Shutter Island (4/2/10)
Even the marked fluttering of the projector seemed to enhance the movie experience as DiCaprio drew deep from his seemingly fathomless depths of acting chops, and Scorsese deftly arrayed both familiar riffs (his ubiquitously present steadicam shot circling a stationary subject) and novel hooks (perhaps the longest and most realistically violent tracking shot that I can recall) to weave an ensnaring cinematic web that traces a parallel exploration of clinical psychosis and the mythological journey to the dark underworld of the unconscious. The only subjective critique that I can levy is against the young couple sitting in front of me who thought it was a paternally mature idea to bring their whining and chattering three year old to an archetypal tale about madness directed by a modern master known for creating visceral and horrifying images of violence; an example of delusional ideation that demonstrates both antisocial tendencies and borderline child abuse.
Green Zone (3/26/10)
When Quentin Tarantino repositions the classic Hollywood hero into a fantasy re-inscribing of humanity’s moral failure during World War II, he encourages the spectator of Inglourious Basterds to withdraw from the problematic ethical responsibility that is implied in our own history as participants. It is in this fantasy avoidance of taking responsibility for our own historical transgressions by focusing on the virtuous white heterosexual male hero of Hollywood that I sadly call Green Zone the thinking person’s Inglourious Basterds.
The Ghost Writer 3/10/10
Effective film trade-craft involves supporting the text of the narrative with the conventions used to physically make the film, such as the choice to use handheld camera work to reinforce the idea of a chaotic or unstable story world. In the case of The Ghost Writer, the reverse is happening in so much that volitionally placed symbolism representing exercises in futility—sweeping up leaves in the wind, riding a bicycle in deep sinking gravel—reinforces the real-life, non-story world in which the filmmakers’ fielding of an intellectually blunted, emotionally inanimate, and wholly uninspired movie is futility in its purest form.
Crazy Heart 3/3/10
If mainstream American cinema resembles an illicit drug, in that it is an incredibly powerful, high-stimulus substance that occupies the mind while simultaneously fomenting passivity, then Hollywood is the prototypical pusher, vending an overpriced product without regard for the long-term effects that habitual users encounter. And if a simple representation of addiction that eschews cinematic hyperbole and follows a more straightforward and reserved method of film trade-craft can be said to serve as an intervention for the typical addict qua moviegoer, then I strongly recommend that you take the first step in recovery and begin treatment by viewing Crazy Heart.
Avatar (2/8/10)
If the right-wing complaints against Avatar are true, that the film makes an explicit statement against colonial militarism and wanton, conspicuous consumption of natural resources while attempting to violently dominate a native culture, then the implicit statement made within the film– that the native culture is best served by a white military man who not only speaks for the culture but becomes its de facto saviour and is rewarded for such with the sexual favors of it’s first daughter–belies a problematic left-wing position that seems to be unaware of its own xenophobia which keeps “the other” at an objectified and safe distance through an unmistakable process of exoticization. However, I must recuse myself from commenting further on the above, owing to my complete absorption during the film with my own post-colonialist desire to cop a peek at the barely and yet tantalizingly obscured and exoticized “nipples of color”.
The Road - (11/26/09)
If an actual, physical, American road is the most apt symbol for the trajectory of United States culture and civilization, from Lewis and Clark’s pragmatic and disciplined forging across the North American continent, to Jack Kerouac’s open road of modern bohemianism, then the film The Road symbolically plots that trajectory across a not only dead, but entirely decomposed landscape where humans are reduced to such a primordial need for survival, concepts like tragedy and cruelty are as numbingly distant as morality and kindness. And if the final destination of that metaphorical road is an equally dead and empty ocean, the paradoxical origin of this planet’s life in totality, then this film was a faithfully executed exploration of the most untrammelled nihilism, completely devoid of both the covertly narcissistic phenomenon of ennui, and any conventional cinematic representations of good and evil.
A Serious Man (11/04/09)
While the evangelical community of the United States spreads the good news of the dry-cleaned and spotless “prosperity” version of the Love of God every Sunday with live amplified music and internet video feeds, the Coen Brothers craft a pathologically disquieting examination of the existentially transmogrified despair that is modern American Judaism. And as far as viewers being attached to an emotionally and spiritually redemptive denouement, how does “F#*k off” grab you?
9 (9/14/09)
If it’s lacking the technological splendor of a film like Beowulf, and it’s not nearly as disturbing or magical as a Quay Brothers’ short, what can one really say about the latest animated flick 9 which is marketed primarily off of the name of the formally visionary director known as Tim Burton, and which seems to be neither visually nor textually related to said director’s former works of brilliance save for the repeated appearances of skulls? How about, “Can you believe that a small popcorn and small Diet Coke® literally costs more than nine dollars?
District 9 (08/14/09)
When comparing one’s positive experience of viewing South African director Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 to the problematic encounters one has with so many prominent American film makers, one is tempted to use the model of a homophobic heterosexual male lamenting an extended period of drunken bisexual experimentation. Considering the voluptuous story that District 9 hangs in front of one’s face, and the nearly flawless and seamlessly integrated visual effects the film attempts to seduce one with, one might imagine the aforementioned heterosexual male asking himself why he ever allowed Quentin Tarantino to go down on him that year.
Gamer (09/04/09)
Although the film makers of Gamer tried to create images that would afford visually sub-textual commentary on a hypothetical vulgarity which is overcoming society, or an obscene montage of simulacra threatening an equally hypothesized humanity, ultimately the attempt is dwarfed by the grotesquely stunted intellect of the film itself; that is, nothing contained within the film is as disturbing or frightening as the thought of the film makers encouraging one another that they were constructing something cinematically cogent. In fact, I stepped out of the auditorium during the film to write this, and in the time that it took to write these two sentences, the warm realization that I would subsequently leave the cinema washed over me like the relaxed pleasure of urinating in the shower.
