Ran

1985 // Japan // Akira Kurosawa // July 5, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Ran is being screened on July 2-6 and 8, 2010 as a part of the Webster University Film Series' retrospective on the films of Akira Kurosawa, in honor of his centennial birthday.]

Ran is something of a seminal film for me. It was not only the first Kurosawa film I ever saw, but also the first non-animated Japanese film and the first non-English-language epic. It remains the only staging, adaptation, or re-imagining of King Lear I've ever seen, live or filmed. On this point, I think that Kurosawa's take—which owes as much, if not more, to legends of the historical daimyo Mori Motonari than it does to the Bard—makes for better cinema than a stricter adaptation of Lear might have made. Ran doesn't really have any analogues to the often confusing Gloucester plot threads in Shakespeare's tragedy. The story rests on the simple formula of the Great Lord and the Three Sons, with Lady Kaede thrown in as the wild card (or the ace up Misfortune's sleeve, depending on you look at it). That said, at its core, Ran is fundamentally a singularly bleak Shakespearean tragedy, stocked with characters who lament (to the heavens, no less) the cruel, capricious, bloody nature of the human condition in suitably purple prose. It's a flawlessly grim film, where even the jester Kyoami's japes seem ripe with dire portent, and it is this discipline in tone that prevents Ran from sliding into the depths of angst-ridden self-parody.

Consistent with what I suspect is the pattern for most viewers, the first time I saw the film, the bloody siege of the Third Castle is what stuck in my mind, along with Tatsuya Nakadai's frightening visage. To be sure, the siege remains a brutal, utterly de-romanticized depiction of warfare, but repeat viewings reveal a slower film than one might remember, replete with pauses, meanderings, and lengthy shots of little more than Nakadai's Hidetora reacting to each fresh twist of fate with stupefied, goggle-eyed horror. Which isn't to say that Ran is a sedate film, by any means. With the exception of the opening sequence on a bucolic green hilltop, the scenes in which very little action is occurring are nonetheless characterized by an uncanny "offness," frequently underlined by natural sounds that intrude into visually placid moments, bestowing a sense of alarm and discord. This gives the audience ample time to savor the pure cinematic majesty of the film, while still maintaining a gnawing awareness that events are tumbling into chaos.

This was my first time experiencing Ran on the big screen, and I discerned endless details that I had never picked up on before. The most startling occurs in the final shots, as Suburo's army marches away in grief across a barren plain. Eventually the films cuts to a closer shot of the orange cliffs that loom behind the army, where blind Tsurumaru waits on the precipice for his sister. I had never before observed that Tsurumaru is actually visible in that initial long shot, as little more than a dot on the cliffs. That detail, putting an actor on that precipice, all so that there would be that little shadowed speck there, and the audience would gasp, "Oh my God, is that the blind guy, still standing there...?" just before the cut that confirms it... well, that's what epic film-making in the days before CGI was all about.

Winter's Bone

2010 // USA // Debra Granik // June 28, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

B+ - The chilly Ozark landscape of Winter's Bone is a skuzzy nightmare version of backwoods Middle America, where every family is linked through tangled blood relations and everyone cooks crystal meth. This city boy can't attest to the authenticity of the rural Missouri portrayed in Debra Granik's film, but the tone of her direction is such that realism takes a back seat to the mythic resonance of seventeen-year-old Ree's (Jennifer Lawrence) journey. The film's depiction of Ree's materially urgent yet emotionally ambivalent search for her bail-bond-skipping father owes much to noir conventions and the chthonic forays of Greek legend. In this tale, however, the Hero wanders in despairing circles, and her dragons are an empty fridge, a corrupt sheriff, and rotten-toothed relations who value secrecy more than kinship. Lawrence shines, and the estimable John Hawkes' turn as Ree's reckless uncle provides jolts of wiry menace and righteous wrath. The script is both frank and admirably subtle, and Granick's bracingly confident hand relies on expressive touches that lend this regional melodrama the feel of real cinema. Certainly, the ending is garish and absurdly tidy, but there is also unease there, as well as a quiet lamentation for a fallen world.

Toy Story 3

This Is the End, Beautiful Friend

2010 // USA // Lee Unkrich // June 21, 2010 // 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli)

A- - I've previously observed that the most gleefully gratifying aspect of Pixar's triumph over the realms of American feature animation has been the burgeoning thematic sophistication of its films, which have evolved from wholesome entertainments into nimble and sensitive works of art. However, I've also long held the perhaps heretical view among Pixar aficionados that Toy Story and Toy Story 2, despite their charming qualities and seminal status in animated cinema, seem, shall we say, slighter than the later-model Pixar efforts. The first two chapters in the saga of Woody and Buzz Lightyear are unambiguously lesser films when held alongside subsequent films. Little in the first two Toy Story films compares to Ratatouille's virtuoso storytelling, WALL●E's sweeping sci-fi explorations, or Up's adroit blending of giddy thrills and profound sorrow. For this reason, there is a rich sense of fulfillment to be had in Toy Story 3, quite apart from its inherent sensory and emotional pleasures. Director Lee Unkrich—here taking solo helming duties for the first time—expands the scope of the studio's most familiar franchise to encompass delicate matters such as emotional abuse, the sting of betrayal, class-based tyranny, and the specter of mortality. Yet Toy Story 3 never loses sight of the fundamental appeal of pint-sized adventure in the perilous wilderness of suburbia, nor of the essential pathos of growing up, here handled (as always) with the utmost care. The third chapter in the Disney / Pixar behemoth reveals itself to be the best: gorgeous, intricate, a little frightening, and shamelessly touching.

The film opens with a ticklish flashback sequence that visualizes a child's frenetic fantasies on a grand scale, as young Andy (Charlies Bright) casts Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen), and the other toys in an outlandish adventure. In the present day, however, the toys are lamenting their long state of disuse just as seventeen-year-old Andy (John Morris) is about to depart for college. The inevitable emotional separation from his grown-up owner haunted Woody in the second film, but it seemed a distant thing. At the outset of Toy Story 3, this slow-motion calamity has finally come to pass for all of Andy's playthings. (Oddly enough, only Woody, as the designated Best Friend, has a chance to tag along to college as a keepsake, a privilege that engenders resentment from the other toys.) Banishment to the attic is the toys' most likely fate—a dull prospect, yet preferable to the landfill—but a series of mix-ups and hasty gambits lands them in the donation bin at Sunnyside Daycare. There they meet a faction of second-hand toys led by the genial magenta teddy bear, Lotso (Ned Beatty), who speaks glowingly of the never-ending cohorts of playmates at the daycare. Naturally, not all is as it seems at Sunnyside: Andy's toys discover to their horror that as "new recruits" they've been relegated to a gaggle of savage toddlers who only know how to bite, bash, and break. (The recommended age metric, it would seem, is less about the safety of the child than that of the toy.) It turns out that Lotso, jilted by a former owner and seething with bitterness, is running Sunnyside as if it were a prison, complete with a rigid caste system and fearsome punishments, such as banishment to the dreaded (Sand) Box.

Consistent with the previous chapters in the series, the narrative of Toy Story 3 is essentially a framework for an extended slapstick adventure tale, although the threat of outright destruction has never been as acute for the toys as it is here. The urgency of a reunion with Andy propels the story forward through a landscape fraught with peril for our eight- to twelve-inch heroes. However, their owner's nascent adulthood heightens the ambiguity of such a reunion. Whereas the primary villains of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 were humans who failed to recognize the sentimental value of the toys to their rightful owner, this outing's antagonists are other playthings who have been traumatized and hardened by their past experiences. On another level, however, the true villain of Toy Story 3 is mortality itself, which menaces our little heroes in a manner that is almost disconcerting for a children's movie. The emotional earnestness of the Toy Story films has always seemed a bit suspect—Can we truly be moved by the travails of plastic junk, no matter how robust the allegorical aspects of their story?—but here the dread of abandonment is paired with a genuinely frightening threat of outright annihilation. One of the film's most affecting scenes confronts the compulsive need to struggle against oblivion, and, with superb poignancy, reveals our heroes' grim resolve to face their demise hand-in-hand. (Their eventual salvation by means of a deus ex machina only moderately detracts from this sequence's potency.)

Needless to say, the visuals of Toy Story 3 are tremendously lush and vibrant. The animators paint a setting of colossal corridors and vast playgrounds, where everything pops with a level of detail that puts even Ratatouille's magnificently realized kitchen to shame. There is an element of undistilled delight in seeing characters created fifteen years ago given life within a reality that finally feels settled and seamless. The script is admirably witty, although the film flirts with raunchy and scatological humor to an unfortunate extent not observed in prior Pixar films. There are plenty of gags that are unmistakably geared towards the adults in the audience, but the film's bountiful cinematic allusions are far more memorable and stimulating. Much of the extensive Sunnyside segment of the film plays as a riff on The Great Escape, but there are abundant nods to influences ranging from Cool Hand Luke to The Ten Commandments, from The Return of the Jedi to The Exorcist. However, Unkrich maintains a generous focus on the story at hand, such that these elements never attain the air of stilted homages or winking novelties, but rather signify a disciplined use of generic tropes to tell a sentimental adventure yarn.

Mawkishness is an obvious risk when one's very subject matter is childhood nostalgia, yet Toy Story 3 evades it with grace by showing us—more so than its predecessors—the authentic creative joy of kids, where the toys are beloved but the act of play is what endures. The film poses that while the relics of our past might exert a powerful magnetism over us, nostalgia is ultimately wrought from emotion and memory, not objects. The authenticity of the film's final scenes, as Andy at last lets go of his old friends, is rooted in the clarity and pain of his sudden revelation that his childhood is gone forever. If there is a spot of comfort, it lies in the notion that Woody the Cowboy is still out there somewhere, riding alongside another little buckaroo.

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.

Orphan

2009 // USA // Jaume Collet-Serra // June 13, 2010 // Blu-ray - Warner Brothers (2009)

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Steadfastly ridiculous from its opening moments to its unnecessarily prolonged conclusion, and yet still a rather fun, ghastly ride, Jaume Collet-Serra's odd little thriller gets lots of mileage out of the Evil Kid archetype. We know from the outset that Isabelle Fuhrman's Esther—all chestnut curls, lacey ribbon, and icepick glares—is Bad News (even if her dimwit adopted father doesn't), but the exact nature of her schemes is a revelation left for the final scenes. Evil Kid thrillers have long been a favorite haunt for creaky nature-versus-nurture questions, going all the way back to Mervyn LeRoy's The Bad Seed. If Orphan were merely a weary retread of such paths, it would be entirely forgettable. However, this murderous nine-year-old girl is, in fact, a murderous 33-year-old Estonian dwarf. That changes things, no? On the one hand, this twist turns Orphan into just another Homicidal Maniac film, robbing it of the Evil Kid sub-sub-genre's unsettling appeal. On the other hand, Esther's adulthood spikes the film with Freudian voodoo, giving Collet-Serra space to engage with twisted themes that most horror films can't tackle, especially the notion of child as spousal replacement. Orphan has its spatters of brutally graphic violence (I'll never look at a workbench vice the same way again), but its most memorable moments are those the revel in their emotional and visual perversity. Chief among these is Esther's vampish seduction of her adopted father, which is, frankly, about nine levels of Fucked Up. Nonetheless, an audacious high concept can't entirely atone for over two hours of ludicrous implausibles, foolish character behavior, and dreary narrative predictability.