Bryant Frazer: September 2007 Archives
The first half of Feast of Love is a near-riot of sex and skin. Every few minutes, it seems, a different youngster is pulling off her blouse or dropping his trou. Nearly everyone in the film is depicted banging or getting banged by someone else, and there's an athletic undertone to the various pairings-off that suggests the vitality of youth — one woman seduces another on a softball diamond, a couple does it on a football field (and, later, in front of a video camera). Like director Robert Benton's earlier Twilight, it's specifically an old man's movie, and one that contemplates the bodies of beautiful young people in order that it may more fully appreciate the predicament old people find themselves in.
Not long ago, a friend emailed me to say she had recently NetFlix'd a "little B movie." She said she enjoyed it, but her tone suggested that she was reluctant to go too far with an endorsement of such a lowbrow film. Had I seen it, she asked?
The name of the movie was Exotica. Why did that blow my mind?
Black Book (Sony)
After the crash-and-burn that ended Paul Verhoeven's career as a director of big-budget Hollywood blockbusters, the director took some time off from filmmaking before returning to his native country, the Netherlands, to make this World War II potboiler reeking of sex and betrayal. Star Carice van Houten is all wide eyes and pursed, pouty lips — shoot her in monochrome and you'd swear you were watching an actress from a 1940s melodrama. (Well, but for her copious nudity, I suppose.) It's not a great film, but a very entertaining one — certainly good enough to qualify as Verhoeven's comeback. Looking back at my original review, I'm surprised I gave it only a B, not a B+.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Black Book or Black Book [Blu-ray]
Knocked Up (Universal)
There's something so close to offensive simplemindedness about this whole enterprise that it's a wonder the results are so strong — dirty, funny, and only suffering from a general adherence to mainstream formula. The subjects of pregnancy and childbirth really do add a new dimension to the ever-present sex comedy, and Judd Apatow's witty, family-values approach (only glancing reference is made to abortion, and you have to figure a Hollywood comedy isn't going there anyway) manages to avoid pandering.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Knocked Up (Unrated Widescreen Edition), Knocked Up - Unrated (Two-Disc Collector's Edition), or Knocked Up [HD DVD]
Into the Wild, Sean Penn's sprawling, stumbling, epic biopic adapted from Jon Krakauer's best-selling book, borrows heavily from the kind of American film that defined the idea of the road movie. It features zooms, split screens, jump cuts, and a song score by a growling Eddie Vedder that wouldn't feel at all out of place on 70s radio. (With backing vocals by Corine Tucker, he revives "Hard Sun," a 1989 anthem by Indio, a band too obscure to have even a Wikipedia entry or Allmusic biography, to great effect.) Cinematographer Eric Gautier (The Motorcycle Diaries, Clean, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) favors long lenses here, the kind that can isolate one subject twixt foreground and background and then, dramatically changing their plane of focus, seek out another. They emphasizes the distances involved in the open spaces where much of the film takes place, and their voyeuristic qualities echo the book's theme of observation across a temporal distance. Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) was found dead in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness. It was Krakauer's job to figure out how an upper-middle-class kid ended up there; it's Penn's to imagine what the journey might have looked like.
Low-budget horror auteur Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo) has a truly clever set-up for his latest shiverfest. Climate change is making life difficult for a group of blue-collar types (think Alien and especially The Thing) working to get oil out of the Alaskan wilderness by melting the ice roads and thawing the frozen tundra, making both unsafe for trucks. As the film progresses, the crew is slowly driven insane, either by "sour gas" being released out of the softening ground, or by some kind of vengeful earth-spirit that's been stirred up by exploitation of the area's natural resources. It's a global-warming horror movie.
If you're a filmmaker planning to juice up an FBI thriller by setting it in the contemporary Middle East and using visceral, highly charged images of suicide bombings and violent religious fundamentalism to drive the story, you'd best be on top of your game, brother. Director Peter Berg says his film about the bloody aftermath of several particularly lethal terror attacks in Saudi Arabia was inspired in part by a failed Saudi police investigation following a bombing near the Khobar Tower apartments in Riyadh. There is an interesting political story to be told here -- and, to be fair, the graphic précis of recent events in the oil-rich Saudi Kingdom that opens the film, covering everything from the discovery of oil in the 1930s to the 2001 attacks by al Qaeda under the leadership of Osama Bin Laden, is almost scarily effective -- but the screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan is little more than a blueprint for a spin-off TV series: C.S.I. Saudi Arabia.
Death Proof (Weinstein Company)
OK, boo and hiss to the Weinsteins' decision not to release the complete, underrated and underpatronized Grindhouse experience to DVD. (At least not yet.) While I'm not sure how Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror will play divorced from its nudge-and-a-wink omnibus context, Death Proof should be a strong experience on its own. Tarantino's idea of girl talk may be more than a bit indulgent, but he backs it up with one hell of a car chase. And who doesn't want to see the "missing reel" that includes Vanessa Ferlito giving Kurt Russell a lap dance?
Buy it from Amazon.com: Grindhouse Presents, Death Proof - Extended and Unrated (Two-Disc Special Edition)
The western isn't dead, exactly, but recent efforts in the genre have been self-conscious, driven either by an urge toward revisionism or an effort to recapture the epic sweep of the work of masters like John Ford or, for another generation, Sergio Leone. 3:10 to Yuma is refreshing because it doesn't seem to have a nostalgic agenda. It's an unflashy potboiler featuring stagecoaches and six-shooters, a wagonload of stolen gold, and a full complement of desperate men on both sides of the law. James Mangold is best known these days for directing Joachim Phoenix in Walk the Line, but 3:10 to Yuma has more in common with his earlier film Cop Land, which cast Sylvester Stallone as one good cop standing up to a whole bunch of bad ones. Christian Bale stars as Dan Evans, a destitute rancher who agrees to escort notorious outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to a prison train in exchange for a desperately needed cash bounty. Hardly a shot-for-shot remake of the Glenn Ford original, the new movie spends more time on the journey and less at the destination. It's gritty and exciting, although the last action scene is outlandishly staged and Mangold can't quite sell the dynamic that develops between the two leads. You can see Crowe struggling throughout to summon the eccentricity that would make his character more credible, and while Bale has the easier job it's his smoldering, unwavering focus, played against Crowe's pointed taunts and wisecracks, that makes 3:10 a pleasure to watch. B
This review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.
Over at Film & Video, I've just posted my interview with Christopher Rouse, the virtuosic film editor on The Bourne Supremacy, United 93, and now The Bourne Ultimatum. He's worked with director Paul Greengrass on three films (going on four), and man oh man, nobody makes movies more intense than these two.
Q: Have you heard the complaints from some viewers that this specific style of filmmaking -- handheld camera, quick cuts -- makes them physically ill?
A: Often. [Laughs.] At the end of the day it's a big tent. There's room for many, many styles of filmmaking. Probably my favorite filmmaker of all time is David Lean, who has a style that in many ways couldn't be more antithetical to the way we shoot a Bourne film. I've had people say to me, "Gosh, I watched your film from the third row of the theater, and I was getting physically ill." Fair enough. Personally, I wouldn't watch any film from the third row of a theater, and if I were to watch Lawrence of Arabia from the third row of a theater I'd probably get physically ill myself. It's an aggressive style, so it's going to attract more attention, but I think it's a style that absolutely supports the film and the narrative. If you like it, great. And if you don't, that's fine too.
From Beyond (MGM)
Stuart Gordon's second horror movie (after the classic Re-Animator) is still his second best -- only the 2001 Lovecraft adaptation Dagon, which finally goes pleasantly nutso in the last reel, registers as a close third. Re-Animator's Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton reunite for another Lovecraft-inspired splatter romp, this one about scientific experiments on the human pineal gland opening up a portal into another dimension. I can't vouch for the importance of the restored material in this "director's cut," which I haven't yet seen (it actually premiered on HD cable in 2006). But here's Gordon, quoted in a 2006 press release from cable channel Monsters HD, on what hit the cutting room floor when the MPAA got hold of his original cut:
"The scene that upset them the most (and as I describe it, it is truly disgusting) is when Jeffrey Combs' character's pineal gland has gone out of control and he's hungry for brains. He attacks a psychiatrist, played by my wife [Carolyn Purdy-Gordon], and he plants his mouth onto her eye socket and starts sucking. And the material that was cut out was when he actually sucks her eyeball out, spits it onto the floor and the eyeball lands looking back up at him and he continues to suck her brains through the eye socket and the camera pushes in. It's really disturbing and it's the longest restored piece, my guess is it's about 30 seconds or so. I think it's the most horrific moment in the whole movie."
If this sounds like a good time I'm pretty sure you'll get a kick out of it.
AMY TAUBIN: I found a piece that someone had posted on Ain't It Cool News about having seen a preview of [Eastern Promises].
DAVID CRONENBERG: Was it the guy who was obsessed with Viggo's balls?
AT: I don't know if I performed an act of repression, but I don't remember seeing his balls.
DC: You do see them. It's just that they go by rather quickly.
AT: Right. I meant I didn't notice them in particular.
DC: It wasn't like there was a close-up of them. But this guy was obsessed. He even wrote "big hairy balls." Well, that's one way of looking at it. They're definitely there, as you would imagine, but it's only if you're looking for them that that's what you see. Because mostly he's shot in full figure. So when people decide to run the DVD frame by frame, they are going to see everything at one point or another. Of course, a lot of the time it's going to be slightly blurred because he's in motion.
Excerpted from "Foreign Affairs", Film Comment, September/October 2007
It wasn't until the end credits of Rob Zombie's head-banging Halloween remake that I had the chance to chuckle. Buried in that pile of scrolling text was a credit for an Alice Cooper song that I missed during the actual movie: "Only Women Bleed." Oh, indeed. I'd consider it a droll joke, bordering on self-deprecation, if only I felt confident that Zombie's film had the presence of mind for reflexivity, or even a sense of humor. I'm still not sure what to think of Zombie's (ironic? who can tell?) use of cheeseball power ballad "Love Hurts" to score a sad montage earlier in the film -- if it's meant to be hilarious, it's the only thing that is.
Stephanie Daley (Genius)
This drama directed by Hilary Brougher and starring Amber Tamblyn and Tilda Swinton barely got a release this year following its debut at Sundance 2006. Stephanie Daley (Tamblyn) is the girl (dubbed the "ski mom" by tabloid-style journalists) accused of killing her newborn baby at an upstate New York ski resort. Lydie Crane (Swinton) is the psychologist tasked with determining her actual culpability in the incident. There's a lot to complain about -- on one level, this is just parallel-lives melodrama, with Daley's story bringing a kind of closure to the pregnant Lydie's feelings about her own recent miscarriage. But Swinton is just credible enough to carry the film through some rough patches, Tamblyn is surprisingly effective, and, most importantly, Brougher is a real director who builds this business into something ferocious and visceral. I left the theater shaken, and my line on it at the time was "scariest movie about childbearing since the original Alien." Brougher has something relevant to say about society's view of women and what goes on in their wombs; it's an effective antidote to the current blithe tendency in mainstream film to romanticize childbirth.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Stephanie Daley
Robot Chicken: Season Two (Adult Swim)
The second season of this action-figure sketch comedy series isn't quite the laff riot that the first one was, but it's still ideal DVD fare for short-attention-span households (episodes clock in at less than 15 minutes, and of course each individual sketch is substantially shorter than that). The DVD set includes the Christmas special -- but not the special, occasionally hilarious all-Star Wars extravaganza that aired in June, so don't get your hopes up.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Robot Chicken - Season Two (Uncensored)
Stranger Than Paradise (Criterion)
My favorite Jarmusch film gets the Criterion DVD treatment. Reviewing its premiere at the New York Film Festival back in 1984, Vincent Canby said, "Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise looks as if it had been left on the windowsill too long." Set in New York, Cleveland, and Florida, It's hard for me to articulate what I like about it so much -- the direction and the gently comic performances have a calculated nonchalance that's charming and wears well. "Stranger Than Paradise is a very funny movie that uses melancholy as its chief device, sort of the way Buster Keaton employed his face," wrote Luc Sante for the original Criterion laserdisc release back in 1998. "It's also a road movie that charms a strange dynamism out of sheer inertia." It's a sterling articulation of the low-key American indie sensibility that seemed so promising back in the 1980s, and which now, post-Tarantino theatrics, exerts a strong nostalgic tug. The new disc boasts a fresh transfer, plus a real bonus: Jarmusch's 1980 debut feature, Permanent Vacation.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Stranger Than Paradise - Criterion Collection
Here we have another movie in which Hollywood filmmakers celebrate the virtue of characters who reject the duplicity and perversity of California in favor of a quiet life in the sticks. In this case "the sticks" is Idaho, where Georgia (Jane Fonda) has agreed to take care of her problem granddaughter, Rachel (Lindsay Lohan), for a few months while mom Lilly (Felicity Huffman) frolics with stepdad Arnold (Cary Elwes) back in San Francisco. The film's first section is breezily entertaining, showing the hard-nosed Georgia's efforts to tame Rachel, who dresses Rodeo Drive for a walk down Main Street before putting the moves on the Mormon locals. As the subject matter becomes darker, director Garry Marshall keeps directing a comedy, with unbalanced, emotionally disconnected results. It all leads toward twin mother-daughter reconciliations, but as the storyline gets more involved, the situations become more contrived. Did screenwriter Mark Andrus really have to lean on that clichéd (and borderline sexist) stereotype of blaming a woman's promiscuous behavior on sexual abuse? And couldn't he have written a single slice-of-life scene that depicted the straight-edge religious population as something more than local yokels? The results feel phony, but Lohan is great fun to watch. C+
This review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.