KevynKnox Blog

TAKING WOODSTOCK a film review

KevynKnox — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:43:11 GMT

(This review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 08/30/09)

Perhaps Ang Lee’s new film is quite the idealized look at its Woodstock subject. A dream of what it was instead of what it really was. An almost too-perfect look back at the seminal rock concert event of forty years ago. And perhaps too, Lee’s film is riddled with cliched caricatures. Emile Hirsch’s flash-backing Vietnam vet. Imelda Staunton’s Ukrainian battalion of a mother. The tough-as-nails ex-marine drag queen played with a nudge and a smirk by Liev Schreiber. The gaggle of flower children actors living in the barn and all those acid-eating hippies a half a million strong. But none of these flaws, mostly of the superficial variety, manage to change the fact that Taking Woodstock is a fun movie to watch.

Perhaps Lee’s choice of far-off idealization was a conscious choice. After all, this is not the story of Woodstock itself (for that go and rent the 1970 documentary on the concert – it is a well worth choice) but more the story of the periphery of the event. Taking Woodstock is less about the concert (we never actually see any of the performers and that may be a blessing in disguise as I dread the idea of someone 'playing' Hendrix or Joplin or the Dead as if this were an Oscar hopeful biopic) and more about those who surround it. To partake of a line from the film, Taking Woodstock is a film about those who surround that center of the universe that was Woodstock itself.

What Lee’s film is, is something a bit more intimate than a concert populated by nearly half a million stoned flower children, a couple hundred helicopter-riding organizers and thirty-some musical acts. What Lee’s film is, is the story of Elliot Teichberg, played with a surprising candor by stand-up comic Demetri Martin (having only a couple of bit parts under his acting belt) and his inadvertent importance in the making of a milestone in music history. Taking Woodstock shows how a young man trying desperately to save his parents run-down, out-of-the-way motel from sure foreclosure, manages, through sheer happenstance and maybe a bit of fortuitous will power, to become the catalyst for the concert event of all-time.

After making two openly gay films, the early Taiwanese rom-com The Wedding Banquet and the stoically tragic Brokeback Mountain (not to mention the homoerotic tension in Lee’s version of Hulk!) it is somewhat surprising to see Lee downplay the homosexuality of his lead protagonist. Though this choice, along with the quite matter-of-factly portrayal of Schreiber’s drag queen (he never even makes an attempt to act lady like) may be a conscious effort on the filmmaker’s behalf to make the film not about sexuality but about how it doesn’t matter what your sexual preference is. An ideal that goes along with the whole idea of what Woodstock was and what the Woodstock generation stands for.

Sure the story may be full of obvious stereotypes and dumbed down cliches, and this may not be Lee at his bravest (leave that for Brokeback Mountain and The Ice Storm) but that shouldn’t stop this film in its tracks as it would with many other movies. Lee’s use of split screen to evoke Michael Wadleigh’s original documentary style as well as his creatively placing amongst the half a million strong moments that seem like they are actually lifted straight out of that aforementioned doc works as an artistic flair that gives the whole shebang a sense of nostalgic awe. His use of long tracking shots (the most memorable being the motorcycle ride through the throngs that evokes the traffic jam shot from Godard’s Weekend) adds to that awe as well. What Lee delivers here is something more akin to what those aforementioned half a million concertgoers probably felt while muddily occupying themselves with three days of peace and music. A sense of bewildered awe.

All in all, the film works (to an extent) not only in spite of its flaws, but also sometimes because of them. Aside from the surprising turn by Martin, Eugene Levy as the iconic Max Yasgur (in the film's most honest, sincere performance) and Schreiber as the drag head of peripheral security (coming right off playing the feral Sabretooth in Wolverine – from X-Man to ex-man!?) both the film’s most ludicrous and most endearing caricature is the smiling horseback-riding knight in suede vest organizer Michael Lang, played with a preening aplomb by Jonathan Groff as if he were portraying a mythical hero (which to some he may very well be!). Perhaps then the whole trip has been an attempt at a certain kind of mythology. Joni Mitchell wrote that we are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves, back to the garden. This may not be the actual garden, or even a realistic facsimile of the garden, but this is Lee’s mythology of how it all came to be. Idealized warts and all.

EASY VIRTUE a film review

KevynKnox — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:42:41 GMT

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 09/01/09)

Pretentious, acerbic English wit Noel Coward has always been known as a diva of sorts - the first pop star if you will - so the quite frivolous air of Stephan Elliott's cover version of the playwright's Easy Virtue should come as no surprise indeed. Playing as some sort of strange melange of sit-com, music video and heady satire of the rich, Elliott's film, though a bit too obvious and fluffy at times (too many problems are left unresolved or resolved without explanation) is wracked with fun, flippant frivolity. And at the heart of all this biting burlesque are a trio of performances that run the spectrum from hilariously vitriolic to delightfully unexpected to surprisingly endearing.

First up is Jessica Biel as Larita, an American racecar driver and adventuress who is running from a shady past into the arms of a well-to-do young Brit named John Whitaker. Their quickie surprise marriage is sure to upset John's upper-crust stuffy family and therein lies the premise of the parody. Biel, who is best known for her ten seasons on 7th Heaven and being the sexy chick who gives Leatherface a run for his chainsaw-wielding money in the slasher remake, gives a most unexpectedly wry turn as the crass American invading the staunchy Brit family. Who would've ever guessed she was more than a pair of lips and a hot ass.

Larita's nemesis, as is to be expected in such a story, is her over-bearing, dictatorial, supercilious new mother-in-law-from-hell, played with the most sardonic of aplomb by the always wonderful Kristin Scott Thomas. Thomas does cynical bitch-from-hell so well she could leave everything else behind and make a living out of just playing thus. Her despotic matriarch, destined to come out the winner in the power-play between domineering mother and freewheeling new bride, never waivers in her blatant disregard and constant contempt for the (ugh!) American and all she stands for. Biel may be a surprise here but even so she is still no match (in character or actor) for Scott Thomas and her queen of the court.

The real stand-out here though is Colin Firth as the screwed-up, war-raged, despondent father of the groom and would-be disenchanted king of the manse. A frittering, sometimes doddering man of jaded leisure who wears his war wounds and psychological scars for all to see and feel either pity or disdain for, Firth's father-in-law is, save for the prerequisitly droll butler, is Larita's only real ally amongst this house of ill-welcome. Never a big fan of Firth's acting prowess - more indifference than any real criticism - he is at his most charming, his most endearing in this quite sympathetic role.

Granted, Elliott is far from a great filmmaker - Priscilla, Queen of the Desert being the only other worthwhile film of note in his short and unspectacular oeuvre - and he drones on here with unresolved, dangling participles, but the three stars of the film pull the proverbial fat out of the proverbial fire enough to allow us to enjoy the sarcastic barbs and jabs throughout Coward's quite biting play. Elliott's bizarro musical choices, blending Coward Cole Porter numbers with strange jazzy remixes (partially sung by the cast) of such modern pop songs as Car Wash, Sex Bomb and When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going, also lend a fun bubble of the aforementioned frivolity to the proceedings. It is all enough to make Easy Virtue much more enjoyable than it probably would have been otherwise.

SUMMER HOURS a film review

KevynKnox — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:24:16 GMT

(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.

DIED YOUNG, STAYED PRETTY a film review

KevynKnox — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:00:13 GMT

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 07/21/09)

Eileen Yaghoobian's doc about the underground art movement that surrounds a group of unknown graphic artists who create rock posters for unknown (or at least once unknown) bands is scattershot, disorderly and a wholly erratic clusterfuck of a movie. And that is exactly what it should be.

The interestingly titled Died Young, Stayed Pretty is the story of a very loose band of underground rock poster artists throughout the continent - in places like Seattle, Austin, Chicago, North Carolina, Minneapolis, Canada - and their ideas on not just the rock world (or the death of it as some will rant on about) but also society, politics and the theory that Elvis was a raging queen who wanted to be Captain Marvel. The film is an array of misfit talking heads telling their stories to Yaghoobian - and anyone else who will listen. The lines of communication work like a stream-of-consciousness rave and Yaghoobian uses this disarray to her best and slickest advantage.

Yaghoobian shows these artists in their own light. In the very style they themselves use to ply their own art, and for the most part it works to highlight such a lifestyle. Other times though it seems to just give a platform for these post-punk societal rejects to espouse on whatever socio-political rant they deem fit for the day. Some interactions are fun - and seemingly heartfelt (one person takes the anti-fogie approach and laments how kids today do not rebel against anything!) - while some verge on the dangerously inappropriate. One poster proclaims that Eddie Vedder is merely a poser until he "pulls the trigger" while another openly mocks the events of September 11 complete with explosion sounds. At one point 9/11 is called "punk rock". These incidents are what make Yaghoobian's doc work.

Much of the naive waxing political gets tiresome after awhile, but when Yaghoobian focuses on the posters themselves and the design and desire behind them her film works. When she doesn't, it doesn't. The film plays out as anthropological peepshow and punk rock in its own way, but drags too often when the subject veers away from the titularly-edged subject matter and heads into the realm of rant.

THE HURT LOCKER a film review

KevynKnox — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:09:20 GMT

(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.

CHERI a film review

KevynKnox — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:00:53 GMT

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 07/18/09)

There is a shot at the very end of Stephen Frears' Chéri, where Michelle Pfeiffer stares into the camera, not a discernible speck of make-up on the 50 year old actress's face. This final shot, before the credits roll, sums up all that this film could have been, if only Frears' wasn't afraid to take his characters to the brink and back - just as Colette had done almost 90 years ago. The film's poster tagline asks us to engage in a wicked game of seduction. If only Frears had the nerve to allow us to do so.

Based on the Colette novels, Chéri & The Last of Chéri and set in pre-World War I Paris, Frears has the great opportunity to delve into the biting, acerbic mannerisms of said Parisian society just as he and screenwriter Christopher Hampton had done so shrewdly with their eighteenth century-set Oscar-winning Dangerous Liaisons some 20 years ago. Unfortunately for us and for the actors (and for Colette who most likely is spinning around in her grave at Père Lachaise right now!) Frears chickens out and hands in instead, the blandest of period pieces. The giddy, subtle mastication that is Colette's novel(s) - where everyone has a hidden agenda and no one says what they really mean except in snide undercurrents - is barely visible here. Frears' assumption that Chéri is a romance and not a tragedy leads him into creating the most typical of typicalities. Enough to make even the most ultra-staid Merchant/Ivory seem wicked in comparison.

Sure, many filmmakers have altered a novel when transferring it to screen (it would be next to impossible to leave an entire book intact and still have a film that could be played in one sitting) but to miss the very essence of a story is nearly inexcusable. Yet that is exactly what Frears and Hampton do here. Where Colette wrote of an aging Parisian courtesan who hands over her young boy toy for the proper marriage that has been pre-arranged for him, Frears and Hampton twists their film into something akin to two long-lost lovers running at each other on the beach with a swell of cloying music behind them. Change the aforementioned beach to a lushly draped Parisian boudoir and that is what this latest version of Chéri ends up being.

In fact missed opportunities abound in Frears' movie. Well acted by both Rupert Friend as the titular Chéri and Pfeiffer as his aging paramour (though Kathy Bates is a shrill cartoon in her portrayal) it is Frears' lack of courage that is the real downfall of the film. Not only does he lose his nerve when it comes to the droll, yet scathing dialogue of Colette's characters (the writer said of her book, "For the first time in my life, I felt morally certain of having written a novel for which I need neither blush nor doubt.") but Frears stumbles at the perfect opportunity for showing how women in today's society - and especially those in Hollywood - are treated after a certain demarcation line of age. Though looking as gorgeous as ever (even maybe more lovely than ever) Pfeiffer would be the perfect subject to breach such a thesis, but instead Frears lumbers along oblivious to the whole theme of what Colette was writing.

Frears' most memorable films, Dangerous Liaisons, My Beautiful Launderette, Prick Up Your Ears, The Grifters and The Queen do all bear the weight of a certain amount of depth and quite a bit of underlying danger, but here the filmmaker falls flat flat flat. An admittedly pretty film (some scenes elicit memories of Monet and the impressionists) and with two strong, if quite cliche'd performances, but still a film that never goes anywhere and while not going anywhere tends to fall out of fashion even with itself. Add to all this the strangest "international" melange of accents (even among mother and son) and a completely unnecessary, and quite annoying series of haphazard narration, and you have Stephen Frears' Chéri. Even on its own, when not compared to the original novel(s), Frears' film fails on most levels.

Perhaps a French version (there were four other versions made previously, two French, one Brit and one Italian - none of which are available today) starring Isabelle Huppert and Louis Garrel, and directed by Catherine Breillat would have better suited Colette's story. Instead all we are left with is that haunting final image of Pfeiffer, aged or not, that only makes us wish Frears had allowed her to give us so much more.

TEETH a film review

KevynKnox — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 04:54:18 GMT

(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.

REVANCHE a film review

KevynKnox — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 04:09:40 GMT

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 06/21/09)

With its moody temperament and (almost) Eastern European roots, Austrian filmmaker Gotz Spielmann's Revanche plays out as high tragedy worthy of Chekhov or Turgenev, or perhaps Tarkovsky or Bresson (or Cassavetes in an American turn) but always with a seeming oblivious wink toward its audience. This wink (intentional or not) works both in the film's favor for a while and as the ultimate let down when all is said and done.

Though the story of two low rent lovers (played superbly by Johannas Krisch and Irina Potapenko) trying to escape the mundane humiliations of their urban lives by robbing a bank and heading for the proverbial hills, Revanche, as its title suggests, is essentially a tale of inevitable revenge after the aforementioned robbery goes tragically awry. This revenge theme works throughout most of the film, and through the glassy eyes of its antagonist, in perpetual foreshadowing motion, we see the ugly taste of that same said revenge piercing the flesh of all those around him. The film works on such a level, sort of a blend of Assayas and Ceylon, and the pacing and photography just add to the intensity exponentially building throughout.

Once the finale comes, though well played, it is the farthest thing thing from a surprise as one can possibly get. This isn't necessarily a large flaw, for so many movies, both good and bad and everything in between, have quite predictable endings, but it still puts such a damper on an otherwise though provoking film as this. Perhaps it is not revenge, but forgiveness that humanity needs and therefore it is a moral tale of sorts - and I suppose it is - but nonetheless, Spielmann's precalculated coda falls a bit short of the rest of his coldly calculating tragi-drama. Perhaps this is mere nitpicking and not actual criticism, especially since I liked and recommend the film overall, but there you have it anyway. I suppose forgiveness is not my foray.

28 WEEKS LATER a film review

KevynKnox — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:22:58 GMT

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 05/13/07)

Many have queried "Why even make 28 Weeks Later?", comparing it to the original 28 Days Later, these naysayers have called the film exploitive and pandering. Well, duh?! What else is a good flesh-eating zombie flick other than exploitive and pandering? Hell, the very genre itself could be parenthetically subtitle (Exploitive & Pandering). So I don't know what they are talking about with their criticisms, because exploitive and pander, well that's what it's all about kiddies.

Taking up the story line of the first film, where, while attempting to liberate a lab full of test monkeys from man's oppression, a group of animal rights activists unwittingly unleash the experimental Rage virus upon the island of Great Britain and 28 days later, a coma patient awakes in an abandoned hospital ward only to find himself running from gangs of flesh-devouring monstrosities who are really really really fucking hungry, 28 Weeks Later, opening upon the allotted time frame, gives us a newly virus free London being reinhabited by those lucky (or unlucky) enough to have survived the last 7 months or so.

Meanwhile, taking over for the hyper-kinetic Danny Boyle in this hyper-kinetic sequel to the hyperkinetic original is the equally hyper-kinetic Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (best known for the cerebral yet quite hyper-kinetic itself mindfuck Intacto) and exploitive pandering withstanding, he makes a film nearly as strong-willed and terrifying as the first. Remember, this ain't your mama's flesh-eating living dead movie. This isn't the lumbering drama of George Romero's grandaddy flesh-eaters wherein the back-against-the-wall tension comes not so much from full on onslaught as from what-will-happen-next nail-biting. 28 Weeks Later (as was its predecessor, as well as Zack Snyder's own remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead) is a new kind of zombie movie. A post 9/11, ADHD-addled, Rage-riddled full out batshitcrazy nightmare of a motion picture. In this new incarnation of the living dead (okay, not exactly living dead so much as virus-infected humans, but they still do love to eat other people), you can no longer outrun the "dead" like in the "old days" of Romero's classics, and I don't know about you, but the scares the bejesus out of me.

Full of allusions to Iraq with its constant military patrols and segmentation into the safe "green zone" and the dangerous "red zone", 28 Weeks Later, as is the case with Romero's originals, shows not only its bloody flesh-filled teeth but its socio-political fangs as well. Opening with one of the most heartbreakingly I-can't-believe-it shocks in recent memory, Fresnadillo's film, as frenetic and zeitgeististic as it is, is still a loving testament to the ideas of family and survival and all that comes inbetween that Romero first set forth in 1968 with his original Night of the Living Dead. In fact Robert Carlyle's cowardly husband and father is the cinematic offspring of the little girl eating her own parents in the basement of Romero's classic. Perhaps not as intense as the original (I suppose there is some validity in critics' questions, but instead of "why?" they should be asking "why not something a bit different?") 28 Weeks Later still wallops quite a brutal punch, from its blitzkrieg beginning to its somewhat too obvious finale (which even more obviously sets the stage for the inevitable 28 Months Later) and in doing so, earns a spot in zombie movie lore - no matter how many genre-purists scoff at the idea of "fast zombies". I suppose, being what may, 28 Weeks Later is just what its critics say it is, exploitive and pandering - and one Hell of a job of it too.

WENDY AND LUCY a film review

KevynKnox — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 04:24:03 GMT

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 12/17/08)

Kelly Reichardt's latest ode to the Pacific northwest, Wendy and Lucy, much like the filmmaker's previous work, Old Joy, is a veritable paean to the disenfranchised of America. To all those who are eaten up by the system and who never, for whatever reason (and none is ever given here) become what society expects them to be. To those on the fringe of America. Outcasts and throw-aways. Not bad people. Not lesser people. Simply people who do not know where they belong, where they fit in. This film, like Old Joy is a sad love song of sorts, sung to those for whom the idea of the American dream simply does not exist.

It is one of these wayward "untouchables", a young woman named Wendy, who we follow along her path of disillusionment. With the most grotesque and quite perverse curiosity, like watching a strange exotic animal in a zoo, never daring to think, there but for the grace of God go I, we watch. We watch as she meticulously, and quite methodically, keeps track of every cent she spends in a pocket notebook, only to see it all be for naught once her car, the very thing she has been living in for God knows how long, breaks down and she becomes trapped once again by society. We watch as Wendy is nabbed for shoplifting by a strangely overzealous stock boy and in the process of being arrested and booked, loses the one thing that means more to her than her car, her faithful companion, her dog Lucy. We watch as this lost little girl searches for her Lucy in what seems like such an overpowering, suffocating world full of profiteering auto mechanics and bureaucratic red tape - as well as one of the most harrowing dog pound scenes I have ever seen (this critic had a hard time making it through as those sadly hopeful eyes peered out at us from behind their chainlinked cages). The very society from which Wendy is supposedly making her escape is the very society that has again ensnared her within its web. Though we may feel like voyeurs at first, like ravenous vultures impatiently awaiting their inevitable carcass, in time, Reichardt's film ensnares us within its web as well, and we to are trapped.

Where Old Joy kept a rather safe distance from its audience, almost as if viewing a sad but mesmerizingly intricate impressionist painting within the relatively safe confines of an art museum, Wendy and Lucy, much in the vein of the expressionist school, becomes all the more personal and up close. Where we merely sat back and absorbed the oft-silent chirpings of Will Oldham's Kurt in Old Joy, we are pulled in as close as we can get, and are forced to get, to Michelle Williams' brilliant turn as Wendy - almost as if we ourselves are an actual participant in her bitter, lonely reality. Where Kurt was lonely and lost, his hapless hippie throwback is seen in an almost comical way at times - the sad clown so to speak, easy to stay detached from - Wendy seems all the more real and therefore all the more terrifying to behold. And it is the bravura performance of teen TV star turned alternative actress par excellence Williams that captures this terrifying emptiness, this desperation as it were, and makes it such an intimate connective to the audience, whether we want it or not. Remember, there but for the grace of God, go we.

Though filmed with the sublime picturesque, and quite auteuristic eye of Ms. Reichardt (no one in American cinema today does better the haunting melancholy of the disembodied outdoors than Kelly Reichardt), this film is tripled, quadrupled, quintupled even, in blatant puissance by the subtly explosion-precipiced performance of the Oscar nominated former Dawson's Creek star. An actress who over the past few years, in films ranging from The Station Agent, Land of Plenty, Brokeback Mountain, The Hawk is Dying, I'm Not There and Charlie Kaufman's current mindfuck, Synecdoche, New York, has become the veritable darling of American independent cinema. It is Williams' ascendancy to this preeminence, her Vormachtstellung if you will, that takes an already exceptional film and raises it to a whole other realm completely. For Williams gives the most heartwrenching performance by any actor, male or female, since, ironically enough, her former love and father of her child, the late Heath Ledger handed in the performance of his sadly shortened lifetime in Brokeback Mountain near three years ago.

The final scene, wherein Wendy is forced to make a decision that will seriously impact two lives, though rather obvious in its forthcoming, is still quite more than enough to tear a person to pieces. To leave them a shattered, withering husk on the figurative theater floor. The scene, emotionally speaking, is much like Ledger's own heart-breaking epic closure to Brokeback. This is the power of Reichardt's film and this is the power of Williams' performance.