msic Reviews

Pretty Persuasion (2005)

cruel humo(u)r: pretty kind of pervasive

[7/10 · 12 April 2005]

(MINOR SPOILERS) Okay, full disclosure: the writer, Skander Halim, is a friend of mine. But even though his particular brand of humo(u)r was immediately recognizable to me (and I'd seen his short film Family Dinner, which was the calling card for Persuasion), some of the funniest moments turned out to be James Woods' ad-libbed non sequiturs. Truthfully, all the humor is of a piece, a caustic willingness to eviscerate any last remaining pieties about the innocence of American girlhood.

Evan Rachel Wood turns in a small miracle of a performance as Kimberly, a rich girl who's more than precocious; she's got the fully formed subjectivity, sexual appetite, and ironic detachment of a grown woman. The piercing subtext of this character and her fate is that as a smart, mature young woman in the cruel, petty culture of American high school, she cannot survive intact. A bit like -- seriously, don't laugh -- the character of Sarah Jane in Sirk's Imitation of Life, Kimberly's clear-eyed picture of the way things work is a knowledge she can't fully capitalize upon. Instead, it effectively drives her insane.

I know this sounds like pretty heady stuff for a "teen comedy," and Pretty Persuasion is aiming for balls-out genre subversion of the sort a film like Election only began to approach. The downside is that the film's ambition outstrips its ability, and the dark turns it finally takes feel less organic, more argumentative, than they probably should. Nevertheless, this film's got guts, and its first two- thirds are, for the most part, unrelentingly funny.

Marcos Siega, moving over from TV and music videos, acquits himself quite well in his first feature outing. There's a flat, unfussy treatment of space and mise-en- scene throughout the film, along with fluid camera-work that slowly and subtly announces to the viewer that we're watching something teen-oriented but with higher aspirations. (Although the feeling is completely different, only Ghost World comes to mind as a fitting analogy.) Siega and Halim do not hit their every mark, and there are a few clunkers even in the comedy section (despite Adi Schnall's solid performance, the character of Randa is not hewn with the requisite care), but more often than not, Pretty Persuasion is tight, tough, and willing to smack you around a little bit. Admit you like it.

May (2002)

Freud much?

[7/10 · 2 May 2002]

This film was an extremely pleasant surprise, although the experience of watching it was often anything but pleasant. MAY takes some basic tropes of horror *and* camp cinema -- the misfit, the overbearing parents, the failed socialization, the fetishization -- and invests them with fresh, bold ideas. Just when McKee threatens to go over the top, and slip into snarky, self-satisfied campiness, he and actress Angela Bettis pull back, revealing the pathos of not fitting in. Here's a psychopath we can all relate to.

I hesitate to mention this, lest anyone think this film is anything less than solid entertainment, but there's a level of theoretical sophistication at work in MAY as well. Typically, our pop-Freud notion of psychoanalysis leads us to reduce individuals to a simple, one-note diagnosis. "He's anal," "she's paranoid," etc. MAY -- both the film and the character -- is a more complex case. The film lights on various key concepts from Freud and Lacan, without ever announcing themselves as such. Fetishism, the uncanny, the "errant" female refusal to accept castration, the scopophilic drive -- it's all there, but never cartoonish and never simplified. So what we get is a beautiful, well-rounded psycho who never has a chance in the outside world. And this is truly heartbreaking, instead of being merely risible.

But again, I emphasize. This film is *not* some sort of filmic demonstration of psychoanalytic theses. It's too smart for that. The full complexity of MAY is only visible in retrospect, right around the time you're picking your jaw up off the floor.

I had just about given up on US "indie" cinema. Lucky for us that McKee came along. Don't miss this excellent modern horror fable.

Harvard Man (2001)

The picture slaps you around.

[8/10 · 14 April 2002]

I was very impressed with HARVARD MAN. At first, it looks like a basic college movie, with basketball, girlfriends and relationships front and center. It soon comes unglued, screwing with chronology, and deploying some of the most jarring, disconcerting jumpcuts I've seen since Godard. Toback manages to cut against any intuitive rhythm, just a millisecond before you'd expect him to. This provokes intense anxiety, which mirrors what the characters are going through. I won't give away any spoilers here, except to say, the situation (and the film form) only get more (in)tense as the film develops. This is a film which only nominally participates in genre conventions, only to knock the stuffing out of them. Extra points for seriously whacked-out, purposefully inappropriate casting. You haven't lived until you've heard Joey Lauren Adams (she whose voice makes Jennifer Tilly sound like freakin' James Earl Jones) delivering a lecture on Wittgenstein. Good job, Mr. Toback.

The Orphan of Anyang (2001)

Brief but potent 6th-Gen offering

[8/10 · 2 November 2001]

This film as a dense, knotty little piece of poetry, clocking in at under 80 minutes with not an inch of fat on it. Wang deftly orchestrates single-take master-shots to keep our viewing at a distance. But, unlike other practitioners of the master-shot school -- filmmakers I admire in their own right, such as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhang-ke -- Wang uses the stationary camera and long take to create slightly more obvious black comedy, like an episode of "The Carol Burnett Show" as directed by Samuel Beckett. In particular, Wang's use of the quick fade is excellent. Often, he'll go to blackout just as some funny or shocking occurrence becomes legible. I may be making this sound like "difficult viewing," but really, it struck me as a 6th-Generation Chinese stab at a Jarmusch film, and as such, it's utterly accessible. Here's hoping it gets picked up for U.S. distribution. It might prove to be a minor hit.

Return to Pontianak (2001)

An admirable effort... (SPOILERS)

[5/10 · 26 August 2001]

RETURN TO PONTIANAK is the sort of movie we should be seeing more of in the digital age -- it embodies the "let's make a monster movie" DIY ethos. It looks great, using the flatness and graininess of DV to good effect, and its overall orange tint creates a sickly, claustrophobic atmosphere. The resurrection of the Polynesian myth of Pontianak, the p***ed-off undead woman scorned, provides a unique jumping-off point for the enterprise.

That said, the film is tonally inconsistent, veering from snarkiness to earnestness to numbness. (Is it just me, or were the other characters nearly Bressonian in their studied apathy when discovering the first dead body?) Also, the script and performances are sadly wanting. DIY doesn't mean going with an undercooked first draft, or going with first takes even when they include flat-affect line readings. Overall, PONTIANAK feels too much like a BLAIR WITCH-inspired lark which suffers greatly for the comparison. This is an admirable first effort from a talented group of filmmakers, but they still have a ways to go.

Ginger Snaps (2000)

Howling mad... (mild spoilers)

[8/10 · 28 July 2001]

I had the good fortune to see GINGER SNAPS at a festival screening, and it's without a doubt one of the smartest, most emotionally complex teen films *or* horror films I've seen in ages. (In fact, only the South Korean film MEMENTO MORI comes to mind as being remotely in the same league.) I'll just reiterate what some of the other comments have said: excellent performances, especially the two leads; great writing, funny without being drenched in irony; a keen, original visual style, until the not-so-impressive latex werewolf shows up in the finale.

GINGER SNAPS compares with Joss Whedon's work on BUFFY, of which I'm a great fan. It isn't easy to take horror-film tropes and scenarios and invest them with sincere and complicated emotions.

The most horrifying thing of all is that this film looks like it isn't going to get picked up for distribution in the States. Why? Well, maybe because nobody here is smart enough to figure out how to market it. (Not teensploitation, not a parody, sort of an art film, sort of not... Let's just throw the masses some more crap like FINAL DESTINATION.) Or, some critics have conjectured that U.S. distributors are too squeamish to promote a film about misfit teens and violence, for fear of backlash following Columbine. With this kind of narrow thinking, U.S. audiences will be treated to films which are "offensive" only because they're so poorly made.

A film as fresh and original as GINGER SNAPS deserves to be seen by U.S. audiences. The fact that this may not happen makes me howling mad.

Wavelength (1967)

we like the films, the films that go zoom...(SPOILERS)

[10/10 · 15 May 2001]

The thing about WAVELENGTH is, the zoom is only the overall shape of the film, and lots of fascinating things happen within the 45-minutes it takes for the zoom lens to cross the room. If you only care about "plot" or "characters" or human-driven "action" in cinema, no amount of persuasion is going to make you warm up to WAVELENGTH. It is more of an intersection between cinema and painting. It doesn't offer plot, like most films, and it occurs across a fixed span of time, unlike paintings which you can walk away from more easily. So it demands a different kind of patience, but I think it rewards that patience in spades. Here, the attractions are qualities of light, textures of swirling film grain, the sheer fascination with how a blue or green filter can change to optical world before you. Yes, it's possible that a film could give you all that, *and* plot, but I submit to you, you wouldn't feel those formal, painterly aspects with as much force. That's minimalism for you. And WAVELENGTH has sensual pleasure to spare.

I think one of the aspects of Snow's cinema which is most disconcerting to many filmgoers is his resolute disinterest in the human world. What do we make of a film in which someone drops dead, but the camera moves right past them? The soundtrack is a demonstration of pure sound, a sine wave which is an orderly but impersonal shifting of air. Like the light waves entering the zoom lens, mathematics and particle physics overtake "merely" human events. Isn't it possible to find interest in the space of the room for itself? Isn't it fascinating to stare into a world which, in its dogged pursuit of its own agenda, barely knows you're there? I think so. As much as I love this film, I must defend it in pretty hard-nosed terms. WAVELENGTH is not here to entertain, affirm, or even please you, any more than sunlight exists to make you visible to your friends. Light and sound are objective forces, and WAVELENGTH gives them a place to play.

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Tragedy shouldn't be so kinetic.

[3/10 · 8 November 2000]

I cannot deny that Aronofsky's film had a major impact on me. The night after I saw the film (election night, as it turned out), I woke up twice with nightmares directly relating to the film. While many critics have said that the film is powerful because it graphically depicts the horrors of drug dependency, I'm not convinced that Aronofsky isn't more interested in creating characters whose plummet into unspeakable degradation becomes an excuse for aestheticized gruesomeness, showy montage experimentation, and take-it-to-the-brink filmmaking for its own sake. The characters in REQUIEM never struck me as altogether real; rather, they are emblems of waste and desperation, put through their paces in order to provide grist for a callous, moralistic, and ultimately exploitive film. This is a shame, because my hopes were high. There is no denying that Aronofsky's images pack a brutal punch -- I still can't shake them. But I think a slower, less bravura execution of this set of stories might've conveyed human loss, instead of "Look, Ma! Watch me cross-cut!" Not recommended, unless you want to be pummelled for what strike me as dubious reasons.

Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896 (1991)

"Filter over left eye....now right, please."

[10/10 · 31 March 2000]

The cinema of Ken Jacobs is most importantly about experiencing light, shadow, and motion on the screen, as stunning phenomena which don't require a "story" or a "plot" to thrill. "Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896" is a Jacobs piece comprised of an 1896 tracking shot from a European train window, shot by the Lumiere brothers. In re-presenting this film, Jacobs distributes light-polarizing filters on wands, which audience members are asked to hold over one eye, then the other, and back again. This filter takes the "flat" information on the screen and imbues it with astonishing multi-planar depth. Trees, buildings, telegraph wires, all move horizontally across the screen in recessed space, all at different rates and in different three-dimensional spaces. The filter allows us to see this film in ways unimaginable to its makers. As Jacobs said at the conclusion of his presentation, "There it is, folks, 3D, 1896."