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The most striking thing about Carnage, Roman Polanski's adaptation of Yazmin Reza's stiff but satisfying stage play God of Carnage, is how much funnier it is than its source material. Polanski, who co-adapted the film's screenplay with Reza, emphasizes the absurd nature of Reza's blackly comic moral play. His leavening of God of Carnage's bleak sense of humor is apparent just from the way that he replaced loutish but menacing James Gandolfini with patently non-threatening John C. Reilly in the role of Michael, one of God of Carnage's four main characters. In Polanski's hands, what was once a brooding Pinter-esque update of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is now more like a broad comedy. Except instead of sitcom-style humor you get jokes indiscriminately lobbed at the expense of four ethically bankrupt petit bourgeois know-nothings. And these are the film's only protagonists! Continue Reading »
Tags: Chistoph Waltz, God of Carnage, Harold Pinter, James Gandolfini, Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet, Luis Bu, New York Film Festival, Pawel Edelman, Roman Polanski, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Yazmin Reza
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by Simon Abrams on September 27th, 2011 at 11:24 am in DVD
The apolitical nature of Incendies, a novelistic melodrama about the way terrorism effects people on a personal level, is strangely more irksome than the film's tempestuous and highly controversial final twist. That last revelation initially seems gratuitous, but it's at least essential to one of the film's major themes: Nobody can understand the role they play in their loved one's lives, especially not the people that are most affected by violence. But still Incendies's drama revolves around a daughter's quest to learn more about her mother, a condemned political prisoner and terrorist. The fact that we don't know what her mom stood for beyond a basic need to protect her family makes the film's lack of historical context troubling.
Incendies is broken up into several chapters whose breaks are broadcast with the kind of massive, bold, and totally unmissable font that Kubrick used to mark time in The Shining. Writer-director Denis Villeneuve refuses to situate his characters' stories within anything more than the most basic frame of reference. As such, the catalyst for Villeneuve's plot is simply Jeanne's (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) quest to find her truant father and deliver a sealed envelope left to him from his recently deceased wife Nawal (Lubna Azabal). Continue Reading »
Tags: Denis Villeneuve, Incendies, Lubna Azabal, Maxim Gaudette, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Stanley Kubrick, The Shining
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To celebrate the New York Asian Film Festival's 10th anniversary, the Subway Cinema gang (Daniel Craft, Paul Kazee, Grady Hendrix, Goran Topalovic, and Marc Walkow) has programmed one of their most consistent and exciting lineups to date. The festival has always been fueled by kinetic and highly idiosyncratic pop cinema from across Asia, and though there are no films that achieve the level of gonzo excellence of former NYAFF titles like The Taste of Tea, Ping Pong, Running on Karma, or Survive Style 5+ do, even the most mediocre-looking films at this year's fest are worth watching. Continue Reading »
Tags: Austin Powers, Bangkok Knockout, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, Donnie Darko, Haunters, I Saw the Devil, Karate Robo Zaborgar, Kim Min-Suk, Last Days of the World, Masked Rider, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Milocrorze: A Love Story, New York Asian Film Festival, Noboru Iguchi, Park Hoon-Jung, Robo Geisha, Ryoo Seung-wan, Sell Out, Subway Cinema, The Blade, The Recipe, The Unjust, Troubleshooter, Tsui Hark
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by Simon Abrams on April 1st, 2011 at 4:01 pm in Film
[This is a submission to the White Elephant blogathon called by Silly Hats Only.]
Submitting Surviving the Game for the White Elephant blogathon is like giving an unwieldy lump of coal to a child on Christmas day: As malicious gestures go, it's a doozy. Yet another remake of The Most Dangerous Game, Surviving the Game is sadly only a little bugfuck crazy and largely just obnoxious and boring. It's bad enough that screenwriter Eric Bernt (Bachelor Party Vegas, Highlander: Endgame) doesn't know how to make his stock plot about a homeless man that gets hunted for sport by a group of crazy, rich guys relatable or recognizably human. What's worse is that director Ernest R. Dickerson (Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, Bulletproof) has absolutely no eye for spectacle. He makes violence seem almost anathema to his vision of even though he's remaking a movie where human beings are treated like animals for the amusement of others. Continue Reading »
Tags: Bachelor Party Vegas, Bulletproof, Charles S. Dutton, Cop Killer, Eric Bernt, Ernest R. Rickerson, F. Murray Abraham, Gary Busey, Highlander: Endgame, Ice-T, John C. McGinley, Rutger Hauer, Surviving the Game, Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, The Most Dangerous Game, White Elephant Blogathon
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Can't we allow ourselves to blamelessly dehumanize one group of real-life boogeymen without the fear of some would-be humanist insisting that these monsters, like us, have souls? Margin Call says, "No," refusing the viewer even the cathartic comfort of tsk-tsking the stock market traders that first discovered the recent collapse and were almost instantly forced to begin pulling out their assets.
According to the film, those investment bankers are human too, sharks that were turned into martyrs as soon as they realized just how bad thing had gotten. They had to fire each other, watch everything they worked for go up in flames, and as if that wasn't enough, one character even loses his dog to liver cancer while all of this is going on. These Armani suit-wearing grunts lost their livelihoods, which in some cases was the one thing they wanted to do in life, thanks to circumstances beyond their control. And yet, at this point in time, when the wounds from the recent recession have still yet to heal and the job market is still insanely tight, one has to wonder: Who cares? Why make this plea for tolerance now and, more importantly, who wants to hear it? Continue Reading »
Tags: J.C. Chandor, Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, Margin Call, New Directors/New Films, Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci, Zachary Quinto
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As a propaganda film, Pak Chong Song's Centre Forward confirms every nebulous assumption one might have about how all cultural roads in North Korea lead to stolid, state-mandated kitsch. Shot in 1978, this stiff but entertaining melodrama is utterly transfixing thanks to its quaint ability to take a seemingly innocent subject—a soccer player's drive toward becoming a striker—and elevate it to nigh-Olympian importance. The film climaxes prematurely during a brutal training montage in which the film's aspirant young protagonist forces himself to shoot 100 consecutive goals while his coach eggs him on. Anything less and he would be forgetting his "responsibility to your team and the motherland." Continue Reading »
Tags: Centre Forward, Korean American Film Festival New York, Pak Chong Song
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by Simon Abrams on March 11th, 2011 at 1:58 pm in Film
There are myriad reasons why the term "torture porn" never made sense and one of the most important is the irrevocable impact Herschell Gordon Lewis's schlocky gore cinema had on American movies. After all, torture porn filmmakers like Rob Zombie and Eli Roth didn't invent the concept of replacing cum shots with images of mutilated bodies for the sake of making money—Lewis did. In Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore, directors Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case, Frankenhooker) and Jimmy Masion have made a sloppy but vital case for Lewis's influence on the horror genre, whether he likes to think of it that way or not. Lewis is notorious for having declared, "I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an art form." Even he doesn't think his films are that good. Continue Reading »
Tags: Basket Case, Blood Feast, Eli Roth, Frank Henenlotter, Frankenhooker, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore, Jimmy Masion, Rob Zombie, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, Two Thousand Maniacs!
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There's nothing inherently wrong with the fact that Top Floor, Left Wing makes light of a hostage situation involving Muslim terrorists. What's wrong with writer-director Angelo Cianci's half-leaden, half-hysterical (and not in a funny way) farce is the way he takes the wrong things seriously and pokes fun of nothing worth laughing at. Unlike Four Lions, Chris Morris's empathetic and genuinely funny comedy about suicide bombers, Top Floor, Left Wing pivots around the serious notion that there's such a thing as defensible or simply respectable terrorist actions while laughing at the concept that the terrorist you don't know is often more dangerous than the one you do. It's a loud, incoherent, and completely unenlightening film about the way we live now, almost a full decade after 9/11. Continue Reading »
Tags: Angelo Cianci, Aymen Saidi, Blake Edwards, Chris Morris, Crash, Four Lions, Hippolyte Girardot, Mohamed Fellag, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Top Floor Left Wing, Victor/Victoria
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With The Queen of Hearts, autodidact Valerie Donzelli proves that she can make a better Tiny Furniture than Lena Dunham, though that really isn't saying much. Donzelli wrote, directed, and starred in Queen of Hearts, a comedy that wears its love of screwball comedies, Godard, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg on its sleeve, but never really advances beyond a comfortable narrative of self-defeating self-loathing.
Thankfully, unlike Tiny Furniture, Queen of Hearts is at least somewhat appealing thanks to the amusing way that it recycles actor Jeremie Elkaim in four different roles. Elkaim plays: Jacques, the married man whose infant Adele (Donzelli) babysits; Pierre, a pleasant but mostly banal art student; Paul, a mysterious man Adele meets and feels an instant attraction to; and Mathieu, Adele's ex. Adele's current relationships with the first three aforementioned men are defined by her neuroses: she has cursorily fulfilling sex with Jacques but wants to actively flee from him every time he comes on to her; she doesn't know what to make of Pierre, but he's always there for her; and she loves Paul though she only meets him briefly three times, exchanging endless text messages with him and eventually engaging in kinky sex for the sake of holding onto him. Continue Reading »
Tags: Jeremie Elkaim, Lena Dunham, Luis Bu, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, That Obscure Object of Desire, The Queen of Hearts, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Tiny Furniture, Valerie Donzelli
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The toothlessness of Service Entrance's upstairs-downstairs satire is immediately apparent from its tacky opening sequence: A handful of Spanish cleaning ladies treat the camera like an interviewer, talking about what they're willing to do and what their specialties and their limitations are. This sequence is a reminder that, no matter how much director Phillipe Le Guay tries to reassure his viewer, through the most conservative and strait-jacketed humor imaginable, of how easy it is for rich white French people to stop relying on stereotypes, he's not pushing his characters away from those loaded assumptions with enough force.
Service Entrance's initial scene is meant to be taken as a lampoon of what white people see when they first let domestic help into their lives: women that only know what they know and can do what they can do. One maid complains that she can't manage cooking French food, only Spanish (quel horreur!). But by film's end, Fabrice Luchini's fuddy-duddy protagonist is meant to learn differently, thanks to his hot Spanish housekeeper: Spanish housemaids are people too, with aspirations beyond housekeeping and a culture of their own. How Le Guay didn't get beaten to a pulp by his Spanish cast, including the great Carmen Maura, while making this film is beyond me; perhaps mass hypnosis was employed. Continue Reading »
Tags: Carmen Maura, Fabrice Luchini, Jerome Tonerre, Natalia Verbeke, Phillipe Le Guay, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Sandrine Kiberlain, Service Entrance
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Série Noire, Alain Corneau's seedy 1979 adaptation of Jim Thompson's A Hell of a Woman, is considered by aficionados of Thompson's work to be one of the best movies based on the bleak novelist's work. Certainly, when compared to something like Michael Winterbottom's recent adaptation of The Killer Inside Me, Corneau's film stands apart, though largely because of its atonal sense of humor. Punch-drunk though Franck Poupart (Patrick Deware), Série Noire's protagonist, may be, especially when compared to The Killer Inside Me's Lou Ford, he's ultimately just as desperate and manic. The key difference is that Lou Ford is almost a two-timing sadist while Franck Poupart is a sadist that thinks of himself as a masochist. Continue Reading »
Tags: A Hell of a Woman, Alain Corneau, Andreas Katsulas, Jeanne Herviale, Jim Thompson, Marie Trintignant, Michael Winterbottom, Myriam Boyer, Patrick Deware, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Série Noire, The Killer Inside Me
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Leave it to Andrew Lau, the director most famous for co-helming Infernal Affairs, to drown a staid, fool-proof setup for success in grandiose tragedy and pseudo-significance. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen takes the blind ra-ra nationalism and the star of the recent blockbusting Ip Man movies and produces nothing memorable beyond a few hyper action scenes that are sure to give you a rush of blood to the head. These scenes tease you with the promise of a unique spin on the formula that Ip Man and Once Upon a Time in China before that, and Fists of Fury before even that, originally laid down. Basically: A conservative local hero stands up for his community by leading them in beating up callous and wholly unwelcome foreigners. If anything, Lau's film only proves that that subgenre of wuxia films is here to stay and no amount of uninspired storytelling can kill it. Continue Reading »
Tags: Andrew Lau, Black Mask, Donnie Yen, Film Comment Selects, Fists of Fury, Ip Man, Jet Li, Kohata Ryu, Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, Once Upon a Time in China, Shut Qi, Zhang Songwen
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Without Rainer Werner Fassbinder's characteristic sense of detachment, the director's Sirkian melodrama I Only Want You to Love Me wouldn't be nearly as engrossing as it is. Produce for a television audience in 1976, Fassbinder's dispassionate portrayal of a marriage supported by the Herculean efforts of nebbish husband Peter (Vitus Zeplichal) maintains a steely air of detachment that makes determining where the director's sympathies lie harder the longer the film goes on.
There's no dogmatic context within the film that Fassbinder's audience can use to inherently understand Peter and his wife Erika's (Elke Aberle) need to get more money and more possessions as being either strictly good or bad. This is the biggest sign of the times in I Only Want You to Love Me, a telling aesthetic choice that says so much about the amoral capitalist society Fassbinder imagines his characters live in. "Money gets more money," a bartender says at one point, a truism that speaks to the firm-handed, matter-of-fact tone of Fassbinder's film. Good or bad, monetary transactions decide everything, making the success of Peter's marriage largely dependent on his ability to generate more moolah. Continue Reading »
Tags: Elke Aberle, Film Comment Selects, I Only Want You to Love Me, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Vitus Zeplichal
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While trial documentary Presumed Guilty's narrative arc is genuinely compelling and heartrending in its depiction of an innocent man's struggle to prove his innocence, the film at large only serves to reinforce the hopelessness of his case. Tono Zuniga, the film's everyman and exhibit A in its case against the corruption of the Mexican judicial system, was sentenced to 20 years in prison despite the fact that there was no physical evidence incriminating him. Presumed Guilty builds up to the new trial that will hopefully acquit him, but while filmmaker and law student Robert Hernandez had unprecedented access to the court and was able to film Zuniga's new trial, the deciding motions in Zuniga's case weren't filmed. The real make-or-break actions were decided off-camera for reasons that are never understood, let alone even speculated on by Hernandez or Zuniga's public defender, though there's a vague hint from one of the three judges that decided his appeal as to what decided his case. Continue Reading »
Tags: Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, Presumed Guilty, Robert Hernandez, Tono Zuniga
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by Simon Abrams on June 15th, 2010 at 12:30 am in Film
[This is a submission to the White Elephant Blogathon called by Silly Hats Only.]
On the stage, John Leguizamo was something of a dynamo caricaturist. His one-man plays, like Freak and Sexaholix, were an explosive series of tirades centered around Leguizamo's mixed ethnicity, effectively turning his insecurity into schtick by sheer force of will alone. On stage, Leguizamo looked like a caged cartoon animal pacing back and forth while tirelessly spitting over-caffeinated rants at his audience. No target was spared, especially not when it came to his parents. He was not Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy, but he was loud and vigorous in his lampooning and the audiences and critics ate it up.
The producers of Paul Miller's 1997 clunker, The Pest, and perhaps Miller himself, who had previously directed 15 episodes of In Living Color and 10 episodes of something called House of Buggin', no doubt saw this angry young man and thought that all they needed to do was put a camera in front of him, wind him up and set him loose to get fans of "ethnic humor" to roll up. He acted like a living looney tune on film so why not on try doing the same thing for film? Continue Reading »
Tags: Aries Spears, David Bar Katz, Freddy Rodriguez, Jeffrey Jones, John Leguizamo, The Pest, The White Elephant Blogathon
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Film Comment Selects 2011: Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
by Simon Abrams on February 25th, 2011 at 2:27 pm in Festivals, Film
Leave it to Andrew Lau, the director most famous for co-helming Infernal Affairs, to drown a staid, fool-proof setup for success in grandiose tragedy and pseudo-significance. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen takes the blind ra-ra nationalism and the star of the recent blockbusting Ip Man movies and produces nothing memorable beyond a few hyper action scenes that are sure to give you a rush of blood to the head. These scenes tease you with the promise of a unique spin on the formula that Ip Man and Once Upon a Time in China before that, and Fists of Fury before even that, originally laid down. Basically: A conservative local hero stands up for his community by leading them in beating up callous and wholly unwelcome foreigners. If anything, Lau's film only proves that that subgenre of wuxia films is here to stay and no amount of uninspired storytelling can kill it. Continue Reading »
Tags: Andrew Lau, Black Mask, Donnie Yen, Film Comment Selects, Fists of Fury, Ip Man, Jet Li, Kohata Ryu, Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, Once Upon a Time in China, Shut Qi, Zhang Songwen
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