mgdu Reviews

Unbroken (I) (2014)

Too preachy, powerful stuff swaddled, over-mothered, but worth seeing

[6/10 · 3 December 2014]

Powerful sequences of war and prison camp captivity, with gripping performances of human good and evil, high-minded, but with insufficient trust in the audience, or in the material, or even ultimately in humanity, and consequently much too heavy a hand on the moral eye-liner, so intent on spelling out the lessons that the visceral power of the actual events is watered down and scumbled in Sunday school pieties.

The film begins very powerfully with us, the camera, in a propeller bomber on a run against Japanese military installations, and just as we start to enjoy the personable young crew hell breaks loose with anti-aircraft flak bursting around us and wasplike Zero Japanese fighters zooming circles around our slow bomber, strafing thru our plane's thin walls w their heavy machine guns, ripping into our machinery and men's bodies w/o warning.

But this exciting, frightening, gripping reality is soon undermined by the directorial decision to spell out the character of the hero through an slew of flashbacks to his early life, starting w a sermon he seemed hardly to be paying attention on the text "love your enemies", going into his loving immigrant family, and the lessons learnt from mentors as he built himself into an Olympic distance runner. All of which might be quality material if subjected to critical analysis in a different movie, an intellectual meditation, but is just empty calories on the superficial level purveyed here, and, most importantly does not at all belong in this film of war and imprisonment, where whatever transcendence and redemption there is manifests itself only through the various courage and fortitude of men to soldier on through vicious and brutal reality, or to give over to the deadly despair or vicious sadism of inner demons and frailty.

Apparently a first directorial effort, fresh ideas, good instincts for performances, but so focused on expressing herself clearly as to blind herself to what the audience is experiencing given what we bring to the film, and so she presses too hard anxiously making sure every theme and motif is spelled out over and over again, until the audience is being drilled in a lesson rather than given the free, open, aesthetic experience needed to evoke pity and terror, profound emotion and illumination.

"Unbroken" is worth seeing for its strong presentation of the ignored dimensions of our humanity in war, brutal captivity, cruelty, and extraordinary strength But it could have been (and might still be?) made into a great film with the necessary editing, something along the lines of what Pound did for Eliot, ripping out all the Sunday-school blather and letting the facts speak for themselves.

Hopefully, Ms Jolie will take a tip from Picasso who defined his artistic process as a sum of destructions, removing from the canvas everything that could be removed, until what was left was the painting.

Snowpiercer (2013)

Noisy garbage for the demented

[2/10 · 1 December 2014]

Bombastic rot with very little living intelligence or sensibility, a tale seemingly razzled up by a pursy cyborg sociopath to lure an audience of coarse appetites and dim minds.

The only redeeming feature in this long, long, turgid slog is the witty cameo pop-ups of Tilda Swinton, tossing a few bits of garlic and sapphire into the muck, like Baudelaire's sun glistening into the carrion putrefying along the roadside.

But even Ms Swinton was painful to watch shilling from the stage of MoMA this evening, trying to pretend that this bloated carrion has any real value. Answering a question about its sources of "inspiration"(sic!), Ms Swinton tolled "bombast" at least 3 times to derogate the kind of world leaders (Qaddafi, et al) that the film reflects, all the while blissfully ignoring that brutal bombast is exactly what comprises this film from snout to tail--including both the spasms of grotesque maiming and murdering wreaked on the characters, and the even worse mental torment wreaked on the minds of the audience (at least on the small sentient quotient, neurons dying as they watched).

And for Ms S to laud this film as a deconstruction of social stratification, as if she had never seen films like Regles du Jeu, had eyes rolling out of sight. No doubt actresses get used to selling themselves inside and out. But can anyone question that Renoir, 70 years less informed, tackled class conflict w incomparably finer grace, intelligence, wit, and emotional power than this pompous turd?

Tossed among the scenes of ugliness and mayhem, battles that unfold w/o rhyme or reason, are heavy musings about life and culpability by characters who are empty stereotypes , often PC, less interesting humanly than the scenery. It's always good to see the great John Hurt, but he is useless here; and Ed Harris is wrong for his part.

Snowpiercer is a film worth avoiding. Even the fight scenes are pathetic, nothing but clichés badly handled, chaotic, arbitrary, unbelievable, distinguished only by some corny sadistic sights and sounds, all of which is especially revolting enveloped in the director's smarmy PC casting and storyline, which reeks of Bill Cosby. The film's only value is for a scathing anthropology of our culture demonstrating in its popularity the buzz of battalions of blow- flies drawn to carrion.

Antichrist (2009)

Lars Von Trier aka Sarah Palin

[3/10 · 25 January 2010]

Dim wits--bright enough to know something's happening, but too benighted to grasp more than a dark glimpse of what it is--become frightened, dogmatically preachy bullies, concocting simple-minded worldviews that they are desperate to batter into other people's heads to quiet their own inner confusion. Think Joe Lieberman, Sarah Palin, Lars Von Trier.

Von Trier deserves respect in that his movies are made out of inner compulsion, no cheap commercialism or glibness, and for his willingness to take rebarbative chances in both form and content. But the downside of his desperation, coming from his limited insight and reason, is a nasty self-righteousness both ham-handed and whingy.

AntiChrist is rotted through with Von Trier's purblind terror. He attempts to defang his demons by making audiences share his pain until we will agree with his perception of the horrors lurking in everyday life and of what we need to do to protect ourselves from them. The result is a dreary, painted-by-the-numbers, horror gross out, cobbled for those who need their catechism ketchuped up, thuddingly portentous, and grotesquely disgusting.

The opening scene--or Prologue as its entitled to help the audience grasp that pearls are being cast to us--is uberschmaltzy, shot in luscious black and white (even the laundering diapers look dreamy), slow-mo, tricked up with ukiyo-e porn, Gesualdoish descant, and sex windowing death. Promising elements but over-amped so that every frames rings as phony. Cut to the lovers Technicolor--deftly shrinking the couple from the mythic stature of the black and white into ordinary neighbors--but, instead of giving us the complexity of real people, Von Trier subjects us to a pair of stultifying sock-puppets.

A Rachel of insufferable grief, played by the aptly catarrhal Charlotte Gainsborough, whose mucus-dripping whispering is geared to make you feel guilty about wanting to strangle her, with her central casting sawdust-for-brains therapist husband, played by winsome Willem DaFoe so woodenly loving and earnest as to make an addled viewer nearly look beyond the horror of his wife--at least that's what Von Trier is counting on, but it's a gamble he loses to anyone paying attention.

As luck would have it, the urban man and wife have a backcountry bungalow lost in primeval woods to which they repair to heal, in nature's bosom as it were. But wait! Do the menacing trees, eerie fauna, and disorienting camera work mean that the couple will cut loose along exactly the not-too-well-hidden dotted lines that they were mechanically constructed to demonstrate? The answer will come as a surprise only to those who find Judy falling out with Punch a dramatic revelation.

But what will impress everyone--painfully--is the deliberately disgusting and grotesque sadomasochism that Von Trier feels justified in bludgeoning us with. Ah, that old time religion, and the fire-breather's sacred duty to purge and edify the spirits of his flock by jabbing the torments of flesh and bone into our bleeding eyes. A must see for those who look forward in naive optimism when a splintering couple retreat to a place they've christened Eden, who seek tutelage in hating women, and who find still fresh the interplay of flesh and garden tools.

The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007)

hail a film that shut up Manohla Dargis

[6/10 · 23 March 2007]

what motivated me up to the new director's festival to catch 'martin frost' tonight was the brutal review that it got yesterday from the lead critic of the new york times, brutal dismissal, to be more accurate, 'the less said about (it) the better', she said, and i figured that any movie able to teach Ms Dargis the virtue of silence for even a few column inches would be worth the trip.

and worth the trip it was. we are brought into a paradise of limpidly beautiful visual textures. the oaken rhythms of a country house ensconced in a springtime parkland of luxuriant trees and luminous skies bestow the soothing natural blessing needed by the main character, martin frost (David Thewlis), a writer rubbed raw by the mechanics of finishing a novel in new york city. (Thewlis makes palpable the casualty of intrapsychic machinery sawed into daemonic reverb against the banausic hive). then paradise morphs into purgatory, leavened comedically, in Dante's sense, by the postmodern angelic visitations of Claire (Irene Jacobs) and Anna (Sophie Auster).

unfortunately, to my taste, the verbal dimensions of the film are flaccid, the logic more fanciful than imaginative, the narrative arc crippled by some irredeemably creaky plotting, especially at the crucial initiation of the relationship between martin and Claire where the seeds of common sense are thrown to the magpies of theatricality.

but so beguiling is the willful vulnerability of auster's fantasy, and the edgy interplay that it potentiates between Thewlis and Jacobs, and the camera, and later Sophie Auster, and the broad comedy of a rural everyman (Michael Imperioli), that it is very pleasant to be carried along on the visual foam of uncertain sensual delight, eddying into a feeling that this film's oddly louche light touch is uniquely adept at tracing some grave lineaments of the human heart.

go innocently.

L'intouchable (2006)

punishes the senses deliberately: literally untouchable

[4/10 · 9 March 2007]

this film punishes the senses deliberately, subjecting its audience to a ripping gauntlet of painful visual and aural textures. our eyeballs are lacerated by the relentlessly jumpy hand-held camera, pans too swift to apprehend without nausea, and the barrage of disorientingly abrupt jump cuts. ears attacked by the harsh banausic soundtrack, pounded by soulless machinery, everything torturously intrusive and overloud, even tap water, where even sitar and tabla are twisted into instruments of pain.

jacquot's apparent rationale for this mortification of our senses is to replicate the pains of a journey of spiritual self-discovery, whose immemorial signposts feature suffering, danger, and abnegation. traditional pilgrims crippled themselves crawling to shrines on their knees. jacquot's pilgrim is a young woman, Jeanne, brought up by her single mother, never feeling at home in society or in her skin, who learns around her 18th birthday that she was conceived in Benares of an Indian father, and compulsively undertakes a voyage seeking him, her roots, herself, a voyage that she insists on financing by painful humiliation.

Isild le Besco, portraying Jeanne, provides a pitch-perfect, nail-on-chalkboard personification of the skin-shredding pilgrim. Using her acting skills and flesh mercilessly, le Besco forces us to internalize the gnawing estrangement, rage, and bafflement that eat at Jeanne like a cancer. The audience is never at ease looking at Jeanne, even when she is getting a massage. Her vulnerability is unendurable, verging always on the razor edge of victimization and violation. le Besco appears to have fattened up her body for this role, especially her hips, which works very well for it, bringing her character to the far edge of voluptuousness, on the point of losing it.

At a Lincoln Center Q&A, Jacquot emphasized repeatedly how crucial it is for a director not to be cognizant of what he is doing. For all his genuine charm, he seemed tormented by hyper-rationality, determined to rid himself of this daemon. The Untouchable, with all its scourging of the senses, seems like his desperate attempt to purge himself of it, like burning away the flesh of corpses in Benares. But doesn't that deliver the film as a triumph of just the kind of rationality that he made it to escape?

For me Jacquot's rip-tide--reason trying to trick away reason by mortifying the senses--made The Untouchable a film that i found almost too painful to watch. The theory was enjoyable to contemplate--as were moments of beauty and mystery--but his programmatic bloodying of my poor eyes and ears gave me a headache so bad that I had to fight to keep from vomiting. Nonetheless, I can't help admiring the good work, thoughtfulness, and courage (to create something so rebarbative) that went into it's creation. Would that Jacquot had trusted those moments of beauty and mystery, allowed them to take off free of the visual and aural punishment, lifted the veil of supplices.

Summer Palace (2006)

pretentious, ugly, dehumanizing crap

[2/10 · 18 February 2007]

it's hard to write about this film, because it leaves you with the feeling that there is little point communicating within any species that could produce it. everybody sure looks uglier coming out of the theatre than going in. mean-spirited bombast like this--where the only suspense is whether the nasty world the film creates will turn out to be more self-important or more self-pitying--debases and deadens the audience.

to cover for the fact that nothing is happening (in the causal sense, that Mr Jones doesn't get), the director subjects us to such cheap tricks as incessant cutting and multiple soundtracks (including an extended fingernail-on-blackboard "seven little girls in the backseat" as background for 'live' music). noise piled on noise, aurally, visually, causally. to condemn all this as sound and fury signifying nothing would be to elevate it; contrasted with sitting through this film, nothing would be paradise. i've never seen any of the mechanical blue movies of the repressed 1950s, but i'm sure that none of them present sex that is any more boring and over-miked than you get here, or with characters who are less interesting.

and all this in the service of a base worldview: the tenor of the film is that the student participants in China's 1980s' democracy movement shattered at Tien An Min square were uncorked hysterics, heads-in-the-clouds, minds-in-the-muck lost goats. too bad, because the benfits and costs of repressive societies vs democratization are a compelling topic, but saints preserve us from the heavy-handedness and cheap tricks that make Summer Palace so excruciating to sit through.

Performance (1970)

delightful nausea, third-eye opening: movie as magic mushroom

[8/10 · 11 February 2007]

rimbaud despaired of poetry when words failed to make reality, but cammell, roeg, jagger and crew cast the sacred spells once more, and they perform. the movie not only showcases fly 'shroom (a. muscaria) but actually manages to give the audience a taste: amusing, disorienting, sickening, and--to the extent that you can keep it down--enlightening.

Turner--eponymous host of the intermediate realm, shaman of the mountain--has his angels turn Chas on. Chas loses his form, his gangster edge, his identity performance, becomes vulnerable, is turned from 1950s' company man (gangster) to 1960s' seeker (freak), daring to experience desire, to enjoy and care for others. could there be sharper contrast between his first and last sex scenes? as the film ends one anticipates the tiger-by-the-tail enlightenment awaiting the criminal gang who have captured not their old enforcer but a shaman.

best of all, we the audience--spiritually much more gangster than saddhu--are carried along with Chas, experiencing in our seats the psychedelic resonance of an actual trip--including, loopy causality, killer music, and peregrine personae. i exited amid happy flashbacks to the bardo, flickers of the oceanic options and performances of living.