2011: So far.

Wow, it's been a while since I've been here. After I dust off a few things and get the lights back on, I'll get started. I hope my writing has improved since I last posted here a year ago. Reading old stuff is so awkward.

To start off the new year, here are the new releases I've watched so far. In the interest of space and brevity, plot details and descriptions will be light:


Cold Weather [Aaron Katz]
Being very unfamiliar with the whole 'mumblecore' movement, my slate of expectations was pretty bare going into this. Would it be about the State of the Slacker in a post-recession world? Relationships between young 20somethings caught in a state of ennui? Doug (Cris Lankenau), a college dropout studying forensic science and an admiration of Sherlock Holmes, moves in with his sister Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn) in where else but Portland and gets a menial job working the night shift at an ice factory where he befriends Carlos (Raúl Castillo). Their lives become wrapped up in a mystery and Doug, literally, puts on his Sherlock Holmes pipe and Cold Weather becomes the most playful movie of 2011 I've seen so far. Doug and Gail become the sister and brother of their childhood and play detectives, using a trick straight out of North By Northwest and putting on disguises, coming only short of using a decoder ring from a cereal box. Like any good mystery movie (see: Fincher's recent Zodiac or even going back to Citizen Kane), it's less about the ultimate answer to the question but the ride you take along the way. [A-]


Kaboom [Gregg Araki]
My only exposure to Araki before this was Mysterious Skin whose eerie calm struck me as far too stoic to enjoy, so when I saw the trailer for this day-glo mashup of MTV's "Undressed"-meets-"Twin Peaks" I was intrigued. There's not much substance here, but you can't help but find pure carnal pleasure out of watching beautiful co-eds fuck each others' brains out while unraveling the threads of a conspiracy theory somehow involved with a doomsday cult. Cerebrally, however, it doesn't do much to rise above nods to junk culture such as the aforementioned "Undressed" and Donnie Darko. But Araki is aware of this, and as quickly as there is the chance your brain might start to ponder something, the extremely silly camera wipes that not even George Lucas would dare use washes it away for us. [B-]


The Housemaid [Im Sang-soo]
The ultimate bait and switch: come for the supposed remake of the Korean classic from 1960, get hit with a trainwreck. Shot with the eroticism of a really bad pay-cable softcore movie and the empty opulence of "Cribs" (wow, that's my second reference to an MTV show), The Housemaid is just simply stupid and its biggest crime is how absolutely unsexy it is despite its beautiful women and its multiple sex scenes. Its epilogue hints at a strangeness lurking within, but none of that was ever apparent and it never comes anywhere near earning that ending. Just watch the original on MUBI.com. [D]


The Green Hornet 3D [Michel Gondry]
What exactly did people find to be wrong with this? No, it's not the cerebral whimsy you come to expect from previous Gondry works, but by God it's an action movie. What Gondry succeeds at where lesser movie have failed is to not foolheartedly tackle heavier issues that often weigh down these lesser movies, instead merely grazing them with a light touch and letting the silliness and the not-too-retro cool look of the movie take center stage. And for a movie whose 3D was only added in post-production (like most 3D disasters have been), the movie looks terrific with the glasses. The fight scenes liberally take cues from slapstick comedies and Hong Kong shoot 'em ups, and sprinkled with a colorful Gondry touch they are a delight to behold. My favorite moment among these might be when Britt Reid (Seth Rogen) gets into fisticuffs with Kato (Jay Chou, who isn't terrible) and Kato repeatedly punches Reid's head into a trashed HDTV, providing colorful flashes reminiscent of comic books flashing "BANG" and "POW" with each hit. [B]


Unknown [Jaume Collet-Serra]
It's a movie of cheap thrills, and it delivers. After all, as Manohla Dargis pointed out in her review, these kinds of movies were made for us to watch car chases on icy German streets. Yes, it's a scenario lifted straight from the Bourne trilogy, but it benefits from its lack of phony gravitas and the irritating Paul Greengrass-patented shakey cam. And while it's not really worth harping much longer on the merits of lack thereof in a movie like Unknown, what I did think was worth pondering were the confused politics of the movie. On one hand, you're made to empathize with a charming old man who happens to be an ex-Stasi officer who "proudly" served (Bruno Ganz), but ultimately the triumph of the movie is that the rescued party is a humanitarian whose work would not have been possible without Liam Neeson to save the day. Not quite at odds but also not quite aligning. Weird. [C+]

Police, Adjective (2009)

For some reason, our cultural history is filled with books, films, and TV shows that are focused on procedure and the process of data analysis. Who doesn't like reading a good mystery novel? Everyone loves a good hardboiled film noir. CSI and it's various incarnations and imitators are among the most popular shows on television. Police, Adjective, Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu's second film, is about procedure and analysis, but it doesn't fit quite nicely in with this history of mysteries and crime dramas.

Instead, Police, Adjective is an analysis of the words and terminology that we use to define and make sense of these mysteries and the ultimate power that they hold. In fact, the crime in the movie is no mystery. In the very first scene we are shown our protagonist, a policeman named Cristi (Dragoş Bucur), following his suspect as he smokes hash. He is expected by his superiors to arrest the teenager for the intent to distribute, but Cristi second thoughts. The crime that the teenager will be put to jail for is an outdated law that has since become abolished everywhere else in Europe, and Cristi doesn't want to have the thought of ruining this kid's life on his conscience.

But laws are laws no matter how we dice it, and as a policeman it is supposed to be his duty to uphold the letter of the law. Right? Well, yes if we're going by the strictest definition of "police." But through the film the integrity of these words are picked apart. After a hard day of following around a hash smoking teenager, Cristi comes home to his wife listening to a Romanian pop ballad on the Internet over and over again. Over his dinner and after a few beers, Cristi begins to pick apart the banality of the schmaltzy lyrics: "What is a field without a flower? / What is the sea without the sun?" To Cristi, it's completely nonsensical, all of these things are still what they are without their accessory!

That scene, along with many others in the film, is all done within the confines of a long, continuous shot that conjures up a sense of surveillance, as if the audience is patiently waiting and watching Cristi while he does the same. Certainly a sentiment that holds some resonance for the native Romanian audience as they lived within their own real-life police state just over 20 years ago under Nicolae Ceauşescu; one that certainly established and asserted it's authority not only with brute force but also with the power of words via the law.

In the film's most remarkable scene, Cristi stands up to his superior as he refuses to go through with the arrest. In response, his superior belittles him by having him look up the definitions of words such as "law" and "police" in order to destroy his argument in the very same manner that he had earlier done to the pop song. It does nothing to clear his conscience, and in the end he must choose between what he feels is right or bow to the power of language.

Avatar (2009)

Boy lemme tell you how excited I was when the movie opened with a sequence that had a ship coasting silently through the depths of space as it approached a gas giant that bore a strong resemblance to our solar system's very own Jupiter. At first I thought I accidentally bought a ticket to 2001: A Space Odyssey: An IMAX 3D Experience and walked right in to the part of the movie where the Discovery One approaches the Jovian moon and Dave goes through the Star Gate. That tunnel of colorful light was going to be a real trip in IMAX 3D! Unfortunately it wasn't to be and instead we're introduced to our protagonist, a paraplegic Marine named Jake Sully who's really morose because he's the main character and we're supposed to empathize with him.

After a whole bunch of really uninteresting exposition that I won't get into here because fucking everyone knows the plot of the movie at this point, we're introduced to our two main bad guys. The first played by that Scientologist guy that was Phoebe's brother on Friends. He's a corporate bigwig and we know this because he wears nicer shirts than anyone else in the movie and he also putts golf balls into a coffee mug just like every other CEO in TV movies and commercials. And just like every other evil corporate dude, he's only after money. The other is a colonel that we know is a huge badass because he's introduced to us when we see him pumping iron and seems to love delivering lines of dialogue with his lips curled to emulate a growl. Both of them endlessly call the natives of Pandora "savages," thus making them making them irredeemably xenophobic and so comically one-dimensional that I was hoping that Clint Eastwood would show up from the set of Gran Torino and tell those aliens to get off his lawn.

Which of course leads us to the Na'vi, the big and blue inhabitants of Pandora that the majority of the film centers itself around. Here's where you probably expected I was going to rehash all the same arguments that joyless assholes like Armond White all decry the movie for being racist and basically the Smurfs version of Dances With Wolves. They're right though; the Na'vi are a race that exist in an extremely romanticized, sci-fi'd harmony with nature that we once believed every New World race existed in even though history and evidence shows otherwise. None of this really reaches a boiling point of absurdity except for a ceremony later on in the movie where they all sit around a tree arm-in-arm and sway back and forth and appear to be singing some Pandoran version of "Kumbaya," but that was more unintentionally hilarious than anything.

Oh right, and Jake (remember him?) is able to remotely control a genetically engineered Na'vi body, which then allows him assimilate with their tribe and catch the jungle fever with a bodacious blue babe whose breasts are obscured by a few convenient ornamental leaves even though there don't appear to be any nipples to hide. Somehow the film is able to captivate me for an hour and a half riding a flimsy plot and sometimes-impressive graphics. Much like James Cameron's previous film, Titanic, we're expected an enormous payoff in the final act when everything just goes absolutely bonkers. Unlike Titanic though, Avatar completely falls off the track and makes a turn for the worse when it needed it most.

Apparently three months have passed now, where the Jake was supposed to get the Na'vi to move off of the gigantic mineral deposit they are living on top of even though he never once mentions it to them until the bulldozers are at their doorstep. It's too late for negotiations and Disney songs to save everyone and it sets up for a really big battle where we watch the forces of peace and harmony confront a psychotic, military-industrial hivemind that would be just fine if it weren't for the fact that the characters are so poorly underwritten that I have mentally checked out at this point. In a big hoo-rah, rally the troops briefing, we see the colonel give a pep talk to a crowd of a few hundred ragtag soldiers of fortune that are too entranced by the boss' plan of, I shit you not, "shock and awe" (I wish Cameron had the dignity to not have used that phrase) to wipe the smirks off their faces. One-dimensional villains only work when they're robots sent from the future.

If you've been able to endure those above five paragraphs to have made it this far, you're probably thinking that I can't see the forest for the trees. It's supposed to be a brainless spectacle! Enjoy the show! Look, I don't need an action movie to be smart or clever to find it enjoyable, but I would like have had some half-decently written characters that would have allowed me to empathize with a side so I had some sort of emotional or even just mental attachment to the big battle. The forty minutes of explosions, guns, and knife-fighting robots (I wish I was kidding) were ultimately just all shock and no awe.

I wanted to like Avatar, I really did. I knew going into it how underwritten and brainless it'd be. I was aware of the stupid eco-new age overtones the movie would be having. But all it amounted to was just a big, dumb, loud movie that became unbearably unenjoyable. And I have nothing against big, dumb, loud movies; I really liked Star Trek.

Made In U.S.A. (1966)

When I started doing my homework, Jean-Luc Godard was kind of an enigma after reading countless articles and quotes from other directors about how he seemed to be this exciting enfant terrible who was so startlingly meta and used jump cuts and other camera tricks to make the mere act of watching a movie exciting. Breathless left me a little cold, but it was a screening of Band of Outsiders at the Billy Wilder Theatre as part of a Godard retrospective that made me saw the pure joy that emanated from his camera. It was the only screening of that program I went to; a mistake I now regret.

Godard you either seem to love or just don't buy into. You either see something in his jump cuts, flashbacks, breaking of the fourth wall, and movie references or it's all bullshit to you. To me it wasn't avant garde to a fault, it was amusingly self-aware and humorously smug. This is why when his little-known Made In U.S.A. made a theater run recently, I was excited. Naturally, I was interested in seeing a movie that is "arguably the most quintessentially 'Godardian' of the filmmaker's great Breathess to Weekend period." Sold!

My initial experience with Made In U.S.A. at the Castro Theatre left me thinking that it was the most exciting thing I had seen by Godard to date. It was colorful, noisy, and was a total mishmash of art, culture, and politics. Anna Karina was Paula Nelson, a wife turned private eye who was solving the death of her husband, a quasi-Mehdi Ben Barka figure named Richard Politzer (a name so politically loaded it was blocked out by bursts of sound). After an early encounter with an Edgar Typhus—where she either knocks him our kills him, we're not sure—Paula is drawn deeper into a seedy underworld of government conspiracy as she apparently unravels the truth behind Richard's death. Along the way she encounters police and bureaucratic thugs, including a wonderfully loquacious László Szabó as Paul Widmark, and that's about as clear as the plot gets from there. As such, I was happy to revisit it with the eventual DVD release (from Criterion, who else?).

On the small screen Made In U.S.A. took on a different life. Instead of the whiz-bang noir thriller I remembered seeing, Made In U.S.A. was a farewell letter. Not from Richard (who we only hear as audio tapes voiced by Godard himself) to Paula or vice versa, but from Godard to Karina. In between meta-dialogue where the audience was constantly reminded they were watching a movie ("Yes we were in a political movie, meaning Walt Disney with blood.") were snippets of what seemed to be the contentious and crumbling marriage between Karina and Godard. "My leaving disturbs him as much as my presence," Paula laments about Richard; a thinly veiled jab. Made In U.S.A. would be the final film of Godard's that Karina would be in, and they would divorce a year later.

The greatest triumph of Made In U.S.A. is the incredible cinematography from the great Raoul Coutard. In a movie that so visually striking, Karina was shot with an extra sense of sensuality, almost as if the colors on the screen slowed down to make way. Always easy on the eyes, Karina is seen shot alongside flowers in bloom as visual enhancement. Slow pans gaze and follow her around with a sense of remorseful finality, as if it'll be the last time she'd ever be put on film."It was once again the kind of day for taking out a camera and making a color movie," she observes in the movie itself. Indeed.

Collateral (2004)

A lot of movies take place in Los Angeles (and of course a lot are made there), but few actually capture the essence of such a unique and strange city. The Los Angeles of the 21st century is a far cry from that of Jake Gittes, where he once remarked, "L.A.'s a small town, people talk." In the Los Angeles of cab driver Max Durocher, L.A. is a sprawling metropolitan area home to 15 million people. And they only talk when forced into proximity of each other; sometimes by taking a cab.

Enter the sharp-dressed hitman Vincent, played by a Tom Cruise, who arrives at LAX with no indication of his location of origin or past. He is The Joker from The Dark Knight before Batman ever began. You can say that this is undermined by the conversation he later has with Max about how he grew up with no mother and that his father despised him, but I would argue that growing up with a loveless single parent is hardly a substantial explanation for a sociopath along the lines of Vincent. "Improvise, adapt to the environment, Darwin, shit happens, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta roll with it," he says, conveniently describing his outlook and demeanor all within one line of dialogue.

Balancing the presence of Vincent is Jamie Foxx as Max, our cabbie that requires planned precision and routine as part of his life. He's been driving his cab for twelve years, but 'temporarily' as he says, only as a holdover until he can get his "Island Limos" company off the ground. His own personal inertia has kept him from doing anything else with his life. It's a fairly simple concept for a story, one where polar opposites collide and we watch the spectacular results of that crash.

While it is a movie driven along literally and figuratively by these two characters, what makes Collateral such an outstanding achievement is director Michael Mann's liberal use of digital cinematography where the crisp image captures a sense of immediacy and velocity that traditional filmstock could not. Los Angeles is a city of people coming and going anonymously, whether that be by cab or hitman's bullet. Collateral never skips a beat, and even seemingly mundane moments the elements of the movie are all accelerating towards the speed of light.

In addition to this eternal movement, Los Angeles (much like other major metropolitan areas) is also a city of urban isolation. People often get lost amongst the hubbub. Vincent recites a story about the man who dies on the MTA and is ignored by passengers for six hours. Max is as lonely as that dead man, alone as he is held captive by Vincent and as authorities think he is the killer himself. But once he learns to adapt to this environment (Darwin, I Ching, or whatever), Max finds another fellow lonely soul and overcomes this in the movie's sometimes-absurd climax.

But this movie is not a damnation of Los Angeles as an epicenter where evil comes to reap what it sows (all but one of the targets that Vincent is picking off seem to be heavily involved in some sort of drug dealing syndicate). Instead it is one that depicts and romanticizes the existence of Angelenos whose lives are always in the shadow of larger forces, be it a well-trained hitman or a city sprawling out of control. It is a beautiful struggle to etch out a niche where no one will give a shit.

While Collateral isn't the first movie to use digital cinematography, it certainly was a torchbearer and provided a glimpse at the potential that the medium had. In the 60s, the auteurs of the French Nouvelle Vague were able to create a sense of urgency and excitement through the use of jump cuts. In the 21st century, it seems as if the use of digital cinematography is the heir apparent to Godard's little trick.

It was partially a technical choice to employ digital cinematography in this movie, as it allowed more to be captured in the image as the majority of the movie takes place at night, but don't think Mann wasn't keenly aware of the aesthetic that it provided. The perpetual motion machine that is Los Angeles is rarely caught on film, and that may be because it is the wrong medium altogether.