For the love of Jurassic Park III

Jurassic Park III
2001
USA
Dir: Joe Johnston

When it comes to Hollywood movie franchises, there always seems to be bizarre patterns of success involved. For anything starring Jason Statham, the second incarnation always stands above the others (I know this to be true of The Transporter, but I’ve heard from various, reputable folks that this is also true of Crank). For a number of the trashy horror chronicles, the Jason Statham rule also proves true (see Final Destination or Rob Zombie’s Halloween… also, outside of the horror genre, the X-Men films), but conversely there’s also the 1 and 3 rule, which applies to two of Wes Craven’s series: the original Nightmare on Elm Streets and Screams (you can argue against Scream 3 being good, certainly, but it’s hard to say it isn’t at least somewhat of an improvement over the 2nd). After indulging for the first time in the third of its series, I would contest that the Jurassic Park series (I’d say trilogy, but I’ve heard another one is in the works) falls into the 1-3 rule, though I know neither of its sequels are held in particularly high regard.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park will always be a notoriously memorable viewing experience for me or, in other words, one that marked a special turning point in my youth. The summer movie season of 1997 will be remembered best as the summer where I first recall truly loathing films of any sort, though it seems hard now to imagine that I was ever “easy to please.” The epic disappointment of The Lost World in May was quickly followed by the colossal disgust of Batman & Robin. Hollywood, for the first time I can remember, has failed this thirteen-year-old with their embarrassing sequels to films I had thoroughly enjoyed during my childhood. Needless to say (perhaps), I decided against seeing Jurassic Park III at 17, already fully jaded, expectedly angsty and unjustifiably haughty; I do know a few of my friends got really stoned and laughed their way through it, but I think I was even “too cool” to get high at that age.

The decision to watch Jurassic Park III nine years later proved to be a fortuitous one. I don’t think that sober, snotty seventeen-year-old would have been half as amused by its ridiculousness (or by the great Téa Leoni!) as this twenty-six-year-old admirer of the low-low-brow was. Like the hilarious and peculiar consistency in which Nicolas Cage has been playing characters with money troubles, Sam Neill returns to the series as Dr. Alan Grant after skipping out on The Lost World and gets tricked into returning to the dinosaur-infested island by a couple of zeroes and a dollar sign (well, as he points out at some point in the film, it’s a neighboring island from the one in the first film, one that’s become overtaken by wild dinosaurs). He’s tricked by a bumbling pair of loons–played by William H. Macy and Téa Leoni (whose hair was clearly styled by the world’s most dedicated Chynna Phillips fan)–whose son (Trevor Morgan) has gone missing on the island after a hang-gliding disaster with the teacher who fucks Reese Witherspoon in Election, who I believe is supposed to be Leoni’s new husband but looks convincingly enough like the town pederast. That the guy from Election shows up, not to mention Laura Dern in a thankless cameo, makes sense when you see Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor’s names appear in the end credits as co-writers. Unlike a lot of other writer-for-hire jobs, Payne and Taylor’s involvement isn’t mysterious or lost in translation, as their contribution can be seen entirely in Macy and Leoni’s characters, who appear to have been magically transported from a very different movie about goofy, bickering exes who inevitably fall back in love with each other. (In a perfect world, Dern would have reprised her role as Ruth Stoops instead of Dr. Ellie Sattler and been cosmically transported into Jurassic Park III).

All of the big dinosaur attacks, once Neill lands on the island with his protégé Alessandro Nivola and the Macy/Leoni odd couple, resemble little of what happens in the first two films, as new director Joe Johnston (the man responsible for such gems as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Rocketeer, The Pagemaster, Jumanji and most recently The Wolfman) shows more of an affinity for the Turok video games than the filmmaker he’d worked under for years. As is always the case for sequels, the stakes are higher, which here translates as the black guy getting offed earlier than he usually would (it takes a little longer for Michael Jeter to bite it). Of course, Macy and Leoni’s far-fetched-in-the-real-world but sure-to-be-true-in-the-movie-land notion that their child is still alive proves true, and of course, the kid is magnetically drawn to the otherwise misanthropic Dr. Grant… and thankfully isn’t half as irritating as the two writer’s contrivances that pass as Richard Attenborough’s grandchildren in the first film (the children of neurotic parents always turn out a lot saner than usual in movies, don’t they?).

At just ninety minutes, Jurassic Park III’s climax smells like the trenchant cocktail of screenplay revisions and budget-cuts, but that’s hardly a setback. Jurassic Park III provides more entertainment than it ever should have; placing a bunch of respectable actors in the broken back half of a jet that’s being tossed around and smashed by a dinosaur has never been a bad idea in my mind, and when those actors happen to be a desperate Sam Neill, a hot Alessandro Nivola, a mustache-donning William H. Macy and Téa Leoni (no adjective needed), I’m sold.

All three Jurassic Park films are available on DVD from Universal everywhere; Blu-rays have yet to come out for any of them.

Down... on the Ground

This post was intended to analyze the similarities and differences between Up in the Air, Fish Tank and An Education, but unfortunately it proved to be a rather uninteresting exercise in surface observations and difficult prose. So I scrapped the idea, but salvaged the only thing worth taking from it: my disdain for Up in the Air. So apologies for the jumpiness and inconclusive arguments, but I thought it might be of some interest regardless. For those who haven't seen the films, I wouldn't recommend reading as this is infested with “spoilers.”

As we’re nearing the half-way point in 2010, I took a look back at what few ’09 releases I actually saw, and one trend really stood out: marital and parental escapism. In three of the notable award contenders of 2009—Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Lone Scherfig’s An Education—the very same third act revelation appears as the protagonists make an uninvited visit to the homes of their respective lovers, discovering that their romantic flames are not only frauds, but frauds with spouses and children.

For Up in the Air’s Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a man whose views of romance are mirrored (of course) by his on-the-go career which keeps him in transit for the majority of his time, a hotel bar encounter with a woman like Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) leads to the most ideal of no-strings-attached affairs. Alex is a woman, seemingly, like Ryan: professional, mature, horny and uninterested in anything related to our traditional notions of maintaining a romantic relationship with someone. Through several different scenarios where Ryan is forced to interact with people whose notions of relationship stability greatly differ from his own, he undergoes a change of heart and falls for Alex in a way he’s likely never felt for anyone else.

In an attempt to compare/contrast An Education and Fish Tank, I hit a dead end, as they’re almost too similar. Both feature teenage girls as protagonists, their older love interests (Peter Sarsgaard, Michael Fassbender) are deceptively charming and both films happen to be directed by women. The only thing truly dividing them from a narrative perspective is their place in time and the issue of class. An Education’s Jenny (Carey Mulligan) comes from a typical middle class English family in the early 1960s, while Fish Tank’s Mia (Katie Jarvis) lives in the outskirts with her young, hot, single mother (Kierston Wareing) and little sister (Rebecca Griffiths). Their differences in quality, which is a steep one, can best be chalked up to the flatness and dryness of Scherfig’s images against the vividness and vibrancy of Arnold’s.

With surprising consistency, Jenny, Mia and Ryan’s worlds are all crushed through uninvited visits to their respective lovers’ homes. It was, after all, too good to be true for each of them, but the lessons aren’t all the same. For Up in the Air, Alex’s “other life” becomes just one of the film’s infuriatingly heavy-handed views of the traditional family structure. Alex is not only villainized through the revelation but all of the refreshing qualities that Ryan found in her morph into the traits of an unhappy wife and mother acting out. While it seemed relatively clear that Ryan’s young co-worker/traveling companion Natalie Keener’s (Anna Kendrick) function in the film was to give (false) validation to Ryan’s beliefs, Natalie’s purpose changes when the film places its scarlet letter upon Alex, as she starts to work as a defense for the screenwriters (and novelist, I suppose, though I haven’t read the book) in showing us that all women aren’t cruel, manipulative, heart-stomping adulteresses. It’s hard to determine whether the simple, vile justification of Alex’s away-from-home behavior or the nauseating placement of the interview footage of the real people laid off from their jobs where they all emphasize the importance of family is what ultimately destroys Up in the Air, but both elements certainly succeed in ridiculing the protagonist… or maybe we should have never trusted a filmmaker who tried to garner sympathy for a character who crushes other people’s lives as a trade.

All three films are available on Blu-ray and DVD in the UK. Up in the Air and An Education are available on Blu-ray and DVD in the US, and Fish Tank will be released by Criterion later in the year.

Rise Above

La fille du RER / The Girl on the Train
2009
France
Dir: André Téchiné

When Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy came out, many people found it to be a rather telling portrait of the economic crash of 2008, though many others noted that the film was made (and even premiered) before that had happened. What was fascinating though about the label placed upon it was that the film concerned a woman in her mid-20s, played by Michelle Williams, while the media focused on those individuals who were being laid off from jobs they’d had for years. André Téchiné’s latest film, The Girl on the Train, is one of the first films to really address this age group, the students who graduated at a time when the work field was grim to say the least, with that in mind… though what’s most appealing about the film is that it never directly approaches the subject.

Twentysomething Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne) is a charming, naïve young woman who lives with her mother Louise (Catherine Deneuve) and spends most of her afternoons rollerblading through Paris. The first moment we see Louise, she’s sitting in front of a computer, looking online for jobs to which her daughter could apply. The scene comes across as rather benign, trivial moment within the film. Louise nags her daughter about finding a job, Jeanne agrees with her while trying to change the subject, Louise adds that the particular job she’s found is working for someone she used to know and offers to revise Jeanne’s résumé. At first, the scene appears to exist in order to establish the relationship between the mother and daughter, who otherwise carry on like the best of friends, but it also establishes a generational gap and places context for the film’s driving act, midway through the film.

For a filmmaker approaching 70, Téchiné has a rather astounding grasp of what it means to be young in this economy. Jeanne lives comfortably with her mother and finds distraction with her iPod and rollerblades, while still harboring a hint of shame about her unemployment, as she lies to Franck (Nicolas Duvauchelle), the boy who fancies her, about working at the job for which she interviewed and (evidently) didn’t get. The other significant youth in the film is the grandson of Samuel Bleistein (Michel Blanc), the lawyer whose secretarial position Jeanne applied for. Nathan’s (Jérémy Quaegebeur) situation is a bit different. He’s 13, approaching his bar mitzvah and consistently bossed around by his quarrelling, liberal parents (Ronit Elkabetz and Mathieu Demy) even though they happen to think their actions are in sync with their son’s wishes. Despite the age difference between Jeanne and Nathan, he’s the only one who seems to understand her situation, or at least the only one willing to lend an ear without imposing judgment upon her, another example of the miscommunications between generation.

On a purely superficial level, Téchiné cinematically captures personal exchanges via the Internet in a totally magnificent, compelling way. One of the biggest hurdles filmmakers have had to tackle in recent years is how to make an online conversation visually stimulating, and it’s an obstacle at which most have failed. Favoring online video chat over phone calls, Jeanne and Franck communicate with one another as most kids would, and without a word spoken, Téchiné manages to make their exchanges as dynamic, sexy and engaging as if they were talking back and forth in person. He even adds a surprising touch with Jeanne and Franck’s first sexual experience together happening through the video chat, which could be chalked up to avoiding the interference from Jeanne’s mother or Franck’s roommate or the comfort Jeanne feels through the impersonal medium, avoiding the likely awkwardness of first having sex with someone (or both, naturally).

Jeanne’s situation, the one that only Nathan is able to understand, is not the pangs of being young but specifically the film’s central act in which Jeanne lies to the police claiming to have been a victim of an anti-Semitic attack. Jeanne isn’t Jewish, but she’s living in a world (the film world, that is; I’m not sure whether this is true in the real one or not) where anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise. Her recognition of this fact is probably brought upon through Bleistein, a Jew who’s gained media attention for defending the victims in court. Téchiné spends a great deal of time building up to Jeanne’s act, diving the film into two chapters, “Les circonstances” (Circumstances) and “Les consequences” (Consequences). No single moment, even the apparent one, gives explanation to why Jeanne did what she did. It’s best understood as a product of realities of her life (obviously) and her struggle not to disappear. Jeanne’s entire relationship with Franck provides the biggest clue to this. On most levels, Franck doesn’t seem like the sort of guy Jeanne would normally be attracted to. He’s rough, streetwise and has a family history of crime… not to mention that Louise seems to disapprove of him (which may be one of his appeals, I’m not sure). What Jeanne finds appealing in Franck is the attention he gives her; he appears dedicated and loyal to her, even if he’s rather shady and manipulative otherwise.

Jeanne never really gives a reason for what she did, and it’s very possible that she isn’t even aware of it in the first place. She doesn’t appear to be a racist toward Jews or the North Africans she claimed attacked her. She seems oblivious to a lot of things, including her own motives. The choice of casting Dequenne as Jeanne doesn’t seem to be an accident. Jeanne shares quite a few similarities with the title character in Rosetta, the role Dequenne is famous for. Both young women feel the weight of the economy crushing them, and both have unorthodox (and morally grey) ways of surviving through it. While Rosetta’s situation is one of singularity, Jeanne’s however is a sentiment that’s, unfortunately, considerably widespread.

La fille du RER will hit DVD from Strand Releasing in the US on 18 May; it is already on DVD in Canada (from Mongrel Media) and France (from UGC Vidéo) and will be released theatrically in the UK in June.

Humpin' Around

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire - d. Lee Daniels - 2009 - USA - Lionsgate

There's so little time left in the year for me to spend a whole lot of time writing about films that I don't like, but I need to flush my feelings for Lee Daniels' Precious out in some form. When my friend Tom sent me a Netflix note saying, "God help me, I partially agree with Armond White," I couldn't help but share his sentiment. Despite the editorial errors (really, how does giving the wrong title for a director's previous film, Shadowboxer not Shadowboxing, get past the NY Press' editor?) and including Marci X, Little Man, Mr. 3000 and Norbit (!!) in all seriousness as "excellent recent films with black themes," White sort of nails the self-loathing that runs through all of Precious, from its ludicrous fantasy sequences--the worst of which placing Precious (Gabourney Sidibe) and her mother (Mo'Nique) in a scene from Vittorio De Sica's Two Women as they watch it on television, despite the fact that Precious is barely literate--to its onslaught of racial stereotypes.

I am glad, however, that Lee Daniels' incompetence is finally getting some press after the film screened at the New York Film Festival. No one seemed to have a bad word to say about it at Sundance, Cannes or Toronto. Poverty porn, emotional porn, a new kind of blaxploitation, an impeccably acted piece of trash, a con job -- all of these descriptions are appropriate. One of the highlights of White's review points out one of Daniels' unsubtle, messy visual gimmicks: "The scene where Precious carries her baby past a “Spay and Neuter Your Pets” sign is sick." But I can't help but give it up, as most of the film's detractors other than White seem to be doing, to the actors, from newcomer Sidibe, a monstrous, Joan Crawford-on-welfare Mo'Nique, a make-up-less, ratty-wig-donning, Jersey-accented Mariah Carey and Paula Patton as the light-skinned lesbian teacher/saint who looks after Precious. Whether the actresses' collectively marvelous performances add to Daniels' lunacy or rise above it isn't certain... all I know is that, thanks to its audacity, if Precious does manage to take home the Best Picture Oscar next February, I won't moaning as much as I did when that other overblown race-issue melodrama did a few years back.

Staying Alive?

Tony Manero - dir. Pablo Larraín - 2008 - Chile/Brazil - Lorber HT Digital

Written for Gone Cinema Poaching.

Like Taxi Driver and Man Bites Dog, Pablo Larraín's Tony Manero offers a new addition to the league of cinema's most fascinatingly maladaptive sociopaths with Raúl Peralta (Alfredo Castro). Set in Chile during Pinochet's oppressive reign over the country, Larraín takes an unflinching look at his nation's history through Raúl, who'd rather be referred to as Tony Manero after John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever. While bearing some resemblance to Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely, the two films part ways quickly as Raúl's celebrity projection turns rapidly grim when we discover that he also brutally murders innocent people without a glimpse of reservation.

More than Taxi Driver, to which it shares a political leaning, Tony Manero recalls some of Michael Haneke's notable works. Like a hybrid of Funny Games' Paul (Arno Frisch) and The Piano Teacher's Erika (Isabelle Huppert), Raúl incorporates Erika's appalling acts of sadism with Paul's absence of remorse. He's not inhuman as much as he's beyond it, a product of the devastating reality of his world and Hollywood's endless dream-pushing.

I resist calling Tony Manero a satire or even a dark comedy as, like The Piano Teacher, its moments of rabid cruelty only spark laughter as a relief from the unshakeable dread the film creates and the repugnance that it instills. In one of the film's most memorably ghastly scenes, the local theatre's change of attraction from Saturday Night Fever to another Travolta vehicle Grease propels Raúl to crush the elderly projectionist's skull inside the projection booth.

While the underlying idea in Tony Manero rings familiar on a couple of levels, those associations never infiltrate the hypnosis Larraín and Castro, who co-wrote the screenplay, place the audience under. Whether it's mortification or a seedy desire to where the film could possibly be headed, there's something thoroughly transfixing about Tony Manero, which sustains its foreboding uneasiness to its final, astonishing sequence.

Family Ties

Summer Hours [L'heure d'été] - dir. Olivier Assayas - 2008 - France - IFC Films

Written for Gone Cinema Poaching.

Separating Olivier Assayas' films into two camps, the "globe-trotting erotic-thriller" and the "prestige" pic, is an easy action. On a superficial level, Boarding Gate and Summer Hours couldn't be more different. However, when it comes to Assayas' work, most people choose to make the simple connections, such as the one above or noting the similarities between demonlover and Boarding Gate without recognizing their strong dissimilarities. But really, pairing one against the other overlooks the central idea that appears in nearly his entire body of work (I haven't seen any of the films that came before L'eau froide): a search for identity within changing landscapes, even if it's indirect.

In Summer Hours, the search is quite apparent. After the passing of their mother Hélène (Edith Scob), three siblings (Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche, Jérémie Renier) must determine how to deal with their family's inheritance, with special consideration for the fact that each of them live on separate continents. Like really all of the director's films, Summer Hours is almost deceptively slight. Assayas keeps the film free of teary melodrama and unwanted sentimentality, restricting his camera from the actual death of Hélène as well as her funeral. Summer Hours isn't about a family's grief; it's about the value, monetary and sentimental, of what's left behind.

Though its persistent honesty is no small feat, the strength of the film reveals itself fully in its final moments. Once it's decided to sell the family home, the two eldest grandchildren (Alice de Lencquesaing, Emile Berling) throw a party in the nearly empty house. As teenagers and loud music occupy the rooms, Assayas takes the film in a place I never expected, though maybe I should have known better as he's always placed great emphasis on his films' closing scenes, even if they seem initially puzzling. As my hands down choice for the best film to hit theatres this year, I'd be surprised to find a film as sublime as Summer Hours in the remaining months of 2009.

I Wanna Be Adored

Adoration - dir. Atom Egoyan - 2008 - Canada - Sony Pictures Classics

Written for Gone Cinema Poaching.

It seems a long time ago that Atom Egoyan, after the successes of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, was among the forefront of international cinema. By following The Sweet Hereafter, which garnered the Egyptian-born, Canadian-raised filmmaker two Oscar nominations, with the disappointing Felicia's Journey, we got our first indication that Egoyan might never create the magic he showed during the late '80s and '90s again. With Adoration, Egoyan returns to the style and structure that worked so well for him early in his career; unfortunately, something's missing, even if it feels like all the pieces are there.

Those familiar with the director's work will spot some of the director's trademarks of style and theme easily. Airport customs, video recorders, fragmented narrative, paternal struggles, Arsinée Khanjian, devastating loss, the nature of truth, traces of personal ancestry. All are weaved into Adoration as one might expect, so why does the film feel so minor league? Like Ararat, the only post-Sweet Hereafter film of his that I genuinely like (even though I'm in the minority), Adoration never comes off like a sad act of self-mimicry. Egoyan continues to pose fascinating, gray-area quandaries; they just don't resonate or haunt the way his films always used to.

I suspect one of the reasons why could be attributed to the fact that Adoration (as well as Ararat) addresses very specific, button-pushing issues where Exotica, The Adjuster, Family Viewing and The Sweet Hereafter tackled more abstract ideas through less particular situations (Where the Truth Lies is another story altogether). It's not that Egoyan is preaching or over-symplifying these matters; it's that, like Charles Aznavour's character in Ararat says, Adoration feels like something he always "needed" to make. This necessity and self-applied obligation to explore terrorism and the waves of ignorance that surround it restrains the director and make the film's mysteries and revelations a hell of a lot less seamless and profound.

Additionally, the importance Egoyan places on keeping Adoration from being sanctimonious gives way for some glaring surface-level problems. It never seemed to dawn on Egoyan the preposterousness of the film's main plot detail, in which high schooler Simon (Devon Bostick) presents an assignment/monologue, with the encouragement of his French teacher Sabine (Khanjian) who also teaches drama, that adopts the perspective of an unborn child whose Middle Eastern father has planted a bomb on the child's mother as she boards a flight to Israel without him. Simon asserts that the story is true, even though his parents (Rachel Blanchard, Noam Jenkins) actually died in a car accident. This "experiment" leads to more social exercises between the boy and his teacher, all of which begin to enrage the (physical and online) community. All the major plot points and subsequent disclosures never rise above their own contrivances, and you can almost see an uneasiness in the way Khanjian, Egoyan's wife and muse, plays her scenes.

Despite fantastic turns from Scott Speedman, as Simon's uncle who raises him after the accident, and Kenneth Welsh, every bit as creepy here as he was in Twin Peaks as Simon's grandfather, Egoyan can't get much out of Bostick, who plays the youthful centerpiece that's so crucial in nearly all of Egoyan's films. After eliciting such a mesmerizing performance from Sarah Polley in The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan hasn't been able to replicate that with Elaine Cassidy, David Alpay, Alison Lohman (though she has been forgiven thanks to Drag Me to Hell) and now Bostick. In his two principle actors, we can see a glimpse of Egoyan's own admirable, but disconcerting hereafter, where everything has become a murky reflection of what once was and the pieces that once fit together no longer do.

Field of Broken Dreams

Sugar - dir. Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck - 2008 - USA - Sony Pictures Classics

Written for Gone Cinema Poaching.

While Laurent Cantet's The Class [Entre les murs] and the fourth season of The Wire may have forever altered the tired classroom genre, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's Half Nelson was the first, rousing sign that the days of Dangerous Minds and Mona Lisa Smile had ended. With Sugar, Fleck and Boden have aimed to do the same with another eye-rolling genre: the sports film. While a mostly admirable attempt, Sugar comes up short in a lot of the aspects Half Nelson succeeded.

Fleck and Boden were the only two people who could have got me excited about a sports film, being neither a fan of athletic competitions nor, especially, their representation on film. Following gifted Dominican pitcher Miguel (Algenis Perez Soto), or Sugar as he's known by everyone else, the filmmaking pair take a surprisingly singular approach to the usually team-oriented subject of baseball. As Sugar moves from the Dominican Republic into the American minor leagues with very little knowledge of the English language, his journey becomes a predominantly solitary one. While it's perhaps unfair to constantly compare the film to Half Nelson, Sugar lacks the astonishing dynamics of character between Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps.

Though aided by some fantastically edited game sequences and an aversion to cheap sentimentality, the temptation to descend into lame clichés isn't evaded as much as one might hope. Sugar's debut on the mount comes with a slew of expected conventions: the initial fumble, the pep talk from his sort-of mentor (Rayniel Rufino) and then the extraordinary delivery on his promise. The film takes a shift in its final third, but for those of you hoping for a scene to mirror the exhilarating climax of Half Nelson (when Gosling and Epps see each other in the hotel room while Broken Social Scene's "Shampoo Suicide" plays on the soundtrack), it isn't there.

In downplaying most of the film, Fleck and Boden provide us with something a lot more meaningful than the typical underdog story, but they also risk making Sugar as unmemorable as the films it's critiquing. I'd also like to start a petition to ban filmmakers from using any version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." From films like Basquiat and Watchmen all the way down to episodes of The West Wing and Scrubs, the song has worn out its welcome, and even using a Spanish-language cover of it, as they do in Sugar, still feels just as trite.

Without a Paddle

The Limits of Control - dir. Jim Jarmusch - 2009 - USA/Spain/Japan - Focus Features

Written for Gone Cinema Poaching.

Though also structured around a series of vignettes, Jim Jarmusch's latest, The Limits of Control, is a welcome departure from his last two films, Broken Flowers and Coffee and Cigarettes. Bearing a much closer resemblance to Dead Man and, perhaps, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, The Limits of Control is Jarmusch at his most coded and narratively "avant garde." Setting aside his usual influences (Yasujiro Ozu and Seijun Suzuki, for example), Jarmusch opts for a strange fusion of Jean-Pierre Melville, Alejandro Jodorowsky and, even, Jacques Rivette. Using these comparisons might suggest a dismissive act of deduction, but, like so many of his other films, The Limits of Control owes everything to the familiar and mysterious world of the cinema.

Though I suspect this is how I feel about most films that would qualify, it isn't until Tilda Swinton appears onscreen that the film begins to work. With a white-blonde wig and cowboy hat, Swinton delivers the film's best line, "Movies are like dreams you're never really sure you've had." The line was taken directly from a speech Swinton gave at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2006 and ultimately serves as both the guiding light of The Limits of Control as well as the point of surrender. As the third visitor for Isaach De Bankolé, the hero of the film simply credited as 'Lone Man,' her arrival onscreen is when the viewer is forced into deciding whether or not they wish to accompany Jarmusch and De Bankolé on their strange, covert journey through Spain.

In a series of arcane, frequently misleading codes, the viewer follows De Bankolé on this cryptic quest, adorned with mostly familiar faces (De Bankolé, Swinton, Bill Murray, Alex Descas, John Hurt and Youki Kudoh have all starred in at least one other film by the director). While the partnerships with cinematographer Christopher Doyle and musicians Boris and Sunn O))) are firsts for their director, they certainly recall the directors' best visual and musical collaborations. In the end, what one takes from The Limits of Control is a matter of decision and acceptance. The film never reaches the unbeatable heights of the films it aspires to (Céline and Julie Go Boating and The Holy Mountain, to name a few), but I'd be ridiculous to slight any film that. For the patient viewer though, The Limits of Control has a lot to offer and is the most assured film the director has made in a decade.

Wicked Game(s)

The Informers - dir. Gregor Jordan - 2009 - Germany/USA - Senator

I've been toiling around with writing about Gregor Jordan's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' The Informers for the past couple days. I've tried defending my liking of it, but the words just aren't convincing. The Informers is a mess, which may or may not be a result of the studio's decision to reject the director's three-ish hour long version, and yet, in my eyes, it's the most successful attempt to bring Ellis' vision to the screen. Of course, it doesn't have a lot of competition. Less Than Zero is an abortion, and both American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction are inspired failures. Jordan does have an advantage over the other filmmakers in choosing Ellis' hands-down worst book to bring to the screen, a loose collection of sordid tales of LA decadence that feel more like B-sides to his better stories (and not the good and/or sought-after type of B-side).

I can't decide if its bit of casting is inspired or if it simply uses the availability of its somewhat absent-from-the-screen stars. With Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder, Chris Isaak and Mickey Rourke (before The Wrestler placed him back on the map), all four would have a dream line-up in Hollywood's eyes had the film been made shortly after it was set, but in 2009, it may have been the only work those actors could find. In Isaak's defense, he was only a part-time actor, though I've always held his turn in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me in high regard. So, like Rourke in The Wrestler, each of the performances exist in an alternate level of reality: Basinger as the pill-popping beauty, Ryder as the disrespected TV anchor, Isaak as the alcoholic flirt who missed every opportunity to connect with his son (Lou Taylor Pucci) and Rourke as the former bodyguard blacklisted from Hollywood after "an incident with that actress." And, really, each of their performances, along with Billy Bob Thornton's movie producer ex-husband of Basinger, are quite potent, much more so than their younger counterparts.

Visually, Jordan captures Ellis' world perfectly in its glassy, cloudy, empty sheen. Though the implications are glaring, the sweeping aerial shot of the Hollywood sign, ominous from a distance and graffiti-ridden up close, is absolutely radiant. Jordan avoids the showboat approach Roger Avary took to capturing The Rules of Attraction and sticks to lens filters to tonally dress the frame. What vanishes though, aside from a number of the book's characters, is Ellis' sense of humor, despite the fact Ellis wrote the screenplay with Nicholas Jarecki, director of the James Toback documentary The Outsider. His humor isn't completely absent, seen best when a woman plays her son's favorite song, Pat Benatar's "Shadows of the Night," at his funeral, but the straight-faced desolation of The Informers manages to work on some level, something Less Than Zero, the film, didn't come close to accomplishing.

Despite the fruitful attempts by Jordan and the senior members of his cast (though, really, all of the younger actors, except for Austin Nichols as music video director Martin, are effective in their hollow poses), I think I fall into the camp of people who don't believe Ellis' work could ever be successfully translated onto the screen. With money comes a level of restraint that his novels never showed, though it's perhaps notable that The Informers left its characters' (bi-)sexuality intact (though only in mention, not in practice), whereas Less Than Zero turned Robery Downey, Jr.'s character straight and The Rules of Attraction made Ian Somerhalder's gay, both differing forms of simplification. A certain explicitness, as well as an understanding of its purpose in Ellis' world, is necessary to convey the author's ideas, and that will probably always remain the greatest obstacle between the written and filmed works. We may never see Jordan's intended version of The Informers, in the same way US audiences have never officially seen the unedited cut of The Rules of Attraction or its counterpart Glitterati, but somewhere within its current shape, there are moments that suggest the "outstanding movie floating out there somewhere" that Ellis alludes to in Scott Tobias' interview with him on The Onion's A.V. Club, and those moments, particularly the final shot, really knocked me out.

Bastards of Young

Adventureland - dir. Greg Mottola - 2009 - USA - Miramax

There's something strangely admirable about the way Judd Apatow comedies (or Apatow-esque in the case of Adventureland) handle earnestness. All of the films that fall under this umbrella go exactly where you expect them to, and while some work better than others, their sincerity nearly permits a forgiveness that most dude-centered comedies are never granted. This isn't to say that Adventureland or any of its not-so-distant cousins are good films, but it's hard to really dislike them. In Adventureland, college grad James (Jesse Eisenberg, doing his best Michael Cera) finds himself back in Pittsgburgh, taking a job at a local theme park after his European vacation is canceled due to lack of funds.

Every review I've read has felt the need to mention (warn?) that Adventureland isn't the uproarious, zany comedy Mottola's Superbad was, but those moments are still present, albeit in diluted form. Mottola doesn't seem confident enough to part with the sort of juvenile, "this is the part that is going to make people laugh" comedy, all of which is reserved for the characters of James' childhood friend Tommy (Matt Bush) and the managers of the theme park (Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig). None of these bits work, though I can't say I've ever found any of these sorts of films remotely funny. Mottola's inability to fully return to the humor of The Daytrippers without going by way of Superbad isn't the only foul.

Enter Em (Kristin Stewart), the hip, attractive coworker who James will inevitably fall for. While Mottola unfortunately reduces a lot of the characters (including James) to clichés, he makes an ill-fated attempt not to do that with Em. She's sexy, mysterious, more spontaneous than the protagonist, has a dead mother and an amazing record collection. After their initial bonding, the camera moves for the first time away from James and follows Em to her rendez-vous with "a friend." You see, Em's assumed the position of "the other woman" to the unhappily married Mike (Ryan Reynolds). Like most of what happens in Adventureland, you know the story well by now. However, with the shift in perspective also comes the first change in tone, and this is not only a poor transition but crude disclosure of the director's disapproval of Em's actions. As she pulls away from James' house, the airiness of the rest of the film gives way to a sense of trepidation as she pulls into the bar, almost as if the secret she's harboring were of a more horrific ilk than just an affair with a married man. Though it may be subconscious on Mottola's part, this action condescends Em, as well as Stewart who otherwise gives an effective performance.

This is carried over to Lisa P (Margarita Levieva), the theme park's resident hottie. Once her slow-motion entrance into the film has passed, she's treated to the same conflicting characterization as Em. On one hand, she's blessed with more depth than her Nick & Norah counterpart Tris, but Mottola can't resist placing her in opposition to Em, to whom she's never allowed to live up to. Lisa P dances with her best friend Kelly (Kimisha Renee Davis) to Shannon's "Let the Music Play;" Em drives around in her car listening to Hüsker Dü's "Don't Want to Know If You Are Lonely." Lisa P doesn't respond to James' mention of his Charles Dickens aspirations; Em seems charmed by it. Lisa P gossips; Em keeps secrets. And so on. Mottola seems as clueless when it comes to women as James does, which shouldn't be a surprise as the film is semi-autobiographical.

Despite all this, Adventureland suffices on its own sincerity. For all the fantastic music featured in the film (The Replacements, Big Star, Lou Reed and Yo La Tengo, who provides the score), it isn't holier-than-thou or even obnoxiously showy, though I can't help but wish directors would move away from the diegetic use of music giving way to non-diegetic montage cues, which is even more irritating in Nick & Norah. While every attempt to improve upon the run-of-the-mill coming-of-age tale flounders, Adventureland's less ambitious pursuits happen to work, which isn't something that can be said about most Hollywood romantic comedies. But a Richard Linklater film this ain't.

Frissons

Martyrs - dir. Pascal Laugier - 2008 - France - The Weinstein Company - with Morjana Alaoui, Mylène Jampanoï, Catherine Bégin, Robert Toupin, Patricia Tulasne, Isabelle Chasse, Juliette Gosselin, Xavier Dolan-Tadros

I'm not so sure it's my place to say anything about Martyrs as its partly-fabricated reputation certainly proceeds it. In the era of what appears to be Hollywood's shittiest onslaught of the horror genre, though I'm not sure when outside of the time around Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen when Hollywood wasn't churning out lowest-common-denominator horror trash, the French have taken the place of Hong Kong and Japan as the salvation for the true horror fanatic (of which, I wouldn't count myself). With their endearing love/hate relationship with Hollywood, the French approached Hollywood horror not in an attempt to reinvent it as much as revitalize it. From deformed inbred horror (Calvaire) to slasher flicks (Haute tension) and a pair of home invasion-ers (À l'intérieur, Ils), the filmmakers borrowed the familiar molds and, for a brief moment, made horror films relevant again. In an ill attempt to play "catch up," Hollywood abandoned their fleeting obsession with remaking every successful Asian horror flick and began enlisting the French to... remake their own national canon of horror. (Apparently, they aren't officially done with Asia though as this year's The Uninvited was a remake of A Tale of Two Sisters.) Despite the lousiness of Hollywood's first attempt with Alexandre Aja (Haute tension) and The Hills Have Eyes, Martyrs director Laugier is slated for the Hellraiser remake. This could certainly fall through as Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo (À l'intérieur) dropped out of the sequel to the remake of Halloween, which seems to be back in Rob Zombie's hands (and which I believe is not a direct remake of the sequel to the original). It might also be noted that H'wood has remade Ils into The Strangers and Aja's last film Mirrors was a loose remake of a Korean film.

I might have wanted to speak more of Martyrs if it weren't riding so high on the waves of horror fantastics' new fascination with French horror. I had plenty to say about Maury and Bustillo's À l'intérieur [Inside] last year, but the stakes appear to be higher now as a result. Like Inside (and, other than placing women in the only active roles, this is the only real similarity between the two), Martyrs is going through the same befuddled release structure from The Weinstein Company. Building word-of-mouth from various film festivals (Toronto, especially) and the few people that saw it there, Martyrs was acquired by the Weinsteins, who are still clueless how to release a graphically violent, subtitled horror film to the American public. The DVD, which is still tentatively set for 28 April, has been delayed twice already (though this may have to do with financial woes), which may be the gravest mistake they could have made. With the French DVD released just yesterday, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before file-sharing networks allow the people who've been eagerly anticipating the film (and there are plenty) to see it before the Weinsteins can take their first check to the bank. I suppose the economic times are too shaky for studios to start experimenting with release structure (especially for The Weinstein Company whose successful Oscar-baiting of The Reader didn't exactly translate to box office gold and whose release slate for 2009 looks pretty depressing). However, if the trend of hotly anticipated European horror films continues, Hollywood is going to need to find a way to tap that market before they lose out to the many of us that have region-free DVD players.

To address the film at hand, I don't wish to perpetrate the outlandish myths that have circulated the Internet, nor do I wish to dispel them. Martyrs plays so much to your expectations, whether they be low after catching all the shit Hollywood's been making or high as a result of fanboy gloating, that it's a disservice to the audience going into specific detail. It's ultimately bound to evade those expectations and that in itself is exciting. I don't mean to be irritatingly cryptic, but if you really crave to know more, there are plenty of other outlets to satiate your curiosity. As hopes of catching Martyrs on the big screen, where it belongs, are nil, it's probably well-suited for the film to simply bask in its transient mystery.

Une autre folie de la jeunesse

Les corps ouverts - dir. Sébastien Lifshitz - 1998 - France - N/A - with Yasmine Belmadi, Pierre-Loup Rajot, Margot Abascal, Mohamed Damraoui, Malik Zidi, Dora Dhouib, Sébastien Lifshitz

If there's a single filmmaker in the past ten years who I think has been criminally overlooked within the film community, it would have to be Sébastien Lifshitz. It's not so much a lack of appreciation, as the one or two people I know who've seen his films feel the same as I do, but being the closest offshoot of Claire Denis doesn't really get the film houses packed. (On a side note, I mentioned in my review of Lifshitz's Wild Side that his film's have more in common with mid-period Bergman, but the Denis comparisons, even beyond sharing the amazing cinematographer Agnès Godard, are apparent.) I finally got a chance to see the short he made prior to Presque rien, Les corps ouverts, which won both the Prix Jean Vigo and the Kodak Short Film Award at Cannes in 1998. Les corps ouverts, which appears on the French Film Office disc for Presque rien but irritatingly not on the US disc from Picture This!, basically lays out the groundwork for Lifshitz's later work, which I suppose is exactly what I hope for when a filmmaker follows the path of establishing theirself with a short to "graduate" to feature-filmmaking. To refer to Les corps ouverts as a "test-run" would be unfair, as it's quite good on its own. However, watching it retroactively, the thought lingered. Though I can remember when non-linear storytelling seemed to be a hot trend, Lifshitz, like Atom Egoyan, understood that the structure could only be truly rewarding if it were dramatically revelatory instead of divisively concealing.

In many ways, the film's protagonist Rémi (Yasmine Belmadi) is Mathieu (Jérémie Elkaïm) of Presque rien and Stéphanie (Stéphanie Michelini) of Wild Side at the same time. Like both, he's thrust into the role of caretaker when his parent falls ill, and similar to his other films, his other parent is absent. Like Mathieu, it's a figurative orphaning as he's left to his own devices during the formation of his own maturity; like Stéphanie (and perhaps Mathieu after-the-fact), this "orphaning" results in an outward hardness (though this isn't exactly the case for Stéphanie) which is deceptive to both the characters around him and, most of all, to himself. The outward hardness, of course, could be reduced to Rémi's floundering attempts at a certain Arab machismo, which is seen early on during a casting session when he tells the director his favorite film is De Palma's Scarface, the beacon of feigned, hard-edged masculinity. His sexuality thus becomes less of an issue as his own applied gender norm, as he assumes the active role of "man of the house" with his ailing father (Mohamed Damraoui) and his sexually maturing sister (Dora Dhouib). This spreads to his sexual affairs, with both film director Marc (Pierre-Loup Rajot) and the street dancer (Margot Abascal), who looks like a Madonna impersonator circa 1988, where his projections conceal what his face is never able to hide. With Marc, Rémi rejects tenderness as if it were something to be ashamed of; with the girl, he recites his own poetry in an attempt to woo her with sensitivity. And then there's the porno theatre hook-up (with a character played by Lifshitz) where all of his naiveté and both sexual and emotional immaturity subconsciously reveal themselves.

To go back to the Bergman reference, Les corps ouverts is no different from Lifshitz's later films. There's a jarring moment of truth in the film's closing shot, where the film returns to Rémi's casting session with Marc. Leaving the camera on Rémi's face as Marc explains the film to him, we learn everything we need to know about the film's protagonist in his face as if the camera captured something intangible within him. The weight of this shot is immeasurable and ultimately devastating. I can't recommend Lifshitz's films with any more enthusiasm that I've already displayed. With no word of future projects listed online for the director, I can only hope Wild Side wasn't the last we've heard from such a gifted filmmaker.

Additional Readings:

Comin' Home [My review of Wild Side from 21 June 2006]
Neverland et la folie de la jeunesse [A comparison piece between Presque rien and Pawel Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love from 14 April 2006]