American Girl goes archipelago. Writer-director Marc Forby (one of six executive producers of “Prom Night”) fashions a scenic after-school biopic about Princess Kaiulani (1875–1899). The title royal with a fifteen-century bloodline is the niece of Queen Liliuokalani, overthrown in 1893. Q’orianka Kilcher—Pocahantas in “The New World”—plays another princess who sails to Britain and back. Unfortunately, Kilcher shows none of what Colin Farrell saw in his young co-star while shooting Terrence Malick’s 2005 film: “She’s such an insane mix of lightness and darkness of spirit. But she has a smile that could light up both hemispheres at the same time, and she has a depth of darkness which would make the world stand still.” Kaiulani is a proud teen who takes her destiny to heart. In the end, Forby frames her as self-sacrificial, a figurehead for a monarchy doomed to annexation as a U.S. territory and later statehood. I wish I could have learned more about the complex frictions between missionaries, landowners and the descendants of islanders who sacrificed Captain Cook. Forby even omits the tale of this half-Scottish princess introducing surfing to Brighton. “Princess Kaiulani” overly valorizes a multicultural role model from Obama’s birthplace. Her offscreen politics include driving “a hydrogen fuel cell zero-emissions vehicle.” Her publicists testify: “She has never pumped a single gallon of gasoline.” Kaiulani and Kilcher deserve a more vexed and voluptuous remake by the likes of Werner Herzog or Claire Denis. With Barry Pepper, Shaun Evans, Will Patton, Jimmy Yuill. 100m. (Bill Stamets)
Review: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?
Chicago Artists, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Recommended 1 Comment »
RECOMMENDED
The racing ostriches. The tiny man dancing on a clear-cut stump in the snow. Endangered flamingoes named McNamara and MacDougal. Plates of shivery black Jell-o offered up as a treat in a Norman Rockwell-styled tableau vivant. Meaninglessly meaningful offerings of basketballs. Brad Dourif spooking Michael Shannon. Werner Herzog does not need special effects. In his David Lynch-produced procedural, “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” the Teutonic seeker of “ecstatic truth” bends the fictions of television narrative to his eccentric ends. It could well be “CSI: Tierra del Fuego.” Shooting a script he’d written several years ago (with Herbert Golder, a classical civilization professor he’s worked with before), the 67-year-old director tells a story based on the real-life case of Mark Yarovsky who became obsessed with Euripides’ “Orestes” and killed his mother with a prop saber. Michael Shannon and Grace Zabriskie (“Twin Peaks,” “Inland Empire”) played the fiction son and mom. Read the rest of this entry »
Furnish a Room: surveying film books of 2009
Film Books, The State of Cinema, World Cinema No Comments »
By Ray Pride
As I write, I am surrounded on three sides by books; one window looks out onto the horizontal play of snowfall. Inside it’s warm: books do furnish a room.
Ways of reading and ways of writing are shifting; that opening paragraph’s fourteen characters too long to Twitter. Whatever to do! From the cool hearth glow of computers and laptops, rampant idle bloggotry is committed every hour of the day and night. Everybody’s writing about movies even if no one’s making a remunerative career of it for the moment. Scanning these bookshelves, especially of the titles on film from past decades that seemed important enough to acquire, alphabetize and dust, I wonder how many tomes on the subject will be committed between covers, hard or soft, in coming years. The tacky tens: the decade when the listicle became literature!
For me, the year’s most important film book is “Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber” (Library of America, $40). Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
Review: Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
Action, Comedy, Drama, Recommended, Stoner No Comments »
RECOMMENDED
With a blank-page disregard for Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult film also called “Bad Lieutenant” and its similar premise, Werner Herzog’s off-the-rails portrait of a drug-addicted cop in post-Katrina New Orleans, starring Nicolas Cage in the feature role, borders on dark comedy with a joyous embrace of bleak absurdity. Cage’s bad, bad lieutenant ingests every ounce of dope he can get his bankrupt hands on while struggling to solve a horrendous multiple homicide, protecting his upscale hooker girlfriend from abusive johns, settling his gambling debts and making the most of his relationship with his alcoholic father. In a perpetual haze of drug-fueled oblivion, moral lines are drawn simply to be snorted up with glee. (“I snorted what I thought was coke but turned out to be heroin” is but one choice line.) Herzog’s balance between cop drama and subversive goof makes for fearless storytelling—the lieutenant’s proclivity for reprehensible behavior, taking advantage of his position of power, sends chills, and Herzog’s jaunts with iguanas and alligators are inspired. This is a hard-luck town that was once nearly all but forgotten. Nicolas Cage delivers one of the best performances of his career, offering exultation and frustration to those aware of the work of which he’s capable. The film’s finale offers a splurge of unexpected uplift that teases the soul. With Val Kilmer, Eva Mendes, Fairuza Balk, Jennifer Coolidge, Brad Dourif, Michael Shannon and Shea Whigham, who somehow steals one scene away from Cage. 121m. (Tom Lynch)
RECOMMENDED
Pixar’s one stumble, “Cars” is reportedly the one that’s made the most money in product tie-ins, but one of their great virtues is letting directors run with passion projects and having their colleagues pitch in with their own inspired notions. While I’m keener on Brad Bird’s work like “The Incredibles” and his masterpiece, “Ratatouille,” “Up,” an improbable variation on Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” plays effortlessly, a grab-bag of comic tone and narrative ambition that works from epic to intimate, from tragedy to doggie goop on a tennis ball. There’s death, blood and a gaudy outsized bird (that caws with jungle obscenity), ranks of easily amused talking dogs and blue skies filled with anthropomorphic clouds and eventually, a world of marzipan-bright helium balloons. “Up” is filled with tidy renditions of Gilliamesque fancies. Read the rest of this entry »
Top 5 Domestic Films
“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan
“Che,” Steven Soderbergh
“Paranoid Park,” Gus Van Sant
“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme
“Ballast,” Lance Hammer
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Foreign Films
“Man on Wire,” James Marsh
“Reprise,” Joachim Trier
“Happy-Go-Lucky,” Mike Leigh
“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle
“A Christmas Tale,” Arnaud Desplechin
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Films
“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle
“Ballast,” Lance Hammer
“Hunger,” Steve McQueen
“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan
“In The City of Sylvia,” Jose Luis Guerin
—Bill Stamets
Top 5 Films
“Milk,” Gus Vant Sant
“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan
“Man on Wire,” James Marsh
“Let the Right One In,” Tomas Alfredson
“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme
—Tom Lynch
Top 5 Performances – Female
Sally Hawkins, “Happy-Go-Lucky”
Melissa Leo, “Frozen River”
Kristin Scott Thomas, “I’ve Loved You So Long”
Kate Winslet, “Revolutionary Road”
Kat Dennings, “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Performances – Male
Benicio Del Toro, “Che”
Sean Penn, “Milk”
Mathieu Amalric, “A Christmas Tale”
Michel Blanc, “The Witnesses”
Ben Kingsley, “Elegy”
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Supporting Performances – Female
Ann Savage, “My Winnipeg”
Nurgul Yesilcay, “The Edge of Heaven”
Viola Davis, “Doubt”
Penelope Cruz, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”
Zoe Kazan, “Revolutionary Road”
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Supporting Performances – Male
Michael Shannon, “Revolutionary Road,” “Shotgun Stories”
Danny McBride, “Pineapple Express”
Richard Dreyfuss, “W.”
Toby Jones, “W.”
Anil Kapoor, “Slumdog Millionaire”
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Directors
Mike Leigh, “Happy-Go-Lucky”
Joachim Trier, “Reprise”
Danny Boyle, “Slumdog Millionaire”
Tomas Alfredson, “Let the Right One In”
James Marsh, “Man on Wire”
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Screenplays
Fatih Akin, “The Edge Of Heaven”
Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, “Reprise”
Simon Beaufoy, “Slumdog Millionaire”
Charlie Kaufman, “Synecdoche, New York”
Martin McDonagh, “In Bruges”
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Domestic Documentaries
“Encounters at the End of the World,” Werner Herzog
“The Order of Myths,” Margaret Brown
“At The Death House Door,” Steve James, Peter Gilbert
“The Unforeseen,” Laura Dunn
“Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father,” Kurt Kuenne
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Foreign Documentaries
“Man On Wire,” James Marsh
“Of Time and the City,” Terence Davies
“Waltz With Bashir,” Ari Folman
“Up the Yangtze,” Yung Chang
“Young@Heart,” Stephen Walker
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Follies
“Speed Racer,” The Wachowski brothers
“The Fall,” Tarsem
“Adam Resurrected,” Paul Schrader
“Australia,” Baz Luhrmann
“My Blueberry Nights,” Wong Kar-wai
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Films You Can’t See Yet
“24 City,” Jia Zhang-Ke
“35 Shots Of Rum,” Claire Denis
“The English Surgeon,” Geoffrey Smith
“Liverpool,” Lisandro Alonso
“Voy a Explotar (I’m Going to Explode),” Gerardo Naranjo
—Ray Pride
Without mercy, Werner Herzog mocked himself in Zak Penn’s “Incident at Loch Ness,” a making-of take-off about the German filmmaker and a documentary crew chasing Scotland’s legendary denizen of the deep. Now Herzog does the real thing: “Encounters at the End of the World” is a transparent meta-travelogue about collecting exotica in Antarctica. For this G-rated essay for the Discovery Channel, Herzog embeds with likeminded “professional dreamers” doing chores and studies at McMurdo Station. A seven-week sojourn reveals debris, machinery and a tacky artificial ice-cream dispenser named Frosty Boy. As usual, Herzog is hungry for all that can disgust and intoxicate him. He spies the sublime above and below the ice. Seals emit signals that sound like those indecipherable signals from deep space heard in a sci-fi film. Herzog watches scientists watch a DVD of sci-fi film “Them!” He encounters an obliging geochronologist, glaciologist and others who sound as if they have seen a Werner Herzog film. Twice, though, our narrator interrupts the overlong tales of others. I winced when he asked a diver surfacing with three new species: “Is this a great moment?” Another overly italicized moment: Herzog implies his own peril with a third-hand story about a traveler to Guatemala who was macheted to death for taking a photo. Herzog’s surrealist misanthropy is best expressed in his inquiry into insanity among penguins. Does a closely packed colony ever drive a Herzog-like individual to make a mad existential dash into the void? As Sartre sort of said, “hell is other penguins.” 99m. (Bill Stamets)