Wavelengths Program 1 (various): mostly awesome
[The breakdown: Tscherkassky sets out to prove he is cinema -- not in the Nick Ray, formal apotheosis way, but in the self-deifying, self-reflexive grandeur way -- and kinda pulls it off; haven't seen TGtB&tU but he seems to radically emphasize implicit content (e.g. the voyeuristic gaze of one man demarcating an entire [negative] visual universe for himself; a helpless wounded bird equated with man; a trek through a cemetary as acknowledgment of feeble mortality, &c), and ironically imbue a sense of emotional depth through the removal of any observational or psychological impetus: check out the bit where man and landscape polyrhythmically change texture, or the layering of long and medium shots that express the inadequacy of the former's impression of solitude. It's wicked cool, enervating, and finally haunting. Pruska-Oldenhof's Fugitive L(i)ght twists vaguely "human" images (ultrasound-like shapes; the twinkly orange buzz of light seen through closed eyes) in inhumanly fluid movements, which serve to complement the otherworldly grace of its (in retrospect rather superfluous) archival ballet footage. Dig the translucent sensibility, love the suggestive imagery, could do without the flowery nostalgia. Close Quarters is dark, packed with feline fun, and is edited counterintuitively -- Brakhage anyone? -- but Jennings is noteworthy for shooting the (curious, and still alive) (black) cat like Antonioni shot Monica Vitti, integrating both its literal and neurological opaqueness as compositional elements, fondling its fur and coddling its mind. Re: Kirby, I’m at a(n appreciative) loss; Pyramid Lake Piaute Reservation Exposure is in "polygon and variations," and the slightly more interesting Black Belt Test Exposure in "B&W verse COLOR chorus B&W verse" and so on. Both pieces make the cinema-video dichotomy seem simply puritan, and surely Michael will have more to offer. Barbieri's cityscape is the surprise favorite of the bunch. For those of us who've flown in the extremely recent past, the birds-eye-view-as-eerie-mirror-of-SimCity will be familiar, as will for anyone in touch with the state of contemporary crap cinema the default introductory "And introducing... City X!" tracker. God bless him, Barbieri's photography is nothing like either, employing a mixture of deep space and highly selective focus, conveying both ample 3-dimensionality and scientific objectivity. The De Oliveira is, sad to say, a comparative yawner: big poles indicating sexuality; planes trains and automobiles; the plight of workers-as-machines; that sort of thing. It's cute, but after being galvanized by a font of contemporary-to-the-core A-G films, a bit lacking; I'm a modern boy, my whole life looks like a picture of a sunny day etc.]
Banlieue 13 (Pierre Morel): 35
[Every major character being bold and "unpredictable": predictable. Political commentary: self-congratulatory. Once vaguely rough, eventually tightly sewn up relationship between protags: contrived. I was about to type "but you have to appreciate the audacity of a film that singles out money, not a particular person, as the noxious, transitive agent of villainy," but then I realized: no. You don't.]
Sat 10
Takeshis' (Takeshi Kitano): 60
[I don't have time to tackle this head-on; suffice to say a stream of visual and verbal puns and metaphors gradually funnel into territory too cohesive to dismiss, and too stringently symbolic to embrace wholeheartedly. Kitano films as if begging for either thorough auteurist analysis or reactionary derision. Sorry bud, it's a film festival. Rough thematic outline: "everyone wants a piece of Takeshi," followed by "Takeshi wants to put a piece in everyone," and finally "Takeshi wants to make peace with everyone." What appears sadism develops into an abstract urge to Kill everyone but not kill anyone: corpses wander aimlessly after death, and most of the time Takeshi shoots, Takeshi misses; but they're motivated by a fear of both "real" mortality (i.e. the self-contained, decontextualized WWII flashback [or rather sketch of an idea for a film] where the lurching presence of death, unlike other motifs, undergoes no variation) and failure (i.e. the girl who ambiguously [anyone have the direct Japanese translation of this line?] wails, "I love your work," first left alone and then disappearing herself, first seeming to misunderstand the "fake" Takeshi but then becoming a symbolic arbiter of his work ethic when it becomes clear she "knows" who he is). Basically, Kitano shreds everything he introduces to bits -- including the "real" Takeshi's homophobic encounter with a flamboyant stylist debunked by the earnest convenience-store proposal to "fake" Takeshi -- and then conceptualizes it -- first the caterpillar-within-the-flower icon indicates a fear of transvestitism, then the caterpillar gets its very own dance number. I mean jesus.]
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-Hsien): 74
[If R Romance decreases proportionally to the rise of F Freedom, the first segment sees F and R at a point of total harmony, if also fragility, latency, and fear. Remember the insert of May and Chen tentatively [SPOILER]ing each other's [SPOILER]s? That was the most unspeakably beautiful moment in any film this year. What threw me off, and which I now see as essential is the latter segments' foregrounding of tangents and distractions: second's conflicted stance towards political activism and social responsibility, and the third's desultory, fetishistic dearth of either. These cement the film's prickly, insatiable nostalgia for the purity of unadorned tentative longing just as they contradict it in both mood and content. The gestalt would have surely been huge had a bunch of TIFFing philistines not stridently pushed the door of the Paramount 1 open as loud as they TIFFing could, or my neighbor who apparently had to softly Tuvan throat-sing to dispel her boredom. Die, cunt, etc.]
Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita): 54
[Um. What this is is the Waterboysian crowd-pleaser mixed with amusingly empty sub-Jarmuschian digressions (note to self: you can't be a minimalist if you don't love Time) that are in fact more in line with the adolescent spaciness of a Napoleon Dynamite than any of that director's elliptical, associative work. Every now and then, a startling composition pops up (Yamashita's got a good eye for the backs of heads, multiple planes of action, and so on), but on the whole this is negligible. Sigh.]
The Quiet (Jamie Babbitt): 25
[This must be how hating Solondz feels: glibly reactionary social commentary, emanating from a distinctly whiny (and probably repressed) voice; a tewibbow dark side prescribed as "complexity"; an ostensible "discovery" of bourgeois malaise which has in fact been pretty much common knowledge for at least the past 150 years. The two differ in Babbitt's abundant Understanding for her zero-dimensional retards, who inexplicably learn to love or conscientiously die trying. And did I mention the godawful script, wherein characters explicitly and carelessly effuse their deepest, most profound desires nary a hint of campy relish? From the top: Everyone -- yes, men, you too -- is lesbian. Incest is bad, but creates a COMPLICATED LOVE-hate relationship, the VICTIM too intrinsically attached to abscond. Etc.]
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (Mike Johnson & Tim Burton): 67
[Ravishing, but still missing something: i.e., what binds love and death, or rather the Victor and the Corpse. Piano duet intended to do exactly that doesn't quite; loveably flawed morbidity does develop something, but it's more like compassion or empathy than even the most complacent love (see: Hou, above). On a more general note, Burton either has to stop moralizing or stop being so soft: just like the Spielbergian assurance of the mutated kids marching intact out the gates in Charlie, here death isn't death; it's Death (see: Kitano, above). What remains is still often hilarious, filled with subtle ironies it doesn't nudge in, and an poignant disquisition on the ills of marriage, when it really wants to be; and the final shot's a refreshingly abrupt stunner that gave me chills, but what this could have been was me suppressing The Quiet (oh, and my suburban malcontent. sorry).]
Sun 11
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg): 83
[Violence as imitation: gentrified suburbanites re-enacting their lost youth to feel "naughty," and actual youth observantly conforming, watching for implicit signs from the older generation that rebellion is "natural." Where does violence come from, we're inclined to wonder: engrained, ideological complacency, or an adolescent zest for the new and revolutionary? If each generation imitates each other, then each seems inclined to bury their own hostilities; if Cronenberg is clearly giving any kind of message, it’s that those hostilities will still inevitably surface. However, he avoids giving violence an origin (no flashbacks = thanks Dave), only a palpably ambiguous presence. Again and again Cronenberg slaps his audience in the face for relenting to genre conventions -- most notably in the pair of sex scenes, one of which offers a simulated reversion to youth, and another, scary, equally erotic but also repulsive "real" reversion. God knows I hated the smelly, loudly reactive obese dude sitting next to me at the time, but in retrospective his dual responses to those scenes were kind of a godsend: moaning (ew) during the former, woahing and hmming the latter. The lesson: Cronenberg's deconstruction is so sharp, even the philistines can get it. The precarious sense of communal solidarity, which mirrors recent von Trier films but cuts deeper, imo, inspires some of the most evidently conflicted filmmaking in recent memory, e.g. when Good You-Can-Count-on-Me Cop leaves Tom's case to rest, we don't know whether to feel unencumbered relief, or dubious insecurity. Ditto for the gut-puncher of a denouement. {ADDENDUM: It's come to my attention that a lot of positive reviews of this are defending it (from slags on idiotic grounds confusing the austere with the simplistic) as psychologically complex. No. I can't think of any other great film this year -- including Last Days -- which so insistently denies its audience access to rounded, human characters. Cronenberg's formal devices, and his abstraction of feebly constructed characters, couldn't call any more attention to themselves sans neon arrows. Moreover, I'm kind of disgusted by the notion of anyone marching into this film expecting anything resembling a semi-accurate depiction of reality, or anything attempting such. My two cents.}]
Elizabethtown (Cameron Crowe): 61
[For almost two straight hours, prime Crowe: cross-sections of canned neuroses; moments of intense emotional reflection diffused by lyrical, picayune nonsense; suspiciously esoteric minutiae that only could have been cribbed directly from experience. Bloom is passive and morbidly emo, but the Braff comparisons stop there; as irritatingly trite as the narrated homilies get, they're more general than solipsistic, more observational than depressive. I have fewer problems with the character, frankly, than Bloom himself, who speaks with this creepy combination of preteen trepidation and trailer-voice-guy pretension that just freaks me out. Dunst, to me, seems too obsessively inquisitive to be a purely wish-fulfillment-based figure, but maybe that’s because she reminds me of this woman who took care of my dogs and had multiple hour-long, uncomfortably personal phone conversations with me despite us never having met prior to the first and implicitly opened up a giant can of worms by hinting at an abusive and sexually deficient marriage conceded to out of caprice. Anyway, ignore them both if you must and focus on Paul Schneider’s loser dad, whose movingly insubordinate parenting is criminally’ subordinated to comic relief. And yes, the ending blows -- imagine the final shot of Almost Famous expanded to something like 30 minutes and injected with ejaculatory mix-tape diarrhea.]
Manderlay (Lars von Trier): 71
[Comments forthcoming.]
L'annulaire (Diane Bertrand): 37
[Sleep Country, Ca-na-da! Why buy a mattress, an-y where else? I'm not kidding; they changed the jingle.]
La Neuvaine (Bernard Emond): 47
[Comments forthcoming.]
Mon 12
Sa-kwa (Kang Yi-kwan): 59
[Comments forthcoming.]
Revolver (Guy Ritchie): 13
[Comments forthcoming.]
Hidden (Michael Haneke): 68
[Only with Haneke could an astute return to form also be deeply unsatisfying. Not in the typically overt Art-Film sense -- see: Lynch -- but certainly not in the lazily-written-Hollywood-schlock sense either. His rug-pulling is undeniably accomplished -- and it's a great, masochistic sort of comfort to see a director grab his audience from the opening to closing credits, never taking a breather -- but on first impression, so formally distinguished as to be nearly ineffectual. It's at once Haneke's most suspenseful and confounding film, a radical fusion of genre and avant-garde tendencies so deeply rooted in both it's difficult to process as either. Haneke's made a masterpiece for himself, but I'm not sure if I can love it; he's always been a tease, but never before has the psycho cruelly transformed the frame into a veritable Where's Waldo? tableaux. And no, I didn’t see shit in the final shot, and my eyes were darting like crazy. Michael, how do you feel about my needs?]
Wassup Rockers (Larry Clark): 57
[Comments forthcoming.]
Into Great Silence (Philip Groening): W/O
[Comments forthcoming.]
Bangkok Loco (Pornchai Hongrattanaporn): 52
[Comments forthcoming.]
Tue 13
Bubble (Steven Soderbergh): 66
[... in which our intrepid fest-goer notices a rather blatant symptomatic motif among some of the first-class auteur-work at this year's TIFF: the anti-mystery, which portends twists and secrets only to effectively destroy its own ostensible agenda (cf. Cronenberg, Haneke). A response to the "killer was an amorphous sheepdog after all" ending du jour, perhaps? Soderbergh devalues the trick ending, surely, but also gives his lack thereof an express purpose: this middle-America is one we're used to seeing in Michael Moore documentaries and quirkfests like True Stories, not blessed with its own mini-narrative. He staunches plot mechanics to give a clear, simple voice to the marginalized dreams of the undereducated and overworked. One character's violence, which initially appears to be a straightforward explosion of misplaced jealousy, in retrospect serves all these characters as an elucidation of ambitions otherwise inexpressible.]
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones): 45
[Why did otherwise vaguely respectable Cannes folk go for this -- specifically Guillermo Arriaga's prosaic, crocodile-tears screenplay and Jones’ clumsily modulated performance (Hong Sang-soo and Daniel Auteuil wuz robbed, respectively)? Arriaga, ala 21 Grams, arbitrarily juts around time, but the structure, which seems to find ample catharsis in "correcting" the wrongs of the past, denies the flashbacks any relevance or resonance; it's telling that the film is still divided into chronological chapters, at conventional odds with its own hip modernism. Jones wants to examine vigilantism, but -- perhaps not by design -- he encourages it. His character has one or two scenes of ambiguous creepiness that are altogether abandoned by the halfway point, and is way too altruistic and meticulous to compare with Barry Pepper, his ethnocentric, pig-headed mirror image. Jones is grappling with complexities he can't comprehend; his imbalanced bevy of perspectives, not to mention flat, inept visuals, are more John Sayles than Ford.]
Backstage (Emmanuelle Bercot): 64
[Comments forthcoming.]
The Forsaken Land (Vimukthi Jayasundara): 55 [rating somewhat fatigue-induced; second viewing required]
[Comments forthcoming.]
Duelist (Lee Myung-se): W/O
[Brakhage? Sheesh.]
Wed 14
Where the Truth Lies (Atom Egoyan): 44
[Comments forthcoming.]
You Bet Your Life (Antonin Svoboda): 65
[Once upon a time, six years or so ago, it was my goal to write a depraved, Breillat-esque screen adaptation of Ella Enchanted (don't ask). Surely a story centered around the total relinquishing of individual will-power had perverse, Hathaway-unfriendly potential? This pleasantly surprising slot-filler (go go Neu-Grit and Austria, the second most reliable progenitor for filmmaking talent; my other Discovery choice, Sa-kwa, spawns from the first) comes as close to fulfilling that seventh-grade embellishment as I could hope for post-O'Haver fucking up everything, with its stalwart hero who disdains those without self-control -- e.g. his friend, the father and fellow gambling addict, with an indomitably sentimental attachment to his family just as deleterious to his game as any substance abuse -- but in turn also gives his own up, slavishly operating as the object of his addiction's whims. Georg Friedrich's performance, all desperation overshadowed by unctuousness, is a reason to see this; despite his greasy exterior, when the inevitable sorrowful downfall hits, it hits hard. Svoboda is another, showing impressive control of DV, going for naturalistic and lo-fi without resorting to Dogme-style entropy, and shaping a style as obstinately impetuous as his protag.]
April Snow (Hur Jin-ho): 62
[Comments forthcoming.]
Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel): 78
[From the first moments of this oneiric, fractured triumph, Garrel admires the May '68 radicals' searching vigour, and spurns the naive abstraction of their ideas; it's an attitude that only could have been formed by both nostalgic regret and empirical analysis. His film is both discursive and precise, tracking Francois (played by his son Louis, which is more textually apposite than you'd expect, e.g. when the camera comes inordinately close to Francois' face when he laments for a society where fathers and sons can't respect each other, one generation ushered into complacency as the other spurts out) as he becomes not so much disillusioned with his political sincerity as aware of its pitfalls. The most inconspicuously lethargic, hangin'-out scenes are also the most crucial: one likens the fall of communism to religious skeptics, implicitly harkening to Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor's contempt for human insecurities and applying that tragic lack of ordained faith to a political system. But Garrel also necessitates fickle faith in the realm of aesthetic scrutiny: painters, poets and sculptors alike grapple with the temptation of commerce, and ultimately it's impossible to tell when a claim of beauty is True or a petty courtesy; money may be superficial and invidious, but it has a concrete certainty aesthetes can't rely on to extend to art. Paranoid of losing his ideals, Francois succumbs partly to their impracticality and partly to the irrationality of Love and Art. Garrel has made a love letter to the pursuit of individual freedom that at every turn recognizes its absurdity.]
Thu 15
A travers le foret (Jean-Paul Civeyrac): 68
[An intriguing little poem, using some of the fest's most lucid camerawork to craft its most fragmented psychology. Civeyrac doesn't disregard space so much as deliberately destroy its coherence. The camera -- apropos, considering the material -- feels like a ghost, an unconscious observer drifting along characters, sustaining a universal solipsism that only feels apt when its grieving, singularly committed subject, Armelle, is onscreen. Civeyrac's long takes ironically sculpt scenes in bits and pieces: where, say, an Altman would savor sisters whispering about a dude's resemblance to one's lost love, while the dude stands adjacent in the frame (and there are 3 Women parallels here), Civeyrac uses the tracking camera to distinguish and demarcate reality from inner consciousness. Formally compelling, yup, but also a touchingly sophisticated take on grief / illusionism; as Armelle sinks deeper in, her nihilism spreads like an infectious disease, and (seemingly as a result) she finally recants corporeal love to search for something, well, within her mind, stupid's that sounds. And Civeyrac's the perfect filmmaker to take her there.]
Gabrielle (Patrice Chereau): 48
[Sheer miscalculation; good luck, Armond, etc. Material's all about feelings harvested indirectly, realizing things too late, passionless attachment, a couple burying their true and happy selves under the veil of society and stolidity, and whatnot; inconceivably, Chereau goes straight for the jugular, with leaden dialogue, strident performances and comic booky stylistic flourishes: *ZIP!* *I WILL NEVER RETURN AGAIN!* *POW!* *IT IS TERRIBLE AND WONDERFUL!* etc. For all its sentimentality, Son Frere at least had some nicely morose languor going for it. Busy and manic, Gabrielle at first seems the victim of Desplechin Syndrome (minus that director’s emotionally complex texture and cubist editing) but more accurately captures the Tony Scott ethos of overheated penis envy. Then again I heard some pentagenarian type females in my general area huffing "you go Huppert girl" so I guess Chereau is a genius; you win, Armond, etc.]
Free Zone (Amos Gitai): 63
[Comments forthcoming.]
The Child (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne): 76
[A fellow TIFFer called this "slight," and though I respect his reservations, dude might as well have told me, "I'm a floating unicorn," i.e., this is powerful cinema. Characterizations are the bros. at their most archetypal -- the callous gangster, the wayward mother -- and the film never diverges from quashing said gangster's chances to win our wholehearted sympathies. We're offered catharsis, but no resolution of the voluminous troubles that precede it. Really, I don't quite know what to take from it, but that I'm dying to is a sign that the audience's moral imperative -- and in this particular case, paternal intuition -- takes on as pertinent a role as any onscreen character. Bruno's comeuppance, only defensibly plausible as the result of sheer, downtrodden enervation, requires a leap of faith from the viewer in belief commensurate with his own in action. The Dardennes' humanism can't be called generosity, as the term implies a one-sided exchange; what the brothers find lacking in their characters, the audience is necessitated to fill in for themselves. I heard another, more anonymous TIFF patron going, in a stream-of-conscious invective, "I expect films to either be entertaining or to contribute to society [shut up], Jolene" But, anonymous guy, isn't teaching audiences to accept a minor form of redemption just as valuable as -- and the Dardennes never do this, but some of their contemporaries obviously do -- encouraging absolute redemption? The Child is a lesson in compassion, and as I type, I've yet to absorb it. And let's be honest: I was about to watch freaking Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, so who knows if I ever will. But still, good job, guys.]
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-wook): 53
[Comments forthcoming.]
The Great Yokai War (Takashi Miike): 39
[Fuck you for stealing two hours of valuable sleep Miike.]
Fri 16
A Perfect Couple (Nobuhiro Suwa): 64
[Comments forthcoming. Sorry,haters.]
Heading South (Laurent Cantet): 61
[I’m not a huge Cantet fan, but this was pretty revelatory w/r/t revealing him as more of an artist than an activist, with a set of moods and obsessions rather than programmed polemics. Held over from Time Out, I suppose, is the critique of capitalism as an enslaving force, this time with Albert the (supposedly Morgan-Freeman-noble, which I don’t quite buy) waiter caught in a job contradictory to the ideals of his ancestors: on the one hand, Albert has an awareness of the hypocritical racism the women unknowingly inflict on their controlling yet passive paramour; on the other, his strength doesn’t extend to his own occupation. But yeah, this is primarily about prejudice, not work; and what of it, mate. With great tact and even-handedness, if not subtlety, Cantet rips apart Brenda’s exoticism by first giving her delusions an identifiable foundation -- i.e., a self-mystified, over-entitled sort of midlife crisis -- and then, ala his other films, observes the destruction that callous solipsism brings about. Cantet condescends to racial double-standards the same way he examined Recoing’s mock-subsistence: with a reserved compassion just toeing the line of derision.]
Everlasting Regret (Stanley Kwan): 40
[Hey remember that scene in Broken Flowers when Bill Murray tries to talk philosophy to his presumed son and comes off as both na’ve and inadvertently Taoist. That was awesome. Remember when Stanley Kwan had nothing to say about exquisitely shot and also boring-ass Chinese history but nebulous Rosenbaum-ready banalities. That was not.]
The Notorious Bettie Page (Mary Harron): 43
[Such a shallow gloss-over that it’s hard to even attempt a comparison of Bettie to Harron’s other protags. Okay, so Bettie is an Oblivious Icon, cf. Bateman and Solanas, but the most interesting thing about her is clearly the ineffable transitivity that got her from Jesus freak to pin-up queen and back again. Mol goes for the constancy approach, i.e. wearing a complicitly jolly smile and recklessly diving in, and while I theoretically dig the idea that can-do voracity transcends moral piety, the film doesn’t really fulfill that. It psychologizes (the rape), contextualizes in the moral world (the boyfriend’s confrontation), and engages in pseudo-nostalgia of a baffling, frivolous sort. Worse, Bettie doesn’t seem to be ultimately affected by any of these tangents, but she’s hardly an impervious wall of complacency either, feeling pangs of doubt when required. This thing is a mess.]
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu): 58
[Misleading reference point #1: the Dardennes, who likewise cram their films with contemporary social and political relevance but do so in a much more compact format. By contrast, Puiu is all breadth, no depth; one imagines Jean-Pierre and Luc fastidiously mining through Cristi's Goldfish Mixer, parting Parmesan from Cheddar. Misleading reference point #2: Rohmer, and this is thanks to the film's part in Puiu's planned Six Tales of Bucharest which according to Ms. Q&A Actress (whom I, intensely weary at this point, in no small part due to a certain outrageous Asian auteur and his overlong hunk of kiddie grotesquerie, somehow did not recognize from the picture itself; and whom I should also mention, just for personal reference's sake, was smokin' hot, moreso than anyone recognizable onscreen, and seemingly semi-responsible for the crowd's shockingly enthused response at a film at least as challenging as the damned-with-faint-praise Forsaken Land or Perfect Couple) is all about variations on the theme of Love. Um, what? I guess she meant between the nurse and Lazarescu? But this is not the complexly articulated, gorgeously latent type of Love we find in Rohmer's films; it's clinical, hesitant, and barely-there. Then again, so was I; FUTM etc. Still quietly extraordinary as a portrait of near-instantaneous mental deterioration; its single-minded ferocity as a psychic Journey would seem to call for the frenetic Noe approach, but Puiu remains an acrid, unforgiving fly on the wall. I need to see this again, by the way; sorry, haters.]
Sat 17
Time to Leave (Francois Ozon): 41
[Comments forthcoming.]
Citizen Dog (Wisit Sasanatieng): 49
[Comments forthcoming.]
Drawing Restraint 9 (Matthew Barney): 27
[Comments forthcoming.]
Mary (Abel Ferrara): 67
[Comments forthcoming.]
House of Sand (Andrucha Waddington): 51
[{WARNING: COMPLETELY UNRELIABLE!} My notes, 20 minutes into this movie: "the febrile worldview of a Mann western -- trapped by but also biologically inclined to protect vast, oppressive landscapes -- filtered through the long-shot, long-take, eyes-on-side-X-of-the-screen Tarr aesthetic." Yup. I also scribbled crap like this: "Iranian-movie histrionics." "Madness -- Herzog." And here's a real kicker: "last shot of Hidden." Huhh. While, if I'm to trust myself, there's no denying the initial formal mastery Waddington exhibits here, there's also no denying that I fell asleep for an indeterminate amount of time and when I woke up some not-very-interesting, not-very-rigorous stuff was going on, so there. Despite the hazy response, thanks much for the rec folco.]
Hostel (Eli Roth): 24
[Eurotrip meets Audition, lacking the former's high spirits and the latter's bitonal purity; kinda makes me dislike Miike and Park's Cinema of Cruelty even more than I have recently (see: two days ago) to see an Eli "I-can’t-believe-I-wrote-the-film-in-three-weeks" Roth shamelessly purloin (and of course, tame) the tricks of their trade, not to mention brag about said thievery during a startlingly arrogant pre-film intro. It goes without saying that A History of Violence decidedly shits all over this film and its ilk. In this case, since a presence like Cronenberg wasn't available to galvanize the audience into self-awareness, I did my best to substitute, squealing "revenge!" at an applause-yielding turn of the tables. It, um, didn't seem to work. Convincing Motivation 101 Dept.: "I always wanted to be a surgeon... they never let me..." -- *snip* *snip*. Almost Worth Seeing Dept.: mercy-amputating the melting eyeball.]