Wednesday, January 5, 2011

things i've been watching: january 2011


Valhalla Rising: (2009. dir: Nicolas Winding Refn) Gorgeous, slow, inscrutable, mesmerizing Viking movie about a one-eyed, invincible bad-ass who sees visions of the future. Early on someone asks him (rhetorically, since he does not speak), "Who are you?" At which I laughed and thought, "Viking Movie, One-Eyed Badassed Seer of Visions... He's Odin!" Turns out I was wrong. He's just your run-of-the-mill invincible, visionary warrior, which, granted, is rather wonderful if you're not expecting gods. That said, the film has so sober an air of its own importance that it feels (although I know from interviews it is not) like propaganda for Forn Sidr. When One-Eye makes his sacrifice in the end, it feels Arthurian, like the great hero is promising to return in Denmark's greatest hour of need.

I want to say the film is redolent of a Malickian nature-mysticism, but without Malick's joie-de-vivre and clarity of purpose. There's an immensity to it, however, built largely of silence and a thick, well-used soundscape. The music is a drum-heavy brand of doom-rock, and just right. The violence is well photographed, slow and unflinching but also unromanticized, not slicked-up as is the custom amongst unscrupulous editors these days. When One-Eye eviscerates a fellow, you can practically smell the meat, feel the steam as the hot innards hit the cool Northern air.

Mads Mikkelsen as One-Eye is, as always, a force of nature. He proved in King Arthur that he's one of those rare actors whose charisma communicates itself even in long shot. Now he's proved it communicates itself even when he's mute and sporting only one eye. Amazing man.


Fool's Gold: (2008. dir: Andy Tennant) There are three things a romantic comedy needs in order to engage properly: chemistry between its leads, believable but credibly overcome obstacles to their love, and a plotline (ie: the pursuit of the Earl Williams news-story in His Girl Friday) on which they can focus while they're falling in love, or rather while they're working out their differences, because in this genre love generally happens at first sight and often, as in this one, before the film begins.

Fool's Gold gets a bad rap, which flummoxes me. In this age overstuffed with shallow and unremarkable love stories, McConaughey and Hudson not only share an extraordinary chemistry, they also have in common a spot-on sense of comic timing and the kind of affable, un-vain carriage of their considerable physical charms which allows us to love rather than envy them. The script, although it often dives headlong into silliness, presents a fully credible emotional journey from personality-crossed young love into mature acceptance. The low comedy (and there is that) is carried off with a good-natured heartiness so that three-stooges moments (like when she borrows a golf club from an old man on a park bench with which to hit her lover/nemesis in the head) are actually funny instead of just absurd or offensive. My boyfriend was making dinner while I watched, and whenever I laughed he'd say what'd I miss? and I kept having to say, "It's all in the timing. It wouldn't be funny if I told it," and that's unquestionably a tribute to some damn fine acting and some damn fine editing. The other thing it has is the treasure-hunting story, a rollicking good one, one the writers obviously enjoyed writing.

Everyone likes Kate Hudson, and that's as it should be, but I don't quite understand why people as a rule don't like McConaughey. Look: Dazed and Confused, Lone Star, A Time To Kill, Frailty, Newton Boys, Reign of Fire, Tropic Thunder? That's an interesting resume. Sure, he's got some probable dogs in there (who's going to watch Failure to Launch to find out if it's actually as bad as they say? a braver human than I), but do me a favor and give the surfer-boy another chance, will you?


the Skeleton Key: (2005. dir: Iain Softley)

And speaking of Kate Hudson...

This is a reconsideration. I reviewed this movie already, back in 2008, one of the first on this blog, in fact, and I short-changed it. It moved too slowly for my taste then, but once you know the ending (a great ending), the second viewing is completely enjoyable, and the script is a very fine venture. Plus, the acting is first-tier among the foursome of leads (Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, Peter Sarsgaard, John Hurt), the atmosphere of Terrebonne Parish saturates the film until you can feel the sultry virtually coating your skin, and it's that rare beast, a hoodoo picture which has a genuine feel to the hoodoo. The sound of it is full and haunting: scratchy old blues and voodoo records, menacing thumpings and scratchings and thunderstorms. It's still a little slow, but it makes up for it in a thousand other ways.

twilight eclipse: bloodlust and milquetoast


If you're looking for great cinema, or great story-telling, you don't look to Twilight: Eclipse. That's not what it's for.

Straight off the top: I'm obviously not of the demographic at which it was very specifically and, I might add, masterfully, aimed. As a piece of marketing to grab that romantic young girl, it is an admirable work of art and I sweep my hat off to it. Kristen Stewart in the lead is Everygirl: not pretty, but strangely engaging to look at. She never wears anything provocative or sexy, even when her friends do. All the beautiful boys fall madly in love with her, but it's HER they're loving, not any surface appearance. It very cleverly figures out a way to get her into the arms of both her vampire-love and her werewolf-love, once in the same tent, that is simultaneously innocent and exciting. Her vampire-love is so gallant that he will not sleep with her, even when she offers, although he makes it clear it is not from lack of passion.

Adolescent boys: if you want to know what an adolescent girl's perfect fantasy is, study this film. There's a lot of long, earnest conversation and long, soul-searching gazes, lots of churning, unfulfilled desires. Both her loves are simultaneously blood-lustingly dangerous and milquetoast safe, and both entirely focused on her. Indeed, her vampire-love seems to have no particular life when she's not in the room. He's got vampire roommates, I mean, but he seems to snap into focus only when she walks into view.

There is no tiresome delving into the social problems of modern teenagers. All exploration is into, around, and emerging from the heroine's somnambulistic romance-extraordinaire, as if the rest of the world existed only as adjunct and support to that single, all-important cathexis. In that sense, it reminds me a bit of an old Neil Jordan fantasy called the Company of Wolves, which was a strange, dreamlike amalgam of lycanthropic fairy tales, all taking place in the mind of a feverish girl sloughing off her girlish skin to step into womanhood. It was flawed (too slow and episodic and with one disastrous piece of casting), but in truly unique ways. Twilight, on the other hand, is admirable in that its flaws are only flaws if viewed from outside the intended perspective: that is, the perspective of the adolescent girl simultaneously eager to step into her womanhood and afraid of the gravity of the step.

(The down side is that girls learning how to live their loves from this mythology are going to be slammed hard up against some harsh realities when they find out that real boys are nothing like these polite super-boyfriends. But that's another problem for another generation, and I'm not even going to step into that morass. Anyway, when did Hollywood ever bother with such niceties as worrying about the psychological development of an audience?)

The mise-en-scene is suitably dark and brooding, with vast, rich landscapes (where is that? Someplace on the Washington coast?) and unconvincing but enjoyable CGI wolves. I watched it because the trailer showed that full-speed, howling battle-clash of a line of wolves smashing up against a line of vampires. I'm a sucker for a thing like that, and I enjoyed it, but the thing I enjoyed most was that someone, presumably a fully grown adult, is so wholly in touch with her inner teenager that she can write a thing like this from the heart, which I suppose is why it's so vastly successful.

What it is not, of course, is an action film, nor is it a horror film. It's one thing: a Girl-Fantasy, and if you look for anything else in it you will gnash your teeth in disappointment.