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Gateway Cinephile

Appreciation and Criticism of Cinema Through Heartland Eyes
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Films by Title Gateway Cinephile Posts by Date The Take-Up and Other Posts by Date Horror Cinema David Lynch's Shorts John Ford's Silents H. P. Lovecraft Adaptations Twin Peaks: The Return Westworld Freeze Frame Archive
What I Read
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SLIFF 2009: Blackspot

2008 // New Zealand // Ben Hawker // November 13, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

For what it is--an ultra-low-budget bit of horror mindfuckery that employs only a handful of actors and locations--Ben Hawker's Blackspot is a worthwhile, white-knuckle stuff. While Hawker cribs a little from urban legend for his story, Blackspot is essentially a pleasurable mash-up of contemporary horror film tropes, Twilight Zone twists and "It-Was-All-a-Dream" fake-outs, and, most surprisingly, David's Lynch brand of pitch-black psychological surrealism. It's hard not to ignore the debt to Lynch in the film's identity-swapping and (seemingly) context-free interludes, not to mention its direct referencing of Lost Highway's iconographic speeding interstate stripes. Hawker nails both the distinctive creepiness of a nocturnal rural road at night as well as the flesh-crawling sense of the uncanny that pervades nightmares. Yet he is too enamored with jump-scares and comic releases to permit grimness to overtake the film. This is both to Blackspot's advantage and its detriment, stranding it in a middle ground between an old-school ghost story and something more ambitious. While Hawker eventually comes around to something like an explanation for all the preceding weirdness, it seems weak tea compared to the dizzying fear that swells the film's best moments.

PostedNovember 14, 2009
AuthorAndrew Wyatt
CategoriesSLIFF 2009
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SLIFF 2009: XXY

2007 // Argentina // Lucía Puenzo // November 13, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

High-profile films that address intersexuality are few and far between—When will HBO ever pull together that rumored Middlesex adaptation?—and so it's no small thing when a work like XXY comes along, which tackles the reality with commendable sensitivity and frankness. Director Puenzo takes her sweet time uncoiling the story of Alex, an adolescent intersexual who has been living as a girl in an Argentine seaside town. The story is a slight little thing, and it's hard to shake the disappointment that Puenzo didn't do a little more with the subject than offer a slice of Alex's life at a critical juncture in the development of her identity and sexuality. Furthermore, the concessions to melodrama—a gratuitous rape scene especially—make the film less potent, not more. Still, XXY is poignant and appropriately anxious in tone, and its principal characters are full of subtly conveyed intricacies that elevate it beyond a crude coming-out story (of sorts). Puenzo utilizes a richly presented sun-bleached aesthetic and a prominent marine life motif to fine effect. The film's emotional success, however, lies principally with a Inés Efron, who at twenty-two plays the fifteen-year-old Alex with a riveting blend of boldness, anger, and vulnerability.

PostedNovember 14, 2009
AuthorAndrew Wyatt
CategoriesSLIFF 2009
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SLIFF 2009: North Face

2008 // Germany - Austria // Philipp Stölzl // November 13, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Richard Wagner is name-checked in Philipp Stölzl Nazi-era mountaineering thriller, North Face, which is appropriate (and not just due to the swastikas). Towering and bombastic, often in moments when such a grandiose tone is entirely unearned, the film chronicles the attempt by two German enlisted men goaded by Nazi propaganda (and a little ambition) to conquer the north face--a.k.a., "The Murder Wall"--of the Eiger in the Bernese Alps. Stölzl's approach is strictly Hollywood by way of Deutschland, complete with soaring orchestral gestures and a pining love interest (Johanna Wokalek, as far from her radical she-devil in The Baader-Meinhof Complex as can be.) The director frequently overplays his hand, particularly with vaguely repugnant supporting characters that have little function other than to compare unfavorably to our Aryan heroes. Which isn't to say the North Face isn't damn thrilling in the moment, particularly with Stölzl keeps his focus on the climbers' ordeal and their astoundingly low-tech methods and tools. With a little CGI wizardry, the film renders the Eiger as a truly terrifying creature in its own right, seemingly more at home in one of Wagner's Teutonic myths (or Middle-Earth) than Switzerland.

PostedNovember 14, 2009
AuthorAndrew Wyatt
CategoriesSLIFF 2009
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SLIFF 2009: An Education

2009 // UK // Lone Scherfig // November 12, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

An Education is a fairly conventional coming-of-age-story that is enlivened and elevated by abundant, magnificent acting. To be sure, Nick Hornby's screenplay boasts plenty of cheek and a canny, understated awareness of its early 1960s British setting. Meanwhile, director Lone Scherfig operates in a mode that is comfortable with melodrama and also assured enough to toss aside its emotional excesses. Scherfig permits her narrative's most pivotal developments to unfold off-screen, but her commanding storytelling ensures that the film never misses a beat. Everything we need to know is up there. That said, An Education would probably have been nothing more than an old story--girl falls for charming cad, girl gets burned, girl moves on--told quite well. It would have, that is, if not for a plethora of dazzling performances. Carey Mulligan is almost spookily well-cast as ambitious and dissatisfied teen Jenny, but equally vital are Peter Sarsgaard in a challenging role as her creepy, oddly vulnerable, and (much) older paramour, and an engrossing Alfred Molina, proving yet again that his best characters are usually well-meaning boobs. Heck, Rosamund Pike deserves praise for lending texture to her ditsy playgirl almost entirely through sideways glances and glum expressions.

PostedNovember 12, 2009
AuthorAndrew Wyatt
CategoriesSLIFF 2009
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Antichrist

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

2009 // Denmark // Lars von Trier // November 3, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

B - Antichrist is an aggressively unpleasant film, but that's not the same thing as a bad film. In fact, the latest effort from Lars von Trier, the noted asshole and self-appointed ambassador of pretentious European film-making, is the most intriguing work from the director I've yet seen. I have never understood the contempt his films often arouse, but my prior experience with von Trier has been admittedly underwhelming. Antichrist, however, proves to be audacious and original. The film is suffused with unforgettable images, seemingly plucked out of a bad dream and given a rotten, mythic life on the screen. Von Trier has achieved a fresh alchemy, blending his essential cynicism with intellectually engrossing themes and a new-found instinct for terror. While a bothersome lack of emotional heft prevents it from succeeding as a genuine work of horror, Antichrist is nonetheless harrowing, provocative stuff. It seems ordained to lurk in the cellar of cinema for years to come, it noisome bellows drawing attention to our unexamined assumptions about remorse, sex, and especially gender. You are forewarned: von Trier has summoned forth an ugly, ugly beast, and staring it down is not enjoyable in the least, but there is something nonetheless compelling in its scabrous eyes.

The film declares its interests with full-throated conviction in an unbearably gorgeous prologue, shot in luminous black-and-white and presented in ultra-slow motion. While an aria from Handel's Rinaldo evokes a sacred tone, the nameless He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) engage in some apparently mind-shattering shower sex that eventually migrates to floor and bed. So rapturous is their lovemaking that the couple fails to notice when their toddler son leaps from his crib, opens a baby gate, climbs on a table, and steps out an open window, plummeting to a sumptuously captured death. Here von Trier entwines sex and death by means of style and storytelling, muddling their flavors to create a concoction that is simultaneously horrific and ecstatic.

She is hospitalized following the funeral, once it becomes apparent that the tragedy has utterly broken her will to live. He, a psychotherapist simmering with restrained intellectual arrogance, decides that her treatment is not working, and resolves to bring his wife home, take her off medication, and subject her to his brand of therapy. Eventually, he brings her to Eden, a cabin in the woods where she once labored on a dissertation on the history of misogynistic violence. What exactly transpires in the forest I won't say, except that it revolves around the power struggle between this devious, controlling man and this astute woman who is in a vulnerable state, and possibly losing her mind.

It's worth taking a moment here to dispose of any suspicion that von Trier, whose films have always maintained a chilly distance from his characters while subjecting them to nasty circumstances, exhibits anything like warmth for these people. He and She are potent symbols, constructed explicitly for the purpose of Antichrist's exploration of repressed fears, but they aren't really characters. We dread for them, but only because von Trier does such an exquisite job of suggesting looming calamity. And when the blood starts to fly, it's horrifying strictly because--as in Argento's baroque nightmares and the countless Saws and Hostels--we can readily imagine the pain. However, von Trier achieves something infinitely more stimulating and disturbing than mere art-house torture porn, because he tethers the scattered moments of gore to a stimulating story steeped in the elements. Spilled blood and rent flesh fit comfortably within Antichrist's motifs of natural savagery and ugliness: snow, rain, hail, gnarled trees, bloated ticks, falling acorns, and woodland animals that ooze with sinister portent.

The novelty of Antichrist is its frank tackling of matters often neglected by "serious" cinema, and long buried as a subtext in genre film, especially horror. Von Trier has presented one of first films that I can recall to explicitly invoke and critique the Othering of a gender, an Othering that goes far beyond run-of-the-mill dehumanization into outright demonization. The fundamental terror that Antichrist exploits is androphobia-gynophobia, a fear that the other gender is alien, frightening, unfathomable, and, above all, Evil. The film's cosmology--or at least the cosmology that threatens to intrude on its secular starting point--is a Manichaean one, where goodness resides in the spiritual and evil dwells in the material. With admirable agility, von Trier ties this worldview to a Christian-pagan conception of the link between nature and feminine power. Satan is manifest in the natural world; women are attuned to the natural world; ergo, women are emissaries of Satan. In her dissertation, entitled "Gynocide," Gainsbourg's She attempted to refute this superstitious and misogynistic nonsense, illustrating how it once led to witch burnings. However, one of von Trier's theses in Antichrist is the seductive nature of sexist mythologizing. Even those who should know better can fall victim to ancient bigotries, especially when they dovetail neatly with unresolved anxieties and festering traumas.

This isn't to say that She is villain of Antichrist. It's debatable whether the term is even applicable to von Trier's fable, which is intriguingly ambiguous despite the spiritual and fleshy terror it engenders. Indeed, one of the film's low-key achievements is its uncanny portrayal of a male antagonist who is outwardly selfless and reasonable but whose actions are manipulative and domineering. Dafoe's He is a supremely subtle kind of monster, whose unflappable confidence and insipid psychological exercises hold a seed of the sinister, one that only expands as the film unspools (and unravels). At one point, He tosses aside any pretense of equality or humanity in his relationship with She, retorting "You don't have to understand; just do what I say."  Von Trier's cynicism has always unshackled him from facile and flaccid romantic conventions, especially the archetypes of the Good Guy and Bad Guy. His films insist that we are all bad guys. This attitude has often led to dismal aimlessness in his films, but in Antichrist, the director exhibits a taut confidence with contradiction. He is resolute in the portrayal of He as a fundamentally despicable man, even as he provokes our pity at the horrors He endures.

Van Trier unfortunately relies on unnecessary excess in Antichrist's final act. The film's grisliest moments aren't enhanced by the director's unflinching devotion to capturing every bloody detail. It doesn't demand much skill to provoke squirming discomfort from an audience with gratuitous shots of battered, pierced, and snipped flesh. This is especially unsatisfactory given that von Trier elsewhere exhibits a hitherto unforeseen talent for restrained horror. Following in the tradition of Cronenberg at his most surreal and Lynch at his finest, von Trier renders the most banal locales with a Luciferian menace. Consistent with his theme of a natural world suffused with evil, he persuades through unnerving visuals and sound design, evoking a setting where, for example, a rustling stand of ferns becomes a lair for unfathomable malice. It is this vital instinct for the uncanny that lends the film its powerful atmosphere of dread. We are unsettled, yet we don't know why. We fear something, but we don't know what. (Or at least we cannot or will not say it out loud.) The aloofness that von Trier stubbornly refuses to shake--or simply can't shake--does nothing to diminish Antichrist's skin-crawling potency. More like this, please, Lars.

PostedNovember 6, 2009
AuthorAndrew Wyatt
CategoriesReviews
CommentPost a comment
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Where the Wild Things Are

It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Hurt

2009 // USA // Spike Jonze // November 1, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

C* - To call Spike Jonze's bewildering, uneasy Where the Wild Things Are an "adaptation" of Maurice Sendak's trim little bedtime story strikes me as the faultiest use of the term since David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. While Jonze's film co-opts Sendak's indelible creature designs and the general thrust of his tale—a boy journeys to an untamed island, is crowned king of the resident monsters, becomes disillusioned, and returns home—it contains little else that is familiar, either from the source material or the whole history of films about children and childhood. This film is wondrous, exhausting, confused, offensive, and deeply affecting, often at the same time. Above all, it is unremittingly odd. It is without question one of the most confounding films I've seen in the past decade, and I've seen INLAND EMPIRE. The space between a film that says uncommon things in unfamiliar ways and a film that has no conception of what it is trying to say... well, that is a narrow and shadowed gap, and Where the Wild Things Are squats squarely in it. The adaptation of a beloved children's book should be a sure-fire opportunity to churn out a crowd-pleasing mediocrity. Somehow, for reasons that only he likely understands, Jonze has refashioned Sendak's tale into a challenging, fractured, and often frustrating work of cinema, and for that I still can't decide whether he deserves some sort of auteur medal or a stint in the time-out corner.

Jonze opens his film by painting a markedly unflattering portrait of Max (Max Records), a grade school terror whose response when things don't go his way ranges from violent rage to weepy petulance. On the sympathetic child protagonist scale, Max ranks well below the titular heroine of Henry Selick's exquisite Coraline, who might have been a selfish brat, but was at least controllable. Max, meanwhile, is prone to threatening the dog with a fork when he's bored, smashing things when he feels snubbed, and even biting his own mother (Catherine Keener) when she has the gall to serve frozen corn for dinner. However, even as Jonze presents Max as a little monster, he shrewdly sketches in a more tender and vulnerable dimension to the boy's home life, whether through the rambling and oddly sad story of vampires he spins at his mom's feet or the haunted terror in his eyes when a clueless teacher explains that the sun will one day burn out. Jonze asks that we assimilate these contradictory reactions to the young hero, anticipating some comeuppance for his nasty behavior and yet also evoking our own childhood feelings of betrayal, loneliness, and despair.

A vicious tussle with Mom eventually sends Max bolting out the front door and on his way to the land of the Wild Things. It's a seamless transition, with Jonze providing no obvious shift in style to signify where reality ends and Max's tantrum-born flight of fancy begins. Ultimately, however, the change proves to be quite jarring, as the film's prior realism is replaced by a mode of storytelling that has all the aesthetics of realism, but is dense with allegory and abstraction. I hesitate to say that Jonze's resolve to shoot both modes of the film with handheld cameras in a naturalistic style is a failure, if only because it's an unconventional choice that results in some singularly lovely imagery. However, it does represent a miscalculation that embodies many of Wild Things' larger problems, in that Jonze's somewhat heedless and shortsighted commitment to a set of artistic preferences often results in tonal confusion.

The Wild Things themselves also exemplify this pitfall. On the one hand, the monsters that Max encounters and eventually comes to rule are marvelous creations of costuming, puppetry, and computer animation. They are as close as a live-action film could possibly come to replicating the menace and charm of Sendak's distinctive illustrations. However, Jonze uses the Wild Things in a manner that is much more ambitious than the book' gnashing and roaring bogeymen. His story demands characters, and that necessitates that his Wild Things be distinctive and reasonably expressive. Thus, the film's monsters boast the movements of people in sports mascot costumes, the voices of adult actors, and dialog reminiscent of children Max's age. This combination proves to be a little unsettling; not exactly Uncanny Valley territory, but something related. As an example, Max's closest companion among the Wild Things is Carol, a horned ogre that walks like Sweetums the Muppet, talks like James Gandolfini, and behaves like a bad-tempered third grader. It's just as disturbing as it sounds.

The land of the Wild Things as envisioned by Jonze has none of Sendak's wonderfully textured jungles, but it's still a savage and memorable country, full of airy woodlands, vast deserts, silvery beaches, and rugged canyons. Tight shots of the monsters' shaggy bulk and toothy grins alternate with wide shots that emphasize the enormity of the natural world, contrasting Max's viewpoint with a more omniscient perspective. The Wild Things' spherical fortress takes on the tragic character of a Tower of Babel, as Max's dream of a playland with robot servants bumps into the hard reality of unfinished wood and stone. (In this, Wild Things contains a subtle retort to Up's guiltless indulgence of "secret clubhouse" fantasies.)

There isn't much of a plot, per se, during Max's tenure as King of the Wild Things. In a cascade of set pieces, Jonze employs the monsters in peculiar bits of psychological role-play, through which Max explores his conflicts with the people in his life and with facets of his own personality. It's futile to attempt to draw one-to-one parallels between the real world and the island of the Wild Things. Jonze weaves a tapestry of analogy that is so dense it sometimes wriggles out of his control, as the story flits breathlessly between events that seem to ooze with deeper meaning and yet remain obscure in their implications. There's also the occasional sedate interlude where the Wild Things talk in hushed tones and with disarming frankness about their sadness and the vain search for a simple remedy to that pain.

For better or for worse, Jonze exhibits a remarkable ability to convey the spirit of children at play, a spirit that, no matter how ecstatic the moment might prove, is always fraught with the tension of hovering trauma. Even in the moments that are supposed to be "fun"—e.g., the Wild Things howling with delight atop the cliffs as Max gleefully urges them on—there is a gnawing undercurrent of anxiety. The Wild Things are simply too reckless and too selfish for someone not to get hurt eventually, physically or emotionally. I can't say what Jonze's goal was, but if he intended Wild Things to evoke the unpredictable character of childhood, always pulling in different directions and skittering on the precipice of calamity, then he succeeded spectacularly. It's a mood I've never quite felt before in any film, and it stands as a bold counter-point to the conventional depiction of childhood as idyllic rather than erratic. If this mood wasn't Jonze's goal, then Wild Things is just a nerve-wracking ordeal whose conception of "fun" is a complete mess.

What truly renders Wild Things problematic is its off-putting morality. One can easily regard Max's rule of the Wild Things as metaphorical, a representation of his struggle to develop a mature approach to socialization. Not so the real-world sequences that bookend the film. Jonze gambles by presenting Max as a truly horrible child, and it might have paid off had the boy's time among the Wild Things prompted him to amend for his past misdeeds, or at least apologize to those he has wronged. Yet Jonze allows Max to return to his life without any consequences for his atrocious behavior. He's warmly embraced after his absence—apparently brief in the real world—and gratefully served his dinner, as though he did something worthy of reward instead of punishment. It's a vaguely repugnant message: run away when you don't get your way and your family will miss you and shower you with kisses and chocolate cake upon your return. The film's coda contains barely a hint that Max has learned anything from the Wild Things, and that's both irksome and bafflingly contrary to the aura of self-discovery that Jonze strives to evoke elsewhere.

* I have bestowed a rating of "C" on this film, partly because I have no notion of how to otherwise quantify it. It's my crude attempt to split the difference, but it captures neither the film's weird, poignant charm, nor is deeply troubling flaws.

Post-Script: I see now that the literate and always insightful Glenn Kenny nails the problem with the film's conclusion with far more precision (and a tad more hostility) than I did:

And I do believe that a big part of my problem with the film stems from what might be seen as an Eggersian attitude, for I found the film's predominant mode of being was not so much as a celebration of childhood, or a painstaking examination of childhood emotional states, as I found it to be a rather snotty privileging of childhood, specifically male childhood. I was particularly put off by the film's coda (I don't know that this is actually a spoiler, but I suppose I ought to alert you), which seems to direct a very specific message at single mothers, that message being, if you even try to carve out a minute corner of life for yourself, your little boy is going to turn on you, and then you'll be sorry, so best not to even go there.
PostedNovember 3, 2009
AuthorAndrew Wyatt
CategoriesReviews
2 CommentsPost a comment
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