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Rarely has Werner Herzog seemed less capable of infusing a nonfiction inquiry with poetic depth than with Into the Abyss, the filmmaker's rumination on life's random, chaotic violence and fragile preciousness, which is filtered through a death penalty case in 2001 Texas. The crime in question involved the murder of Sandra Stotler, her 16-year-old son, Adam, and his friend, Jeremy Richardson, by two teenagers, Jason Burkett and Michael Perry, in order to steal a red Camaro, an insanely senseless act that culminated with the two suspects being apprehended after a shootout and sentenced to life (for Burkett) and lethal injection (for Perry). Herzog opines at the start to Perry, with whom he speaks through a glass partition eight days before the man's 2010 execution, that he does not support the idea of the state taking convicts' lives, a position that pops up repeatedly throughout his latest doc, but to little appreciable gain. Subsequent conversations with the victims' family members, the killers' acquaintances and loved ones (including Burkett's wife, whom Burkett met while behind bars), and Fred Allen, the former captain of the Death House where Perry met his end, often include comments about the futility of the death penalty to bring back the dead, but despite its rigorous gaze, Into the Abyss doesn't succeed in plumbing the justness of capital punishment either through debate, intellectual argumentation, or cinematic expression. Continue Reading »
Tags: Adam Stotler, DOC NYC, Fred Allen, Into the Abyss, Jason Burkett, Jeremy Richardson, Michael Perry, Sandra Stotler, The Thin Blue Line, Werner Herzog
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The exterior mirrors the interior and vice versa in Melancholia, Lars Von Trier's second consecutive allegorically autobiographical work about crippling depression (after 2009's Antichrist), which he here confronts via the story of a wedding-gone-awry and a subsequent world apocalypse. Those two events are a vehicle for von Trier to explore both emotional and spiritual crisis while also proffering a pitch-black worldview with regard to God and life's meaning, concerns that feature little of the overt glibness that plagued Antichrist, whose provocations and stylistic tics regularly undercut its psycho-horror, but remain issues that the Danish director treats at a frustrating remove. Von Trier still appears to care more for conceptual stunts than actual people and feelings, though at least he tries in this instance, commencing with a gorgeously wrought, if decidedly over-the-top, series of foreshadowing end-of-days tableaus set to Wagner before seguing into the more restrained action proper, in which Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) first glide, then wobble, and finally crash through their nuptials at an opulent and remote estate. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alexander Skarsgård, Antichrist, Cameron Spurr, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Kirsten Dunst, Lars von Trier, Melancholia, New York Film Festival, Richard Wagner, Stellan Skarsgård
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by Nick Schager on May 20th, 2011 at 9:18 am in Film
For a filmmaker so consumed with the inexorable progression of time, history, and life, the way in which we're all complex byproducts of the past and harbingers of the future, it's fitting that The Tree of Life finds Terrence Malick finally returning to the beginning, travelling back, back, back to the dawn of everything, even as he grapples with his own complicated childhood memories and the bewildering present. Though that eon-spanning journey doesn't occur from the outset, its relatively early appearance colors the entirety of this bold, mystifying, hypnotic film, laying bare the director's desire to comingle the ancient, recent, and now for a lushly poetic inquiry—at once more personal and specific than his prior work, and yet also more universal and oblique—into man's rapport with his environment, his place in the galaxy, his heart's simultaneous capacity for kindness and cruelty, and his contradictory relationship to God. It's the last of these that repeatedly takes center stage during the course of Malick's fifth magnum opus, as a title-card quote from the Book of Job intriguingly open this metaphysical investigation into suffering and forgiveness—a Biblical reference to set the stage for a drama gripped by the question of why a father, and our heavenly Father, might hurt the very ones he claims to love. Continue Reading »
Tags: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alexandre Desplat, Brad Pitt, Douglas Trumbull, Emmanuel Lubezki, Hunter McCracken, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn, Terrence Malick, The Fountain, The New World, The Tree of Life
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Tyrannosaur opens with the sight of vicious bastard Joseph (Peter Mullan) killing his dog in a fit of spastic kicking rage, an act of cruelty so horrible that actor Paddy Considine's film immediately telegraphs its forthcoming nowhere-to-go-but-up trajectory. Men are monsters, albeit ones with the potential for redemption, in this measured, mechanical portrait of Joseph, whose slow moral awakening comes via an unlikely relationship with thrift-store proprietor Hannah (Olivia Colman), whom Joseph—after attacking a gang of young bar patrons—ruthlessly berates during their opening meeting, condemning her (without any justification) for being a content middle-class idiot whose barren womb is a source of shame. The type of unshaven, glowering Travis Bickle type (he even jokingly refers to himself as "Robert De Niro" at one point) who sits in a bar's corner booth ranting and raving to himself, Joseph is such a cartoon creep that Hannah's kindness to him immediately reeks of screenwriter contrivance. That feeling is merely enforced (rather than dispelled) by the eventual revelation that Hannah's comfort around psychos isn't something new, since she's married to a lunatic named James (Eddie Marsan) who makes his maiden entrance by pissing all over his wife while she pretends, out of terror, to be asleep. Continue Reading »
Tags: Eddie Marsan, Gary Oldman, Ned Dennehy, New Directors/New Films, Nil By Mouth, Olivia Colman, Paddy Considine, Peter Mullan, Samuel Bottomley, Tyrannosaur
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So arch you can practically hear its back breaking, Potiche finds François Ozon following up the psychologically incisive Hideaway by reverting to his campy 8 Women ways. Ozon immediately establishes his mood of lighthearted frivolity via an opening credit sequence in which the screen breaks into round-edged fragments, all of them encapsulating sights of Suzanne (Catherine Deneuve) jogging through a softly lit forest while wearing a candy-red track suit, stopping along her route to watch rabbits screw and write poetry about passing squirrels. That self-satisfied tongue-in-cheek mood doesn't dissipate once Suzanne returns home, where her adulterous, umbrella factory-running husband, Robert (Fabrice Luchini), treats his wife like an empty-headed "trophy housewife" (the film's title refers to a decorative vase that sits on a mantle), scoffing at her advice while explaining that her role is to be merely his most prized piece of domestic ornamentation. Continue Reading »
Tags: 8 Women, Catherine Deneuve, Fabrice Luchini, François Ozon, Gérard Depardieu, Hideaway, Jérémie Rénier, Judith Godreche, Karin Viard, Potiche, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema
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Klaus Kinski's infamous intensity and lunacy are both on vivid display in Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ the Savior, a recently recovered record of a 1971 theatrical performance by the Aguirre: The Wrath of God star. On a German stage outfitted with only a microphone stand, Kinski steps into a lone spotlight and begins reciting an extended monologue about a persecuted, angry Jesus Christ: "Wanted: Jesus Christ. Charged with seduction, anarchistic tendencies, conspiracy against the authority of the state." From the outset, Kinski's own god-complex association with his divine subject, whose role he soon assumes via speaking in first-person, is clear, and immediately rankles segments of the crowd who've attended simply to heckle. As audience members cry out, "I want my 10 marks back!," and call out Kinski for what they see as the hypocrisy of his performance (the wealthy star extols anti-materialism and nonviolence, while also railing against his tormentors with threats of physical aggression), the show's powder keg atmosphere ignites. Kinski storms off stage, albeit not before screaming, "You stupid pig!," to a young man who tries, and fails, to command the mike before being removed by a security guard—to predictable audience objections to Kinski as a "fascist!" Continue Reading »
Tags: Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Film Comment Selects, Klaus Kinski, Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ the Savior, Peter Geyer
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In a Better World concerns itself with a thicket of mature moral questions, only to resolve them in the most glib and banal means possible. Working from a script she co-wrote with Anders Thomas Jensen, and following up her superior Things We Lost in the Fire, Danish director Susanne Bier opens her latest with the clichéd sight of young African children chasing after a truck carrying a white man—in this case, Anton (Mikael Persbrandt), a doctor who regularly visits Kenya to treat the sick, leaving behind the wife, Marianne (Trine Dyrholm), from whom he's now separated, and the son, Elias (Markus Rygaard), whose need for a full-time father figure is epitomized by the constant punishment he receives from bullies at school. Meanwhile, in a concurrent strand that soon dovetails with the aforementioned tale, young Christian (William Jøhnk Juels Nielsen) moves to town after the death of his mother, which has left him estranged from his father, Claus (Ulrich Thomsen), and furious at the world. It's an anger that—after he spies the bucktoothed Elias being taunted at school as "rat face"—he expresses by viciously confronting Elias's tormentor and, later still, by concocting an explosive scheme to punish a belligerent auto mechanic who publicly slaps Anton around. Continue Reading »
Tags: Anders Thomas Jensen, In a Better World, Markus Rygaard, Mikael Persbrandt, Sundance Film Festival, Susanne Bier, Trine Dyrholm, Ulrich Thomsen, William Jøhnk Juels Nielsen
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Aesthetically ungainly and thematically familiar, Joe Swanberg's Uncle Kent finds the writer-director plumbing the same tired issues, albeit from a slightly older perspective. Rather than the twentysomethings of his prior works, Swanberg's latest focuses on 40-year-old Kent (Kent Osborne), a single artist on a kids' cartoon show whose life consists of petting his cat, drawing, drinking beer, smoking pot, and hanging out with his obnoxious coworker Kev (Kevin Bewersdorf). As with many of Swanberg's protagonists, Kent lives his life through a filter of modern technology, filming himself and others via a flip cam and spending copious amounts of time on the Internet and, specifically, Chatroulette, where he draws photos of the weirdoes spied on the other side of the Ethernet connection—including a faceless regular who strokes his cock for the Internet hordes. As Kent reveals to an acquaintance (Swanberg) staying at a producer's lavish house, dating at 40 carries with it the stink of desperation, and marriage, though theoretically coveted, is a frightening proposition that leads to loss of slacker freedom (he likes being able to get out of bed whenever he wants!), rather stock hang-ups that Swanberg fails to develop in any meaningfully complex way. Continue Reading »
Tags: Chatroulette, Craigslist, Jennifer Prediger, Joe Swanberg, Kevin Bewersdorf, Sundance Film Festival, Uncle Kent
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Most reality-based first-person shooters use their authentic geopolitical locations, enemies, weaponry, and tactical strategies as mere window-dressing; regardless of what these environments or adversaries are called or look like, they still function only in rudimentary video game terms. So it most definitely goes with Medal of Honor, which like Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series, finds EA rebooting its classic WWII-themed franchise for the modern age, positing you as a Tier 1 special ops badass tasked with eliminating Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan. What this in fact means, though, is that the action takes place in scraggly mountains, caves, and towns, and requires that you mow down vaguely Arab-looking fellows alongside comrades dressed in local attire and matching beards. Otherwise, it's the same old FPS mayhem: Go here and kill lots of robotic villains, then trudge (by foot, or ATV vehicle, or chopper) to the next venue and battle even more faceless foes whose behavior is so predictably routine—everyone either runs right at you, or takes cover in the same spots, emerging at regular intervals to shoot at you—that any verité trappings are immediately and conclusively undermined. Continue Reading »
Tags: Battlefield, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, DICE, EA LA, Electronic Arts, Medal of Honor, Xbox 360
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Avoiding speeding tickets is one of many things I don't want to do in a video game. Yet 2K Games apparently thought I'd feel differently when designing Mafia II, since going over the speed limit in the presence of police officers (40mph on regular roads, 60mph on bridges and highways) will immediately lead to hot pursuit and, if you're feeling too lazy to ditch the cops, a $50 fine. Since this sequel to 2002's third-person PC sandbox title is a brazen rip-off of Grand Theft Auto in virtually every respect, this driving-related statute is the height of absurdity, forcing one to either leisurely navigate the NYC-ish Empire Bay—an immense annoyance, given how many missions require lengthy car rides—or to constantly risk courting law enforcement's ire and a potential chase through crowded city streets. Admittedly, in the grand scheme of things, this one issue is reasonably minor, and is at least mitigated by the fact that one can enable a speed-limit device that prevents your car from exceeding the posted limit (plus, you can still run red lights). Yet it's nonetheless indicative of this polished but wholly uninspired follow-up, which finds only ridiculous and/or meaningless ways to tweak its borrowed Grand Theft Auto template. Continue Reading »
Tags: 2K Czech, 2K Games, Goodfellas, Grand Theft Auto, Mafia II, The Godfather, Xbox 360
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Video games are well suited to pulse-pounding action, but heart-rending drama? Not so much, though that hasn't stopped them from trying. Halo: Reach, the latest entrant in Microsoft's cash-cow franchise, arrives on a tide of hype that has often included overly enthusiastic praise for a somber, elegiac tone born from this prequel's focus on the human race's defeat by invading alien Covenant forces on the outpost planet Reach. Composer Martin O'Donnell's soaring melancholic score cascades over cutscenes of armored soldiers attempting to grapple with impending failure and the immense loss of life it entails, the images often striving for iconographic sorrow: a sole Spartan, head downturned, in a military aircraft, or a group of squadmates cast in silhouette against a torched-city-in-ruins backdrop (less-than-subtle shades of WWII and 9/11). Amplified by the fact that the title stands as a Halo swan song for original producers Bungie Studios, such a morose mood seeks to counterbalance and complicate the franchise's traditional one-against-many heroic template with an air of gravity. And, in almost every meaningful way, it fails in this respect.
But then, who cares? Halo's FPS calling card was never narrative profundity (despite its increasingly convoluted plots, as well as tie-in novels and peripheral stories), but sturdy mechanics that were second-to-none in terms of effective, thrilling simplicity. The Call of Dutys and Bioshocks of the gaming world may have more intricate control schemes and afford more complex actions and reactions, but Halo's fundamental gameplay remains a surefire genre standard-bearer, and with Reach, Bungie has refined its template to near perfection. With only slight tweaks to the formula (the inclusion of Armor Abilities—like speed-running, camouflage, and jet packs, which first appeared in Halo: ODST—and an aerial combat sequence set in space), the interface is at once wholly familiar and yet smoother and more robust than before. Like the gorgeous HD graphics and sound design, it feels more muscular, and never sluggish or unintuitive. To play Reach is not only to be reminded of why Halo has become such an industry titan, but to understand that all prior installments were, at least with regard to gameplay, merely preludes to this current state. Continue Reading »
Tags: BioShock, Bungie Software, Call of Duty, Halo, Halo: ODST, Halo: Reach, Martin O'Donnell, Microsoft Games Studios, Xbox 360
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Naughty Bear is an unpleasant forest animal. Naughty Bear is his equally unpleasant game, a title (available for Xbox 360 or PS3) whose cutie-pie premise isn't the least bit cute and whose execution leaves everything to be desired. Arriving on the heels of advanced clips that indicated an amusing Sesame Street-gone-awry vibe, SOS Games's latest—in which you make Naughty scare other forest bears, or simply hack, bludgeon, or shoot them in gratuitously violent ways—promised inventively vile, delinquent action wrapped up in a cuddly stuffed-animal façade. Such a discordant form-content scenario always seemed a tad too on-the-nose (see, Naughty looks like a toddler's toy! But he acts like Reservoir Dogs's Mr. Blonde!), but as with all art forms, games deserve the benefit of the doubt. Alas, to actually attempt to make it through this dud's myriad levels is to know the meaning of frustration: From graphics to audio to level structure and basic gameplay mechanics, Naughty Bear is unendurable.
As stated above, you play as Naughty, a prickish bear that the forest's other bears despise. At start, Naughty isn't invited to a birthday party, leading to a task in which you have to scare and/or kill those who left him out of the fun. Except that's not really the case—because, in truth, all you really have to do is kill them. By using one of the trigger buttons, you can have Naughty roar at others in an intimidating fashion in order to rack up points. However, with the exception of those missions that specifically require you to scare and not harm, there's no reason to frighten anyone. Roaring is one-note and audibly irritating (the accompanying sound effect quickly becomes a virtual version of nails on a chalkboard), and setting up more elaborate environmental traps to alarm or unsettle is equally tedious. Murder always gets the job done quicker, and because no tangible value is placed on acquiring points in the first place (they're random, save for the need to acquire a certain amount to complete each stage), simply slashing your way through levels is the more inherently efficient way of going about things. Continue Reading »
Tags: 505 Games, A2M, Naughty Bear, REservoir Dogs, Xbox 360
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Red Dead Redemption is the game Grand Theft Auto always wanted to be. Developed by GTA masterminds Rockstar Games, this pseudo-sequel to 2004's Red Dead Revolver—a functional if underwhelming third-person western saga—thrusts you into a roam-all-you-want Old West sandbox environment, allowing you the freedom to concentrate on the storyline's primary missions or simply gallop about the vast plains, dusty deserts, and Mexican mountains, collecting rare herbs, hunting wild animals, and rescuing whatever damsel in distress you might happen upon along the way. Far less limiting than GTA's urban metropolises, which—because so much of those cities' interior spaces were inaccessible—always felt constructed out of paper houses, Red Dead Redemption's settings are fully, thrillingly alive, their functioning ecosystems, sudden dramatic occurrences, and operative economy all helping to create a sense of participating in a universe that operates independent of (rather than revolves around) you. To spend time in this adventure's locales is to feel a part of a wider world. And, consequently, to catch a glimpse at gaming's immersive potential.
As with its GTA predecessors, Red Dead Redemption is at once upfront about its cinematic influences and yet not beholden to them, using its myriad frames of reference to produce something both familiar and unique. You platy as John Marston, a former outlaw who's compelled in 1911 by the federal government—under threat to his family—to visit New Austin (a Texas stand-in) to track down and kill former criminal mate Bill Williamson. It's a task that goes awry at outset, thus compelling you to get Marston back on his feet and prepare for a siege on Williams's fort compound. If that basic setup sounds similar to countless classic and revisionist westerns, that's no accident, as allusions abound throughout Red Dead Redemption's lengthy campaign. As always, though, Rockstar doesn't name-check so much as simply tip the cap to its favorite celluloid ancestors, from Once Upon a Time in the West (and its depiction of encroaching modernity sounding the old guard's death knell) and The Wild Bunch (especially during the game's later Mexican Civil War sequences) to, in the name of a budding oil community, There Will Be Blood. Continue Reading »
Tags: Grand Theft Auto, Once Upon a Time in the West, Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Revolver, Rockstar Games, Rockstar San Diego, The Wild Bunch, There Will Be Blood, Xbox 360
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Contrary to early reports, Alan Wake is not a transcendent gaming experience. This, it should be noted upfront, is a good thing. For all its daring and ingenuity, Remedy Games's long-in-production third-person Xbox 360 title has one foot firmly planted in expansive, compelling storytelling, and the other in basic gameplay. And there's something refreshingly honest about the game's standard action mechanics, which—though somewhat butting up against the narrative's desire to be a profound, haunting meditation on issues of light and dark, fiction and reality—don't attempt to position the material as some groundbreaker it's not, as was the case with the wretched "interactive movie" Heavy Rain. Aside from some shortcomings, the game's plot captivatingly expands on traditional game scripting, yet Alan Wake never loses sight of its fundamental search-kill-puzzle construction, a focus that does much to ground the proceedings even when its aspirations exceed its ability.
Opening with a verbal reference to Stephen King (whose novels, especially The Shining, proves a primary source of inspiration), and then telling a tale heavily indebted to Twin Peaks and Lost (right down to the action being split into "chapters" that commence with clever "previously on" episode recaps), the game has the player take control of Alan Wake, a crime-fiction novelist on vacation with wife Alice. After an intro tutorial sequence set in Alan's nightmare, we learn that Alan is beset with writer's block, and has been convinced by Alice to travel to the remote forested town of Bright Falls, Washington to clear his head, though Alan's attempts to spend some time out of the limelight are thwarted by locales who not only recognize but adore him. Alan Wake takes its time during these interactive, non-battle-oriented early passages, establishing a strong sense of milieu as well as community. This is key given that much of the ensuing drama hinges on Alan's rapport with the world around him, a relationship that soon goes screwy once—upon being tricked into staying at a cabin on ominous Cauldron Lake—Alice goes missing, and Alan wakes up alone and confused behind the wheel of a crashed car. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alan Wake, American Psycho, Microsoft Games Studios, Remedy Entertainment, Silent Hill, Stephen King, The Dark Half, The Shining, Twilight Zone, Xbox 360
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Dead to Rights: Retribution confirms that there's minor value in setting the bar low. Simply performing basic gameplay mechanisms via a conventional controller remains one of console gaming's chief pleasures, and that's certainly the focus of Namco's reboot of its critically reviled Xbox franchise, comprised of 2002's dreadful original and its even lamer 2005 sequel. Striving to be nothing more than a competent third-person actioner with a signature novelty (your hero K9 cop is paired with a vicious husky), the game takes baby steps toward rehabilitating its ancestors' wretched reputation by just focusing on its core elements. Hardly groundbreaking or even all that memorable, Volatile Games's latest is, in light of its predecessors' awfulness, nonetheless a decent reclamation project, proving that muted aspirations don't have to be fatal.
In Retribution, you play as Jack Slate, a Grant City super cop with steroidal biceps, a gruff voice, and a generic desire to do good and exact vengeance against those who murdered his father. Slate is a bore, but of a non-aggravating sort, and while his canine sidekick Shadow is also short on personality, the two are a functional pair of proxies. Beginning with a sequence in which, as Shadow, you protect an injured Jack from assaulting forces, and then flashing back to elucidate the preceding events, the game has a rather mundane story to tell about Jack's efforts to avenge his father's death, a quest that leads him to uncover a plot by a titan of industry and a traitorous fellow officer to seize control of the city. A conspiracy-tinted saga full of faux twists, the narrative is a perfunctory bit of nonsense, though if it never engages, at least it's handled via passable cutscenes that maintain adequate forward-progress momentum. Continue Reading »
Tags: Dead to Rights: Retribution, Namco, Volatile Games, Xbox 360
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Film Comment Selects 2011: Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ the Savior
by Nick Schager on February 17th, 2011 at 11:00 am in Festivals, Film
Klaus Kinski's infamous intensity and lunacy are both on vivid display in Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ the Savior, a recently recovered record of a 1971 theatrical performance by the Aguirre: The Wrath of God star. On a German stage outfitted with only a microphone stand, Kinski steps into a lone spotlight and begins reciting an extended monologue about a persecuted, angry Jesus Christ: "Wanted: Jesus Christ. Charged with seduction, anarchistic tendencies, conspiracy against the authority of the state." From the outset, Kinski's own god-complex association with his divine subject, whose role he soon assumes via speaking in first-person, is clear, and immediately rankles segments of the crowd who've attended simply to heckle. As audience members cry out, "I want my 10 marks back!," and call out Kinski for what they see as the hypocrisy of his performance (the wealthy star extols anti-materialism and nonviolence, while also railing against his tormentors with threats of physical aggression), the show's powder keg atmosphere ignites. Kinski storms off stage, albeit not before screaming, "You stupid pig!," to a young man who tries, and fails, to command the mike before being removed by a security guard—to predictable audience objections to Kinski as a "fascist!" Continue Reading »
Tags: Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Film Comment Selects, Klaus Kinski, Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ the Savior, Peter Geyer
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