KevynKnox Blog

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN a film review

Was this review helpful? [Be the first to tell us!]

Under discussion:

Let the Right One In (2008)

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 12/07/08)

With a chilly Scandinavian breeze blowing across the screen, and a haunting cinematic foreshadowing rap-rap-rapping at our brain, we see a pale young boy watching from his window as two mysterious figures, an older man and a young girl about the boy's own age, exit a cab and enter his apartment building late at night. We find out later, though it comes as no surprise since the film is billed as such, that the young girl is a creature who subsists on human blood (she refuses the moniker vampire) and the older man is her father/caretaker, doomed with the dubious task of procuring "food" for his hungry daughter. This is the start of a surprisingly simple yet overtly complex little film that both charms and thrills, lulls and titillates, snugs and bugs throughout.

Layered with the frosty moodiness one might expect from the cinematic northern environs of Sweden - not far from the Danish homeland of Dreyer and his very own melancholy Vampyr - Thomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In, the story of a twelve year old boy who is bullied at school and who is befriended by the mysterious new dark-haired neighbor girl. Almost immediately the boy falls for this strange girl who only comes out in the dark of night, and finds in her what little happiness his dank life appears to know. It is in this girl, who is "more or less" twelve and for that matter possibly not even be a girl at all (in the book the character is said to be neither boy nor girl, genderless, a self-described "nothing" - something only alluded to in the film itself) that he finds, in essence, like the wizard was to the lion, his courage. And suddenly this sullen child finds in this alluring enigma of tween desire, a compatriot, a friend, a lover, albeit chastely so, and, in the end, a champion.

Alfredson's film rolls along at the most leisurely pace, yet manages to keep you on the very edge of your seat with his subtly stark photography and quick, thunderous flashes of bloody revelry, vanishing as quickly as they appear. Yet no matter how cool and crisp Alfredson's cinematography and editing are, it is the two young first-time actors (Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar, the bullied little boy with a barely hidden violent lust and Lina Leandersson as Eli, the youthful bloodlusting beast in sheep's clothing) that hammer the final nail into the coffin, so to speak, and through their childlike exuberance (Oskar flashes his knife with the most innocently sinister of smirks upon his face and Eli's vicious, almost perversely sexual, attacks on her fellow townspeople is quite the disturbing little treat) make the film both the delight and the terror that it is.

Now, to bring up the inevitable comparison, concurrent with the American release of this diminutive, almost completely overlooked and overshadowed Swedish vampire film, there is the ultra generic young adult book series turned ultra generic Hollywood teen blockbuster Twilight and everyone is going all swooney over themselves at the mere mention of it. It poses itself as the new it thing for tweens and teens (and the occasional like-minded adult who has nothing better to do than inexplicably fawn over something meant for someone half their age) and in doing so, it makes one think that something, somewhere, has gone utterly and completely madhouse bonkers. Perhaps, as I suggested last year concerning the rapturously stoic 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and the half-brained mockingbird fallacy Juno, for every person who buys a ticket for Twilight they should be made to sit through its very antithesis, Let the Right One In instead. To finish with a pun of sorts, and perhaps channel Gene Shalit from whatever floor of the Rockefeller Center he is currently canoodling one, perhaps they too, should let the right one in.

Posted Saturday, July 11, 2009 2:23 PM by KevynKnox | with 0 comments

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED a film review

Was this review helpful? [Be the first to tell us!]

Under discussion:

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 12/05/08)

With allusions to Dogme filmmaking (if the dialogue were in Danish, one would swear this was a film by von Trier or Vinterberg) and brimming with the most Altmanesque of mechanizations, Jonathan Demme has taken a script idea that could have so easily fallen into an oversentimentalized vortex of banality and mediocre obviousness, and handed us something not unlike a cinematic punch in the gut, but with beauty, sublimity and a certain realistic dream quality, all stuffed to the veritable rafters with an unquestioned multi-cultural melange of just about everything from whitebread Connecticut sterility to afro-carib-centric chest-thumping to repressed unanswered anger to far eastern new age lama chanting to cold hearted rehab mantras to erupting unbridled sadness to Robyn Hitchcock and Fab Five Freddy, all of which is as much Jonathan Demme as Italian family squabbles and bloody mob beatdowns are Martin Scorsese or creepy pseudo-suburban underground netherworlds are David Lynch.

In essence, Demme has combined his deft handling of undesirable filmic material, as in his own Oscar-winning psycho warhorse Silence of the Lambs and his frenzied enthusiasms for world music, as seen in his myriad of music videologies and documentaries, and has created this upliftingly horrifying (or is that horrifyingly uplifting?) hybrid of disenfranchised stereotypes and oft-claustrophobic human drama all rolled into the story of one big slap-happy miserable dysfunctional family get-together, which under a lesser, or should I say more mainstream comfortable director could easily have been a disaster of well-intentioned yet ill-conceived plebianistic movie-making.

Like a Benetton ad without the hype, Demme's world book wedding celebration, replete with just about every genre, from alt rock to African drumming to country twang to rap, jazz, classical and even a brief peek at some sort of south seas something, imaginable and the unquestioned interlocking of the four corners of the Earth, is nothing shy of pure unaffected entertainment. With this being Demme, the idea of a black man marrying a white woman never becomes the story. We are never bogged down with the oft-cliche-riddled inter-character fighting over racial disharmony that many a lesser director (or one working for the studio system of eternal political correctness eggshell walking) would have so blatantly stepped waist high in. It is never brought into question. It simply is. Not for good nor for bad. It just is.

Perhaps this is a ripple effect of the post-Bush worldwide election elation that gave us all hope for a better world ahead (even if Demme finished his film well before the unprecedented happenings of November 4, 2008) or perhaps it is some sort of Utopian hyper-reality that hovers just below the surface of our own world (made all the more bitter lo these past eight years) or perhaps it is just Demme being Demme, and wearing upon his sleeve his natural and genuine love and passion for cultural diversity and racial indifference. Then again, perhaps it is not the case of black or white or red or brown or yellow (to use the simplicities of a Crayola box as metaphor) but simply the story of real people with real problems. Perhaps this is not a tale above or below racial and cultural questions, but one much beyond them altogether.

But enough about all that, for then there is Anne Hathaway. Beautiful alluring sexy Anne Hathaway. For, title notwithstanding, and keeping with her character's own self-absorption and narcissistic tantrum-setting, cultural harmony aside, this is invariably Hathaway's stage to strut and fret her hours upon as recently rehab-released blacksheep sister-of-the-bride Kym. Entering her family home like some sort of half-cracked disquieting gila monster of apprehension and anxiety with a huge chip on her shoulder and an even more humongous monkey on her back , Kym manages to disrupt the feted proceedings with a self-centered mockery of everything her family - and especially her sister - hold dear. At the rehearsal party dinner, Kym begins her bridal toast "I am Shiva the destroyer, your harbinger of doom this evening" and she may not be far from the truth. Kym is angry, bitter, jaded and quite often the most unpleasant person in the room yet at the same time she is obviously terrified of life and everyone around her, acting the fool to hide the secret shame she has carried around for many years. And all this is done with the most cunning of aplomb by a surprisingly gritty Ms. Hathaway.

Yes, this is the same Anne Hathaway who was the very epitome of teen angst-****-innocence in the Princess Diaries movies and yes, this is the same Anne Hathaway who played dress-up in the fluffy yet quite entertaining The Devil Wears Prada - and yes, this is the same Anne Hathaway who can be seen in a trailer before the film trading pillowy gossamer Hollywood barbs at Kate Hudson. But this is also the same Anne Hathaway who has taken on roles in Brokeback Mountain and the recent, albeit it rather forgettable thriller Passengers and she has begun work on Tim Burton's live-action Alice in Wonderland. So perhaps this is the Anne Hathaway that should be, and could be, and hopefully will be. A subtly nuanced actress (was Prada co-star Streep any influence one must surely wonder?) with both the fortitude and the character to pull of what could easily have been nothing but one gigantic cliche under the auspices of another actress. Perhaps this is the Anne Hathaway of the future.

Posted Saturday, July 11, 2009 2:20 PM by KevynKnox | with 0 comments

300 a film review

Was this review helpful? [Be the first to tell us!]

Under discussion:

300 (2007)

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 4/1/07)

From the very first moment, as the Warner Bros. logo flashes and slashes its way across the darkened screen, as if forged by mighty Hephaestus himself, we instantly know that Zack Snyder and his X-Box-weened posse of computer geeks, graphic novel junkees and comic book fanboys are about to mightily thrust upon the unsuspecting public a vast and mighty display of ultrasupercoolawesomeness to the very freakin' tippy-top apex-eroding grody-to-the-max. Of course, for those of us who are not brought to the very precipice (or beyond) of orgasm by the thought of a CGI-created universe full of rabid bare-chested oiled-up steroid-pumped half-men half-beast warriors led by a pompous half-man half-pariah (all bad actor) who is just one note (and a lot less work-outs) away from a certain White House residing war monger of our own, fighting an equally rabid über-army of glimmer-masked maurauders, gigantic Frankensteinian monstrosities and a few big-ass battle elephants led by some sort of mascara'd crossbreed of Marilyn Manson and Rupaul, way beyond Thunderdome, this film, full of lusty vim and vigor and spewing ultrasupercoolawesomeness out its proverbial watusi, gets real tired real soon - and I got real pissed off real freakin' fast.

Now to begin, please allow me to say that if your artistic sensibilities are not totally grossed out within the first ten minutes or so, as if someone had just thrown-up big fat chunks of falafel and moussaka all over you, then this is surely the movie for you - vacuous, demeaning, completely devoid of any substance whatsoever, repleat with all the idiotic, brain-numbing, Nietzsche-praising video gaming geekocity one could ever dream of while sleeping snug and cozy at age 37 in their mommy's basement rec room, copy of Maxim under their pillow and thoughts of Pamela Anderson floating like sugar plum fairies throughout their heads. If this is you, then nothing I can say or do will ever sway your opinion away from the ultrasupercoolawesomeness of this computer designed crypto-movie atrocity that blatantly spits in the face of cinematic integrity, and perhaps you should just stop reading right now and go finish that saved game of Warcraft you've been so buggin' to get back to. Meanwhile, everyone else, my faithful readers perhaps, please read on, for I truly scathe only very few and far between and you wouldn't want to miss any of the mordacious tongue slathering that is sure to follow.

Based upon Frank Miller's graphic novel about the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae, where the King of Sparta led his meager army of 300 strong against the interloping throng of the mighty Persian horde, which in turn was apocryphally based by Miller upon the 1962 film, The 300 Spartans, he saw as an impressionable (if not a bit ADHD) child, Zack Snyder, who gave us all quite the surprise with his quick-witted Dawn of the Dead remake a few years back, tries to have his cake and eat it too by attempting to recreate the feeling of cinematic overzealousness and pop-pulp flim-flam that was the last Frank Miller penned adaptation. Yet Sin City, even with all its many flaws, still managed to hit its intended target at least half the time, while Snyder's overwrought mega movie just falls deeper and deeper into the inevitable chasm of CGI-induced banality, ending up nothing shy of a deadened, terrifically dull, plodding slab of man meat-****-action figure tableaux, perfectly in tune with the Maxim reading machismo of modern "man".

Snyder's film may indeed have its momentary visual exaltation of larks, but once one gets beyond such slapdash smattery and one-dimensional eye porn, one must surely see 300 for what it truly is - a simultaneously homoerotic and homophobic testosteronic monkeyshine, full of so much hokey ham-handed faux pixilated battle scenes, one trick pony actors-****-glistening torsos, slathered in enough body oils to simultaneously and permanently ejaculate each and every last gay porn connoisseur from P-Town to the Golden Gate, naked writhing slave-girl oracles straight off of a Maxfield Parrish calendar and enough level-ending melees with every fanged, clawed and muscled monster this side of the Khyber Pass, to nearly eradicate the ever-blurring fine line between modern mass market movie making and the benighted art of video games, not to mention giving every person over the IQ of drooling monosyllabic Spartan, a headache the size of the Persian Empire at its glorious behemothic height.

As our mighty Spartan heroes, led by the churlish Gerald Butler, not even attempting to disguise his thick Scottish burr, form an "impenetrable phalanx at the hot gates" and the equally mighty 8-foot-tall man-muffin god-king Xerxes sends wave after wave of circus sideshow lallapalooza at them, one can not help but notice the totally ludicrous identity crisis this movie has in spades. Both sexually confused (this entire freakin' shama lama ding dong is full of enough beefcake bunnies and chest-piercing blood-n-gore for both the leather-boy and the frat boy to be both aroused by and bothered by) and politically metaphored (aka macho jar-headed white guys vs. interloping terroristic golden brown guys), Snyder has pounded every square peg into every round hole he could find and in doing so has let loose a Pandora's box of phallic Freudian psychobabble and right-winged rhetoric spin-doctoring unto an already applesauce'd burlesque of inanity. Ultimately, Snyder's sophomore (and sophomoric) film plays out as an excitably unexciting yet hilariously hysterical (as Nathan Lee of The Village Voice has called it) mélange of utter flapdoodle and mad cow-riddled absurdity - all fried up in a synthetically manufactured landscape of digital drudgery. Run, don't walk from the blob that is 300.

Posted Saturday, July 11, 2009 2:52 AM by KevynKnox | with 0 comments

MARIE ANTOINETTE a film review

Was this review helpful? [Be the first to tell us!]

Under discussion:

Marie Antoinette (2006)

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 10/12/06)

What does one get when one combines postmodern pop sensibility, French Nouvelle Vague philosophies and eighties new wave music and pour it all into an 18th century period piece already stuffed fat and full with ravishing costumes, luscious set pieces and sexually decadent behaviour? One gets Sofia Coppola's best film yet!

Opening with a wink and a nod, and full of candy-coloured confections of awkward yet graceful charm and wry wit, Marie Antoinette perhaps is not as surfacely deep as her two earlier films, but it does share with her predecessors a claustrophobic sense of entrapment and unheeded privilege. Like Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte in Lost in Translation, afraid to venture pass the lobby of her plush Park Hyatt Tokyo, and Kirsten Dunst herself as Lux Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides, a languorous kitten trapped by society inside her own imagined world, Marie, just fourteen when sent to marry the Dauphin of France, Louis Auguste, is like a lost little bird trapped inside the gilded cage that is Versailles. These girls, squelched by the strangulation of privilege, are what Coppola does best - for obvious autobiographical reasons - and she does it with her most grandiose hand yet in Marie Antoinette. Do not let yourself be fooled, for this is not your mother's historical biopic - it is frivolity underscored with seriousness.

Instead of faking the mannersims of a staunchy haughty period piece - so overblown by many a great director in the past - Coppola sends Dunst out with the voice of a mall queen with daddy's credit card in her Prada bag - princess of the all-nite rave. Many critics have said Coppola and Dunst portray the teen queen as an 18th century Paris Hilton - and this is probably true on many fronts - but they also show that being Paris Hilton (or any other rich bitch prima donna) may not be all that great a thing to be after all - you just might lose your head over it.

Full of music two hundred years out of time, this pomo set piece plays out as if The Cure or New Order are perfectly in sync with an 18th century masqued ball or a royal coronation. One number in particular, Bow Wow Wow's I Want Candy booms across the soundtrack as Marie and her ladies-in-waiting go on a shopping spree full of decadent wardrobes, delicious shoes (including a pair of purple Converse snuck in for flair) and resplendantly ridiculous hairstyles - never once seeming out of place. The modern music and period setting may be rather similar in vein to the films of Baz Luhrmann, but Coppola manages to weave her way past the overly trite style of a film like Moulin Rouge and belts out a film not only full of magniloquence and pretty party pieces, but also of a subtly meaty political underpining beneath the pink frosted exterior that is this pop star Versailles.

Peripherally responsible for the starvation of France which in turn led to the French Revolution which in turn led to the beheading of both Antoinette and Louis XVI, Coppola's queen is played more for sympathy than sneer (which assuredly led to the few boo's it recieved from the Cannes balconies). Showing instead, Marie Antoinette as an apathetic hautier that more likely than not never even came into contact with the "people of France" let alone was in any capable state to rule them. The scapegoat of history - her crime being perhaps more an innocent indifference than a calculated reign of terror - Marie Antoinette was more the giggling schoolgirl of privilege than anything else. Not that this is any excuse for what the French citizenry endured during those days before the revolution (remember when George Bush the Father could not even fathom a guess on how much a quart of milk cost?), but it is most likely the most accurate way to look at this child queen.

Even the surely apocryphal "let them eat cake" quote (the comment that launched a thousand guillotines) is played at by Coppola as if it were a snide little remark to be manipulated and teased - and Dunst's Marie, a pretty powdered present from Austria to France is commented on as "a piece of cake" early on in the film. All this leading to a pop film that seems at first glance nothing more than confectionary sugar and pink and blue sprinkles, but on deeper reflection can be seen as a politically charged dress-up film of revolutionary standards. A film that is set between 1765 and 1793 with music from 1980 through 1985 and is postmodern enough to have the heart of the cinematic future beating beneath its ostentatious chest.

Finally, in the end, although we all know the outcome (and if you do not then read a book once and a while) we still feel a kind of sadness at this fall of eden - a child's eden at that.

Posted Saturday, July 11, 2009 2:44 AM by KevynKnox | with 0 comments

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN a film review

Was this review helpful? [Be the first to tell us!]

Under discussion:

No Country for Old Men (2007)

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 2/13/08)

Leave it to the Coens, denizens of the mundanely macabre, to create a villian so heinous, yet so methodically efficient (yes, even hired assassins have a work ethic) that you actually find yourself both titillated and repulsed by the mere fact that you are rooting for him to track down and kill his intended quarry. Okay, maybe that was just me. Sure, he likes to use a high-powered air gun to put holes through people's heads and at his flippantly morosest, flips a coin to decide the fate of someone unlucky enough to look his way, and yes, he does seem to get quite the bug-eyed satisfaction over strangling a cop with the very handcuffs he has been shackled in, but Javier Bardem plays hired gun Anton Chigurh with such a straight-faced cruelty, such a blasé yet secretively gleeful matter-of-fact workmanship, as if channeling the ghost of Robert Mitchum from whatever netherworld he may currently be residing in (all that's missing are love and hate tattooed on each set of knuckles), that one cannot help but get their own perverse sense of propitiation out of watching him go about his deliberate, disciplined dispatchment of death. Too substantially evil to be considered an anti-hero though - and Josh Brolin's somewhat inept opportunist already fits that bill anyway - Bardem's Chigurh is more aptly fitted with the title of death. Not the bringer of death, just simply death - with a capital D.

But enough about death (for now) for this is more than just a one trick pony show. After a spate of very un-Coen (and unsuccessful) misfires - the faux elegant Ladykillers, the visually stunning yet ultimately (and shamefully) forgettable The Man Who Wasn't There and the completely unnecessary Intolerable Cruelty - the brothers are back in form (and very top form at that) with their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, which plays out as both the brashest of westerns and the grandest of operas while at the very same moment acting as the most personal and individualistic thesis on man's struggle with not only his fellow man, but nature itself. Never bogged down with the pratfalls that have turned many a past Coen Bros. film into almost a parody of themselves, No Country for Old Men is the closest the Brothers Coen have ever come to creating what in essence is a near-masterpiece. An epic homage to the likes of Anthony Mann, John Huston, Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, all rolled into one grand opus of (and here's that word again) death, No Country for Old Men is one of several 2007 American movies - along with Anderson's There Will be Blood, Haynes' I'm Not There, Fincher's Zodiac, Burton's Sweeney Todd and even to a point, Tarantino's Death Proof half of Grindhouse - to be hailed as an auteurist onslaught, replete with the most sincere genuflection of filmic history. In short, a new American cinema.

New cinema as it is though, blood opera as it is, 21st century nihilistic as it is No Country for Old Men is still the most classic work in this new age of auteurs that 2007 has set forth with such a giddy thunderbolt of abruptness. No Country for Old Men is a film that, take away the more obvious violence, could have easily been made by someone such as Orson Welles or Anthony Mann back in the 1950's. Full of noirish charm and a deep sense of foreboding - and the tensest of motel room scenes since Marion Crane stepped into that shower lo those many years ago - the Coens wrap their film in the blackest of night while simultaneously opening it up - figuratively and literally - to the most effulgent of themes - fate. The fate of those Mexican drug runners lying dead and decomposing in the desert of Texas. The fate of Brolin's Llewelyn stealing the abandoned drug money and taking it on the run. The fate doled out by Chigurh and his coin-tossing consequence. The fate of Llewelyn's wife (played with the sturdiest stand-by-your-man aplomb by Kelly Macdonald) as she is confronted by Chigurh and his coin of death in what is the most emotionall mind-numbing scene in the entire film. The fate of Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Ed Bell as he trails both Llewelyn and Chigurh only to find his own fate elsewhere. Fate is what brings these characters together and fate is what kills some of them and leaves others to live another day.

Then again, as fateful as it may be, as black as it may be, No Country for Old Men is also a treatise on the corruptive deadly sin of greed right out of the ether of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The greed of those decaying Mexican drug runners. The greed of Llewelyn and his two million dollar desert theft. The greed of those who hired Chigurh to get their money back. The greed (or should we say lust?) of Chigurh as he doles out death throughout - his money is the souls he steals. Death. Fate. Greed. Again, this film, like those other works of the past year, is a veritable history book of cinema, and at the same time, an elegantly dooming dissertation on humanity. The best and most Judgment Day-ish film of the Coens 23 year career. No Country for Old Men is indeed, like their character of Chigurh, the Coens' at their very best, doing their very worst.