hunt's Frozen River are welcome to a second helping with Winter's Bone. I fear it might signal the start of a new genre: grass-and-granola cinema nobly detailing the plight of the working poor crossed with pulpy film noir. (Granola noir, perhaps?) The problem with these movies is that grass-and-granola and film noir just do not mix. The "plight of the working poor" is grossly oversimplified when narratively expressed in noir terms. The gangsters in Winter's Bone are meth dealers, but that's details--what really matters is that they're gangsters. Meth is reduced to a plot device, which does a great disservice to those whose families have actually been affected by the drug. And the "grass-and-granola" aesthetic grounds film noir in reality, neutralizing the dream-like abstraction endemic to the genre. Winter's Bone simply doesn't work in pop-movie terms. But it's not only that: combining "grass-and-granola" with film noir confuses the sociology of gender and class stratification with existential fatalism. Rhee Jessup (Jennifer Lawrence), the seventeen-year-old protagonist of Winter's Bone, is cast in the familiar role of Mom Who Will Do Anything For Her Children. With her own mother becoming increasingly senile and her father in prison for cooking meth, Rhee is forced to raise her younger brother and sister on her own. When Rhee discovers that her father has put up their house for bail money and skipped town, she risks her life by investigating his disappearance. Rhee is crudely idealized as a woman tough enough to go toe-to-toe with dangerous, wife-beating meth dealers and come out unscathed. While she's not a passive character, that isn't to say she has free agency. Rhee is forced to make these decisions out of love for her family and a desire to ensure they don't wind up homeless. Her actions are dictated by external forces. All Rhee wants to do is raise her kids. She has no sexual desire that we can ascertain, nor does she have any real drive to move up the social ladder. This is not film noir. In film noir, people are motivated by sex or greed and fate finds a way to fuck them over in the end. They can't change the outcome, but the genre is based on the notion that people have choices and are nonetheless too weak and fragile to make the right ones. Grass-and-granola is idealistic; film noir is cynical. They don't go together because they represent two fundamentally opposed worldviews.

Sundance '10: Smash His Camera

**/****
directed by Leon Gast

by Alex Jackson Leon Gast's Smash His Camera isn't much more than bubble gum: it's kind of sweet for a while and gives you something to chew on, but it has no nutritional value. A hagiography of paparazzo Ron Galella, the film is so deliriously meta in conception that it feels like some kind of joke at our expense. We're told by one of Galella's critics that his photographs are interesting simply because he photographs interesting people--we look at them for the subject, not for the artistry. That's all quite true, and perhaps even so obvious it could have gone without saying. But what does this mean when the subject of the Galella treatment is Galella himself? Gast is starfucking a starfucker. The film's saying that if you love celebrities enough, you will become a celebrity yourself and be subject to that same adoration. No surprise, then, that Galella was Andy Warhol's favourite photographer. I'm more alarmed by Roger Ebert's blog entry on this documentary. Ebert writes that he responds to Galella's "life force" and passion for his work and ends the entry by reminiscing about the era Galella inhabited and the stars they mutually worshipped. He drank the Kool-Aid, in other words. Ebert isn't showing the slightest shred of critical skepticism, though of course that's only part of the problem. The bigger issue is that he seems to identify with Galella and sees his particular strain of movie-love as something worth celebrating. Smash His Camera is easy to like, but I worry that liking it robs the cinema of the potential for being great art. When critics embrace a movie like Smash His Camera, they facilitate the shift from film criticism to entertainment reporting. They suggest that everything is pop and sensationalism and that nothing ever has any deeper meaning. Galella's pet subject was Jackie Onassis. He photographed her for years, even after she got a restraining order against him. Galella explains that he didn't have a girlfriend at the time and so Jackie became his girlfriend. No doubt this is an extremely revealing statement, yet Gast never follows it into darker territory. In establishing that he does very much the same thing as Galella, he's not going to paint Galella's obsessions as dysfunctional and risk indicting himself or his audience. Better to hide in a thick head of frothy inconsequence, I suppose.

Sundance '10: One Too Many Mornings

**½/****
starring Stephen Hale, Anthony Deptula, Tina Kapousis, Jonathan Shockley
screenplay by Anthony Deptula, Michael Mohan, Stephen Hale
directed by Michael Mohan

by Alex Jackson One Too Many Mornings is yet another semi-autobiographical romantic dramedy about two twentysomething males refusing to enter the adult world. It sounds a lot like the below-reviewed Bass Ackwards and Obselidia, but this one was made completely out-of-pocket and shot on the weekends over the course of two years. Considering the ultra-low budget, I'll admit there's a temptation to lower my standards. The filmmaking itself is stylish and inventive while essentially staying organic to the material--there's a fine action sequence involving an angry drunk, while the use of canted angles to convey a character's hangover works nicely, however elementary. I also liked a montage of light switches being turned off that's repeated a few times throughout the film and becomes something of a motif. (It's a successfully cinematic expression of tedium.) Director Michael Mohan is not content to just point-and-shoot, and on the other end of the spectrum, he's not going to play around with the medium unless it serves the characters or the story. One Too Many Mornings is not as bad as the Butler Brothers' 2000 atrocity Alive and Lubricated. It's not even in the same ballpark. Alive and Lubricated was made by amateurs; One Too Many Mornings was made by actual filmmakers. I guess it's pretty good for what it is, though it's still not good enough. Like a lot of these movies, the acting is broad and exaggerated in a way that keeps the performers from exposing too much of themselves. Similarly, the comic elements aren't sourced to a singular, overarching worldview, but are there so the proceedings don't get too serious and brooding. The saving grace of Clerks is that it has an authentic New Jersey flavour; I don't know or remember where One Too Many Mornings takes place--it seems that it could be anywhere. Similarly, the saving grace of Quentin Tarantino's unfinished My Best Friend's Birthday is that it's infused with Tarantino's voice and personality. There's nothing terribly unique or distinctive about One Too Many Mornings.

Sundance '10: Memories of Overdevelopment

Memorias del desarrollo
**½/****
starring Ron Blair, Eileen Alana, Susana Pérez, Lester Martínez
screenplay by Miguel Coyula, based on the novel by Edmundo Desnoes
directed by Miguel Coyula

by Alex Jackson Asked by a student why he left Cuba despite supporting and believing in his country's socialist principles, Latin-American studies professor Sergio responds that not being able to write what he wanted to write was simply unbearable. Now that he's in the United States, he's free to say whatever he wants--and nobody cares. It's a relatively minor moment in an aggressively polemic film, but it's an extremely important one just the same. Throughout Memories of Overdevelopment, Sergio makes photo collages out of pornography and religious iconography. This is the ultimate art-world cliché, though I think the movie recognizes it as such. It's saying that obscenity and sacrilege have become so commonplace that they no longer have any currency. While in Cuba, Sergio wrote that Americans have Superman and Cubans have Che. He meant that their hero is flesh-and-blood while ours is a cartoon character, but his editor tells him that the analogy could easily be misconstrued (i.e., dangerous). There's virtually nothing "dangerous" Sergio could say in the U.S. and this frustrates him to no end. He takes it to mean that we have no ideals or values worth protecting. Writer-director Miguel Coyula initially appears to be an aggressively shitty filmmaker, indulging in a lot of goofy rotoscoping and cut-out animation, particularly early on in the film. Compounding the amateurish feeling of the entire production, he shoots on cruddy digital video. The film also goes on far too long. It feels repetitive and self-indulgent, to put it mildly. It's one of those movies you can guarantee people will walk out of, even when they've paid fifteen dollars for a ticket. But as Memories of Overdevelopment is an externalization of Sergio's subjective state, where all communication has been rendered empty noise and even anti-consumerism has become a product to be consumed, this shittiness seems entirely justified. A well-made, conventionally attractive film would not capture this mindset nearly as successfully. That isn't to say I don't kind of hate Memories of Overdevelopment. Late in the picture, Sergio bemoans religion, politics, and consumerism as his three greatest enemies. But if you don't have religion, you don't have politics, and you don't have consumerism. You don't really have much of anything; what's the use of disillusionment if it never leads to anything better? All this drifting around is depressing and nihilistic. Sergio's rut is certainly an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Sundance '10: Bass Ackwards

**½/****
starring Linas Phillips, Davie-Blue, Jim Fletcher, Paul Lazar
written and directed by Linas Phillips

by Alex Jackson It took me a while to have any reaction whatsoever to Linas Phillips' Bass Ackwards. I guess I ultimately settled on mild affection, but this is not a film that's going to divide people. Phillips plays a Seattle-area wedding videographer named, yes, Linas. He's living with a young married couple and having an affair with the wife thereof (Davie-Blue). She's not willing to develop the relationship any farther and her husband kicks Linas out of their house. With no home and no girl, Linas picks up a '76 Volkswagen bus and decides to drive to the east coast to stay with his parents. Yeah, so it's a road-trip movie. Phillips is essentially playing himself and the film seems to be based on personal experience. Accordingly, as a writer, director, and actor, he is generously self-effacing and willing to look foolish--but he's never particularly critical of the Linas "character." Until the movie was over, I was only about seventy-five percent sure that Linas was having an affair. (The other twenty-five percent of me believed that his girlfriend and the wife were actually two different people who happened to look alike.) Even though I don't think this is an "emotional affair," nobody ever has sex. They just talk to one another with a familiarity more suited to lovers than to friends; the entire thing is left for us to infer. It seems that anything more explicit would render Linas unsympathetic--a loser-loser instead of a lovable one--and Phillips couldn't stand us seeing his alter ego that way. He appears to have had a rather conventional "quirky" road comedy in mind when conceptualizing Bass Ackwards and maybe the film would have turned out that way had he never met cinematographer Sean Porter. Imagine Little Miss Sunshine directed by Terrence Malick and you might get some idea of what you're in for. Porter's photography is incredible on an aesthetic level, and it's genuinely shocking to learn that the finished film (after post-production) cost a mere $90,000. Bass Ackwards would no doubt be worse without him. But I found all that beauty problematically tasteful, especially when combined with Phillips' softball treatment of "Linas." How about this? Anybody who hates Bass Ackwards is doing so for reasons unrelated to the quality of the movie itself; anybody who loves it has given up on asking for films that demand anything of them.

Sundance '10: Obselidia

**/****
starring Michael Piccirilli, Gaynor Howe, Frank Hoyt Taylor, Chris Byrne
written and directed by Diane Bell

by Alex Jackson Mark (Michael Blackman Beck) is working on an encyclopedia of obsolete things. He writes on a typewriter, wears a fedora, and films interviews for his book with an outdated camcorder. One of the things he considers obsolete is love. This belief is tested when he meets Sophie (Gaynor Howe), a projectionist of silent movies who nonetheless loves life too much to be stuck in the past. Diane Bell's Obselidia is gorgeous to look at and very well-acted. If the description I just gave made it sound like something you might want to see, then you will probably enjoy it. Still, I found the film to be transparently manipulative. It seems we're meant to envy Mark's cocoon-like isolation while feeling inspired by how Sophie breaks him out of it. Realizing there is only so much tension that can develop between Mark and Sophie, Bell artificially shoehorns in a road trip to provide the film some kind of narrative drive. It's an acknowledgment on her part that she's reluctant to give either character any depth and thus risk neutralizing the quirky romantic escapism Obselidia has been consciously cultivating. There came a point where I wondered to myself if Mark has an entry for minstrel shows in his encyclopedia, which got me thinking how much better a film is Ghost World. Ghost World empathizes with its characters, but it also keeps pushing until the romance of being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl or the sadsack loser whose life she redeems loses its sheen; it has too much respect for the complexity of identity formation and romantic relationships to give us the easy pay-offs of Obselidia. In addition to all that, Obselidia annoyingly panders to an arthouse audience. Sophie bemoans that her boyfriend thinks Star Wars is the greatest movie ever made when he refuses to even watch Au hasard Balthazar because it's in black-and-white with subtitles. What's the use of preferring Au hasard Balthazar if you think Obselidia is worthwhile filmmaking?

Sundance '10: 7 Days

Les 7 jours du talion
**/****
starring Rémy Girard, Claude Legault, Fanny Mallette, Martin Dubreuil
screenplay by Patrick Senecal
directed by Daniel Grou

by Alex Jackson Perhaps one of the more overtly sadomasochistic entries in the torture-porn genre, French-Canadian Daniel Grou's 7 Days seems to be seething at the bit to get to the good stuff. When Jasmine (Rose-Marie Coallier), the eight-year-old daughter of surgeon Bruno Hamell (Claude Legault), is raped and murdered, he decides to kidnap, torture, and kill the man responsible and then turn himself in. Hamell catches the killer, a day labourer named Anthony Lemaire (Martin Dubreuil) who has been implicated through DNA evidence, ties him up, and strips off his clothes. Lemaire then spends the rest of the film completely naked. I hope it's not a function of a prudish American upbringing, but whenever this guy was on screen my eyes were immediately drawn to his exposed penis. Allegedly, the suspense is in whether or not the police will find and stop Hamell; in practice, the suspense is in when exactly Hamell will castrate Lemaire. Hamell smashes Lemaire's knee with a sledgehammer and we just think to ourselves, Well, thank God it was only his knee. 7 Days isn't about the horror of losing a daughter--it's about the horror of getting hit in the balls. I don't think Grou is a deliberate provocateur, per se. This is an utterly bleak and humourless movie, lacking the sensationalism and showmanship of Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noé, Eli Roth, or even Lars von Trier. Grou actually seems serious about this subject matter. But to quote Pauline Kael, that this film has impact doesn't make it art. Because we only see her body after the fact, Jasmine's rape and murder don't have the proportional weight of the resulting torture. It becomes an excuse to make a movie about a naked man being tortured. I also found the relationship between Hamell and Jasmine to be overly idyllic. I sense that anybody who would want to get revenge like this, who would have it in them to do these things to another human being, would already have a rather strained relationship with the person he's avenging. This isn't about Jasmine, it's all about Hamell, and we should get more of a sense of this egotism in his family life before the murder. 7 Days doesn't have a lot of insight into human behaviour, much less the ethics of vengeance or the emotional experience of mourning.

Sundance '10: Double Take

***/****
starring Ron Burrage, Mark Perry
written and directed by Johan Grimonprez

by Alex Jackson Johan Gimonprez's Double Take imagines an instance where Alfred Hitchcock is interrupted from filming 1963's The Birds to talk to his "double." This doppelgänger is from 1980--the year, you may remember (or reasonably guess), that Hitchcock died--and not his "double" at all, but rather his wraith, a vision of himself on the eve of his death. Hitchcock asks him who wins the Cold War and the wraith dismisses the question as unimportant. He wants to talk about how television is destroying cinema. The bulk of Double Take is a montage of archival footage--host segments from "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and television broadcasts of Hitchcock's films, commercial spots for Folger's Instant Coffee that border on misogynistic, and news coverage of the 1959 Nixon/Khrushchev "kitchen debate," the infamous 1960 Nixon/Kennedy debate, the space race, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The film calls to mind Jayne Loader and Kevin & Pierce Rafferty's 1982 curiosity The Atomic Cafe, in which the threat of nuclear holocaust is documented entirely through archival footage with no contextualizing narration or interviews. Gimonprez's digs at Richard Nixon (he match-cuts his twitchy eyes with those of a space monkey) and his facile but extremely powerful juxtaposition of The Supremes singing "Baby Love" and "Where Did Our Love Go" with footage of nuclear explosions and the escalating tensions between Cuba and the United States, to take the two most obvious examples, would have had more resonance 25 or 30 years ago, when condescension to the late-'50s/early-'60s was more fashionable and we were still under the immediate threat of nuclear annihilation. In 2010, Gimonprez's boogeyman isn't nuclear war, but television. He's suggesting that television makes everything it shows equally significant, until finally none of it matters. The Cold War is as pop as an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. But once we establish that, the film becomes somewhat self-cannibalizing. By putting criticism of television in the mouth of Hitchcock and the defense of it in the mouth of Nixon, and by holding Kennedy up as a manifestation of its denigrating effects (he seems more like a hologram than like a man), the film itself becomes subject to its own critique. If television has made it so that nothing is important, then that means Double Take itself is not important. I came out of Double Take feeling refreshed, as though I had just woken up from a beautiful dream, but something tells me I might have been even happier seeing three back-to-back episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", complete with vintage commercials.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947) - DVD

***/**** Image F (colorized)/B+ (b&w) Sound B Extras C
starring Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn, Gene Lockhart
screenplay by George Seaton, based on the story by Valentine Davies
directed by George Seaton

by Alex Jackson George Seaton's Miracle on 34^th Street isn't my Christmas movie of choice. My most potent movie memory of Christmas is actually watching the Star Wars trilogy when it was broadcast on the USA network however many years ago. Accordingly, I make it a point of marking the holiday by watching some kind of Star Wars-like "deep reality" science-fiction or fantasy film, such as The Lord of the Rings, or Blade Runner. A couple years back, I watched The Passion of the Christ. But I digress. Of all the major Christmas movie cults--including those surrounding A Christmas Story, It's a Wonderful Life, Elf, and 1951's A Christmas Carol--the Miracle on 34^th Street cult is the one with which I'd most want to spend the holidays. The film manages to be irreverent without becoming sacrilegious and sentimental without becoming saccharine. It's a pretty silly film, but I guess you could say that it's serious about being silly. It values silliness for its restorative, therapeutic quality.

The Odd Couple (1968) [Centennial Collection] - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, John Fiedler, Herb Edelman
screenplay by Neil Simon, based on his play
directed by Gene Saks

by Alex Jackson My high-school psychology teacher used The Odd Couple's Oscar and Felix as an example of two men who had never resolved the anal stage of Sigmund Freud's model for psychosexual development. Oscar (Walter Matthau) is anal expulsive, rebelling against toilet-training well into adulthood, wallowing in his own filth and living completely in the moment. Felix (Jack Lemmon) is anal-retentive, finding pleasure in withholding his feces as a child, and as an adult obsessively cleaning and re-cleaning his surroundings and living by a strictly-controlled schedule. Indeed, playwright Neil Simon's The Odd Couple seems custom-built to illustrate the anal-stage concept in Freudian psychosexual development. In a broader sense, The Odd Couple is also an overt embodiment of the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy: Felix represents the need to create order, whereas Oscar represents the need to maintain a natural chaotic state.

Nanking (2007) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A
directed by Bill Guttentag & Dan Sturman

by Alex Jackson Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's 90-minute documentary on the 1937 Nanking Massacre isn't so much reductive or simplistic as it is overachieving. The film suggests several promising avenues of discussion but stops there, at the level of overview, leaving you frustrated and hungry. As I felt similarly unsatisfied by the Ken Burns mini-series The Civil War, it occurs to me that the problem is one not of brevity but of excess ambition. With several hours at his disposal, Burns tried and failed to meet the likely-futile goal of creating the definitive document of the American Civil War. Even allowing for the decrease in scale, Guttentag and Sturman shouldn't have expected to sum up the entirety of the Nanking Massacre in a scant hour-and-a-half. By trying to tell us everything about the Nanking Massacre, Nanking ultimately tells us very little.

Gigi (1958) - Blu-ray Disc

GIGI (1958)
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, Hermione Gingold
screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, based on the novel by Colette
directed by Vincente Minnelli

GIGI (1949)
**/**** Image C+ Sound C
starring Gaby Morlay, Danièle Delorme, Jean Tissier, Yvonne de Bray
scteenplay by Pierre Laroche, based on the novel by Colette
directed by Jacqueline Audry

by Alex Jackson How weird is it that Vincente Minnelli's Gigi won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1958, when four years later Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Lolita barely got the seal of approval? I suppose we shouldn't underestimate the power of sex to scandalize when it isn't disguised as love. In Gigi, wealthy Parisian playboy Gaston Lachaille (Louis Jourdan) is fixated on 15-year-old Gigi (27-year-old Leslie Caron), the granddaughter of family friend Madame Alvarez (Hermione Gingold). He likes her precisely because she is still a child. Most of the women Gaston goes with are accustomed and entitled to a certain standard of living. By contrast, Gigi can appreciate being spoiled. Gaston also admires her irreverence--how she can cheat at cards and tease him about it, or how she can effortlessly tell him off after he insults her dress. She hasn't learned how to be a lady yet; her rough edges haven't been smoothed out and she's capable of challenging him. There's a life to her that's drained out of most of the other women he meets long before he gets there.

Pretty Woman (1990) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, Ralph Bellamy, Hector Elizondo
screenplay by J.F. Lawton
directed by Garry Marshall

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Well, I'm willing to admit this much: Pretty Woman has a ridiculous premise. Corporate raider Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) buys up struggling companies and liquidates their assets. While in Los Angeles planning the purchase of ship manufacturer Morse Industries, he gets lost on the way back to his Beverly Hills hotel and stops on Hollywood Blvd. to ask for directions. This is where he meets Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts), a hooker desperate to pay off a few debts. She subsequently drives him to his hotel; as Edward recently broke up with his girlfriend in New York and feels bad about making Vivian take the bus home, he invites her to spend the night. They bargain over her price, arrive at the figure of three-hundred dollars, and sleep together. In the morning, Edward has a phone conversation with his lawyer, Philip Stuckey (Jason Alexander), who suggests he have dinner with James Morse, the owner and founder of Morse Industries, and that he bring a date to keep things social. Still on the phone, Edward walks in on Vivian singing along to Prince in the bathtub and offers to pay her for the entire week to be at his "beck-and-call."

Sundance '09: Earth Days

***/****
directed by Robert Stone

by Alex Jackson I'm not quite sure how I feel about the environmental movement--the subject of Robert Stone's documentary Earth Days. There are two inarguable, somewhat contradictory truths at work here: mankind has been destroying and continues to destroy the planet he is inhabiting; and various doomsday scenarios predicted by the environmental and population-control movements have not come to pass. Stone shows us environmental leaders from three decades ago predicting that the sky will fall in 30 years. I sort of wish he had found room for a clip from Richard Fleischer's great 1973 film Soylent Green, which posits a future where strawberry jam is sold on the black market and food shortages are great enough that corporations start selling people in cracker form. It was a dystopia that never saw the light of day. Stone includes archival footage from the 1950s of men spraying pesticides on kids swimming in a community pool and it gets a huge laugh from the audience. We wonder how Americans could have been so naïve. But with its roots in the '60s counterculture, the environmental movement has its own kind of naivety; as Andrew Stanton's WALL·E demonstrated with its mock corporate-logo stinger, anti-consumerism is itself a product to be consumed. The attitudes of the 1960s are every bit as campy, every bit as surrounded by quotation marks, as those of the 1950s.  As a teenager, I found myself strongly siding with the population-control movement. Seeing how more people were being born than dying, I was convinced that human beings would eventually outstrip their resources. The large Mormon families whose offspring I went to school with struck me as morally bankrupt.  I've since chilled out. Stone interviews a woman who, upon graduating from college, announced that she was never going to have a child. I find it incredible that she is willing to sacrifice the joy of becoming a mother not because she personally doesn't identify motherhood as joyful, but because she doesn't want to contribute to overpopulation. Subjugating one's individualism in the name of the Greater Good to this degree registers as a little insane. It's true that we are all citizens of planet Earth and it's true that we should be conscientious of the cumulative impact of our individual actions, yet living exclusively on a global scale really isn't any way to live at all.

Sundance '09: Moon

****/****
starring Sam Rockwell
screenplay by Nathan Parker
directed by Duncan Jones

by Alex Jackson Lunar miner Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of a three-year contract with Lunar Industries when an accident lands him in his spaceship's sickbay. Upon regaining consciousness, he meets a facsimile of himself and begins to suspect that his employer and his robot companion Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) have been keeping something from him. While Moon has some kind of basic dramatic conflict and is centred around an actual story instead of impressive visuals (though Sam Rockwell playing table tennis with himself is a hella neat trick), its vision of the future is surprisingly utopian. Bell is mining helium energy from the moon's surface and this efficient, clean-burning fuel has solved a great deal of Earth's energy problems. Once the truth of Lunar Industries' deception is finally revealed, we implicitly understand that Bell is necessary collateral damage sacrificed for the greater good. The most provocative thing about Moon is that it doesn't bother indulging in sanctimonious outrage or in typecasting Lunar Industries as a monolithic villain. Bell never launches into a moralistic tirade condemning them and they never launch into a diabolical tirade defending themselves. The film in general is a strangely comforting experience. Rockwell may be the most amiable actor working today while Spacey, perfectly cast as the voice of Gerty, slyly sends up both himself and sci-fi movie computer voices. (Perhaps in order to make Gerty's presence genuinely calming and reassuring, the filmmakers had to acknowledge, on some level, the calm and reassuring computer voice as a genre cliché.) If the film is completely unthreatening stylistically, the questions at the heart of the material are not. Like this year's Boy Interrupted, coincidentally enough, Moon forces us to confront the natural ramifications of seeing Man as a biological rather than spiritual entity. When we learn the perfectly logical reason why Bell can see himself, it just fucks with our minds even more. Identity is not something that should be explained scientifically. The film's future epitomizes how science and reason can make our lives better, not only through technological improvements but through a move towards utilitarian ethics as well. And yet, by design, there is something terrifying about it.

Sundance '09: Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire

Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
***½/****
starring Gabourey Sidibe, Paula Patton, Mo'Nique, Mariah Carey
screenplay by Damien Paul
directed by Lee Daniels

by Alex Jackson The enormous hype surrounding Lee Daniels's Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire (hereafter Push) is both validating and a little confounding. Leaving Sundance with Grand Jury and Audience awards in the dramatic category, the film is an incredible mess. It takes a lot of risks, probably more than it needed to, and sometimes it falls flat on its face. The backlash has already begun to set in, natch--one commentator on the IMDb writes, "It's all glitzy fake heart, with no subtlety or clarity. It's pure adrenaline, the movie equivalent of Red Bull." He certainly saw the same movie I did, but in my book "glitzy" and "fake" aren't necessarily pejorative terms and "subtlety" isn't necessarily a virtue. If nothing else, Push is a welcome alternative to the useless, navel-gazing naturalism that so often characterizes socially conscientious cinema. It's Harlem, circa 1987, and obese, illiterate teenager Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is pregnant with her father's second child. Her principal places her in an educational program where, under the tutelage of a dedicated English teacher (Paula Patton), she learns how to read and prepares to earn her GED. Meanwhile, her abusive mother Mary (Mo'Nique) is trying to get her to forget about education and instead apply for welfare. Interspersed throughout the film are dramatizations of Precious's daydreams, fantasies of being married to her Math teacher or living inside an Italian neo-realist film. Daniels may have intended these sequences to be bittersweet and somewhat pathetic, but I found them overly cutesy. They give us a way to distance ourselves from the material. I was also turned off by a melodramatic development in the third act that exists mostly to take advantage of the 1980s setting and to artificially induce a confrontation between Mary and Precious. Still, said confrontation is a humdinger and in itself makes the picture worth recommending. As monstrous as Mary is, we see that she has her reasons for behaving as she does, and while that doesn't excuse her, it does allow us to pity and forgive her on Precious's behalf. Push is the most damning critique of the culture of poverty and our welfare system since Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby. The film positions education as the best weapon against poverty in that it moves one's locus of control inward. When Precious reveals her test score at the end of the piece, it's an authentic indicator that she is a person of worth and has overcome her mother's negativity. Far from simply appeasing the popular audience, Push additionally proves itself sociologically sound.

Sundance '09: Kimjongilia

The Flower of Kim Jong II
**½/****
directed by NC Heikin

by Alex Jackson Kimjongilia takes its title from a hybrid red begonia created in honour of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's 46^th birthday. It is said to symbolize wisdom, love, justice, and peace. Director NC Heikin juxtaposes propaganda footage romanticizing Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung's North Korea against interviews with former oppressed North Koreans who now reside in South Korea. As political filmmaking, it's pretty crude. There really aren't two sides to this issue: Kim Jong Il is a bad guy and there doesn't seem to be any way to argue that he's not. Heikin does give us a timeline explaining how the Kim family came to power after ousting the occupying Japanese from Korea, but her scope isn't broad enough to explore the difficulties of establishing a new government from the ruins of war. Instead, Kimjongilia is more a simple revel in absurdity. The propaganda pieces are beyond satire--they come off as the bastard children of Leni Riefenstahl and Lawrence Welk. They feature musical numbers routinely centred around the abundance of food, a recurrent obsession in a country hobbled by famine. There's a good moment where a North Korean singer explains that she was forbidden to sing because her voice was judged as too commercial; entertainment in communist countries apparently has to be bad enough that nobody will want to pay money for it. We then hear the kinds of stories the propaganda is meant to cover up. Three generations of a family can be placed in a prison camp for something one member did. Heikin interviews a man born into a prison camp for an unnamed crime committed by his grandfather. People are routinely incarcerated for associating with those who have embarrassed or have the potential to embarrass the Great Leader. Later, we learn that part of the reason admission standards to the prison camps are so lax is because North Korea's economy relies on slave labour to manufacture products which are subsequently exported to European countries. The prison-camp stories themselves are so terrible they're darkly hilarious--no matter how bad you think things can get, they get worse. Still, I found that Kimjongilia only truly came alive during the propaganda sequences. Kim-Jong Il's bald-faced lies offer more to chew on than the secrets he keeps. I wonder how the film would work if the propaganda moved to the forefront and the point didn't lie so much in said juxtaposition. Kimjongilia isn't worthless, but it's ultimately not telling us much we don't already know.