KevynKnox

Under discussion:

Taking Woodstock  (2009)

(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.

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.

Under discussion:

28 Weeks Later  (2007)

(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.

Under discussion:

Cargo 200  (2007)

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 01/06/09)

Positioned somewhere between the dank environs of Tarkovsky and Michael Haneke and the torture cinema of Eli Roth and his "Splat Pack" brethren, this based-on-real-events political allegory-****-horror story of 1984 USSR, replete with Huxley's squat gray buildings and a properly proportional festooning of decaying landscapes and milky omnipresent clouds, Aleksei Balabanov's Cargo 200 is at heart, an anti-communist era diatribe, showing with a matter-of-fact realism the ugly corrupt nightmare world that was the Soviet Union (Balabanov said in a 2007 Wall Street Journal interview, "I show what filth we live in. Society was sick from 1917 onwards.") but can also feel right at home, thanks to its severing second half, as some sort of Soviet Chainsaw Massacre.

Not to give away to much of the plot - the gradual build-up to the terrifying final act is part of the fun (though fun is hardly the appropriate word when describing this bleak and harrowing film) - let us just say Cargo 200 is the interconnected stories of several Soviet citizens - an atheist professor, a cult-leaning bootlegger, an enterprising and quite cocksure young capitalist dressed in instigatory CCCP tee shirt, a corrupt (and quite insane) police official and the requisite horror story scantily clad (at least eventually) teenage virgin - in small town Russia in the wake of the Soviet/Afghan war and their disparate views on politics and society. At least that is what the first half of the film is, the second half is another thing altogether, falling into a disturbing world of rape, murder and necrophilia - sometimes all three at once. And, to make things even more uncomfortable, as desolate as anything coming out of the Romanian Black Wave with that nation's iron-curtained anti-sentimentality, Cargo 200 also manages, inexplicably enough, to play out as black comedy, with much of its laughter held in nervously stilted inner chuckle.

Disallowing any sort of cathartic denouement, or at least teasing us with such only to pull the rug out at the moment just before, we watch as society, already rotted to the bureaucratic and spiritual core, falls deeper and deeper into an abyss that is also the allegory for not just a corrupt aging Communist system in wintry decay, but for most of Western society as a whole. There is a scene midway through this film of coffins being taken off one side of a military plane (the "cargo 200" of the title) while fresh-faced new soldiers march on to the other, like a tragic cartoon factory cycle. This is a world where the weak are preyed upon and never saved, and though the forces of evil may eventually fail at times, the more conniving forces of indifference and injustice are ultimately triumphant. Though lacking in any real originality save for its odd juxtaposition of genres (the dark, dank Eastern Bloc thriller has been done to death, but at least here there is a twist - and that is what makes the film) Cargo 200, with its strange melange of sociopolitical allegory and black comedy B-terror may be a warning of what we might become one day. Or have we already become it?

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.

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.

Under discussion:

I'm Not There  (2007)

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 12/16/07)

In the opening salvo of his near-Proustian length critique par excellence in the Village Voice, J. Hoberman called I'm Not There the movie of the year - and he may very well be right. In fact he could ostensibly exchange the word decade for the word year and still be very much within his rights. Easily the most daring experimentation in filmmaking (read: a bite in the ass of cinema) since Lars von Trier's Dogville in 2003.

Half casting stunt, half cinematic experimentation, Todd Haynes, the former Brown University semiotics major turned cinematic manipulator extraordinaire, and the man who gave us Far From Heaven, an impressionistic and socially rupturous homage to Douglas Sirk and a scathing indictment of American sexual mores, Velvet Goldmine, a kinky Citizen Kane structured ode to glam rock, [Safe], his diabolic take on the insecurities of humanity and Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an absurdist Barbie-dolled super-8 mockery of everything America holds dear (sort of), now hands us his by-far fullest plate yet - a deconstruction not only of the enigmatic Bob Dylan, a man who playing his own game of propagandism, already sliced and diced himself into a multitude of ideas and ideals, but of the very concept of cinema itself. Taking the typically one-man (or one-woman) ultra-polished horse and pony show that is the biopic genre, Haynes flips it on its already much beleaguered head and shows us not one man, but six (or really seven) different aspects of one man, here personified by six different actors, all of different ages, races and even genders. Six actors, but in search of what?

With influences ranging from Fellini and Godard to Laurence Sterne and James Joyce, with a bit of Rashomonian Chaucer thrown in and an undercurrent of Marshall McLuhan to boot, Todd Haynes has created not only a film "about" Bob Dylan, but also a film that plays at times as being from Dylan, to Dylan, by Dylan and even on occasion, becoming Dylan. Breathed of the same cubist air in which Dylan created his own self-imitating (and oft-maligned and highly underrated) opus Renaldo & Clara back in 1978, and possibly with many of the same box office blockades (as far as the common moviegoer is concerned - length, unwarranted philosophizing, a dibilitatingly obscure linear structure et al), Haynes' film is a stroke of mad genius mixed with an air of semi-satiric superiority and blended with the mystique of frustrated stardom - all rolled into some sort of postmodern concoction of deconstructive catharsis.

First up (and I say that with an air of trepidation since the film is only superficially linear and Haynes cuts back and forth at the slightest provocation and/or whim) is Ben Whishaw as the poet Arthur Rimbaud, the personification of Dylan's poetic aspirations. In the midst of an interrogation being held by an off-stage voice, Whishaw is both mouthpiece for Dylan and his very own Joan of Arc, his face as blaise here as Dreyer's Maria Falconetti's was tormented. He is the voice of dissident, and diffident, reason.

Next comes Marcus Carl Franklin as a ten year old train-hopping black runaway in 1959 who goes by the name Woody Guthrie. Rather appropriately played by a black child actor, considering Dylan's youthful exuberance for Guthrie and his being led to the origin of blues music through this exuberance, this is the boy the man would become. Obsessed to the point of believing his own lies, Woody is Dylan as Dylan perhaps dreamt himself as a child. Tremulous at times, yet full of verve and desire. Replete with likely apocryphal tales of being a serial runaway, Dylan's childhood fantasies of becoming his one-time idol - fantasies which have many times over either been surpassed or missed altogether - play as both prelude and omen to what is to come. Where Rimbaud is his mind, Woody is the heart of Bob Dylan.

After the child prodigy incarnation of Woody vanishes from the screen (for now), we are given Christian Bale as the finger-pointing, political singing-songwriting-harmonica-playing troubadour Jack Rollins, here accompanied by Julianne Moore doing her best Joan Baez in full VH1 Where Are They Now? mode, giving us the early acoustic-strung world shattering aspirations of a still quite green Dylan. We watch wide-eyed naivety turn to jaded indignance in Bale's superbly bitter (and typically tortured Bale-ian) performance. This is Dylan turning his back on what people "expected" him to be. This is Dylan refusing to be the left-wing lap-dog they wanted. This is Dylan turning toward a different left. The left of the counterculture. The left of his Beat idols like Ginsberg and Kerouac and McClure. This is the soul of Dylan, aching to be alive.

This turning away from the "established" folk-centered left and turning toward the beat aesthetic is perfectly played in what is surely the centerpiece of Haynes' cubist masterwork (as well as the film's most sincere shot at Oscar gold) - Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn, wild-eyed speed-freak electric rock & roll rebel at the apex of his (or her - does it even matter at this point?) circus cannonball blast to stardom. Shot in black and white and layered after both D.A. Pennebaker's 1965 Dylan doc Don't Look Back and Fellini's 1963 masterpiece of misinterpretation and misdirection 8½, this section is rife with allegorical slaps at modern-day mass-hysteroid media and the often stampeding effect it has on celebrity, complete with a queer little helium-voiced "cameo" by four mop-topped lads from Liverpool, playing A Hard Day's Night/Help!-like with a similarly frolicking Jude/Dylan/Blanchett.

And if Dylan truly is the hero of our story then Bruce Greenwood as a quite nasty little Brit TV talk show host amalgamation known as Mr. Jones (who incidentally provocates a spectacular rendition of The Ballad of The Thin Man) is the villain. Snidely mocking Dylan's pretentiousness while snarkily being counter-attacked by Dylan/Quinn/Blanchett's sharp-tongued back quips, these Pennebaker-inspired sparring matches are the epitome of Dylan's jadedness toward the media. Meanwhile, amidst this Felliniesque circustry, we get David Cross as a pitch-perfect Allen Ginsberg making his entrance a la golf cart and Michelle Williams as part Edie Sedgewick, part personification of Dylan's fading muse. It was shortly after this time period - the Blonde on Blonde era and what many call the apogee of Dylan's songwriting career - that Dylan crashed his motorcycle and became a backwoods recluse for several years.

This segues nicely into Dylan's recluse days (the first version of them that is) and into the "family" life of Dylan personified here by Heath Ledger, doing his best James Dean (yet another Dylan idol). Ledger plays Robbie Clark, half rising half fading star of the silver screen and the incarnation of Dylan as Dylan himself showed in parts of Renaldo & Clara. Failing actor, failing husband and failing father. The "macho" antithesis of Blanchett's foppish Jude, Ledger's Robbie is a man at constant odds with himself and all those around him. Playing Robbie's wife (and stand-in for Sara Dylan, Suze Rotolo and other Dylan loves and muses - as well as Haynes own personal Anna Karina) is French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, appropriately (and surely uncoincidentally) cast in the role of spotlight mother, herself coming from the womb of a fashion model and the loins of a pop star. This is Dylan as false God. This is Dylan as faker. This is Dylan's lost soul.

And what would a lost soul be without someone to find - and save - it. This is exactly what happened to Dylan in the late seventies when he "found" Jesus and this is just what we get from Christian (aptly named?) Bale in redux. Former musical instigator Jack Rollins is now evangelical minister Paster John in what plays as a brief interlude from the rest of the story - which may be just what Dylan's own "rebirth" was. If Ledger's Robbie was his false God, then this could very well be Dylan as false Man.

Then comes the final act. The reclusive hermetic Dylan. The fantasy Dylan. The dream Dylan. He comes in the package of a frazzled greying Richard Gere known as Mr. B, or as we later find out, Billy the Kid. Running from the law, running from his music, running from his fans and running from himself perhaps, Gere's Billy the Kid appears in what could very well be a dream world, full of surreal imagery and replete with masked men, women and children. Everyone, even in his dreams, are hiding - and Dylan is no different. With the sudden (re)appearance of Bruce Greenwood, this time behind his own mask as an aging Pat Garrett, Gere's "Kid" goes on the run and finds himself hopping back on the trains of his youth - and in doing so, we are taken right back to the beginning again. Structured in many ways upon Joyce's Finnigan's Wake, it is Billy's temporally implausible discovery of Woody's guitar aboard an empty boxcar that brings Haynes' film river running itself right back to where we started from.

And still, while much of the film takes on a Joycean life of its own, and it is, of course, based on the life of (if not the ruminations of) Bob Dylan, not to mention the melange of influences cited earlier, there is yet another must-see influence weighing heavy upon the auteuristic stylings of Mr. Haynes (could it be that Haynes has as many sides as Dylan himself?), and that influence is Jean-Luc Godard. Beginning and ending (as useless as those relative terms are in this case) in much the same gunshot fashion as Godard's Masculine/Feminine - not coincidentally the only one of Godard's seemingly endless oeuvre to openly reference Dylan - Haynes, at his most Godardian (and really, what current filmmaker is any more Godardian than Haynes right now?), lock stocks and barrels his way through the life of Bob Dylan with the stream-of-consciousness rhythms of a deconstructionive mad scientist. Haynes as the all-knowing, all-seeing (all that can be known and/or seen that is) doctor, and the many ideas of who or what or where or when Bob Dylan is, as his somewhat flawed yet genius monster - all the while never kow-towing to what one expects from the genre of biopic. After all, as Haynes recently more than alludes to in an interview in Cineaste, there are lies in all biography, but at least here we are let in on the joke.

I have a good friend who is, and I don't think he would be the slightest bit offended by the choice of adjective, obsessed with all things Dylan. Having seen him in concert about 953 times or so and owning just about every recorded piece of music, bootlegs and all, and much of it on vinyl, and referring to Dylan as The P.I. (for those of us in the know, that stands for Prophet Incarnate), and being a true Dylanologist of the highest order, I am sure he would get many more of the referential moments than even I did. Which may very well beg for a precursive crash course in Dylanology for those out there not so inclined toward The P.I., and though the recurring tarantula should be quite obvious to even the novice Dylan acolyte, I'm sure a primer in watching Scorsese's expounding doc No Direction Home (a great film even outside of the predications of I'm Not There) wouldn't hurt anyone.

In sum, there are not many people who have been able to successfully metamorphose into so many different creatures (possibly John Lennon or Miles Davis or the aforementioned Godard), but still this film is not just about Dylan. Never uttering the name throughout, this film is as much about Bob Dylan as it is not about Bob Dylan. Taking Proust's idea of a "succession of selves" and running with it - as Dylan has done to himself throughout his career (we are still not sure of many of the facts) - Haynes shows us not just another life (or another movie), but life (or Cinema) itself.

Under discussion:

Goodbye Solo  (2009)

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com)

With obvious influential stylings from both the neorealist movement of post WWII Italy and the French Nouvelle Vague of the late fifties and early sixties, as well as director Ramin Bahrani's own ethnically-backgrounded national cinematic scene (though the US-born Irani-American Bahrani denies any influence whatsoever from his ancestral Persia) Goodbye Solo is a powerfully original and uniquely unpretentious American independent film from a filmmaker who is quickly becoming one of the best American directors in cinema today.

Along with his first two features, Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, Bahrani has stumbled his way into the much-argued-about quasi-film-movement known in some circles as neo-neorealism. Much like Hollywood at the start of the Great Depression, with its socially conscientious storytelling and prophetic soap-boxing, today's American independent cinema, in its own financial straights, has begun a movement that attempts to tell the tales of those on or below the accepted poverty line. This movement of sorts also includes filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy & Wendy and Lucy), So Yong Kim (Treeless Mountain), Lance Hammer (Ballast) and even perhaps Vincent Gallo (Brown Bunny), though that last one may be a stretch if I am to understand this so-called neo-neorealism at all.

Whether this is a conscious effort on the filmmakers part or mere coincidence due merely to the economic woes hitting just about everyone is still up for debate. Sometimes much heated debate (mostly started by the NYTimes' A.O. Scott in his opening essay about neo-neorealism). I personally think it mere coincidence, but coincidence predicated on the idea of mob mentality. Yes, that comment was meant to be quite tongue-in-cheek. Anyway, the early depression years also had a spate of fun loving escapist filmmaking from Astaire & Rogers to the Marx Brothers. Yet, real or imagined, nature or nurture, neo-neorealism, or whatever one wishes to call it, seems to be here to stay. But then, we are not here to talk of movements and film waves, but instead about one particular film - Goodbye Solo.

Bahrani's story abruptly begins mid-sentence in the cab of our titular protagonist played with a melancholy glee by Senegalese non-actor Souleymane Sy Savane. Solo is being paid to drive his passenger William, a begrizzled older man played by longtime character actor Red West, to a mountaintop where Solo is to return home alone. It is obvious, to us, to Solo, that William is planning on dying on said mountaintop. The brunt of Bahrani's film is Solo trying to figure out why. It is also about the eventual shaky friendship forged between the overly optimistic Solo and the angry, tired William. Beyond any ideas of class genre film movement, Bahrani's film rests on the emotional punch it delivers again and again and again throughout what is surely the filmmaker's best work yet.

(this first appeared on my blog, The Most Beautiful Fraud in the World)

Now that 2009 has come to an abrupt center (today is the exact middle of the year - and my birthday to boot) it is time to look back at the first half that was.

So far 2009 has gotten off to a better start than 2008.   Sure, last year may have had stellar films such as Charlie Kauffman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, Desplechin’s gorgeous A Christmas Tale, Wendy Reichardt’s neo-neorealist Wendy and Lucy and Soderbergh’s two-part Che biopic extraordinaire, but none of those would open until later in the year.  Not even The Dark Knight had opened yet.   Of my eventual five favourite films of the year, only Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, which I had originally seen at the 2007 NYFF, had made an appearance at this point in 2008.

As of today, July 2nd (the exact middle of the year) there sits no less than six films that I could see being on my eventual best of 2009 list come New Year’s Day.   With the almost inevitable influx of quality films that inundate us at the end of each year (and I do NOT mean the crush of usually tepid, middlebrow, mediocrities that are considered Oscar hopefuls!) this could all mean one of three things.   1.  2009 will be one of the best years in cinema in a very long time.   2. The second half of the year is going to suck big time.  or 3. I’m getting soft in my old age and am not as critical as I used to be.

I am hoping for 1 but fearful of 2.  As for 3, I am only turning 42 today so I don’t think I’ve lost my edge all that much.   If anything I am a different kind of critical now than I was at 20 or 30.   Seriously though, this has been a pretty good first half, and several films have really really moved me (I’ll mention them below) but even with all that in mind, it still seems like that one GREAT movie - the one that gleams at the top of my annual best of lists like a shiny new whatchyamacallit - has yet to make its appearance.   I have an inkling it will be around by the end.

As for the best of the first half of 2009, here they are:

1) The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)

2) Hunger (Steve McQueen)

3) The Class (Laurent Cantet)

4) Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi)

5) Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)

6) The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh)

7) Sugar (Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden)

8) Star Trek (J.J. Abrams)

9) Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani)

10) Watchmen (Zack Snyder)

Seriously, this is more than a respectable year-end Top Ten List!  I would be proud to show this list to the world.   Even that mealy-mouth crotch pheasant Ben Lyons couldn’t argue with me!  Okay he probably would (especially considering Transformers didn’t make my list) but he’s a fucking idiot so who cares.

If the second half of the year is even half as good as the first half - and we have yet to see Inglourious Basterds, The Box, Shutter Island, A Serious Man, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, Nine or 9 (?) - then we are in for the best year in cinema in nearly a decade.   Now if only we could stop Michael Bay from killing again.

Under discussion:

The Limits of Control  (2009)

Ed Gonzalez, perspicacious top dog critic (and co-creator / film editor) at Slant Magazine, and fellow traveler I am more oft than not in critical sync with, describes Jim Jarmusch's latest cinematic offering, The Limits of Control as "what a David Lynch film no doubt looks like to people who don't actually like David Lynch films".

I suppose on one level that is an accurate and rather astute statement, considering it does trod rather heavily, albeit snarkily so, on the soggy-minded grounds of Lynchian soil, with its cryptic messages and mysterious strange-talking interlopers and omnipresent awareness of sinister guiding forces controlling everything that happens. Now I do not mean to disparage Mr. Gonzalez in any way as I have great respect for him as a critic and concede many of the points laid out in his review, but I must take certain umbrage toward this particular statement, for I happen to love David Lynch films, and consider him one of, if not the greatest American filmmaker working today, and I am still quite able to enjoy Jarmusch's latest as well. Perhaps I am the proverbial exception that proves the rule. Perhaps I just got way-laid by the coolly nuanced mise en scene of Jarmusch's quippy style of cinema. Perhaps I have no idea what I am saying. Who knows and more to the point, c'est la vie whatever the answer.

Evoking a winking cinephilia that can easily be mistaken for a snarky contempt for his audience and/or pretentious self-indulgence, Jarmusch, even more so here than in any of his previous cinephilia-biased works (which is basically his entire oeuvre - good and bad), creates a cinema that is above all else - and below all else as well - about cinema itself. With allusions to everything from Hitchcock to Antonioni to Aki Kaurismaki to Jean-Luc Godard to a self-referential thesis on Jarmusch himself to the aforementioned David Lynch, this is cinema looking at cinema talking about cinema. A roundtable of sorts on the very idea of cinephilia. Truffaut once said that "film lovers are sick people" and he was probably right about that.

Sick or not (professionally and obsessionally speaking, I think we all are to some extent) Jarmusch is the ultimate cinephile, right up there with other cinephiliac filmmakers such as Godard, Scorsese, Tarantino, Bogdanovich, De Palma and the sui generis quoter himself, M. Truffaut. He proves it in scene after scene after scene after scene. Tilda Swinton carrying on about The Lady From Shanghai while looking every bit the escapee from the ultra cool universe of early Wong Kar-wai, complete with trenchcoat and coiffed in a platinum wig. His recreation of JLG's genuflectory, and rightly so, shot of Bardot's brazen bare ass in Les Mepris. Bill Murray's fateful finale cameo deep in a concrete bunker, channeling something straight out of Dr. Strangelove via Dick Cheney. Even Jarmusch's use of uber-cinematographer Christopher Doyle and Mexican new wave poster child Gael Garcia Bernal (Brando from South of the Border) is in many ways a bow to the art cinema of the more recent past.

Perhaps all this can get quite tiresome to the novice viewer - the film is purposefully repetitive after all - and too perhaps, does the story get rather convoluted and seemingly unnecessary at times, but pretension be damned, the film is pure eye and ear candy for the rather indulgent and somewhat gluttonous cinephile in us all - even with its many flaws, not least of which its blatant ignorance of necessity. Perhaps, like many fellow critics have already announced, the film is full of hooey after all. Perhaps it does indeed have a snarky contempt for its audience and/or a pretentious self-indulgence. Perhaps it is merely Jarmusch making the movie he has always needed to make in order to feed his ravenous cinephilia before it completely devours him. Perhaps I am just awed-for-awe's-sake - at least on the most superficial fellow cinephile-like of levels. Perhaps this is nothing more than future fodder to dissect and disseminate in film schools someday and can only be truly appreciated in that long-off aspect. Perhaps Mr. Gonzalez does know of what he speaks. Perhaps I have no idea what I am talking about still. Whatever the answer, c'est la vie.

Under discussion:

Star Trek  (2009)

Forty-three years after Gene Roddenberry first boldly went where no one had gone before and thirty years after the first cinematic endeavor and twenty-two years after the coming of the next generation and seven years after the last movie attempt (and at least fifteen years after anyone really cared anymore), Star Trek has been reborn - or should I say, rebooted.

Daring us to once again boldly go while at the same time tagging us with the bold statement that this was no longer our father's Star Trek (or in the case of us "older folks" who grew up with the original series - "our" Star Trek), TV wunderkind J.J. Abrams has managed the seemingly impossible. He has made a Star Trek so ingrained with four plus decades of sci-fi mythology as to please even the most discerning of die-hard Trekkers (even those still living in their parent's basement at near middle age - their own phasers set on stun) while at the same time keeping it youthful enough to bring aboard legions of novice Starfleet cadets. He, just like a young and cocky James Tiberius Kirk, has beaten the unbeatable Kobayashi Maru - and he only cheated a little. How's that for a reference sure to confound all those aforementioned neophyte cadets yet thrill the legions of Trek nerds I boldly announce myself as completely in tune with.

Using the time-tested (pun very much intended) Trek standby (re: cheat) of time travel to create what is in essence an alternate reality Star Trek, Abrams comes aboard, as brash and full of bravado as Chris Pine's newly retooled rebel without a cause Kirk himself, with not just a beloved sci-fi universe rolled out in front of him, but with the suave beauty of a clean slate to boldly go wherever he damn well pleases. Abrams (born mere months before the original series first flew into living rooms across America) can have his space cake and eat it to - and blow it up if he wants (which he does in part). Just like Roddenberry back in '66, it lays at his feet for him to do with whatever he so desires. After seeing the finished product, this self admitted Star Trek nerd can safely say he believes that Roddenberry is looking down from his resting place amongst the stars with a happy heart - or at least he should be.

The story begins, as always, in the heat of battle. A federation ship is being attacked by Nero, a renegade Romulan looking more like a Maori beyond Thunderdome than the traditional Romulan of Trek lore. When the ship's captain is summoned over to the Romulan's obvious deathtrap, he places a young officer by the name of George Kirk in command. To make a long story short, Kirk goes down with his ship after making sure the crew, along with his giving-birth-right-now wife and their fresh-faced new son, one James Tiberius Kirk, are shuttled off to safety. It is pure space opera and it works on just that level. After this we get backstories and character introductions (and even get to see cadet Kirk's tryst with a green-skinned alien) and finally just why that damned Nero is so pissed off at the federation - and especially Spock. We even get allusions to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan when Nero screeches Spock!!! into the otherwise soundproof environs of space just as Shatner's Kirk yelled Khan!!!. It's just as cheesy and just as fun. Pauline Kael once wrote of the second Trek movie that it was "wonderful dumb fun" and this is certainly no different.

And the new cast, the veritable nexus of chat room speculation and argumentative controversy ever since Abrams' revamping plans began to first unfold, works as well. Chris Pine as the iconic Captain Kirk is a twenty-something horndog roustabout who joins Starfleet more out of spite or on a dare than out of any sense of duty. The perpetually brooding Zachary Quinto plays the even more iconic Mr. Spock with a Vulcan calmness just this side of emotional eruption. He looks so much like Nimoy one must wonder if he wasn't born to play the part. Karl Urban, in one of the most dead reckoning impersonations in the group, plays Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy with the same bug-eyed curmudgeonry as DeForest Kelly's original grizzled anti-social country doctor with a taste for bourbon and a definitive distaste for space travel. Then there is Simon Pegg doing Scotty in high brogue as only a comic actor can and should do him. My one major criticism of the film is there is not enough Scotty (he doesn't even make an appearance until around minute 85 or 90). We also get Zoe Saldana as the smokin' hot Uhura in retro mini skirt and gogo boots (she really doesn't have much else to do), John Cho (sans Kumar) as the helmsman Sulu, Anton Yelchin as a seventeen Pavel Chekov with a major case of 23rd century ADD, Bruce Greenwood as the ill-fated Captain Christopher Pike, Ben Cross and Winona Ryder as Spock's star-crossed parents, Eric Bana as the aforementioned Khan-esque Nero and even Tyler Perry as a Starfleet Admiral (luckily not trying to be "very funny").

All the favorite characters are here (but where are Nurse Chapel and Yeoman Rand?) fulfilling their duty as newly appointed icons, replete with all the old standard lines that have become part of sci-fi lore, but still, as always, this is the Kirk and Spock show. Philosophically set against each other - Kirk and Spock, body and mind - we watch the beginnings of an eternal struggle put to rest by the almost symbiotic way these two opposite reactions work together toward the same goal. Both are great in the parts but it is Pine who has the decidedly tougher mountain to climb. Pine has to channel the bravura of Shatner's Kirk but also avoid falling into the drama queen over excess of Shatner the actor. A friend describes Shatner lovingly (sort of) as that embarrassing uncle who tries to get you to fish around in his pocket for a present. Shatner's presence, bloated jackass or not (and don't get me wrong, I loved him in the original role), will always be there and yet Pine manages to parlay only the good into his transformation into Captain James T. Kirk.

Yet, the old school Trekker in me (I was just two years old when the original series was canceled due to low ratings!? but grew up on the seventies reruns) cannot help but keep returning to Leonard Nimoy's Spock Prime. More than just a glorified cameo, Spock Prime, who's inadvertent delineation of the known timeline which flips everything on its head is the nadir of the film's story, is the very heart and soul of the new Star Trek. Watching Nimoy back where he belongs and obviously loving every moment of his trek back home (pun intended again) is like once again seeing that beloved childhood friend you never even realized you missed like crazy but who has been in the back of your mind for years and years and years. Just as Nimoy has gone home again (and who said you couldn't?) so to has this once, and always, impressionable perpetual youth.

Forty-three years of pop culture references - from South Park and Family Guy to Galaxy Quest, SNL and even That 70's Show - and the franchise of Star Trek, with its phasers and communicators and its "beam me up Scotty" apocryphals, is still alive. Perhaps it has been on life support for a while now. Kept alive long after any real interest in the later spin-offs and elongated episodic cinematic endeavors has gone as kaput as a red-shirted ensign on a landing party. But no matter how sick it may have become, the imagery has never died. It is this very pop culture and all the mythos and iconography which surrounds it that makes Abrams reboot work as well as it does. His sleek new look that never takes away from the now-retro original series is a pitch-perfect melange of old and new sensibilities. My critical half (aka my pretentious half) is inline with my nerd half and I too can have my cake and eat it.

In the final scene, when everyone is on the bridge in those iconic (and somewhat cooler) original episode uniforms - I actually got chills (God, I am a nerd!!!) and Pine's subtle Shatneresque smirk and slap on Bones' shoulder and the way he sits in that captain's chair, legs crossed ala Shatner, along with the obvious love and care in giving us Nimoy's Spock "Prime", shows that though this is not our father's Star Trek and is definitely boldly going where no one has gone before, it would and could still hold high reverence for all that had come before it. The mythology is still there and yet, like Zefram Cochrane making first contact, Abrams brings new life to this long dead Phoenix and we realize we can boldly go anywhere from here. What more could we ever ask for. Now bring on the Klingons.

Under discussion:

The Man From London  (2007)

After the most tumultuous production this side of Welles' fated Don Quixote fiasco and lasting six some years from improbable start to damnable finish and surviving multiple setbacks not least of which was the suicide of producer Humbert Balsan and the reactive shut down of filming for a year, Béla Tarr's long anticipated follow-up to his somberly melodic masterpiece Werckmeister Harmonies, which is still one of the best and most important works of this still young 21st century, finally arrived upon the festival scene last year only to be met with an almost unanimous accord of not praise nor haze, but with simple and ultimately damning indifference. This indifference continues this week as The Man From London finally opens (sixteen months after its Cannes debut) not at a theatre so much as a museum. MoMa will be playing Tarr's indifferently-received film for one week as dust already collects on less a cinematic event, less a vibrant exercise in Tarrian philosophology, than a prematurely greying museum piece.

Sure, when inevitably, and probably somewhat unfairly, compared with Tarr's last four films (the resonantly brash Almanac of Fall, the oddly humourous machinations of Damnation, the aforementioned lyrical Harmonies and especially the monumentally mammoth masterpiece Sátántangó) his latest, The Man From London, adapted from Georges Simenon's novel and the directors first attempt at noir, is well doomed to failure. Just look at reaction to Welles' films, no matter how spectacular, when compared to his first or the recently released Wong Kar-wai road movie My Blueberry Nights when put up against In the Mood For Love. Just as there is lesser Welles and lesser Wong, there too is lesser Tarr and no matter, the fact still remains that just like Welles' The Stranger or F For Fake are still undeniably Orson Welles, The Man From London is still, lesser or not, Béla Tarr. Comparative criticism may be inevitable - T.S. Eliot said "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead". - and being the auteurist I am, I play at it myself all the time, but that still doesn't mean it's fair.

The film opens with (of course) a lengthy tracking shot, weaving its way from stem to stern, port to starboard across a dilapidated old ship, done in (of course, again) stark black & white and reminding one of Tarr's kino-eye as it wrapped itself around the great sad whale in Harmonies, and, with the one odd exception of a seemingly misplaced Tilda Swinton being dubbed into Hungarian almost as if this were some old Italian film (save for the choice of language), it goes on from there like a black icy heartbeat pounding, pounding, pounding until, even at the rather un-Tarrian sprightly running time of a mere 132 minutes, its last dying breath. This is pure Eastern European, lesser or not. This is pure Tarkovskyian poetics, lesser or not. This is pure cinema. Pure Tarr.

Once one gets past all the hoopla and reaches beyond the fact that not much can compare with a film as monumentally historic as Sátántangó, and finally taken on its own merits, Tarr's film, a sort of nontraditional, transcendental film noir, is, just like his previous output, a beautifully photographed, deceptively alluring, pin-pointedly nuanced dance of old world style meets viscously modernist cinematic poetics. Béla Tarr, the Ezra Pound of cinema, with his thick thoughts and brooding questions of faith and a world gone to shit (to paraphrase the auteur himself), may have made a film that cannot compare to his own best work - his own dead poetry as it were - but he has still handed us a film of bitter and constant dark beauty. A film that, despite an inevitable inferiority to past works, screams in a ghostly soulful moan so apt to the cinema of the auteur, that this is most certainly Béla Tarr.

Under discussion:

Drag Me to Hell  (2009)

With tongue firmly in cheek, and then bitten down on, Sam Raimi, whose career has careened from low budget schlock to mega budget summer blockbusters, heads back to his original bread'n'butter with Drag Me To Hell. After a decade or so on the A-List superhero gravy train, Raimi gets back to his rootiest of roots with this gutsy spit-on-your-grave brouhaha of a motion picture. Just think, the best American film of the year so far and it is a silly retro horror flick full of demonic spirits, maggot-riddled vomit and that Goddamn MAC guy from TV. Of course this is exactly what Drag Me To Hell should be and wants to be.

Giving out a giddy gross-out good ole time that one should come to expect from a well done horror movie, but that unfortunately one usually no longer gets, Drag Me To Hell is a throwback to the days of James Whale, Mario Bava, early Corman & Romero and to the slick bloody glee that was Dario Argento in his prime - even to Raimi's own early oeuvre of Evil Deads. In essence, Drag Me To Hell is just what a horror movie should be, and all those other horror wannabes out there darkening up the cinematic landscapes with their wrongly-directed attempts at "reality terror" - and you know who you are you - should take note to see just how it should be done.

The story, about a young loan officer who after "shaming" a wretched old gypsy crone with a penchant for spitting up radioactive looking green phlegm, has a curse put on her where she will be, as the title clearly promises, dragged to Hell, may be quite ridiculous at times (a scene involving a precariously dangling anvil and another involving a talking sacrificial goat are uppermost on that same ridiculous scale) but it is in this very ridiculousness that Drag Me To Hell gets its winning personality. A low brow idea with a high brow artistic vision, Raimi's film is a melange of both art and fancy and of thematic vulgarity and visual audacity.

The film stars the business-casual Allison Lohman as the perky young loan officer with a doozy of a curse on her head and corporate MAC shill Justin Long as her passive-aggressive psych prof boyfriend (and yes there is a prominently displayed Apple on his office desk). Girl-next-door Lohman has stated in interviews that working with Raimi on Drag Me To Hell was like being in a race toward the end of the movie, and that is just what we get while watching the film. Quickly paced, but never feeling rushed, the film is like a roller coaster that is simultaneously click-clacking its way toward the mile high acme and careening down the other side in a high pitch screech toward the titular Hell that Lohman describes as her inevitable finish line.

An interesting side note of sorts is the portrayal of villainy in the film. I'm not talking about the demons and ghouls and nasty old gypsies that should be a given in such a film. I am talking about the bankers. The bankers and loan officers in this film make up a sort of secondary ring of bad guys. Not evil per se but still quite ruthless and repugnant. The 80's had the big bad Russians, the 90's, the drug-runners of Central America and this passing decade has/had the Islamic jihadists born from the ashes of 9/11. Perhaps the cinematic uber villains of the next generation will be the bankers and loan officers of the corporate world. Here, perhaps even indicting himself a bit out of possible unfounded guilt over his late spidery success, Raimi has put the kibosh on the banking community. Here they get no remorse. No reprieve. Here they get no bail-outs.

The one slight downfall of the film though, is the rather surprising no-show of Raimi stalwart Bruce Campbell going chin-first into a nice juicy cameo somewhere in this quite Hellish story. Be that as it may, Drag Me To Hell is as fun a romp as any horror film has the right to be, and the slam-bang finale, not to give anything away, is right up there with the best of 'em.

Under discussion:

Hangover  (2009)

Once it was John Landis and Animal House and Bob Clark and his Porky's films. Now, when one thinks low brow frat boy humor, one’s mind tends to drift toward the films of Todd Phillips. Most likely the name will not ring a bell - his name is not big enough to create buzz from the multi-plex masses, nor indie enough to incite idol worship from the cinephiliac crowd - but his films (site specifically, Road Trip and Old School) are among the so-called elite of the genre.

Yet, with the exception of a few (a very few) laughs interspersed within the toilet nyucks of Old School, Phillips is not exactly known for his classic comedic skills. He is known for a low brow technique of fart, feces and penis jokes, and being that guy who let man-child Will Ferrell run around completely stark-raving naked throughout his most well known film.

His films, which also include the Starsky & Hutch retread and the somewhat underappreciated School for Scoundrels, have always seemed chock full of cheaply set-up, crass, bottom feeder humor not fit for anyone who has progressed beyond the age of thirteen – unless they are very drunk or very stoned. In Phillips’ defense though, these are probably the two most popular manners of watching his work, so I suppose in a way this approach works for him. It has never worked for me though.

With all this in mind, I was pleasantly, and thoroughly surprised as I sat there in the dark watching his latest foray into the arena of the overgrown man-child, The Hangover. The film, set during the day after a night of bachelor party debauchery in Las Vegas, is smartly written and well acted and is directed with an almost slick winking of the camera-eye at the cinematic legacy that is Sin City. In a nutshell, Todd Phillips has finally done good.

The (appropriately titled) Hangover stars Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis as three friends who wake up in a beyond trashed Vegas hotel room with a live tiger, a missing groom and no recollection whatsoever of what happened the night before that put them in such a state. Once they brush themselves off, put on their pants, lock the tiger in the bathroom and pick-up their stolen police car from the valet, the adventure to regain their memories and rescue their missing friend begins in earnest.

As the movie progresses and our heroes (of sorts) become more and more entrenched in the ramifications of last night, the scenarios get curiouser and curiouser, and the laughs get hairier and hairier. Eventually there are arrests and kidnappings and ransom demands and surprise marriages and Mike Tyson and a pretty well played Rain Man meets 21 skit – and of course the obligatory naked man leaping out of the trunk and kicking everyone’s asses. Each new trouble becoming even worse than the one before and in turn funnier than the one before.

It is within this structure that The Hangover becomes something more than mere dirty humor. It is within these confines that The Hangover becomes more of something on par with Arthur Hiller's The Out of Towners. Just like poor schmuck Jack Lemmon and his put upon wife Sandy Dennis in that 1970 comedy, Cooper, Helms and Galifianakis drown deeper and deeper and even deeper into a domino effect of unfortunate hilarity. As I said above, each new misstep becomes even more unbelievable than the last and in turn funnier than the one before.

The ending may get a bit sickly sweet at times - schmaltz doesn't really go well with what else Phillips and his Vegas boys have going here - and could have probably been left undone. Perhaps, as the slogan alludes to, Phillips should have kept what happened in Vegas, in Vegas. The schmaltzy finale aside though, in a nutshell, the film done good.