September 2010

September 2010

We Own the Night (Gray, 2007)|||||7.5
Ponyo (Miyazaki, 2009)|||||8
Trick or Treat (Smith, 1986)|||||4
Cowards Bend the Knee (Maddin, 2003)|||||7
Blood Feast (Lewis, 1963)|||||3
* It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (Cohen, 1987)|||||7
Machete (Rodriguez & Maniquis, 2010)|||||5
Fred: The Movie (Weiner, 2010) (TV)|||||2.5
A Perfect Couple (Altman, 1979)|||||7
The Town (Affleck, 2010)|||||7
* Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)|||||5
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (Talalay, 1991)|||||4
Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999)|||||8
* It Lives Again (Cohen, 1978)|||||6
Empire of the Sun (Spielberg, 1987)|||||8
* Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954)|||||9

Munich is erudite and well-informed and exquisitely political and all, but Johnny Guitar - now that's an anti-prejudice, anti-violence/retaliation film. Such a lovely film.

Tomb of Ligeia (Corman, 1964)|||||6
Village of the Damned (Carpenter, 1995)|||||4
Shutter Island (Scorsese, 2010)|||||5.5

*spoilers* Shutter Island equates the institutional man's (the "institutional man" being any man belonging to an institution... "America" for most and most generally) greatest nightmares - as law men, as psychologists, as ideologues and activists, as "men of violence" - with the world's grandest, most maniacal, human-devouring conspiracy, as if conspiracy is what has to exist for the world's greatest atrocities to occur. And as imperturbable as grand conspiracy and great atrocity is, the mind may only be able to cope with it through madness that is less intrinsic to a mind but contrived by both events and the manipulations of cunning minds who doctor and engineer sanity to their wishing. Shutter Island's use of genre tropes - the grizzled cop, the conspiracy games, the tormenting ghosts - is a sly acknowledgment of genre diversions - like cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, heroes and madmen - as indulgences of a temporary madness, one that is impotent to effect the "true fantasies" of genocide and high-level machinations. DiCaprio's reformed Uncle Sam's boy may wish to excavate truth and recover order, but ultimately his lofty desires are just smoke and mirrors, and relegated to role-play for a delusional mind. "In hopes to convince you how impossible it is!" one character exclaims to him late in the film. Perhaps, but how far off is any a disturbed mind's concoctions from the real world? Scorsese and the screenwriter stack it high the fact that DiCaprio's character is in fact a sufferer of true delusions, but the tableau of the film is clear: that all these terrible things - from political obfuscation to great wars to mad housewives - are all but possible, and they're all such mad fantasies (or should have stayed so), both the true and hallucinated. A welcome ambiguity in the final coda suggests some men (and women) - often the violent kind - simply do rule the world, and that, out of those who don't, the madmen have got the right idea.

That said, I didn't like the film very much. Having style does not a great film make, and Shutter Island's highly flamboyant style is often diverting, but often not much more than distraction and hollow playfulness (I will admit, though, Scorsese's bombastic use of an appropriated score is a pleasure, and reminds me how anemic film scoring can be nowadays). Scorsese's anti-continuity tricks and hallucinogenic optical illusions were less expressive as they were contrived. The performances are uniformly fine, with DiCaprio the weak link, not because he is bad, which he isn't, but because he's terribly miscast. He plays it either too big or too small, likely in the need to step up to a role he's not fit for, when everyone around him is fitted perfectly. (Michelle Williams again proves herself one of the most capable young actors in Hollywood.) The film is bloated and overlong, its primary narrative and tonal approach being rather condescending-to-genre-film B-movie silliness, an approach that failed entirely to engage me at much emotional level. Rather than letting any of its thick ruminations sink in, the film is contented fucking with audience's heads and to merely amuse; amuse and dazzle with lurid shocks and flashy cinematography. The traces of poignancy that Scorsese no doubt does sense in the material he ultimately fails to respect. The film feels coldly planned and plotted, and its convoluted approach becomes tiresome and uninspired, and stinks of a complacence with the insinuating notion of "genre film mediocrity."

The Thin Red Line (Malick, 1998)|||||8.5

The Thin Red Line is a superb and audacious mix of meander and tense extended battle sequences; certainly one of the most powerful depictions of the sheer meaningless of everything in combat. Jim Caviezel's Florence Nightingale of Kentucky boy WWII soldiers is a great character.

* McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Altman, 1971)|||||9

"Destroy all the myths of heroism," Altman claims was his goal with McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Business power and the way of the gun Altman successfully fixes to the top of the food chain.

Wolfen (Wadleigh, 1981)|||||6.5
Cries and Whispers (Bergman, 1972)|||||8.5