Beautiful Frauds

Washingtonian Film Picks, Week of 5/31/12

I’ve watched Wes Anderson’s new film, Moonrise Kingdom, twice now. After the first screening, I really liked it, as you can read in my review for NPR. After the second, last night, I can upgrade that feeling to a very nearly unconditional love. Anderson takes a memory of his own past—the sort of memory we all have, of the first stirrings of something resembling love in our preadolescent hearts, destined to almost always go unrequited—and spins it into a left-of-reality fantasy that acts as wish fulfillment for the 12-year-old romantic in all of us, as well as a serious investigation of how love manifests itself at different parts of our lives. He does so through the story of Sam and Suzy, two kids living on a remote New England island who decide, at the age of 12, to run away with one another, out of both love and a sense that they are severely misunderstood by the adults in their lives. Much of the movie is devoted to a full-scale search of the island by Suzy’s parents (Frances McDormand and Bill Murray), Sam’s scout leader (Edward Norton), and the island’s lone law enforcement officer (Bruce Willis), all of whom are in various states of despair or melancholy over the loneliness of their own love lives or lack thereof.

For those who’ve already decided they hate the fussy, quirky Anderson aesthetic, there may not be much here to change their mind on that front, as this is as quintessentially Andersonian as The Royal Tenenbaums or Rushmore. But I’ve always found that to be a shallow reading, as Anderson’s whimsical constructions almost always rest atop a deeply affecting well of emotion, which is as near to the surface as ever in Moonrise Kingdom. I used to think that if I could go to any cinematic place and time, I’d be driving a Citroën down the streets of Paris in a Godard feature. Feel free to mock that particular personal cliché all you wish, but his visions were both romantic and tough, welcoming and a little dangerous. Wes Anderson’s worlds are much sweeter, and the dangers are more from the surplus of melancholy, but they’re just as vivid, romantic, and inviting. I want to spend time on his made-up island of New Penzance just as intensely.

View the trailer. Opens tomorrow at E Street and Bethesda Row.

2012 DC Caribbean Filmfest

For the 12th year, the AFI is teaming up with a number of local Caribbean organizations and associations to present a collection of films from all over the West Indies. This year’s selection of 11 titles comes from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, Antigua and Barbuda, Guadeloupe, Barbados, and Belize. Things get started tomorrow night with Fire in Babylon, a British documentary about the “Windies,” a cricket squad that collects players from across the nations of the Caribbean into one team, which dominated the sport in the ’70s and ’80s. The rest of the festival showcases both narrative and documentary features, many dealing with the rich musical tradition of the islands as well as the often rocky political background of many of their nations.

View the trailer for Fire in Babylon. Starts tomorrow and runs through Monday at the AFI. See the schedule for complete listings and showtimes.

Continue reading the rest of my picks for this week over at Washingtonian.

Washingtonian Film Picks, Week of 5/25/12

Being There

In the final years of his life, Peter Sellers engaged in a persistent campaign to gain the film rights to Jerry Kosinski’s 1971 novel about a simple-minded gardener named Chance, who makes an unlikely rise through the ranks of the most powerful people of DC after the death of his employer, who had shielded him from the world for most of his life. Sellers saw something profound in the material, and an opportunity to play a significant and subtly comic role that would serve him better as a legacy than the beloved, but hardly serious, Pink Panther films. He was eventually successful, and with one of the most idiosyncratic directors of the ’70s, Hal Ashby, at the helm, Sellers made what would be the final film of his released while he was still alive.

The result is a masterpiece, and easily among my top five favorite films of that decade. Sellers creates a lovingly nuanced character study of a man who appears to others to be a blank slate, allowing them to create reflections of themselves in him while interpreting the homespun platitudes that dominate his speech in whatever self-serving fashion they desire. Chance becomes an inspirational political celebrity for a nation desperate for political heroes, and Ashby never loses sight of the larger satire inherent in the story, even as he navigates the small and deeply personal aspects of Chance’s less public journey. Some years later, Forrest Gump would cover some of the same territory: simple man becomes lauded national celebrity without meaning to. But where Gump was maudlin and leaned heavily on a crutch of nostalgia for goodwill, Being There is the far better, if criminally less remembered, film.

View the trailer. Screens through Sunday, and again next Thursday at the AFI. Check the AFI schedule for showtimes.

Little Otik and Jan Švankmajer shorts

Surrealist Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer has carved out a niche over the past half century as one of the most immediately recognizable figures in cinema, with his distinctive style of stop-motion animation. Even if you’re unfamiliar with surrealist Czech art films, some might still ring a bell if you were ever a regular watcher of MTV in the ’80s, when some of his shorts appeared as between-video bumpers. The National Gallery begins a retrospective of the director’s work this weekend with a number of his short-subject works, which served as a massive influence for other animators, such as Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam. This collection will be followed by Švankmajer’s fourth feature, 2000’s Little Otik, which blends stop-motion and live action to re-create a Czech folk tale about a childless couple who dig up a tree stump that comes to life and that they raise as their own ­until they discover its appetite may become a danger to those around them.

View the trailer. The shorts collection screens Saturday at 1 PM, and Little Otik on Sunday at 4:30 PM at the National Gallery of Art. Further Švankmajer films screen during the following two weekends.

Continue reading the rest of this week’s picks over at Washingtonian.

Atlantic Essay: Where Have All the Gigantic, Nuclear-Powered, Horror Monsters Gone?

There are few horrors that any filmmaker has ever devised to put onscreen that can match those that face us in the real world and within our own psyches. That’s why the language of horror has always been metaphor: vampires for the fearful power of lust and sex, werewolves for the repressed and violent sides of our own natures, and zombies for the slow, unstoppable march of death.

But with the birth of the atomic age, horror saw a sea change. Who needs monsters when mankind has the ability to wipe out millions of people in an instant with the press of a button? In terms of things that go bump in the night, a nuclear warhead creates an awfully loud bump. But how dependent were the scares in those films on the tenor of the time? Does nuclear radiation still provide enough energy to fuel 90 minutes of fright, as director Bradley Parker and writer/producer Oren Peli (creator of the Paranormal Activity series) hope is the case in the new Chernobyl Diaries?

The answer to that question is probably a definitive, resounding, “maybe.” That’s because Chernobyl Diaries doesn’t really seek to follow any of the conventions of atomic age horror. This is a standard-issue slasher movie without much slashing, substituting the ghost town of Pripyat—the city that housed the workers and families of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, hurriedly evacuated in the wake of that plant’s disastrous 1986 accident—for the likes of Friday the 13th’s Camp Crystal Lake. It’s essentially exactly the film many audiences thought they were going to see when they turned out for Cabin in the Woods last month: unironic boilerplate horror, with a cast of young, attractive archetypes secluded in a remote location, being picked off in the dark one by one.

Continue reading the rest of my piece over at The Atlantic.

NPR Review: Moonrise Kingdom

In the first few minutes of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, the camera tracks horizontally and vertically along the cross-sectioned rooms of a house. It’s one of the writer-director’s signature visual tics, one that, like many of his techniques, announces his art as something artificial. Anderson isn’t breaking the fourth wall, he’s eliminating it, literally: all these rooms have only three, in order that we might glimpse the carefully choreographed ballet he has arranged for us inside.

That dance starts in the Bishop household, a family living on the fictitious New England island of New Penzance in the 1960s. (Anderson’s usual fetishization of that decade has finally led him to set a movie there.) The younger kids play on braided rugs, listening to Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” on a toy record player, as mom and dad go about their evening routine. The eldest daughter, Suzy (Kara Hayward), obsessively scans the horizon with binoculars.

When the setting shifts, it’s to an encampment of “khaki scouts,” a troop under the command of the strict but earnest Scout Master Randy Ward (Edward Norton). He’s about to find that one of his young charges, 12-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman), has gone AWOL. Sam and Suzy, in the grips of young, on-the-verge-of-pubescence love, have plans to run away together.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR.

Washingtonian Film Picks, Week of 5/17/12

Sacha Baron Cohen abandons the fiction/documentary hybrid of Borat and Brüno for his latest, The Dictator. He’s still playing an over-the-top parody of a foreign stereotype—in this case a megalomaniacal blend of Hussein/Qaddafi/Ahmadinejad—but the surrounding players are all fictional and scripted, as well, rather than embarrassingly real people being goaded into their worst behavior by Cohen’s character. After two television series and two previous features from Cohen, 2009’s Brüno showed that the joke was mostly played out. So for his first fully scripted satire, Cohen channels Chaplin and the Marx Brothers for silly political satire that’s still serious at its core. Of course, those Middle Eastern dictators are fish in a barrel, as ready-made for cartoonish spoofing as Hitler was for Chaplin in 1940. Cohen doesn’t satisfy himself with just that easy target, but also goes after Western interests that are perhaps more beholden to the quasi-dictatorial control of the dollar than they’d like to admit.

View the trailer. Now playing at theaters across the area.

Raj Kapoor and the Golden Age of Indian Cinema

Raj Kapoor is one of the greats of Indian cinema, an actor and director who helped shape the entertainment factory that is modern Bollywood, and also a respected artist lauded just as much by critics and festival juries as by ticket buyers. Of course, Bollywood has never quite taken hold in the US the way it has in many other areas of the world, so this collection of films, presented at both the AFI and the Freer, will be new to most audiences, and an excellent introduction to an artist often overlooked here. This weekend, the AFI screens a brand new 35-millimeter print of My Name Is Joker, Kapoor’s 1970 epic failure, the life story of a circus clown that originally clocked in at five hours. The film has grown in status since its difficult original release, and numerous cuts of the film are out there; the AFI will be showing a comparatively briefer 199-minute version. In the film, Kapoor plays a variation of a character he’d cultivated over the years (not dissimilar to Charlie Chaplin’s “tramp”)—in this case Raju, a clown who follows in the show-business footsteps of his late father. The film traces Raju’s often tragic life from childhood to the end of his career.

View a scene from My Name is Joker, which screens Saturday at 3 PM at the AFI. The series continues with occasional screenings through the end of June at both the AFI and the Freer.
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Continue reading the rest of this week’s picks over at Washingtonian.

Criticwire Survey: The Ultimate Midnight Movie

In this week’s Criticwire survey asks the collected critical cognoscenti what’s the “ultimate” midnight movie. There are many different directions to go with this, from dark, violent, trippy psychedelia, to kitschy goofy cult fun. I went for the latter, but could easily have signed on to almost any of these other responses. You could program a great, and lengthy midnight movie series just by pulling from the responses to this week’s survey. Here’s what I had to say:

I’m not sure if it ever actually played the midnight circuit, but for sheer quotability, rewatchability, and general strangeness, I’m going to go with Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. What doesn’t this movie have? It’s got that scrappy late-70s Roger Corman aesthetic wherein absolutely anything could happen: I mean, there’s not one, but two 6-foot-tall mice in the film without anyone even really acknowledging the fact that there are life-sized mice running around wearing human clothes. Exploding lab mice. Also (spoiler!), an exploding high school. It’s got cult staples Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov in quintessential roles, a great screw-authority attitude, and an amazing soundtrack. And that’s without even getting into the presence of the Ramones, which is much more than the simple cameo one might expect. Finally, it’s got the single worst acting moment of any rock star who ever found himself in a feature film, as Dee Dee Ramone was asked to deliver but one line, and can’t even manage to say something as simple as ‘Hey! Pizza!’ convincingly. That line reading alone is the stuff great midnight movies are made of.

Atlantic Interview: Bobcat Goldthwait on God Bless America

Who hasn’t been there? You’re sitting on the couch late at night, too tired to get up and go to bed, too lazy to change the channel, and suddenly you’re watching some program that displays the lower demons of our nature: spoiled teenagers throwing fits about their parents buying them the “wrong” car, news commentators spewing hatred, entertainment shows feeding off our tendency to obsess over the public failings of celebrities. Faced with proudly packaged evidence of our collective cultural decline, you think to yourself, “Man, would I ever like to lock one of these people in their car and stuff a flaming rag into their gas tank.”

OK, perhaps your frustration doesn’t go that far. But that’s exactly what Frank (Joel Murray, a familiar character actor who shines in his first lead role here), the “hero” of Bobcat Goldthwait’s new God Bless America, is thinking. But before violently fantasizing about the figures on his TV screen, the constant noise of the boorish residents of the apartment next door inspires him to dream of taking a shotgun to all three of them, incessantly screaming infant included. Frank’s reverie—which includes the image of exploded baby parts showering the mother who had held up her child as a human shield—is an efficient introduction of the dark, unrelenting violence that is to follow. But this is no simple wish-fulfillment revenge fantasy. It’s an indictment of us as viewers and tacit supporters of the cultural trash heap.

Continue reading the rest of this piece over at The Atlantic.

NPR Review: Small, Beautifully Moving Parts

Like the best road movies, Small, Beautifully Moving Parts features a pair of individuals newly thrust together, unsure what to make of one another, yet unable to separate. Of course, that inseparability is usually one forced by the situation; in this film, the bond joining these travelers is umbilical: Sarah Sparks (Anna Margaret Hollyman) is pregnant.

Sarah is a Brooklyn-based “freelance technologist,” a woman with an insatiable desire to understand how gadgets work. Writer-directors Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson open the film with a montage of Sarah hanging fliers offering her services, interviewing people on the street about their relationship with technology, and taking apart everything from computers to old transistor radios to lay out their guts and see how all those titular moving parts interact.

The same curiosity applies to the gadget she holds as that montage ends: a home pregnancy test. When it comes up positive, her husband, Leon (Andre Holland), is giddy with surprise, while she merely notes the surprisingly nice quality of the font in the device’s digital display. Later, at the first ultrasound, she asks the technician about the technology being used, and notes the image “looks just like a baby.” Leon has to remind her that it is, in fact, a baby.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR.

Washingtonian Film Picks, Week of May 10, 2012

God Bless America

Bobcat Goldthwait returns with another of his biting black comedies, this one a takedown of everything he finds execrable in modern American culture (specifically reality television, celebrity worship, cable news blowhards, and political correctness). The film centers on Frank (Joel Murray, shining in his first starring role), a put-upon office worker who finds himself out of a job after a kind gesture toward a coworker lands him with a sexual harassment claim. When he discovers that on top of that, he’s also got a brain tumor, he decides to go out in a blaze of glory, taking with him every representative of the worst of popular culture he can get in his gunsights. He meets up with a teenage girl sympathetic to his rampage, and the two go on an all-out cross-country killing spree.

What starts as revenge-fantasy wish fulfillment takes an even darker turn as Goldthwait has his characters push things too far. In the process, he points the finger squarely back at the audience, suggesting that the same sense of satisfaction we get from Frank taking “justice” into his own hands is part of the strange fascination we all have with the ugly sensationalism Frank is attempting to exact justice on. The film can sometimes come off as angry polemic, but Goldthwait’s willingness to point the finger back not just at us, but at himself (Frank feels very much like a stand-in for the director) makes the film a fascinating analysis of our own worst natures and a wakeup call for a culture in decline.

View the trailer. Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.

Dark Shadows

Tim Burton and Johnny Depp team up yet again, for yet another remake of a (semi-) familiar property—in this case the strange 1960s vampire soap opera Dark Shadows. On the surface, this seems like just the sort of story that could break the nearly unbroken string of diminishing returns in Burton/Depp pairings. Just like Sweeney Todd—the only really good Burton live-action film of the past decade or so—it’s a dark story laced with quirky black humor, about an 18th-century gentleman cursed into vampirism by a spurned lover who happens to be a witch, who locks him in a metal coffin and buries him for what is meant to be an eternity. Only he’s unearthed some 200 years later and must learn to live in the 1970s with the decidedly weird remnants of his once-powerful family.

For the first half of the film, Burton plays up the campy humor and references the high melodrama of the original series, even shooting some scenes with setups that recall daytime soap conventions. The film looks absolutely gorgeous, and Depp doesn’t overplay Barnabas Collins as has become his habit in recent Burton films and in the Pirates of the Caribbean series. Unfortunately, Burton abandons that approach for an effects-heavy, action-packed second half that’s neither funny nor thrilling, and mostly just boring. In this context, bizarre touches such as stunt-casting Alice Cooper as his late-twentysomething self just seem like acts of desperation in a film that held a great deal of promise.

View the trailer. Opens tomorrow at theaters across the area.

NPR Review: The Perfect Family

Guilt can be a powerful force. In The Perfect Family, it’s also a self-perpetuating one. Director Anne Renton’s film puts on display a woman so obsessed with her place in the afterlife that for a guarantee of absolution, she’s willing to engage in morally questionable activities that are bound to cause her even greater guilt.

If that sounds like a cutting critique of organized religion and situational morality, not quite: Renton’s approach is, to its benefit, fair and never strident. But it’s also gentle and cautious, often to a fault.

Eileen Cleary (Kathleen Turner) is a devout Catholic who goes to confession daily, delivers food to the elderly, holds the plate of Communion wafers for the parish priest and generally is about as involved as she can be in her church short of chucking everything and joining the convent.

For her labors, she’s been nominated for Catholic Woman of the Year. The prize will get her recognition at a church dinner, maybe a pretty plaque for the mantel. Most important, it comes with a personal prayer of absolution from a high-ranking visiting Irish archbishop. Eileen wants this assurance of forgiveness most of all.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR.