KevynKnox Blog

Under discussion:

Summer Hours  (2009)

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 07/22/09)

There is a moment in Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours when a father is showing his teenage son a pair of paintings hanging in his mother's country home. To the father's chagrin, the boy reacts by saying they are from another time. This too can be said of Assayas' new film. It is of another time. Away from the maddening present, Summer Hours is of another age, and it could be argued that the film is also of another director than Assayas. At least of what we know of Assayas.

Starring the intense triumvirate of Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jérémie Renier, Summer Hours is an almost complete departure of sorts for the director. Usually delving deep in the quite claustrophobic industrial urban techno-thriller of the modern Parisian underground, both of its outcasts and of its artists, he hands us instead a beautifully and elegantly shot, lushly panoramic vista of a family, already disheveled by modern society who must witness the disappearance of their childhood memories, and thus, of their childhood.

But what Assayas leaves behind in wanton flush and youthful verve, he gains in a masterly stroke of impressionistic austerity. Not to knock his earlier films - both demonlover and Boarding Gate are intensely erotic films that border on some sort of metaphorical cyberporn wavelength and Irma Vep, the auteur's greatest work, is a luscious ode to cinema in the vein of Truffaut or Rivette - but here Assayas has changed gears from expressionism to impressionism. In this wake he may seem a bit out of place at times, wandering along lazily, without a care in the world, but it works for the most part with a film such as this. His lazy wandering in a film like Boarding Gate for example, ends up much more noticeable and thus much more disastrous. Summer Hours, despite this out of place strangeness, is a gorgeous pictorial on the breakdown of familial connections that borrows heavily from the visual legacy of Monet. In cinematic terms, it is like Rohmer without the burden of a morality lesson.

In another cinematic take, Summer Hours can be seen as an updating of Ozu and his gloriously moribund Tokyo Story. Lyrical yet purposefully claustrophobic in many ways (perhaps Assayas hasn't gone that far astray after all) Summer Hours can work as dual tragedy. Both the tragedy of losing the family matriarch, both mother and grandmother, and the tragedy of not being able, or willing, to deal with said death. Just like Ozu, Assayas uses his idea of modern society to show the devaluation of family ties. A time and place where we have no time to live and deal with life. We are too busy avoiding it altogether. If anything, Assayas has created the very antithesis of the family tale - the breakdown of the family done as elegant tragedy.

Whatever Summer Hours is - loving tribute, complacent homage, auteuristic off-topic treatise, autobiographical sketch, misplaced wandering - one thing is for sure - it is Olivier Assayas at both his most tender and, despite his past sardonic nature, his most subtly biting. Whatever it is, it is worth whatever time you can put into it.

Under discussion:

The Hurt Locker  (2009)

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 07/19/09)

There has been a veritable onslaught of Iraq war movies over the past few years. Both of the dramatic variety (Jarhead, The Kingdom, Redacted, Stop-Loss) and the documentary (Fahrenheit 9/11, Voices of Iraq, No End in Sight). Some have been pro-America. Most have been anti-war. Some gung-ho chest-thumping, some thought-inducing and philosophical. The one thing they all have in common is their attempt to document, from a non-fiction or fictionalized viewpoint, an event so fresh in moviegoers minds that it is still actually going on to this very day.

What Kathryn Bigelow's new film, The Hurt Locker does, is take a completely different stand on the subject. Without seeming to be pro or anti anything, The Hurt Locker acts as a completely apolitical war film. What Bigelow shows is a group of three men, a bomb disposal crew, going through their daily routine in the craggled streets and bombed-out countryside of Baghdad. Three men who could at any moment, via an explosion, be sent to the "hurt locker". More than war, this film is about the psyche of human nature. We barely even get to see either a US or an Iraqi flag. If not for our pre-conceived knowledge, these men could be from anywhere. This movie could be from anywhere. It could be about anywhere. But this is Iraq and it is real. At least in the sense that it is something going on right this very moment. After all this, The Hurt Locker may well be the most personal war film I have ever seen.

As far as the story itself goes, The Hurt Locker stars Jeremy Renner (a relatively unknown actor who is hopefully going to finally get the recognition he deserves with the release of this film) as Staff Sergeant William James, a wild cowboy soldier who dismantles bombs as if not having a care in the world. One general praises him for the 878 bombs he's defused so far as if he were a sports hero of some sort. The Babe Ruth of Baghdad. He is a gung ho redneck who thrives on the adrenaline that pumps through his veins as he is dismantling bombs. Refusing to wear the protective suit (it's not going to do anything up close and personal anyway) or heed any warnings from his anxious teammates, Sgt. James is a renegade out to prove something to someone, if only to himself.

But James' loose cannon does not play well with his two teammates played by Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty. To these two, their brazen team leader seems the most dangerous man out there. There is even a conversation about killing their superior. It is a strange mix of anger and hate, with a sort of obligatory adoration, that serves these two soldiers only thirty-eight days from going home when they are assigned together. The love/hate tension comes to a boil in the relationship between the racist redneck James and Mackie's African American comrade. Eventually coming to a head the only way it can with men such as these. Mano y mano in a punching contest that, thanks to James' insistence on going too far, ends up with a knife at someones throat.

I could, as many critics have, gone the route of highlighting the (quite obvious) fact that Kathryn Bigelow is a woman. A woman who has made a career out of playing with the boys in the usually male-dominated world of action cinema. With such testosterone-laden films as Point Break, Strange Days, Near Dark and K-19: The Widowmaker, not to mention her 1978 student film The Set-Up, which was a thesis on why violence is so seductive (plus she directed a few episodes of the gritty TV drama, Homicide: Life on the Streets) it is almost obligatory to question how a woman filmmaker can make such films. The question is unnecessary though. Male or female, one can have an eye for action. An eye for bravado. An eye for the bonding of men (or women). Bigelow seems to take us to the very edge of cliche but then turns us on our heads instead.

Bigelow may be a pioneer of sorts, paving the way for future female action directors (if they ever show up), but to delve too deeply into such a theme only sells the filmmaker short. First and foremost, Bigelow is a director. A director who knows how to show action without it seeming comical. Something her male brethren like Michael Bay and his ilk cannot seem to do. Yet it is not this boys club her film seems in simpatico with. The filmic connections to John Ford's The Searchers is rampant throughout The Hurt Locker. So much so that Renner's Sgt. James could be seen as the evolutionary eventuality of John Wayne's iconic Ethan Edwards. Even Bigelow's final shot has Sgt. James, just like Ethan, turning his back on hearth and home and walking into the sunset with his demons.

It is this bravado of character, this seeming death wish attitude that is the focal point of the film. As Renner's Sgt. James goes about his business, done in the most methodical manner and therefore spiking the tension level up to about 11, he is like a machine that can do no wrong – or more appropriately, a machine that, just like Ethan Edwards again, doesn’t care if he does wrong, as long as he gets the job done. It is this very adrenaline rush that he needs to keep on surviving doing what he is doing. There is a scene in a supermarket (while James is back home for a while) which shows this misplaced soldier in an unknown world, his eyes dead to the sterile environment around him. His eyes only alive when he is surrounded by war and getting his fix of action. Just watching this highly intense film is enough action for this critic. I'll leave the high risk jobs to the likes of Sgt. James and his real-life heroic ilk.

Under discussion:

Teeth  (2007)

(this review was first published at Plume-Noire on 03/02/09)

Teeth is a mish-mash of genre monikers, from female empowerment movie to coming-of-age saga to black comedy-horror to rape & revenge drama to Lynchian suburban melodrama. Pop artist fil Mitchell Lichtenstein gives us the story of Dawn, a white picket fence pretty young girl coping with growing up "pure and virginal" in a world obsessed with sexual innuendo around each and every corner. This includes her own house as her lecherous big bad wolf epitome'd stepbrother sniffs after her with tongue a-flicking. After a date gone horribly, horribly awry, Dawn finds out that she is cursed with the mythical mutation known as "vaginal dentata" - aka she's got razor sharp teeth in her pussy, yo! The result is that Teeth ends up being a quirky (how could it not be?), sunnily macabre work of neo-candy pop horror that can in no way whatsoever be watched by anyone of the male gender without constant squirming and shuffling about in what are suddenly very uncomfortable seats.

Opening in the suburban shadow of a nuclear power plant with towers billowing grey choke from their gritty Teeth as if a nod-and-a-wink absurdist homage to The Simpsons. Teeth struts out with a creeping small town menace overlying everything and proceeds down a road of desperate reciprocatory acts of the most bizarre nature. With the perils of male violence festooned within every darting-eyed nook and cranny moment, Teeth takes place in a world completely ensconced within one of those old sex ed filmstrips made to keep junior high school girls legs clamped shut until their wedding night.

Dawn, played with a scared forest animal comic frenzy by Jess Weixler, looking every bit the girl next door on the verge of bad girl in the basement is spokesperson for a promise ring wearing teenage purity movement - a movement lampooned on Family Guy but given real "teeth" here. Dawn is seen as the ultimate sexual goal-****-prize by just about every male classmate in her school, as if every teenage boy is some sort of licentious lycanthrope ready to pounce and deflower every pretty girl they come across at the drop of a hat - or any article of clothing. Dawn sees herself as such too and fights even her own naturally budding urges (a scene showing our intrepid heroine in bed "thinking" about a boy she longs for attests to such) to keep her vow of chastity upright. That is until one fateful swimmin' hole romp that ends with the lake being dredged for the body of Dawn's unfortunate date sans one pretty important body part.

Once the newly deflowered Dawn throws away the moniker of curse and looks upon her mutation as a rightful empowerment to avenge her becoming the victim of the seemingly rampant male violence of this strange new world the film goes from anti-sexual to proto-sexual. With Dawn going from Little Red Riding Hood to the Big Bad Wold herself, the film here turns from strangely charming fantasy to something straight out of a seedy dogeared pulp fiction paperback. It is at this point that Teeth philosophically joins in with such rape & revenge films as Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45 and its more recent counterpart The Brave One from Neil Jordan. Teeth though is a much less mature, more light-hearted film that the aforementioned. After all, horror-edged or not, Lichtenstein is going for laughs here. Leaving a hilarious slew of severed penii (as well as four fingers of a rather over-amorous gynecologist) in her wake, Dawn strews her victims "better halves" across the landscape like discarded cigarette butts in the early dusky morning after a concert in the park.

One scene, inevitably choreographed, involves Dawn's salacious step-brother (played with a grim concupiscence by snarky Nip/Tuck regular John Hensley), his pet rottweiler and his freshly decapitated member half eaten with its pierced tip discarded like so much gristle. Though obvious in its outcome, this scene is certainly the pièce de résistance of this giddily twisted fairy tale of female empowerment overtaking a male dominated society of sexual despotism. On a whole, Teeth is funny, though a little bit crotch-writhing for those of us so engendered. Lichtenstein's film is a delight of, albeit stereotyped caricatures, fumbling their way through a darkish suburban nightmarescape that combines the punchy humor of a youthful Almadovar with the clean efficiently disturbed Middle America of a budding David Lynch. This critic for one, looks forward to what will come next.