Beautiful Frauds

NPR Review: What Maisie Knew

By the end of What Maisie Knew, what 6-year-old Maisie knows is the thing everyone in the theater has figured out in the first five minutes: This poor little girl has two of the most horrible movie parents since Faye Dunaway got her hands on a wire hanger.

They fight or are distracted so much that Maisie is often left to her own devices, making herself meals or scrounging for cash to pay for the pizza her parents ordered.

Her father, Beale (Steve Coogan), runs off with the nanny, Margo (Joanna Vanderham), and that’s just the first in an endless string of abandonments and other outrages. Susanna (Julianne Moore), Maisie’s rock-star mother, invites one of Maisie’s classmates over to stay the night, just to try to get the kid’s mom to say a few nice things about her in the impending divorce proceedings. Problem is, she schedules the sleepover for the same night as a booze-and-cigarette-filled hangout with her band and assorted hangers-on. The friend goes home sobbing in the middle of the night. This couple is poison to anyone with the misfortune to wander into their decaying orbit.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR.

NPR Review: Kon-Tiki

Early in Kon-Tiki, a dramatization of Thor Heyerdahl’s famous 1947 trans-Pacific raft expedition, the Norwegian ethnographer arrives at the New York Explorers Club trying to drum up support for his crazy adventure.

Though the host initially tells him he’s not welcome — Heyerdahl (Pal Sverre Hagen) has already been soundly rejected by every publisher, magazine editor and potential financier in the city — the Danish explorer Peter Freuchen (Soren Pilmark) recognizes him and lets him in.

Freuchen’s appearance in Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg’s film is limited to just this one scene, but the character introduces two key concepts — one that will be central to Heyerdahl’s philosophy, and another that will prove key to that of the filmmakers. When trying to live as native peoples do, Freuchen explains, it’s best to trust in the native ways of doing things. Heyerdahl takes this advice to heart in the building of his titular raft, a craft built of balsa wood, held together without a single nail or rivet.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR.

WCP Arts Desk Blog: Avalon Going Digital

You’ve already kicked in to help Veronica Mars hit the big screen and Zach Braff plumb the plights of existentially challenged thirtysomething white dudes. Now you’re wondering where to throw those philanthropic film dollars next.

For those inclined to give locally, D.C.’s Avalon Theatre is throwing an anniversary bash and fundraiser this weekend, the proceeds from which will help the nonprofit theater transition to digital projection.

As Washington City Paper reported last year, the District’s cinema screens, just like those all over the nation, have been rapidly transitioning to pixel-based projection as celluloid film prints become increasingly scarce. It’s an expensive process, and one that’s hitting independent nonprofit theaters like the Avalon particularly hard, as they aren’t in a position to take advantage of the strings-attached financial aid packages offered by distributors to help defray the costs.

Continue reading the rest of my post over at Washington City Paper.

WCP Theatre Review: The Lady Becomes Him

Another in my occasional forays outside a cinema to that other brand of theater:

The great rock ‘n’ roll philosophers of Spinal Tap once said there’s a fine line between stupid and clever. That might seem like nonsense to anyone with, well, a firm grasp of the concept of opposites. But after seeing Faction of Fools’ production of The Lady Becomes Him, one might come around to David St. Hubbins’ unconventional wisdom.

Faction is a company devoted to preserving and evolving commedia dell’arte, merging the tropes and stock characters of that old Italian tradition with more modern sensibilities. The core of The Lady Becomes Him is a 17th century scenario called “Donna Zanni”—the broad sketches of a romantic comedy of errors involving adultery, mistaken identities, unrequited love, and magic rings. Oh, and a love pentagon between the play’s upstairs nobility, plus an entirely separate love triangle among the downstairs help.

Given all that geometry, a diagram would be helpful to describe the plot, which involves Celia (Lindsey D. Snyder), who is married to the nobleman Il Dottore (Matthew Pauli) and having an affair with the gallant Orazio (Stephen Hock), who is loved from afar by the rich foreigner Isabella (Amelia Hensley), who is being pursued by Luzio (James McGowan). Meanwhile, Isabella’s servant Rosetta (Rachel Spicknall Mulford) is shacking up with both Dottore and Orazio’s servants. And matters become confused even further by a sorcerer-aided body swap subplot that juggles both class and gender.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at the Washington City Paper.

Atlantic Essay: Lords of Salem & Rob Zombie as One-Hit Wonder

Ever since he first made the jump from musician to moviemaker, horror fans like me have wanted to root for Rob Zombie. It has little to do with whether one is a fan of his music or not. It’s that there was a consistent aesthetic at work in everything he did that made it seem like he was going to make the kind of movies that genre buffs were going to love.

After all, here was a guy who named his band (White Zombie) after a great 1932 Bela Lugosi horror flick, sampled exploitation and horror classics like Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Night of the Living Dead in his songs, and embedded cult culture and film references throughout his records. In short, beneath the shaggy hair, scraggly beard, and heavy metal gloom, he was basically just a sci-fi/horror nerd. Add to that his background in graphic arts, filmmaking experience making music videos, and it was easy for any person who shared his tastes to figure some good could come from having Zombie behind the camera.

But with today’s release of his fifth movie, Lords of Salem, it’s time to come to terms with the sad truth: Rob Zombie as a filmmaker is at best a one-hit wonder, and a case study in the dangers of putting a fanboy in the director’s chair.

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

NPR Review: Unmade in China

The best documentaries about filmmaking are the ones that show it at its worst.

Movie sets are fundamentally boring places, where there’s mostly a lot of waiting around going on. But when disaster strikes with millions of dollars on the line, the tension and drama are suddenly amped up to levels that often equal those in the movie being filmed.

Watching Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski nearly come to blows in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, for instance, is just as gripping as Fitzcarraldo, the movie they’re making. Perhaps the best of this genre is Lost in La Mancha, which doesn’t need to search for a metaphor to describe Terry Gilliam’s doomed production: The movie he’s failing spectacularly to make is, of course, about literature’s most famous conquistador of futility, Don Quixote.

Throughout the new documentary Unmade in China, director Gil Kofman is dedicated to a seemingly quixotic task of his own. He’s been given a green light to direct his second feature, but with a hefty catch: He has to make the movie in China, with a Chinese cast and crew, in Mandarin — a language he doesn’t speak. Oh, and he has to do all this under the watchful eye of the Chinese film production system, a nonsensical and labyrinthine maze of graft, misogyny, bizarre rules and Communist Party politics that still manages to operate with an almost admirable lockstep efficiency. Unless you challenge any part of it.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR

Atlantic Essay: Cinematic Experimenters, Shane Carruth, and Upstream Color

The wall between experimental and commercial film is as easy to see and difficult to penetrate as the marble walls of a museum. Experimental filmmakers generally work alone, eschewing narrative in favor of exploring the raw visual and sonic possibilities of the medium, and their work is nearly as confined to those museums as the Picassos and Pollacks in the next room. Yet every now and then, a commercial director manages to play populist art thief, sneaking the theoretical ideas of the avant-garde out of the gallery and into the cinema.

David Lynch is the best example: a filmmaker who has long made highly experimental shorts that then inform his (relatively) more accessible narrative work—and occasionally, as in the “Rabbits” sequence from his 2006 Inland Empire, uses those shorts within the long-form work. Terrence Malick is another, a director whose drift into more and more abstracted territory found him licensing the work of experimentalists like Thomas Wilfred and Scott Nyerges to use in the meditative birth-of-the universe sequence from Tree of Life in 2011. But the most recent addition to the collection, Shane Carruth, director of the mesmerizing new Upstream Color, is perhaps even more radical.

Nine years after successfully debuting the micro-budgeted time travel mindbender Primer at Sundance, Carruth has returned with a work of ambitious, difficult, and unapologetic experimentation. It’s difficult, heady stuff, using a fractured structure that mirrors the messy-but-ordered way of nature to tell a love story using the interlocking life cycles of plants, pigs, nematodes, and humans.

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

NPR Review: Evil Dead

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: Fede Alvarez’s remake of Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead can’t hold a candle, shotgun or revving chainsaw to the original.

Raimi’s 1981 debut is a masterpiece of punk filmmaking, a bunch of young enthusiasts who barely knew what they were doing, going out into the woods and stumbling blindly into the creation of a ragged landmark — largely because they didn’t know, didn’t care or didn’t have the money to do it the way it was supposed to be done.

Luckily Alvarez, for whom Evil Dead is also a debut feature, doesn’t try to replicate the practically accidental glory of that film. With studio money, and Raimi and original star Bruce Campbell on board as producers, this Evil Dead is polished and meticulously planned, and it benefits from the attention to detail as well as from Alvarez’s obvious love for the spirit of the source material.

The basic, archetypal framework is the same: Five 20-somethings head to a remote forest location, accidentally unleash unspeakable evil via a flesh-bound book of rituals and incantations, and fall prey to malevolent, soul-devouring demons. But the first major shift that Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues introduce is giving these characters a little more depth and purpose.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR.

Criticwire Survey: The Dud You Love

This week’s survey asked: “What movie widely regarded as a cinematic dud do you like (or maybe even love)?” Here’s what I had to say:

While I think maybe it’s gained a small cult following over the past decade, the critics’ scores and box office numbers for Antonia Bird’s Western-cannibal-horror flick, ‘Ravenous,’ are pretty anemic: 37% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 45 on Metacritic for a movie that didn’t even manage to make back 20% of its $12 million budget. That response has always surprised me, as it’s a movie that I immediately became attached to when I first saw it, and go back to regularly. Yes, it’s a film of wild mood swings, starting out on the bloody battlefields of the Mexican-American war, moving to a bleak and isolated military outpost in a Sierra Nevada mountain pass in what looks to be a turn towards frontier survivalism, and then out of nowhere it becomes a supernaturally-inflected, gory cannibal horror piece. But the genre mashup works, thanks to really fantastic performances from Guy Pearce as a cowardly army captain and the scene-chewing Robert Carlyle, tapping the same reservoir of villainous likability that fueled his turn as Begbie in ‘Trainspotting.’ Jeremy Davies, Jeffrey Jones, Neal McDonough, and yes, even David Arquette round things out nicely with a lot of really well balanced black comic relief. On top of all that, ‘Ravenous’ boasts one of the most striking scores from any film of the 90s, featuring off-kilter riffs on 19th-century Americana from Blur’s Damon Albarn along with Michael Nyman.

Washington City Paper review: Starbuck

David Wozniak is no garden-variety screwup. The protagonist of writer/director Ken Scott’s endearing but ingratiating Québécois comedy, Starbuck, is a walking cautionary tale on life and how not to live it. He’s terrible at his career, and only keeps his job as a perpetually tardy delivery driver because it’s the family business. His romantic life is no better: His longtime girlfriend is ready to leave him because she’s pretty sure he’s keeping things from her. She’s not wrong. He’s secretly trying to grow hydroponic weed in his apartment to raise $80,000 for his bookie. None of that is likely to go over well with her—given that she’s a cop.

But that might not be the worst of this guy’s offenses. As a broke student, he also donated copious amounts of sperm. After the sperm bank enthusiastically doled out his DNA, he’s the biological father to more than 500 children, 142 of whom have banded together in a class action. Their goal: to force the clinic to turn over the real name of “Starbuck,” his nom de donateur back when he was regularly providing top-grade genetic material.

This scenario could only be considered a screw-up in the weird logic of Scott’s movie. Starbuck hinges on the assumption that there’s something weird about a sperm donor having sired a lot of children. Granted, there are a lot in this case, and more than sperm banks are supposed to allow, but that’s not David’s fault. Yet in the movie’s fantasy world, the anonymous Starbuck is talked about like a pervert in the media, with outrage directed at him from around the world as the trial reaches its improbable fever pitch.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at the City Paper.