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13 December 2011

Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)



A few years ago I was fortunate to be in attendance at the Wexner Center when Lodge Kerrigan spoke at a screening of his film, Keane. (If you've not seen it, do so. It's one of the best American films of the last decade.) During the Q&A I thanked Mr. Kerrigan for not exploiting the main character's mental illness, by playing it for cheap laughs, like in a Robin Williams vehicle. Anyone who's dealt with mental illness, either personally or with a family member, knows that it's not funny.

But what about an artist who exploits their own mental illness? Van Gogh clearly suffered from some sort of psychological malady, yet his ability to channel his fears, dreams, and hallucinations into his work is an important part of why it's so compelling; we get a window into the world of someone not like us, and it's hard to resist.

Melancholia is a work of self-exploitation. Von Trier, while suffering from a bout of depression, was struck by how people suffering from depression handle stressful situations with seeming calm. Since even the worst reality imaginable, i.e., the end of the world, isn't as bad as their perceived reality, why get all bothered about it?

The end of the world in Melancholia is the destruction of Earth, caused by the collision into it of a much larger, 'rogue' planet, named Melancholia. The various characters anticipate or reject the possibility of this calamitous event to varying degrees, and their reaction to its inevitability is determined by various things, not the least of which, their mental 'health.'



Justine (Kirsten Dunst) is not mentally healthy. We discover this as we meet her, on her wedding day. As the film opens, she is two hours late to her reception, and spends the rest of the evening sulking, hiding, and avoiding most everyone, particularly her groom. One person she wants to talk to, her father, played by a well-disguised John Hurt, hasn't time for her, preferring to flirt with two young women named 'Betty.' By the end of the evening Justine has managed to quit her job, have perfunctory, anonymous sex with an erstwhile co-worker, and (unsurprisingly) alienate her new husband (Alexander Skarsgard, son of von Trier-regular Stellan Skarsgard, who himself plays Justine's boss.)



In the second part of the film, ostensibly focused upon Justine's sister, Claire (played by the ever-wonderful Charlotte Gainsbourg), the Melancholia-as-planet plot comes to the fore. John, Claire's impossibly wealthy husband, played by a suitably buttoned-up Keifer Sutherland, eagerly anticipates Melancholia's 'fly-by.' A believer in the 'non-sensationalist' variety of scientists (the ones who tell everyone there's no danger, that Melancholia will pass by the Earth with only the smallest of incident), John tracks the patch of the rogue planet each night with an expensive array of telescopes, initiating his and Claire's son into his stargazing hobby. He has warned Claire to not go online, that the scientists predicting doom and gloom are only angling for attention. Predictably, John is least able to cope with the truth of things.



(Incidentally, Melancholia may be von Trier's least misogynist film, coming on the heels of Antichrist, by consensus his most misogynist one. To be sure, Melancholia is by no means a feminist work, but, taken in the aggregate, the male characters are a far less appealing bunch than the females.)

As it becomes clear that Melancholia will not avoid Earth, the benefit of Justine's melancholia becomes clear - she just doesn't care that she, and every other living creature in the universe, is about to die. "Life is evil," she states blankly. The calm that she exudes is actually a saving grace, of a sort, to her sister and nephew. I don't really think von Trier is trying to make a statement here, that, perhaps, the depressives among us are actually capable of helping the rest of us through life's calamities, but I simply think he's investigating an interesting concept in the most extreme way possible.



Whatever the purpose of the film, I think that von Trier has gifted us with something special. "A beautiful film about the end of the world," (the movie's tagline) doesn't even approach the magnificence that has been achieved. Special mention should be made of the performance of Dunst, who was required to carry the emotional weight of the film, and does so admirably. She was awarded Best Actress at this year's Cannes festival, and it would be churlish to say the award wasn't deserved. For her performance, combined with Manuel Alberto Claro's photography, make Melancholia worth seeing. Everything else is a bonus.

16 May 2011

Really good foreign language films, 2001-2010

2001

Read My Lips (Jacques Audiard)
The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke)
What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang)
Time Out (Laurent Cantet)
In Praise of Love (Jean-Luc Godard)
Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón)
Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat)
Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)

2002

On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (Hong Sang-soo)
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki)
Blisfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar)
Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Friday Night (Claire Denis)
Ten (Abbas Kiarostami)
man on the Train (Patrice Leconte)
The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismaki)

2003

The Return (Andrey Zvyagintsev)
Blind Shaft (Li Yang)
Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi)
The Story of Marie and Julien (Jacques Rivette)
Strayed (Andres Techine)
The Five Obstructions (Jorgen Lett and Lars von Trier)

2004

Samaritan Girl (Kim Ki-duk)
3-Iron (Kim Ki-duk)
The World (Jia Zhangke)
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar)
Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin)
Notre Musique (Jean-Luc Godard)
2046 (Wong Kar-wai)

2005

Tale of Cinema (Hong Sang-soo)
The Child (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Cache (Michael Haneke)
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)

2006

Still Life (Jia Zhangke)
Volver (Pedro Almodovar)

2007

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)
Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)

2008

The Class (Laurent Cantet)
35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)
A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)
Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson)
Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)

2009

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
In Prophete (Jacques Audiard)
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)
White Material (Claire Denis)
The Girl on the Train (Andres Techine)

2010

Uncle Boonmee  Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Carlos (Olivier Assayas)

01 April 2011

Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006)



Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Southland Tales is a monumental mess of a movie. It's a huge, colossal disaster. I really can't think of any way to describe it. Set in a contemporary, post-apocalyptic America which, after a number of orchestrated nuclear attacks, has devolved into a Balkanized police state watched over by a PATRIOT Act-on-steroids aided government, the film concerns the actions of Boxer Santaros, a politically connected actor, played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, along with a group of anti-government rebels known as the "Neo-Marxists." And it's narrated by Justin Timberlake.

Seriously.

The Rock and Mr "SexyBack".

And the hits keep on coming - Wallace Shawn plays a possibly evil, definitely mad, scientist, who harnesses the oceans to generate all the power the U.S. War machine will ever need, Jon Lovitz plays a racist cop in a blonde wig, and Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a porn star who hosts a The View-esque daytime talk show (with a panel of other porn stars who discuss current events while sitting on deck chairs along Venice Beach) who shacks up with Boxer and with him co-writes a script about a psychic L.A. Cop.

The plot is predictably a mess. Three years after the attacks, and on the eve of the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, Boxer, the son-on-law of GOP VP candidate Bobby Frost, goes missing in Nevada and then re-appears several days later. California and its 55 electoral votes is the key to the election. (Don't bother doing the electoral math necessary for that to actually happen.) The Neo-Marxists kidnap Boxer, and hope to use him to swing the election. The government has a mole inside the Neo-Marxists. Some people take some high-tech drugs and Timberlake lip-syncs a song by The Killers. There's a zeppelin. Then the world is falling apart. A cop who has a twin doesn't have a twin, they're duplicates of each other, and if they cross the streams touch it would be bad. They do, and then maybe the world ends, "not with a whimper but with a bang."

OK, I liked the part when Timberlake danced around the room and lip-synched. It was something approaching reality.

If anything the film is something of a time capsule of the Bush years - the liberal paranoia, the conservative jingoism, the stale romanticism of the anti-war movement. It's the low-brow, outre counterpart of Aaron Sorkin's preachy TV show, Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip, a show that ranted for 40 minutes every week at how stupid Middle America had to be to vote for Bush, twice. Looking back on that time, just a few short years ago, is like staring at a photo of yourself from when you had a really bad cold and were all sweaty and pale and feverish. It's you, but a you you barely recognize and would prefer to not if given the choice. But I really think I'm giving Kelly too much credit here. The guy can't write a script to save his life and his concept of drama or genuine human relationships makes the Geico caveman commercials seem sophisticated. But he somehow latched onto the zeitgeist of the aughts in a weird way, and ran with it, for 144 minutes and $17 million. I can only wonder what I'd have thought of the film had I seen it in a first run.

I don't think I'm surprising anyone when I state that Southland Tales isn't a very good movie. There's too much bad writing and bad acting for it to be objectively considered a quality motion picture. And quality notwithstanding it's at least 40 minutes too long. But it's also, in stretches, incredibly entertaining. The absurdity of it all guarantees it - the fact that so many big names, if not big talents, are attached to it, that it actually got green-lit, that someone thought up all this crap, is astonishing, and on occasion astonishingly funny. I mean, it played at Cannes, for God's sake. In competition. Never mind that it's an awful movie, somehow, somebody somewhere stuck it up there against The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Volver.

Film history is laden with directors making an acclaimed movie and then, given something approaching carte blanche, making a giant failure on their next effort. Southland Tales is no Heaven's Gate - no studios were harmed in the making of this picture - but it's far worse.

22 February 2011

Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans (FW Murnau, 1927)



Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans is a story told almost entirely in stereotypes. This is intentional. The story is very basic, and cluttering it with nuance or surprise would detract from his impact. A man is tempted. He overcomes temptation, but almost loses everything anyway. Once he realizes what could have been lost his life is changed forever. The end.

The beauty of the movie is in its simplicity, and its execution. I got to see it again last night as part of the Wexner Center's Film History 101 series.

21 February 2011

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)



As I write this, David Fincher's The Social Network is almost sure to win the Oscar™ for Best Picture. So, I'm late to the party, but I just watched it for the first time the other night. I don't know; I don't think it was that good. It benefits from a decent Aaron Sorkin script, but I don't think the multiple depositions as a framing device worked well. I kept waiting for that to finish so we could get on with the story, which, of course, never happened. The framing device was the story.

We're supposed to come away with the idea that Zuckerberg is kind of an asshole (or at least his ambition is to be one) but that he really doesn't have it in him because he's deep down, a nice guy. He just wants to be liked, which is why he invented Facebook in the first place. That's great, but I don't care and it doesn't make him interesting. It makes him dull.

The other thing we're supposed to understand is that Zuckerberg is at the forefront of a generation of tech geniuses who, unlike their forebears, don't just invent something great and then cash in, they stick with it and actually, you know, run things.
"I'm the CEO, bitch"
Except that Bill Gates is still (effectively) running Microsoft, ditto Jobs at Apple, Bezos at Amazon... So there's not a whole lot special about Zuckerberg except that he's still really young.

The first fifteen or twenty minutes of The Social Network are breathlessly good, but then the structure of the film starts to weigh it down like ankle weights, and it never recovers. Once it's over you feel unfulfilled, not because that it was a bad movie, just because there wasn't enough to it to satisfy.

01 January 2011

Film log - 2011 edition

  1. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) ***** 2010.01.18
  2. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) ***** 2010.01.10
  3. Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) ***** 2010.01.23
  4. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007) ***** 2010.02.06
  5. The Big Lebowski (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1998) ***** 2010.02.05
  6. White Material (Claire Denis, 2009) **** 2010.01.21
  7. Charlotte et Véronique, ou Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick (Jean-Luc Godard, 1957) **** 2010.02.06
  8. Bellamy (Claude Chabrol, 2009) **** 2010.01.20
  9. Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944) **** 2010.01.16
  10. In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008) **** 2010.01.02
  11. Winter's Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) **** 2010.01.01
  12. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010) *** 2010.02.20
  13. True Grit (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2010) *** 2010.01.27
  14. Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) *** 2010.01.17
  15. Atlantiques (Mati Diop, 2009) *** 2010.01.21
  16. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010) *** 2010.01.02