Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2009)

In her review for the New York Times, Manohla Dargis writes, “If you care about strong stories, don’t bother. Hardly anything happens here in conventional movie terms…”.  I disagree.  Although its narrative certainly isn’t conventional, as it’s told entirely from the first-person perspective of Tokyo-bound drug dealing/abusing American Oscar, both living and dead (though from the back of his head when glimpsing flashes of his past), the story of his life, death, and afterlife is told in a way that I feel covers a lot more ground than a more conventional narrative.  The first segment, a sort of day-in-the-life – style glimpse of Oscar’s life in a squalid apartment with his stripper sister Linda, doesn’t tell us much about this kid, but enough to intrigue.  After his death at the hands of trigger-happy cops, the collage of flashbacks and then what is presumably Oscar’s spirit drifting through Tokyo, overseeing the people he left behind, we’re presented with subjective, deeply personal information that a more objective, traditional narrative wouldn’t be privy to.  A different film would let us know that Oscar and Linda were deeply scarred by the car accident that gruesomely killed their parents, but Noé’s disjointed narrative, going back and forth through Oscar’s past as you’d imagine one’s life would flash before his or her eyes at the moment of death, repeating and emphasizing certain images like the accident, tell us just how much they were scarred.  The little snippets of past, presented in no real chronological order, give us just enough background and foundation into the story and the lives of the characters to make the present much more relevant.  Sure, the incestuous desire between Oscar and Linda is played up ad nauseam to the point of tedium, but nevertheless, the moment in which Oscar’s noncorporeal spirit enters the back of the head of the sleazy strip club proprietor / Linda’s employer while he’s screwing her, so that both Oscar and we are essentially screwing his very sister from the first person perspective, is a disturbing but psychologically captivating one, as Oscar, now dead, can finally fulfill his forbidden desires/fantasies without consequence.  Ironically, once Oscar becomes a silent, invisible, flying camera lens, his deepest fears, desires, and instincts become that much more tangible.

The psychadelic finale, with lots of people having lots of sex amongst lots of neon lights and mystical crotch-auras, may be overkill, despite being a technical marvel (and takes a page directly out of Spielberg’s Minority Report), but that sequence, as well as what immediately precedes it as Alex’s spirit/eyes transition between reality and a light-filled void, could represent his slipping further and further from our reality and into what lies beyond.  This certainly was not the 2 ½ hour completely non-narrative, drug-fueled, Brakhage-esque light-and-color fest I was expecting, as the busy-as-hell camera, flamboyant purgatory of Tokyo, and disintegration of the major players in Oscar’s life allow us to attach our own subjectivity to the silent camera that is the first-person perspective of Alex’s spirit, making our subjectivity his, and thus making an otherwise unexceptional story of a druggie’s death and how it affects the other losers who associated with him a lot more interesting than it ought to be.  This will be an incredibly divisive film, no doubt.  Those it doesn’t click with could hopefully, at the least, admire it as a technical marvel, despite its (literally) dizzying repetitions, both storywise and camerawise. For everyone else, this could be the future of cinematic narrative storytelling.

9/10

Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010)

This was the first film I’d watched after I finished reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, so naturally it unfairly became that movie in which I’d inevitably look for all of Campbell’s factors of shared myth.  Sure enough, they’re there – the mythological hero (Ree, setting out from her common-day home (her run-down home and destitute, but good-hearted, younger siblings) being called or lured into an adventure (the need to find her bail-skipping father lest her family lose their home) and crossing a threshold into the wild and frightening unknown (the secret world of meth cookers), often guided by a helper or mentor (her uncle, the rough and often mean but streetwise (or meth-infested hell-wise) Teardrop), facing off against gate-guarding monsters / ogres (the terrifying old man and his (inbred?) group of hillbilly meth heads, Garret Dillahunt’s slackjawed and useless sheriff), and finally the gaining of a boon, in this case the atonement with the father (quite literally in this case, as Ree’s whole purpose is to atone with Jessup, whether he’s living or dead), which physical boon and the enlightened knowledge that comes with it can be used to restore the non-mythical ordinary world from whence Ree commenced her journey (again, her threatened home).  If I misread either this film or Campbell’s thesis in general, sue me, but regardless, the film certainly has a mythic journey quality, which while adding a level of excitement to an otherwise impossibly depressing setting, perhaps was the very reason why it didn’t click with me as much as it could have.  It just seemed like the lines between good and evil were too delineated, too apparent (with the exception of Teardrop, played wonderfully as an outwardly stoic yet undeniably conflicted man by John Hawkes) – Ree is the hero you can’t not cheer for (how she grows to be such a responsible and morally virtuous young woman in that living environment is beyond me, which may contribute to my problem in and of itself), while the meth heads, obsessed with mutual silence and weird semi-familial bonds, she must wrestle information from, both literally and figuratively, are the evil monsters she the hero must do battle with who you couldn’t find an admirable quality in with an electron microscope.  Despite Ree being an incredibly admirable and determined protagonist (Jennifer Lawrence displays a maturity much, much beyond her years in her performance), intelligent and headstrong, perhaps to a fault with how it often gets her into incredible danger, I would’ve liked to see more people and less archetypes overall.  Nevertheless, the cinematography and muted color palette of this wasteland are INCREDIBLE, and a wasteland it definitely is, like what you’d imagine the Ozarks would look like after Skynet used the world’s nuclear arsenal to destroy the world.  But no, this is the present day, and if this is really what this significant portion of America is like, with long-rusted over cars strewing the countryside and its inhabitants living by this extreme code of silence and territoriality, I have to get my head out of Joseph Campbell’s myths and face reality.

8/10

Requiem (Hans-Christian Schmid, 2006)

To even say this is cliché, but regardless, a major strength of Requiem is how some dynamic good vs. evil, religion vs. science argument isn’t thrown in your face, but lingers in the background; Michaela’s succumbing to epilepsy and how her resentful and ignorant mother and an overly-zealous priest convince her fragile mind that exorcism is the only answer, certainly has that science vs. religion argument embedded in the very core of its story, but is presented in a way that it just is what it is –  a girl with epilepsy and possibly a deeper mental illness, and how the differing opinions of her family, clergy, boyfriend, and best friend both alleviate and exacerbate that condition.  You’re never knocked over the head with the filmmakers’ grand philosophical treatise, you’re simply left to watch Michaela’s slow descent into mental illness (or, according to some, possession) in a minimal and realistic depiction, to the point where even the late-film exorcism just feels like the next logical step in how a rural-suburban, god-fearing family would deal with an issue such as this, and left to make your own judgment.  In fact, I saw this most as a meditation on how one psychologically deals with the physical or mental malady of a loved one, or of oneself.  As Michaela’s loving but enabling father hides his daughter’s diagnoses from his overbearing wife so that Michaela can fulfill her dream of going to school, that priest practically salivates at the chance to use Michaela to make his bones as an exorcist, and her more secular friend tries to pull her back from the jaws of religious fanaticism, it’s interesting to see how Michaela herself just tries to live her own life, succumbing to the pressure of a research paper, and finally lets all the divergent opinions of those around her influence her decision on whether it’s a brain defect or a demon afflicting her.  Bad things just happen to good people, and Michaela’s eventual breakdown, convincing herself of the extraordinary circumstances of her affliction, speak of how any of us just want an explanation for everything, to justify random bad luck with the idea that it just had to happen for a reason.  And all this is presented behind the scenes, in a straightforward, chronologically linear, objective account, where we can only sit there and helplessly observe, lament, and finally stew when that pre-credits blurb comes up telling us what became of the real-life inspiration for Michaela.

9/10

Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)

No wonder X wants to escape this torturous present and focus on his past affair with A.  Or maybe it’s a fantasy of an affair with A.  Or maybe the present we’re seeing is fantasy.  Damned if I know.  Hell, this isn’t a luxurious vacation place of a hotel so much as Madame Tussaud’s wax museum.  As the creepy organ music blares and the rich snobs stiffly trudge along like Molly Shannon in that Seinfeld episode, it’s all like a funeral procession for androids.  The dialogue irritated me, even as X intriguingly describes this supposed past affair that A has no memory of; but then again, the formal, flowery words are perhaps the most robotic aspect of all, which may serve to further the dehumanizing atmosphere of this place.  Amongst the statue-like robotic rich people standing still in that garden or slowly trudging through those hallways towards nowhere, one image that really stuck with me was everyone watching a concert, a small group of string players; we watch it too, but we don’t hear it.  As we watch the bows eagerly and furiously moving back and forth on the violins and cellos, we don’t hear the music those instruments give birth to; we hear the same funeralistic organ music that’s pervaded this hotel and this film from the opening moments.  Under the visual facade of decadence and nobility, these so-called people aren’t living at all, they’re not-so-living proof of Macbeth’s soliloquy, of life being “but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more.  It is a tale / told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (had to do it after my shitty Macbeth write-up).  I didn’t give a shit about A’s supposed husband or lover or controller or whatever he is M, other than the really cool card game he beats everyone at, or about the supposed affair between X and A, or the semi-poetic language that pervades it all.  Hell, this could’ve been a silent film for all I care, the atmosphere alone is what stuck with me, one that for the sake of humanity I hope is just one part of X’s grand and elaborate fantasy.

7/10

Macbeth (Roman Polanski, 1971)

Hugh Hefner executive produced this. And that’s probably the most interesting thing about it. This being Polanski’s first film after his wife and unborn child were brutally slaughtered, I was expecting much more of a totally revisionist, ultra-depraved/violent/gory, grief-laden dartboard where Polanski just let out all of his mental anguish. Instead, I was surprised at how relatively tame, aka boring, it was…well-staged, well-photographed, nice atmosphere of fog and unease, sure, but not much to really keep me awake after a long day at work and little sleep the night before. Select moments where Polanski does go outside the box of the Bard to make the Tragedy of Macbeth his own are few and far between, but overall, excellent; moments like the ghost of Banquo’s back to Macbeth, slowly turning his pale and soon-to-be-spurting-blood face towards Macbeth while the other men at the feast are practically frozen in place and time, or the murder of the King, seen in all its detail here while merely hinted at in the original text, or Macbeth’s hyperfrenzied dream/hallucination of his past sins and future doom at the gathering (orgy) of naked witches, or the brutally detailed rape/slaughter of Macduff’s family, or the march of the “forest” towards the castle, or the non-glamorized, musicless final sword battle between Macbeth and Macduff. Moments like these are violent and nauseating and utterly visceral, but that I could identify and separate them definitively, spread throughout a 2 1/4 hour movie, shows that either there just wasn’t enough of Polanski’s unique vision of this classic tale, or that I just wasn’t in the right mindset. Either way, for some reason it just felt like Lady Macbeth, in the text one of literature’s great villainesses, got sort of a short shrift here as a pitiful mental weakling instead of the wannabe-sexless woman who controls her husband like a puppet before losing her own mind, and that Macbeth’s transition from eager Thane fascinated/manipulated by a vague vision of the future into power-drunk monster was too sudden. I think I might like Shakespeare adaptations like Kurosawa’s (Ran, Throne of Blood) better than these literal ones, only borrowing the general story while retaining the themes instead of being handcuffed to the words themselves. Or something. Whatever, I’m too stupid to try to understand Shakespeare.

6.5/10

Play Misty for Me (Clint Eastwood, 1971)

Pretty terrifying, and almost exclusively because of Jessica Walter’s acting. An Ally-like obsessive psychopath to be sure, but I like how little to no effort is made to explain, say, her past or any other reason for that madness. All we see is a quirky but cute girl who mixes an impossibly innocent/childlike smile and laugh with terrifying verbal outbursts and a surprising sexuality that contrasts completely with that innocence at the drop of a hat, all of which gradually descends into outright mania when she becomes more and more obsessed with Eastwood’s radio DJ Dave the more he pushes her away. The mystery as to why she’s so crazy makes the crazy that much more interesting. Eastwood doesn’t do his film any favors with his acting, with the same whispery/raspy voice as his Man with No Name just not really fitting in contemporary California, other than seeming custom-made for a radio show. However, look for instance at the odd little Adam and Eve, Roberta Flack interlude that sticks out like a sore thumb amongst all the Jessica Walter-centric suspense, as Eastwood and his girlfriend feel safe at last and make love in the woods. The whole time during this long, drawn-out sex scene, I was expecting Clint to lean his head down and kiss his girl, only for him to lift his head up and for us to see that it’s suddenly Jessica Walter, and then he wakes up all sweaty in his bed. That never happens, which arguably makes this scene out of nowhere seem even more out of place, but at the same time, I applaud Eastwood for refusing to use the long-unoriginal it-was-all-a-nightmare gag. In fact, that I was expecting something terrible to happen in this scene of utter idyll is testament to how Clint, directing a film for the first time, was able to combine a truly creepy performance out of Jessica Walter and a simple yet incredibly effective air of suspense (combining ‘is she watching him just off in the distance?’ stretches with sudden moments of jarring, shaky-camera, exploitative violence) to keep your attention from start to finish. Eastwood’s transition of power from the front of the screen to behind it made a great beginning here.

8/10

Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller, 1961)

For much of this, Cliff Robertson’s Tolly is a lot like Lee Marvin’s Walker in “Point Blank,” never actually killing anyone, yet still causing the deaths of many men who’ve wronged him, the men who beat up and killed his father years before and have now risen to the top of the criminal underworld, making Tolly’s job of seeking revenge that much more difficult. Walker just wanted his 93 grand back, while Tolly wants to avenge his beloved father, so while Walker has this kind of ultra-cool aloofness as he stumbles his way through that criminal organization to avenge himself, Tolly tastes blood, and puts in a specific plan, not to kill these men himself, but to ingratiate himself with both the underworld and the law and then turn all sides against each other Red Harvest/Yojimbo-style, defying his outward appearance of a determined yet dumb hood with a rather ingenious plan where everything has to go right. As a result, Fuller’s film comes damn close to full-on glorifying the concept of revenge, as Tolly truly seems to live a charmed life as he implements his plan, as nothing goes wrong, and the girl/witness he rescues even falls for him despite his treating her like trash, and to this I objected while nevertheless having fun with what I was watching. But then, by the end, Tolly crosses the point of no return, learns that crime never pays, and all is right again with the world. But this is Samuel Fuller’s world, of tough-talking criminals, cigarette smoke, a fashionably scarred anti-protagonist, over-the-top jazzy musical scores, little girls getting run over to send a message to a potential witness, a corrupt police chief eating his gun in his own office in the middle of the day, and the drunk love interest looking right into the camera as she rants and rambles, so who the hell knows what’s right and what’s wrong in this world.

8.5/10

The Seventh Veil (Compton Bennett, 1945)

As the crippled failed musician Nicholas intently, and nearly obsessively, watches his ward, and gifted piano student, Francesca during her first professional performance, comparisons to “Citizen Kane” become easy – not just in this scene, but with Nicholas’s near-abusive, and at the very least possessive, treatment of Francesca being comparable to Charles Foster Kane’s treatment of his bride Susan in general.  Difference is, turns out I much prefer the dulcet tones of James Mason to the blustery ostentatiousness of Orson Welles, because Mason’s Nicholas comes off as the consummate elegant gentleman, making his misogyny and mother issues and abuse of Francesca, and his intentions in general, that much more of an intriguing mystery to decipher, arguably rivaling the intriguing mystery that is Anton Walbrook’s obsessive ballet impresario Lermontov in “The Red Shoes.”  What’s this guy’s angle?  They’re merely second cousins, why revolve his entire life around making this girl’s life miserable and shaping her into an impossibly talented, but soulless, pianist?  Project his own failed musical aspirations onto the much more talented Francesca, perhaps?  Try to act like a father figure while barely concealing a weird kind of attraction?  Just use her as an outlet for his hatred of women (when she first comes under his care, he practically brags that he despises having women in his home, and she’s one of the first)?  Tough to figure, since Nicholas is so deplorable, yet James Mason has an impossibly elegant disposition, but really, that’s about where this film’s ascendance over Kane comes to an end.  Even when not comparing the two films, as to compare this or nearly any film to Welles’s orgy of technique and filmmaking deftness would simply be unfair, there isn’t that much that stands out apart from trying to figure Nicholas out, and some vague suspense in the concert scenes (will she faint or do something rebellious?  even if she doesn’t, the music selection’s still great).  Francesca and the other men in her life who inevitably fall in love with her are cardboard cutouts, the flashback-utilizing story structure doesn’t add anything, and the ending is downright stunning and startling in its misogyny, at least as I read it.  Francesca’s desire to move apart from the controlling Nicholas is admirable, and you do get caught up in her plight as Nicholas’s cruel treatment of her is subtle yet truly psychological and compelling, but that ending, after a film’s worth of a protagonist’s enduring mental and emotional abuse, really makes me wonder whether this film’s actually putting up its heroine as a mere object to be saved or even won as a prize by men, men like Nicholas.

7/10

Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)

Edward G. Robinson was really, really good at acting.  Two types of acting, really…over-the-top, confident, mile-a-minute talker, and shy, hunched-over, and soft-spoken.  Polar opposites, and you literally got to see both of those types of Edward G. Robinson in Ford’s “The Whole Town’s Talking” as he played two totally different but lookalike characters.  Here, he falls squarely into the latter category, as his unassuming bank cashier / wannabe painter Christopher Cross is painfully timid, completely emasculated by a loud monster of a wife, and desperate to be liked and/or loved.  Enter Joan Bennett’s Kitty March, whom Chris believes he saved from a mugging (in an outstanding scene, by the way…all outside sound is drowned out by the soft, steady drone of a train.  It’s probably the most single-minded and focused Chris has been on a particular task, and the most powerful he’s felt, in a very, very long time).  In actuality, he saved her for a moment or two from her abusive rat of a boyfriend, and the couple then decide to con the poor sap when they figure he’s a well-to-do artist.  Both sides are fooled by their misconceptions about the other based on their respective desires – Kitty and Johnny want money, Chris wants love, but it’s Chris’s fawning over Kitty that is the truly pathetic misconception at work here.  In no time, he’s asking Kitty if she would marry him if he wasn’t already married, timidly knocking on the door of her apartment he’s putting up the money for like a dog scratching at the door to come inside, and even when she woefully screws up the con and he discovers that she’s profiting off of his paintings as if they’re her own, he’s happy for her.  It reminded me of the unsuspecting dwarf Hans’s pathetic courting of the amused Cleopatra in “Freaks.”  She has this poor sap Chris twisted around her finger.  Kitty and Johnny as characters are utterly ridiculous and over-the-top, and frankly so is Chris, but there’s just something so pitiful in Edward G. Robinson’s performance that he stands out…a man so beaten down by his own insecurities, that even though we’re in on the secret he isn’t, that he’s headed towards inevitable heartbreak by being willfully ignorant enough to fawn over the deplorable Kitty, at least something is making him feel alive, pathetic as that ‘living’ may be.  It’s all pretty standard fare, as Fritz Lang doesn’t really make his presence truly felt until one of the final Telltale Heart-esque scenes, when Chris finds himself alone in a shitty hotel room, the neon sign outside the window flashing on and off, as he confronts his own sense of guilt.  Minus the imaginary voices, it’s something right out of silent expressionism, and in as memorable a way as possible, this film puts Chris right back where he started (and really, never left): alone.  All you need is love…

8/10

Cronos (Guillermo del Toro, 1993)

It was very refreshing to see a “vampire movie” (emphasis on the ” “) that didn’t have fangs, or neck-biting, or seductive and beautiful ever-young people, and was largely devoid of cliché of the vampire variety of otherwise, which by now I’ve come to expect from the largely unique and cliché-free Guillermo del Toro (shame he dropped out of “The Hobbit.” That would’ve been cool  ). Not since “Nosferatu” perhaps has a vampire film really, really focused on what a curse, not a blessing, it would be to be granted immortality by unnatural means. As the kindly old antique shopkeeper Jesus Gris becomes more and more immortal after being ‘bitten’ by the Cronos device, his thirst for blood at a most inopportune time during a black-tie New Years’ party and being chased by a dying, despicable industrialist and his bumbling nephew/henchman (Ron Perlman is one ugly motherfucker…) are the least of his worries. As his skin rots and falls off, his wife and everyone else in the world except his mute and adoring granddaughter believe him to be dead, and sunlight becomes poison, it becomes obvious to both Jesus and us just what a curse this is. He never asked for this fate when he found that metal scarab inside the statue in his shop, and yet here he is. That he, a good and previously unassuming man, must suffer everlasting youth in mind but certainly not in body, and not the greedy industrialist and now Jesus’s mortal enemy who certainly deserves such a fate, brings out the tragic aspects of that kind of immortality that much more, in that our sympathy is added on to the gruesome bodily decay. That del Toro pits old man against old man (hardly an expected protagonist-antagonist pairing in this day and age of fantasy/horror), uses a scene of a flamboyant mortician proudly dolling up a mangled body in stark detail for comic relief, and doesn’t exactly depict Jesus as the most innocent of victims, as he in fact revels in using the violent Cronos device for a time, certainly make this one more unique than you might think. When you consider the idea of the body wanting to die and the brain just not cooperating with that desire, there may be a fate worse than death after all.

8/10