THE BANISHMENT (Andrei Zvyaginstev) - 62
[Cannes reception is inexcusable; minus the last half-hour, I'd be 70+. And that last half-hour isn't so much bad as profoundly superfluous, expanding something easily explained in 30 seconds to, well, 60 times that many. Zvyaginstev is still a master of intergenerational repression--the kids and adults each have vague evidence of each other's lives, and the way they interpret it is fascinating--and deserving Cannes prize-winner Konstantin Lavronenko still expertly limns patriarchy brimming with latent rage. He's genuinely unpredictable, all the moreso for having friends like brother Mark who give terrible, albeit sympathetic advice. Get a new editor, Andrei!]
MY KID COULD PAINT THAT (Amir Bar-lev) - 49
[Jared compared discovering Marla's paintings were the work of a fraud to discovering P.T. Anderson's films were ghost-directed by Guy Ritchie, and whether you like MY KID should, in my opinion, depend on whether that revelation would give you newfound respect for the auteur of SNATCH or an instinctive loathing of BOOGIE NIGHTS, Anderson's superiority to Ritchie being a given. To me it only seems natural to embrace the object, not the maker--since the object should redefine our impression of the maker--even when the maker is a 4-year-old girl, which makes the collectors of Marla's work strike me as nauseatingly naive, and certainly as eager for attention as the Olmsteads. ("Hey, you'll never guess the age of the painter who did that!") This would all be a very interesting subject for investigation, but Bar-lev shies away from it, instead saving all of his contempt for the family. One assumes this is because he doesn't have convictions about art himself, period; this sense damages the film, in that the sequences in which we're meant to analyze the dubiously varied styles of Marla's paintings reek wholly of investigative cynicism, devoid of the joy I instinctively search for in art. The footage of Marla's parents fares better, just because Bar-lev is able to temper his expectations of their honesty.]
4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (Cristian Mungiu) - 60
[Mungiu sidesteps formal inventiveness in favor of long master takes, which is wise, because he fumbles most badly when deviating from this formula. (Why the sudden close-up on the abortionist in the hotel upon his searing reproach of the girls?) Mostly notable for a general aversion to sentimentality: Vlad Ivanov is actually quite fine as the abortionist so long as he keeps to matter-of-factly laying out the potential dangers of the operation. He overcomes an undercurrent of sinister motives through sheer intelligence. Laura Vasiliu's Gabita is similar, withholding sympathy for a woman in a bad situation by heightening her own nervous tension to a point where she can merely squeal instead of gesticulate. I'm a little more puzzled by the praise for Anamaria Marinca, a blanker slate of a character who mostly seems to play along with the audience response to the abortionist and Gabita. (She grows more sympathetic towards the former, and more irritated by the latter.) Lacks the dramatic precision of a Puiu, but there's enough here to keep me excited for more work from Mungiu.]
PLOY (Pen-ek Ratanaruang) - 47
[Pen-ek continues to suffuse serious topics with comic nihilism, taking a marriage in discord, effectively sucking any semblance of love from it ("marriage just expires," the husband casually observes), but continuing interest in husband, wife, and the title young girl with a trio of dream sequences. Interesting in theory and deadly to watch, as Pen-ek's signature dissonant synth score hardly makes interest out of mystifying sexual episodes and fights. Don't get why half the frame often looks straight out of a home-furnishing advertisement.]
HAPPINESS (Hur Jin-ho) - 67
[I'd like to have screened this for the protesters often surrounding the Scotiabank, for some end pissed about smoking in cinema. Here's a movie that modestly posits healthy living, and yet is realistic enough in its expectations to watch its cirrhosis-afflicted protagonist revert to booze without a blink. The late-breaking reversal is, I'm guessing, the protag's [SPOILER!] solemn admission to his beloved fellow invalid that he's happier with a carefree slut than her, at once gut-wrenchingly honest and despicable in its brutality. The title is unironic: Hur ruthlessly considers the nature of happiness. Are we better off with companions who perpetually remind us of our failings?]
DIARY OF THE DEAD (George A. Romero) - 73
[Many have made note of the formal restrictions Romero has chosen, and their relation to the YouTube age and New Media. Fair enough, but I was riveted by how a single roving video camera (later augmented to a few) at once gave credence to a bevy of perspectives on the horror conventions at play. Most incisive is the conflict between the project's callousness and its necessity: director Jason firmly believes in the latter, but subsides into neuroses; his tough, intelligent, rather Hawksian girlfriend is usually annoyed by the project but still offers reluctant concessions like "You make a good argument." But the movie has a lot of questions to explore, and answers them satisfactorily, e.g., Q: why do modern horror flicks feature fast zombies?; A: because it's more straightforwardly menacing and ergo easier for the filmmakers to think about. This is a movie that offers 1001 ways to feel guilty and/or exhilarated by mayhem, some of which don't catch on for intriguing reasons: my audience's refusal to applaud the catch-phrase "Don't mess with Texas" says a lot about where its convictions lie.]
6 comments:
I woulda reversed that number on Diary there. But that's just me.
What Theo said, minus the Beaujolais Villages part.
MKCPT has no contempt for the Olmstead family and is in fact about precisely what you claim it shies away from. Unless by "explore" you mean "spell out for idiots," in which case no, it doesn't do that.
The fact that Bar-lev confesses that the mere idea of the fraud is "sad" -- he says it as if he's using it as a euphemism for "pathetic" -- makes me believe the question of whether it's even important or not whether the family is a fraud is less significant to him than whether or not they *are* a fraud.
He does question his own motivations, but bluntly, in a way that does rather spell it out for the audience. He struck me as proud of his own occasional self-consciousness, though I never felt that self-consciousness inflected the scenes featuring the art collectors in a satisfying way.
Anyway, my problem with the film is not exactly that Bar-lev has contempt for the Olmsteads... I actually think that (measured) contempt is productive when he's interviewing them, since it allows us to view them with a grain of salt.
What rubbed me the wrong way was that he never seemed to have the same measured contempt for those who bought into the Olmsteads: the media, the collectors, etc.
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