October 2006 Archives

Babel (2006)

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This is the Cinema of Escalating Crises, in which the whims and misfortunes of people on any given continent can have a profound impact thousands of miles away. The film’s very first scene involves that most cinematic of weapons, a rifle. After a genial transaction involving cash and a goat, the rifle finds its way into the hands of children (This move represents the first in the film’s long chain of Bad Decisions.) And those children, having no comprehension of the special gravity of bullets, betray their own lives and the lives of others.

EDMOND

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Director Stuart Gordon put in time as an enfant terrible on the Midwest theater scene before making his feature film debut in 1985 with Re-Animator, one of the greatest — and sickest — horror comedies. He never quite recaptured that kind of lightning in a bottle, but his latest film, a darkly humorous adaptation of David Mamet’s 1982 play, Edmond, with William H. Macy, is the best thing he’s done in 20 years. Macy plays Edmond Burke, a middle manager who gets some sort of premonition that all is not right in his life, dumps his wife (Mamet stalwart Rebecca Pidgeon), and heads out into the night to beat his chest and find himself a date. Mamet’s non-naturalistic style has always been a specialized taste, and the main character here is a whinging racist and misogynist (and a cheapskate, to boot) who’d be awfully had to take if it weren’t for Macy’s skill with the dialogue — his performance reinforces the existential comedy inherent in his predicament as the archetypal middle-aged white guy with a half-baked philosophy that’s bigger than his experience. With an episodic structure and an audience-friendly running time (less than 80 minutes), this is a trenchantly funny look at Edmond’s cataclysmic encounter with the wider world outside his own narrow mind.

Originally published in the White Plains Times, October 6, 2024


If you have a real interest in animation, sooner or later you need to make the acquaintance of the Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, one of the last true surrealists working in the cinema. There are several DVDs collecting his short films, but this newest one, from a Brooklyn-based outfit called Kim Stim, may be the most rewarding. The title film is a 10-minute black-and-white documentary shot in Czechoslovakia’s forbidding Sedlec Monastery Ossuary, which contains the skeletal remains of some 40,000 people. Amazingly, the mountains of bones were sorted and rearranged as sculpture by a live-in artist at the end of the 19th Century. “The Ossuary” is not animated, but Svankmajer’s approach to the material includes graceful camera moves, surprising jump cuts, and an occasional rapid-fire montage that brings his subject to visual life. His great, wry humor is evident in another short, “Historia Naturae (Suita),” which illustrates the food chain in a series of vignettes, set to jazzy music, that involve anatomy and mastication. But the funniest, and most recognizably capital-S surreal short here has to be the clay-animated masterpiece “Darkness Light Darkness,” a comedy about the human body — the hand with eyeballs and the butterfly made of ears are only the beginning.

Originally published in the White Plains Times, October 13, 2024

Tideland (2005)

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Terry Gilliam has made a living out of movies that dance along the line separating the physical world from that of the imagination, serenity from hubbub, and sanity from madness. In a career that sprang from the organized chaos that was Monty Python, he has slept with the surrealists, danced with Jan Svankmajer, and kissed the sweaty brow of Tex Avery. His pictures have ranged from whimsical fantasy and uneasy science fiction to startling takes on the dementia that devours the very edges of our reality, occasionally swallowing human beings whole. While his missteps may well outnumber his outright triumphs, the Gilliam stalwart (and I do count myself among them) will find something effective and admirable, and likely something over-the-top brilliant, in almost every outing.

IMPRINT (2006)

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The newest Takashi Miike extravaganza arrived in the U.S. (on DVD) last week, and while many of his films are infamous for some bizarre content, Imprint is the first I know of that can credibly place the word “Banned” in a banner across its packaging. Imprint was originally commissioned by Mick Garris and IDT Entertainment as one episode among 13 in the independently produced Masters of Horror series that was meant to premiere on the U.S. cable channel Showtime and then live forever on DVD. Partway through the season, word got out that the schedule had been changed for the last few airings — Showtime had declined the opportunity to air Miike-san’s contribution to the series. In a series that featured contributions from genre stalwarts like John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, and Don Coscarelli — and the great Joe Dante piece, Homecoming, about a bunch of Iraq vets who come back in an election year as zombies determined to vote President Bush out of office — the one that succeeded in getting Showtime’s dander up was by the Japanese dude with the crazy sunglasses.