creak, creak, we exist in all zones

Flightplan (2005)

In Flightplan, motherly love is expressed not through the familiar tropes of maternal sacrifice or revenge, but through maternal paranoia.  The mother and child bonding scenes early in the film that establish Jodie Foster's character Kyle Pratt as the mother-hero carry their emotional weight in the barely suppressed panic that flickers across Foster's worried face whenever she observes her daughter, a panic that escalates into a fierce and full-blown conspiracy theory when the little girl disappears.

It's almost intoxicatingly pleasurable to watch Jodie Foster stride wild-eyed and twitchy-faced through the plane, shoving passengers and stewardesses out of her way and spouting out technically dazzling demands for a full aircraft search.  Because her over-the-top egocentrism is disguised as maternal devotion, Kyle is the ultimate validation of our forbidden desire for unrestrained megalomania.  Apparently, any and all obnoxious behaviour, including racism, is not only forgivable but truly righteous if it's in the name of protecting your child.  Thus the moral low road of selfish individualism becomes the moral high road of selfless concern for another.  The film is so intent on legitimizing Kyle's monstrous behaviour toward everyone on the plane from children to the captain that it goes out of its way to end the film with a series of punishments for all those who doubted her.  It not only forces the grave flight captain to apologize for not ceding to Kyle's demands over his concern for the well-being of the 400 or so other passengers, but most absurdly, it actually ends with an Arab fellow passenger deferentially helping her with her bags.  This is the same man who Kyle had savagely and wrongfully accused of kidnapping her daughter and plotting to hijack the plane. Being a white mother not only means never having to say you're sorry, it also means that dark-skinned people will carry your baggage for you even after you brand them as terrorists. --Irene

 

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)

It should be official by now: cgi morphing is NOT scary.  Because of their affinity with supernatural phenomenon--both cgi effects and "ghosts" are immaterial, fluid, and free from the laws of density, gravity and temporality--digital effects are often enlisted to help visualize the supernatural.  Thus the 1999 remakes of The Haunting and The Mummy both showed us vapory spirits from beyond, rendered in cgi, that were invisible in the original versions.  Yet something about phantasmagoric digital effects allows them to elicit awe, bedazzlement, and even shock, but not deep, bone-chilling horror.  "Bone-chilling" might be the important term, because it seems that contemporary uses of cgi typically fail to force their way into your very bones, to access the clenched solidity of absolute dread at a bodily register.  The ghoulishly morphing faces and clouds that Father Moore and Emily Rose see when under demonic attack look like digital images tweaked in Photoshop ("Yeah, let's use the 'satanic distortion' filter.")

But the harrowing bodily contortions of the actress who plays Emily rose are so intense, every nerve and muscle across her body is wound so excruciatingly tight, that the true horror of the film is in watching this "hypersensitive" body react to and articulate demonic possession with such violent, unrestrained hysteria.  It's essentially like watching an electro-shock torture scene over and over again--the face clenching and spine arching to breaking point as the body is racked by invisible bolts of electricity.  It's not really about being disturbed by the spectre of true primordial evil.  It's about being freaked out by this hollow-faced young woman's skewed and out-of-control physical body.  A face transformed into an image whose contours can be digitally morphed is now a banality, not an abomination.   But the transgression of a young woman's bodily integrity and comportment still horrifies.  Ultimately, "Emily's story" is not where the the film, the lawyer, and the priest explicitly point us, in her maudlin letter about saintly visions.  Emily Rose is essentially mute throughout the film and unable to narrate her own experience of being possessed.  Her body, raging and convulsing hideously, takes on the weight of showing us everything. --Irene

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

The nuclear family is back with a vengeance, it seems, if indeed it ever went away.  But what with everyone at the last Oscars falling over themselves trying to show off their children and moms, and even Britney Spears about to give birth, the most glamorous, fulfilling, and deep thing you can do nowadays is to squirt out 2.5 children and puff yourself out beneath the righteous flag of Family.  And to find this current coursing through several recent Hollywood blockbusters--The Incredibles, War of the Worlds, only to land, a little touched but still pristinely didactic, into the twisted universe of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is getting to be rather alarming.  After all, except in the few occasions when they are eccentric obsessives, parents in Roald Dahl stories are either gruesomely killed off or horridly gruesome themselves, leaving their children to take up with insects, giants, and cigar-smoking grandmothers.  The new movie subtly deflates Willy Wonka's dangerous perversity by tacking on and pounding in the story of his integration into the Bucket family.  The movie just can't deal with the idea of an effeminate adult man who gives candy to children and leave it at that, with ragged edges and cruelties left in place.  It has to coax him into the soft and fuzzy narrative of the hurt man-child who needs an adorably cozy family to teach him about love.  The thing is, I was thoroughly charmed by the ragamuffin Buckets with their horrid teeth and tottering cottage in the opening of the film, perhaps spurred by my love for Noah Taylor. It wasn't until they were rallied into the cause of Family  vs. Dandy at the end of the film that I started to balk.  And Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka started out promisingly enough by channelling Mr. Jellinek from Strangers with Candy, but lost his poreless, otherworldly, cgi-sheen and creepy awkwardness with the 4th "mumbler!" gag. 

The most disappointing part of the movie was precisely in the area where I thought Tim Burton would excel.  The visual spectacle of the chocolate factory's inner workings weren't nearly as awful as the ill-conceived, Cirque du Soleil sequences that are supposed to pass for never-never-land in Finding Neverland, a movie whose insulting sappiness hovers too closely around this one.  But I found myself missing the lickable wallpaper, sudsy locomotive, levitation soda, and atomic-model-like Everlasting Gobstopper from the original film.  The new film moves briskly and mechanically from one child's demise to the next, replacing the detours into Charlie's transgressions  that propelled the original film with Wonka's childhood flashbacks.  These would have been amusing if they hadn't been mere set-ups for a big family hug that ends the film. --Irene

34 in 04: movie review catch-up

To make up for the months that have passed since I last posted a movie review, I will attempt to power through the 34 movies that I have seen in 2004 up till now. Does it seem odd that, despite the fact that I am in graduate school studying film, I have watched only about 2/3 the number of films this year thus far as last year thus far? Of course, quantity isn't really the point. However, for some reason, the film-watching experiences that I can count as truly riveting and pleasurable has also gone down hill. Is it the magic of the 99W drive-in, film buddies Becca, Valarie and Brian, that heavenly silver screen pass, ducking into the Fox theater after work just to get out of the rain, or the cheap popcorn and brewer's yeast at the Cinema 21 that I miss? Or is studying what you love just a bad idea?

My Favorite Wife (1940)
The frivolous treatment of marriage and motherhood as a light, silly amusement to be taken up when it charms you and abandoned when there are other adventures to be had is great fun and never gets fully quashed by the reunification of husband with proper wife at the end. Cary Grant is daft, wishy-washy, and dreamy.

Tale of Springtime (1990)
I love the offhand chattiness, the small compromises, and the way people casually float into each other's lives and then become complicated and entangled, but so gently, in Rohmer films. There's the free-spirited, intelligent, sensitive young woman who curiously stumbles upon a strange (and strangely shaped) younger friend; the spineless man who nevertheless occupies the center of the film as his entitlement; betrayal and misunderstanding. But ultimately, it's about the tone, which is incredibly subtle and even. While others might take the same themes and situations and make them satiric, hilarious, melancholy, cruel, or depressing--such strong words--this film is consistently temperate.

School of Rock (2003)
This is the type of anthem movie that makes you spontaneously applaud with delight. I may be a complete sucker for the comedic man-child genre, but just looking at Jack Black doing anything at all, walking down a school hallway or carrying a lunch tray, makes me laugh out loud--even in repose he is so irrepressibly consumed by rock. Mike White from "Chuck and Buck" is perfectly nebbish, the Spider guitarist slam is hilariously dead-on, and most importantly, the kids ring true. Linklater has deep affection for all that is awkward, sloppy, and hopeful.

Love, Actually (2003)
A bit unsatisfying along some of the many romantic threads, and more than a bit disturbing in treating male employer-female employee romances like some sort of inevitable norm. I'm also not a big fan of the "if you are in love with someone, then you must declare your love to them no matter what" school of romance, where it's not only ok but deeply romantic for this icky ribbed turtleneck guy to tell his best friend's wife that he's obsessed with her, as if said declaration was some sort of sweet gift, a romantic ideal, rather than a creepy burden. With the exception of Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman's painful revelations, the stories that stayed silly and tongue-in-cheek worked best. And Hugh Grant as the Pointer-Sisters-dancing PM was a bit of screwy fantastical fluff that transcended its roots in coy manipulation to charm me over. In a break with the "beautiful people belong together even when they are pretending not to be beautiful" convention that brought us Notting Hill, here the biggest star gets paired with the chubby non-star.

Bad Santa (2003)
Outrageously dark and misanthropic, a perfect counterpoint to the saccharine bright humor of Elf. The cruelty heaped onto that awful little boy and the hopelessness of his adult protectors, only partially redeemed at the end, was worthy of Dan Clowes.

An Ideal Husband (1999)
Cate Blanchett and Jeremy Northam's gorgeous and honorable but beleaguered couple at the center of the story is so high-minded and prissy as to be gag-inducing; and the movie gets wonderful when you realize that it recognizes this. Minnie Driver is so incredibly weird-looking (her face is like a Rubik's Cube in mid-move, all oddly-aligned polygons) that I find her disconcerting when she plays a prim, rather conventional husband-seeker rather than the sort of loopy free-spirit at which she excels.

Dazed and Confused (1993)
The first time I watched this film surrounded by a bunch of loudly self-congratulatory Oberlin students, I hated it. I liked it better with this second look, and kept thinking about it as a "hang out" movie as described by Quentin Tarantino in his recent New Yorker interview--the kind of movie that you watch over and over again because you like hanging out with the characters. I loved the way the movie undercut the house party which had been building up as an expected climax to a classic teen movie trajectory, then offhandedly tumbled it all down midway and just as casually rebuilt it again into the big party blowout we had been hoping for. As for characters, the only ones I really enjoyed were Matthew McConaughey, who moves like he owns the world, and the three nerds.

In America (2002)
The only reason to see this film is for Samantha Morton, whose performance goes against the grain of an otherwise mostly conventionally sentimental film where children are innocent angels, dads try their best to provide for their families, and friendly black neighbors who die of AIDS leave you all their money. Why does she act like she's mute, as if she was still in Minority Report or Sweet and Lowdown? In fact, Morton does pretty much act exactly like Morvern Callar transplanted into a Jim Sheridan immigrants-in-NY movie--inscrutable, impetuous, a bit autistic, expressive of some sort of restless yearning.

Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (1933)
Al Jolson plays a hobo, the "major of Central Park," who relishes his community of fellow male hobos (in today's terminology, homeless) who live in Central Park, sleeping on park benches and living off of scraps. His launch into the world of productive labor and a sexual economy, so that he can afford an apartment for the amnesia-striken girl he has fallen in love with, turns out to be miserable. He ultimately rejects it for a return to his ebullient, freeloading hobo life, the freedom to do nothing whenever he pleases. This Depression-era film's politically charged anti-production and anti-reproduction stance is remarkable in the face of today's accelerated pace of capitalist production, 24/7 work ethic and obsession with the normative family. His black sidekick Acorn is also quite disruptive--how to play "servant" to a bum? How do rules of race continue to work even when capitalist rules have been so radically and ostentatiously dismissed? Also striking is that the film is a musical, but with no dance numbers, and the characters speak in really odd rhyming dialogue that periodically turns into song.

21 Grams

Despite all the powerhouse teary breakdowns, the characters in 21 Grams (2003) failed to gel, like they were so busy working on their big scenes that they forgot to interact with the other characters in the film. I accuse Sean Penn in particular, whose silly wheezing was exceedingly irritating and who was too smarmy and uncharming to inspire me to care. Even though I think there is something mushy and malleable about her face that intrigues me, and even though I was a tiny bit moved by the idea of refusing to let time heal all wounds, I kept thinking that Naomi Watts was in the casting scene she played in Mulholland Drive, that she would break the spell and become a perky Canadian girl at any moment. Perhaps once you play meta it's hard to play method. And I kept wanting to give poor Benicio Del Toro a decent haircut and some soap and a role where he doesn't play an inchoate beast. The most compelling scenes were with Charlotte Gainsbourg who dared to underact and who has the most amazingly faux-homely pout in the universe. The class conflict inherent in the narrative trajectory--a bourgeouis professor and wife of an architect who together accuse this trashy ex-con of ruining their tidy lives, and whose joint breakdown must culminate not in a nice granite-topped kitchen decorated with tasteful prints, but in the shithole universe of the ex-con, so that they can emerge from this nadir into a healing process--started to burble up as a fascinatingly unequal division but then flattened out and disappeared by the end. Stylistic conceits like the dreary oversaturated near-monochrome of the film stock, and the fragmented flashback structure failed to keep the melodrama at the transplanted heart of the film from flatlining, from hitting a single emotional pitch and staying there. --Irene

The Thing

Is The Thing (1982) a better or worse movie for ensuring, except in one quickly recuperated moment, that we know that our hero Kurt Russell is unmistakably human throughout a film whose central terrifying question is how to distinguish a real man from his perfect biological facsimile? The horror is not of death, madness, fascism, privation or other problems that often vex people trapped and isolated in a space whether Antarctica or Jupiter--but of the hybrid body, the leaky body, the body that violates the containing borders of cell, skin, and species. Here is an invasive, contaminating force that behaves like and looks like a human, even down to the innards, but is liable to bite off your face and suck you into itself, to become both you and its previously absorbed creatures in some mongrel amalgam. In today's over-cgi-ed alien aesthetic, I loved the squelchy wetness of the monster bodies. --Irene

The Last Samurai

Formally, if you removed the moralizing, slow-motion, "war is hell" sections, The Last Samurai (2003) battle scenes were Kill Bill. You've got ninjas pouring in cat-leaps off the rooftops, you've got swords slashing brilliant red gashes into Japanese bodies, you've got heads rolling and blood spraying in beautiful arabesques. Whereas Kill Bill refuses a moral stance and thus seems totally lacking a center beyond what Uma Thurman can muster through sheer grit, The Last Samurai plugs in a flimsy one (war is um, bad, 'cause innocent people get killed and it gives soldiers scary nightmares and uh, globalization is bad too) that obscures its true obsession with beautiful bloody death. The film is fixated on death--every scene yearns for it, charges towards it, and then revels in it in such a single-mindedly fatalistic way that I was convinced that they would actually kill off Tom Cruise in the end. Not just death but death by penetration, being fucked to death, as evidenced by the number of sharp pointy things threatening to enter or entering bodies all over the place. But brutal, glorious death was displaced from our star to the samurai master, and the scene of Katsumoto plunging his knife into himself while Tom Cruise clutched and glared at him with what was supposed to be manly sympathy but looked like the furious, blank plateau preceding orgasm was so preposterously homoerotic that I wanted to scream. The film's disavowal of its own death instinct, when Tom Cruise tells the weird pansy emperor that he will tell the tale not of how Katsumoto died but how he lived seems doubly absurd when you consider that the scenes of peaceful Japanese hobbies like calligraphy, tea-drinking, and composing cherry blossom poetry were a snore compared to the cool battle action scenes where men were dying in the most thrilling and fascinating ways. As if men's bodies were too constrained by dumpy pre-spandex 19th-century clothing to truly rub in the bodily effects of penetration, and because you can't very well have a battle scene populated by well-oiled naked men, we get all these shots of naked horse flanks getting pummelled and crushed. The last battle sequence when the Japanese army pulls out the automatic machine guns against the samurai to finish them off is the most telling--the guns are hand-cranked and perched on a stands like movie cameras on tripods, coldly and efficiently taking aim on these helpless subjects who get brutally mowed down, but in this incredibly satisfying, visually entrancing way.

Tom Cruise plays his usual brand of fever-eyed intensity--the guy is so pugnaciously intense that even his nose looks erect. One amazingly singular scene, when Tom Cruise discovers the samurai way and quickly dispatches a bunch of attackers with hand-to-hand combat rather than his gun, plays through in a quick and confusing blur of action. Then, amazingly, Tom Cruise immediately replays the fight AGAIN, as a memory, this time in slow-motion with helpful close-ups, as if we had been watching a particularly thrilling moment in a football game and are now treated to the instant replay; or like when you knock someone out in a video game like Virtua Fighter and they replay the sequence from a more dramatic angle so you can immediately relive your triumph cinematically. And finally, suffice to say that the requisite Japanese Shogun/Madame Butterfly gal--modestly cast-down eyes, good at sewing, washes her silky long hair in waterfalls, looks really cute gardening, kneeling, and pushing shut paper screen doors as if they were veils-- doesn't break open any new ground in Hollywood's depiction of Asian women. --Irene

Finding Nemo

Thank you to Ben for selecting the perfect brain-unfreezer to distract me from the pit of paper-writing: Finding Nemo (2003)! Visions of posh flat-screen LCD screens sugar-plummed through my head as the animation unfolded across the sturdy, old-fashioned 19" TV that my mom won as a door prize at a company holiday party nearly ten years ago. But even on my less than street-of-dreams home theater, the jewel-brightness of the pretty colors and sparkly underwater wavy things charmed my socks off. Focusing the story on the coming-of-age of two deeply flawed grown-ups, one neurotic and the other one truly deranged, rather than just on the kid, was really weird for a Disney film, where parents are supposed to be those warm, self-sacrificing, uncomplicated figures like the good Skin Horse in Velveteen Rabbit, not like Francis McDormand in Laurel Canyon. Perhaps this is Pixar's fundamental distinction from Disney--in Pixar films you are supposed to identify with the parent, in Disney films you identify with the child? Perhaps this shift to fully-realizing the parent story in what is ostensibly a children's movie reflects the narcissism of the new, post-yuppie parent?

In any case, Dora was the most oddly unstable character in a non-Japanese kid's movie ever. Her short-term memory thing was too creepy to be just a gag, unless you think Alzheimer's is a big hoot--here was this barely-cohesive entity that flittered about without memory or history, trapped in some schizophrenic "perpetual present" with no sense of personal identity sustained over time. The scene when Dora pleads with Marlin not to abandon her was more than a pat homily about how friends should stick together. Here was someone who relied utterly on another being to fix her identity and to be the repository for her memory begging to be saved from the abyss of madness and self-annihilation. The fact that she was chipper and affable and funny didn't fully cover up the fact that she was truly mentally disturbed. Combine that with the voice of the most well-known lesbian in entertainment and you've got someone a bit too out there to be fully recuperated into a shiny happy ending. Funnily enough, the dvd blitzed out into a riot of smeary pixels during the last chapter, so I didn't get to see the ending. But I really wonder where in the economy of normal family balance a character like Dora ends up. She is inherently the wrong "species" (wink, wink) to hook up with Marlin and form a handy mother-father-child hetero-nuclear unit, not to mention being too much of a child herself to be an appropriate mother (Dads, uncles, aunts, grandmas--basically anyone--is allowed to be immature and refuse to grow up without censure, except Mothers).

Anyway, I loved the hippie turtle and was amazed that they managed to combine the gestures that equal wasted surfer with the movements that equal turtle and make it work so wonderfully. I also eagerly concur with the film's assessment of seagulls as dangerous and stupid creatures who are happy to swarm together and peck you to pieces, ala The Birds. I am also grateful that despite hints that we might be in for some seriously icky visuals, that the film allowed Nemo to be sent down a sink drain rather than a toilet drain to his freedom. --Irene

Jackie Brown

That profile of Quentin Tarantino in the New Yorker combined with recently seeing Kill Bill prompted me to finally rent Jackie Brown (1997), which I had somehow entirely missed. I was surprised at how warm and compassionate, not just slavishly fannish, Tarantino was in drawing Jackie Brown and Max Cherry. And any film that just assumes, without even trying too hard, that a 45-year-old woman is some seriously hot stuff gets my vote. I was stunned by the scene where Samuel Jackson executes Robert de Niro and says something like "What happened to you man, you used to be beautiful." It suddenly sharpened my reading of the de Niro character, who had seemed oddly uncomfortable and ineffectual as the bump on a log in the periphery of Samuel Jackson's sphere of charisma. Where Ordell was appealingly sleazy and saturated with idiosyncratic cool, Louis was non-descript and humorless, incapable of copping an attitude. It was a succinct and brutal put-down of how far the promise of Taxi Driver - Mean Streets - Raging Bull had slid these days. And of course, according to Paul Schrader (as characterized by Tarantino), this decline is in fact the fault of Quentin Tarantino's "ironic heroes" who have made the de Niros of the world irrelevant. (Did anyone else have the irresistible urge to break out in giggles during that scene in Affliction, written and directed by Schrader, where Nick Nolte turns into some savage roaring Sasquatch and starts yanking maniacally on his tooth, and we're supposed to feel bad for him?) --Irene

Master and Commander

The decision was between Elf, Master and Commander, and 21 Grams (2003). Elf was to be saved for the holidays, Benicio Del Toro would have to wait until 21 Grams actually opened in the bay area, so we were left in the high seas (after a meal of vegan sushi, I might add). The fact that David had fallen asleep next to me made me acutely aware of the pacing of the film, which did not lurch from action scene to action scene in perpetual climax (actually, it's precisely these types of movies that put me to sleep), but sort of meandered along.

The trajectory of the chase which supposedly structured the journey dissipated away at some point and I didn't miss it. I was too caught up in the Gosford Park-esque detailing of ship culture. Visually, the ship seemed to always be teetering into chaos--tossed about by waves, ropes entangling the air space, dirty bodies crowded into nooks and crannies and bumping past each other, children giving orders. Yet the thing ran like clockwork--everyone knew their role exactly and worked in an efficient concert that felt like utopia--enough controversy in the form of the doctor's philosophical arguments with the ship's captain to keep things exciting, but not enough to make us deeply uneasy about the possibility of other edge-of-the-world societies gone bad that float in the cultural consciousness (Aliens, Mutiny on the Bounty, Donner party, Lord of the Flies). The film had me convinced that a strong benevolent military dictator and a rigidly heirarchical society devoid of the disruptive presence of women (but not of class and racial difference), where everyone knows their role and performs it competently without question, is the most harmonious, moral, and satisfying way to run things.

I was elated when the scapegoat and the threat to the ship's wonderful balance that he represented was purged. I wanted them to toss out the creepy guy with the plate in his head too, for stirring up trouble. There is something of the naval geek inspired by this film too that makes me picture boys poring through cross-section books on "Great Ships" and the men who do Civil War battle re-enactments. This was not a pirate movie where you are enthralled by the bawdy motley renegades-- here you love the doctor/naturalist/intellectual's contrary self-righteousness and brilliance (my thrilled anticipation of the "self-surgery" scene was nearly obscene), but are secretly glad that the he never truly challenges the Master and Commander. Ideologically suspect but incredibly pleasant, like fascism. --Irene