F.I.L.M. of the Week (April 13, 2017)

13 04 2017

At some point while working on a profile of Robert Pattinson, I realized I couldn’t write honestly or insightfully about the actor if I only considered his post-“Twilight” work, which I generally considered to. I’m not sure at what point I decided I needed to watch everything in his filmography, but one film I did not particularly anticipate sitting through was “Bel Ami.” Costume dramas, especially ones set in 19th-century Europe, tend to function as something akin to the bane of my existence.

But to my very pleasant surprise, “Bel Ami” stands out as a delicious experience in a primarily dreary and stuffy genre. To be fair, I’m not sure how much I would have enjoyed the film had I watched it upon release in 2012. Pattinson was still, reluctantly, in the thrall of “Twilight” mania. The specious read of the film is to see his character, Georges Duroy, as an emotionless man who somehow manages to function as an effortless womanizer. (There is admittedly some jealousy in play, I’ll be up front.)

Indeed, there are some similarities to Edward Cullen at the surface level of “Bel Ami.” Yet with some distance, the film looks more like a reaction against his famous role. Georges makes plenty of sexual conquests in the film, but he achieves them not out of confidence or swagger. He’s deeply insecure about his station in the Parisian social strata, nervously approaching formality. In his first high society appearance, Georges musses with his appearance several times in the mirror before entering the room.

He’s at a distinct advantage in the elite ecosystem since he does not come from money and only gets a seat at the table when a former comrade from war lifts him up. To hold this tenuous position, Georges needs an ace in the hole, and he finds it through gaming undersexed and undervalued wives. Wooing them works to his benefit for a while, but eventually he learns that appealing to them goes only so far in a male-dominated world. This narrative acts as something of a meta commentary on Pattinson’s participation in the “Twilight” franchise, and his desperation and frustration is the secret sauce that raises “Bel Ami” out of standard period piece drudgery and into the “F.I.L.M. of the Week” territory.


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REVIEW: Gifted

10 04 2017

Movie dads are a dime a dozen, but we rarely get movies about the specific pressures of paternity. It’s tough to tell, then, whether the pleasures of Marc Webb’s “Gifted” are organic or simply a refreshingly different story in a crowded environment.

There’s plenty to enjoy and identify with in Chris Evans’ Frank Adler, an uncle-cum-surrogate dad who mills about working-class Florida in his dirt-stained undershirt and seemingly permanent bedhead. He’s raising his niece, the film’s titular savant Mary Adler (McKenna Grace), based on his hardscrabble and wisecracking instincts. Segregating the exceptional from the average, he jokes, only produces congressmen. His everyman parenting style gets a shock from the arrival of his ivory tower-minded mother, Lindsay Duncan’s Evelyn.

From there on out, “Gifted” plays out like the Florida Man edition of “Kramer vs. Kramer” with a little dash of “Good Will Hunting” to liven up the familiar settings of family court and therapy sessions. How much that affects each viewer probably depends on their individual tolerance for the well-executed cliché and the obvious emotional moment. When Frank and Mary spend some quality time watching new dads come out of delivery to the hospital waiting room, it’s possible to read the scene as hopelessly cloying or truly touching.

I found “Gifted” somewhere in between, affecting in fits and spurts while never truly melting my heart like a stick of butter in the sun. Evans clearly has a big heart that he pumps into the film, yet Tom Flynn’s script gives him remarkably little agency. Frank is defined primarily in relation to other characters, many of whom float in and out of the plot with whiplash-inducing speed. (And let’s not even brooch the serious ethical debate that Flynn completely sidesteps in the film’s big finale.) But don’t worry everyone, there’s a truly great movie about an uncle struggling to provide adequate guardianship for the orphaned child of his departed sibling – and it’s readily available to watch. B- / 


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REVIEW: Personal Shopper

9 04 2017

Olivier Assayas’ “Personal Shopper” bills itself as a ghost story, and that moniker applies to just about every facet of the film. Yes, there’s the obvious – Kristen Stewart’s Maureen considers herself a medium, and she looks to commune with the spirit of her recently departed twin brother Lewis. The first to leave the land of the living was to leave the other a sign, so she relocates to Paris in order to make contact. But mostly she’s just “waiting,” as Maureen describes it.

The apparitional element extends beyond the supernatural and the spiritualistic, though. Maureen pays her way in the City of Light as a personal shopper, a go-between for the producing and the consuming class. Her employer, the socialite Kyra, sends out Maureen as a phantom presence to select, purchase but never try on clothes for future engagements. The two scarcely ever have physical interactions, leading Maureen to approach her vocation with a deepening sense of estrangement and alienation. Not unlike with Lewis, it’s like she must communicate with and channel the spirit of a ghost.

Practically every aspect of “Personal Shopper” sees Maureen in contact with some kind of reality removed from her own, be it her boyfriend over Skype or a mysteriously probing and knowledgeable unknown number via text in the film’s centerpiece. As Maureen travels round-trip from Paris to London for the sole purpose of picking up a dress for Kyra, she feels an other-worldly gravitational pull to return to this persistent phantasm. As much as her thumbs may quiver in response, she keeps the conversation going for the cross-country train journey, revealing truths about herself to a person whose identity she cannot even verify.

There’s so much to unpack here, so much so that it feels wrong to even take a stab at the deeper meanings of “Personal Shopper” after just one viewing. Further watches will likely further illuminate just how carefully Stewart dances along the line of channeling someone and desiring to become that person altogether. Her ethereal performance does not so much power the film as she haunts it. Like a ghost, she’s diffuse, elusive and difficult to pin down and describe. B+ / 


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REVIEW: We Are the Flesh

8 04 2017

Fantastic Fest

Due to some kind of inexplicable error with the DCP file, I had to watch Emiliano Rocha Minter’s “We Are the Flesh” off some kind of pixelated backup copy. Maybe it was for the best that I couldn’t see every inch of the film in all its graphic detail. I saw plenty – or dare I say, too much – from what was there.

Credit Minter for crafting a visually innovative hellscape that invokes the surreal “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” only here as the devil’s cavern. He also assembles a cacophonous symphony of tactile sounds that accentuate the unnatural space. Yet beyond the creation of a unique world, the “last monument of a miserable society,” I can offer few compliments.

“We Are the Flesh” makes “Wetlands” seem like a Disney movie in its innocence. Minter drops two siblings in this unforgiving landscape and introduces them to a deranged stranger who awakens their incestuous desires. It was around the point of the Reygadas-esque sex scene, complete with freeze frames during orgastic spasms, where I just gave up any hope of finding meaning or commentary in the film. Minter is shocking for the sake of being shocking. He’s free to make the movie he wants, but I certainly don’t have to enjoy being subjected to an orgy of flesh eating as the ends of the film, not its means. C+ / 


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REVIEW: Raw

7 04 2017

Fantastic Fest

Getting adjusted to college life can bring out the monster in all of us. Julia Ducornau’s “Raw” just makes that a little more vivid and terrifying by adding in an element of cannibalism as a metaphor for the suppressed true self. (Yes, you read that right.)

The film begins with Justine (Garance Marillier) arriving quietly at veterinary school with the kind of milquetoast blandness that indicates a lack of self-confidence. She’s the type to wander the party alone – no judgment; I can definitely relate. Her sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf), an upperclassman, does her best to gently nudge Justine to break out of her shell. When that fails, she takes more drastic steps towards humiliation and mortification.

Alexia means her actions with the kind of tough familial love we all come to expect from siblings, but they begin to have immediate physical consequences for Justine. Like a nagging rash, vomiting hair and more. The family condition involves a taste for their fellow humans awakened by flesh contact, a sadistically difficult thing to avoid when surrounded by the blood and meat of animals … not to mention the normal carnal desires of young people packed into tight living quarters.

Ducornau does a fine job balancing the two faces of “Raw,” both the specifics of its body horror and the generalities of its collegiate angst. She’s not afraid to indulge in a moment of pure discomfort or a little levity. (For more on the latter aspect – shameless plug – check out my piece from Fantastic Fest comparing it to critical cause célèbre “Toni Erdmann.”) And, as always, the scariest element is no one moment but simply the dawning realization of the aberrant desires pent up inside ourselves. B+ / 


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F.I.L.M. of the Week (April 6, 2017)

6 04 2017

Seduction gets the on-screen treatment quite a bit, though I can say I’ve rarely seen it so expertly dissembled as it was in Catherine Breillat’s “Fat Girl,” my pick for the “F.I.L.M. of the Week.” This twisted tale of adolescent experimentation, which delightedly revels in its own bawdiness, spends a solid 20 minutes of its tight 83 minute runtime devoted to a single scene in which college-aged beach rat Fernando (Libero De Rienzo) attempts to get in the pants of teenaged Elena (Roxane Mesquida). He’s using just about every trick in the book to end up at intercourse, but Elena clutches the prize of her virginity with a firm grip. It’s not something Fernando would need to pry from her cold, dead hands, so, slowly, he chips away at her resistance.

All the while, Elena’s younger sister Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) bears witness to the scene playing out from the vantage point of her bed a few feet away. She’s an odd mixture of appalled and fascinated, repelled and curious. At the time documented in the movie, Anaïs (the titular obese woman) has begun to realize and visualize herself in sexual terms. She betrays little, concealing both her jealousy and vicarious pleasure.

“Fat Girl” provides only a short window into the lives of Elena and Anaïs, denying us the chance to go on any of the traditional “journey” narratives associated with teenage sexuality. Instead, Breillat forces us to stare at sex for what it is. That’s not always pretty. Sometimes, it amounts to little more than the fulfillment of animalistic desires – even over the valid objections of another person.


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REVIEW: Queen of the Desert

5 04 2017

“You will not scare men with your intelligence,” warns an elder to the young Gertrude Bell at the outset of Werner Herzog’s “Queen of the Desert.” It’s the kind of “nevertheless, she persisted” moment that would spur on a great feminist tale. Instead, the line represents the tease for a story that never materializes.

This story of an accomplished archaeologist who provided valuable research on tribes in the Ottoman Empire as their empire collapses is all too eager to define her life in relation to the men whose path she crosses. There’s T.E. Lawrence (Robert Pattinson) of “Lawrence of Arabia” fame, a more professional acquaintance, but she sets off on her quest primarily in grief-stricken anguish at the loss of Henry Cadogan (James Franco). While in the Middle East, she spends as much time on screen rebuffing offers from Charles Doughty-Wylie (Damian Lewis) as she interacts with the native tribes.

This becomes an issue later on when Herzog tries to land the film with an anti-imperialist message as Winston Churchill arrives from the British Empire to help break up the Ottoman Empire. Gradually, Bell does grow into a bit of an anti-imperialist as she increases her understanding of the region’s tribes. But in her embittered farewell, knowing that her advice will likely be discarded, Bell expresses a kind of fondness for the people she loves that also reeks of a white savior complex.

The only thing to recommend in the film is Pattinson’s turn as Lawrence; he does the self-effacing British elite routine with aplomb. Otherwise, “Queen of the Desert” sits on a hollow throne. C / 


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REVIEW: Miss Bala

4 04 2017

The concept of “Miss Bala” is horrifyingly compelling: beauty queen (hence the ironic title, translated into English as “Miss Bullet”) turned drug mule. Everything about that just sounds awesome, like Quentin Tarantino remaking “Maria Full of Grace” – and I didn’t really even like that movie.

Yet while the violence and carnage of “Miss Bala” further convinces me that the Mexican drug trafficking trade is a brutally dangerous one, it felt a little like preaching to the converted. At least, it felt that way for me being from Texas where stories of bloodshed along the border make the local news more often. Perhaps it will strike more of a cord with different audiences less familiar with the drug trade. But for me, I just found “Miss Bala” a boring albeit bloody slog through a thinly-plotted script. It somehow manages to feel interminably long despite many sequences of extreme violence.

The performance of Stephanie Sigman as Laura, the movie’s protagonist, is weak at best. To carry the movie and really drive home the horror, she needed to be a lot stronger and more emotionally forceful.  I just never really connected to the character to the point where I cared about her journey at all. By the end, I didn’t feel strongly one way or another about her survival. I just wanted “Miss Bala” to end.  C- / 1halfstars


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REVIEW: The Discovery

3 04 2017

Sundance Film Festival

I was a bit peeved to learn that Netflix owned the rights to Charlie McDowell’s The Discovery after I had blown a portion of my precious ticket allotment to see the film at the festival. Most people will experience this film from the comforts of their own living room. That’s their loss.

McDowell’s follow-up to his audacious debut, 2014’s “The One I Love,” works from a similarly complex setup. Robert Redford’s Thomas Harber discovers proof of an afterlife, leading masses of people worldwide to commit suicide to get there. A few years later, his son Will (Jason Segel) navigates a “Children of Men“­­-like world so substantially depleted of human energy that a hashtag campaign using #nomoresuicides and #discoverlife exists. Against his better judgment, he ends up in a position to probe the boundaries of his father’s finding and expose some potentially unsavory truths about what really lies there.

Will also encounters the suicidal Isla, played by Rooney Mara in what might be the closest thing she ever plays to Clementine Kruczynski, which substantially deepens his knowledge of rapidly changing attitudes. We get out of this world what we put into it, and neglecting our imperfect existence in favor of some distant fantasy can only lead to ruin. Locating meaning in death rather than in life leads people in strange directions, such as the cult-like estate that the elder Harber establishes.

It was nice to know, too, that audiences still respond to the shock of suicide. Too bad that Netflix can’t include the audible gasps of a stunned Sundance crowd at many moments in “The Discovery” as some kind of supplemental audio track. McDowell makes perfectly clear that human life matters in the film. Sharing and reaffirming that feeling with others just serves to emphasize it all the more. B+ / 

NOTE: A portion of this review ran as a part of my coverage of the Sundance Film Festival for Movie Mezzanine.


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REVIEW: Trespass Against Us

2 04 2017

No law dictates that every movie about rural-based robbers must be compared to “Hell or High Water,” but it’s going to be a tempting comparison from hereon out given the way that film seamlessly connected geographic isolation with the self-defeating act. Director Adam Smith and writer Alastair Simmons try something similar with the dwellers of a secluded Irish mobile-home compound in “Trespass Against Us” to mixed effect. It’s passable as a crime thriller but genuinely compelling as the story of one father’s struggle.

That delinquent dad is Michael Fassbender’s Chad Cutler, the most put-together offspring of patriarch Colby (Brendan Gleeson), a Jim Jones-type who inspires a religiously-tinged devotion from his kin. Chad has entered the family trade of larceny, though with significant hesitation due in part to pressure from his wife Kelly (Lyndsey Marshal) to provide some semblance of normality for their two young kids. She wants stability, both in his profession and their living quarters.

There’s no grand moment of conscience for Chad in “Trespass Against Us.” He would rather find some way to please both masters in his life by continuing with extralegal measures away from the Cutler shantytown. But given the escalation of activity demanded by Colby, such a grand bargain becomes exceedingly elusive. Fassbender gives the movie real weight as he ponders which side of the divide Chad would like to fall. It’s a more repressed, bottled-up version of the characters he typically animates, and the more internalized portrayal works for Chad, a man who projects authority without really ever experiencing much autonomy. Discovering who he is proves the greater draw than what he does. B / 


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REVIEW: The Blackcoat’s Daughter

29 03 2017

When it comes to horror genre fare, I’m the first person to rail against the overuse of the jump scare or other lazy techniques designed to get a quick, visceral reaction. Myself, and many others of the critical ilk, prefer tension and suspense. Or better yet – an atmospheric horror that seeps into dark crevasses of the psyche.

There’s a way for the pendulum to swing too far in the way of those aforementioned good things. When that happens, you get something that looks a lot like Oz Perkins’ “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” a technically sound machine that feels overly programmed to the point of becoming inorganic. It’s overthought to the point of being overwrought, akin to a student thesis film. (Perhaps no coincidence that it marks Perkins’ directorial debut.)

Perkins’ film is all foreplay and very little fun. “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” weaves together two storylines of young women in peril, Emma Roberts’ Joan on the open road and Kiernan Shipka’s Kat in a suffocating religious environment. We eventually learn the reason their tales are intertwined, but … well, no spoilers. It’s half-decent because of a twist at the end. The journey there is quite tedious, filled with opportunities for true terror that too often go unconsummated. Perkins clearly has the brains for the genre. Hopefully he gains confidence to add in the nerves for it, too. C / 


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REVIEW: Song to Song

28 03 2017

If life is a song, as narration from Rooney Mara’s Faye in “Song to Song” suggests, then rest assured that writer/director Terrence Malick is following the spasmodic tune in his own head with dogged determination. In what appears to be the final feature film made in his post-“The Tree of Life” productivity period, the cinema’s philosopher laureate continues to push himself further into avant-garde, non-narrative forms of storytelling. This latest work might be the definitive achievement of the bunch as Malick probes and roves more than he presumes and pronounces, making the spirit of the film match his intellectually curious aesthetic.

Not one to slow down in his seventies, Malick expands the scope of his deeply interior characterizations to encompass an entire ensemble. His past films normally only allow audiences entry to a select few characters’ headspace through pensive narration. In “Song to Song,” that applies to aspiring musicians Faye and BV (Ryan Gosling) as well as teacher-turned-waitress Rhonda (Natalie Portman) dragged into their orbit.

Each of these three tries to follow their motivating forces – love, art, protection – by trusting their instincts. Yet these often decisions lead them back to a sinister music producer Cook, played with a primate-like ferocity by Michael Fassbender. He’s commercialism incarnate, simultaneously abhorrent and alluring. Cook provides, but he also demands. When the impulse to love crosses into lust, he’s there to cash in.

“Song to Song” hums by on the inclination of Malick’s emotional logic, with Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera (seemingly unresponsive to the laws of gravity) there to capture his vision in all its grimy intimacy. He’s not big on traditional beauty here; long lens shots flatten out the images, and jump cuts within the same scene provide a jarring jolt to the mundane. But there’s something more honest about the ever-searching indeterminacy of the film. Malick seems less fixated on answers and more interested in simply tracing the development of a musical movement. The end result is far from melodic, though that matters not. For all the seeking and yearning in the story and the form itself, the free-flowing riff makes for a perfect means of expression. B+ / 


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REVIEW: Wilson

27 03 2017

Sundance Film Festival

Somehow, despite it being my most anticipated film of Sundance, I wound up at the second screening of Craig Johnson’s “Wilson” while virtually everyone else I knew got tickets to the premiere. More than one person cautioned me that Woody Harrelson’s eponymous character, based on graphic artist Daniel Clowes’ creation, was so intensely dyspeptic that he was basically unlikable.

Now, to be clear, I often love unlikable characters. And when I sat down to watch the film, I did not find Wilson difficult to watch or enjoy. In fact, his particular brand of thorniness was quite a welcome contemporary spin on the garden-variety curmudgeon. In typical Harrelson fashion, the character is a foul-mouthed prankster determined never to take a moment too seriously or treat a person with full respect. But Wilson is something different. As he repels nearly everyone with whom he makes contact, he also tries to cure them of the modern malaise of isolation. Whether in the form of phones, technology or a hermetic bubble of their own choosing, Wilson violates arbitrary decorum to highlight the absurdity of our perpetual estrangement.

I read Clowes’ graphic novel over a year ago anticipating a 2016 Sundance bow for “Wilson” (full disclosure: I am well acquainted with the film’s director), and my faint recollection of the text relies on a simple joke structure where Wilson reacts with predictable atrophy at whatever situation thrown at him. Clowes’ script for the film, which included some input by Johnson, takes the character in a much more interesting direction. It’s similarly episodic, though the narrative quest of reuniting with his estranged wife Pippi (Laura Dern) to track down his previously assumed aborted daughter Claire (Isabella Amara) does provide “Wilson” with some structure.

The differentiating factor is that Wilson himself feels much freer and open as a character, which in turn makes his exploits far more interesting to observe. In Harrelson’s hands, he’s more than just a human incarnation of Oscar the Grouch. Wilson has some inner joy, some of which simply manifests itself in caustic comments that make others uncomfortable. Johnson and Clowes create a world in which everyone else is far too comfortable, perhaps even complacent, that they need Wilson to shake them out of their stillness. Watching the disruption proves quite entertaining. B+ / 


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REVIEW: Donald Cried

22 03 2017

SXSW Film Festival, 2016

There’s something to be said for working within familiar genre tropes and hallmarks … and still managing to turn out something interesting. Kris Avedisian’s understated yet subversive take on the coming home indie dramedy, “Donald Cried,” provides just that – but not just that. The story of these two estranged former friends, reunited when one returns to their working class Rhode Island neighborhood, sneaks into some unpleasant crevasses of a fraught relationship.

Repeated interactions between visiting Wall Street hotshot Peter (Jesse Wakeman) and attic-dwelling Donald (Avedisian, in front of the camera) do not rekindle nostalgic memories. Rather, illusions shatter with each successive encounter, and past events that both recall rather innocuously are recast to show the hot-headed Peter outright disparaging the odd Donald. To their credit, neither Wakeman or Avedisian play the roles as traditional “types” that play into an established power dynamic of bully and victim. Watching them flip advantage based on humiliation or ignorance makes “Donald Cried” a live wire watch from minute to minute, with the settling position of their relationship never obviously discernible.

Avedisian, a first-time director, achieves all of this without reaching for emotion in close-ups or relying heavily on reaction shots. He trust his instincts and his actors to do the work right and create a tense atmosphere on their own. The harmoniously executed discord that ensues leaves a bittersweet taste – just as he wants it. “Donald Cried” lingers by frustrating our expectations just enough to wonder why we’re still a little upset by the end. B+ / 


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REVIEW: Frantz

21 03 2017

Sundance Film Festival

Cinema still runs low on great films about the Great War this side of “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Though more people ought to give another look to Derek Cianfrance’s “The Light Between Oceans,” roundly dismissed after being dumped in theaters over Labor Day weekend, they should also look at François Ozon’s “Frantz,” a film which debuted just a few days later at the 2016 Venice Film Festival. Rather than steeping his post-war milieu in melodrama like the former director, Ozon stages a dimly austere meditation on forgiveness in continental Europe.

The pared back simplicity of the black and white visual scheme, recalling the crispness of Haneke’s similarly two-toned “The White Ribbon,” might come as shocking to any Francophile cinema fans who know Ozon for his fizzy, vivacious filmmaking. The occasional stylistic flourishes do make their way into “Frantz,” punctuating the tense silences by reminding us of a joy seemingly absent in the wake of World War I’s devastation. But the overwhelming majority of the film is a masterclass in controlling ambiance and delicate unravelling of repressed emotion.

Of course, little of this occurs while letting the film wash over. “Frantz” begins as a simple mystery as Anna (Paula Beer), the widow of a German solider, observes a Frenchman repeatedly visiting her departed husband’s grave. He eventually introduces himself as Adrien (Pierre Niney), and he claims to have come in order to pay respects to the soldier he too knew. Showing up to a small, provincial town little over a year after the Armistice is a bold move for Adrien given that, as someone declares, “every Frenchman is my son’s murderer.”

The ensuing engagement and estrangement between he and Anna illustrates the difficult process of healing and remarrying while the wounds of armed conflict are still fresh. 1920 was still a time of hope for a brighter future; maybe the Great War would live up to its title of “The War to End All Wars” after all. But Adrien, Anna and Europe as a whole know the temptation of a comforting lie to paper over difficult fissures in a relationship. Ozon never shows these chasms in “Frantz,” though they loom ever larger as the post-war tranquility appears increasingly illusory. B+ / 


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