SXSW Review: EXCESS FLESH

March 13, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Bethany Orr, Excess Flesh, Festival Reviews, Film Festivals, Mary Loveless, Patrick Kennelly, Reviews, Sigrid Gilmer, SXSW 2015

Remember those fetid middle school health videos about eating disorders? The concerned best friend, the bespectacled guidance counselor, the implied offscreen self-abuse. The gorging. The vomiting. The inevitable dramatic hospital visit. Excess Flesh isn’t quite that but Patrick Kennelly‘s wannabe horror feature is still very much the cinematic version of binging and purging. It crams a bunch of junk down your throat only to yuck it back on the screen as watery, indistinct gook. Kinda like the next day stomach movement of a truly ripping kegger. Kennelly’s narrative circle of hell exhumes outdated and/or overplayed models of violence towards women and the violence women inflict on themselves to ill-effect. Aided by a predictable and heavily cliched script from Kennelly and co-writer Sigrid Gilmer (starring bottom-feeding lines like “You’re not gonna get away with this, you know”), Excess Flesh is at once an obvious and oblivious body dysmorphia thriller that’s more than a little flabby. And by curtain time, it, like a half-starved model, has totally collapsed off the runway. Read More

SXSW Review: AVA’S POSSESSIONS

March 13, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Ava's Possessions, Deborah Rush, Festival Reviews, Jordan Galland, Louisa Krause, SXSW 2015, William Sadler 1 Comment

Traditionally, the horror movies begins with the tabula rasa and from there builds upwards with little narrative Lincoln Logs stacked on shower scares and mirror pop-ins. Ava’s Possessions shrewdly flips the formula on its head, poising an intriguing conceit in the exploration of what transpires after a ghastly, cathartic event. Where is the werewolf at mentally the morn after the full moon? When do the disfigured, backwoods cannibals run out of human stock and have to settle on Ramen? How nasty a case of PDST results from a Eli Roth-style torture session? What is the aftermath of an exorcism? Read More

SXSW Review: PETTING ZOO

March 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Devon Keller, Micah Magee, Petting Zoo, Reviews, SXSW 2015 Reviews 2 Comments

Petting Zoo exists in the crossroads between Texas-sized conservative values and an emerging genus of first-generation aspirations as 17-year-old Layla finds herself simultaneously presented with a college scholarship and a bun in the oven. Writer, director Micah Magee‘s tale of unexpected pregnancy is one that cuts close to home, having been a pregnant teen herself.

States Magee, “I wanted to tell this story from a place of empathy and experience instead of a political angle.” By in large, her dramatic tale of difficult choices at a ripe young age does linger in the emotional corner of the room though some of the most interesting aspects of the film – her fundamental ideological differences with her birth parents – those that might just be political after all, feel skimped on.

Acting as Magee’s stand-in is Devon Keller (Layla). Her fawn-like eyes and meek frame wrangle in an underlying glow of intelligence and an cerebral hearth of cunning. The most defining feature of Layla though, like all hormone-laded teenage girls, is her fragile emotional epicenter. Not one to be bucked off balance by a philandering beau, unsupportive parents or her blue collar roots, Layla faces constant trials to her psychological health in dance halls and doctor’s offices alike.

Keller, a non-actor, surfaced for the role in a doozy of a casting call anecdote. At the same school where casting was taking place, Keller won a Taco Bell burrito at a fashion show (oh Texas) and awkwardly accepted her bean and cheesy prize. Though initially hesitant to sign on for the role, Keller provides Layla layers of honesty and plain-faced charm that would have otherwise been altered by the presence of a more “actory” performance.

Debuting at Berlin Film Festival to dull roars of approval – Variety’s Peter Debruge called Petting Zoo his “favorite film” at the festival – Magee’s film aims to distinguish itself by way of an overwhelming sense of stern-faced seriousness. Last year, Jenny Slate transformed her pregnancy in a feminist laugh riot, crafting a bonafide hilarious abortion comedy. In 2007, Juno snarked a way through her knocked up interim with acerbic zingers in a borderline romanticized, nonchalant fashion wholly uncharacteristic of your average accidental teenage pregnancy. Here, Layla takes the fetus feeding inside her deadly serious and so does Magee. The result, though honest, revealing and emotionally forthright, is kind of a drag.

Growing pains and relationship strife bucks up against strict family values and the ensuing dichotomy of a lower-class preggo schoolgirl hoping against hope to populate her mind with collegiate knowledge is an emotional wrestling match in itself. And far be to it for me to say that all pregnancy dramas should come with a hearty scoop of a self-deprecating female jester, all that pain and suffering becomes a hefty dose without the sweet release of an occasional levity.

C+

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SXSW Review: SWEATY BETTY

March 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Joe Frank, Reviews, Sweaty Betty, SXSW 2015 Reviews, Zack Reed

Idiosyncratic Sweaty Betty is a documentary-cum-nonfiction of odd variety. Consisting of six scenes and six cuts and using a cast composed entirely of non-actors, it represents a new-age, inner city twist on the undiluted realism of Richard Linklater or Curtis Snow’s disconcertingly realistic Snow on Tha Bluff. Tactically less intellectual than Linklater and yet more restrained and tender than Snow, Sweaty Betty shows the 21st century promise of plopping a camera in a foreign landscape to eye-opening effect, even if said landscape is on American soil.

The two dueling narratives of Sweaty Betty frame a somewhat askew relationship between man and beast. Issues of domestication, profitability and, gasp, love swirl into and out of the pocket of Joe Frank and Zack Reed‘s film but there’s never an attempt to pinpoint exactly what it is they’re attempting to communicate beyond slamming the camera in the middle of the action and letting it roll.

Events play out as a series of fast-talking closed captioned conversations and thank the gods for that. The characters, particularly the loquacious Scobby, are such hasty-gabbing windbags that they make Seinfeld‘s Jackie Chiles look like a traveling orator for senior centers. Without the visual aid of superimposed text, their Maryland motormouths might be garbled streaks of sound. Assisted by phonetic subtitles, their slang is hypnotic and strangely exciting – some of Scooby’s colorful verbiage is the equivalent of ghetto Shakespeare – and since directing duo Frank and Reed are themselves products of this Cheverly community, their spotlighting of this particular lexicon couldn’t feel less exploitative. Rather, the product itself boils down to the direcor’s intention to put their experience on the screen as it might play out in real life, “From a directing and editing standpoint, we wanted to show life in real time. We wanted to show two great real-life stories unfold, but just as important, we wanted to show the pace at which these real-life stories unfold.”

One of said story lines features best friends and young single dads Rico and Scooby as they come into owning a “cocaine white” pit bull puppy whose adorable levels are squeal-worthy. The other thread drops in on the Rich family and their 1000-pound pig as they half-assedly attempt to transform their beloved porker Mrs. Charlotte (whether the name choice is intentionally ironic or not is never certain) into the official mascot for the Washington Redskins. How perfectly suitable for a NFL brand that has largely associated itself with pigheadedness.

But where another film might be intentionally making this association, this is not the least bit the goal of Reed and Frank, nor the true-to-life Rich family. Rather, the Rich clan are of preternaturally earnest stock. The genuine purpose that patriarch Floyd and his folk garnish from their possession and neighborhood propagation of said swine is their soul’s foodstuffs. It’s bacon to feed their dreams. Their quiet aspirations to have their over-sized pig represent an NFL franchise is borderline heartbreaking. When legal interests interject to alter the pig’s status within the Rich family, there is an immeasurable sense of loss, as if all they had to live for has been snatched with the scoop of a greedy carnival claw.

Told that they could not just pick up a camera and start filming, directing team Frank and Reed did exactly that. Their Best Buy Nikon d5100 came out of its packaging and immediately turned its gaze into the midst of this pair of real-life events. The narrative itself isn’t meant to shake the earth, nor is it in itself a sensational mountain of intrigue, but their feature is nonetheless massively effective at dropping us into a place swirling with low-key issues symbolically representative of the specific cultural zeitgeist at large.

A few horrid musical cues – Luther Vandross’ melodramatic “Dance With My Father” overstays its welcome within seconds – arrive aggressively on the nose. But even with such shameless grabs at our heartstrings, the sentiment behind such ideas are pure, even though obviously emotionally manipulative. It’s their ability to succeed even in the face of commonplace platitudes that make Frank and Reed such a promising duo and Sweaty Betty such an unexpected accomplishment. See it for Scooby’s delectable diatribes alone, yung.

B-

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Out in Theaters: CINDERELLA

March 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Cate Blanchett, Cinderella, Disney, Helena Bonham Carter, Kenneth Branagh, Lily James, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Richard Madden 1 Comment

From the first time they put pen to paper, the House of Mouse changed things. Classics from Snow White to Sleeping Beauty capitalized on groundbreaking innovation, brokered a new medium for entertainment and launched the phenomenon of the Disney princess, a cultural landmark that lasted for decades. Maybe it was my being a teenager and all, but from what I gathered, that cultural landmark dried up around Y2K, petering out with a string of computer animated duds. Dinosaur, Atlantis, Brother Bear and Chicken Little all represented a low point for the imaginative power of the ubiquitous studio, especially when juxtaposed with the meteoric rise of Pixar. With a certifiable hit in Princess and the Frog reviving the old-fashioned charm of the Disney engine a year earlier, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland arrived on the scene to dominate the box office to the tune of a billion dollars. Dollar signs in their eyes, the once great studio turned its attention to recycling old mainstays with new CGI to the collective groan of people everywhere. Read More

Out in Theaters: ’71

March 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged '71, Jack O'Connell, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Yann Demange

On the ground during 1971’s deadly Belfast riots, a British solider is separated from his unit in Yann Demange‘s strategically taut ’71. Proving that not all action thrillers need over-the-top set pieces or larger-than-life villains, ’71 is an exercise in tactful realism that bleeds intelligence and authenticity between harrowing sequences of true blue terrorism, askew nationalism and boundless tension. Demange’s gripping piece of historical fiction is served sizzling hot with its hero positioned in a constant state of explosiony danger, giving new life to the phrase “out of the fire and into the frying pan.” Read More

Out in Theaters: WILD TALES

March 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Damián Szifrón, Foreign Film, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Wild Tales 1 Comment

Damián Szifrón‘s unabashedly violent anthology Wild Tales is total guano. The nutrient-rich, black market, Ace Ventura “they use it to make everything” guano. That is, Szifrón’s smokin’ opus is batshit in all the rights ways – it’s ironic, smart, blisteringly funny and downright brutal. It’s a concoction of true madness and borderline genius, shaken up and exploding onto the screen in gory, imaginative splashes.

Like any anthology, you’re always going to have some segments that succeed more than others and that fate doesn’t escape Szifrón. His best material is used up first with a trio of fast-paced, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sketches that set up the hilariously violent and deeply serendipitous world that Wild Tales takes place in. Though the closing sequence is one of the most masterfully constructed, even it cannot match the decadent fun of that initial three step tango.

The first segment, which can be loosely considered a twisted prologue, is called “Pasternak” and deals in the currency of coincidence. Having consumed it, just the name “Pasternak” is likely to induce a smile. Soon after boarding a flight, two passengers discover that they have a peer of sorts in common. It just so happens that neither of them ended their relationship with said peer on particularly pleasant terms. When a third and fourth passenger reveal that they too know the party in question, events quickly veer towards black humor at 600 mph. To reveal anymore about this high-flying farce would be to rob “Pasternak” of its punch but let’s just say that it sets the bar improbably high.

In my screening, Pasternak evoked fits of rampant laughter amongst my audience, a group of mixed ages who were positively tickled. I admittedly was as well. The dark humor and sly satire is presented with a smarmy self-awareness that totally summons the delightfully offbeat tendencies of director and Wild Tales producer Pedro Almodóvar (The Skin I Live In). You can feel the hot, toying breathe of Almodóvar all over this Argentine-Spanish feature.

Rat poison, road rage, tow trucks, hit and runs and a supremely botched wedding all follow with each “wild tale” tucking into the deliciously devious nature that Szifrón has brewed up to various extent. Each short explores a different theme but is done with such a tongue-in-cheek, satirical form that you might be too busy laughing to catch the point. Many deal with the notion of “the breaking point,” be that in a professional-sense, with the government or with a random passerby. What is that final straw that tips up towards madness? What motivates us towards revenge? Is there ever such thing as a clean getaway? Szifrón doesn’t plan to answer these questions so much as raise them as one might an eyebrow.

While I would be hard pressed to deem any of the shorts unworthy, the middle portion of the film hit a bit of a lull with “The Proposal”, a segment that provided a low point in terms of creativity and comedy both. As the most straight-faced of the bunch, it sticks out as melodramatic, save for a heavily forecasted twist of Grecian fate in its closing moments. With so many other fantastic elements in the film, “The Proposal”‘s existence within its middle makes the tail end drag and forces the film beyond the two hour mark. Were a more time-conscious editor on board, I would think it would have crash landed like a certain pilot onto the cutting room floor.

Although the anthology film has seen a bit of a revival of late withiin the horror genre (three V/H/S films, ABCs of Death 1&2), Wild Tales seeks to raise the bar on the narrative gimmick like he’s James Cameron in a South Park episode. Gone are the multiple directors and in its place is a much more focused, singular vision. No Szifrón doesn’t define his feature by narrative consistency but much like the BBC’s Black Mirror, the shorts are stitched together through their overarching sense of exaggerated realism. In Black Mirror, this narrative trope can be seen in the explorations of technology’s pitfalls and the dangers of our reliance on such. Wild Tales also exaggerates the idea of violent and revenge but is much more nonchalant about its purpose. In large part due to this, Szifrón is able to comment like a certified peanut gallery member. He truly has his cake and blows it up too.

A-

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Weekly Review 74: MAPS, FRENCH, DEATH

March 10, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged Game of Death, Maps to the Stars, Reviews, The French Connection, Weekly Review

When it rains, it pours and this last week (much like the Seattle weather) held very little rain. A casual week at the theater held a screening of the tragically misunderstood Chappie as well as gripping British war film ’71 (review later this week.) At home, I consumed some new Cronenberg in the form of Maps to the Stars and a fledgling William Friedkin crime drama – The French Connection. Capping off my run at the Seattle Cinerama’s Fists and Fury Festival, I caught Bruce Lee‘s “final” unfinished film Game of Death. Web screenings have been flooding my inbox in preparation for SXSW so I’ve also had to dive head first into those, but more on that later. For all you who follow from here, there be Weekly Review.

MAPS TO THE STARS (2014)

With Maps to the Stars, Canadian experimentalist maestro David Cronenberg extends his middle digit to the Hollywood lifestyle and its fuddy-duddy inhabitants without much nuance, or style for that matter. The film deals in stark shades of excess, featuring a cadre of Hollywood cliches – the burnouts, the up-and-comers, the desperate wannabe stars – stumbling into or out of fame. Cronenberg’s characters are about as deep as those supporting figures in Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama’s stock and just as poisonous. The whole Hollywood’s a cesspool commentary is nothing new with Bruce Wagner’s faltering script feeling at least two decades out of date. Solid performances from the likes of Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack, Robert Pattinson, Evan Bird and Olivia Williams help to keep Maps afloat, as does Cronenberg’s knack for dark excess, but it’s too little too late in a film that is as fundamentally confused about its identity as an aspiring Hollywood starlet on her knees at some producer’s house and is, in many instances, just about as desperate. (C-)

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

Armed with a snub-nosed revolver and a bowler cap, Gene Hackman‘s Jimmy Doyle is a nigh misanthropic narc cop who roughs and tumbles in the darkened back alleys of NYC with partner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) in tow. Doyle is a dick of a previous era – a shoot first, sneer later lawman – and Hackman is near iconic in the role. The Exorcist‘s William Friedkin directs with steady panache, including a pulse-pounding subway chase sequence that is framed just perfectly. Composer Don Ellis though brings the whole thing home with his absolutely sinister score, pulsating and scraping like it itself is possessed. The conceit – Doyle and Russo stumble upon a smuggling ring associated with New York-based French foreign nationals – isn’t anything all that new or special but Friedkin’s inverted take on the crime drama gives the material more intrigue. (B)

GAME OF DEATH (1978)

To call Game of Death Bruce Lee‘s final movie isn’t entirely true, considering that he only completed 12 minutes of usable footage before he died. The remainder – stitched together from other unused Lee material, additional material filmed with not one but two separate stand ins and a truly despicable scene that actually takes place at Lee’s actual funeral – is a wholly laughable, arguably meta kung fu flub-up. Released five years after Lee’s death, Game of Death tells the story of a martial-artist-cum-actor whose success has him sought after by a shady organization. Said organization is quick to unleash henchmen upon Lee (or rather, his body doubles) in scenes that are so comically senseless and gravity-defying that you can’t stop the flow of giggles. It’s a true shame because the final three-level battle features some of Lee’s finest high-flying action yet, particularly in a whip-cracking nun chucks scene. (C-)

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Out in Theaters: CHAPPIE

March 6, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Chappie, Die Antwoord, Hugh Jackman, Neill Blomkamp, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Sharlto Copley, Yo-Landi

Chappie star Yolandi Vizzer said of the “Zef” movement that defines Cape Town rave-rap group Die Antwoord, “It’s associated with people who soup their cars up and rock gold and shit. Zef is, you’re poor but you’re fancy, you’re sexy, you’ve got style.” Her home-on-the-Afrikaans-range expressionist sentiments on Zef appropriately sum up Chappie, a mouthy sci-fi lark that manages to exist in the schizophrenic space between philosophy class and the thug lyfe. Narcotic in design, Chappie has the ability to be thoughtful, sardonic, batty, stupid, far-fetched, irreverent, intoxicated and absurd in the same sentence. To get a feel for what’s in store, imagine Chappie grabbing his robot junk, slouching like a gangster and wiping at his nonexistent nose before rapping on the heady notions of psychological impermanence and the potential of conscious transference. Those of lesser imaginative are damned to misunderstand the intent in such a film, a “how did this even get made” kind of product whose deranged sensibilities are delirious by design, but that’s their problem. In the “in” circles, they pity such handicapped imaginations. So hollers the hip-hopper handbook, haters gonna hate.

Much like Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer worked in tandem on Interstellar – Nolan gave Zimmer “feelings and themes” he wanted the film to communicate without ever revealing to Zimmer the genre of Interstellar. Zimmer then cooked up the backbone of a score and his work went on to influence Nolan’s developing script, etc. etc. – Chappie and Die Antwoord are intrinsically unified. They’re brothers from another mother. Droogs of the same breed. To drawn a line in the sand between the perfectly ironic poppiness of Die Antwoord’s counter-culture movement and the Hollywood blockbuster construct of Chappie is a hopeless exercise that I don’t seek to understand. Basing estimations of Chappie on existing models and traditions of big-budget (Chappie‘s was apparently 50 million) filmmaking is impossible since those models and traditions have been promptly, purposefully rocketed into space like they’re Ellen Ripley at the tail end of Alien. Neill Blomkamp‘s screenplay for Chappie talks about evolution and, ironically, it sails so much in the face of traditional movie-making models that it in itself is a kind of a quasi-evolution of the movie-making game. It’s so f*cking meta.

The Antwoord duo preserves their stage names in Chappie because why not? Ninja (played by Ninja) sports his customary military mullet – a hairstyle that came to him in a dream – and slurs his way through chunky Afrikaan slang not too far off from the head-scratching lexicon of Clockwork Orange or, more recently, Attack the Block. Expect a BuzzFeed article titled “What the What Do These 21 Chappie Phrases Mean?” Female-half Yolandi rocks the same violently pink “Who Wants Tits?” belly shirt she does in Antwoord’s deliciously off-color “Baby’s On Fire” music video. A later wardrobe change has her sporting a “CHAPPiE” crop top. Even robo-Chappie himself has got a not-so-subtly spraypainted “ZEF” tramp stamp. Blomkamp’s movie self-promotes both itself and Die Antwoord like a hungry hip-hop artist. It’s so f*cking metal.

We’ve rapped about Chappie as counter culture in film form but in the same vein, it’s also very much Blomkamp’s attempt to define a foreign zeitgeist in a very specific place and time. His efforts to justify, or rather rationalize, South African’s prominent underground civilization to the world appears lost on many and I would like to assume that that’s also part of the point. Not everyone’s going to get it but no worries here. Good riddance. In that line of thinking, Chappie is an intentional affront to good taste. Where we expect our hero robot to zag, he zigs. We expect him to mature out of a pubescent state but he’s too busy twisting up zig-zags. What Mad Max did for dystopian MCs, Chappie does for punk-samurai robots. What Star Wars achieved for flowy robes, Chappie pulls off for in-your-face neon. If you boiled down the guttural madness of the Matrix Reloaded rave scene, dosed it with some golden-toothed slang and outfitted its doltishness with automatic weapons, you’d have something resembling Chappie. “Radical” attempts to describes it but I think only “Zef” can properly sum it up.

But what the hell is Chappie about, Matt? Well anyone who’s heard the electronic mumblings of “I am Chappie” through their radio waves know that Blomkamp’s third features a robot. Anyone who’s seen a Chappie poster knows that said robot sports bling bling. Peeps who be trolling the trailers are probz aware that Hugh Jackman‘s skull sprouted a maybe-mullet for the film and he’s basically the heavy here, though very much not in the way you might at first have thunk. What you don’t know is that Chappie is not in the least bit the film you expect it to be. Especially if you’ve tapped into the overwhelming negative reception of the film. Chappie is way more weird, way more bonkers, way more gaga than you would anticipate of a movie with this kind of budget and backing. Were Chappie to meet ET, he’d ask him to politely bite the curb. If he paired up with Mac, he’d put his deformed visage gently “to sleep.” If you thought Matt Damon in a mech suit was wackadoo, wait until you get a load of Chappie. He’s so f*cking manic.

And that’s really what it comes down to, Chappie as a character is worth the price of admission alone. With Sharlto Copley voicing the character, he’s got more grit to him than a offroader’s fender and is far from the innocent robot the promotional material paints him as. Sure, he initially wields paintbrushes instead of PPKs but his jive-talking mannerisms arrive with a limited learning curve and soon enough he’s parroting the gangbangin’ verbiage of his too-so-Kosher mommy and daddy. Comedy cometh.

In an age that is so obnoxiously focused on franchise world-building, Blomkamp excels in the thematically exacting specificity of his future-set pasquinades. He’s clearly having fun but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t also have an agenda. In District 9, we got a taste for an “inventive” history of South Africa in Blomkamp’s straight-faced satirical portrait of refuges. Camps thick with burned trash and thin on food rubbed up against legal boundaries blurred by racist governmental ordinances. Blomkamp recently ousted himself for “f*cking up Elysium” though I’m not willing to dismiss that work just yet as it provided one of the more provocative pictures of the institutional evils of bureaucracy. And (did I mention??) had Matt Damon in a mech-suit. Chappie gets to ideas of bankrupt corporate morality and existential crises that also stops to ask how we can live with the knowledge that we will die? I’m…intrigued? It also features a kind of ED-209, appropriately named the Moose, stomping on a character and pulling him gorily in half. It’s about something until it’s not. It’s self-involved and batshit until it’s genuinely provocative. It’s that improbably rare, inimitable kinda “WTF was that?!” movie.

Look, I’m not here to convince you that you’re going to like Chappie because in earnest, this is not a movie with the masses in mind. It’s the kind of “hey, welcome to the party” film that attempts to ask big questions but winds up with concepts infinitely more silly – a la how many Playstation 4s does it take to house a person’s consciousness – but that doesn’t derail the intrigue that exists there in the first place. At least not for me. We cannot dismiss the stoner without at least hearing him out. Sometimes, he has a hell of a point. Occasional narrative poverty gives way to a much more important feeling of style, expressionism and innovation – the “gold and shit” – in what is most assuredly a one-of-a-kind, totally berserk robot gangster misadventure for the anals of f*cking history. On the coolness/acclaim axis, Chappie‘s lightning in a bottle existence gangsta leans towards being impenetrably hip and so be it. My mom doesn’t understand hip hop and that’s ok with me. I don’t bother trying to convince her because that’s missing the point. If you’re not in on the whole shebang, that’s your problem.

B+

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Weekly Review 73: BURGUNDY, VIRGUNA, MULHOLLAND, SAMURAI, WINDOWS

March 3, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged Mulholland Drive, Open Windows, Reviews, Seven Samurai, The Duke of Burgundy, Virunga, Weekly Review

A not-so-eventful week in the theater meant I had some time to consume some serious film this week at home. Hitting wide release this past weekend were the aggressively underwhelming Focus and The Lazarus Effect. I also caught screenings of Disney’s new Cinderella and Wild Tales but can’t yet talk about them beyond alluding to the fact that I enjoyed them both. At home, I took in some top-notch erotica, an Oscar-nominated documentary, a David Lynch mindf*ck, a faltering, gimmicky horror and a classic in the theater. All in this issue of Weekly Review.

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (2015)

On the tail of Fifty Shades of Grey, any onscreen erotica would seem elevated by proxy. But Peter Strickland‘s The Duke of Burgundy succeeds not only by compassion but by its own ubiquitous merit. Sensual, erotic and mesmerizing, Strickland’s sensational sensual sexploration is the anti-Fifty Shades of Grey for its fair treatment of the dominant-submissive lifestyle, its apt character development and singular cinematic flair. The score from Canadian group Cat’s Eye is a hot water bottle of sound, blanketing Strickland’s carefully hypnotic visuals with a beautiful but uneasy sonicscape. Performances from Sidse Babett Knudsen and Chiara D’Anna help sell the drama as Strickland’s script amplifies their emotional connection in increasing clarity as the minutes tick onward, mining the depths of sexuality and love in this tonally unique yet totally relatable bond to striking, poignant effect. (B+)

VIRUNGA (2014)

Netflix‘s first horseshoe toss into the Academy Awards game might not have been a dead ringer but it scored a nomination and was a dark house for the win behind Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour. Virunga tracks the harrowing political situation unfolding in the Congo’s Virunga National Park. One of the last homes of the mountain gorilla and a sanctuary for those animals orphaned or injured, Virunga has been a hotspot of rebel conflict in large part due to British Corporation Soco International exploiting the situation for its oil. Documentarian Orlando von Einsiedel exposes the extent of the corruption in wire-wearing scenes of hot tension though partially fails to connect all the yarn on the cork board. But von Einsiedel’s film thrives in the beauty of Virunga and its gentle warriors, the selfless park rangers, willing to put their lives on the line to defend it. (B-)

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

David Lynch‘s vision of Hollywood starlets and duplicitous murder has been a source of debate, study and speculation for more than a decade. To think that I could add anything to the discussion would be presumptuous (even for me) so I won’t try to get into the heavy themes so much as express my enjoyment of the flick. Naomi Watt‘s gives half of a brilliant performance with Laura Harring matching her step-for-step as a distraught amnesiac with a purse full of money and a blue key. Mulholland Drive is deeply surrealistic and narratively wishy-washy adding up to a pocket full of “Whaaaa”. Meaning, this is not your grandma’s expressionism. Dark, cryptic, episodic and engrossing, Mulholland Drive is Lynch’s puzzle without a key and, for better or worse, it’s truly something to behold. (A-)

SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)

The assembling of the heroes has become such a narrative standard that it arrives on our modern day screens unquestioned and without much fanfare. Akira Kurosawa did it first in Seven Samurai. Imagine a world before the misfit heroes joining together for a singular cause. You can’t, can you? Kurosawa also introduced the idea of the central hero embarking on a mission unrelated to the central narrative before they launched into the meat of the story, a trope that has been duplicated in everything from James Bond to Indiana Jones to The Dark Knight. The effect of Seven Samurai is so vast and so all-encompassing that it’s hard to imagine what film would look like today without it. In fact, Seven Samurai is such a cultural cornerstone that just today, Antoine Fuqua announced that he would be remaking Magnificent Seven (the 1960 Western remake of Samurai) with Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke and Chris Pratt. Even without its extensive butterfly effect on film culture en masse, Kurosawa’s landmark film is an epic to behold, especially on 35mm in Seattle’s Cinerama Theater (now one of the most advanced, hi-tech theaters in the world.) At 202 minutes, Seven Samurai invests time in characters worth investing in, offering a meaty narrative that builds its cast in the first act and then sets them to war in the second (complete with intermission). Takashi Shimura gives a masterful performance as Kambei, the elder leader of a ragtag team of ronins, banded together to stave bandits off from a village of peasants and his final moments in the film are as effective and affecting as any Oscar-nominated performance this year. (A)

OPEN WINDOWS (2014)

Elijah Wood continues a string of experimental, misconceived, poorly written horror thrillers. Maniac saw the entire film from Wood’s POV to ill-effect, Grand Piano sat him in one location and forced him to stab at black and white keys lest an explosion make a fortune go poof and 2014 Sundance premiere Cooties had a bunch of TV actors try their hand at grander schemes. It didn’t work. The grand scheme here all takes place within Wood’s laptop with Nacho Vigalondo‘s “camerawork” prying between various computer windows. A hacker conceit comes to head with a kidnapping plot with Wood racing to save actress Jill Goddard (porn star Sasha Grey) from a malicious internet hacker with devious intents. The proceedings are as bad as you might expect from such a premise with the dull “in screen” gimmick running its course quickly and leaving the piss-poor writing and cruddy acting on full, embarrassing display. It seems that even with her new acting career, Sasha Grey has found a whole new glory hole. (D)

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