Film School Rejects » H. Stewart

Spielberg Returns to Form with ‘Crystal Skull’

H. Stewart — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:17:01 +0000

Forget War of the Worlds—when Spielberg wants to be, he’s a master storyteller in that grand Hollywood tradition of efficient, effective populism. In the new Indiana Jones movie, which fans have both long anticipated and dreaded, the clunky Spielberg of recent years, from the absurd and pointless The Terminal through the interminably rambling Munich, has disappeared; in his place is the Spielberg of yore, the Spielberg of impossible dinosaur dreams made real. His dinosaur here is Jones, made real once again through a seeming cinematic miracle, equal in scale to that which resurrected the velociraptor. By revisiting his twenty-year-old franchise, Spielberg seems to have rediscovered that spark, the sense of pulpy excitement rooted in youthful fantasy, that made him into what he is today—the darling of commercial American cinema.

Shooting with Janusz Kaminski, his right-hand cameraman since Schindler’s List, Spielberg soaks the new Jones film’s visuals in a crisp, old-fashioned elegance; his form follows suit. The director revels in the sophistication of the slow reveal; nearly an entire reel goes by—including a bizarre opening credit sequence featuring groundhogs and drag racing—before we see Jones, who is in the custody of the Soviets and imprisoned in the trunk of a car, as anything but a distant crumple. We see his iconic hat tossed to the floor; we see his silhouetted shadow affixing it to his head with a careful cock; and then, only then, does Spielberg give us a full-on view of the reprising Harrison Ford, brandishing his trademark smirk.

Set about 20 years after The Last Crusade, in the late 1950’s—if the title card didn’t tell us the year, surely we could figure it out from the clumsy signifiers: the Howdy Doody clip, the shakin’, rattlin’ and rollin’ soundtrack, The Wild One costuming—Jones has been up to quite a bit, including a stint in the OSS. Jones is no longer a mere movie hero, champion of the archaeologists, but a conspicuously American hero; there’s a bit of propagandist flag-waving to Crystal Skull’s first reels. “Any last words?” the Commies ask Jones at gunpoint. “I like Ike!” Jones declares, wearing his flag on his sleeve.

But Spielberg goes on to upend, lightly, such shameless patriotism. Jones escapes the Soviets to find momentary refuge in an ersatz town designed for nuclear weapons testing; Jones, standing against the backdrop of a blood-red-and-black mushroom cloud that has just obliterated a microcosmically plasticized America, does not exactly inspire the spontaneous singing of the National Anthem. Furthermore, Jones is then taken into custody by the FBI, which has the cojones to question His patriotism. “I barely recognize this country anymore,” one character says, referring to the George W. Bush years…I mean, the charged climate of McCarthyism.

You can already hear the multiplexes emitting a collective yawn, and after such chest thumping the filmmakers never again address America or the 1950’s—by the end, we can only assume, Jones has been cleared of all suspicions. Spielberg has his sights set, instead, on South American jungle romping and car chases, lots of car chases. As cinema, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is unadulterated action-adventure, a stack of set-pieces with, once it gets going, little to no subtext to parse. (Unless you’re adventurous enough to try and make the case that its story about ancient extra terrestrial knowledge has something to do with the immigration debate.)

There is a story, of course, wrapped around the car chases, a rather convoluted one about El Dorado, Soviet perfidy, alien intelligence and legends of unfathomable power and yadda yadda yadda. It’s not what Crystal Skull is about but how it plays out and, like many a great storyteller before him, Spielberg deals heavily in cliché: driving too close to the edge of a cliff, getting hit in the crotch, a near-fatal run-in with quicksand. The new Jones movie is built on familiarity, from its characters to its forms. The entire story could be boiled down to The Lord of the Rings’ narrative archetype: an ancient artifact of great power must be returned whence it belongs. Spielberg takes the conventions, though, and tweaks them just enough to make them his own. As they travel down a river, his heroes go over a waterfall—one that they don’t notice until someone points it out at the last moment, of course. But they go over three waterfalls in a row and they do so while sitting in a car. Spielberg makes no effort to create suspense out of this—of course no one will be hurt—but rather: with the economy tanking outside, ain’t it fun to watch people topple over a waterfall inside the darkened safety of the movie theater?

Shine a Light Movie Review

H. Stewart — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:49:28 +0000

Despite Mick Jagger’s lively prancing—his energetic frontmannery—a Rolling Stones concert is above all a sonic affair, rather than a visual event. A concert film, then, would seem pretty straightforward, at best: something to hear, but not much to look at—the sort of thing that goes straight to DVD or PBS.

Martin Scorsese, however, through his ever-moving concert cam, manages to make Shine a Light both. Through fast-paced editing and vigorous camera movement, Scorsese and his team imbue the par for the course proceedings with palpable energy, without ever lapsing into cheap concert-movie cliché. (There are no canted shots of Keith Richards from below, for example.) The Rolling Stones may be commanding showmen, but on a screen they would be little more than clownish, costumed dinosaurs without Scorsese, who understands how to translate their performing prowess to film. (See: the Bridges to Babylon DVD.) Together, the two are a hell of an entertaining pair. Shine a Light doesn’t so much provide a “you are there” experience as a distinct experience all its own; it’s not just a document, but a living document—a loud, dizzying and overwhelming experience of pure cinema, all shaky close-ups and dancing tracking shots.

Coordinating such a complexly choreographed film was no easy task, logistically and otherwise, Scorsese is sure to let us know. The first fifteen minutes are dedicated to the concert and the film’s arrangements, a choppy and comical behind the scenes/making of—a special feature built into the film—in which Scorsese and Jagger risibly butt heads. Making a movie is tough! Especially when it involves a neurotic New Yorker dealing with easygoing, non-committal burnouts. Finally, someone tries to explain it to Scorsese: “this is rock n’ roll.”

Those first 15 minutes are about all the back-stage/offstage footage we get, distinguishing Shine a Light from its most obvious antecedent, 1978’s The Last Waltz, in which Scorsese spends a good deal of film interviewing the Band and watching them shoot pool or jam. But why waste time, Scorsese’s and the Stones’, shooting B-roll with a band that has decades worth in the vaults? Every two or three songs, Scorsese punctuates the concert (two concerts actually, at the Beacon Theater in Fall 2006) with archival interview footage that superficially fills in the Stones’ backstory, usually some ironic clip of an interviewer asking a question along the lines of, “how long do you fellas think you can keep this up?”

A long time, obviously! All yuks aside, that’s the point—the Rolling Stones are old but the band still sounds tight, demonstrating the sort of fine-tuned collaboration that gets honed over 45 years on the road, and Jagger is still as limber as a teenager. Not only that, but the boys, even if they’re mugging a bit for the conspicuous cameras, give off the feeling that they genuinely love one another, that they have a blast doing what they do and doing it together. That seems a rare enough occurrence—“the rock n’ roll band that didn’t break up,” as rare as two people staying married for 50 years—as to warrant a filmic record. In the end, Shine a Light is a celebration of perseverance from a long-working director who only recently got his best director Oscar—a tribute to doing what you love for as long as you can still do it. In the Rolling Stones, Scorsese has found himself, despite their superficial dissimilarities.

DVD Review: Sicko

H. Stewart — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:38:18 +0000

Michael Moore has a knack for devising compelling theses on the state of American society and its maladies, but unfortunately he all too often undermines them with his style of argument—that is, his style of filmmaking. It’s not his snarky tone, which admittedly is often quite funny, but his regrettable habit of falling into gimmicky set pieces and cheaply earned sentimentality. In short, he is, disappointingly, a chronic oversimplifier. In Sicko, Moore does a commendable job of avoiding many of these shortcomings for a chunk of the film’s running time, but he continually slips as the film progresses until, by the last half hour, he has given in to his worst impulses—egotism, exploitation and disingenuousness.

Rather than focus on the few dozen million Americans who lack health insurance, Moore’s film surprisingly, at least initially, focuses on the 200+ million who do, and in the process reveals a callous, profit-driven insurance system without conscience, one that rewards medical professionals for denying potentially life-saving procedures to those that need them. Moore also spends a little time, though not enough, establishing the troubling connections between the executive & legislative branches and the health insurance industry in an effort to show how the industry sustains such misanthropic policies. (Moore lets Hillary Clinton off the hook a little too easily for her universal coverage fiasco while first lady, but nails her when he notes that today she comes in second among Senators with the highest amount of contributions from insurance companies.)

There are a few slips into mawkishness—Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” played over the damning congressional testimony of a healthcare executive is one of the most ridiculous—but Moore balances it with some arguably effective anecdotal journalism, mostly in the form American HMO horror stories, while wisely keeping his controversial self out of the frame. (He serves as narrator and off-screen interviewer.) At least, anyway, until the film packs up and visits foreign countries to see how (well) socialized medicine works in Canada, England and France, where Moore walks around, on-camera, with a faux-naivete that makes him look shallow with fawning adoration. Scott Tobias breaks down the typical exchanges: “Moore: ‘So how much are you paying for [this incredibly expensive procedure]?’ Patient: ‘Nothing.’ Moore: ‘Really?! Wow!’”

In the end, if you can judge a society by the way it treats its least-fortunate, as Moore suggests, then, despite its individuals’ propensity for charity and generosity, our culture as a whole gets low, low marks. But however righteous Moore’s position might be—and as one of the uninsured Americans, I’m on his side—his argument is weak; he counters conservatives’ arguments against government-run healthcare, and backs up his own reasons for it, with anecdotes, but anecdotal rebuttal or support aren’t particularly strong forms of argument. Surely a member of the opposing camp could come up with a similar string of anecdotes to support their position and tear down Moore’s?

You get the feeling that Moore is cherry-picking his supporting examples, and the film is so easy to take issue with at so many points that it’s more likely to inspire skepticism and divisiveness than it is to build a consensus around such a seemingly self-evident principle: that Americans need a healthcare system for all that serves people over profit. In his refusal to fairly address his opponents and the shortcomings of the foreign systems he upholds as ideals, or to delve more deeply into the cultural roots of the issue he examines, Moore is bound only to draw ire from his ideological opponents and laurels from his supporters. That is, in the end, Moore simply stokes an already-raging conflict between opposing camps; instead of solving the problem or draw attention to a pressing issue, he only raises his own profile.

An interview with an Englishman briefly provides the essential context for why Americans are abused by the for-profit health industry: helpless people, like the sick and bankrupted, don’t vote, and educated, healthy and confident people are harder to govern that the sick, ignorant and fearful. An American expat in France puts it this way: in France, the government fears the people; in America, the people fear the government.

But such moments of revelation are too far and few between in Sicko; Moore prefers, in the end, to deal in stunts: after laying out a terrible irony—that terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay receive full health-care while 9/11 volunteer rescue workers get none—Moore gets a bunch of the latter on boats in Florida and sails them down to Cuba. It’s, at best, sappy—especially a long sequence in which Cuban firefighters hug their American counterparts—and at worst, well, Michael Moore’s typically insufferable shtick. Moore wraps the movie in a nutshell at the end, when he boasts of anonymously donating several thousand dollars to one of his fiercest critics when he can no longer keep his website up because, ironically, he’s a victim of the American healthcare system. Those who brag about their anonymous donations in major feature films expose themselves, with little comment necessary, as far more egomaniacal than altruistic.

Movie Review: Diary of the Dead

H. Stewart — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:31:36 +0000

One of Stephen Colbert’s best jokes to date came during the “Don’t Tase Me, Bro!” affair, when he pointed out, within the infamous video of undergraduate Andrew Meyer being tased by security forces, a student sitting nearby looking bored, not paying attention to his fellow student under attack. “He’s thinking, ‘I wish they’d stop tasing this guy,’” Colbert said, “‘so I can go home and watch him getting tased on YouTube.’”

While Colbert used the young generation’s disconnect from the real world, which they experience through mediated means more than any other generation ever has, as comic fodder, it’s much more serious stuff to George Romero, who earnestly tackles the same issue, and some others, in his latest filmic foray into the zombie genre—his genre—Diary of the Dead.

Though they must have been in production around the same time, as their release dates were separated by only a month or so, Diary of the Dead feels like a direct response to Cloverfield; both adopt a digital handheld aesthetic and use it to capture a monster attack, but the two films have very different intentions. If Cloverfield is the text, Diary… is the metatext. Where Cloverfield is all about immediacy and emotional manipulation—and quite successfully so —Diary of the Dead is about the ethics of video documentation and the function of the media.

A group of students, along with their professor (Scott Wentworth), are filming a cheap horror movie out in the woods when news reports start coming in about the dead coming back to life. (Essentially, it’s set on the same day as Romero’s initial zombie outing, Night of the Living Dead, if you can imagine that film as being set in the future, since there are cellphones and high-speed internet connections in this film.) Freaked out, they call it a wrap and hit the road, while the movie-within-the-movie’s director Joshua Close keeps the camera on in order to document their experience—to create a non-fiction monster movie. What we get is that footage, edited and presented by the characters under the name “The Death of Death”.

T.J. Miller, who played Cloverfield’s cameraman, is only confronted once about why he’s kept the camera recording while a Godzilla-esque monster decimates Manhattan. “People will want to see this,” he answers, and that’s that. Close, on the other hand, is treated with contempt by his comrades, confronted again and again about why he’s keeping his camera on. His professor derides his filming as a “document of cruelty,” and, as though refuting Miller’s response in Cloverfield, one of Close’s pals asks him, “who’s gonna be left to watch?”

Romero presents the act of filming as a compulsion bordering on a psychosis, and criticizes videojournalism, as well as its consumers, by arguing that there are times when, morally, it’s time to stop shooting and start helping, to stop watching and start acting. Romero gets to this right at the beginning, when a news crew asks paramedics to move their ambulance because it’s blocking their shot. When a corpse comes back to life, spoiling the correspondent’s report, rather than rush to help the paramedic being mauled she whines that her piece has been upended: “I thought she was supposed to be dead.” We create dichotomies, Romero says, between us and them, when in truth “they” are us.

Romero exposes Cloverfield as a fraud: video, even if it documents horrors in unbroken takes, doesn’t bring us any closer to reality; video only breeds detachment. Cloverfield may be thrilling, but it’s enjoyed from a protected distance. “We were trying to create a film that would be entertaining and, as a by-product of the subject matter, perhaps be a catharsis,” Cloverfield producer J.J. Abrams told Time magazine recently. “We wanted to let people live through their wildest fears but be in a safe place.”

But Romero worries about taking this too far; do people process fiction and non-fiction video differently, or is it all just emotional response from a safe distance and an invitation to passivity? Cameras are like guns—both are methods of self-defense (one physical, the other psychological) that are way “too easy,” eventually inuring the “shooters” to the horror of death.

To his credit, Close gets 72,000 hits on MySpace within eight minutes of posting his edited video footage. He argues that citizen journalists like him are essential for providing real information to the public; by showing other people how he and his friends have survived thus far, he argues, they may be able to figure out how to survive themselves. But Close’s girlfriend, Michelle Morgan, notes that with so much information on the internet, the chance for spin is even greater, until all information is reduced to just noise.

All of this complex film and media theory is nothing you can’t easily take from the film yourself, as Romero addresses it all point by point in voice-overs and declarative dialogue. Diary of the Dead is intellectually stimulating, but unfortunately little else. (Less The Death of Death than The Death of Subtlety.)

Romero goes through his criticisms pretty academically, neglecting baser concerns like narrative while doing so; his characters are cardboard and his actors, poor. This is less a story with themes that Big Themes with a perfunctory story built clumsily around them; Romero is content to keep the audience at an arm’s length, transforming the movie theater into the lecture hall.

In fairness, he crafts some effective moments of tension, usually when something is happening off-camera (in line with the idea that we can’t capture anything on video worth capturing?), but for the most part the film plods along, preaching to the audience rather than letting them in to it and then enlightening them.

But it might not be accidental that Romero keeps the audience at a distance. “You’re supposed to be affected,” Morgan says, referring to documentary video, “but you’re not.” It’s self-confirming: the film doesn’t work on an emotional level because it isn’t possible for it to, without becoming a fraud.

By the end, Romero has given up. Who wants to live in such a world, Close asks of his zombie-ravaged dimension, although one gets the suspicion that Romero is talking about our world as well. “All that’s left,” Close says, “is to record what’s happening.” That is, to document the world as it destroys itself, while remaining removed and neglecting to realize that not to act is an action in itself.

Full credits from IMDb
Watch the Trailer (It’s pretty good!)

Written & Directed by: George A. Romero

DVD Review: Offside

H. Stewart — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:00:31 +0000

It’s 2005 and Iran is in the throes of soccer pandemonium, as riotous buses packed with chanting fans make their way to a World Cup classifying match against Bahrain. Among the male passengers, young and old, are a number of female fans with football fever, although they’re officially banned from attending public sporting events.

Offisde follows one of these ladies, Sima Mobarak-Shahi, as, disguised androgynously—though everyone sees right through her—she makes her way to the game and tries to sneak past security. Of course, she’s almost immediately apprehended and herded off to a pen with a handful of other captured chicks.

Though set at a stadium and all about soccer, Offside offers only fleeting glimpses of the game; the big match takes place off-screen, watched by the soldiers obliged to guard the women through metal bars, and the bulk of the film is set against drab concrete walls. As something not quite reachable but just quite visible, the stadium serves as a subtle metaphor for independence; it’s described early on as a place of relative free rein in Iran, a place where, as one fan says, there’s shouting and swearing and yet no one calls in the Revolutionary Guard.

Mobarak-Shahi, though quickly stripped of the leading role (it becomes an ensemble piece, women vs. guards), keeps the film grounded with her sweet and achingly sympathetic looks of disappointment and her pangs of immature indignation and injustice. A humble film—conspicuously inexpensive—that bops right along thanks to the filmmakers’ energetic pacing, Offside carefully balances its serious message about Iran’s contemporary culture with humor, particularly a scene in which one of the imprisoned girls, who needs to pee, is brought to a men’s room (because there are no ladies’ rooms) and forced—absurdly, delightfully—to wear a poster as a mask so she can’t read the scatological writings on the stall’s walls.

Offisde is modest in its style and execution, even frequently light-hearted, but that’s not to say that it’s simple-minded; Panahi’s superficially engaging film cleverly uses the plight of the banned women (who’re more strong-willed than the men guarding them) to provide a microcosmic allegory for modern Iran, presenting a country with a crumbling power structure, with oppressive laws but little control over their enforcement. The Iranian people have no discernible respect for authority—the soldiers are harassed and abused by men and women alike, the latter picking at the logic of their exclusion to the consternation of the young guards just trying to do their jobs.

The young (male) soccer fans seem sympathetic to the young women’s plight, but are powerless to help because, well, the army’s got guns. Offside still maintains a sense of promise, though, of an Iran in flux and on the brink of change. The film ends with an Iranian victory in the big game and an overwhelming feeling of optimism. Iranians, equal in their national pride, empty into the streets for a celebratory eruption—the lines between men and women, soldiers and civilians dissolved, if only for a moment. Iran may have its problems of policy, the film suggests, but its people are, by and large, decent and good and slowly, in small ways, working to make their country free.

Oscar Week: Best Supporting Actor

H. Stewart — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:00:49 +0000

As any critic will tell you, 2007 was an unusually strong year for American film, and it shows all the way down to the Oscar nominations for best supporting actor. The nominated performances are all strong, but there isn’t exactly “stiff competition,” as a clear frontrunner dominates the list.

Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men

Given that Bardem has already won 17 awards for this performance, including the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award, he seems a favorite, if not a shoo-in, for the award. Despite some stiff competition, he could certainly be said to have earned it. (I might vote for someone else, but that doesn’t mean his performance isn’t masterful.) Bardem plays Chigurgh, an out-an-out psychopathic assassin, but he plays it all with his eyes, which reveal a wealth of great emotion. (Not to mention his gravelly, trembling voice.) It elevates his unredeemed killer beyond the mere cardboard Frankenstein a lesser actor might have made him.

Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Academy’s distinction between lead and supporting actors seems arbitrary, considering that Anthony Hopkins got a best lead actor nomination—and win—for 16 minutes of screen time in Silence of the Lambs. Why Casey Affleck got nominated for best supporting actor and not best lead performance is anyone’s guess, especially as his character, Robert Ford, is a major character in the film, enough so that he merits mention in the film’s exhausting title.

I suppose co-star Brad Pitt, as the title’s Jesse James, overshadowed him. Pitt, despite his lack of a reinforcing nomination, gives his most tender performance to date in the film, but it’s Affleck’s turn that makes the film the treasure that it is. (Certainly one of the year’s best.) The gorgeous cinematography, brilliant script and patient, poetic direction are all essential, but without a performance as strong and cryptically complex as Affleck’s, the film wouldn’t be able to stand so firmly. Combined with his fine work in Gone Baby Gone, he beats even Daniel Day-Lewis for the title of 2007’s best actor, if only for the sheer volume of solid performances.

Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton

They say that the roles only get better with age, for men anyway. If that’s not entirely true, surely the actors get better as they get older—there was a treasure trove of great performances this year from actors over 60 (Wilkinson, Holbrook, Tommy Lee Jones in No Country, Albert Finney in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.) It may not be a country for old men, but it’s certainly an industry for one.

Wilkinson has been making a name for himself only in the last few years with solid roles in indie flicks (mostly supporting, as in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but also lead, like In the Bedroom.) He’s a powerful and convincingly credible actor, so it’s encouraging to see him recognized by the Academy, even if he lacks the necessary buzz to take the award.

Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild

Into the Wild was an awful film, but it wasn’t the fault of its cast, particularly Hal Holbrook. He plays a father figure to the adventurer Chris McCandless, who abandons him like everyone else in the young man’s life. It might be kind of sad when McCandless leaves Catherine Keener behind, but it’s downright devastating and heartbreaking when he does it to Holbrook, who single-handedly drives home the emotional cost of McCandless’ solipsistic existence.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War

Hoffman gave two highly respected performances last year…and he was also in Charlie Wilson’s War. As fine as he is in Charlie Wilson, he gave the performance of his career, hitherto, in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, and yet it went un-nominated. Given how crowded the lead actor category is, and what a favorite Hoffman is of the Academy (best actor, Capote, 2005), this looks more like a pity nomination, one to round out the category.

Who’s going to win?
Javier Bardem

Who should win?
Casey Affleck or Hal Holbrook
(No Country’s not going to win enough awards in other categories?)

Who got overlooked?
Albert Finney, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Movie Review: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

H. Stewart — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:58:12 +0000

Not much seems to be happening at the beginning of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 Luni, 3 Saptamani si 2 Zile), and if I didn’t know better I’d think it might be shaping up to be a modest slice of life film that evokes, perfectly, the decrepit character of late-Communism/late-Ceau?escu Romania—something like the first half of 12:08 East of Bucharest, especially as 4 Months… is even kind of funny at points. All that humor completely evaporates, though, in due time, as one realizes that the descending character of the title is a countdown of sorts, one that parallels the gripping propulsion that drives the film forward to its rattling blast-off.

4 Months… has a decidedly simple story: an abortion is arranged, performed and… curtain; but Mungiu, a master director, delivers it with devastating pathos and a terrifying authenticity, providing a blunt look at the horrors—that is, the simple reality—of (illegal) abortion. His camera hardly ever cuts within scenes; it simply observes and follows, avoiding the manipulative sensationalism—there’s also no score, for instance—a lesser director might easily have fallen into.

The only problem with 4 Months… is that it comes too soon; an emotionally exhausting second act—featuring the act itself—leads to a mercifully relenting third (that, once again, is even kind of funny at points), but the state of numbness the film produces is hard to get out of, leaving the audience more trapped than captivated, much like the two goldfish, swimming in a tank inarguably half-empty, on which the film opens. (As Armond White writes, the new Romanian directors “have inherited Ceausescu’s fascistic egotism: Their movies make audiences suffer as they claim to have suffered.”)

In the film’s 1980’s Romania, with its chipped wooden-walls and peeling paint, one imagines that even water for the fish is hard to spare. No amenities seem available outside of the thriving black market; nothing worth having, anyway. (One character has a taste for orange tic-tacs—hey, it’s just like Juno, though devoid of any and all cuteness.) Also available on the black market are abortionists, as abortion is against the law in the Communist dictatorship, one of whom Laura Vasiliu has enlisted to terminate her pregnancy. But the film’s focus is on her friend and dormmate, Anamaria Marinca, who is the one who must do all the legwork: renting the hotel room, meeting the man who’ll perform the procedure.

As there’s more than one way to perform an abortion, especially in a country where you can’t even score a pack of Kents, Mungiu is able to amass an incredible amount of tension building up to the procedure’s execution. Don’t worry, there’s no coat hanger involved, but it’s still agonizingly intense: the film’s second act plays out in a nearly unbroken take as the pregnant girl, her friend and the abortionist, Vlad Ivanov, sit around the rented room and discuss the procedure in troubling detail—it’s unsparing in its procedural description—and engage in an intensely heated negotiation of terms that mercilessly concludes in devastating sexual exploitation. Vasiliu, in her vulnerability, is heartbreaking while Marinca is astounding; still, neither commands the screen quite like the bullying Ivanov, and once he’s gone the film flags. “Don’t put the fetus down the toilet, because it’ll clog it up,” he advises horrifically. “Whole or in pieces,” he adds, teasing up the vomit that’s already collected in the audience’s throats.

4 Weeks… spares us having to watch the passing of the fetus, as Marinca, whom Mungiu stays with, leaves the hotel room to attend her boyfriend’s mother’s birthday party. This trip to the see the charming bourgeoisie and listen to their trivial conversation is clever act of suspense building by Mungiu—placing a stationary camera across the table from Marinca, tightly packing her into the frame, and not moving it for what seems like forever—not to mention a necessary respite from the horrors just endured. It might even be a bit of comic relief, if we weren’t already so upset and in no laughing mood. In an act of clemency, the film’s harrowing-ness peters out after the first hour, despite some graphic images and striking sequences to follow; by that point, the audience has been inured to the film’s horrors—the abject misery of the hotel scene can’t be topped (spoiler), even by an extended, full-on shot (no mere glimpse) of the lifeless fetus or the tossing of it down a garbage chute. (end spoiler)

For American audiences, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days addresses the abortion issue with a measure of neutrality, without partisan determination anyway; abortion is terrible, the film evenly shows, but it’s especially terrible, and gruesome, when it’s illegal and performed in backrooms. It serves as a persuasive lesson: make something illegal, and a black market will simply supply it—candy, cigarettes or abortions. Making abortion illegal only makes a bad situation that much worse.

Movie Review: Cassandra’s Dream

H. Stewart — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 05:01:22 +0000

Decades ago, critics and audiences, unhappy with post-Interiors indulgences like September, implored Woody Allen to stick to making comedies; now, ironically, after dismal comic outings like The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and taut, intelligent thrillers like Match Point, the public’s position has reversed. In his old age, Allen’s proving his propensity for drama is becoming stronger than his comedy—no small feat, or arguable tribulation, for such a naturally funny man.

With Cassandra’s Dream, Woody Allen, still in his self-imposed London exile, forgets the diversion of his previous film, Scoop, and returns to the serious matters of murder, morality and the English class system that he previously visited in 2005’s Match Point, itself an Anglophized retread of his 1989 masterpiece, Crimes and Misdemeanors. Allen has become like an old uncle at a holiday gathering, telling the same old story year after year, but it’s such a good story and he tells it so well (and, hell, you love the guy) that you can’t help but want to hear him tell it again and again, with all the little changes that the years add.

Cassandra’s Dream is, if nothing else, particularly well-crafted; Allen’s form is becoming more reliable than his content, and his years of experience behind the camera are on full display in the way he builds some excruciating tension with the story of two two-bit brothers, Ewan McGregor (charming) and Colin Farrell (mopey), who are enlisted by their rich uncle Tom Wilkinson, spoken of with a Harry Lime-like reverence for a third of the film, to kill a former business associate who plans to testify against him. It takes a few reels of marvelously mounting suspense to perform the act, not so much of a “will they or won’t they?” variety—of course they will, it’s a Woody Allen thriller—but of a “oh my how and when is this going to happen?” sort.

Bearing a conspicuous though surely unintentional resemblance to last year’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (fellow New Yorker Lumet didn’t find it necessary to cross the Atlantic in order to rediscover himself), Cassandra’s Dream has a pair of brothers in over their heads with debts and financial obligations, but who aren’t fit for the lives of crime that they thrust themselves into. The film opens with promise—Farrell’s gambling successes, McGregor’s idyllic trip to the country, the loving women in their lives—but Allen subtly undermines it, foreshadowing the predictable misfortune to follow: in an early scene at a marina, the brothers are seen planning to buy themselves a modest boat. Sounds great, but a two-shot of Farrell and McGregor finds the latter behind a chain-link fence, indicating of course that he’s symbolically caged in contrast to the false freedom that the boat may initially signify.

As anyone who’s ever seen a film set, wholly or in part, on a boat before knows, it never ends well. (Knife in the Water, most glaringly, but also Dead Calm, even the final scenes of Funny Games or Key Largo.) “Ain’t life grand?” the brothers ask, quoting Bonnie & Clyde no less, but their father, John Benfield, is the one with the right idea: “the only ship sure to come in,” he says, “has black sails.”

In Allen’s world, business and upward class mobilization are built on the exploitation of others, here in the form of blood, and the film is about the potential, and obvious, moral conflicts therein. (“If we were in the army,” McGregor argues, “we’d be expected to kill strangers all the time for the profit of people up to here,” raising his flattened hand to eye-level, “in corruption.”) It also, like just about every other film lately, attacks the institution of family, for it’s out of “family obligation” (and a cash bail-out) that the brothers commit their crime, to keep their uncle out of jail. It’s only quite late in the film that Farrell finally realizes the obvious, that maybe their Uncle Howard (Wilkinson) deserves to go to jail, even if he “never forgot his family” after becoming rich and successful.

Cassandra’s Dream turns out to be a bit more moralistic than Allen’s previous forays into similar territory—and as such is a bit more old-fashioned, earning a PG-13 rating with a lack of on-screen violence or sex—with Farrell able to provide the chainsmoking superego to Ewan McGregor’s, or Jonathan Rhys-Myers’ or Martin Landau’s, id. “We broke God’s law,” Farrell says of the murder, to which McGregor responds, “God? What God, you idiot.” Farrell’s drunken, woeisme boohoohooery gets a bit tiresome as the film progresses, but it serves as a necessary contrast to McGregor’s cool acceptance that to get anywhere in the world, one must be prepared to kill, that men are either failures or murderers. Once again, it’s Benfield who gets it right when he observes, “nobody wants to be selfish, but everybody is.” But for perhaps the first time in Allen’s oeuvre, the characters actually pay for it.

Movie Review: Cloverfield

H. Stewart — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:30:19 +0000

Cloverfield looks, intentionally, like a home movie; the raw video that makes up the film is passed off as found footage a la The Blair Witch Project, an exhibition of tape recovered by the Defense Department from the “area formerly known as Central Park.” But, more than a mere retread of the Blair Witch approach to the filmmaking, Cloverfield is the first film to successfully use the internet’s dominant YouTube aesthetic and to reflect the “shoot first and let computers sort it out” ethos of today’s shutter-happy generation. Notice that not-exactly-hip critics like The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane are complaining that the shaky, amateur camerawork induces dizziness.

Cloverfield starts off as a camcorder document of Michael Stahl-David’s going away party and the ensuing WB-style drama between he and his hip, affluent (and white) New-York-yuppie friends. (Director Matt Reeves is credited with penning 64 episodes of Felicity and directing five.) But it soon takes a turn for the worse—it’s Stahl-David’s last night in New York, as he’s about to start a new job in Japan, but the film does him the dubious favor of bringing Japan to him, in the form of a Godzilla-esque, city-demolishing, run amok monster.

The party is interrupted—bummer, dude!—by the creature’s attack on the city, which, first things first, sends the Statue of Liberty’s head crashing down into the streets; the survivors gather-round with their cameraphones, natch, before they’re sent running for their lives. As a monster movie, Cloverfield is unique, a new breed perhaps—it doesn’t serve as an environmentalist and/or anti-nuclear allegory, like the original Godzilla or the more recent The Host (or plenty of other flicks in between), nor is it really even about the monster. If Cloverfield’s monster represents anything, by its rare appearances, resistance to the methods of modern warfare and anti-New York inclination, it’s Terrorism. (Notice the monster’s first victim is Lady Liberty, just as 9/11 robbed us not only of our right not to be killed but also of our right not to be wiretapped.) Exposition is handled perfunctorily, doled out via speculation by people on the street, quickly captured news broadcasts and brief encounters with the military; we hardly even see the monster at all.

But we do see its trail of destruction, as a few people from the party improbably make their way uptown to save a friend trapped in the rubble of what used to be her apartment. Cloverfield is about terrorism’s human effects, not its spectacle. (Unlike, say, Independnce Day, whose most, if not only, memorable moments were the obliterations of iconic American structures.) Of all its cinematic forefathers, Cloverfield owes its greatest debt to Children of Men (though that’s not to say it’s on par with it); above all, it’s an exercise in cinematic urgency, immediacy and naturalism, with the unbroken takes, the handheld, first-person camera and recognizable if not exactly likeable characters working to suture the viewer into the middle of the action. It exploits memories of 9/11, obviously, as well as provides a vicarious experience of the Iraq War when our heroes stumble upon the military in the midst of an urban, street-level firefight, but those are only jumping-off points; the film’s pleasures derive not from (re-)witnessing the leveling of New York landmarks but from sharing the emotional experience of the characters amid the carnage. Reeves & Co. keep the film compelling from end-to-end, balancing the grueling action and attacks, including a terrifying one by giant spiders (?) in the abandoned tunnels of the No. 6 train, by maintaining a sense of humor in the downtime with a running commentary from cameraman T.J. Miller. Despite the occasional levity, though, Cloverfield is relentlessly draining and depressing as a human story of surviving through, and bearing witness to, unimaginable destruction. It’s really about cinema’s capacity to deliver a vivid emotional experience—when asked why he’s kept the camera on, Miller responds, “people will want to know how it all went down.”

“You could just tell them.”

“No, that wouldn’t work,” he answers. “People will want to see this.”

There Will Be Blood

H. Stewart — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:45:00 +0000

Though set around the turn of the 20th Century, There Will Be Blood is, in its pitting of capitalism against revivalism, conspicuously more about the state of the union at the turn of the 21st. (There’s even an oilman, or oilboy, called “H.W.”!) Daniel Day-Lewis tears through the film as an oilman, father of H.W. (though the character’s name is Daniel, not Prescott), who picks up a few thousand oil-ripe acres out west—beginning with those belonging to Paul Dano, a young preacher, and his family, in exchange for the promise of a tithe—and starts drilling. Forget films about the American Revolution or the Civil War—this is the true document of the birth of the nation as it stands today, when Texas tea met the Christian church.

Possibly because Day-Lewis fails to let Dano perform a blessing on the first derrick before it starts pumping—“a simple blessing,” he says, “but an important one”—tragedy ensues; soon, an accident sets the derrick ablaze, and through director Paul Thomas Andseron’s lens it looks like hellfire escaping from Hades through a hole in the ground, the devil come to earth with a pitch-black, soaked-in-oil Day-Lewis as his one man welcoming committee. Not that Dano is some kind of saint; not long thereafter, Day-Lewis cuts him down to size by pushing him into a puddle of oil on the ground, a reminder to Dano and to the audience that the two are not so different.

There Will Be Blood announces its grim and somber heft from the onset, through its austere style characterized by uncut long takes, solemnly muted colors and frames packed with sweaty and serious men. (Religion and industry are the domains of men, and as such there is hardly a speaking role for a woman in the film.) Though Dano plays a central role in the film, he can’t help but be overshadowed; There Will Be Blood belongs to Day-Lewis, whom Anderson emphasizes by shooting in unbroken close-ups; but Anderson contrasts this intimacy with a tendency to allow the action to unfold in the frame’s distant rearground. There Will Be Blood is meant to be understood microcosmically, an illumination of one barbarous tycoon in a expansive country full of them, in a world that turns on their dollar.

Although Day-Lewis doesn’t seem like much of a villain at first; not so much cold, callous or cruel, he comes across as simply arrogant. But midway through the film he delivers a speech that clues us in to his bitter and rampant misanthropy, which he has hitherto successfully hidden from his public: “I have a competition in me,” he says. “I want no one else to succeed.” In Anderson’s film, the hubris and greed of unchecked ambition yields tragedy, as Day-Lewis, to his undoing, slips into sin: from lust and drink to abandonment and, finally, murder. At the film’s start, Day-Lewis falls down a crude mine shaft and breaks his leg, though it doesn’t stop him from crawling out, like an animal, to stake a silver claim; he walks with a limp through the rest of the film, his unquenchable yearning for power through money manifest as a physical handicap.

Dano, for his part, is also nothing more than a mountebank, finally exposed, in no big surprise, as nothing more than a manipulative “man of God” out for his own piece of the oil pie. Day-Lewis, like the Cheneyes of the world, co-opts Dano’s religious agenda to push his own oil-money agenda, while Dano forms an uneasy alliance with Day-Lewis to gain control of his small religious community and further his own career. There Will be Blood presents two self-destructive forces, the dominant strains in America—Jesus and oil—as they battle against one another; as a result, the film follows through on its titular promise as one consumes the other, leaving but one: miserable, impotent and alone.

It’s no accident, then, that the film ends during the unraveling of the American Dream known as the Great Depression. If There Will Be Blood begins by showing where the country came from, it moves on to show how it ends. Anderson slyly uses history to predict the future, and to warn Americans that their country is falling in on itself.

Starting Out in the Evening

H. Stewart — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:46:13 +0000

Curiously starting out in the daytime, Starting Out in the Evening at least gets right down to it; in an efficient diner scene, the basics are quickly established: that Frank Langella is an ailing writer with four books out of print, that Lauren Ambrose is a go-getting grad student writing her master’s thesis on his work, and that they’re about to embark on developing a complex relationship. If only the rest of the film were as crisp as its first scene; instead, it ambles about, not exactly sure of what it’s about or what it wants to say. A potent conflict between an aging writer and his young student is lost amid the clutter, too often undermined by a saccharine score, diminished by dreadful lines like, “maybe the characters in your books have the luxury of grappling with moral issues, but I’m in the real world,” and side-tracked by a worthless subplot involving the rote and lame romance between Langella’s daughter, Lili Taylor, and her boyfriend Adrian Lester. (No disrespect to Taylor as an actress, but plenty of disrespect toward the filmmakers for creating such a whiny and tiresome character.) It’s the sort of sloppy film in which a character looks at a photograph and, for our sake (oh don’t bother!), speaks to it. “Where are you?” Ambrose stupidly asks a photo of a young Langella.

Last year, Langella bowled over New Yorkers, and tourists too I suppose, with his blustering and commanding performance on Broadway as Richard Nixon in Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon. His performance here is far more painstakingly dignified and composed, but no less titanic; unfortunately, like his aging, fading character, the surrounding film lacks focus, drive and, most of all, enthusiasm; in effect, his performance goes wasted. Somewhere buried inside Starting Out in the Evening there’s an intelligent and fascinating film about aging, relationships and the artistic process, but for every genuine or cleverly subtle moment there is another that rings twice as false or twice as loud. Its worst crime is that the filmmakers apparently truly believed they could add depth to Langella’s story by telling it parallel to a yawn-inducing tale of an unlikable couple’s fundamental disagreement over whether or not to have children.

If Starting Out in the Evening were much shorter, it would be more easily forgivable; as Nathan Rabin recently wrote, “I always appreciate movies that end after seventy-five or eighty minutes. It’s as if they’re saying ‘Look, we know we aren’t very good. But we won’t take up too much of your time. In fact we’ll let you go fifteen minutes early so you can get on with your busy life.’” With its subplots and strolling pacing, though, Starting Out in the Evening unnecessarily pushes the two hour mark, and what was merely a nuisance of a film becomes, as the running time improbably drags on, aggressively irritating. As Rabin continues, “movies that linger past the two-hour mark are like teachers who keep you after school.”

Most infuriating of all, Starting Out in the Evening seems fully aware of its shortcomings, as it blithely criticizes itself throughout. Lester describes one of Langella’s books as “soft and sentimental…it’s one of those relationship books, two couples and all their problems and all of that, yadda yadda yadda.” Are the filmmakers really so dense that they fail to appreciate that that’s what wrong with their film, or do they think they’re being cheeky while proudly staying above the put-downs? Do they really, I mean really, think their film is better than that? “Following your characters takes time,” Langella says of his writing method; yeah, but it shouldn’t take this long. Finally, Langella laments, “my characters haven’t done anything interesting.” Phew, you could say that again.

The Orphanage

H. Stewart — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 04:31:09 +0000

Seeing as Guillermo del Toro produced J.A. Bayona’s The Orphanage (El Orfanato)—and since his name is slathered all over the advertising—I think it’s only fair for us to run through the “essential elements of a del Toro movie checklist,” via The Devil’s Backbone and, to a lesser extent, Pan’s Labyrinth, to determine how much of an influence he may have had on the film. Do we have an imaginative, wide-eyed kid? Check. How about a contrasting creepy-looking kid? Check. A cavernous underground space, like a cave or a basement? Check, check. Really? What about a remote country house? Check. How about the accidental drowning of a child? Check. Well then, sounds like a del Toro film to me; all that seems to be missing is some mention of the Spanish Civil War.

Alackaday, there’s no backgrounded war in The Orphanage; in fact, there isn’t much sense of the setting at all, beyond the eponymous orphanage’s property lines at least. Without that sort of context, historical or otherwise, The Orphanage, to its detriment, is tough to pin-down up until the very end, if at all. When a young boy goes missing and his mother, Belén Rueda, comes to believe that he was taken by the ghost-orphans that may or may not haunt their home—a former orphanage—the film seems headed toward serving as an allegory about injured ghosts (of history? that might make sense) that need to be satisfied and put to rest so that future generations—our children’s—may thrive. It plays out as a classic tale of the return of the repressed, save for one little thing, that is: our hero, Rueda, hasn’t repressed anything! Any grievances these ghosts might have don’t have anything to do with Rueda who, while once a resident of the orphanage, was adopted and spirited away before the nefarious goings on, which might merit revenge, that we discover to have occurred.

The filmmakers seem to be trying to leave it up to us whether the film is meant to be taken symbolically or not, but if we were to take it that way it wouldn’t make any sense. So rather than function as ghastly historical allegory, then, I suppose The Orphanage shapes up to be, with a debt to 1961’s The Innocents, a mystery more psychological than paranormal, an expressionistic tale of a woman gone mad after the disappearance of her son. “I’m not crazy,” Rueda roundly declares, but it’s tough to believe her; after all, isn’t it perfectly plausible that a woman who has lost her dear child might just be imagining that her house is haunted by a gang of school-aged ghosts who’ve kidnapped him? More so than believing the ghosts to be real, anyway—no? As a psychic medium tells Rueda, “seeing is not believing, it’s the other way around.” With that maxim in mind, as in Pan’s Labyrinth, the film’s happy ending is thankfully only deceptively so (though to make it a question at all is arguably a cop out)—that is, a happy ending ought only to be seen by those who believe that they’re seeing a happy ending. But the filmmakers don’t seem to realize there’s two kinds of ambiguous filmmaking: the cleverly so, like the ending, and the slipshodily so, like the preceding eighty or so minutes.

Atonement

H. Stewart — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 03:15:36 +0000

At the very least, director Joe Wright, together with screenwriter Christopher Hampton, can be commended for fashioning a remarkably efficient filmic adaptation out of Ian McEwan’s titanic tour-de-force of a novel; what takes McEwan 300 pocketbook-sized pages to accomplish, the filmmakers knock off in 45 minutes, without sacrificing too much substance that it would offend the book’s fans. McEwan’s novel is thoroughly internal and deeply psychological, but the filmmakers turn it into a tale of both revealing gestures—the film is full of close-ups of hands, whether furtively brushing beneath a table or spooning sugar into coffee—and pithily significant remarks. In short, they make it cinema.

But Atonement: The Movie has more to offer than mere efficiency. Opening in the English countryside during the build-up to WWII, the film shows no sign of any expense having been spared in its pursuit of visual opulence; it’s a gift to the senses, with the lush feel of a grand, old-fashioned period piece. Thankfully, however, it replaces that genre’s characteristic stuffiness with pulsating vitality. The sense of 19th Century, Victorian propriety is undercut by a throbbing 20th Century sensibility of violence and sexuality; the film is propelled forward by a quivering lust that appears in nearly every character’s glance. (Fine performances are delivered across the board.)

In one ravishing sequence—and the film is full of lavish visuals—Wright cuts between his two central lovers, played by James McEvoy (phenomenal) and Keira Knightley (excellent) as they prepare for dinner; Wright soaks the halcyon country life in a sunstreaked, smoky haze and the gorgeous glow of nostalgia, but he soon punctures the film’s misty romance by confronting us with that most vile of English words, cunt, being spelled-out on a typewriter. (Welcome to the 20th Century!) As a tale of love and misunderstanding, Atonement’s first half could easily be reworked as romantic farce; instead, the story unfolds as tragedy, exposing a world in which repressed veneers of propriety lead not to healthy sexual expression but to rape (statutory at least), and where disjoined lovers find not reunion but the rampant destruction of the second World War.

By leaping, midway through the film, a few years into the future to find our hero on the march to Dunkirk, Atonement suggests that its central romance is so troubled that it rivals the failed Anglo-Franco resistance to the German invasion of France. The wartime violence isn’t excessive but is still unsparing, from the discovery of a field full of schoolchildren’s lined-up corpses to the systematic assassination of horses at Bray Dunes. (The uninterrupted tracking shot upon our hero’s arrival at the Bray Dunes is a masterpiece of form and the year’s most technically impressive sequence.) The colors go muted in the film’s second half, though the light remains brilliant, and the haze that was once so romantic takes on a character of menace. Gradually, love is smothered by war.

McEwan’s novel is told in three spatiotemporally distinct sections, each with tremendous cinematic potential. (As though begging to be set in celluloid!) Hampton, however, by necessity—for the sake of a trim and decent running time—pares down the novel’s latter sections, especially the second, and as a result the film’s three segments, taken together, don’t quite add up properly; by retaining the novel’s tripartite structure but stripping some of those episodes’ narrative purpose and intensity, the film winds up feeling flighty and unfocused. Why, exactly, are we in France during WWII? Or a London hospital?

Finally, McEwan’s subtext about the nature of artistic creation, namely its ability to improve upon the dreary misery of real life, feels incongruously set within the film’s romance; by trying to stay too faithful to its source material, Atonement winds up a bit muddy. Some novels just won’t make good films, but if Atonement just had to get made as a feature film, I don’t see how Wright and Hampton could have done it any better. From its settings to its leads, it sure is pretty, at least.

Grade: B+

Persepolis

H. Stewart — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 07:30:03 +0000

Over the last decade or so, comic books, as a medium, have assumed a position of cultural legitimacy under the banner of the “graphic novel,” becoming a respectable, and commercially viable, form in which artists and writers can tell the stories they want to tell. Comics no longer have to be aimed at children, nor must they only concern the adventures of superheroes anymore; they can now be about ordinary people and ordinary life—just like ordinary novels.

The animated Persepolis marks the graphic novel’s transition to the world of movies; it’s not the first non-fantastical comic to be adapted to the big screen—the live-action Ghost World immediately pops to mind, as do A History of Violence and The Road to Perdition—but perhaps the first to be adapted, visually, from page to screen so faithfully. By retaining its source material’s black-and-white aesthetic simplicity, Persepolis plays like a comic book, er graphic novel, in motion, and not like a film merely “adapted from” one. Its origins are unabashedly conspicuous.

Not least of all in its fluidity, the animation, particularly that of two wormlike women who condemn our hero’s Michael Jackson button, vaguely recalls the Fleischer Bros., like a Betty Boop cartoon with a bit more verisimilitude in the character design. Its hand-drawn style, even if it doesn’t all look hand-drawn, is a welcome change of pace, no matter how stunning Pixar’s films are, from the turn to computers that’s dominating the animation industry. (Disney doesn’t even employ animators to animate by hand anymore!)

Unfortunately, the shallow depth of field of its two-dimensionality reflects the flatness of its story, which concerns one woman’s experiences growing up in Iran. Creator and co-writer/co-director Marjane Satrapi tells us her life story, first of herself as a young girl before the overthrow of the Shah, later as an adolescent during the country’s increasingly restrictive turn to Islamic rule, then her life abroad and finally back in Iran. (She now lives in Paris, though that creeps into the film only marginally.) Satrapi feels a stranger wherever she goes, not fitting in under the oppressive strictures of Iran nor adapting to the relative freedom of Austria, where it only takes simple boy problems—and, in fairness, some encounters with racism—to provoke her undoing. (The point being that shit sucks, albeit for different reasons, no matter where you go.)

Satrapi proves a sympathetic everywoman, even in her relatable moments of vanity and selfishness, but there’s nothing truly fresh, remarkable or provocative about her coming of age tale; the only aspect that provides any bit of distinction is that she’s Iranian, but that fact alone is not enough to raise the tale above the level of boilerplate misadventures in search of an identity. Added to what Noel Murray calls its “and then this happened” structure, Persepolis, despite its inventive and pleasing animation, drags on dully.

Not to mention that it’s uncomfortably conceited, not only in its reduction of the surrounding political turmoil to its effects on one woman—since we don’t meet many Iranians outside of her simplistically noble family, she doesn’t serve as much of a universal representation of a people; it is less the tale of Iran told through one woman than the tale of one self-absorbed woman incidentally set in Iran—but also in the very fact that she’s telling us her story at all. (And not least of all in the fact that she presents her young self as a prophet with a direct connection to God!) At root, Persepolis‘ narrative arc is as simple as this: Satrapi grew up, felt out of place everywhere, and eventually got over it, though not entirely; couldn’t anybody on the street tell a similar story? Oh, did I mention that it takes place in Iran, though?

The Chronological Donald Duck Vol. 3

H. Stewart — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 04:49:22 +0000

The shorts collected in The Chronological Donald: Volume Three are uneven, ranging from the lovely to the disposable. Watched consecutively, the thirty shorts, even the good ones, can’t help but grow tiresome; after all, they were never meant to be watched that way, all in a row like that, intended instead to be taken in small, individual doses. Like most volumes of The Walt Disney Treasures series (the original “Silly Symphonies” set is a notable exception), The Chronological Donald: Volume Three is best enjoyed in the way thick reference books are: occasionally flipped through at random, not read cover-to-cover; as a valuable historical record, to sit on the shelf collecting dust until needed.

As historical record, the set offers a fascinating glimpse into the lesser, more obscure offerings of an animation studio that, back then anyway—the set covers 1947-1950—never put anything less than its all into its craft. (The animation anyway; the writing often leaves something to be desired.) Each short has its fair share of clever visual gags, from Donald’s “cold stares” producing a tangible stream of solid ice to a collision with a tree that transforms Donald’s trendy sports car into something out of The Magnificent Ambersons. The laws of physics are violated with an infectious glee, the cartoons ride with a marvelously uninhibited fluidity of motion.

The duck himself is, as always, hilariously irascible, but so one-note that his trademark squawk grows wearying over the course of the two discs’ four-hour running time. Overall, Donald works best in smaller roles and co-starring duties, as a scene-stealer rather than the focus of attention. (Though he can be, at his very best, strong enough to carry an entire short.) He finds his stride playing off of mischievous characters—Huey, Dewey & Louie; “Bootle Beetle”; Chip n’ Dale—who excite his famous temper, but the shorts trip up when Donald is paired with his romantic foil, Daisy Duck. She’s a humorless biddy who all too often, in her whining insecurity, keeps Donald and his temper—the source of his humor—in check.

The shorts are best appreciated in the way they were meant to be enjoyed: toss one on before watching a DVD, recreating the classic moviegoing experience, albeit sans a newsreel. Just don’t watch more than one at a time.

Grade: B

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