Sweetgrass

USA // 2009 // Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor //June 18, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Sweetgrass is being featured in a limited engagement from June 18-24, 2010 at the Webster University Film Series.]

B - Raw and curiously engrossing, Sweetgrass is unwavering in its sparing, hard-edged appraisal of a vanishing way of life. While Barbash and Castaing-Taylor are palpably fascinated by the Allestad sheep ranch, where men on horseback still graze their herds in the high country of Montana, the film aims for something far more lyrical than a mere anthropological treatise on the West. Spiritually urgent and yet possessing a bittersweet lassitude, Sweetgrass bears witness to uncommonly cruel pastoral patterns that once characterized America's proud self-conception, but are now forgotten, withered, and nearly vanished. Nocturnal visits from hungry grizzlies and other daunting challenges lend the story a dose of drama, but the film-makers are more assured when they are simply observing the sensory character of herding life with reverent diligence. The enduring sights and sounds are sustained, pensive, and faintly abstract, whether the dirty-white blur of hundreds of sheep picking their way through a stream, or the uncanny hush of men who are comfortable sitting in silence. Sweetgrass might be an essentially American portrait, but the film's closest kin might be Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze, as both share a quiet attentiveness borne of equal parts absorption and gentle sorrow.

The Wolfman

2010 // UK - USA // Joe Johnston // June 14, 2010 // DVD - Universal (2010) (Unrated Director's Cut)

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]​

C- - I have to give screenwriters Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self a point for hewing to the essential elements for an old-fashioned werewolf feature, particularly the now-slightly-subversive notion that the luckless protagonist must perish by the time the credits roll. Unfortunately, the film tips its hand entirely too early with respect to the progenitor lycanthrope, and as a result the whole enterprise runs out of steam long before the clunky, climactic werewolf-on-werewolf brawl. The Victorian-gothic production design is admittedly luscious, even downright bewitching at times, but this only contributes to The Wolfman's disjointed tone. When the titular monster is nowhere to be seen, it's an atmospheric B-movie, stuffed with faux-gravitas and lent a dollop of menace by Anthony Hopkins' glowering, lip-licking presence. When the werewolf attacks, meanwhile, the film veers off into slasher-flick camp, clashing dreadfully with the chilly tone that dominates elsewhere. The film's R rating is utterly unnecessary, other than to provide the beast with license to rend limbs, slash bowels, and devour a victim's liver. The crowning disappointment is that while the film-makers capitalize on the evocative power of the classic Universal feature, they disregard the screamingly obvious role of the werewolf myth as a metaphor for the unrestrained id.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2009 // Sweden // Niels Arden Oplev // May 1, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

B- - The film adaptation of the late Stieg Larsson's phenomenally popular novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is a nearly flawless Swedish replica of a lurid Hollywood thriller. Whether that statement represents high praise or a backhand compliment depends on one's regard for lurid Hollywood thrillers, but director Niels Arden Oplev has created, at minimum, a fierce little whodunit that is unwavering in its crackling regard for its heroine. That would be Lisbeth Salander, a misfit hacker with anemic social skills and an eidetic memory, embodied with spooky precision by Noomi Rapace. Oddly alluring and as tightly wound as a feral cat, Rapace is far more compelling than Michael Nyqvist's doughy journalist or the film's convoluted story of a vanished teen. Oplev, to his credit, preserves the novel's righteous anger at misogynistic violence, and also its flair for lending thrilling significance to the tiniest of clues. However, the film's gloomy aesthetic and faux-provocative shocks don't conceal its fundamentally disposable nature. Salander may add some texture to the ranks of fictional female sleuths, but Girl is still just crime, peril, and conspiracy recast as entertainment, a movie-of-the-week seen through a Scandinavian, post-Thomas Harris lens.

The Losers

2010 // USA // Sylvain White // April 29, 2010 // Theatrical Print (AMC Esquire)

C - Adapted from the comic of the same name by writer Andy Diggle and illustrator Jocks, The Losers suffers from a sloppy sort of faithfulness to its source material's story, motifs, and dialogue. Exaggerated generic elements are essential to the language of the comics medium, but on the screen, The Losers' techno-thriller gobbledygook and melodramatic tropes just seem like the markers of lazy film-making. ("Hey, if we're going to incinerate a bunch of hapless kids, we might as well linger on the charred teddy bear. Y'know, for pathos.") Still, aside from some cringe-worthy racial "humor," there's not much about this A-Team variation that's actively bad. The Losers delivers exactly what one expects of it: wise-cracking Special Forces badasses (and one obligatory hot chick) pulling off hyper-violent heists. It's often fun, occasionally funny, and utterly forgettable. Unfortunately, few of the actors seems to realize just what sort of film they're making here. The exceptions are Jason Patric as spook super-villain Max, who nails the necessary blend of menace and high camp, and to a lesser extent Chris Evans, who's clearly having fun playing a bit against type as a high-strung, motormouth hacker. Ultimately, The Losers is just ninety minutes of stuff blowing up real good.

Green Zone

2010 // USA //Paul Greengrass // April 3, 2010 // Theatrical Print (AMC West Olive)

C+ - In Green Zone, Paul Greengrass employs his relentless, You-Are-There approach to action film-making to establish a liberal, skeptical cinematic counter-myth to the corrupted, calcifying historical Iraq War narrative. This loose adaptation of Imperial Life in the Emerald City is justly cynical about the 2003 invasion. However, Greengrass' fictionalized take on the subject diminishes the real lies and crimes behind the war. While journalists from Thomas Ricks to Greg Palast are still searching for the truth, Greengrass seems content with a pat conclusion that casts his film as a kind of anti-war First Blood. At least Greengrass is a sufficient talent to render the enterprise stirring, and Green Zone throbs with the same searing momentum as the director's Bourne installments. One barely gets a moment to breathe as the film's (all-too-believable) conspiracy unravels. Greengrass' imagery of fiery, war-shattered Iraq is both jarring and gnawingly familiar, and Damon is working at the peak of his tough-guy powers. However, artful thrills can't mask the formulaic outline to the proceedings—Will Greg Kinnear's slimy Pentagon bureaucrat get his comeuppance?—or the sense that this subject deserves better. Seven years on, the definitive film about the Iraq War is still In the Loop.

The Art of the Steal

2009 // USA // Don Argott // March 25, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

B - Narrowness of scope serves The Art of the Steal well. While the film boasts the righteous outrage of a more sweeping polemic such as Food, Inc., director Don Argott approaches his subject--the legal looting of the priceless Albert Barnes art collection by Philadelphia's political and cultural elite--as an act of slow-motion theft. Accordingly, the film has the feel of a heist documentary stood on its head, detailing how one man's bequest to the world was systematically dismantled by those who object to his unconventional views on art. The film's uneven pacing and undistinguished style aren't especially bothersome when the story is this intrinsically compelling and passionately told. Argott frames his story as part Lear-like tragedy about the reaving of a legacy, and part exposé on the dastardly deeds of rapacious Philly blue-noses. It's fairly stunning that several of Argott's villains--a former head of the Barnes Foundation, former governor, and former attorney-general--were willing to appear in his film and smugly characterize the looting of the collection as a proud moment. These confessions only heighten the film's potent sense of loss, as does the reverential footage of Barnes' museum in both its early and final days.