Category: Reviews

The Arbor

“The Arbor” is an experimental documentary by Clio Barnard about playwright Andrea Dunbar.

I complained about the subtitles in “The Arbor” as soon as I saw them. I wrote off subtitles for an English language movie as one more obnoxious gimmick in an already experimental British documentary that from the start tests our understanding of what a documentary is.

But before long, I was glad to have them. There’s no substitution for this thick Yorkshire dialect in creating the most authentic version of this story, and they allowed me to hang on every word of this compelling and fascinating experiment in filmmaking.

“The Arbor” tells the life story of the playwright Andrea Dunbar, a woman who saw success on stage as young as the age of 15, but then gave birth to three children each from different fathers and died from a drug overdose at 29.

We hear it through the voices of her children, lovers, parents, neighbors and Andrea herself, but we see it through the eyes of actors. Clio Barnard has made a film that teeters the line between documentary and biographical fiction by casting actors to lip sync to the vocal testimonial of the actual subjects.

This gives Barnard the freedom to stage her actors in social tableaux settings as they deliver harrowing testimonial directly to the camera. It’s a unique cinematic style that is not only constantly visually stimulating but one that redefines the way a documentary could be filmed. Continue reading “The Arbor”

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

David Fincher’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” has made a stark, coldly digitized thriller that is at times brilliant and others tedious.

“The Social Network” gave me false hope.

It was my favorite movie of last year. The prospect of seeing David Fincher (and not to mention Trent Reznor) tackling “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” after seeing the Swedish version (I haven’t read the book yet. I know, pathetic, right?) was just too good to be true.

I assumed Fincher’s approach to Facebook and the Zodiac Killer would make him a perfect fit for the cold, computerized, technology driven thriller that made the original so riveting.

In this American adaptation of the Millennium novels and not a remake, Fincher has done exactly what I expected and has made a film that is at times thrilling and brilliant and at others frustrating, slow and dry. Continue reading “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)”

The Girl Who Played With Fire

The sequel to the Swedish “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” falls short of the original.

This review was originally written and published in the summer of 2010.

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is a literary phenomenon. The rapid speed in which the books were released and diffused all throughout the world has been remarkable, and the great quality of the first Swedish film, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” only added to that excitement.

The Swedish filmmakers answered that demand even quicker than the publishers of Larsson’s books could. The Millennium trilogy was intended to be a Swedish TV miniseries following the first film, but instead was hustled out the door as two more films so they could be released within WEEKS of one another.

After seeing “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and realizing that this trilogy would be completed within one calendar year, I speculated this had potential to be the greatest collection of three anyone had ever put out in one year since the Beatles put out three albums in 1964.

So my anticipation for “The Girl Who Played With Fire” was high, and for a while I ignored a lackluster story and poor writing that read like a TV movie for a chance to see Noomi Rapace take another stab at Lisbeth Salander.

But a TV movie is exactly what this sequel is. It’s a half-baked attempt to capitalize on a craze, and it misses the point of what made the original so compelling. Continue reading “The Girl Who Played With Fire”

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

This review was originally written and published in the summer of 2010 before I knew “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” was a book and before it was an international phenomenon as well as before I knew any casting news on the American version.

Before I had even seen “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” I had heard news about its announced American remake directed by David Fincher. I hope that film is not a direct remake, as this Swedish film is a dark, disturbing, complex and cerebral thriller with a hard R-rating. After seeing it, I’m less excited for the American version and more so for the two sequels due out in the same calendar year.

This is a rare thriller that does as much for its story as it does for its characters. It has an intricate plot about a journalist named Mikael Blomkvich (Michael Nyqvist) being framed for forging evidence for an article. He’s got six months until his sentence, and in that time, businessman Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) has hired him to pick up the pieces of a murder/disappearance case that’s 40 years old. His niece Harriet was murdered by one of the members of the Vanger family, and after some digging, Mikael suspects three brothers that were Nazi supporters.

As he investigates the murder, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a goth girl and the best computer hacker in Sweden, is investigating him to find proof that he really forged the evidence. She says Mikael’s clean, but she continues following him and helps him out with the murder case. Lisbeth’s a recluse with a mysterious past, a criminal and psychiatric record, and she’s a feminist with lesbian urges.

Throughout the course of the film, we see her endure some serious pain and torture, but the other side of the coin is her ability to dish it out as well. The complexity of her character lies in her questionable morals and ethics, which teeter the line between decency and justice. Continue reading “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009)”

Young Adult

Jason Reitman reteams with Diablo Cody in this intriguing dramedy starring Charlize Theron.

Mavis Gary is a bitchy, entitled slob stuck in her high school glory days. She is so convinced she is better than the world she left that she’s blinded.

Although in this day and age, what’s wrong with that?

“Young Adult” presents us with a character so unlikeable and progressively horrible that from its first moments it challenges us to even feel pity for this woman. It’s a deliciously intriguing black comedy that considers leaps and bounds about nostalgia, cynicism and happiness in the 21st Century.

Mavis’s (Charlize Theron) goal is to return to her small, hick hometown and win back the love of her high school flame Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson) by breaking up Buddy’s happy marriage and newly formed family.

We’ve maybe heard this story, but you’re wrong if you think she’ll warm to her quaint hometown. You’re wrong if you think she’ll grow up and catch the difference between never leaving home and living in the past. You’re wrong if you think she’ll ultimately fall for the old high school nerd she always ignored. You’re wrong if you even think she’ll leave a better person.

Because you’re wrong is what makes “Young Adult” so right. Continue reading “Young Adult”

The Skin I Live In

Pedro Almodovar’s lush thriller stars Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya.

I guess you could classify “The Skin I Live In” as a surrealistic revenge sci-fi romance. Pedro Almodovar’s film is so lush, sexual, exotic and artful, as they always are, that it’s above genre or even emotional expectations. Rarely is a film this darkly sexually perverse simultaneously queasy and mesmerizing.

The plot in ways recalls “Vertigo,” although this Spanish art house classic hardly feels or looks like Hitchcock’s masterpiece. It’s the twisted story of the wealthy plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas). Robert decorates his house with priceless Renaissance nudes, each Madonna shimmering in her perfection. But his prize possession he watches from a hi-def surveillance camera placed in the next room.

There sits Vera (Elena Anaya), a goddess Robert has crafted for himself. As he watches, his instincts transcend voyeurism. He is captivated in awe at the deep secrets and memories she represents, for she seems not entirely a woman but an untouched being. Each day, Vera sits in isolation doing yoga and reading, and she seems only aware of her purpose for Robert.

It’s because he has literally created Vera using a synthetic skin stronger than a human’s. She resembles Robert’s dead wife, and her strength against cuts, stings or burns leaves her an untouched masterpiece. Most of all, Vera radiates. Continue reading “The Skin I Live In”

Senna

The extent to which I know anything about Formula One racing is that Michael Schumacher posed as The Stig on an episode of “Top Gear” and that he also kind of looks like my dad.

That said, I am not the intended audience for the documentary “Senna,” based on the life of the three-time F1 Champ Ayrton Senna. And yet it remains a touching portrait of a true athlete.

Ayrton Senna was considered the best Formula One driver of all time until he was killed in a crash in a 1994 race. He won the World Championship three times and was at the time the top ranked driver in the world. He has since lost several of his records, but after his fatal crash the safety requirements were overhauled to the point that no driver has been killed since.

Watching the film by Asif Kapadia, I perhaps only learned so much about the rules of racing, the technique or the fierce competition behind it, but I came away with an appreciation for the man. Continue reading “Senna”

Melancholia

I’ve compared nearly half of the great movies this year to “The Tree of Life,” and this review will be no different, but the comparisons should really go the other way to Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia.” Arguably a better film than Terrence Malick’s and the polar opposite in tone, von Trier’s elegantly bleak way of defining life is to end it.

Rather than witnessing the birth of the Earth, “Melancholia” reveals to us in all its destructive glory the end of the world as another planet collides with Earth. Perhaps only the dour Dane von Trier could truly show the absolute majesty of oblivion. His opening sequence of operatic surrealism recalls Fellini and Kubrick. Time literally slows watching it. Nature, death and sci-fi as a genre are re-imagined in this picturesque procession of painterly beauty and celestial wonder. Continue reading “Melancholia”

Hell House

 

We wanted to watch “Jesus Camp” that night. Our conversation topic had diverted to being scared silly at the junk extremist, fundamentalist Christians do, and someone thought this 2001 documentary they stumbled across on Netflix, “Hell House,” would be a reasonable substitute.

Although shortly into it I began to question if “Hell House” was actually celebrating the horrific acts of a group of Christians in this suburb near Dallas. Regardless of its stance, the documentary’s ambiguous editing and testimonials make it a questionably one-sided, unentertaining and uninformative film.

Each year in Texas, the Trinity Church hosts a haunted house designed to recreate sinful acts and the experience of walking through hell before aiming to convert them to the path of Jesus Christ. The house (a literal house built from scratch rather than a tent. Why don’t they use these resources to help the homeless or something?) warns against drunk driving and doing drugs, but also condemns suicide, homosexuality and abortion with punishment of eternal damnation.

Lucky parents can walk through this makeshift hellhole and see their kids grasping for life beneath glass covering a red gas filled chamber. And at the end of the tour, an authoritative black man will give you six seconds to walk through a door and pray with the church or risk dying and going to hell knowing what they now know.

An intertitle at the end of the film informs that the Hell House has attracted over 75,000 people in roughly five years with about 15,000 converting and that other churches are following suit.

I find these to be scary numbers, and the homophobia and general ignorance rampant in this organization insults and terrifies me.

“Hell House” didn’t exactly reflect my opinions, and nor should it. The documentary is all cinema-verite and doesn’t outwardly demonize these people, make fun of them or even question them, but the editing remains ambiguous.

If the film is merely a journalistic, slice of life observation designed to educate us to some shocking people, what is particularly newsworthy about these people in Dallas? I’m aware these thoughts and feelings persist in communities like this, and “Hell House” merely confirms them. Beyond that, our journey into the Hell House is an unedited glimpse of each of the various sketches, denying us the backlash of others that would better educate us or the personal touches of individual characters we can follow and identify with.

And yet if this is a social commentary documentary, it certainly doesn’t seem to be using these scare tactics to great effect. All of the people director George Ratliff observe seem to take scary pleasure in imagining hell, but then he allows them to speak in serene looking infinity backdrops as they spout standard horror euphemisms and other emotionally charged, life changing affirmations. The people who enjoyed the Hell House, such as a mother who claims she’s had two miscarriages and thought the image of a teenager bleeding out her vagina after taking a morning after pill looked realistic, are treated normally, whereas those who actually talk back to the church management seem like the demons.

The message I derived from “Hell House” is that this church is doing something admirable and that their actions will help them escape the Earth before the moment of rapture. The director may not even agree with this statement, even if the church themselves certainly does. But regardless of their positions, I take no pleasure from hearing any part of it.

1 ½ stars

Cedar Rapids

“Cedar Rapids” is not your standard fish-out-of-water comedy because its hero is only breaking out of a very small bubble into a slightly larger bubble.

For Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), Cedar Rapids, MI may as well be the land of Sodom and Gomorrah, but we know better. That’s what makes this very familiar story interesting, clever and good-hearted, but also ultimately tepid.

Lippe is travelling to Cedar Rapids for an insurance convention, and he’s determined to come back to his small hometown in Wisconsin with the coveted Two Diamonds prize.

Having never left his hometown, Lippe is scared witless by these people with so much “worldly experience,” namely Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly). The Deansie may be a womanizing, drunkard buffoon typical to these comedies, but he’s only crazy and outrageous on Midwestern insurance salesman standards.

Putting these characters on such a small scale is precisely what makes them endearing, and forcing them into a truly outrageous and raunchy scenario would be a betrayal.

But when a lot is made of this Two Diamonds prize, it serves as a notorious MacGuffin. The specific plot points already matter little in a movie like this, but when their dramatic conflicts are intentionally placed on a lower pedestal, the emotional payoff is nada.

And yet there are still charming moments of comedy throughout a very funny cast. Helms plays the dope amongst dopes so well that when he’s forced to sing in front of a crowd, we forget as an actor he does it all the time on “The Office.” Reilly is having a terrific year, and The Deansie is a memorable character just because of the way Reilly controls his body as a performer. Even Anne Heche as the love interest Joan is a congenial tomcat good for a few grins and laughs.

It’s a shame the rest of the movie feels so slight and insignificant around them.

2 ½ stars