Monthly Archives: October 2010

Black Swan
Review: If you feel like Darren Aronofsky may be softening, with the great but relatively straightforward The Wrestler and the news that he’s directing Wolverine 2, that’s just because you haven’t seen Black Swan, his batty new film that stars Natalie Portman as a ballerina with a fragile mental state. Portman has just been cast as the Swan Queen in a production of Swan Lake and, although she is flawless as the White Swan, she has trouble tapping into the seductive darkness and lack of control that characterizes the Black Swan. Add in an overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey), an aging, unhinged star (Winona Ryder), a director with less than pure intentions (Vincent Cassel), and a rival who seems to personify all the qualities she lacks (Mila Kunis), and it doesn’t take much to push Portman over the edge.

But where does that take her? The film is ambiguous on a literal level, lending a dreamlike feel to things that seem like they are really happening and a stark violence to thigns that may not. Aronofsky focuses on the physical toll dancing can take on the human body, stretching even small injuries like cut fingers and toes to horrifying proportions. Like his past films, Aronofsky also focuses on the way obsession cuts both ways, making the obsessor great at his or her skill (dancing here, or math in Pi, for example) but sickens the mind. At times Aronofsky’s lack of restraint leads to some silliness, but it also pays off in some nauseating and shocking moments.

But mostly, it is a film that spends its first 2/3 establishing a pattern of control, only to blow that up in the last half hour (not unlike Portman herself). From the point Kunis takes Portman out drinking onward (the latter’s first remotely irresponsible act in the entire film, if I remember correctly), the movie takes on such a rapid, nauseating flow, moving from one shocking setpiece to the next, that literally anything is possible.  Is Portman going to fail onstage? Kill somebody? Turn into a swan? What is real? By that point, Portman’s psyche has cracked and fractured far too much to tell for sure. At its most ridiculous (one critic correctly dubbed this movie balletsploitation) the movie feels like an arthouse-meets-Skinemax retelling of The Red Shoes, but at its best the movie gets at the violent depths that plague talented, creative people who pursue perfection. Just make sure you bring a paper bag to thwart hyperventilation.
Jonah’s Score: 81
TUiW Grade: A-

That will wrap up our coverage of the Austin Film Festival! All in all, I was a little disappointed in the overall selections, but the films that I liked (Black Swan, Meek’s Cutoff) I REALLY liked. Thanks for reading!

Fair Game:
Review: On Friday, Wikileaks released thousands and thousands of documents showing the Iraq War to be even more violent and poorly managed than we thought. Even as our presence there is decreasing (but still FAR from 0), it is still important, I think, for us to understand how and why we went there because I don’t think anyone would tell you that Iraq will be the last time we get into a conflict with a country that could involve a war so we might want to learn from it for next time. Which is to say that I’m not one of those people who is going to be like “why did we make this movie, everybody already knows what happened,” especially since, judging from the gasps in the theater, people don’t know exactly what happened when Joe Wilson published an op-ed saying that George Bush was lying about whether or not Saddam Hussein acquired uranium.

But that being said, did this movie have to be so boring and smug (I guess the latter was inevitable since it stars Sean Penn; ka-pow!)? Penn is a former ambassador who goes to Niger to do the CIA a solid and look into whether or not Saddam bought houses from the Bluth Company yellow cake uranium. His wife, played by Naomi Watts, is a covert agent with the CIA who is in charge of researching Iraq. So, anyway, Penn publishes an op-ed saying Saddam has no uranium and, as payback, the Bush Administration  blows Watts’ cover in every newspaper they can find (the title comes from Karl Rove’s quote to Chris Matthews saying that she is “fair game” for reporters) (because if someone in the government says it, it must be true!) (sorry).

For the first hour, Fair Game just kind of throws a bunch of stuff out there and sees what will stick. There’s a lot of boring spy stuff that tries to be more “realistic” than Bourne but just ends up being incredibly boring (put it this way, it made me miss the scintillating, non-stop action of Rubicon), but there was also some promising stuff about what it is like to be married to a covert agent and little insights into their life. But once Penn publishes the op-ed, the movie becomes unbearably tiresome, as Penn and Watts basically just argue a ton. Fair Game ends up transforming into a whistleblower thriller, with the Joe Wilson character cast as the crusading man trying to just speak truth to power and (incredibly) the Plame character turning into the nagging wife who is trying to stop him (think about The Insider or JFK or anything movie like that where a man is trying to unravel this huge conspiracy but his wife keeps being like “THINK OF THE CHILDREN”). Now for all I know this is how it really went down, but it felt like the movie kept forgetting whose story it was as Watts receeded further and further into the background. If nothing else, it was really dull to watch her and Penn keep having the same conversation over and over again. There were about 20 interesting movies that could come from this source material, but director Doug Liman made the most boring one possible.

Jonah’s Score: 51
TUiW Grade:C

127 Hours
Review: By now the Danny Boyle brand is pretty recognizable and 127 Horus is definitely on-brand. Boyle takes his kinetic, oft-exhiliarting storytelling to Utah to tell the true story of a hiker, biker, adventurer (James Franco) who gets trapped under a boulder for the titular length of time and ends up having to go to extreme methods to survive. Franco does a great job in what is almost completely a one-man show and Boyle constructs a number of very exciting moments, but ultimately (as happens to often with Boyle) those moments never really coalesce into a meaningful whole. The film is ultimately pushing a very bland theme about how much we all need each other and how connected we all are and it doesn’t seem like Boyle is even really interested in getting at who this guy is or how people react to extreme situations or anything like that. In the end, 127 Hours is just 5 or 6 really good music videos stretched out over 90 minutes and I couldn’t help but spend a lot of that time wondering what Werner Herzog might have been able to do with this story.
Jonah’s Score: 61
TUiW Grade: B-

Festival Notes:

-Monday night I saw a pair of competition films: Dig and narrative award winner Adios Mundo Cruel. While the former showed a lot of real potential from its filmmaker and the latter had a couple of inspired gags, they were both ultimately pretty forgettable.

-On the whole, that would have to be how I would describe most of the movies I’ve seen here. It seems like the programmers sought out the 5 or 6 biggest fall releases they could find, a bunch of really great panelists, and then punted on everything else. South By Southwest had MacGruber and Kick-Ass but they also screened Dogtooth and Winter’s Bone and Cyrus and premiered Tiny Furniture and Marwencol. And Fantastic Fest may have been lacking in big films, but those movies certainly aren’t boring and middlebrow. I can’t help but dream about what kind of great film festival we could have by merging Fantastic Fest with AFF (or really making Fantastic Fest safe for movies like Blue Valentine and Meek’s Cutoff), but that’s not really the point of either.

Tomorrow: LAST DAY! BLACK SWAN! WOO!

Blue Valentine
Derek Cianfrance’s emotionally apocalyptic depiction of a crumbling marriage seems built to capture the arthouse zeitgeist. Combining two incredibly reliable actors (Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling) and borrowing from a number of different touchstones (500 Days’ of Summer‘s timeline zipping, Eternal Sunshine‘s romantic melancholy, Funny Ha Ha‘s disconcerting intimacy). But what makes Blue Valentine so effective is the way it shapes these elements into an emotional atom bomb, without resorting to cheap manipulation. Unlike those other movies, there’s no zany humor or sci-fi underpinnings to hide behind, just a sharply drawn, completely realized examination of a poisoned relationship.
Jonah’s Score: 77
TUiW Grade: B+

The Company Men
Review: Another Sundance hit, The Company Men looks, on paper, like the most likely movie to break out and reach a wide audience, given its star studded cast and timely premise. The movie focuses on a series of businessmen (led by Ben Affleck) who find their cushy lifestyles threatened by aggressive downsizing at their megacompany (all while the CEO makes millions of dollars!) which is more the product of stocks and hostile takeovers than a total necessity. The film is well-shot (thanks to the always great cinematographer Roger Deakins) and the performances are pretty strong (Tommy Lee Jones is especially nice in an understated turn), but the whole adds up to significantly less than the sum of its pieces. The problems start with the screenplay by writer-director John Wells (best known for helping other people make ER and The West Wing) (sorry, that was a little harsh; Team Sorkin!), who seems to have never met a cliché he doesn’t like (Affleck learns the quiet nobility in manual labor in one especially strained moment). As a lot of us have learned over the last few years, there’s a lot of drama and pain in losing one’s job in an frighteningly uncertain job market, but The Company Men struggles to find new honesty in such a scenario.
Jonah’s Score: 51
TUiW Grade: C

Lone Star
There is a rather notable TV component to the festival, which this year included two screenings and panels committed to TV shows that, when they were scheduled, must have seemed like the best and brightest of the new TV season. Unfortunately, those shows were Lone Star and My Generation. At the presentation for the former, the promised “unaired episode” was actually just the show’s pilot, which sets up its conman-has-two-wives scenario with flair. One gets the feeling that creator Kyle Killen (who, to top off his depressing 2010, also wrote The Beaver – which is basically a one-man show for Mel Gibson) is a little sick of talking about what went wrong, especially because from his perspective nothing really did. Killen delivered a great show that blended the cable-ready moral murkiness of Don Draper or Bill Henrickson with the more mainstream conventions of soaps like Dallas (on paper, the show seems like another show that merged a bunch of cable-ready antiheroes with familiar network conventions: Lost), and FOX was looking for such a show. Unfortunately, these shows need a lot of time to grow (to give one example, during season three of “Mad Men” I knew maybe three or four people who watched the show; this year my friend’s can’t stop talking about it) and the realities of network TV make that pretty much impossible. Asking people to watch a new show is asking them to make a new habit (not easy) while also possibly breaking an old one (even harder) and shows like Lone Star need time for that to happen. As a viewer, the trade off is that a show with Lost’s ambition may be difficult to ever mount again, but it is a fair trade off for the rise of networks like AMC or HBO that are willing to stock up on nothing but quality dramas. Like Shawn Ryan (the creator of this fall’s most tragically underwatched show, Terriers) said, quality is now a niche in and of itself, and one available to an audience willing to look for it.

Make Believe
Review: Pitched as Spellbound by way of King of Kong (Seth Gordon, director of the latter, was a producer on this) the result is a film that is not nearly as riveting as the latter or engaging as the former. Make Believe is about six teenagers who are going to Las Vegas for a teen magician competition; for the winner it is an important step on the road to becoming a professional magician. The stakes are high enough and the kids are cute (ranging from a preppy overachiever who seems like a fusion of Hannah Montana and Tracy Flick to an idealistic Japanese kid who grew up in an extremely rural area), but the movie seems content to sit on the surface and coast on those two factors. It makes for a film that is appealing but in an unsatisfying and ultimately hollow way.
Jonah’s Score: 50
TUiW Grade: C

Meek’s Cutoff
Review: Even films that purport to demythologize the mythological West (think McCabe and Ms. Miller or Unforgiven) buy into a lot of that mythology, even if they cloak it in moral grayness and an air of anti-violence. Enter Meek’s Cutoff, from director Kelly Reichardt, which is steadfast in its unflinching portrayal the extraordinary desperation and dire circumstances that actually characterized the settling of the west. Set in 1845, the movie is about a group of three families travelling down the Oregon Trail, who have been led off-course by the navigator they hired, the grizzled Stephen Meek. Reichardt’s shots are long in terms of both duration and composition, giving a sense of the vast, suffocating emptiness that the travelers face every day (where most westerns utilize the lushest cinematography possible to play up the gorgeousness of the landscape, Reichardt doesn’t even bother with widescreen, composing the film in 4:3 instead). The movie’s pace is deliberate, but necessarily so to communicate how desperate the situation is (and how tedious the journey could be). The wagon train moves slowly, water is scarce, salvation or terror could lie just out of sight, and something as simple as crossing a river or travelling down a hill means putting everything at risk. The scenario is dire enough but inches closer to combusting when the train comes across a Native American who could help them find their way or could simply be leading them into a trap. Reichardt wrings every last bit of suspense without sacrificing an ounce of realism and presents a story that works on several levels (as a look at the way women are marginalized in society or a multifaceted examination of our societal fear of otherness) without giving itself over to an easy allegory (a fact that is helped along by the movie’s unbelievable ending). The performances are low-key and fascinating (it may take you a while to recognize most of the recognizable people, since they are buried under layers of grime and malnutrition), especially Michelle Williams as a woman who takes an interest in the Native American hostage. I could go on and on about this movie but, since the movie isn’t coming out until 2011, I will shut up for now. But let me put it this way, I haven’t seen a movie released in 2009 or 2010 that I have had a stronger reaction to this one.
Jonah’s Score: 91
TUiW Grade: A

Tomorrow: Local filmmakers tackle family secrets and frisbee golf.

Paradise Recovered
Review: Esther, the devout believer trapped in a restrictive fundamentalist sect, has never seen a movie, listened to a rock and roll song, or eaten pork, all to please God. She has been promised to marry a man she has known for three days and who seems devotion to the sect as a means to an end. Then she gets excommunicated when he tries to force himself on her, only for his fanatical father to walk in on them. If this doesn’t seem like the set up to a romantic comedy to you then you’ve hit on one of the major problems with Paradise Recovered, a film that strands an interesting main character in a sea of cliche and expository writing. Once she leaves the sect and falls in with a pair of slacker atheists the film turns into a blandly conventional romantic comedy - boy and girl fall in love, boy loses girl, boy finds the courage to get girl back. It also wastes the early insight into religion, veering instead towards a blandly obvious conversation about God and belief. That would be excusible were it not for the fact that the film surrounds Esther with far too many bland stock characters who explain what they’re feeling or thinking in the most direct way possible (“This is the proudest I’ve ever been of you, son.” “I love you Dad.”). Heather Del Rio gives a strong performance as Esther, but the film doesn’t quite know what to do with it.
Jonah’s Score: 51
TUiW Grade: C

Main Street
Review: Written, shot, and performed in a vaccuum of austerity and prestige, Main Street feels like a revivial of a 50 year old play, which is unfortunate since the film is ostensibly set in 2010. Set in a Durham, NC that is much closer in spirit to Mayberry than the city that is home to Duke University and a growing research and software based economy, Main Street deals with the bland problems of a bunch of bland Southerners, led by Colin Firth, Patricia Clarkson, and Orlando Bloom. The movie is bland to a fault, recycling and jumbling plotlines and characters that you’ve seen a thousand times and that has no bearing or basis in the way anyone in 2010 actually behaves or acts. In most ensemble films, there’s one plotline that, whenever the movie cuts to it, you silently groan to youself. “Oh no, not this again.” I did that every time the film cut to the next set of characters. At every point the film seems to come close to making an interesting point (such as the fact that one of its main plot points involves the town’s concern over storing hazardous waste in a defunct tobacco warehouse – essentially replacing one set of deadly chemicals for another), it quickly backs away, less the film become too interesting. The direction is flat and boring and, aside from the always reliable Patricia Clarkson, the cast is kind of a mess. The less said about Firth’s outlandish Texas accent, or Amber Tamblyn’s strange decision to conflate a Southern accent with a British one the better. Part of my reaction to this movie almost certainly has to do with my own issues over how lazy this movie is about portraying a region of this country that I am very familiar with, but even leaving that aside the movie is too dated, too dull, and too airless.
Jonah’s Score: 41
TUiW Grade: C-

General Observations:

-The Austin Film Festival is as much about the screenwriter’s conference as the film festival part, so its not surprising to me that both films I saw last night seemed to be more about the writing than any sort of visual accomplishment. This is probably the only festival that lists the screenwriter before the director in the program.

-Given Austin’s lack of movie theaters downtown (made worse with the recent shuttering of the Dobie), the festival’s screenings are scattered all around town, some even located extremely far north, which is already making the logistics of going from one movie to the next very annoying (especially without any sort of festival-sponsored shuttle) (why yes, some cheese with my wine would be lovely, why do you ask?)

-So there is a writing contest here that includes categories for spec TV scripts and one of the finalists is someone’s episode of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia that is titled “Dennis and Dee Commit a Little Incest.” The only question is how this person beat the Sunny crew to writing that episode (other contenders include a 30 Rock spec episode called “Little People Boxing”).

Next time: Die-hard Cubs fans, child magicians, and the NC-17 stylings of Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling. Make sure to follow @tangledupinwire for all the action in real time!