Beast of the Southern Wild (June 26, 2012) (60)

Beasts of the Southern Wild, by first-time feature co-writer and director Behn Zeitlin, is much more of a portrait of an emotional moment and feeling than it is a narrative story that follows a character from one point in her life to another. It has the eerie lyricism of a Terrence Malick film (particularly Days of Heaven) as it examines the relationship between neorealism and magical realism that can coexist in a child's psyche.

Loosely described, the film tells the story of Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), an 8-year-old girl being raised by her father, Wink (Dwight Henry) in a (fictional) area called the Bathtub in southern Louisiana, in the wilderness south of New Orleans. It seems in this near-post-apocalyptic time, the polar ice caps have melted and have flooded the low bayou. Residents of the Bathtub live a semi-amphibious lives jumping between boats, house trailers perched in high trees and houseboats. There are several dozen residents in this community, where they seem to live life in a non-linear, joyful way. There is a sense that somewhere north of them is civilization, continuing mostly as it seems for us today, while they down below try to avoid that world.

Hushpuppy and the other kids her age go to a makeshift school where their teacher Miss Bathsheeba (Gina Montana) teaches them they they "are all just meat". She tells them that they have to watch out for themselves because if they don't some other animal will come to eat them.

Hushpuppy's mother, it seems, has left in the years before, although it's never totally clear whether she actually walked away from the Bathtub or if she died and Wink just told the girl that her mother had "left". This concept is one of the first times we are faced with an oblique concept due to a mix of fantasy and reality in Hushpuppy's perception of the world. She is haunted by visions of massive beasts running roughshod over the land toward the Bathtub to eat them.

Throughout the film, Zeitlin interjects moments and scenes that don't totally follow in a narrative path, but add to the general feeling of happiness and innocence of the location. The film opens with a magnificent party, shot hand-held, that easily conveys the joy of the village and the community feeling of all the people. Later, there is a craw fish boil with singing and a wonderful feeling of warmth and support as Hushpuppy is taught how to open crabs by "beasting" them (ripping them) apart.

Zeitlin cleverly plays with New Orleans culture and recent history as he alludes to typical tropes from the area. One moment, above all others, is particularly powerful, as the Bathtub is flooded by a storm and the residents blow up the levee that separates the Bathtub from the mainland. When they do this, the water drains, like out of a tub, into the land above. This is a very deep and significant allusion to the common conspiracy theory that the US government blew the hold in the levees that flooded the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina. Here it's the poor people (mostly black) who are flooding the richer, nicer areas north of them.

Stylistically, Zeitlin weaves a very interesting tale, where dream-like sequences of the wild beasts, in Hushpuppy's imagination, are cut in with more hard-nosed, brutal images of the living conditions of the people and their struggle to survive. Added to this are segments that seem to exist neither in a totally naturalistic place nor a totally fantastical place, as when Hushpuppy and some of her friends go out looking for her mother and end up in a floating brothel in the bayou where the girls dance with the prostitutes (whores in New Orleans, an allusion to several New Orleans movies and stories over the years). The story becomes a spectrum of reality and surreality, ranging in degree from one shot to the next. At one point the Bathtubbers are discovered by what seems to be FEMA workers and taken to a hospital. Suddenly everything is clean and made of plastic in right angles. It's both super-real (from our point of view) and incredibly uncanny (from Hushpuppy's point of view).

The cinematography by Ben Richardson is beautiful and dreamy. It seems to be shot mostly digitally, though that adds a quickness and naturalness to settings and situations. We see lens flares and sun spots as the hand-held camera pans around a dark room, lit only by the sunlight peeking through the cracks in the wooden shack wall. The music, by Dan Romer (the brother of a close friend of mine, full disclosure) and Zeitlin is ethereal and classical in a sense not normally seen in a small film like this. It is very evocative of Morricone's score for Days of Heaven, as well as the Saint-Saens "Carnival of the Animals"excerpt from the same movie.

This is an excellent first film that shows a true directoral voice and point of view. I appreciate that Zeitlin doesn't answer too many questions, but leaves us open to figure out the puzzle ourselves. As a snap-shot story, there is no tidy ending, only a slow fade out of the characters and action. This is a movie about dreams, and as such, is hard to nail down as meaning one thing or another. Yes, some of the imagery is a bit heavy-handed, though that too is the nature of dreams. At time this film is frightening, exuberant, dark, funny, sad and hopeful. This is a roller coaster of emotion and tone, but feels warm and very well made.

Stars: 4 of 4

Keyhole (Tuesday, April 10, 2012) (35)

Guy Maddin is the most interesting and best Canadian filmmaker working today and easily one of the best filmmakers from any region. I have a never-ending respect for David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, two directors whose work in the past has been spectacular, but Maddin has eclipsed them and developed a new style and visual language along the way. His films fall somewhere between narrative and experimental works on a filmic spectrum, frequently using documentary elements and always dealing with nostalgia and subconscious through a Brechtian formalist language. He walks the line of being fun and funny, but also uncanny, sometimes uncomfortable and frequently difficult.

His latest work, Keyhole, is all of these things. It's not really a linear narrative film, not totally experimental (despite being commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State), but also totally weird and unsettling. All the while it's thrilling, exuberant and firmly sarcastic. It is a film told in a "fugue state" style, making elements disconnected, obscured and abstract. It is wonderful and fascinating.

The story of the film is really secondary to the formalism and thematic content, but deals with a noir-like plot involving a man named Ulysses (Jason Patric), who returns to his home after a botched job with his underworld lackeys. He brings with him a young beauty, Denny (Brooke Palsson), and a bound young man, Manners (David Wontner), who seems to be his son. In the house on the upper floor is his wife, Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini), and an old man who claims to be her father, guardian of all memories in the house. This geezer walks around, out of shape, in his underwear, dragging with him a heavy chain that seems to keep him tied to the building itself. Ulysses must struggle to get to his wife, deal with Old Man Memory and figure out what to do with his two prisoners.

As a dream-essay, the film doesn't move along in an A-to-B fashion, but jumps from one thing to another in a sometimes bizarre or difficult way. Characters don't seem to be really alive or dead, but suspended in mid-flight between two places (waking and sleeping, still and dynamic, past and present). Just like a dream, there are small circular stories connected with other circular stories, making the film slightly more difficult to follow... though if you sit back and enjoy it, everything becomes clear. (Part of this structure is that there is a somewhat Marxist element of having no internal dynamism, making it hard to know what is next or when it will end. This is certainly a challenge, but a thrilling and, ultimately, a rewarding one.)

From one scene to the next, Ulysses goes from hard-boiled B-movie noir star to a nervous everyman dealing with his memories and his demons. The house becomes his subconscious, his journey though it, like his classical namesake, becomes his psychoanalysis. The eponymous keyhole in the door to the upstairs bathroom (where Hyacinth and Old Man Memory seem to live) serves the purposes of being a small view into a distant recess of memory as well as a hole through which Ulysses can pull threads (literally). The reason the story feels choppy, difficult and strange is because it's Ulysses' therapeutic journey. My shrink father once said that psychoanalysis is the act of taking down a wall, brick by brick, and then rebuilding it slowly with better mortar... that seems pretty apt here in the case of this house.

Aside from all of this elegant presentation and plot, what makes Maddin's films so clever and enjoyable is how technically interesting they are. He's a master of juxtaposition, editing and pacing. Images are frequently on screen for seconds or only several frames, signaling something in our brains, but remaining distant enough that we feel we are just short of making a connection. Characters come and go through dark canals and obscured spaces, making the act of watching one of his films (this one in particular) a game, but one with no rules that are easy to win. It's a new kind of filmmaking, a doorway to more avante-garde material, reminiscent of the work of Bruce Connor, but shown through the prism of something almost familiar and narrative. It's difficult to define, but thrilling to behold.

Stars: 4 of 4

Attenberg (Friday, February 24, 2012) (18)

When watching Athina Rachel Tsangari's film Attenberg, it is important to keep in mind that the writer-director got a masters in Performance Studies. Her film is as much a study of motion, dance and performance as it is a narrative. Considering this fact is also central in understanding that this is not a typical film with a standard "A to B" structure, nor is it an "easy" movie where you walk out feeling happy that you just saw some nice storytelling.

It is a challenging and a strangely cold film, though a totally beautiful one. It is one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time. It feels very much like Giorgos Lanthimos' brilliant 2010 film Dogtooth (for which Tsangari was an Associate Producer), though much more human and relatable.

The film centers on Marina (Ariane Labed), a 23-year-old woman who takes care of her father Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis) in the last stages of cancer treatment. They live in a small mining town on the water that Spyros designed at some point in the past 30 years, now seeming to have nearly no inhabitants in it. It's a typical Modernist village, with rectilinear streets and buildings, awkward public spaces and difficult, cold interiors.

When she's not taking her father to the hospital for his tests, Marina spends much of her time driving visiting scientists around for the local mining firm. As the story goes on, her main rider is an engineer (Lanthimos... yes, the same guy who directed Dogtooth) who she finds theoretically attractive, despite the fact that she's generally not interested in sex and has no experience with it.

One of her main interests is hanging out with her best friend Bella (Evangelia Randou). The two almost exclusively talk about sex; Bella is a normal 23-year-old who likes sex, has a boyfriend and likes talking about it and she's rather obsessed with teaching Marina all she knows. Marina, meanwhile, seems reticent about her sexuality or any erotic emotions.

All of this is rather simple and straightforward and makes up most of the plot ... which is to say very little happens in this story. What keeps it interesting the whole time, though, is that Tsangari formally tells a separate story, different from the general narrative. The film is a master class in the differences and effects of static and moving camera work. Almost all of the standard narrative elements are shot with static shots. Tsangari has a keen eye for composition and these shots are almost all interesting, contrasting deep shots with shallow ones and characters at different points in space .

In the middle of all these static story-telling scenes, Tsangari intercuts sequences of uncanny dance and movement performed by Marina and Bella. At first glance these seem a bit out of place and disconnected, and they all use moving cameras. Why this stark change in style all of a sudden? Well, these near-nondiegetic moments seem to function as some sort of dream-space, or at least non-chronological pieces of the story. Both characters intently look at the camera as they do these actions, reminding us that we are watching two performers, who might be the characters we know them as, but might just be two random people dancing. Certainly these dynamic shots are more liberating than the rest of the static ones.

There's a wonderful long dolly shot following Marina pushing Spyros down a long hall in the hospital. Here is where the dream world crosses over for a moment with the earthly, Modernist world. In fact, the whole film functions as a long and effective criticism of Modernist ideals. For one thing, Spyros himself criticizes his own design, saying he built this unnatural space on the top of sheep meadows. He gets into the concept that there was not a natural evolution in this town (or perhaps in Greece in general) from one era to another (from agriculture to industry), but that the Modernist era came along and sat on history, forcing its emotionless will on everything. He's ashamed of his greatest accomplishment as he gets ready to face the unknown. (There's an interesting analysis of the current Greek debt crisis here, more incisive than many news reports.)

This leads Marina's other main hobby, which is watching the nature films of Sir David Attenborough. Both Spyros and Marina (when he's at home and not in the hospital) love to watch the scientist talk about monkeys and other jungle creatures and sometimes re-enact their strange movements and screams. She seems to have a connection with natural, evolutionary things more than she does with other people. She is the product of Modernism, devoid of deep sentiment and disconnected from other things. The title of the film, at this point, becomes a Modernist respelling of Attenborough's name.

Tsangari has all the actors speaking their lines in particularly monotone, dispassionate style, possibly inspired by Richard Maxwell or other Post-Modern theater or performance creators. Again, this underlines the strangeness and non-humanness of the setting and the people in the film. All of the actors are wonderful, but particularly Labed and Mourikis, who seem to have a fun time as they do mundane things (and also seem to interact in a wonderful and intimate way that fathers and daughters who love one another really do).

This is a deeply interesting and thematically difficult film. Whereas Lanthimos' Dogtooth was a bit of joke, playing mostly with semiotics in a bizarro non-place, Attenberg seems to take the argument one step farther. Tsangari shows how the Modernist legacy in every-day life has magnified certain behaviors and alienated us from our natural states of being. She raises simple bathos to near holy, fetishistic levels, mixing weirdness and beauty in connected (and disconnected) moments. This is what modernity is. She does this all in a gorgeous and elegant way with techniques far beyond her years.

Stars: 4 of 4

Tomboy (2011) (January 16, 2012) (139)

Writer-director Céline Sciamma's previous film, Water Lilies, was a great, simple and beautiful film about teen sexuality and power. In Tomboy, she makes another film that rests on the edge of Western cultural mores about children and sex, this time with younger, pre-sexual kids.

The film opens with a prepubescent child with short hair riding in the car with his/her father. It is not clear if this is a girl or a boy, but he/she looks about 10-years old. The family has just moved to a new apartment in the Paris banlieue. Right after moving in, the child goes outside to walk around and meets a young girl, Lisa. The child says his/her name is Mikael and is then introduced to the other kids as the new boy in the building. Later, in a bath with his younger sister, it becomes clear that Mikael is not who he says he is, but rather is a girl named Laure. Now Laure/Mikael has to pass as a boy, despite her sister finding out about the situation.

This is a very simple film in narrative. There is one falsehood presented early on and it leads to a few situations that are totally uncomfortable for the audience and difficult for Laure. Much of the tension in the film relates to Laure's "secret" coming out and how the viewers generally root for her to pass as a boy. Sciamma beautifully plays with this idea, however, as she puts Laure in positions that bend gender, and make the audience squirm. At one point, Lisa puts makeup on Mikael the way two 10-year-olds might play. For us, this is a very disconcerting moment as it feels like a boy is being forced to look like a girl... though, of course, it's really just a girl getting makeup on her face. At another moment, Laure's mother insists she put on a dress, which feels very much like she's a boy wearing a dress.

This brings up all sorts of interesting stuff about how society prejudges kids with regard to gender and who once we think a kid is a boy or a girl, they are put into categories in our minds. Girls wear pink and play with makeup; boys wear blue and wrestle. (Laure's mother mentions offhandedly that her bedroom was painted blue.) Even when we know Laure is a girl, her wearing a dress still feels uncomfortable. This also leads to questions about our feelings of childhood sexuality and presexuality. It's very easy to just to the conclusion that Laure is a pre-lesbian, but she's really pre-sexual and this experiment has much more to do with being a new kid in the building, wanting to fit in and her feelings about her parents and sister.

There's something about French directors that they direct kids in amazingly and naturally, unlike most English-speaking directors. Sciamma is working mostly with non-actor kids or kids with very little experience and most of the scenes in the film involve kids running around and playing or talking and arguing as kids. Throughout the film, everything feels totally natural and honest. Some scenes could pass as unscripted documentary footage (much of it is probably unscripted). Zoé Héran, who plays Laure/Mikael, is particularly great in this role, though with kids it's always hard to compliment acting because it's not clear how much of a stretch they're making or how aware they are of what they're doing.

This is easily one of the best films of 2011. Much like Lucia Puenzo's fabulous film XXY from a few years back, it examines childhood gender roles in an elegant, non-exploitative fashion. It is straightforward with an uncomplicated plot, it has a beautiful realistic quality and interacts with the audience in very interesting ways that force reflexive analysis and more consideration.

Stars: 4 of 4

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Friday, January 6, 2012) (1)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time In Anatolia has almost no action in it, and yet is is one of the best policiers I've seen in a long time. The film opens in a small police car as five men drive around the Turkish countryside looking for a particular, but hard-to-find location. It seems the man in the middle of the back seat has admitted to murdering a man and dumping his body. The cops in this car, and two other cars in a caravan, are out looking for that location, along with the prosecutor and a doctor who is there to give medical evidence at the scene of the crime. Because the murder occurred at night, the man has difficulty knowing exactly where the body is now.

Considering they are driving around at night in the first half of the film, it is shot mostly in extreme chiaroscuro, with the dark black outside interrupted only by the moonlight reflected on the men's faces and the occasional headlights in wide landscape shots. The roads they drive weave around the rolling hills of Anatolia, generally directionless, and the murderer tries to recall where the act was committed, possibly near a natural spring, possibly near a tree, maybe with a bridge nearby and a wide farmer's field.

This is wonderful and pure Becketian existentialism as the film moves along slowly and carefully. The men have several seemingly insignificant conversations that all seem to reveal nothing. It's an immersive experience to be with them, bewildering in it's solemn pace and tone. One scene drips slowly into another. First they go to one possible location, then they go to another, then the murderer thinks he finally remember something and they go to another location, but that's not it either. We keep getting stuck in mundane and ridiculous arguments about exactly what town a certain field is in, and whether that town's line is on one side of a tree or another. It's all beautiful and rather absurdist (as we're supposed to be investigating a murder).

This film is probably the most Romanian New Wave film I've ever seen that is not a Romanian film. The long, long scenes with nothing happening are very reminiscent of Corneliu Porumboiu's brilliant Police, Adjective. Certainly the mix of existentialist non-action combined with arch bureaucratic formalism is something both these films share. Like the Porumboiu, the second half of this film brings out the absurdity of paperwork, situational malaise and the sadness connected to the browns and beiges of officialdom.

The acting throughout the film is amazing, particularly the three leads, Muhammet Uzuner (who plays the doctor), Yilmaz Erdogan (who plays the police commissioner) and Taner Birsel (who plays the prosecutor). They are totally natural and honest, a bit arch and silly at the proper moment, though straight in a way that helps to underline their winking.

The whole experience of watching this film is very interesting on a meta level, I think. It's 150 minutes long and almost nothing happens, yet it's almost always totally gripping. It's the lack of action, the attention you feel you must pay at every moment that keeps you glued to the screen (not unlike Chantal Akerman's masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the formal antecedent to the Romanian New Wave).

There are small beautiful things dotted throughout the film that show that Ceylan is a brilliant director. At one moment when the caravan is driving along the country, we see the lighted windows of a train passing in the distance. Immediately we consider that for people on that train, this caravan of several cars probably looks much the same to them. There is an elegance and a minimalism to the concept that the first half of the film is shot in near darkness, while the second half takes place the following morning, in bright light. There are several more of these dualities: rural and city, nature and buildings, rich and poor (between the doctor and the functionaries), Turkish and ethnic (it seems the murderer is an ethnic minority, possibly Kurdish).

This is a long movie, but a gorgeous one. At this point in the year it is silly to suggest it's going to be my favorite film of 2012, but I can't imagine there will be many other films that I like this much. It has a beautiful script, fantastic acting and looks amazing.

Stars: 4 of 4

Nostalgia for the Light (2011) (Thursday, January 5, 2012) (132)

I feel like watching Werner Herzog's The Cave of Forgotten Dreams should be a requirement for anyone watching Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light. Part of this is due to the fact that this film is one of the most Herzogian films not made by Herzog that I've ever seen. Furthermore, both films deal with the concept of researching and discovering the unknown past in similar ways. Both director's films look at physical and celestial things, but investigates the metaphysical along the way. They both look at the very small in a greater search for answers to the very big.

Guzman's documentary looks at the Atacama desert, a high desert in northern Chile, where, due to an unusual lack of any humidity, astronomers have found it to be an ideal place for observing the night sky and extraterrestrial bodies. In addition to this, it is also a bleak landscape where, due to it's salty soil, pre-Columbian human history for tens of thousands of years is evident. But this is not the only history that lies inches beneath the surface. During the 19th century, this area was the home of a massive mining industry that relied heavily on slave or indentured-servant labor. Most importantly it was also the home of several concentration camps for political rivals during the Pinochet regime. Thousands of people were "disappeared" to the desert, many of them were buried there for a time, until, it is suggested, their bodies were exummed and subsequently dumped in the ocean to cover the state murderer's tracks.

This film is a look at people who study several things and several points in history from the same place on earth. There are scientists who look up at the heavens through their telescopes and search for evidence of the beginning of the universe. There are archeologists who look at the pre-Columbian, prehistoric human record. There are political historians who look at the Pinochet era. Finally there is a group of women who visit the desert looking for human evidence of their lost or missing loved ones who might have been buried in the desert, even for only a short time.

The connections that Guzman makes from one person's testimony to another's is wonderful. He asks the astronomers about their thoughts on the desert itself, as a harsh, almost-extraterrestrial landscape and beautifully connects what they say to shots of women digging in the dirt for signs of human bone fragments. At one point he takes two of those women and sets them up inside one of the oldest telescopes in the area, brought there by German scientists in the late-19th century. The connection between old and new, celestial and terrestrial, known and unknown is powerful and elegant.

The film is shot on DV camera and looks more like a home movie, than a internationally funded documentary. Still, there is a homemade intimacy here that is very powerful. I appreciate that this is a very personal, human story of trying to wrap one's head around difficult matters. Of course, this is a movie that is trying to gather material about people who are trying to gather material, and I think Guzman is aware of the cheekiness of such a proposition.

The title, Nostalgia for the Light, suggests that we are all searching for some sort of light, either literal (as in the astronomers) or metaphysical (as in the women who look for their loved ones). There is also the suggestion by Guzman that seeing some of the old telescopes in this high desert is a return to the Chile of his youth, a nostalgia for the pre-Pinochet eden of his childhood. This is a totally wonderful and brilliant film that should be seen by anyone interested in great documentaries about ontological dilemmas and the human condition. This is easily one of the best films of the year, of any genre or format.

Stars: 4 of 4

A Separation (Friday, December 30, 2011) (129)

Asghar Farhadi's A Separation begins with Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) in a courtroom speaking to a judge about getting a divorce. Simin wants her her husband Nader and daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, Asghar's own daughter) to go with her but he refuses, claiming he has to take care of his elderly father in Tehran. As a result they get a separation and she stays in Tehran just the same, with the Termeh living mostly with Nader.

He is a good father, very understanding and honest and she's a very good mother. They are an upper-middle class family with a nice apartment in a nice building. To help him take care of Termeh and his father, Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat) a woman who can help him keep the house and manage things. One day, when he gets very frustrated, Nader after she leaves his father in the middle of the day, he fires her and shoves her out the door rather violently.

This brings about a lawsuit about how much she was really hurt and if Nader caused her to lose the baby she was pregnant with, or if she was hurt by other means. It seems Razieh is working with a handful of lies that might protect her from her husband. Nader is a bit of a scapegoat here for other things that are happening.

The story deals a lot with issues of class and money, reminiscent of themes in films by fellow Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. It is clear that Nader and Simin are rich and more European in their tastes. Simin wears a colorful chador (either burgundy, green, lavender or blue), that seems much more liberal and design-forward than the more conservative and traditional one worn by Razieh. Simin also looks a lot more European (and gorgeous) with red hair and less Persian (I am not aware of Iranian minority groups enough to know if Razieh and her husband are from a minority group, such as the Kurds, but the possibility is certainly there). There is also the idea that the rich can do what they want to the poor, even though Nader is being accused of harm that we're almost certain he didn't cause.

Putting this all in context, it is important to be aware of the extreme attention and deference that is paid to the Iranian jurisprudential system, not only in the case of the separation proceedings at the beginning (and end), but later during the trial, when Razieh and her husband sue Nader. The judges seem to be reasonable non-idealists who are looking to do right regardless of politics. There is no criticism of the post-Revolutionary government or the rights of women or poor people. This is presented as a sober tale of lies and hidden facts. Albeit one that involves a good amount of interaction with the courts.

The writing in Farhadi's script is wonderful and all the acting is tremendous, particularly Peyman Moadi, Leila Hatami and Sarina Farhadi. They all deal with their various legal troubles differently, but totally naturally. It is wonderful to see such interesting and powerful acting, when it's not overdone or forced.

At one point near the end of the film, as Termeh talks to Nader about the legal issues they're involved in, she says, "I thought you said this wouldn't be serious," to which he snaps, "Well, it got serious." This is a beautiful and uncomfortable commentary on life and an efficient explanation of a neorealist view of this world. This is a beautiful, dispassionate film and one that explains things simply and effectively.

This is really a film about a man who is a wimp and almost totally emasculated -- not by his wife, but by his own doing. As a quick-fix for his inability to deal with issues, he is constantly scrappily doing small things to changes situations -- mostly for the worse. His wife, on the other hand is clinical and calm and efficient. This is about the choice of who we wish to believe and "life with" -- much like how Termeh has to make a similar decision. Nader is kind and loving, but makes small issues more problematic due to his tinkering; Simin is a bit cold, but calculated and correct. Both approaches can deal with and fix problems in different ways. In the end there is some truth that we're trying to excavate, and each side hopes to be seen as correct.

Stars: 4 of 4

A Brighter Summer Day (Saturday, November 26, 2011) (118)

Note: The great Taiwanese director Edward Yang made A Brighter Summer Day in 1991 and released it on the festival circuit then. Due to a few complicating factors, such as its unwieldy 4-hour length, it was never released theatrically at that time. It did however gain a tremendous status in the cinema world for being an unknown gem, a magnum opus that was all but unavailable.

This year, just over five years after Yang's death, it was finally released theatrically. Although I could consider the film for my year-end "Best Films of 2011" list, I will not, because I don't feel like that's very fair to the films of 2011. I am thrilled to have been able to watch it (it's a magnificent film), but I do not really consider it a 2011 release.

The title of A Brighter Summer Day comes from a scene when a few of the main kids in the film are sitting around a record player trying to transcribe the lyrics to Elvis Presley's "Are you Lonesome To-Night,"released a few months before the story takes place. The kids are obsessed with rock music and have a not-terrible band that plays in the local diner. The band members are all from the same street gang and they hope their shows won't get broken up by the rival gang.

They are all the children of mainland Chinese people who fled the Communist revolution in the late 1940s. Now, in the early 1960s, they are teenagers, mostly 12 to 15-years-old, trying to make their way in the world and find some grounding. Their parents are all modest people, generally working for the government, and they live in massive public housing compounds that contain apartments, several cafés and their school.

The gangs they create are more like the gangs of West Side Story than of Boyz n the Hood, they get in fist fights and political battles over turf, but generally are not too dangerous. They're much more likely to use a bat than anything more, even a knife.

As we follow the main character, Xiao Si'r, we see him trying to survive the street, needing to show his toughness to his fellow gang members, hoping for a better life than what his parents have given to him, trying to remain a good student and trying to negotiate the trickiness of developing a crush on a girl from the rival gang.

The story is simple, actually, but because it is 4-hours long, it has a lot of detailed information in it. It's a wonderful narrative filled with small ups and downs as the Xiao Si'r and his friends work to survive. There are hundreds are kids in this film, though it's never really hard to figure out who is doing what. Yang is very clear about everyone's intentions and motives as the story moves along.

This is what neorealist cinema is and should always be compared to. This has more of a logical connection to films by de Sica and Rossellini than anything in Hollywood or Asia. I keep thinking about Ozu's Tokyo Story, because it's equally domestic and neorealist, but it's much bigger than that and much less sentimental. The colors of the film are largely gray and green due to the concrete structures the kids exist in and the public street lighting of nighttime Taipei. The interiors are modest, but rich in detail. Xiao Si'r and his brother sleep in two levels of a closet in order to fit all their sisters into the bed rooms.

Yang had an amazing ability to work with kid actors (or non-actors) and get them to come off more naturally than just about any other director I can think of (possibly similar to the boy in Rossellini's Germany Year Zero). In his masterpiece Yi Yi the son takes pictures of the backs of people's heads, saying that that is the most honest way to shoot someone because they don't know they're being shot. It's such a simple and basic idea, a childish idea even, but a true concept.

Here too, Yang works with a passel of kids, most of whom are non-actors, and gets them to be as natural as if they were not acting at all. Their troubles and fights are real and don't feel forced or faked at all. What they do and say comes off as totally honest and significant. This is a great achievement because it's a very fine line between manipulation and profundity. Yang always stays on the good and smart side of that edge.

Stars: 4 of 4

The Muppets (Thursday, December 1, 2011) (109)

I was very worried that The Muppets would be just another Muppets movie with not much going for it (can you say Muppets from Space?). Happily I was totally wrong about it. It's fantastic. It's funny and fresh and has all the warmth a joy of the gold-age Muppets with a very clever contemporary flair. It feels much more geared toward Muppets fans who grew up with them in the '70s and '80s than for kids today. Happily that's not my problem.

In the world of the film, puppets of all shapes and colors live among people and that is totally normal for everyone. Walter, a boyish puppet, lives in the mid-American town of Smalltown and is the biggest fan of the Muppets, a group of puppet performers he knows from the Muppet Show and several movies from his childhood. His brother and best friend Gary (Jason Segal) and Gary's girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) want to go on a vacation to Hollywood and agree to bring Walter along so he can visit Muppet Theater, where the Muppet Show was produced a long time ago.

When they get there, they find that it is closed to the public and in terrible shape. Walter overhears oilman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) buying the theater and talking about how plans tear it down and drill for oil there. Walter, Gary and Mary have to find Kermit the Frog to get the Muppets back together to perform a telethon and raise the money to buy back the theater back from Richman. In grand Muppets style, they all go around the country picking up the old gang (Fozzie is working in Reno with his band, the Moopets; Gonzo is a plumbing and toilet bowl magnate; Animal is in anger management rehab; Piggy is in Paris working for a fashion magazine).

I love that the story is silly but generally simple enough to hold together. It's very, very funny and filled with some of the wonderful double jokes that work for kids and adults on different levels. There's lots of Muppet-centric humor and lots of very clever and timely jokes. There are great songs, including some of the old favs like The Rainbow Connection, Moving Right Along and the Muppet Show theme song. The tone is very fun and silly and it's constantly winking at us as ridiculous stuff happens. The film was co-written by Segal and Nicholas Stoller and the script is great.

There's really nothing to criticize about the story or the production. There are a few fantastic moments that I still laugh about now when I think about them. This is a warm, wonderful movie that I hope to watch again and again and fits in perfectly with early Muppet films like The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper and Muppets Take Manhattan. This is an instant classic in my book and totally wonderful.

Stars: 4 of 4

Mysteries of Lisbon (Friday, August 5, 2011) (64)

Filmmakers, perhaps more than any other artists, have always been fascinated by point-of-view and the internal narrative structure of a story. There are probably many reasons for this, but it has a lot to do with the fact that film is a multi-media, multi-sensory format where things like the camera's angle, what is seen and what is unseen, who the narrator is and at what point in the story is he or she sitting all affect the audience's view of something. In literature there are certainly issues of a narrator's voice (first person, third person) and if any of the characters in the story are telling the tale, but I don't think this element is as interesting or as deep.

Raoul Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon is a long movie to be sure, at a staggering 272-minutes, but it's rich and filled with an interesting investigation of point-of-view and of stories within stories. He takes cues from Kubrick, Sokurov and Bergman and turns out one of the best films of the year.

The gigantic tale, adapted by Carlos Saboga from a book by Camilo Castelo Branco, mostly revolves around Pedro da Silva, a boy who lives in a Church school when the film opens in mid-19th-century Lisbon. He does not know who is parents are and is ostracized by the other kids because of this. It is soon revealed that he is the out-of-wedlock child of a noblewoman and her lover and was protected by the head priest, Padre Dinis (Adriano Luz), when he was born. Now his mother is back in his life and Padre Dinis is going to give him the story of his birth and his parents' romance.

From this point forward we see a tremendous story along the lines of Dickens, Hugo or Thackeray that investigates the histories of every person in Pedro da Silva's family, and many of his family members' associates. This is a story of discovery for the boy, for Padre Dinis and for us as they delve into the baroque complexity of his parentage and his life.

In one of the first scenes, Pedro's mother gives him a cardboard proscenium frame for cut-out puppets - a clear homage to the toy that Alexander played with in the opening shot of Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. Our first thought is of all the themes from that film: the questioning of faith, the loss of faith, death, humiliation, anger at parents, reconciliation, magic and imagination. This is a powerful symbol and an efficient way of bringing up these ideas that we come back to later in the story.

This proscenium also serves to show us that the story is just a story and that we will be experiencing it through the eyes of several characters; the frame of the cardboard stage lets us know that we will be seeing a story from many different frames of reference told by many different people. Throughout the film we see sequences set up by having the characters appear in cardboard cut-out-form inside that proscenium, underlining the fictional, manufactured elements of the story. Right away there is an idea that there is no absolute truth that exists in this world, but that all history is relative, complicate to understand and somehow unnatural or fake.

From here we see and hear stories told by different characters, like Padre Dinis, some of whom tell stories within stories (and some stories within stories, within stories) about different characters and their backgrounds. We find out that basically everyone has a complicated past where they had a different identity (and some will have different identities in the future). We see how small decisions at one point will affect many points down the road, but then when you go back to retrace the steps, understanding becomes difficult.

This richness we find is not only visible in the storytelling, but also in the amazing direction by Ruiz and his brilliant composition of the frame and choreography of movements within it. He brilliantly uses short and long lenses to gain depth of field or focus on small elements, he frequently stages gorgeous static moments when characters are seen in the frame in beautiful correspondence with the others. Scenes where there is movement, like the requisite dance scenes in period pictures (there's always got to be at least one, doesn't there?), are full of people and textures, decorations and objects - a total delight for the eyes (an very reminiscent of Sukurov's Russian Ark).

Big productions are always complicated to make and open their directors to tremendous criticism (James Cameron for Avatar) or praise (Olivier Assayas for Carlos), much of which stems from the sheer size of the work (they're too long, too complicated, hard to follow, amazing in their detail, such a big and wonderful story). This film, originally made for Portuguese television where it played as a six-part miniseries, is just about the grandest thing you'll see this year, but it is also an incredibly dynamic story with a gripping plot filled with intrigue and masterful visual artistry. It's rare to see a movie of this length where the artistic elements are as compelling as the story (Assayas, for instance, didn't use much style or creativity in his presentation of Carlos - the story was really the most important element for him).

Despite its length, I strongly recommend sitting through the whole picture (it's shown in two parts and one could easily see each part on a different sitting). The scope of the story from beginning to end is amazing and beautiful and it's wonderful to see how each character deals with his or her own story, considering they are each living in their own subjective worlds seeing life through their own prosceniums.

Stars: 4 of 4

The Future (Wednesday, July 13, 2011) (54)

As trite as it sounds to say, Miranda July doesn't see the world the way you and I see it; she sees it through the eyes of an unconventional artist. Time after time in her newest film, The Future, she shows us something totally original, something we never would have thought of, as a way of telling a rather standard story. It is a wonderful view of the world, an incredibly sad and anxious view. It's the post-post-Graduate view of the world (or post-post-post-) where thirtysomethings are looking ahead not knowing their direction, not knowing about marriage or kids, not knowing about What Comes Next. It's a story of the fear of the future, either known or unknown, and a the uncertainty that comes from not having memories of the future (shit - I just blew my own mind there).

There is a traditional narrative story and a less traditional one that coexist simultaneously here. The film opens with a squeaky, non-human voice-over of a cat, who serves as a sort of Greek chorus, but in a much more Brechtian sense. When we finally see the cat, it's just a puppet of the front two legs and paws as in a cage. (This is the first of those totally creative and outside-the-box things that July gives us that probably no other director would have imagined or considered.) There is something particularly jarring, but appealing, about this, setting up a D.I.Y. world, a janky, wonderful aesthetic.

It's instantly comforting and sweet without being anywhere close to banal. (I have no idea who July looks to for inspiration, but this film feels like what a Michael Gondry film would be if he was more talented and also is very reminiscent of the fantastic Belgian film L'Iceberg, by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy). It's a bit surrealist, a bit absurdist and much closer to experimental/art film than standard narrative fare.

Back in the human world, Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) are a couple in their mid-thirties who have been dating for about four years and living together for much of that time. He works from home as a phone tech-support clerk and she works as a dance teacher for pre-kindergarten pre-ballet students. They're both obsessed with modern conveniences (she spends hours watching a co-workers YouTube video of a cringe-worthy dance routine).

Once they decide to adopt that cat, Paw-Paw, they find they have a month before they can take him home (once its medical procedures have healed), a month before their serious adult lives will begin. They decide to quit their respective jobs, turn off their Internet service and change their lives. He starts to volunteer selling trees for an environmental nonprofit, more of a fill-in thing to do than a real career switch, and she begins to flounder, attempting and failing to post "30 dances in 30 days" videos to the Web. But then things start to go wrong when Sophie experiments with cheating on Jason and then tells him about it.

The idea of "memories from the future" is very significant in the third act of the film, and is something that really connects the standard narrative world to the atypical, creative one. As we see Jason's imagination of Sophie's future and his future without her, it becomes unclear whose point of view we're witnessing, whether we're really inside a dream-state or if it's really just the standard narrative again and when exactly this passage ends. Within Jason's mind, Sophie herself has revelations that we later see her responding to in her waking life. This is not him wishing she would learn some lesson (as a spurned lover might think of his partner), but him actually seeing a future where she learns these lessons and then her learning these lessons in the real world. Perhaps they're sharing the dream/fear and they're both in some collective unconscious. It is an absolutely brilliant illustration of an abstract, non-linear timeline.

In the middle of the film, we see several things that fall much more in line with July's own performance/video art background than with this, or any other, narrative story line. She gives us two funny, bizarre dances (if you liked the dance scene in Dogtooth, buckle up for what you will see here), both of them amazing and neither one necessarily advancing the story, but totally perfect in their moments. This still from the film is a perfect example of how the normal becomes a bit less than that in July's world. She's a bit too far out that window for a standard filmmaker to conceive of, it's a dramatic, almost violent, certainly sexual movement that has much more in common with silent film than anything we've seen in years.

As a short-story writer, July has a fantastic grasp of language and natural dialogue. Most of it is very funny and never feels forced. At one point when she's getting ready to go out, Sophie, looking in a mirror, says to Jason, "I wish I was a notch better looking; I'm right on the fence. I constantly have to make my case to each new person I meet." (Oh, I feel you, sister.) In another scene with her paramour, Sophie asks him what they're doing that night, to which he responds, "Well, we're going to fuck, then you can eat ice cream, then watch TV and then I'll watch you." To which she answers, "Is there really ice cream?" It's refreshingly realistic and painfully familiar.

The acting in this is wonderful. July is fantastic, vulnerable, weird, shy, self-doubting, but capable of normal interactions when she gains confidence (at least in Jason's mind). Linklater is great (he really is a great actor on stage and screen), also frustrated, unsure, quiet, scared and angry.

This film mixes all sorts of styles and formats, similar to how a video artist would do with found footage, creative ideas and abstract concepts. There's a sequence in the middle of the film where Jason meets a man who is selling a hair dryer for $3 in the local penny-saver magazine. We see a few scenes of the two men talking about life and love and getting a tour of the man's house and his weird collections. Although it's scripted, there's a cinema-verite feel to this, as if Jason (and Linklater) were stepping off the performance stage and into this man's living room.(July met the man during a non-fiction writing project she did; he is a non-actor.) This is yet another anti-establishment, risky decision that July makes, and, like the rest of the film, it pays off beautifully.

There's an amazing feeling I get as a viewer when I see something totally original, fun and interesting. The Future is all of those things and Miranda July is a brilliant artist and wonderful storyteller and filmmaker.

Stars: 4 of 4

The Sleeping Beauty (Friday, July 8, 2011) (52)

The very first image we see in Catherine Breillat's The Sleeping Beauty is a pair of old scissors that an old witch holds in the air over her head. Immediately our minds dive into the symbolism and connections of scissors and cutting: castration, self-mutilation, domesticity. The scissors here are used to cut a baby girl's umbilical cord (another significant symbol) and at the same time, the old witch puts a curse on the baby, saying she will die when she's 16.

We next see three silly teenage girls frolicking in a river. They seem rather contemporary and foolishly unaware of where they are or what they're doing. Next they show up at the baby's side, and seem to be three good witches, who change the curse by saying the girl will not die but sleep for 100 years when she turns six and that when she wakes up she will be sixteen. While she sleeps she will experience a bunch of interesting dreams.

The opening sequence seems to take place in the late 19th Century, and the girl, Anastasia, seems to be the daughter of a Frenchman and a Russian woman. They are very high class, live in a castle and refer to the young girl as a princess (though it's probably a term of endearment rather than royalty).

We next see Anastasia in her gigantic bed, setting dozens of alarm clocks (mostly from 1950s and pop culturey, like Mickey Mouse clocks) and reading a gigantic dictionary (of course this is a wonderful pun that the Sleeping Beauty is setting alarm clocks). She proudly declares that she enjoys reading the dictionary better than novels because she likes words and their meanings. From this moment, we understand that this film is about a conflict between words literal meanings and their symbolic, relative associations.

One of the words Anastasia reads is "hermaphrodite". She has already declared that she wants to be called Sir Vladimir and now she tells us that she should be considered both male and female, both Anastasia and Vladimir (both Anastasia Romanov and Vladimir Illyich Lenin? Interesting.). This idea is also very important as we see the idea of gender and sexuality move in a very fluid way form here out. At times Anastasia seems to be a girl, and at other times, she shows traits of a boy (particularly from a sexual development point of view).

When she does go to sleep, Anastasia goes on an epic journey into a dreamworld where we meet all sorts of interesting characters. One of her first stops is at the house of a mother and son who seem to live in the 1950s in the woods. There Anastasia falls in love with the boy, Peter, and his sudden departure from home gives her an excuse to move along to the next stop, in an effort to meet up with him again. She goes on to visit a kingdom of midgets (er... little people), an albino child prince and princess, a gypsy (er... Romani) family and a Snow Queen, to name just a few. At each stop she interacts with the people (in a sometimes sexual way), learning new things from each. With each one, the idea of time (either time flying or time being hidden) seems to be a theme.

This film is an amazing deconstruction of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, from a Derrida-ist point of view. The way she took apart and explored the Bluebeard story in her last film, Breillat gets into our understanding of our contemporary sexuality and our understanding of feminism and Freudian thinking by tearing this tale apart and taping it back together.

As either a girl or a boy, Anastasia seems to follow a very traditional Freudian sexual development, where her latency stage is almost exactly when she is "sleeping" (this is a great and rather brilliant literal translation of this theory). Meanwhile, her dreams are chock full of amazing symbolism. There are lots of knives and trains, some candies and a lot of snow.

When she wakes, she is in a contemporary Paris (well, really in a castle somewhere not on a busy street, but close enough so that a Parisian Lothario boy, Johan, can visit her). Some of the characters from her dream re-appear to her, though whether they're really there or some middle dream-reality state is unclear.

She meets the now grown Romani princess, who seems to have aged at the same rate as she has (that is, 10 years in 100), and Johan says he's Peter's grandson. Again, there is a blurry line between reality and dreams, between real and imagined. We see how sex has now become less of a childish curiosity and more of a sensual or violent act. She is a grown woman, filled with real emotions and no longer a vessel for an education.

Breillat is a totally fascinating director and certainly gets me thinking about literary criticism more than just about any other director working today. That she tends to highlight feminist ideas and references contemporary philosophy (as only a French elite could do). Her films are full of material to unpack and investigate.

This is a beautiful film, aside from being thought provoking. It has wonderful and interesting art direction, costumes and photography and you get the sense that everything on screen is meant to be exactly where it is. This amazing attention to detail is part of the reason why I think Breillat is one of the best directors alive.

I strongly recommend this film, but fully admit that after seeing it twice (I had to see it a second time to be sure I understood what I thought I understood), I still have a lot of unanswered questions and there are still a ton of symbolic meanings that I'm sure I'm missing. To me, that's the sign of a great work of art. It's challenging but an amazing thing to explore.

Stars: 4 of 4

Aurora (Sunday, July 3, 2011) (49)

Cristi Puiu's first major film to be released in the States, The Death of Mr. Lasarescu (2006), is an amazing existentialist story of life and death in Post-Communist Bucharest. It is the most successful and greatest of the Romanian New Wave films to hit these shores, incredibly simple in story (a man slowly dies over the course of 150 minutes and we watch unable to do anything about it), reserved but powerful in style and devoid of any real structure. It's the very definition of the RomWave. In his newest film, Aurora, which he wrote, stars in and directs, Puiu brings us another brilliant work, this time even more obscure and more unlike anything we've seen before... and this time adds another half hour of content.

The story of the film is so very unclear (or unknown), that it's enough to just know the basic characters involved. Viorel (Puiu) is a 40-something man with two young daughters and a woman who seems to be his wife. He also has an elderly mother he looks after and she has a new husband who he hates. The film opens with him talking about the daughters with his wife in the kitchen as she gets dressed. She gives him a bag lunch and sends him off. For the next 45 minutes or so he wanders around with no particular direction, at some point buying a shotgun. It is never totally clear that he has a job or anywhere to be and circles back to places he has already been several times.

Unlike Mr. Lasarescu, and unlike Radu Muntean's recent Tuesday, After Christmas, this is not really about the brokenness of Bucharest and the old Communisty aesthetic, nor is it about how the city is a modern European capital. It falls somewhere in between. We see the back allies and rail yards (which look crappy in any town in the world), and also see the fancy boutiques on the boulevard.

When action does pick up a bit (it never really gets much faster than a crawl, but at some point there are a few things that happen) there is a sense that there is an everyday human level to living and a separate "rule-of-law" world of right and wrong, but the two remain separate. This is not too dissimilar from Puiu's comment in Mr. Lasarescu, that people die and the system can't help them, though in that it's rather directed at the whole system (hospitals, medical care, ambulances), while here it's more directly existentialist about the inevitability of stuff and the fact that the police (or lack of them) are an agent, but not the pure cause of badness. Viorel never rushes, he never panics, he walks and drives around carefully, knowing full well that he is heading in a specific direction.

It's impossible to proceed without mentioning all that the story owes to Camus, Sartre, Becket, Antonini and Bergman. It is clear that Puiu is a good reader and watcher and that he's studied his nihilistic absurdest existentialists. Life for Viorel is a series of moments that connect to one another; for us, however, his story is somewhat choppy and sometimes unmotivated. Puiu never gives us much background on actions. Viorel does things that don't totally make sense and then we have to either guss at their meanings or wait until they're explained (three hours later). In this way, Puiu puts us in the story by showing us that life is about randomness and non-understanding. Puiu might have a direction, but it's unclear to everyone else. Life for us is about experiencing other people as they go about their business without explaining thier actions to us. This hyperrealism is one of the keys of the RomWave and it is fantastic.

Just because the film is 181 minutes long, doesn't mean it's boring or dull. One of my favorite things about the film is the amazing dialogue and the fact that Puiu's script is full of jokes and humor. Yes, most of it is dark comedy, but it's very entertaining, particularly toward the end, when Viorel's tour is revealed to us a bit more. He's the world's greatest baadasssss, at times talking back to school teachers and kindergarten classmates of his daughters, insulting his mother's new beau or scolding the police. He says what we all wish we could say, but don't figure out until it's a minute too late. (There's also a fantastic piss joke around minute 178.)

I'm a bit stumped by the title of the film. I guess this is about the dawn of a new day for Viorel, or possibly a dawn of a new era for Bucharest and Romania. Perhaps it refers to how when we see stars and light they're actually gone light years ago or that there is no substance to lights in the sky, but just gasses and electricity. All of this connects to Viorel's situation, that we don't really notice him until he does something big or talks back to others.

Stars: 4 of 4

The Tree of Life (Friday, May 27, 2011) (36)

If you go into Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life expecting a standard narrative film with three acts and a story that moves forward in time from one point to another, you will be disappointed. The film has a structure unlike just about anything I have ever seen before. It is really a visual symphony - and I do not mean that in the superlative sense that it is just really beautiful (though it is really beautiful, of course). I mean that the film has more in common with the architecture of a symphony than it does with standard narrative feature films.

There is one big story that's broken up into movements that are each broken up into smaller passages that tell a rather complete story when experienced together. Almost nothing is told in standard narrative scenes with dialogue, rather atmospheric, impressionistic memory moments are shown and impressionistically convey story and emotion. Individually these elements are very pretty and really function as short stories, but their impact can only be fully experienced when connected to the other moments. There are visual motifs that pop up in various places (trees and water are very common) that allude to bigger themes and are not always specifically thematically relevant to the moments they are in.

The overall narrative of the film deals with the life of Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn). As a middle-aged man he remembers back to his childhood on the anniversary of his younger brother's death years earlier. He grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Waco with a stern father, Mr. O’Brien (brilliantly played by Brad Pitt), and loving mother, Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain). His father was a failed-musician-cum-mechanical engineer who was never really happy in his own life and always a tough disciplinarian with him and his two younger brothers. Most of his time was spent playing with them and other boys in the neighborhood, doing what kids do: running around, breaking windows, launching frogs on rockets and getting interested in girls.

Malick takes the unusual step of not just showing Jack's life, through his memories, but rather showing a history of the universe up until Jack, and then showing the boy’s story. There is the Big Bang, the first sea-creatures in the water, dinosaurs, an asteroid collision into Earth that killed the dinosaurs, and the ice age. Despite the fact that this is ostensibly the view of the world of the grown Jack in the present day, it seems like his memories are some sort of collection of everyone’s memories or a projection of what he imagines unseen events looked like. Clearly there is a connection between his intimate memories and the story of all things everywhere.

To understand this link, it is necessary to examine the symbolic story Malick presents. The film opens with an epigram of two lines from the Book of Job (38; 4 and 7) where God tells Job that he is the creator of the universe and suggests that Job is ignorant, saying: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth ... when the morning stars sang together?" Immediately after this, in voice-over, Mrs. O’Brien, the much more religious parent, says that there has always been a dichotomy in life between Nature and Grace, where Nature is a harsh, unforgiving, unbending character and Grace is a loving, accepting, nurturing force. This duality is the emotional and thematic center of the film.

As the story moves along, the conflict between Nature and Grace exists in almost every moment. On the surface, Mr. O’Brien is Nature (stern, unrepentant, sometimes cruel or apparently irrational) and Mrs. O’Brien is Grace (happy and loving, willing to overlook mistakes). But the relationship is actually not so straightforward as this. Despite his base in Nature, Mr. O’Brien seems to be like God - he's certainly the dominant force and ruler of the house - but he lacks the understanding and kindness that really leads to Grace. It almost seems that he is the Old Testament God, the God of Job, who would be cruel, punishing and unclear about his desires, while the mother is a New Testament, Christian God, a loving and forgiving one. It seems that Malick is showing the real conflict between the God of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. One is a God of creation-out-of-chaos, floods, wrath, exactly what one thinks about the cruel side of Nature. The other is a God of love and peace, of understanding, exactly what one thinks about the New Testament and Jesus’ teachings.

The Job story is very important for understanding the film. In that story a man has lost everything and is asking God why he has done this to him. God's response is cryptic and Job is left to figure that only his deep faith will pay off in the long run. In this sense, Jack as a boy (or Jack as a grown man looking back on his childhood) could be a man of faith who sees that he was either being tested by God with a very difficult father or that his father, as the wrathful weather God, was always testing him, ultimately making him see that the only choice he had was to submit to his father entirely.

From the point of view of Jack as an observant and faithful person, the entire history of the universe lead up to his birth and childhood and everything in the world conspired to test him - that the history of the universe (dinosaurs and all) is God and he feels, much like Job did, that God had it out for him for some unexplained reason (suggesting that the history of the universe sequence in the film is grown-up Jack's own view of history).

But on a secular level, a Nature level, there is the idea that Jack and Job are just merely overly self-centered and don't understand the hard ways of Nature. Sometimes things just seem random and unfair; there is not a cosmic plot against individual people. Sometimes people have strict fathers, sometimes their wives die and they lose their money, sometimes a bigger dinosaur comes to step on their heads or they die when an asteroid collides with their planet. It's all very cruel and bitterly irrational, as Nature frequently is.

The non-traditional structure of the film, brilliantly allows one to watch and take in all of the biblical matter, or merely watch the secular story and enjoy the amazing technical details: the amazing photography and camera work of Emmanuel Lubezki (who previously worked with Malick on The New World), the wonderful score of Alexandre Desplat (most of the music is from the classical cannon; Desplat just adds smaller elements, frequently on the piano), and the beautiful editing of a team of editors. This is a sensually rich film filled with bright colors and beautiful sounds. Much like a symphony with beautiful passages, each shot of this film gives a powerful image and functions as small sub-story within a bigger work. Each shot, being only a memory in Jack’s mind, is filled with nostalgia and melancholy for a time long gone. Even though Malick only shows small or partial moments, a bigger picture of those stories emerges and, in an impressionistic way, whole subplots emerge from only a few incidents.

Almost all of the film is shot in a style that falls somewhere between a Steadicam and a hand-held camera, giving the view of a camera that seems to float just behind or just above all the action. This gives the sense of a third-party observer to the action, floating in every room just above the action, who is constantly present, non-judgmental and all-knowing. This is God's view of the action. This is not a typical third-person voice/view for story telling; the audience becomes a constant party to all the action, a strange, kind-hearted, voyeuristic viewer. Much like how the story of the Universe is not just Jack’s memories but a collection of everyone’s memories, so too is this view not any one person’s view, but a communal view, a sort of collective window into this one family’s actions. Just as how God is all things and states of being, so too is this God’s view and everyone’s view.

Being that this is a symphony, the use of music is a crucial means of telling the story. Symbolically, classical music represents Jack's dad as he is a failed classical pianist and still plays the piano in the house and the organ in church. That individual moments of grown-Jack's memories include specific sound leitmotifs is an important thing when dealing with Jack's relationship to his father. Grown-Jack is haunted by the man who cast a shadow over everything he remembers from his childhood. He is obsessed with the way his father wielded his power, the way Job ultimately recognizes and succumbs to God's power. He clearly remembers his father as rigid and difficult, but is impressed by his force and majesty.

Given the title of the film, it is no surprise that trees appear frequently throughout the film, however in the world of the grown Jack, many of these trees appear in relation to buildings. Grown Jack is an architect, a man in charge of building structures (the same way that God is in charge of building life). Several times Malick shows the lobby of his office building, which has a big tree growing in it. This shows that people try to control Nature (that is, try to control violent forces), but don’t really understand it. It is such a strange juxtaposition as it seems very healthy and green, but is totally surrounded by constructed materials.

Clearly humans can never totally know and understand Grace, but we can try to control things on Earth, like trees and land. In effect we become the heartless controller of Nature, an unforgiving, graceless disciplinarian, unaware of our cruelty. We are the dinosaur stepping on weaker one's head, the father who tells his son to stop talking at the dinner table. Our narcissistic search for Grace has turned us into truculent beasts.

Stars: 4 of 4

Cave of Forgotten Dreams- 3D (Friday, April 29, 2011) (26)

On its surface, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a documentary about the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in South-western France and the spectacular paintings/drawings on the walls. Herzog and and a small crew were granted rare access to the cave to shoot a movie... so he made a documentary in 3D, of course! He shows amazing shots of the drawings, speaks to scientists about the age of the cave and the drawings and what we know or can speculate about the people who might have created them.

Of course nothing as as simple as it seems with Herzog, a madman, genius and life-long rule-breaker. This film really is an examination of human perception, comprehension and existence as well as a post-modern evaluation of the filmic form and our experience with movies.

Clearly the most gaudy part of this formal inquiry is the fact that it is a documentary (probably the least profitable cinematic form) made in 3D (probably the most expensive, showiest format). At some level you can understand that if you get the access to the cave that Herzog got, it only makes sense to make as much with it as you can. We viewers will never get to visit the cave ourselves (access is extremely limited to a few scientists each year), so we should be able to see it in a hyper-realistic format like 3D.

But this begs the question: What is a a hyper-realistic format? Would any method be more naturalistic than this? Is anything that is shot on film and projected onto a screen (or played digitally) really going to be like it is in the world, or is our understanding of the verisimilitude of the style overstated? I think Herzog is showing us here that what we perceive to be a given reality is frequently far from the truth.

Similarly our understanding of the paintings and the people who created them is never going to be complete and, in the end, is only guess work, despite a tremendous amount of time and effort spent researching them. We will never know if what appears to be an altar with a bear skull on it is really an altar or just a random thing that one person 30,000 years ago might have done done day for no particular reason. Formality, here, is a haphazard thing and not something we should put too much stock in.

This is underlined, I think, at a moment when two scientists are speaking about one wall where a person put a series of hand-prints on the wall. We see the two women standing in the foreground and see the wall they're talking about in the distance. As the 3D was processed in post-production from a 2D print (as opposed to being shot in 3D with multiple cameras), part of the area between the women (that is in the background) that surrounds their silhouettes is partially brought to the foreground.

One could see this as a technical mistake, but I'm not sure Herzog would leave something as obvious in the film. I think he's showing us that this 3D view is not what it seems; it is as much a construction as the scientific theories that these women are talking about are. Everything we see in the world is affected by our own view of the world. The scientists who are researching this cave are looking at it from a 20th/21st Century point of view. They are in the space themselves with their own human psychology changing their hypotheses. Nothing is pure or exact.

At one point a scientist working on mapping all the markings on the walls says that after spending a few consecutive days in the cave looking at drawings of lions, he went home and dreamed about lions that night. Herzog asked him if he dreamed about the lion drawings from the cave or about real lions that he'd seen on TV or in person. The man responds, "both". This is a very important moment because what the man is describing is exactly what happens when you watch a movie. At some point in the experience, you stop noticing you are watching on a screen and your mind goes "into" the picture. The mediation vanishes and you are somehow not in the theater (or living room), but a direct witness of what you're watching.

The documentary form is a kind of mediation as well and Herzog reminds us over and over again that as much as we can study the cave paintings, we will never know what the people who made them meant or thought. There are a lot of plays with documentary formalism and he breaks several rules of technique. Herzog narrates the film, but is also a character in it (as he's done with many of his documentaries), you see his crew in many of the shots and he even says to us directly that they would be there and he speaks of the camera they use to shoot (I don't know for sure, but I think it was a standard HD camera that was later converted to 3D). All of these things are normally cut out of documentaries to make them seem more "pure", but Herzog leaves them in. He's reminding us that these things get between us and the so-called "reality" of the cave - the same way the great distance of time gets between us and the cave painters.

In another sequence Herzog shows two drawings that are next to one another and says that they were actually painted more than 5000 years apart. (The drawings are about 30,000 years old and the cave has been sealed by a rock slide at the entrance for more than 10,000 years.) He makes a comment about how the people who lived at the time the paintings were done had a different idea of the passage of time than we do. Time gets compressed for us modern people over the great span of years. After that much distance, we can only imagine what their "forgotten dreams" were - assuming they had any in the first place.

There is still a stunning proximity to these drawings and to the time and place where they were painted. Some of the drawings show now-extinct animals, like mammoths, cave lions and cave bears when they lived in what is now called Europe. It is really stunning to consider that these beings we learned about in paleontology class, always distant fantasies, honestly roamed the world at the same time as human species. Suddenly these things don't seem so far away, suddenly the things we have imagined about these species comes alive. Our dreams and imagination, the opposite of mediation, become science.

For me, this is a logical pair to Herzog's 2008 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, another film ostensibly about science, but really about human existence and the lack of knowledge we really have about our world and ourselves. These films can be seen on a very straight-forward level, as movies about specific places (Antarctica or the Chauvet Cave), but they can also been seen at deeper, more existential levels.

Humans are creative beings, we make paintings and movies, but the reasons for doing those things is not always clear when they are made and even less clear as our time passes. This film will become like the paintings, a totem from a forgotten moment of expression. We shouldn't put too much importance on it.

In Herzog's view, the world is generally a thankless, horrible place where misery is around every corner. For him, these drawings are as much about the futility of creativity, due to its formal elements and its necessary contextual relevance, as they are about the human hope for documenting the past and leaving something for the future. We have no idea who these people are and it is rather silly to get into trying to understand them, but the study of these people itself is an interesting thing to examine inasmuch as it reflects on us and our view of our own humanity.

Stars: 4 of 4

Meek's Cutoff (Friday, April 8, 2011) (24)

Kelly Reichardt makes very slow movies about nothingness. Her previous two films, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy both follow people (and a dog) doing mundane stuff with no real plot or formal narrative structure. Her movies are basically the answer to the question, "What would a movie about my life look like." The simple answer is: it would be rather uneventful.

But Reichardt shines in this dullness and makes it rather beautiful. Her newest film, Meek's Cuttoff is a departure from her previous films as it is not set in our contemporary world, but is otherwise very similar in tone and concept. It follows a wagon train of three settler families as they cross the desert wastelands in Eastern Oregon in the mid-1800s. They are being led by a mysterious man named Meek who has either lost his way and is lying about knowing it or knows where he is going but can't explain to the families how long the journey will take. Whichever one it is, the train seems to not be making much progress in the middle of the desert.

As they move along, there is tension between the families and Meek, fighting within the families and a constant fear that the Native people of this part of the country will kill them for trespassing on their land. Along the way they pick up a native guide who speaks no English (his dialogue is not subtitled, leaving us as much in the dark about what he's saying as the characters are) and seems to be as much a harbinger of death as a pathfinder. The eeriness of desolate landscape is made even more spooky by the lack of any particular action or the change in topography. It seems the group might be going in circles, but it's never really clear.

Technically this film is a real triumph of doing a lot with a minimal amount of flare. Whereas with her past two films Reichardt showed a particularly DIY quality, here everything looks a bit more polished, though still with a very simple, non-showy nature. She uses mostly available light so it's particularly bright and white/yellow during the day and is black with firelight at night. She employs wonderful silhouettes during the day and shadows at night.

Her very natural recording of sound is one of the most amazing parts of the film, where the microphones are clearly put in positions to not only catch the blowing wind but also the snippets of conversation of people talking far away, as if you were in the desert with them. The most remarkable scene has the men talking in a group about 50 yards away from the women who are watching them. Reichardt sets up the mic close to the women so you hear what they hear, drowned out by the distance, rather than what most directors would do, setting the mic over by the men and just gaze at them from afar.

There does seem to be a rather feminist or at least "women's" point of view here. The costumes throughout the film are particularly wonderful (designed by Victoria Farrell) but the women's costumes are bright in fantastic colors, and much more interesting than their very basic designs. What's very important is that all the women wear bonnets whose brims hide their faces. A few times Reichardt puts the camera inside the wagons looking forward or backward so the arch-form of the frame imitates the arch-shape of the female headgear, giving us a similar view to what they are seeing.

Almost all of the characters appear throughout the film with obscured faces. Meek (Bruce Greenwood) has one of the all-time bushiest beards ever seen on film (you can barely tell it's him because you can't really see much of him). The men all wear hats and the women wear their bonnets, and everyone has filthy faces from the miles they've traveled, of course.

All of the acting is very strong, thought none of the performances are particularly noteworthy as they all become part of the harsh landscape. Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson, Will Patton and Zoe Kazan are all very talented actors and recede into the background when it is most important.

The allegorical content here is very interesting and just as unanswerable as any question in the film. There are clear allusions to the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Book of Numbers and, of course, the Inferno. It seems like the group might be traveling through hell and that maybe they're dead already or on their way to being dead. It's never clear if Meek is a charlatan, a false idol, or if he is really a cryptic guide who moves in a timespace that humans can't understand so well.

This really is an existentialist film at its heart and the closest literary connection might be Sartre's No Exit. Whether these people are really going anywhere or are just stuck with one another for eternity is never totally clear. The only person who seems to have a clear vision of what is going on is the Native tracker who abandons the group at a point. I particularly love that Reichardt gets all this amazing thematic and formal content into such a simple-looking film. She touches on all these things but doesn't dwell on any one aspect. It's really a beautifully and brilliant execution.

Stars: 4 of 4

The Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl (Thursday, September 30, 2010) (125)

Manoel de Oliviera made The Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl when he was 100-years old (he's now 102). He started making movies in the 1930s in the silent era and is still working today. None of this really really means anything significant, but it's impressive as hell - especially considering how good a movie this is.


More than anything, this is a visual pleasure to behold. Oliviera's use of color, texture and scale is absolutely masterful, making this one of the most beautiful works I've seen in a long time. Based on a short story by Jose Maria de Eca de Queiroz, the 19th Century Portuguese novelist, this movie basically plays like a short story at only 64 minutes long. And like a good short story the economical use of dialogue, explication, detail and atmosphere is the key here.


Macario is a young accountant who works in his uncle's fabric store. At work above the shop one day he looks out the window and sees a girl in the window facing him across the street, Luisa, keeping cool by waving a fan on herself. At first he notices the fan, but then he notices the girl. She's only a few years younger than he is and is absolutely gorgeous. Immediately he falls in love with her.


After meeting her and meeting her family, he wants to ask her to marry him, but his traditional uncle doesn't want her to distract him from his work. The very conservative man feels that it is inappropriate for the two to date and also worries that he is not very good at his work and throwing a woman into his life might make him make more mistakes. He must prove to his uncle and to Luisa's family that he is a good, honest man who can take care of himself financially and use good judgment.


One thing that is a bit surprising about the film, but something that I really liked, is that the story is basically not updated at all from the old-fashionedness of the short story. We basically are watching a 19th Century story played out in modern times. The very mannered acting and dialogue underlines this point and shows how that much has changed in the world in the past 200 years, still some similar things remain.


There is a gorgeous quality to the photography here (by Sabine Lancelin) that has incredibly rich colors in each and ever shot - turning each set-up into a beautiful painting. This is not super intense colors, like you might find in a Fassbinder film, but rather single bold colors that fit in naturally to the other tones of a room or landscape. In some cases it's just a simple yellow curtain by the window in the corner, in other cases, it's the pinkish tone of a building exterior.


It seems like as much time went into showing amazing textures to us as well. One of my favorite elements in the film is the nearly-tactile travertine frame around the window that Luisa stands in. This beautiful texture meshes amazingly with the plaster wall of the building that surrounds it. Making this whole set-up even more wonderful size of the window (almost bigger than human-sized) and the frame the window creates within the overall shot. It's a simple thing, but it's absolutely gorgeous. If this were a painting in a museum it would be a masterpiece.


There is an interesting element of memory and idealization in this film that is very important. We see many wide-angle shots with incredibly deep focus. This reminds us of how deep memories go and how for Macario beautiful things (beautiful girls) can be idealized and remain perfect forever.


I appreciate how small and gentle this film is. It is technically tremendous but also has a beautiful, simple story as well.


Stars: 4 of 4

Bluebeard (Saturday, August 7, 2010) (96)

Catherine Breillat is one of the most interesting contemporary feminist filmmakers working today. Her 2001 film Fat Girl (A Ma Soeur, en francais) remains one of the most interesting works of the aughts and one of the most powerful works on feminine sexual liberation, jealousy and vengeance.


Here, in her adaptation of the Bluebeard fairytale (which she adapted and directed) she gives another fascinating portrayal of ownership and possession of female sexuality, femininity and freedom. She does this not only on a story level with the script, but also beautifully integrates formal, technical elements to this too. Bluebeard is as much an essay on the use of color and the power of color as it is about the power of gender and traditional sex roles.


The traditional story of Bluebeard (as written by Charles Perrault) is that there is an ugly, rich man who lives in a lavish castle. He marries a series of girls who are never heard from again. One day he goes to a neighbor lady and tells them that he'd like to marry one of her two daughters; the younger girl decides to marry him, despite the fact that he is incredibly ugly (and has a blue beard!).


As the story goes, he gives her a key to a secret room and tells her not to go into it. She's not able to not see what is forbidden so she goes in and finds the bloody bodies of all his previous brides. When he discovers that she disobeyed him, he insists on killing her too (clearly this is how her predecessors met their ends as well).


In the context of this film, however, that traditional story is shown to us by a more modern girl (maybe from the 1930s or 1940s) reading the story to her older sister. In other words, you have two different levels of sisters and two levels of sisterly jealousy spanning centuries. Interestingly it is never obvious which story is the framing story and which one is the story within the story. At times they are both either the primary or secondary stories.


This is very important - especially how it relates to the growth of the girls' views of sexuality (even as preadolescents). In one moment the old and new stories merge, suggesting the modern younger sister is liberating herself by seeing herself in the fairy tale. (Does "self-liberation" have to necessarily mean masturbation if it involves a prepubescent girl? I really don't know.)


Breillat uses color here beautifully. Cinematographer (and Emir Kusurica alumnus) Vilko Filac does a wonderful job of giving the film a very muted color palette. It almost looks like what technicolor films from the 1960s and 1970s have come to look when shown today. It is colorful but somewhat muddied and gray overall. Still, within this more somber color scheme, bold colors stand out - and convey power.


Clearly Bluebeard has power because his beard is, well, blue. But beyond this, when the brown-haired younger sister becomes his wife, she puts aside the black smocks her mother has dressed her in after her father's death and puts on a brightly colored red cape and a green silk gown. (Interestingly it is her older red-haired sister who is the most vocal against the convention of wearing black for mourning; the younger sister is rewarded for her conventionality with a shower of color and freedom).


I love that both the Bluebeard story and the more modern story feature sisters with red and brown hair respectively. In the former, it is the older sister who has red hair and is generally more free-thinking; her younger brunette sister is more aloof. In the latter, the younger sister is red-headed, but has more power than her older, brunette sister and takes a dominant role. This back-and-forth is very reminiscent of the relationship between the sisters in Fat Girl, a discussion about sisterly jealousy and the power of sexuality.


The simplicity and economy of the film is also very refreshing. Clocking in at a mere 81 minutes, the film opens a world of interesting debate about the role of female sexuality in the feminist world of today. There is only a minimal score and Breillat beautifully uses the repetition of shots (showing one shot three consecutive times) to show the passage of time or movement across space - almost in a dream state.


The story is highly symbolic (as is the fairy tale, I'm sure). With the "keys" to the "doors of the castle" Bluebeard gives to his young bride being very overt symbols for her own sexual identity and expression. He respects the young bride because she reacts to him in a non-submissive fashion - almost a masculine view and knowledge of things. The young wife becomes a proto-feminist by embracing her self-ness, showing him that she will control her own sexuality, rather than letting him defile her at his own whim. The unwashable blood on the key she drops in his secret room is clearly blood from her auto-defloration.


The more modern sisters act as a Greek Chorus here - but a very contemporary chorus, despite the more mid-century clothing they wear. There are moments of their part where it almost appears to be documentary-like. It's not clear to me if everything these girls say is scripted or if it might be two young women in the present day talking about sexual and social mores - through the eyes of children.


At one moment, one girl mentions that "marriage" between a man and a woman is something of a "homosexual" act. That marriage is about self-love rather than love of one another. That marriage is in its essence a non-sexual pact, but a narcissistic or masturbatory one. (I wonder if this idea works better in the context of the French reflexive verb construct, s'aimer.)


I think it's important to remember that this film is a feminist appraisal of sexuality by a woman through the prism of the male gaze - Breillat is showing us how men see women sexually. Considering this, there is a good chance that the "girls" in the film are not really girls at all, but the slanted male view of sexual women. Throughout our culture women are infantilized and reduced, particularly in sexual ways (here Bluebeard makes his wife sleep in a child's toy bed).


Women do not own their sexuality the same way that children are not responsible for their actions. I think it's entirely possible that the girls in the film are really grown women in control of their sexual destinies who are seen by men as silly girls with no understanding of things. Breillat shows us directly what society thinks of women - that they're all just "girls." (This would also make the concept of masturbation easier to understand.)


Near the end of the film, Breillat invokes the Salome story and suggests that female sexual liberty threatens men with decapitation or castration. This is really interesting to me. She says that for women the devil you know (sexual liberation) is better than the devil you don't know (sexual repression). The young wife is not afraid of Bluebeard because she is sexually open and interested. Were she a more traditional girl of the era, she would be scared of him because he represents raw sexual power.


Stars: 4 of 4