Top 5 U.S. Films
“The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow
“The Limits of Control,” Jim Jarmusch
“A Serious Man,” Joel and Ethan Coen
“Two Lovers,” James Gray
“The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Wes Anderson
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Foreign Films
“Summer Hours,” Olivier Assayas
“The Headless Woman,” Lucrecia Martel
“35 Shots of Rum,” Claire Denis
“You, the Living,” Roy Andersson
“Night and Day,” Hong Sang-soo
—Ray Pride Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
Erica Zonca made an indelible impression with his “Dreamlife of Angels” (1998) but managed only to produce one other feature since. In his erratic but fascinating “Julia,” Tilda Swinton is center screen as a 40-year-old alcoholic and liar who’s lousy at con jobs and lousier at life. Coming from an actress who’s avowedly teetotal, the sense, and almost the scent, of dissolution and despair is ever-present. (A child-kidnapping plot that goes multiply awry adds to the dread.) While the narrative lurches, Swinton ably captures states of drunkenness and disregard, disorientation and self-degradation. It takes the film’s exhausting but often-exhilarating duration to cycle through self-abasement to self-awareness and perhaps even hope. With Saul Rubinek, Kate del Castillo, Adam Gould. 144m. 35mm. (Ray Pride)
By Ray Pride
There’s a lovely, lovely comic harrumph from Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels”: “Nothing like a deep-dish movie to drive ‘em out in the open!” Sturges adored both the patrician and the philistine in human nature and made comic hey-hey out of both. Jim Jarmusch’s latest, the glorious, gleaming, controlled-in-the-service of repetition-compulsion “The Limits of Control” managed in its first weekend in New York and Los Angeles to drive a raft of nay-saying critical minds out into the open, and it’s a bit of a sorrow to read so many resistant to its hypnagogic pull. The Wall Street Journal’s smart Joe Morgenstern’s review read, in total, “Jim Jarmusch’s Dada meander, shot by Christopher Doyle, is empty and excruciating—that’s really all you need to know.” This may not be your cup of cinema, but cinema it is, and it’s dreamy. And if you love movies, it’s aromatic, deep-dish as all get-out. Read the rest of this entry »
By Ray Pride
It get don’t I.
A case of too much of a so-so thing, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a fatal mismatch of sensibilities, orchestrated by a master of complete control, David Fincher, with a poet of the passive, screenwriter Eric Roth, whose work includes “The Good Shepherd” (spy as watcher) and “Forrest Gump” (simpleton as empty vessel).
Drawing on a slim conceit from a wafer of a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald—man bites dog! I mean, “man born old grows young”—“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is less picaresque or lifelong wanderjahr than a hybrid “Forrest Button.” Things happen. A character gawps. The mind wanders. And it makes one muse over passivity in Fincher’s films: in “Fight Club,” doesn’t The Narrator lie back and let rampaging id Tyler do all the work? And “Zodiac” is a masterpiece about a gaze that misunderstands, about asking the wrong questions rather than not ever finding a sought answer.
Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is born old and grows to be an ancient newborn. Ever-fresh Daisy, the girl he loves, dances from a redhead of 10 to a dancer of whatever, embodied in some parts by Cate Blanchett, and in the distancing present-tense portions, set during the winds and lashing rains of Hurricane Katrina, by a bid for a Best MakeUp Oscar. In the middle, there’s stuff about shipping out to sea and committing adultery with Tilda Swinton in a Russian hotel and getting sunk at sea and eventually Brad Pitt digitized to a younger, ever more angelic version of himself on the back of a fine shiny motorcycle. For me, the feeling was less one of coolness and distance and apartness from the material that some have identified than simply, what is going on here? It feels as impersonal as a yellowed telegram ordering clock parts. Pitt is a lovely mirror, but what’s reflected back? Are you the hero of your own life if your fate is to repeatedly open the closet in the hall and life avalanches on your head like a succession of empty boxes?
Born in New Orleans on the day World War II ends, Benjamin is a foundling, thought a monster for his newborn decrepitude, but once left on the doorstep of an infertile young woman (Taraji P. Henson), a miracle. Fireworks play across the French Quarter night, like the similar digital sky that opens “Zodiac,” with fireworks exploding above the bridges of the Bay. But the episodic tale that follows pales in comparison to “Zelig” or to “Forrest Gump,” less a chronicle of experiential amplitude than one of fussy gee-whillikers cod-drollery.
Images of intimate beauty twinkle through the tobacco’ed skies of this would-be epic, but the voluminous narration reminds again and again of only one indelible figure from the pantheon of cinema: Joey Nickels. Joey Nickels? Joey Nickels from “Annie Hall”! Joey Five Cents? (What! an asshole!) The stories being funneled through the walls of the theater invariably sound like oft-repeated balderdash from someone who’s grown used to no one listening, not even himself. (“Button”’s best recurring joke involves lightning strikes, and is self-criticism of high comic attainment.)
Still, in terms of inedible imagery, Jean-Pierre Fincher still trumps Jeunet, to whose work “Button” has been compared. In faux battlefield footage, doughboys stride backward as if emerging from the bullets that had in fact just pierced their chests. Florets of fireworks reflected incidentally in a Model T’s tilted-just-so windscreen. Night-set scenes that work on the verge of pitch, the blackness and guttering sepia of de la Tour candlelight. A perspective of bridges overhead melting with fog. Daisy in a flat beret. An early 1960s rocket launch from Cape Canaveral. Scars on a woman’s legs, fingered deftly.
Any element beyond the simplest elements of timepieces, beyond basic movement, consists of constructions that are crested with a lovely term of art: complications. (Thus, great and treasured watches are built from complications of complications.) But in plotting, as in childbirth, complications can be the death of a thing, the death of narrative grace and ease. There are heartening, hushed instances when you can feel Benjamin and Daisy meeting in the middle, the conceit of the moments of the two lovers are slowly hurtling in opposite directions, and you can furnish the particulars of your own life and loves to capture the sense of the fleeting correspondence of contact, or parallel human treks. But that’s the function of canvas, not of a painting. And at these instances when the characters meet at nearly the same age that imply the sorrows of fleeting flesh and ever-limber love…yet the moment you’re touched Roth reaches out and slaps you with a nice wet bromide. Something like “You’re odd. You’re diff’r'nt from anybody I ever met,” or “You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. You can make the best or the worst of it.” Box of chocolates for $160 million, Alex? I can’t see the trees for the Forrest, but sweep Oscar smell I.
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is birthed Christmas day.
The 44th Chicago International Film Festival continues through October 29, and highlights include a repeat showing of Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler,” with Mickey Rourke as a man whose body had been his living is killing himself with it; “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” a seeming mock-doc about a real, middle-aged Canadian heavy metal band; and “Wesley Willis’ Joyrides,” which chronicles the local musician who did not make it to middle age. Erick Zoncka’s “Julia,” with Tilda Swinton in the central role, reportedly examines the far reaches of a troubled woman’s sanity; it’s his first feature since “The Dreamlife of Angels.” James Gray moves outside of his usual realm of New York corruption to examine a love affair between two troubled souls, played by Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, in “Two Lovers”; holiday family conflict is on the menu in Arnaud Desplechin’s “A Christmas Tale,” a worthy complement to his earlier features like “My Sex Life… or How I Got Into An Argument” and “Kings and Queen.” Stefan Forbes’ “Boogey Man: The Story of Lee Atwater” is the most seasonal of attractions, dealing with the amoral life and painful, slow death of the political advisor who developed much of the Republican style of campaigning, and was a mentor to Karl Rove. It’s almost possible to believe that such a loathsome man existed, but Forbes does fine work in capturing his life and legacy. Established directors are on hand as well, with Andrzej Wajda’s “Katyn,” about the aftereffects of the Russian slaughter of the cream of the Polish military; Jerzy Skolimowski’s “Four Nights With Anna,” reportedly a return to form for the genially absurdist director of “Deep End” and “Moonlighting”; and Hong Kong action master Johnny To’s “Sparrow” makes its Chicago debut. (Ray Pride)
Full schedule at chicagofilmfestival.com
RECOMMENDED
Isaac Julien, noted English filmmaker and peer of the late Derek Jarman, takes a brief, punchy look at “Derek,” with the orotund assistance of Tilda Swinton, who wrote her own narration of the man who began her career. Jarman was a man of many artistic endeavors, and his early, impressionistic, no-fi movies, often originating on Super 8mm, cast the lustrous, androgynous Swinton as an almost otherworldly presence. She returns the favor with her own mythologizing of his life as artist and muse to the arts and assertive activist. It’s more of a telling snapshot than a full-on biography, but there is a good book of his life as well as his own intriguing published diaries for that. 76m. (Ray Pride)
RECOMMENDED
Or, “No Country for White Men.” It’s almost a sure bet that the Coen brothers share a chuckle when they’re not taken seriously. My first infuriation came with “The Hudsucker Proxy,” which set me off in a couple of ways, writing something to the effect that they’d finally crossed the thin but all-defining line between wise guys and assholes. But, if I were to slip it in tonight, I’d likely find some levels or elements that eluded me oh so many years ago. Seeing “The Big Lebowski” a few weeks before its release and interviewing the Coens as well, much of what I admire about it now eluded me. (If I’d only known that my then-girlfriend who I saw it with was a secret stoner: illumination might have been had on the spot.) “Lebowski”’s become an ur-text in the decade since. Not only is the Dude’s behavior based on a real friend of the Coens, the ubiquitous producer’s rep Jeff Dowd, but also his political background. The Dude abides no lies. There’s also an undercurrent of the idea of masculinity’s reaction to generational displacement that’s as telling as anything in Eustache’s Euro-epic “The Mother and the Whore.” Similar things are at work in the genially splenetic “Burn After Reading,” which ends with the brothers’ fuck-you production company logo, but accompanies its end credits with a live performance by the Fugs, of Tuli Kupferberg singing, “Fuckin’ Amen” (the last line of the movie is “Tuli!”), a 1960s song about the CIA and CIA “men.” (“Who can squash republics like bananas because they don’t like their social manners? The CIA can.”) “Burn After Reading”’s Coen of the realm is critiquing the alabaster reach of the high white reaches of American power. Their latest boobarama is populated with white people filled with black lies and dumb-ass dreams, white-on-white on blue sky. Whiter than Tilda Swinton’s complexion under her bright red bob, whiter than milk in snow. J. K. Simmons, a comic god of the present moment, takes honors as a high-high-up in the agency who listens to reports from fixer David Rasche about the workaholic knuckleheads, dreamers of low intelligence and limited imagination, wreaking havoc in their backyard with screw-you calm and fuck-you dispatch. His final line, a weary obscenity-blasphemy heard in variations throughout the movie, is perfect, especially with the shot that follows. Very Rumsfeldian. A profane snowflake. And explain it to me when it makes sense. As the disenfranchised CIA analyst whose troubles set the plot to pinwheeling, Malkovich plays to his Steppenwolf-style strengths as a Punchinello of verbal fuckery, and the image of this fabulous fop in carpet slippers and a dressing gown rampaging down the streets of Brooklyn (doubling for Georgetown) with a hatchet in his hand and murder on his lips is inspired. Still, McDormand’s Linda Litzke is the true anti-heroine, a resilient employee of Hardbodies Gym, of high spirits and ready frustration who wants only for four cosmetic surgeries, and like Linda Tripp, is prepared to spend any potential ill-gotten gains from blackmail on it. Simple! Focused! Brad Pitt’s turn as Chad, her goggle-eyed, ever-hydrating boob-in-arms, is better seen than described, although his blond skunk pompadour may be the first and last cinematic homage to his tresses in the forgotten “Johnny Suede.” George Clooney’s Treasury guy? The biggest idiot he’s ever played, and his sexual compulsion knows no bounds. If only he could get a run in… Dry and deadly, “Burn After Reading” is savage, cynical, sarcastic vaudeville about the powers that be. The only notable figure of color is an apparently Latino cleaning man who finds the CD that sets the story in motion on the locker room floor; presumably named after the premium brand of shoes favored by the Secretary of State. 96m. (Ray Pride)
