KINATAY

Kinatay (The Execution of P)
Directed by Brillante Ma. Mendoza
Written by Armando Lao




The heart of darkness Kinatay plumbs is a black hole we know, but couch in the cozy swaddle of urban legend, of things that happen to other people. Because confronting them without that measure of remove, without that deniability at arms' length, puts us too far out in harm’s way for comfort,makes us fair game.

But nearly everybody has a third person rogue cop story, or knows somebody who knows somebody who does, of men with guns and abductions in the night, of death squads and body parts in sackcloth, of devilish deeds done dirt cheap. I tend to cold sweat on impulse at the sight of checkpoints myself. I'm overreacting,sure, but none of that anxiety is mere caprice. Kinatay has night-thoughts to rummage through,alright. Enough verite to tap. Buttons to push.

But not agendas. Kinatay spews from firsthand moral outrage - - -Mendoza's, Lao's - - -but doesn't politicize nor exoticize nor even outrightly address it. It's apolitical. And amoral. And in a way that does little but thicken its soup of dread 'til we're choking on it, gasping for air. It's a closed-in half-lit morally blank world Coco Martin's rookie cop - - -and us along with him - - -is marooned in without coordinates,a world of permanent midnight and spatial displacement where malevolence is the hunch of a lieutenant's back and Hell, a nondescript spare room turned makeshift abbatoir.

And it's tone is of a chilling passivity that neither gets as nosy nor as horny as tortureporn ,which it sort of is, albeit wth the volume turned way way down, a real time abstraction if you will, a horror movie bereft not only of gory sensation - - -the controversial raping and torturing and beating and slaying and dismembering is a dimly-lit battery of master shots verging on unseeable- - - but also of ways out - - -an almost unbearable sequence during a detour to buy balut on a beer run and an even more unbearable one near the end when a cab gets a flat and the bravura van ride that knots coils in my gut still and that last shot and the harrowing pointlessness of it all. It's deadened and deadening.

The word "salvage" may have re-entered the vernacular freighted with an alarming new meaning but it's also freighted with an alarming currency that wears off the scald over time. Salvage victims are mostly nobodies anyway,other people. And who cares what perversities are visited on a haggard old whore ,moreso one who's dim enough to think she can dupe rogue cops of their drug loot? Repulsed. Desensitized. These are the emotional polarities of salvage. And these,too,are the emotional polarities of Kinatay. It can either burrow under your skin and breed cultures of unease. Or it can numb you into feeling nothing. Both, of course, is the desired effect. * * * *

NOW SHOWING

Now Showing
Directed and Written by Raya Martin


"(Nostalgia) is delicate but potent. . . in Greek, it literally means the pain from an old wound.It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone." - Don Draper, Mad Men

Lovely Rita, the girl who leaps through time here, had a movie star for a grandmother who wore a dress spun from gold, that now hangs from a nail on the door, a yellowing ghost leeched of its exuberance much like Rita herself, making the rent as a teenager from the hawking of bootleg DVDs

Coming of age stories, the sugar pill of arthouse, tend to heighten the mythic in the banal. Raya Martin’s Now Showing, ostensibly a coming of age story, taps into these banalities, rather, for the despair and beauty of impermanence. The past is a forever fragmenting thing, forever slippery, forever changing shape, making every memory implicitly flawed and implicitly precious. Retro is what nostalgia is often mistaken for. But retro's passive - - -the weak shit of the time-locked. Nostalgia has a lot more at stake - --a rescue mission but always with casualties.

Of a throb with avant-garde diary films like Khavn’s Memory of Forgetting and Jonas Mekas’ Lost Lost Lost in the way it parses for mesh in disjuncture, teasing membranes of story from random found life vignettes, it's not as if Raya is splicing together his own found life - - -he's merely co-opting the syntax. Now Showing is a triptych bookended by the two halves of Rita - - -the prepubescent trembling with wonderment and the post-teen lost in space. But it is the middle third, a re-purposing of the weathered but resplendent remains of Octavio Silos’ lost film Tunay Na Ina into what seems at first mere connective tissue, that somehow bears the ore of the whole piece - - -that is, the corrosive vagaries of time. And like his Indio Nacional and Autohystoria, this is an historical autopsy, too, notwithstanding the shift in temperature, and as bothered by the futilities of retrieving the past without having to make up the parts mislaid to the blind spots of memory.

Chris Marker, in Sans Soleil, said “Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting but rather its inner lining.We don’t so much remember as we rewrite memory.” I'm with Chris and so's Raya.Now Showing is all remembering and re-enactment, if these are his memories or if these are even memories at all , but conceived with a naturalism so immersive, the seams melt. A fake passing itself off as real passing itself off as fake until you can't tell which is which anymore. With thickly familiar pangs of mood evoking a sense of deja vu that can't be right but never leaves you anyway.

Each of the three parts it divides itself into is queasy with a specific veneer of decay - - -imperfect failing memory and the imperfect failing platforms that foolishly try to capture and preserve them - - -but the first third, a love letter to childhood that's flush and agog with tiny incident and shot as if on a lo-res camcorder, is queasiest, opaque to the point of creamy, with that vague sense of torpor that someone else's home movies have in the way the interstitial shots linger- - -on a birthday party, on kids playing patintero at night, on a young girl singing mutely to the roar of the crowd in her head, on nothing much - - -past ambient and into tedium. But not without that murmur of peril, as if some fugitive magic will be forever lost if the pause button is pressed too soon. That's the lethal poignancy of nostalgia. And it leaks like blood into what these interstices connect, throwing shadows on everything. And a swatch of hope. There is nothing mythic to heighten in the lives we lived. There is only the warmth and burnish of remembering , the flames that gnaw at the edges and the things we save from the fire.
* * * * *

ALEXIS TIOSECO 1981-2009

I didn’t know Alexis enough to say we were close but knew him enough to feel kindred with him. And maybe that was all it took - - -the too few run-ins, the too few conversations, the too few emails, the too few fond anecdotes. Why else would there be this much shock and fear and regret and grief? Why else would all the cinema in the world suddenly feel so outmoded and impotent in the face of what happened? But let’s not put cinema down, as it was, after all, the magnet that drew us to each other - - -this mad fervid love for it that many thought almost freaky. Having declared my unwavering fealty to it even before I was in high school and knew better, I always thought my love bottomless and indomitable but the depth Alexis’ feelings ran - - -and the things it made him do - - -makes mine look like a petty crush . It put me to shame. But also had me keyed up. If there was one thing Alexis left with me, it’s knowing that there was still, and will always be, much more cinema to fall in love with.

Much as I'd like to say I was writing this as a friend, and much as I know Alexis wouldn’t mind if I did that or called him one, I feel it’s not entirely my place to do so. I’m writing this instead as a fellow lover of cinema and a fellow writer, a fellow film critic if you will. This blog was my secluded little pocket of the internet to write about something I loved. I never factored in that there would be traffic- - -the spotlight and me never really did see eye to eye, always had a touch of the hermetic, camera shyness. But the very first thing Alexis said to me when I was introduced to him was ”Hi. I like your blog”. It was immensely flattering. And it would later fuel me to not just write, but write faster, write truer, write more - - -my sloth may be my downfall but I’m getting there. But it was also immensely daunting knowing there was someone reading, let alone someone like Alexis. It was the second most frightening thing he ever said to me,really.

The most frightening thing was when he asked much later on if I really was shooting my first film. I told him sheepishly that I had shot one scene. Who knows what he would have thought of it had he lived to see it finished? Not that it would’ve mattered, I figured, long as I make it with generosity and conviction and love. That's how Alexis did his work. And that's how everyone in this ragtag so-called scene of ours sets out to do theirs, too. That's how he would've prefered it, I think - - -I don't know, I won't know. But it's all about love,in the end. The last few days I've been swimming in this warm and fraternal and almost familial inundation of community, this coming together in consensual sorrow,bonded by this shared and senseless loss and by this shared love for both cinema and for two people who gave so much for it. Too much.

Love is,as Alexis once said, the first impulse of critics. It is also the first impulse of friends.


Peace for the last time, Alexis and Nika. I hardly knew you but I'm glad I did.

WATCHMEN

Watchmen
Directed by Zack Snyder
Written by David Hayter and Alex Tse
From the Comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons






"There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can't." - Alan Moore


Alan Moore was right. Zack Snyder's Watchmen is an epic redundancy. A doppelganger stitched together with hubris and airplane glue but hollowed out, bereft of soul. A dummy twitching on the lap of a ventriloquist with no voice to throw so he throws someone else's. An impostor bursting at the seams with all the digital pretty that money can buy licking your eyes over and over and over until you give and have its baby - - -I looooove you, Zack Snyder's Watchmen ! You're so sooooo pretty! - - - as if the whole point of steeping yourself - - - and to a virulent degree at that - - - in both the lore and the form of comic books is to someday see them blown up at 24 fps, as if the whole point of comic books is to be glorified shooting boards for comic book movies, as if the whole point was not the comic books.

None of this is puritan fanboy outrage, mind - - -there's no blasphemy in getting a comic book movie wrong. And are there still puritan fanboys out there and if there are, have they been out of the house lately? And no, this isn't a disappointment funk,either. Exasperated as I am about lowering my expectations to armor myself from deficient over-hyped blockbusters, it would have been profoundly foolish to come to this with my head in a more heightened space so I expected little from Zack Snyder's Watchmen and got exactly that.

Superheroes, for ages the hot ticket of comic books , have become the hot ticket of theme park cinema. And Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen is only the Citizen Kane of superhero comics. Viral and monolithic but unfilmable - - -that was the recurring prognosis. Too colossal. Too grim. Too dense. Too expensive to mount. A whole litany of too's. But the most crucial "too" is the most neglected out of it not being readily apparent: too self-contained. The nine panel grid was not for the hell of it. The work fed off its medium. This was not Iron Man or Batman or Hellboy where Favreau, Nolan, Del Toro - - -dork, craftsman, genius - - - took characters from another medium then retroactively folded them into theirs. Watchmen demanded more taking apart, more toil, more translation. The last thing you want to do with it is use the comic book as a shooting board. That's the first thing Zack does.

And who is Zack Snyder exactly? What's his aesthetic? What's his stance? He undercranks his fight scenes. That's it. That's my only peg on him as a filmmaker. That's everything he has to say about the world: combat is like ballet when slowed down. Does anybody making a popcorn movie need to say anything about the world? No, but that's just it, Zack's not making a popcorn movie anymore, is he? And before you pull out that haggard art vs.entertainment card - - - Zack sort of said that, not me. Only he doesn't really do much. He undercranks the fight scenes - - -he would. And bloats them into set pieces that go on and on and on- - -when short and sharp and shocking is what they are. He also makes the superheroes super - - -missing the whole point that, apart from the glowing blue dick of Dr.Manhattan,these were little more than kooks empowered by a silly costume and the balls to wear them. He shortcuts his nuances with some of modern cinema's most painfully obvious musical cues - - -The Times They Are A Changin' during the rather wonderful opening montage showing how . . .um, the times are. . .um, a-changin'. Duh. Mason Hood is peripheral. Ozymandias becomes a fascist caricature. The gigantic squid is 86'd - - -well, that one I can let slip. He upsets the dynamic. The feel is off. The plot is lost. Oh, he nails Rorsharch - - - but only a buffoon would not nail Rorsharch and Zack isn't a buffoon by any measure, just in over his head.

His Watchmen is a glorified motion comic. Epic. Redundant. And that's my beef,really. Everything I take from his movie I've already taken from the book. Or maybe I don't. I just fill blanks in my head. That sequence with Dr.Manhattan striding across Vietnam rice paddies shooting death rays from his hands to decimate Cong had me palpitating,sure. And there are about half a dozen other sequences here that do that,too - - - and those undercranked fight scenes of his do have a supple beauty even if they have no bearing, make no sense. Thing is, they all had me palpitating on the page, where they also had the conspirational throb of context. Here, they're just money shots. Eyecandy. Digital pretty licking your eyes over and over and over.

And this, those of us grumbling in the corners are told, should suffice. Shame, that. Know what, maybe this is a bit of puritan fanboy outrage . Having steeped myself in the lore and the form of comic books to a virulent degree, I think I've earned the right to great expectations when a comic book movie rolls into town, to demand more from them than just the fleeting thrill of being gangraped by the digital pretty and to not settle for something just because they got Night Owl's costume right. * *

20-SEIKI SHONEN CHAPTER 1 ( 20TH CENTURY BOYS CHAPTER 1)

20-Seiki Shônen Chapter 1 (20th Century Boys Chapter 1)
Directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi
Written by Yasushi Fukuda and Takashi Nagasaki and
Naoki Urasawa and Yûsuke Watanabe
From the manga by Naoki Urasawa







I've destroyed the world many times before - - - and so have you. With crayon drawings on torn notebook paper. This is what us boys would do to give vent to the berserker rages of all our boyish imaginations. Gleefully, dementedly laying waste to civilizations, perhaps in secret hope of remaking the world from the rubble but this time to our prepubescent whims. Or maybe it was merely out of how diabolically fun blowing up imaginary cities can be. Not to mention drawing all the flamboyant, impossible monsters that blew them up.

Back in the 20th century, flying a 747 into a skyscraper as a terrorist plot rang with similarly feverish delirium- - - crayon drawings on torn notebook paper. That was just nine years ago. Not that you need to be told but this is the world we woke up to after the millennium changed hands- - - boyhood annihilation fantasies as real world genocide scenarios with wackos for architects, bent on remaking the world to their whims. Fucked up doesn't quite cover it. And taken one way, Naoki Urusawa's immense manga 20th Century Boys , filtrated as it is through this grand pop sieve of weird viruses and giant robots and shadowy cults, is all about what life is like in this new world we live in, which is what life was like in the old world we lived in except it's more fitful and more rickety and more prone to toxic absurdities.

Taken another way, it's about the vagaries of obsolesence , the way those of us whose destinies have passed us by flail for some kind of bearing in a world that doesn't give a shit like it used to, if it did at all. And the possible devastations getting stuck in the past can wreak on the future. That T. Rex song - - - "I'm your toy, your 20th century boy" - - - has a riff so mighty you can believe how the kids here fell under it like a banner to signal changes. Fed by Marc Bolan's futuresexy androgyny, it was a song on the cusp of a world to come. The irony, of course, and the subtext Naoki is aiming for, is that today nothing sums someone up more as a relic of his time than calling him a 20th century boy.

Taken the same way and minus the millennial divide, this is what Stephen King's It was about, too - - - waking up in a present you didn't expect to wake up in agitated by a past that's come to collect. It's not as if it would take a genius to run them - - - the parallels between the two do glare and vibrate. There's the relentless toggling between two timelines. There's the childhood friends - - -boy dominant with a token girl - - - sputtering invisibly through a bland middle age. There's the banding together to thwart an enemy they may have unwittingly loosed. There's the epic sprawl - - -it starts in the '70s and ends in 2015. There's the turned-up volume to everything. Except it's not supernatural bunk Naoki cranks up.

He hews closer to the sort of boy detective sci-fic pop the younger Ray Bradbury and the younger Steven Spielberg proliferated but without lapsing into the dewy cloy they both tended to stoop to back then. And he's as fiendish as King is with story. It , of course, was massive, but also unwieldy and turgid and not the novel you uphold to champion King - - - ominipotent turtles and gangbangs, WTF? 20th Century Boys is even more vast but manga always gives itself the room to stretch and breathe and not hurry that Americans seem chronically allergic to, and over its 24 volumes, it moves at a clip but paces its convolutions so it never really disintegrates into the gooey mess we're left with at the end of It.

Given how Tsutsumi's spacing out all 24 volumes across three features - - - and this is merely the first - - - it's a little disingenuous to raise him up for the structural liberties he takes that makes this spry or put him down not only for how the nuances he forsakes activates a little supercompression vertigo but also for how he exaggerates the cataclysm near the cliffhanging end. He does soothe my doubts about the next two to come by tempering all the heightened arcana that comes with being a kid with all the simmering melancholia that comes with being an adult. 20th Century Boys is all about how hope and ruin intersect, potential and failure, wonderment and exhaustion. And how, to paraphrase another glam rock icon, we can all be heroes in the overlap. Trite, sure - - - but lay in a mighty guitar riff on top of it and it's a banner to fall under.* * *

OKA IN THE HOUSE

Sniff the air. Yes, it’s Oscar season. Let the rituals fire up anew. The descending wave of bootleg screener copies. The clairvoyant bloggers. The ferocious temperatures message board arguments reach. The griping of malcontents. Frankly, I couldn’t care less - - -and no, the labyrinthine, overheated Dark Knight was not robbed of anything at all, so let it go, nerds.

Nonchalant curiosity is all Oscar gets from me these days, after all the dreck it’s venerated - - - Titanic, Gladiator, Little Miss Sunshine, A Beautiful Mind, Ray ,Juno - - -and all that it’s ignored- - - Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Zodiac. I don’t take it seriously, is all. And Hollywood is a mere outer-borough in the vast land mass of world cinema. The noise that accumulates around Oscar, though, that’s more of a chore to remain oblivious to, even for me. It’s ubiquitous. It’s full-on. And I don’t even try to shut it out. Yeah, I tuned in. Starporn is a vortex of no escaping.

Oscar has long been the default code for cinema leveling up. Oscar being an ostensibly regional event, though, commemorating American cinema and little else, the leveling up is not of cinema per se. Few see it this way. There is no other cinema past the outskirts of Hollywood for many. Down here, we don’t even call Hollywood movies foreign films - - - which they are. So Oscar night gets beamed via satellite to knife across time zones. The BAFTAs don’t get beamed via satellite. Neither does Cannes. Only world events get beamed via satellite. But given how deep we are in our captive thrall to Hollywood - - - its stars if not necessarily its cinema - - - Oscar night is something of a world event. Oscar is also dogma. Founded on this perceived and counterfeit cinematic dominance on America’s part, so much so that what the Oscars uphold as its Best Pictures becomes the rest of the planet’s, too.

With my diet of American movies dwindling to near zero this year and with most of them - - - Twilight, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Sex And The City, Eagle Eye - - - stinking enough to further deepen my indifference to the trophy-bait - - - I haven’t even seen all of last year’s picks - - - it’s a staggering achievement on my part that I did see three out of five of this year’s, and one more outside the main category for good measure. Gus Van Sant and his graceful , joyous Milk should have both won, sure, but not one of the rest is at all bad. My compulsions to go watch were driven by four things: Langella, Bollywood, Van Sant, Rourke. Although why Kate Winslet in constant states of undress didn’t spur me to catch The Reader fast enough to make the piece will remain a mystery for the ages.

Frost / Nixon
Directed by Ron Howard
Written by Peter Morgan

Frank Langella nails it, more ways than one. At some point, disappeared totally inside his Richard Nixon, he tells Michael Sheen, undergoing a similar inhabiting as David Frost, what all this is: a duel. Ron Howard is nobody’s go-to man for coloring outside the lines, he’s harmless, but it’s precisely that quality that makes him oddly suited for this. As it was in real life, everything here anchors itself on the parry and thrust, on the spar and volley transpiring between the gadfly showman and the political titan in advanced stages of crumble. And Howard , embodying mainstream professional to the letter - - -skillful, artless, cushy, polite and utterly succumbed to serving his writer’s vision, contrivances and all - - - doesn’t intrude. Nor digress. Nor burdens with subtext. All he does is zero in. And move his camera along the contours of the performances. He sneaks in one possible flourish and it is quite the standout, too : there’s Frost, watching news footage of Nixon leaving the White House, and their eyes impossibly lock at the same brief instant that Nixon’s face grotesquely contorts , making Frost flinch. Having been born in the Third World and not having seen the Peter Morgan play either, my removal from the source material was almost a given. The original Frost/Nixon interviews were archival matter of another nation’s political history. And another generation’s Reality TV. The capacity to detonate resonances with me, and with any of us really, is palpable, pivoting as it does around a deposed president ensnared into making a public apology on national TV, albeit with catches. But until we get our own confessional breakdown in a close-up as damning as the one that did Nixon in, the only vantage points left for me here are wishful thinking and entertainment. And from at least one of these , this much under-hyped piece feeds.* * *


Slumdog Millionaire
Directed by Danny Boyle
Written by Simon Beuafoy

Sum up Bollywood blind and the word ebullient is like your magic shotgun round, no matter how wild your aim is, you’re bound to hit something dead-on with it. Not that it would take a genius, of course. Random snatches are enough to give you emissions - - - the herky-jerky gyrations, the colors running riot, the ostentatious melodrama, the picturesque bombshells, the whole vibrant giddy. Ebullient, then, that’ll do. I am a virgin to how it all coheres, having never seen, to my utter shame, a single Bollywood movie whole, having only seen in fact random snatches, so I base all this on the Bollywood in my head, a cover version if nothing else, not utterly precise but not utterly off the mark either, and which I love with a mad vigor, in anticipation of the mad and vigorous love I will feel for the real thing.

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s soap operatic Monrak Transistor might be what Slumdog Millionaire makes me think of right off the bat, a rags-to-riches love story that convolutes across time and populist genres swaddled in magic-realist fugues, but it’s a little higher up in the ether of make-believe. And pretty much amounts to a Danny Boyle cover version of Bollywood. Meaning what is heightened - - - the herky-jerky gyrations, the colors running riot, the ostentatious melodrama, the picturesque bombshells, the whole vibrant giddy - - - gets heightened even more. And moves at a perpetual hurtle. I thoroughly despise all that crash and tumble MTV for ADD crap and I should ,in principle, thoroughly despise Boyle’s pathological fondness for it and side with the amassing pack of haters now that this has taken home the gold medal - - -and both Brillante Mendoza and Fernando Meirelles did that slalom through the slums better and with cheaper, shoddier equipment in Tirador and City of God, respectively. But he’s always imbued the technique with a rigorous poetry and, brought to bear on something as sinister and opulent as the mean streets of Mumbai, it gains something approaching the buoyant abandon of a silly pop song. Take a silly pop song apart and you get something that’s fleeting and empty and impossible and has nothing new to say and nothing new to say it with either. This is all that, sure. But where’s the fun in taking a silly pop song apart, killjoy? Groove is in the heart, and on purely right-brain terms, even if it never quite crosses over from ebullience to ecstasy the way great silly pop songs often do, and I imagine the way Bollywood spectacles do, that hook is catharsis enough. * * *

The Wrestler
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Written by Robert Siegel

Beefs up as anthropology, immersing itself as it does in the freaky-obscure redneck wrestling subculture. But the comeback horse Mickey Rourke rode in on, playing has-been wrestler The Ram, bugs me as melodrama, parsing as little more than a morose Rocky Balboa - - - the obsolescence, the revolting biology, the diminishing fallback career, the emotional fallout - - - but denied the irony and the self-effacing wit and the euphoria. Uphold the indie spirit, sure. And morose is no issue. But did the weepy clichés - - - the estranged daughter who despises him for ,get this, not being there for her and the stripper who empathically tells him much later that she is - - -have to pockmark it so obviously? Darren Aronofsky doesn’t let his love for the Dardenne Brothers go deeper than the ickily intimate shakycam but the barren vacuum he strips the milieu down to does give Rourke all the table he needs to work the metatextual juice up to a cranked lather. All raw uplift, Milk was not so much polemic as about milieu, too, and had its own eerie metatextual charges, what with the looming shadow of Prop 8, and with how Harvey Milk’s shorthand- - -first openly gay elected public official - - - was freighted with the same momentous cage rattle and climate change as Barack Obama’s. Sean Penn pulling the surprise win is no rip-off, his Harvey Milk is an impeccable creation, but a creation nonetheless. Rourke’s Ram doesn’t feel like it is. The downtrodden superstar playing the downtrodden prizefighter playing the downtrodden superstar. Failings notwithstanding, Rourke colonizes the piece, becomes it. It’s a territorial pissing. An exorcism rite. And the performance of a lifetime.
* * *

* Originally published in Philippine Free Press

THE WRESTLER

The Wrestler
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Written by Robert Siegel











Dig if you will Randy “The Ram” Robinson, this slab of macho ruin , has-been wrestling superstar and 80s holdover, scraping for rent on the amateur circuit but some nights barely eking out enough that he has to sleep in his van. It’s a pitiful figure he tends to cut, a brokedown redneck tragedy, a soldier without a war - - - those long and ratty hair-metal locks stranded between a lion’s mane and a blonde floormop, that swollen physique bearing his traumas like map points down to the last shred of scar tissue. He embodies a kind of quintessence - - - the brutal backfire of following your bliss - - -but also a kind of bland anachronism - - - the sports film washout.

Dig if you will, too, Mickey Rourke , the icon in eclipse , he’s been box office poison for so long that his spurts of comeback have barely reversed his fall from grace. He’s something of an 80s holdover, too, and something of a hero of mine. Diabolical , risky and when cool needed embodying, there was no other. Rumblefish and Year of the Dragon and Barfly and Angel Heart and Johnny Handsome - - - that was the quantum of his streak. Greased lightning. And then . . . but you all know what happened next. The brief detour into prizefighting may have been punk of him and the pet chiuaua he walked off a set for was primo nutso but he mostly embodied another bland anachronism - - - the haywire movie star.

Now dig if you will how both part and player blur the dichotomy between reel and real. The showbiz rise and fall. The toll of bodily abuse. The coasting on old glories. The catalogs of woe. The banalities of their turmoil. And the banalities of their pathos.The parallels are 30 feet tall and they glow in the dark - - -you can not not see it and not dig it. The craft Rourke deploys is impeccable, sure. Christian Bale in The Machinist was the last time someone threw himself at the mercy of extreme method, transforming his body into an atrocity exhibit. Rourke does little outside of a regimen and mostly he brings in his own wardrobe,so to speak, his own ossified battle scars,but the derelict physique that emerges gains the same inverted freakshow glamour. He’s this lumbering specimen of obsolescence, trapped in a world he didn’t make, visibly eroding into the margins with every shamble and groan,a grotesque Everyloser.It makes me skittish and uneasy just to watch him get from here to there.

Extract Rourke, though, and you have little left that isn’t derivative and corny and obvious and maudlin and conventional. Life’s nothing but a pileup of hackneyed clichés for this champion gone to seed, it turns out. And The Wrestler on paper is man soap succumbed to its worst tendencies. You could argue that real life’s mostly nothing but a pileup of hackneyed clichés anyway - - -and the banality of his turmoil somehow deepens the banality of his pathos by leaving him without even something to romanticize. And every hackneyed cliché the melodrama forces him to confront - - - the blue collar day job drudgery, the estranged daughter who loathes him, the single mother stripper whose heart of gold doesn’t quite beat for him, the heart attack that pretty much scrapes what residue of career he has left off his docket - - - is never really taken to the places where they become cliché. But what empowers them mostly is the palpable tingle of desperation Rourke imbues them with , this sense of something at stake, as if everything was the last straw, as if the picture was, for Rourke. And it could well be. It’s more than mere resonance. It’s thick enough to cut with a knife. And thick enough to pack a wallop. Rourke stews inside the Ram, occupying the wartorn carcass so thoroughly you can’t see the joins. Maybe there aren’t any at all.

Every time someone talks about the difficulty in picturing anybody else in the part, it’s more likely these creepy double exposures they’re talking about. Aronofsky is many things to many people - - - showy , devious, beyond, wild , curious, awry, none of which scan as flaws to me - - -but he’s canny,too. He knows the whole meta throb, once it starts to woo our thrall to trainwrecks, can chew miles further than the tepid fiction he has to wring a movie from. The aesthetic gesture of feeding off the stark naturalism of Jean Luc & Pierre Dardenne stops at the way the camera prowls and with the tawdry minimalism - - - but that’s more out of how everything is pared down to give Rourke every square inch of room he needs. And he strides like a colossus across it. None of what he does is terrifyingly original, but all of it is terribly authentic.It really is the full circuit of a comeback. He exalts the piece and in doing so, ennobles himself. The Wrestler is piffle but Rourke’s a hand grenade with a blast radius so immense he takes everything else with it * * *

* Originally published in Philippine Free Press

LE SCAPHANDRE ET LE PAPILLON (THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY )

Le Scaphandre Et Le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)

Directed by Julian Schnabel
Written by Ronald Harwood
From the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby








The eye is everything, the eye is the universe, the eye is God. And the eye is what Schnabel nails, that crucial POV. Crucial out of how the eye is all that’s left of Jean Dominque Bauby that works after an apocalyptic stroke leaves him severely crippled - - -well, that and his lucid brain. Disembodied but connective, biological yet psychic, it drinks in the world around it with a fetishistic relish, it ogles cleavage all boy and lascivious, it gums up when it gets so lonesome it could cry.

Bauby, he had no mouth and he must scream, sort of. And the eye was it- - - breaking down gregarious streams of consciousness into particles of code. I don’t quite get how it works exactly, this alphabet of twitches and tics, and don’t much care to, really. Knowing perhaps that as a feat of will, it’s a marvel, but as a trope, it can get distracting and turn gimmicky, Schnabel resists making its termite interstices and multiple moving parts central. He resists, too, making goo of injury. The human spirit rah-rah. The banalities of melodrama. Not that old school tearjerk is above him. Just lurid self-pitying, store-bought pathos, groveling for sympathy, cliche. The beach scene with Bauby and family gets milked for poignant crush once and never again and it’s the desperate yearning of Tom Waits’ All The World Is Green that does most of the work.

Bauby’s profound wreckage, reduced from robust to debris by the whip of fate. But it’s his loved ones that dismantle - - -and Max Von Sydow as his father disintegrates so brutally it claws lesions in my forebrain. Otherwise, Bauby’s funny, unrepentant, perverse, agog. What he sees through his cyclop gaze is a heightened state. Of bewilderment and awe. Of hallucination and catharsis. Slide past 35 and the horror story of locked-in syndrome seeps like ink into your brainfolds. That scene when it strikes Bauby gave me palpitations. I couldn't look. Locked-in syndrome is a terminal sentence. And the diving bell is more than a metaphor for Bauby's insurgent body. It’s the locked room the dying hole up in, the one with a less dispiriting view, with the possibility of uplift. Making peace with death,after all, is the ultimate triumph of the will. And its beautiful oblivion is what Schnabel aims for. No one is more alive than someone aware of his doom. It's a sad and awful thing but also a transcendent thing , a blissful thing, a state of grace, and when that rampant eye takes flight like a superpower , it soars high enough that it defies the gravity of the situation.* * * * *

PAALAM AKING BULALAKAW (GOODBYE MY SHOOTING STAR)

Paalam Aking Bulalakaw (Goodbye My Shooting Star)
Directed and Written by Khavn De La Cruz
Dialogue by Khavn De La Cruz & Meryll Soriano







Who knows what came to pass between K and Ana before today? K is, of course, director Khavn himself sort of, the man with the movie camera whom we never see, and Ana is Meryll Soriano, his obscure object of desire whom we can't take our eyes off. They talk and it's not as if it gets so obtuse as to resist parsing. Just weightless and hesitant and stumblebum . There are no codes in the conversation to decipher. What we talk about when we talk about love are the things that go unsaid anyway. The inarticulate speech of the heart. So maybe we should just take Khavn's word for it that K loves Ana and that's as far as it got. Which then makes this. . . what? Chance? Or design? Date? Or destiny? Unrequited? Reunited?

The Linklater parallels you invoke only to cut a long story short and to peg what can be a bitch to peg, what is better off seeing for yourself- - - Before Sunrise at 30 f.p.s. on a shoestring. The parallelism does take, somewhat - - - the walking around, the talking around, the going everywhere, the going nowhere. But there's no arc in this first person love story, no fate playing matchmaker, no intrusions from the universe. Only the brutal symmetry - - - the solipsistic economy and delicate equilibrium and minimalist stasis- - - of its POV.

It's the longest goodbye in the universe when your shooting star burns out, shooting star here's used loosely, figuratively. It rings more poetically in the vernacular - - -bulalakaw. You call them that because they burn so bright, because you wistfully look to the sky for their trajectories to cross your radar again even after their orbits have passed most likely forever, because you wish on them. But you knew that and maybe you knew that out of having had this extraterrestrial hurt too, out of having the unforgettable face of that lapsed darling afterimaging in your head long after her radio silence, her invisibility, her supernova before your eyes. And all of this is in K's head. Like the lovesongs falling on deaf ears, like the poetry in the details, like the words that fail, like the wishfully-thinking extraterrestrial hurt it hooks me with.* * * *

ONCE

Once
Directed and Written by John Carney













Pin it all down to a moment that melts your heart like butter and gets in your eyes and sums it all up, and there it is, at the back of a music store, the brokenhearted busker giving the girl sitting on the piano a song to sing, a song he wrote for that other girl he can’t forget but transferable by fate and now a song for whoever, for the unfound One, the possibility beheld
- - -“I don’t know you, but I want you, all the more for that . . .” What do you make of that hook when it digs into you and it’s someone you've just met? The giddy shaking to the core over a perfect stranger? It's all about the low spark when random lives overlap and emotional happenstance meshes into story. It's all about the angels shitting on you.

I break this down in my head over and over , out of how it sends me on so little, out of how words fail. Emotional happenstance is an old trope. Emotional happenstance without even a tic of melodrama is ,too, but it throws you on a loop for being so unfussy and honest. Boy meets girl, sort of fall in love, sing a lot. You can jot it down in the back of a bar napkin, like John Carney did, like you can with any love story. Boy’s Irishborn romantic depressive songwriter-in-waiting. Girl’s blithe Czech émigré, husbandless but with kid. She visits him at home and he makes a pass at her - - - lonely boys will be boys. He asks her if she loves her boy’s Dad and she answers cryptically in her own tongue which she wouldn’t if it was a yes and yet . . . yeah, women. Has all the niggling, baffling colors and noise and static that make men men and women women but still,I break it down and get parts that shouldn't fit but somehow do. I get a series of brief encounters banal on paper and on its own but somehow incandescent on a string. I get an ending I fervently wish is a beginning. I get naked and hurtful indiefolk love songs, fucking beautiful throughout and majestic at least three times, and blame it all on its wise mush.

And the way Glen Hansard & Marketa Iglova have with it, a delicate and almost icky earnestness that toes the line it has to cross before it becomes precious, a sense of its own vulnerability that refuses to back off, a clenching of all the tenderness and beyond loneliness and agony and pissed-offness into fists of pure emotion that not only catches in your throat but gets sticky in your forebrain. Marketa breaking down at her piano in the dark in The Hill. The skeptical engineer cracking a smile when he hears the cascading triumphalism of When Your Mind's Made Up. The indignant desperate yearning of Say It To Me Now - - -" . . . 'cause this is what you've waited for,a chance to even up the score, and as these shadows fall on me now, I will somehow, and if you have something to say you'd better say it now . . .” - - - that turns Glen's voice to gravel. The music store duet when it hits that tearjerky chorus - - -“take this sinking boat and steer it home, we’ve still got time”. Something for the longing. Tears on my pillow.

And the déjà vu when the songs snap into place as if you’ve heard them before. I have,sort of. And so have you. I’ve played some song just like any of these to myself in the grotty dark of my bedroom, headphones cutting me off from the cruel world, nursing a bottle of whisky, pining and pissed-off at the ex who left me for someone else or somesuch romantic crash and burn, poeticizing the apocalypse in my gut - - - which is really just me blowing trouble out of proportion but dammit if it doesn’t hurt and nag - - - with a pop song someone else wrote but feels uncannily as if whoever did fed a wiretap into my brain for grist. And I hang everything on its grasp of this eternal and emotional universality, also the singular virtue of the songs closest to our hearts, the pop beloved if you will. And there's no escaping how much song centers this.

If you can't be with the one you love , love the one you’re with - - - Stephen Stills was a prophet for nailing the dynamics of most modern relationships. And there may be a planet of difference between choice and decision but sometimes the stakes can be too high so you pretend there isn't. But much as true love may never run smooth for all the odds you have to buck getting there , it will find you in the end. Naive as it makes me, I hold out hope in that. And maybe it's just me but when Glen smiles to himself rushing to catch a plane and Marketa looks out the window, I can tell they do,too. * * * * *

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

Across the Universe
Directed by Julie Taymor
Written by Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais
From a Story by Julie Taymor, Dick Clement
and Ian Le Frenais












The names are what rubs me weird before everything else: there's Jude, there’s Lucy and Prudence, Max - - -who hammers, Jojo - - -who doesn't get back, Sadie - - -who you can tell is sexy but some dork has to go blurt it out so the children get it, Dr.Robert - - -who’s Bono in a bad wig, Mr.Kite - - -who’s Eddie Izzard. No Eleanor Rigby but then that would’ve hit one nadir of trite. No Strawberry Fields either, which would’ve hit another. We do get to hear the words “ . . . she came in through the bathroom window . . .” uttered and right after some girl does come in through a bathroom window,too! A green apple gets held up to the light at some point. Blue meanies cameo as chorus line but no yellow sub. And the Prudence chick holes up in her room just like the real Prudence Farrow did so her friends can coax her out of it by singing guess what song? Oh, dear.

Having seen her Titus and her Frida but not her Lion King , it's safe to say I’m no champion of Taymor. Florid and prone to overbear and needs lightening up - - -those are my nits. Florid has a place here much as prone to overbear doesn’t but they both show up regardless. Does her lightening up mean she has to stoop this low,though? When did she get this obvious, this corny, this kid silly? Did she not sift through the vapid rubble of Sgt.Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)? Everything now boilable to a pun? A little ambiguity too much to ask? Am I being a little too hard on Julie? Is Joe Roth really to blame? Mea culpa, then, for wishfully thinking that the prologue with the quasi-McCartney replicant on a beach cooing Girl to the camera was a portent, that its sublime crackle would keep.

No, I'm not above denying there’s high concept ore in making musical theater out of pop. I'm all for it, in fact. Show tunes suck. But until someone gets it right, we make do with Mamma Mia! Tricky part's how the music almost predisposes hanging all onus on it: never mind the libretto, the songs will out. Sure. You end up with a revue that way. Not a very rock and roll circus, that. Baz knew to vogue on the mash-up. Also knew to fashion vivid new skins and vivid new contexts for his secondhand repertoire - - -some of which were boring at birth so he really had no choice - - - undergirded by Bollywoodian mutant La Boheme. Grotesque as Moulin Rouge often got, the synergies between song and libretto that are crucial to musicals never misfired. Fun,too.

Not that this isn't, no, maybe not as wildly abandoned, but still a step up for Taymor, funwise. Making musical theater out of Lennon-McCartney does rope in a whole new make and model of tricky. I’m a third-gen Beatlehead who once briefly thought Siouxsie Sioux a genius for writing Dear Prudence but even I can’t sit through half the best-ofs on parade here without making my ears bleed a little from having heard them over and over and over. What are the chances of coming to Lennon-McCartney - - -the canon, not the obscurities, so not Rain, not I'll Cry Instead, not Polythene Pam - - - and sucking fresh sap from its old bones? Unless you're 12 , I'd say slim. Do these chestnuts have any give and flex left? Are they open to interpretation? Anyone willing to take a hammer to them ? See what twists form in the shards? Should Taymor have asked for Siouxsie's help instead of Joe Cocker's? Is what George Martin did for Love as good as we'll ever get? Oh, she does freshen I Wanna Hold Your Hand up with a churning, wistful eroticism - - -sung by a gorgeous Filipina lesbian cheerleader at that - - -that's better than the frankly crummy original. But if we go by yet two more (enough already) blues-rock vamps through Oh!Darling and Don't Let me Down here , if we go by the cover of Oasis' cover of Revolution, if we go by the riot footage playing over a bed of Helter Skelter, if we go by the overabundance of cliches, if we go by nearly everything else that very little is done to - - -could be.

When she takes Let It Be to church, Taymor evokes the exhausted disillusionment of the 60s so poignantly that my theory of how she's refracting the era through the music starts to grow cartilage and bone. But the pablum 60s cliche she insists on is so determined, it pretty much second-thinks everything. The performances may be full-on and mad skilled - - -Dana Fuchs, Martin Luther McCoy and T.V. Carpio particularly - - -but the characters they sing through are so anonymous it all amounts to karaoke. I'm hanging on to my I Am Sam CD, if it's all the same to you. The songs don't tell a different story other than what we already know when we played those records, and therefore serve no story at all outside of its own nostalgic reflex, parsing as little more than robust but unimaginative covers. Glorified retro. Sgt. Pepper Redux - - -and before you brand me a snide boy, I did like Earth Wind & Fire there, also the Steve Martin bit holds up.

And a softheaded pseudo-musical made from Beatles songs that is ultimately about nothing except maybe about singing Beatles songs is something a lot of people might want to tuck under their pillows. And who can blame 'em? We have shut off our brains for far worse pictures anyway. I'd argue for it somehow working as a valentine to the utopian in Beatlesque but I'd stick with it being more often than not supernaturally pretty - - -and we're not even talking about Evan Rachel Wood yet. Taymor has a gift for visual pastry and for the times the gift spikes into odd coordinates of transcendence, this can be quite the ecstatic, empty eyeful. The circus folderol of Being for the Benefit of Mr.Kite may make me want to scoop out my eyes with a spoon, ditto I Want You and Happiness Is A Warm Gun and maybe Come Together, but I still haven't gotten over the underwater ballet set to Because. Nor those beautiful bleeding strawberries. * * *

BURDEN OF DREAMS

Burden of Dreams (1982)
Directed by Les Blank
Written by Michael Goodwin
Narrated by Maureen Gosling











The crackpot rubber baron Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald
- - -a.k.a. Fitzcarraldo - - - took the steamship apart in real life, chasing this dream of his : Caruso among the savages, a dream sick with grandiose insanities. Werner Herzog's own sick dream only seems less sick except he was never going to shoot Fitzcarraldo (1982) in some wussy botanical garden with toy boats and Jack Nicholson. It was always Klaus Kinski and his epic tantrums in the veins of the Amazon herself. And he hauled the steamship up a mountain whole, on a 40 degree incline 20 degrees steeper than suicidal.

"I wanted the audience to trust its eyes again", he says now, hindsighting or,who knows, truly prescient about this fear he had back then of digital effects tyrannizing and falsifying the way movies looked and the way we looked at them because . . .well, they did. So much so that on rewatch, not only has that iconic sequence not lost the come-on of spectacle but gains, too, an exotic otherness to the rigor , to the whine and stress of the winches and pulleys. Scorn may have dogged the heels of Fitzcarraldo , some of it as it should, but when they pull that boat up, you can't neglect the way it trembles with this gauche purity.

The guts of the process transfix Blank. But it's in his laying bare the segregated encampments and the makeshift bordellos and the bodies in the mud and the internecine disputes and the aborted scenes like so much throbbing gristle that Burden of Dreams supernovas into more than some banal making-of, into something closer to a tactile contemplating of the schism between two cultures rubbing up against each other but never quite making a mesh. Werner stands on the precipice of another world openly lamenting this culture vanishing before his eyes, these natives in Mickey Mouse Disco shirts- - - "It's a catastrophe and a tragedy that's going on and we are losing riches and riches and riches and we lose cultures and languages and individualities and we're left stark naked in the end and will end up like all the cultures in the world and a universal kind of culture like America." But he is his own Fitzcarraldo here. And he, too, has embarked on a conqueror's folly. He,too, as he calls himself, has become a conquistador of the useless, an intruder who has made an enemy of- - -and fallen in love with- - - all this verdant and beautiful malevolence, all this vile nature, an enemy he never had a hope to quell but he could sometimes outwit - - - if it let him. "The Amazon's an unfinished country, a land God created in anger. A harmony of overwhelming and collective murder." Poison arrows for souvenirs and no getting drunk on the wine they ferment with spit.

Double-bill this with George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr's Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalpyse(1991) for the spiritual linkages, for the severity of the on-set turmoil edging into the surreal, for the same nutso charge it emits. Apocalypse Now (1979) was a set intimate with chaos,too. But Coppolla was not batshit like Herzog and in his grappling with the unfathomable, he was eaten alive and spat out broken - - -"We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." Werner plunged into that jungle battle-readied. He had made his Apocalypse Now seven years before Coppolla with Aguirre Wrath of God (1972). He was a man intimate with chaos. And prone to magnificent obsessions and the mad compulsions to act on them, at one point cooking and eating his shoe in public after losing a bet - - -and letting someone make a film out of it. He came out of Fitzcarraldo scarred but with a glint in his eye when he says "I shouldn't be making any more movies. I should be taken to an asylum." Some quarters have upheld the ascendancy of Burden of Dreams over Fitzcarraldo, for hanging better as a piece maybe - - - which it does. But it doesn't so much supercede as it decodes and deepens, both uncannily symbiotic and separate. Blank directed Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) , too. That tiny oddment spoke wryly between its freakshow lines on the impulses and logistics of art. This trawls over the same issues, but in its quintessence of the filmmaker as crackpot and the lengths he will go to when bullied by his sick dreams, it's a vaster and more fucked-up behemoth. It's tremendously Herzogian.
* * * *

IT'S ALL ABOUT LOVE

It's All About Love (2003)
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg
Written by Mogens Rukov and Thomas Vinterberg








All our sci-fic futures are really all our presents
modified- - -disguised, tampered with, untethered. Futureset without trumpeting itself as sci-fic,perhaps aware of its void in both the outlandish tech - - -of any tech at all really - - -and the outlandish speculation that would at least give it surface crackle, not to mention what Philip K. Dick called the shock of dysrecognition that fulfills his paradigm of sci-fic, it's neither fish nor fowl. Vinterberg's better tomorrow really isn't, only colder, a planet in neverending coldsnap hosting strange phenomena: snowfall during heatwaves, Ugandan males spontaneously levitating, figure skaters as showbiz royalty, people dropping in their tracks dead of loneliness. It's a cold world. And more die of heartbreak. Its conceptual dislocations do beguile , not so much futurist headmelt as apocalyptic disquiet , but so dreamlike and diffuse it's nothing more than magic realist aura, smoke ghosts in the corner of your eye. And the less beguiling story Vinterberg and Festen co-writer Rukov really want to tell is all about . . .well,love : in a cold climate, second time around, on the run. You know, estranged couple,made targets of a conspiracy, rekindle inevitably. Doppelgangers figure in here somehow. And for a Dogme 95 co-legislator, Vinterberg has an uncanny grasp for atonal displacement, for whispering corridors , for sinuous violence - - -the ice rink mowdown is a dazzler. But you have men in the skies tied to their houses by their wives with a rope around their ankles to stop them floating away forever. You don't need doppelgangers. Or you don't need doppelgangers to foreground. And you sit and wait for some of the weirdness in its peripheries to leak , irradiate, make this crack and really go wiggy. And you sit and wait in vain. Parallels with Wim Wender's Until the End of the World have been made but really end with being about a man and a woman running around in the future,too. And being both a bit of a mess. But Wenders, he let the sci-fic get bacterial and profuse so it cracked, really got wiggy. Until the End of the World was a wonderful mess. Vinterberg mutes everything to reverie. Nothing wrong with reverie. But this is mostly just a mess. Mostly. It does climb up a mountain for a genuinely moving finale that would likely make you swoon enough for the chemistry between Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes to seem not as vaporous as you first thought - - - and moving finales and not-vaporous chemistry are two things a love story get by on, so there. Much angelic poignancy to parse ,too, in Sean Penn's aerophobic brother cameo on a plane that can't land for the world snowing in and whiting out. And then there's the gleeful perversity in an ex-Dogme making what is essentially a piece of snow globe architecture: lovely, artificial, out of reach. * * *

JUNO

Juno
Directed by Jason Reitman
Written by Diablo Cody








Pork swords worked for me, why not. And there’s a whiff of gall in me taking Diablo Cody to task for overwriting, pot calling kettle black and all that and the trophy they gave her for it could whack a dent in your skull if she decides to weaponize it against sour-graping hecklers. No criticproofing like Oscar's. But no harm done all the same in Ellen Page - - -wondrous, incandescent - - -toilet-training the glib snark of her frankly unspeakable, intolerably and self -righteously hip banter, not to the point she has me believing there are teenagers out there who actually talk like that and how colossally annoying those teenagers would be if there were, more to the point of diminishing its grate and throwing the scent off any false alarms that this is arch, anarchic, satiric, true to life, none of which it is. Rather, lighthearted and lightheaded suburban fantasia - - -where the parents are so with-it, they shrug off their daughter getting knocked up for at least not involving jail time and it's the dork next door who got her that way and is never around but gets to steal her heart by doing absolutely nothing anyway. You know, alternate universe fluff - - -with benefits. So the superspeak sort of fits. Nothing wrong with Diablo and cohort Jason Reitman making baby food farce out of the messy, volatile interstices of teenage pregnancy - - -Pretty In Pink did the same thing with issues of class and made you swoon when the poor girl nabs the rich boy. Odd apertures open into genuine modes of feeling that toggle from emotionally insightful to unremittingly sweet, so you'll probably swoon, too - - - when barren adoptive mother Jennifer Garner touches Juno's distended belly and feels her first babykick or when Juno finally declares her love for Michael Cera. Does it deserve its Oscar nod? Not as much and about as much as any bad movie that ever got one,really - - -A Beautiful Life, Gladiator, Chocolat, name your excreta. Upside is its funny- - -pork swords, yeah. In a strictly Molly Ringwald prom-night emo way,of course. Yes, Diablo Cody is that kind of wonderful throwback. She’s the John Hughes of her time. And God only knows how much we need one. Prevail, sister. * *

I'M NOT THERE

I'm Not There
Directed by Todd Haynes
Written by Todd Haynes and Oren Moverman









“Who said I was sincere?”

The quip’s typical Bob Dylan piss-take, typically glib and evasive yet atypically dead-on about his mercurial self-mythologizing, his one-man revolt against an easy peg, his career as a slippery hoax. The counterfeit personae get inventoried early on. “Poet. Prophet. Outlaw. Fake. Star of Electricity.” But mostly fake. Masked and anonymous, like a complete unknown. Right.

Haynes breaks Dylan down for us into six of his splinter selves, not out of hoping to pin down the man shifting from shape to shape but more out of knowing he couldn’t. Christian Bale multitasking as protest folkie Jack Rollins and born-again visionary Pastor John, Heath Ledger's Robbie Clark weathering a turbulent marriage with his sad eyed lady of the lowlands Charlotte Gainsbourg and Cate Blanchett's puckish hellion Jude Quinn cutting a swath through 60s London - - -they're the least obtuse. Marcus Carl Franklin's black preteen Woody riding the rails with a fascist-killing guitar, Ben Whishaw's temperamental Arthur Rimbaud under interrogation in a disembodied no-place and Richard Gere's Billy the Kid hiding away in a gaudy Felliniesque frontier town opiate - - -they're purer abstractions.

But we've all met them before.

The troubadour and the evangelist. The lout. The rock beast. The vagabond. The dandy.The exile. Conscience, dysfunction, narcissism, innocence, agitation, penitence. Respectively. All of them are Dylan. None of them are Dylan.

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." (Maxwell Scott in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance)

The Basement Tapes outtake that gives this its title was a ballad laden with regret - - -"Of course I'll not deceive her,I'm not there, I'm gone, it's all about confusion and I cry for her"- - - but pried loose from the song, it's become proviso, threat, kiss-off. And Haynes is staying true to its implications. You can read into how it sort of bookends with the presentiment and later the debris of Dylan's mysterious motorbike accident as insinuating that all this is the life that flashed before his eyes right before he hit that tree and snapped his neck, but doing so incriminates Dylan as a co-conspirator, semi-passive but somehow in on this - - -incriminates him as being here. And he isn't. If anything, the bookends foreshadow his leaving. Making him, at most, a ghost, reflected and refracted through a kind of metatexted Sixties with aspects of Godard and Fellini and Peckinpah and Richard Lester and D.A.Pennebaker and Huey Newton & Bobby Seale and Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg as prisms, mirrors. His songs run gorgeously like connective tissue between dream states here but even if the likeliest place you'll find an artist is inside his art, Dylan isn’t entirely there either. Instead, echoes, mimicry, puppetry, ventriloquism, heresies, reconstruction, deconstruction, metamorphoses. 29 singers. 29 more shards. 29 more decoys.

The degree of removal makes plain that Haynes isn't drilling for biopic lode but also enables his hitting it, not disambiguating the myths so much as pigging out on them, feeding it hormones 'til some veer into hallucination- - - Quinn and his band brandishing submachineguns and mowing down the crowd that booed Dylan at Newport for going electric, a cartoon whale chasing Woody after he jumps off a train into a river, circus animals wandering through the 19th century town of Riddle where Billy is known by many names. More Dylanhead than Dylanologist - - -because how much of a Dylanologist can someone who came to Dylan in hindsight , and by way of Street Legal at that, be? - - -Dylan to me's never been anything but this parade of camouflages the man hiding in plain sight couldn't possibly measure up to. The troubadour and the evangelist. The lout. The rock beast. The vagabond. The dandy.The exile. Poet. Prophet. Outlaw. Fake. Star of Electricity.Dylan to me's never been there.

Dylan to many,too. Dylan to Haynes, most likely. Unkempt, frivolous, heady, magnetic and daring with a not imminently crackable, if at all, semiotic density, he performs an autopsy on that absence and finds it sunk in the self-inventive urges of art and moreso, the self-inventive urges of rock and roll. And in exalting these fake Dylans, he exalts that urge,too. Doesn't matter if the one true Dylan remains missing. Haynes has eaten the document. And printed the legend. * * * * *

CLOVERFIELD

Cloverfield
Directed by Matt Reaves
Written by Drew Godard
Produced by J. J. Abrams









Radioactive cautionary nothing. Godzilla - - - and really that entire lovable and endlessly regurgitating man-in-suit phenomenon - - - struck me as a symptom of some annihilation and renewal trauma, a culture ritually purging its hand-me-down collective memory of destruction at the mercy of an atomic behemoth. Godzilla was da bomb, so to speak. But that came much later, let's not get carried away here. More Eiji Tsuburaya voguing on Ray Harryhausen, Godzilla always had/has me at rampageporn.

Also, giant monsters. Love 'em.

Post-911 New York tussles with its own Hiroshima/Nagasaki poltergeists. Relocate Godzilla here and reframe the rampageporn in the default platform of the September 11 attacks - - -amateur video - - -and you’re tapping into these sticky new crannies of unease. Stickier for us who got all that catastrophe as bad news feed is this immersive, irrational quicksand of panic and turmoil and vertigo that's a cinematic mini-syntax upon itself,signifiers of a postmodern context reality. But it's not for everyone, this video verite. It's the motion sickness that gets to people, mostly. And it's a bit tricky to parse as cinema. As metatext, sure. But any horror fed through it gets no more viscous plotwise and characterwise than a campfire ghost story.

Plot and character are so not the point of the thing, of course. And much as taping over the estranged lovers roaming their undestroyed city in happier times wrings some poignant frisson out of a rather blunt metaphor, it's a little off. Cthulhu's a no-show here - - -dick with legs leaking homicidal crabs is more like it. So, too, the multiple handycam POVs. The ditching’s for the good of all, by dint of its found format. What the lone POV does is restrict the field of vision, ups an illusion of randomness, makes it ickier- - - here's a generation in this continual, ego-pickled state of recording and uploading its every twitch, its every wank, its every facet. All this compulsive shooting in the thick of bugfuck is just so them. Hazard a guess what goes through their heads as they run and shoot and run and shoot and it’s likely they’re thinking how bitchin' the footage would look on YouTube as much as their chances of making it out of the city alive. Yuppie dorks,yeah. But J.J. should've ditched that dorky money shot near the end, too.

Cloverfield works as one trick pony - - -skeletal and shallow as God intended. And it’s closer to Michael Snow’s Wavelength than The Host for the way it targets a different substrata of emotional responses more to do with sensory discomfort , with the taxonomy of textures, with weird thingies you can't quite make out. The stress becomes more empathic that way, on a base primal level. And us less passive.

Blair Witch hooked me on spatial displacement , my fear of thickets, my deep love for campfire ghost stories. Cloverfield stokes my apocalyptic neuroses and Fortean hard-ons into hysteric simmer. The geek in me always found more creep and arcana in blurry photographs of cryptids than a stack of Sarah Michelle Gellar sedatives. Doozies of the sort abound, sure- - -a massive dim-lit is-that-a-tail flitting between buildings, a skyscraper leaning against another like a heartbroken lover resting its weary head, a horse-drawn carriage missing its coachman wandering city streets missing its people - - -but this kaiju meltdown had me at rampageporn.

Also, giant monsters. Love ‘em. * * *

EYE IN THE SKY (GUN CHUNG)

Eye In The Sky (Gun Chung)
Directed by Yau Nai Hoi
Written by Yau Nai Hoi and Au Kin Yee
Produced by Johnnie To

The word you’re looking for is sexy. The word for what this makes surveillance cop procedure into.

It helps to have the lovely ex-Miss HK Kate Tsui play your rookie in deep tutelage under a method-fattened and at first blush unrecognizable Simon Yam’s graying sensei, no doubt - - - and not too shabbily at that. And there already is a strand of eroticism in their covert processes, these chameleon police, stalking their targets like lovelorn voyeurs, horny for odd tics and tremors to catalog and weaponize and use against the enemy.

Still. Sexy. The kind of sexy Johnnie To’s sinuous mise en scene can get. Yau parroting his graying sensei is protocol but his cocked-up stamina and keening grace argues osmosis more than rip-off, belying his own rookie status. And vet his resume as Milkyway’s most prolific writer-in-residence - - - he’s got real dibs on the rest of the house style. That scene up on a roof roping in a gang of party-hearty thieves, juicy chicken on a grill and a girl undressing in an adjacent window evokes the wry, taciturn candor of that waiting room soccer game with balled-up office stationery from The Mission. Yau wrote that, too.

But his fingerprint here's really more that metaphysical hum in the fissures, the way he kits out the well-inhabited procedural world with elegant matrices of serendipity that imply a deeper working and right off the bat, too - - - those cops and crooks, oblivious to each other, overlapping and intersecting and foreshadowing their convergence in supple long shots. Later, peripheral incidents tingle with code. Karmic signals reverb and retribute. And an innocuous alias - - - the Paul Verhoeven wink or TS Eliot nod of Tony Leung Kar Fai’s elusive master thief's a.k.a., Hollow Man - - - throws echoes : a cipher obsessed with puzzles, a ghost in a shell, an invisible target unseen save by the gods. An eye in the sky's surveillance cop sobriquet for what they do, connoting omniscience - - - and that's no accident. Godhead has always been a constant in HK noir but never manifested with this little room for plausible deniability, with this much alienating tangibility. Doves, yeah. Few will doubtless second but the surprise for me - - - and the charge - - -is not that the omniscient connotation literalizes but that when it does, in a scene that giddily quotes The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , it's also its giddy apotheosis, it also lifts.* * * *

JACK KETCHUM'S THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door
Directed by Gregory Nelson
Written by Daniel Farrands and Philip Nutman
Based on the book by Jack Ketchum











Doomed to polarize - - -and it has. Try making anything out of something this repellent- - - even in a desensitized republic of tabloid daughterfuckers and babykillers like ours - - -see if you don't divide the room in a snap . 1965 Indiana: Gertrude Banizewski and her children and her children's friends put her 16 year old charge Sylvia Likens through three months of abuse and torture and eventually murder. Enough there, on paper, to do frail sensibilities in. Wholesale. Takashi Miike’s Odishon or Gaspar Noe’s I Stand Alone, equally polarizing extremists, at least possessed some measure of intellectual remove, buffering the traumatic imagery somewhat but not by much. This doesn't even harbor pretenses to social anthropology. It wades kneedeep into the muck and asks us to thrust our hands in it. It’s repulsive - - -but that’s the point. Had me looking away a few times- - -which hardly happens, my thresholds being pretty up there. Had me scrabbling, too - - - for something to assert some kind of grasp over the atrocities here. But there’s nothing. No systemic breakdown. No psychosis. Nothing but what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. Nothing but random void. No comfort. Funny thing is, Greg Nelson’s no James Wan, or Miike or Noe for that matter. Could be he has no more horror movies in him. He pulls away from grue, you see, doesn’t find it kewl. The perversities visited are half-lit, suggestive, aghast. Tasteful almost. The piece instead bleeds malaise. The aura's corrupt with a sticky, appalling miasma of helplessness. Its eyes are David's from next door - - -a boy with a gigantic love and a monstrous chaos to thwart but can’t even get his parents to listen to him, a bug in a land of giants. And you flail with him, grasp for air as it thickens. Ketchum's fictionalization, which this siphons off, resets to the 50s, relieves his Gertrude of alleged drug problems, makes her instead a decrepit beauty - - -Blanche Baker, palpable- - - crushed under the weight and warped by a lifetime of matrimonial and domestic failures, adds rape and disfigurement to the regimen of torment. And the Sylvia surrogate - - - Blythe Auffarth, heartbreaking - - - is now bereft of parents after a car accident, a blind spot to the gods. She shimmers the first time she enters frame, enchanting David, presentiments of the rot she's put through polluting her radiance with murmurs of disquiet. It's a love story from the get-go. But one freighted with a ruthless loss. Her slow, violent corrosion- - -and that thing with the blowtorch - - -grazed my brainpan but it’s that last conversation she has with David- - -on a ratty bed, subsumed in a blackness nobody survives whole, speaking their love at last- - - that knotted my insides like pretzel dough.* * *

TRIANGLE

Triangle (Tie Saam Gok)
Directed by Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam and Johnnie To
Written by Sharon Chung and Kenny Kan and
Yau Nau Hoi & Au Kin Yee & Yip Tin Shing

Triangle is like scrimmage - - - a no-bearing show of skill, a pure indulgence. Narcissistic, hedonistic, almost pointless as anything but a porno of its perpetrators' delicious vanities, of which these hot pistols of the HK crime scene - - - Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam and Johnnie To - - - have reservoirs of, all paraded here.

Gamelike in both model and process so that spirit of play suits it, it breaks into three pieces that lock into a whole with each piece having multiple moving parts. Triangle is a sleek and shiny toy. Playability high. Plot's mere chassis here - - -a treasure hunt that spins on the same,though far less didactic, moral axis as Treasure of the Sierra Madre, none of that National Treasure bullshit. But it’s all about the hurtle and whirr and click and catch of the mechanism. The ride,if you will. It's vulnerable to disjoint, sure, and the brusque tonal shifts could induce whiplash but that’s rough ordinance and better for it.

Superstars Louis Koo, Simon Yam and Sun Hun Lei play the stock pulp lowlifes looking for a cash-in and tweaked at an angle but it’s not happenstance that their dynamic and their temperaments - - - nervy skittishness, haunted reserve and sang froid, respectively - - -run parallel with their bosses. Koo, Yam and Lei are just the front-loaded starpower. Marquee value hinges on the three directors, they're the real stars.

Tsui serves - - - and it's a pell-mell of golden vests, agitated jewel thieves, bullish cops and cheating nutso wives, throwing the gauntlet in setting the chaos up. He’s aboriginal to this dense manner of hectic anxiety. Time & Tide boasted similar convolutions. And has the same desperate sheen,too. At feature length, his sense of tumult tends to spiral downwardly and sometimes outright disintegrates into incoherence. Bite-sized, it sort of still does, threatens to at least, but this time its strategic and giddy with a diabolic glee in upping the ante for his cohorts.

Ringo's Full Contact was like Walter Hill with Tourette’s , that is, like a Tsui Hark film. But his filmmaking's usually slower, more sedate and more - - -not sentimental, that's John Woo - - -emotive. Also, more submerged. So he pulls back - - - lets the farrago catch its breath. And one-ups Tsui. Characters foreground and show their bruises, in mood-lit long shots soaked with the tenor of melancholy, slow dancing with tears in their eyes. More than just fulcrum, it centers and coheres. It's beautiful. And almost my favorite segment. But then To's turn at bat comes. And everything spins into some kind of wondrous. Hard to argue with viscera this full-on. It's impossible to codify except to say that everyone and everything gets thrown into a swamp. And the bullets start to fly. You'd do well to duck.* * * *

MALING AKALA

Maling Akala (Wrong Assumption)
Directed and Written by Pablo Biglangawa
and Veronica Velasco
















You'd know the bubble more if you've loved impossibly. It's always geographic - - - your little corner of the world away from prying eyes and floating finitely, perpetually beset by threats of bursting.

Boy and girl here are impossible lovers. They meet on a country bus. He's city kid , she’s barrio lass. She's coming home, he's on a road to nowhere. He has a blood stain on his shirt, she's pregnant. She goes into labor, he stays with her. They pretend to be married and billet at her folks' bucolic utopia. They're fated,sealed in.

Think Juday-Wowie inversion leeched of mawk with a love team way more resplendent. Title makes foregone conclusion of mistaken identity driving a wedge between them but whether whoever turns out thug, loon, married or gay is immaterial - - -you could see it coming anyway, no big whoop.

The horsepower of romantic melodrama is in the bittersweet toil of impossible love, pursuing what can not be pursued, sleeping with the enemy, and if it finds release in the consummation of hope springing eternal or in its sobering dissolution, release is release. So this may ring anorexic starving the romance of a truly cathartic catharsis and that last shot left me asphyxiated - - - unsold or unwilling or maybe Victor Basa needs to sway me more - - -but what Pablo and Veronica are going for is more the trapping, the bottling even, of a sensation- - -what the weather’s like inside that bubble.

Its candied burnish feels phony at first. Telecomm ad phony. Worse, Olivia Lamasan weepie phony. But it isn’t. Romance romanticized is the sovereign principle of faith inside the bubble - - - love conquers all, the emotional Kevlar you put on to go up against the world even if sometimes, most times, the world knows to take head shots. Everything heightens here, gets intense and surreal , blind to the odds against two very disparate worlds colliding and enmeshing, pumping up delusions of invincibility, intoxicating your impossible love with unbearable possibility- - - part drug high, part juggling chainsaws, part juggling chainsaws on drugs. As a feat of mood is how this all opens up to me, a tone poem planting a kiss on my cheek - - - hopelessly and wistfully romantic, suspended between alarm and euphoria. Happiness is the longing for repetition.

The gospel hook of Kundera's words echo here. So, too, Karen Carpenter's - - -love is surrender. What boy and girl here want is what every boy and girl in love,impossible or not, ultimately want :a little more time in the bubble and the nerve to succumb to its ecstasies- - -the murmurs of another world, the minutes stretching into infinities, the feathery tweepop delicacies, the kind of hush. Drink deep and drink long,then. We've all been here before and nothing lasts forever but you can always make the rush linger. * * *

ALTAR

Altar
Directed by Rico Maria Ilarde
Written by Rico Maria Ilarde and Mammu Chua






What the creatures that gnash and tumble through Rico Ilarde's features do is take irony into the woods and slits its throat. They’re tactile presences, these mud women and genetic fuckups and fish demons. They're context. They’re not meant to multitask as semiotic bullshit and be anything other than what they are upfront. In a more snide universe, calling them pulpy schlock amounts to a dis but in a universe that knows better they are pulpy schlock but they’re also what gives the work its frisson, its dissonance. B movies, say the scornful lazy. Fair enough. Unlike the kind Uwe Boll or Brett Ratner or Michael Bay shit through their noses, though, and more like what Monte Hellman or Francis Coppolla used to make for Roger Corman, this is genre, hundred proof, but with a bit more on its mind, more room to maneuver without wandering off into the kind of disdainful postmodern appropriation that is so chickenshit and dull. The interstitial complexities of his work are possessed by nothing short of true love for the genre, for its tropes. And the beauty of Sa Ilalim Ng Cogon, despite having me more - - -and having more, really - - - in the poignant taboo of its love story than the black science gone fuckup it converged with - - -and once converged became something else- - -was that, ultimately,it was a tricked-up Dr.Moreau riff and wore it proudly.

Altar is Rico's first haunted house, and a far grimmer, far grimier affair than the lush, pungent gumbo of Cogon, but still within his esthetic. There's repeating yourself and there's making the same movie over and over, like an exorcism rite, a honing and a purging both. The difference is the difference between formula and theme, between hack and auteur. Push Rico for the latter- - - because he is. And the movie he keeps making over and over is about the Everyman who flees the world that owes him by crossing over the weird precipice of another. Here, it's a prizefighter with no fight left in him, fallen from grace, sick with remorse, shrunk to drudge, soul in tatters. Too bad having read the virtually unchanged treatment a year back has dampened all the creepy goings-on for me. It's the boxer's pathos I chew on for resonance - - -the soul of Rico's movies has always been in the things he lets simmer under the genre tropes . And it's a chill up my spine when he tells the girl he loves his fate's not so much out of trespasses he's atoning for, more the butt of a mean joke the universe played. Flies to wanton gods. In a universe painted this black,any ghost that attic holds almost counts as relief. * * *

3 DAYS OF DARKNESS (TATLONG ARAW NG KADILIMAN)

3 Days of Darkness (Tatlong Araw Ng kadiliman)
Directed by Khavn de la Cruz
Written by Alfred Aloysius Adlawan





Nothing quite bashed my young skull in like old school Catholic mindfuck did, all its silt like baby tarantulas in my head- - - the 3D Jesuses, the self-flagellating nutters, the stormtrooper nuns, the injured Jack Chick comics. But Revelation’s freaky grip was special, a trauma lesion. Endtime scenarios spooked the altarboy in me for the sticky claustrophobia it teased out of all that Lovecraftian cataclysm - - -the wrath of God singling me out, getting personal. It’s on you, sisters - - - all that religion’s wire in the blood now. False alarms from pulpits may have made anticlimax out of apocalypse and David Seltzer may have housebroken it into a cuddly subgenre, but these veins of dread run deep. Watching Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture after having thought myself long past its clutches fortified that. That young girl alone, eerily crooning Hark The Herald Angels Sing inside her jail cell as TVs everywhere blank into white noise and distant angelic trumpets blow, has doomed me to never hear that song in the same way again.

None of this gets as scripturally anal- - -or scriptural at all - - -nor is there anything here that can get under your skin as purely - - - what happens when Katya Santos confesses her troubles to a priest is another mode of fuck-you-up entirely- - - but it invokes the same colors of unease : gray and grim, mostly. Invokes Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger and Diamanda Galas and Blair Witch and Wait Until Dark and Rosemary's Baby, too.

Horror in a nutshell boils down to that moment when you’re backed into a tight corner you can't get out of and the bad shit starts having its way with you. This is that moment drawn out- - -ominous calm melting into a din of oppressive hysteria, teasing claustrophobia from cataclysm. The more fragile among you might wilt from the confusion the last half's near-utter sensory deprivation brings- - - more stressful than scary, which amounts to same, which is the point. It's really a siege but seen from what brokedown senses the besieged have left in all this night and all this fever and all this panic- - - and Oggs Cruz's theory that the three girls- - -Katya in her blond wig, half-Japanese Gwen Garci, ilustrado stock Precious Adona - - -are colonial detritus backs this up more than my theory that they're just three variants of ditz.

But there is a gleeful perversity in having these bimbos hole up in a country house to stave off a clusterfuck of demons and does count for most of its grotty glory- - -Samuel Z. Arkoff would've thought the world of it. They all could be hallucinating the invasion , of course, but it's far ballsier to think they aren't. The world is coming to an end and it isn't letting us off easy. * * *

WE OWN THE NIGHT

We Own The Night
Directed and Written by James Gray

A Biblical schism - - -Luke 15:11-32 - - - triangulates the emotional turmoil here also it's a genre trope long encrusted with mold- - - a grizzled cop and his two sons, one dutiful, the other wayward- - - but Gray's bigger fish to fry is a specific permutation of high pulp, not a deconstructing really but more a darkening and deepening and a deromanticizing and deglamorizing, too, of the old saws. If he weren't so unprolific, you could cede him proprietorship for the tendency, gone missing - - -save for spurts - - - since the 70s. His works are somber, purged bummers- - -Little Odessa, The Yards, moreso this. Here's the drudgery of the working class cop life. Here's the pyrrhic glamor and decadent void of the thug life. Here's both worlds going nowhere as a prodigal son learns what price to pay for waking up on the side of the angels. And in the gray jungle snarl, all the fight you’ve got going for you is love - - - but even that can turn as fragile as a heart of glass. Not too many American cop pieces of recent vintage are as fiercely tinged with quotidian weariness as this, are as surrendered to its desolate futility, are as a bitch to shake off. Not The Departed, no, which it's kindred with, which it never gets as quasimythic as, which it beats. The Glass Shield, maybe? And that was, what, 1994? TV seems rife with it- - -David Simon's incessantly brilliant The Wire pops to mind ,as it should. But these tackled more the sociologies of the cop/criminal coin so similarities finish with tone and fierce thesping. We Own the Night may derive its evocative title from an 80s NYPD slogan - - -and is not above a spectacular rainswept car chase that blows the wheels off every car chase we've seen since possibly when Friedkin did it - - - but is really less about the vicissitudes of the job than it is about the vicissitudes of family. The hold blood has on us. And how inexorable and often merciless that hold can get. * * * *

RESCUE DAWN

Rescue Dawn
Directed and Written by Werner Herzog






Shit. Werner had me with shit. Not metaphorical shit but biological shit, fecal - - -men shitting themselves then walking around in the balmy heat for weeks encased in the same soiled clothes. Societal breakdown broken down right there. Never underestimate hygiene issues in a POW movie- - -nothing nails the ignominy of being captured by the enemy more. Sup on a plateful of worms later, sure, but how barbaric was that Laotian jungle camp? Like your own shit drying to cake between your legs. We've been here many times before, Herzogheads. Map the ouevre - - -from Aguirre Wrath of God to Fitzcarraldo to Grizzly Man - - -and it keeps coming up, his recurrent obsessing on one man's desire to command the elements, push against it, figure it out, tussle with it. And Werner, he roots these pocket worlds of elemental combat in the psyches his solitary men possess - - - monomania mostly,all different flavors of it - - - giving the piece they inhabit its demeanor. We've also literally been here before - - - Dieter Dengler was the subject of the Herzog documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly and was, apparently, willpower incarnate. That impossible optimism is what invigorates this with blasts of endorphin - - - and Christian Bale getting into it with so much gusto his eyes pop. Steve Zahn sticks to me, too, the fragile other prisoner who becomes like a surrogate kid brother. The dynamic's a little trite - - -a man who's forgotten how to hope and a man who bursts with it - - -but milked for a quality that's unremittingly touching. Wrung through big studio machinery may mean this is Werner conventionalized but there's measures of grace and soul in his acclimating. Good luck making it past the hamfisting of that epilogue, so excruciating it's as if you'd wandered kneedeep into a Taylor Hackford cornfest by mistake- - - but this is still his most unconditionally hospitable work yet. And moneyed up means he gets to show off his grasp for spectacle- - -and he's got Michael Bay on the mat on that. There's that plane crash. And there's a handcuffed Dieter, denied a toilet and running across a suspension bridge towards incarceration in a gliding, gorgeous slow motion long shot. Jaws will drop. Leave it to Werner to make a man with his own wet shit dripping from his ass look so heroic. * * *

INVISIBLE WAVES

Invisible Waves (2006)
Directed by Pen-ek Ratanaruang
Written by Prabda Yoon






Grow up among nuns and you get real cozy with both the notion and throb of guilt, wear it like a scar that recedes but never really fades. It’s like a bitch monkey on your back, up there with regret, and often the same thing, for the vehemence of its nag and its bite - - - and man, can it bite. So you get how the blood on Tadanobu Asano's chef's hands is actually making him physically sick. You also get how his milieu's suddenly irradiated with bulletins of his sin - - -a decrepit hotel room in Phuket with graffiti that reads redrum, for instance. You get it mostly because he's your quintessential noir fall guy - - - works for a gangster, bangs the boss's wife, feeds her a spoonful of poison under orders, goes on the lam, gets shot to death, comes back to life, takes revenge - - - and we've seen remorse manifest itself as anxiety, paranoia and stomach disorder many times in many noirs. But this is only half the quintessential noir you think it is, perhaps even less, and those echoes of the noir piece it most closely hews to - - - John Boorman's great Point Blank - - - bouncing off the walls are only just echoes, and what Pen-Ek really siphons off to make weird green soup with is its ambiguous shadow instead- - - that Lee Marvin's resurrected hitman could be a ghost. Title alone's fat with metaphor- - -rebirth, purification, cleansing - - -and this isn't so much Pen-Ek headtripping on the vagaries of guilt but more on the currencies of atonement. Because guilt with no out is nihilistic and pointless. Grow up among nuns and you get real cozy with that, too. You can see the shape its arc wants to be - - - a sort of karmic coming to grace. And Christopher Doyle's palette isn't so much bleak as it is an opaque remove - - - everybody here's from someplace else, adrift and seeking anchor points, talking in a stilted English that evokes their unmooring. That entire first half on the cruise ship he escapes on with its malfunctioning cabins, bloodstained fishtank full of baby sharks, childhood friends he doesn't remember and repentant barkeep who's a ringer for his Dad going sensei on repentance has such a rich, purgatorial charge, you wish it never disembarked for the lukewarm second half that brings everything full circle back to Hong Kong, a cleavage it doesn't make it out of whole. Guilt is not a cul-de-sac and there's ecstasy in just the promise of transcendence alone. But the impertinent, overlong confrontation with the double-crossing boss sucks the fatalistic conclusion of whatever measure of epiphany it might have shivered with and leaves us nothing but metaphysical void. Withdrawal like that can sap you into a stupor. * * *

GALACTICA RAZOR

Galactica: Razor
Directed by Felix Alcala
Written by Michael Taylor







Frak me if the postapocalyptic sturm and drang of Ronald Moore's Battlestar rejig isn't still the seismic motherlode of current longform sci-fic TV
- - - as opposed to shortform sci-fic TV, which is what Doctor Who is, which is every bit as grand so far. Nowhere near series best, though,this recursive, supersized episode flashing back to the brutal goings-on aboard the Battlestar Pegasus under Admiral Helena Cain's watch means to hinge everything so far - - - the new signposts to where Earth is, New Caprica, the Baltar trial, the four new unmasked Cylons, the return of Kara Thrace and the repercussions of what she brought back with her, that Bob Dylan song and what it means- - - with its looming final leg and is so vigorously co-dependent on at least the last two seasons that it has no autonomy as a piece, is so of a piece , really, that rookies to the mythos - - -essentially a spacebound Book of Exodus but so much more than that - - - should back off and boot up with the pilot, suck in that aura of haggard doom then work their way here before all the backstories and foreshadowings and reveals start to pack brunt and bristle. The choir of geeks it preaches to, though, is bound to shudder with glee - - -at what was going on between Cain and the Number 6 she had on board, at the old school Cylons and what they're guarding, at the eleventh hour revelation that darkens everything to come. It isn't so much the severity of the sociopolitical mirror this new Galactica holds up to the world as we know it post-911 but the way interpersonal dynamics mutate under such conditions that resonate more with me- - - less the space opera than the space soap opera. Cain has one line epitomizing her venomous temperament that somehow nails, too, what the show, at its core, is ultimately about: “Sometimes we have to do things that we never thought we were capable of, if only to show the enemy our will. When you can be this for as long as you have to be, then you’re a razor. This war is forcing us all to become razors. If we don’t, we don’t survive, and then we don’t have the luxury of becoming simply human again." * * *

BRINGING UP BABY

Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Directed by Howard Hawks
Written by Dudley Nichols & Hagar Wilde

Hooks you purely on its lunatic velocity - - - also, it's irrevocably funny - - -because, let's face it, there's no one here to hang on to, no one to root for, no one to like. Not Katherine Hepburn's sassy monster and the kindling she makes of Cary Grant's spineless paleontologist. Nor the gaggle of loopy, batshit kooks that populate this snowball of ruckus . . .the leopard, maybe. A chaos mechanism full of grace- - - here is where Hawks' command of the frame gets truly masterful- - - propelled by nothing more than the anarchic glee with which he works that exquisite dissonance the auteur in him was savvy at. With not a beat out of synch and not a hair out of place and with no let-up and no coming up for air- - -calamity physics on 11. There's a line about the love impulse showing up in times of conflict not meant to be throwaway but could misrepresent that cozy rom-com veneer this Kane of screwball has accrued over time to be more than what it is - - - a veneer. Grant's upright scientist flouncing around in a nightgown or scrabbling about for bones in the wild makes obvious that this is the anatomy of a breakdown - - - rather, a man broken down by a woman he loathes. But much as Hawks' odd couplings always had the neverending war between genders as fulcrum happily ending in armistice, he has no pat truce for the crackpot and the nerd here, no. Their misadventures reform neither the pushover he is nor the dominatrix she is and when they fall into each other's arms as a brontosaurus skeleton crumbles below them- - - after she browbeats him into submitting to her love - - - you just know their relationship is doomed. * * * *

FAET (ALONE)

Faet(Alone)
Directed and Written by
Banjong Pisanthanakun & Parkpoom Wongpoom










The Nakata redux in Pisanthanakun & Wongpoom’s skill set seemed predisposed for vivid mindfuck if you went by the creepy ferocity of Shutter. No Pang brothers, these two, from the look of things. Gets our hopes up. But Alone is a hoax - - -the beach scene tries so hard, not hard enough. Missing genuine sensations of displacement, it's all sleek gleam and gauzy languor- - -gorgeous and mediocre. Peeking out of the ghost story in flashback and enlivening the bland a bit is a love triangle between conjoined twins. Not a drop of the supernatural but dripping malice so palpable you can cut it, it's a mere germ but contagion enough for an entire other, better piece. Should've been your follow-up, boys. Girl spooks and their tresses - - -about time we gave 'em a rest. Their lovely bones are tired. *

BEYOND HYPOTHERMIA

Beyond Hypothermia (1996)
Directed by Patrick Leung
Written by Roy Szeto
Produced by Johnnie To








The pitch is prime HK pulp: a lady assassin whose body temperature's a few degrees below yours and mine. Cool and cold-blooded,then. Tends to shine up a hitwoman's CV, those. But it gets ditched as soon as it asserts itself- - - in an icehouse set piece at that, natch - - -perhaps aware that it has no story legs outside of a few punny winks- - - that rubout where she eats a snowcone (geddit?) before opening fire and. . . that's it.

It's her thawing that matters here, not the perpetual crisis of conscience that is hitman cinema's most exasperating cliche but her gasping for a sense of self - - - one touching scene has her taking her own polaroids to stare at and then burns the evidence - - - and the warmth of connection- - - in the shape of Lau Ching Wan's ex-thug who cooks her a hot bowl of noodles after every kill.

Works - - -mostly because it moves at enough of a clip to outrun its own silliness. But the gunporn conspicuously throttles down from its hyperbolic delirium and seen one way, this is the point John Woo passed the baton to Johnnie To. Leung's a Woo crony,though, so this isn't as over old school Heroic Bloodshed as you'd like - - -mush on full cloy, metaphors crude, synths cheesy, no doves though. But To shadows the mood shifting into a kind of blasted melancholy. The fragmenting of the action- - - cutting away a few beats early and abruptly as if repulsed by the carnage, framed tight and claustrophobic so it feels anxious and coiled
- - - and the poeticizing imagery - - - a discharged bullet melting through a block of ice, two mismatched lovers tobogganing down a steep alleyway on a toy raft, a tuft of cotton candy slowly soaking in fresh blood - - - are what Milkyway would mint into the pervasive signatures of their new ethos. Embryonic, then, if nothing else.* * *

BRICK

Brick (2005)
Directed & Written by Rian Johnson






A noir riff, it proudly declares, but noir riff here doesn't imply anything as banal as blowing cigarette smoke through moodily-lit fan blades but doesn't imply anything as obtuse either. The ominous rhythm of its cutting ,the speaking thick and hyper in slang, the sick aura of dysfunction, the desperate gravitas, the co-opted Hammett near the end- - - idioms of hardboiled all, classic and apparent. Shifting milieus to a modern-day high school with a vigorous drug trade is the one gimmicky tweak you can forgive out of the way it impregnates the facetious transposing of stereotypes - - - a student plays the detective carrying a torch and beaten up by thugs 'til he starts coughing blood, his missing ex is the girl in trouble caught in the cul-de-sac of a bad choice, the popular girl is a femme fatale with more up her sleeve than she lets on, the clubfooted druglord operates out of his parents' house while his doting mother serves cookies to his henchmen - - -with energy that not only can burn on pure surface tension alone but can also run deep with sinister frisson tracing kindred moral rot in its post-Columbine teenage wasteland.
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