Programmatically joyless, more cringe-inducing than laugh-drawing, Rick Alverson's The Comedy does everything it possibly can to disclaim its title. Featuring Tim Heidecker of the Tim and Eric comic team, it focuses on Swanson, a 35-year-old man living off his comatose father's wealth and engaging in a series of outrageous (anti)social interactions that just about make Ben Stiller's hellish Greenberg look like a paragon of civility.
Alverson buries all hope of audience identification with his obnoxious protagonist right at the start: Following a slow-motion drunken-sumo-party intro (almost abstract in its imbibed nuttiness), Swanson verbally abuses his father's male nurse by suggesting he may inadvertently carry his patients' feces under his fingernails. After that, none of the multiple upcoming indiscretions seem shocking—save, maybe, for a throwaway endorsement of Hitler as "a great cheerleader for his nation." Part immoral Seth Rogen-esque slob, part kissing cousin to Lars Von Trier's prankish Idiots, Heidecker's character willfully violates rules of social conduct in order to follow his own, however twisted, pleasure principle. Continue Reading »
As modest and self-explanatory as its lower-case title suggests, small roads is James Benning's latest contemplation of American landscape as an awesome man-made sculpture. In contrast to RR, which was focused on moving railway vehicles, small roads examines the ways in which paths—firmly asserted in asphalt and only occasionally traversed—shape the visible world.
Shot with digital camera over the course of two years (even as Benning was working on other projects), the movie arrives barely annotated, so that you need the director himself to point out its underlying geographical journey—starting in California and headed first to the South, then to the Midwest. What we see are 47 immobile shots of roads in a roughly organized order that follows the succession of the seasons. At first, the structuring principle seems to be that each shot has one moving car in it before the image peters out. It comes as a minor shock, then, when shot number eight ends with no vehicle appearance whatsoever. From then on, all bets are off—in a manner of speaking. Continue Reading »
Sharon Bar-Ziv's debut feature, shot over the course of five days after an intense period of rehearsals, strives for a handheld immediacy and raw emotional power that it only intermittently achieves. More than anything else, Room 514 plays like a stripped-down, if not downright impoverished, version of A Few Good Men, in which an army newcomer's zeal is pitted against the unwritten, near-atavistic code of old timers and their ruthlessly programmed minions.
When Anna (Asia Neifeld), a Russian-born Israeli soldier serving as an MP, starts to interrogate members of an elite "Samaria Wolves" battalion about an alleged incident of excessive anti-Palestinian violence, she opens a can of worms quite impossible to handle. A young woman standing up to her supposed peers, she has to deal with a torrent of verbal abuse, ranging from sexist remarks ("You cunt") to political allegations ("You leftie") to ethnic slurs ("You little Russian"). Her dignity undermined but her resolve undaunted, Anna grows steadier in her sense of purpose after one of the soldiers decides to cooperate. But then things take a unexpectedly tragic turn. Continue Reading »
With Rodney Ascher's fantastic hoot of a movie, this year's omnipresent Sundance tagline ("Look Again") has finally lived up to its promise. Room 237 is a sustained act of tireless scrutiny, representing a near-kabbalistic approach to cinema, in which a sacred celluloid text is all that matters, and one can only aspire to offer a tentative interpretation of it—if only to then reread it yet again.
The text in question is Stanley Kubrick's supremely conceptual mind-fuck The Shining, and Room 237 serves largely as a hospitable soapbox for a few devoted fans and scholars who are free to unravel their theories on the film's "hidden meanings." The scale of devotion at play is indicated early on, when one of the speakers describes a childhood screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey as the "first religious experience" of his life. The entire movie—the full title of which actually reads Room 237: Being an Inquiry into "The Shining" in 9 Parts—plays a bit like an awe-stricken medieval exegesis of the Bible, taking the chilly story of Jack Torrance's legendary psychological meltdown as a mere starting point to comment on the nature of, well, everything. Continue Reading »
When it comes to Julie Delpy, the key question remains the old Barbra Streisand one. Namely, how much of her can you take in one sitting? A dedicated movie-polymath, effortlessly bilingual and scooping the best of both Old and New World, Delpy resembles a bizarre version of Miranda July: Instead of celebrating lonely quirks of a self-centered sensibility, she throws herself (and the viewer) into a comic vortex of agitated, super-busy scenes of noisy familial squabbles and cerebral lovers' quarrels, which seems a projection of her own coyly humane view of life.
Her new movie is a sequel to 2 Days in Paris, in which she played a fabulously promiscuous European chick to Adam Goldberg's perpetually shocked American straight man. Five years have passed, and Goldberg is no longer in the picture: Delpy's character, Marion, is now living in New York with a new partner, Mingus (Chris Rock), and two children—one of hers and one of his. As befits a typical New York couple, Mingus is a radio-show host (and a Village Voice reporter, no less), while Marion prepares to open a debut photo exhibition, frankly examining her previous sexual relationships and involving a public act of a (literal) "selling of her soul" to an anonymous buyer. Continue Reading »
There's such a world of difference between Ira Sachs's second and third features—Forty Shades of Blue is as beautifully delicate as Married Life is self-consciously smarmy—that I approached his new movie with anxious trepidation. I'm happy to report that Keep the Lights On is a major achievement that puts Sachs back where Forty Shades of Blue left him: as a supreme observer of the perils of shared intimacy. The paradox at the heart of his style seems to be that lyricism doesn't make him foggy-eyed; the grainy haze he bathes his scenes in doesn't blur the edges of the masterfully rendered personalities of his characters.
The new film shares some thematic concerns with Forty Shades of Blue, again focusing on a foreign-born character living in the U.S. and undergoing a severely confusing relationship, in which strong sexual connection goes hand in hand with self-destruction. But where Forty Shades of Blue told a story of marital infidelity, Keep the Lights On explores the ways in which one lover's drug abuse steadily undermines a couple's mutual trust. Continue Reading »
It opens with a series of attentive glances thrown every few seconds toward an unseen object, which then proves to be a stuffed doe being sketched by a group of art students. Within that single opening scene, director Denis Côté both establishes his main theme and prescribes the viewer how to approach his film, since a hard, focused look is exactly what's required to appreciate Bestiaire's wordless, unlovely splendor.
As we start scrutinizing an unfamiliar space populated by a surprising variety of animal species (introduced in an ascending order of exoticness), we slowly realize we're inside zoo facilities. Contrary to, say, Frederick Wiseman, whose habitually mammoth 1993 documentary Zoo examined the practical ways the eponymous facility was run, Côté is so disinterested in the mundane aspects of the institution he portrays as to make it look positively abstract. Instead of a narrative of a specific place in time, what we get is a distillation of a place into a string of visions that can work both as documentary and as a free-associational ode to life and stillness alike. Continue Reading »
So Yong Kim's latest feature, For Ellen, while certainly not an abject failure, is a disappointment nevertheless, and may cause concern to all those to whom the director's 2006 debut, In Between Days, was as dear as it remains to this writer. The story concerns a no-good, conspicuously disheveled rock singer, Joby (Paul Dano), who redeems his longstanding neglect of his five-year-old daughter by bonding with her on the eve of divorcing her mom. Joby's hectic, self-centered lifestyle is rendered in a succession of predominantly shallow-focused long takes of observational persistence as daring as it is tiresome.
Kim's deliberate diluting of dramatic elements of the plot to the point of its near-obliteration, so highly effective in the case of In Between Days, yields rather emaciated results in For Ellen. The reason is that there's a barely concealed generic mechanism at play here, built upon a trite premise of a prodigal father slowly winning back the affection of a cute neglected child by means of spontaneously shared fun. Even if Kim may wince at the comparison, she's not that far from mushy Kramer vs. Kramer territory when Dano wells up at the sight of his cute lil' girl banging out a garbled version of Für Elise on her electric piano. Continue Reading »
Antonio Campos's much-awaited second feature, while less clear-cut than his supremely affectless debut Afterschool, is just about as unsettling. An American-in-Paris story of sorts, it follows a slow but acute mental unraveling of the eponymous character (played by the film's co-screenwriter, Brady Corbet) as he seeks a post-breakup consolation in the "city of love." The Paris of the movie, intermittently respectable and seedy, becomes a scene for Simon's desperate pursuit of affection, which gradually turns more and more insidious and scary.
The opening sections (redolent somehow of Sofia Coppola's much gentler universe) offer some beautifully rendered stretches of epic ennui, with Simon's self-avowed pursuit of "doing absolutely nothing" slowly curdling into a disturbing maze of near-psychotic self-delusion. As Campos coolly multiplies discomfiting narrative ripples that make us question Simon's credibility, then his sanity, Corbet goes from cutely absent-minded to disheveled to plain cuckoo with fearful precision. Given that the whole film plays with the notion of false appearances, it makes perfect, if a tad too symmetrical, sense that Simon's alleged profession has something to do with studying "the relationship between the eye and the brain." Continue Reading »
[We Need to Talk About Kevin opens today in New York and L.A.]
Forget The Great Ectasy of Robert Carmichael (2005)—this year, Lynne Ramsay puts the art-house crowd though a titillating wringer in her contraption-like parental-dread thriller, We Need to Talk About Kevin. Centered upon a diabolical child not unlike the psycho-tots seen in The Omen (1976) and The Good Son (1993), the carefully disjointed narrative sets out to make you experience the visceral horror Rosemary must have felt after she spawned baby Satan and the end-credits rolled on Roman Polanski's sick-joke masterpiece. Continue Reading »
Michał Oleszczyk: I'm struck by how beautifully structured your film is: especially given that its concept probably had to morph a lot as the incredible story of your brother Marc unfolded.
Kimberly Reed: In coming up with the structure for Prodigal Sons, we had to get back to cultural basics, which even shows in the title. [Laughs] If you have a very simple path leading to a very complicated terrain, it can become a good storytelling device. Not that I want to put myself in this company, but if you take a common-sense look at the Odyssey, it's a story about a man who wants to make it home. All his wild adventures along the way are built around that basic premise. To have such a clear narrative directive is very compelling, and we were aiming for that. My own story is surprising and unique. So is Marc's. It would be easy to get infatuated with one of these stories and tilt the balance of the whole movie, thus turning it into an exploitation of some kind; a small curiosity told on a cocktail-party-sensation level. I wanted to avoid that and tell the true story of how me and my brother tried to reconnect after years of being estranged. Continue Reading »
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