Movies: June 2007 Archives
God bless Pixar for doing it the hard way. There's a new wave of banal, aggressively condescending talking-animal cartoons being shoveled out of the Hollywood CG-image factories these days, but Ratatouille is everything those films aren't and it's nothing that kids raised on lowest-common-denominator cartoon pablum expect. The setting is Paris. The subject is food -- good food, in fact, and also the difference between good food and bad. And dramatizing that very unexpected story of the gulf between adequacy and excellence, and our capacity as human beings to recognize and be moved by sublime endeavor, may be the most difficult narrative trick of all.
In the old days, this would have been called Doom Room or maybe Suite of Terror, and I would have been watching it on the 10:30 p.m. Shock Theatre late show on Channel 13 out of Colorado Springs. In fact, I found its basic lack of ambition refreshing. Stretched to an almost ridiculous length, the two-handed sequence anchoring the first half of this film — in which Sam Jackson methodically employs a cold stare and fine liquor in an effort to dissuade the imperturbable John Cusack from spending a night in the clutches of hotel room 1408 — is one of the more riveting stretches of pop cinema I’ve seen all year. It does a fine job of ratcheting up the tension surrounding Cusack’s arrival in reputedly lethal accommodations. And the ferocious window-slamming, faucet-spewing scene where Hell Hotel first starts to bite, smearing Cusack’s blood across windowsill and wall, is pretty invigorating. It’s only when the proceedings turn to maudlin “psychological horror”, as he faces the manifestations of his estranged father and dead daughter, that the film turns tiresome.
The debut film by director Asger Leth (son of Jørgen Leth of The Five Obstructions fame) is an edgy documentary about gangsters in the desperately impoverished Port-au-Prince neighborhood known as Cité Soleil. Startling in its immediacy (just how did a filmmaker get that close to these guys, anyway?), it's a scary but compelling nonfiction look at the kind of violent, charismatic characters who often populate narrative films. The titular ghosts, or chimères, are the common gangsters who ruled the streets of Cité Soleil during the rein of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The film chronicles the events leading up to Aristide's exile in 2004, the immediate aftermath, and its implications for the chimeres, who were seen as Aristide loyalists. The truth as laid out by Leth is a little more complicated — one of the gang leaders, Bily, believes in his country's leadership and even has political aspirations, while another, Bily's brother 2pac, is more jaded.
The very first image in Manufactured Landscapes is a stately, Sacha Vierny-style tracking shot peering down the long aisles of a massive Chinese manufacturing facility where scores of workers hunch over tables, dutifully assembling little bits of material into larger pieces of whoknowswhat. At first, what's remarkable about the men and women in the shot is how little attention they pay to the movie camera moving sideways past them. Occasionally someone glances up, or peers over a shoulder, but mostly they seem absorbed in their routines. The camera keeps tracking, taking in aisle after aisle, stacks and stacks of boxes, and gliding past slightly more open spaces where one or two uniformed workers are actually walking around. The seemingly endless spectacle builds up an almost comical intensity -- I was suddenly reminded of the traffic jam in Week End and half-expected Mettler's camera to alight on some heinous act of violence -- a supervisor garroted, perhaps, by a finely-tuned machine tool. Instead, the pay-off is nothing less ordinary than an overhead shot depicting the factory's aisles receding into distance.
The problem with Hostel Part II isn't its sadism. (Actually, there's only one graphic torture scene, unless you count an abortive attempt that sends a would-be sadist blubbering from the room.) And the problem isn't its sexism. (The female stereotypes are deliberately stoopid and thus represent an effort at cleverness rather than outright misogyny.) No, the problem with this horror sequel is its laziness.