How does one make a zombie film scarier? One option is to swap out the undead for the more earthbound terrors of pit bulls and neo-Nazis. Director Jeremy Saulnier takes this approach with the grisly thriller Green Room, the follow-up to his other movie from the color spectrum, the acclaimed indie Blue Ruin.
“The best weapons are the stories, and every time the story is told, something changes. There are no photographs to be introduced as evidence[.]”
“All we can depend on are slow-motion replays of our lives.”
~Sherman Alexie, “Captivity”
Joachim Trier, in his newest and third feature film, is interested in story-telling and in the peculiar power of stories, a theme he explores by way of a particular family, a man and his two sons, struggling with the loss of a wife and mother. Each survivor constructs and reconstructs their memories of the dead woman, reconstructions that reveal the particular viewpoints and obsessions of each, perhaps more than they reveal the woman’s own story and identity, for each character, we see, is adrift in his own life, alienated and unsure, and the reach back to the past, to the memories of this woman, is a way of coping with the present, a way of constructing a sense of self. Continue reading “Louder Than Bombs (Joachim Trier, 2015)”
One of the interesting things about actors who have worked for a long time (and have a recognizable on-screen persona) is that when they get older, they begin to interrogate those personae, and what they mean. Clint Eastwood has been doing this since the 70s. In Fan, the latest film by director Maneesh Sharma, the subject is Shah Rukh Khan, arguably the most famous Indian actor of the last 25 years.
Shah Rukh Khan is a great ham. He’s a shameless entertainer, doing anything to ensure that the films he’s in work. SRK is great because you can see the effort behind his work, the flop sweat. It’s been that way since the beginning. SRK began acting in films in the early 90s in a series of villainous roles (Baazigar, Aanjam) before becoming more of a romantic hero. His iconic role in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge paved the way for a new type of hero (and film) that directly addressed the Indian diaspora. The films in this period with SRK in the Swiss alps, his arms outstretched waiting for his love, often fell into cliched territory, but SRK always gave everything to the role. He’s branched out from these roles to become an action hero, a comedian, all while finding time to work with prestigious directors (Mani Ratnam, Kamal Hasaan). While the last few films have seen him make a few lazy choices (his work with Rohit Shetty is pretty uninspired), Fan acts as something of a rejuvenation for him. He hasn’t been this engaged in quite a while.
Fan stars Shah Rukh Khan in a dual role. He plays Aryan Khanna, the biggest Bollywood star in the world, as essentially himself. He also plays Gaurav Chandna, Aryan’s biggest fan, in a performance aided by visual effects that transforms him into a slightly askew version of his younger self. Gaurav moonlights as an Aryan impersonator, and it’s his dream to one day meet him. So, one day he sets out to the big city in order to accomplish this. Things get complicated from there.
Here, Sisyphus meets John Bunyan’s Christian.
Or something like that.
Terrence Malick, for me, is a bit like T. S. Eliot, a forager through resonant, mythic fragments, pieced together into something that, while offering a reader a whole Thing and an often intensely emotional experience, also spins that reader off into multiple directions at once.
With something like “The Hollow Men,” for example, I first trace the Fisher King threads, and then I follow a Dante and Beatrice path, and then I’m sent to re-think Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, and then to grasp at remnants from Julius Caesar. All of these literary references are in “The Hollow Men,” and knowing them enriches my experience of the poem. But then, I also find that the poem works on a level that doesn’t seem to need any particular literary knowledge. Many of my students who’ve never read any of those other works love Eliot’s wasteland vision, those hollow whispering men; they can take the line “not with a bang but a whimper” and savor it. Just for itself. That line reaches directly into the feelings.
And so there’s meaning and there’s meaning and there’s meaning. Eliot is someone I will read my whole life and still find dark corners – that will very suddenly light up. Even Eliot himself, when a reader noted that he must have taken the “shadow” lines in “Hollow Men” from a poem by Ernest Dowson, agreed, “This derivation had not occurred in my mind, but I believe it to be correct, because the lines… have always run in my head.” It delights me to understand that even an artist cannot know everything contained in their own work. Eliot was an artist who was a receptacle who then poured himself into his work, at a conscious and unconscious level.
Malick is like that, I think, an artist, giving himself to his work utterly, and the result is a rich work that grows only richer. It is a richness that will make watching and re-watching and re-watching his films a life-long pleasure. Continue reading “Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015)”
Sam Rockwell dancing, Anna Kendrick snarking and twinkling—what’s not to like? Mr. Right leans hard on the considerable charm of its leads and the skill of its supporting cast (most notably the excellent Tim Roth and the very funny newcomer Katie Nehra), and while it too often feels formulaic and forced, it’s still good fun. Continue reading “Mr. Right (Paco Cabezas, 2015)”
Major League Baseball returns this week. There is nothing like the arrival of a new season, timed to coincide with the inviting sunshine of spring, to fill one’s heart with hope and excitement. The helmets are shiny, not a disgusting buildup of pine tar on a single one. Heroes are about to be made. Arriving on cinema screens at the same time is director Richard Linklater’s new comedy Everybody Wants Some, a raunchy reminiscence of life among college baseball players in pre-AIDS 1980. It’s here to remind us that baseball players are rarely heroes. They’re usually just unfunny jerks, entitled and annoying. Thanks a lot, Dick. Continue reading “Everybody Wants Some (Richard Linklater, 2016)”
Everything you’ve heard is true. Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames is, in many ways, a really terrible movie. Performances by the mostly amateur cast are stiff and awkward, the editing is clumsy, the script consists entirely of polemic and exposition, and the soundtrack ranges from being simply unlistenable to becoming a source of torment of the kind expressly prohibited by the Geneva Convention. Some of the film’s flaws can be excused as being the result of its ultra-low budget, but others are inherent in its project, which is almost entirely political and only incidentally artistic. Continue reading “Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, 1983)”
This review was originally published in 2014 on the author’s old blog.
A young witch coming of age arrives in a seaside town to master her abilities. To do so she has left behind her family and her home, with nothing but a broom, a bag, and a cat by her side. The girl is a romantic and a bit of a klutz, longing for the ocean whilst crashing into trees. She is taken in by a kind woman on the verge of motherhood, who gives her a job and a home. An enthusiastic and indefatigable boy falls for her and pesters the young woman to be his friend. The witch makes pancakes. It is wonderful. Continue reading “Kiki’s Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki, 1989)”
Requiem for the American Dream should be required viewing on every college campus in the nation. This is not just because of the film’s concise and lucid overview of the thinking of its interview subject, American intellectual Noam Chomsky, on a critically important topic, the erosion of American democracy and the subsequent rise of income inequality and decline of individual and communal rights and freedoms. This overview is of enormous value, but the film’s other gift to its audience is a model of what political discourse can sound like. At the present moment of rage politics and deafeningly loud appeals to the lizard-brain of the American voter, Chomsky’s quiet, humane voice and deeply informed, thoughtful perspectives provide a badly needed antidote to the prevailing culture of dumbed-down, amped-up public speech. Continue reading “Requiem for the American Dream (Peter Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, Jared Scott, 2016)”
This is a revised and expanded review based on a post from the critic’s defunct blog.
Brazilian director Alê Abreu’s charming feature Boy and the World finally gets a regular theatrical run after playing the festival circuit for the last couple of years. The film previously played in Seattle 20 months ago as part of the 2014 Seattle International Film Festival. Over those myriad screenings the film has garnered a windfall of goodwill, including winning numerous audience awards. In a sign of the diversity in this year’s Best Animated Feature field, it is conceivable that if Pixar’s Inside Out was not in the running, Boy and the World would have a legitimate chance at the Oscar. Continue reading “Boy and the World (Alê Abreu, 2013)”
Seattle Screen Scene 