28 January 2010

La mujer sin cabeza [The Headless Woman] (2008)

In La mujer sin cabeza we watch as a middle class woman named Vero struggles to regain her sense of identity after she hits something with her car on a rural Argentinean road one afternoon. She does not know what she ran over on her way home from a get together—it could have been a dog or a person. She simply drives away after the accident, thereby inducing an odd dreamlike mental state that lasts for days on end following the incident.

I have been waiting with great anticipatory mania for the arrival of this movie, the most recent title by one of my favorite directors of all time, Lucrecia Martel. (She directed one of my favorite films, La ciénaga (2001), which I reviewed as part of my Top Ten off the Top of my Head list a while back.) And I have to say that while I’m not counting on La mujer sin cabeza to replace La ciénaga as one of my all time favorites just yet1, I still feel that it is an incredibly intriguing work because it contains the elements of Martel’s previous works that originally piqued my interest.

Like Martel’s other films, the point of La mujer sin cabeza is not actually the central event driving the rest of the story, but rather the odd, partially obscured details of the protagonist’s life that the ramifications of the central event draw out. As we follow the post-accident Vero wandering through her life in a somnambulistic haze, we catch a glimpse of the many strange and complex relationships surrounding her. We are privy to the unspoken details and whispers of Vero and her husband’s marriage, Vero’s relationship with her lover, Vero and her bedridden, addled mother, and the flirtation between Vero and her niece. Even with the peripheral characters of the film there are references to other ambiguous yet nuanced relationships that Martel hints at but never fully defines.

Indeed, what’s especially good about La mujer sin cabeza is that Martel refuses to offer explanations for many events and conversations, instead referencing the off-screen, the unsaid, the absent. However, rather than creating a void or a lack of meaning with all these question marks, Martel uses double entendre, ambient music, and overheard, half intelligible conversations to prove the existence of that which lies beyond her frame.

In the end Martel is able to say more by saying less, forcing us to focus in on the edges of her story-world, craning our necks to see if we can catch a glimpse of what lies just beyond the borders of the frame. This, for me, is great cinema.

--
1. You always have to watch Martel’s work several times over before you can begin to play favorites with characters and stories.

26 January 2010

Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2008)

This is a documentary about how the women of Liberia decided they’d had enough with the outrageous violence and civil unrest in their country and then actually did something about it. Awesome!

The filmmaking itself wasn’t anything spectacular. There was a lengthy segment of the movie that had a bunch of text on the screen, headlines and news clips and whatnot, and that part really annoyed me. It seemed like a trailer for the movie and not the movie itself. Other than that the format was fairly standard—nothing too crazy, nothing too experimental. It made me happy to see that the film was produced almost solely by women.

I would recommend this movie based on the inspirational quality of the story. Pray the Devil Back to Hell is about events that you think sound way too good to be true, and so when you realize that they really did happen you feel like the world isn’t as awful a place as you feared.

21 January 2010

Youth in Revolt (2009)

Soooo. Filmmakers behind Youth in Revolt. Again with Michael Cera in the “young guy who really wants to not be a virgin anymore” role? Really?

And the ill-advised audacity of shoehorning overly pretentious youths pining away for French Cinema of the ‘60s into this tired narrative?

And using ridiculously poorly done “artsy” animations to pass the time between the hackneyed scenes of teenage romance?!

Please. Please do not do this kind of thing. Ever. Again.

P.S. Michael Cera: more Francois Dillinger roles, less Nick Twisp. Grow a pair, buddy. Take some freaking risks. You were almost sexy there for a second, guy. Almost.

16 January 2010

Up in the Air (2009)

I don’t have much of a narrative to weave about this one, just a few thoughts I’d like to throw together here.

First of all, this movie was very sad. It was about sad people doing sad things in a sad world. George Clooney plays a guy who fires people for a living. That’s all he does—travel all around the country for 300 days a year firing people. Needless to say we are confronted with many questions of human connections, emotions, and what it means to be tied down.

That is the strength of Up in the Air—it is about very relevant current affairs. How many people have been laid off lately? How many people find themselves drifting through their days, wondering what aspects of their lives right now are going to last into tomorrow? I liked that Up in the Air didn’t flinch away from showing how horrible things can get for some people, economically and emotionally speaking.

As usual, I had some minor reservations, predominantly relating to the acting. To me George Clooney is always acting like George Clooney, and Up in the Air is certainly no exception to this rule. That’s fine and dandy if you like George Clooney, but I don’t really care for him too much. It’s not that he isn’t a good actor. I just kind of want to smack him for smirking so often. He did do a good job being a vulnerable George Clooney in this movie though. So that’s saying something.

I also had a problem with the disjunction between the real people who played those being laid off and the actors. Evidently the director, Jason Reitman, used non-actors who had recently been laid off to do some of the scenes between Clooney and his victims, and then sprinkled in some recognizable faces for certain scenes. I don’t know what these docu-esque moments were supposed to do, because this movie was no documentary. To me all this mixture did was highlight the falseness of the actors’ portrayals of the people who had been laid off. Probably not what the director was aiming for.

In spite of my reservations I can still very much see why this is already nominated for best picture. Up in the Air is highly relevant to current events with good performances and a refreshingly realistic view of the ways of the world. Pretty rare.

10 January 2010

The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) (1979)

So here’s something unusual: it seems I have writer’s block. That is why there has been a bit of a lag in my usual regular posting. Every time I sit down to write I end up averting my eyes from Word and lamely clicking around on the internet. To be fair, there has been some hugely amusing stuff out there lately, but nothing so interesting as to justify me becoming unable to casually barf out some snark about film and post it without actually editing, as I usually do.

Maybe this aversion to writing is a result of the movie I have been trying to write about, which was so odd I’m not even sure there’s any point in trying to describe it. I watched The Tin Drum, as far as I can gather is pretty much an essay in uncomfortable situations. The story is about a three year old boy in WWI-WWII era Germany who decides not to grow up. However, not growing up doesn’t stop him from having sex with people, being hell bent on destroying various precious objects, and being generally depraved no matter what the situation.

I actually really admired The Tin Drum for its sheer audacity in presenting these explicit situations of violence, abjection, and sexuality candidly. I also was extremely impressed by Angela Winkler’s performance as the mother of the weird-o perpetual toddler. I think the scenes when she goes blank and shoves preserved fish in her mouth are brilliant.

The main issue that I take with the film is that I couldn’t really figure out what the whole thing was supposed to mean. A lot of the time when you have an unusual or fantasy-ish storyline and it’s historically located in a really specific iconic period it means that the storytellers behind it are trying to construct some sort of metaphor that relates to an overarching moral or theme. For the life of me I could not figure out what the hell this bizarro tale was supposed to be saying.

Despite my own intellectual failings I still enjoyed the movie overall. A definite recommendation for anyone who likes to indulge in the darker side of cinema, with the added bonus of getting to watch the forest fairy named Gump from Legend (1985) get busy with his sixteen year old nanny.

Up Next:
Up in the Air

05 January 2010

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (2009)

The Squeakquel essentially amounts to a terrible amalgam of everything that irritates me about bad children's media.

It is filled with very stale jokes, an extremely pointless plot, ugly, clunky, and charmless animation, actors who seem like it is a chore to be in the movie, oddly sexualized cartoon child-animals, and an incredibly short attention span both with regard to story and editing.

It addresses the audience as if neither children nor adults have any semblance of an imagination, intellect, or wit.

At best: boring. At worst: offensively bad.

Here's to hoping 2010 has something more to offer!
Happy New Year. The Phantasmagoria of Complaints continues.