Until the Light Takes Us

On the surface, Until the Light Takes Us seems a film tailor-made for people like me: curious about the Norwegian black metal scene that caused a media frenzy, and even open to some of the bands to emerge from the surprisingly complex evolution of a sound initially defined with a rigorous set of aesthetic and social codes. Unfortunately, the movie never gets off the ground, and not even the low budget can excuse some of the rampant amateurism of the production.

Directors Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell, compared to someone like Sam Dunn, seem less devoted metalheads thirsting for the full story than curious hipsters who heard some such about a church burning or two and decided to look into it. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but Until the Light Takes Us never focuses on anything but the scandal, and its fleeting moments of insight come off as spontaneous, unplanned moments instead of something actively sought by the filmmakers.

Most of the film revolves around the commentary of two main subjects: Gylve "Fenriz" Nagell of the band Darkthrone and the legendary Varg Vikernes, he of Mayhem and Burzum fame. The directors establish them as foils: both were among the genres progenitors, but Vikernes helped nurse the public image until it spiraled out of control (largely thanks to him), while Fenriz, somewhat wistfully, only cared about the music. These are essentially the only two points of view presented in the film, and the directors ensure that what few sources they get to fill out their 90 minutes tend to fit on Vikernes' side of things, only without his retrospective clarity.

If your only interest in black metal concerns the church burnings, well, this might be the movie for you. Until the Light Takes Us makes sure to include endless montages of blazing cathedrals and concerned, stuffy Norwegian presenters gravely speaking about the black metal scene in old newscasts. Though most of the arson was limited to a set period in the early '90s, Aites and Ewell find a way to keep coming back to these montages, littering the film with them ad nauseam.

For those who actually wanted to hear something about the music, however, the film offers few nuggets. The talking heads discuss Helvete, the record store opened by Mayhem's guitarist Euronymous that became the epicenter for Oslo's nascent extreme metal scene, but they never discuss what the place really meant for people. The only time anyone does something of the sort is in a brief mention of Emperor's original drummer Faust, who came to Oslo from the Norwegian boonies as a teenager and found somewhere he belonged; then, one of his old friends changes the subject to focus on Faust's murder of a gay man back in his hometown, not to shed light on anything but to speak approvingly of the slaying.

Where is the discussion about black metal's growth? Bathory hardly rates a mention, and non-Norwegian groups like proto-black metal band Celtic Frost and modern masters Agalloch are nowhere to be found, nor is any talk, good or bad, included about semi-mainstream BM group Cradle of Filth. Even some magnificent, forward-thinking Norwegian bands like Arcturus and In the Woods... are cast aside. No effort is made to talk about some of the striking art related to the genre -- the inventive way bands stylize their logos alone should have been a minor focus -- the difference between traditional, death and thrash-influence black metal and the more symphonic, progressive sound pioneered by groups like Emperor. Even the considerable evolution of both Fenriz and Varg's groups are downplayed, mentioned primarily in each of the old, estranged friends' passive-aggressive put-downs of the other (Fenriz mocks the electronic doodling added to some black metal bands, bands like Burzum; Varg all but outright accuses Fenriz of selling out).

Only the intriguing quality of the main participants saves this film from total failure. I was surprised, considering how scandal-hungry the directors are, that they never once touched upon the anti-Semitic and racist Vikernes espoused when in prison. They do, however, tackle the reason why they are sitting in a (quite cozy, it must be said) prison talking to Varg, and the musician is forthright, if still self-justifying, about the arson and murder that landed him in jail. With the benefit of hindsight, his bitterness over taking credit for various church burnings just to piss off the teenagers and rival bands who did them to impress him is tempered by a realization that one shouldn't state in print that one committed a crime, or even leave open a hint that could bring investigation. About the murder of his Mayhem bandmate Euronymous, Varg sticks to his self-defense line but at last admits paranoid thoughts he should have considered. Still, he lightly chuckles at the idea, as if remembering some embarrassing moment from childhood and not the grisly stabbing death of one of his friends. Yet the filmmakers do not press him on this, apparently failing to understand the difference between being hostile and simply asking tough questions.

Luckily for the audience, Varg is so interesting he shines in spite of the hollowness of much of his words. He attributes the black metal philosophy to a reaction against Americanization and the loss of cultural identity in a liberal, globalized Norway that had already lost much of its past from Christian purges, but he also voices disgust with those who insisted black metal had to be tied to Satan. He comes across as one of the nicest, most polite white supremacists you'll ever meet, and it's difficult to reconcile how charming he is in these interviews with the dark nature of his past and the abhorrent views he continues to voice everywhere but in these facile 90 minutes. Fenriz, too, is a soft soul: the first shot of the film depicts the crew setting up the lighting for his interview, and he comes off as polite and a bit shy, smiling sheepishly as the crew prepares around him. He even whistles a bit.

Both Fenriz and Varg ultimately paint themselves as bright but alienated young men who reacted against society for not fitting into it. As Norway is one of the most liberal places on Earth, the solution they found was extreme and reactionary: if liberalism bred a conformity of its own, all the better to simply be authoritarian and violent. If one must conform, at least make it interesting. The best moment of the film involves Fenriz, in his halting English, explaining his outlook by bring up his least favorite artist, Frida Kahlo. Even though he hates her, Fenriz marvels that Frida and other Latin American painters, all of whom operated under oppressive regimes and exploitative American policies, used vibrant colors in their paintings. When one looks at art from liberal Scandinavia, however, there is a starkness, be it in Norwegian black metal or in the films of the Swede Ingmar Bergman. Artists, the discontent members of society, paint that which they see but is not before their eyes.

Another highlight involves the differing reactions to black metal's entry into the public consciousness. In Stockholm, Fenriz walks around an art gallery featuring photographs from the black metal scene and art inspired by it.* Though the less political of the two primary talking heads, Fenriz nearly has a physical reaction to seeing his past commodified and confirmed to be trend. He quivers with suppressed rage and disgust, and when he tries to be polite and shake the curator's hand, for a split second I wondered if he would lunge at the poor man. A third black metaller, Kjetil "Frost" Haraldstad, projects an image of being an attention whore, but when a performance artist convinces him to come to Milan to put on some black-metal-inspired visual art, suddenly the man who cheerfully talks about the flattering thrill of getting his photo printed comes to terms with just what his life has become. He broods on the flight over, and his self-mutilating act no longer seems a cry for attention but a response to mounting feelings of self-loathing.

Sam Dunn, with his degree in anthropology, traced metal's roots for his rockumentary. A journalist, trained to get anecdotes and a more personal perspective that makes even critical biographies intimate, might have made a better oral history of the scene. Documentarians rooted in film can find the narrative, best exemplified in movies like Harlan County, U.S.A. and Hoop Dreams. A film-background director might also have focused a bit too much on the scandals, but at least a narrative might have come from it. Aites, a musician inspired not by metal but indie bands such as Sebadoh and the Mountain Goats, just appears to be doing this on a lark. I like anything that deconstructs the absurd mythology around the black metal scene, but Until the Light Takes Us doesn't even do that. Aites, hipster that he is, appears to be genuinely impressed by the musicians' actions backing up their words, even if both are abhorrent. He has no interest in the music itself, and the film ultimately doesn't even rate a decent bit of muckraking. The low budget wouldn't have been such a hurdle if the filmmakers could have figured out what they wanted to say with this.


*I must confess, I couldn't stop laughing at someone's contribution: a photo of Mickey Rourke with corpse paint slopped over his face and a painted message reading "Black Metal Mickey." Next to it was the regular photo with another painted title: "Not Black Metal Mickey."

The Intruder

Claire Denis' The Intruder takes the director's sensual minimalism to its extremity, carving an entire film out of her tactile, elliptical direction at the expense of plot. Based on philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's autobiographical, post-structuralist essay of the same name, L'Intrus for the most part lacks even the recurring symbols that anchor her other features. The only constants are characters, about whom we learn nearly nothing.

What's impressive about Denis' staging is that L'Intrus still feels remarkably light-footed for its lack of clear-cut narrative. Denis' primary strength as a filmmaker is her ability to frame the human body in inventive and evocative manners, and she filters Nancy's philosophical text through an emotional lens, balancing an intellectualism that matches up with some of her own recurring themes with her most delicate, tantalizing imagery. The result is nothing less than a masterpiece.


L'Intrus opens with a Russian woman offering a précis of the film, solemnly whispering, "Your worst enemies are hiding inside, in the shadow, in your heart" before moving to an unconnected image of a country road, the tranquility of which is interrupted by warning signs and a guard post. We see a customs official search a vehicle traveling from France into Switzerland, beginning the dialectical juxtaposition that defines much of the film's editing. Denis follows the border guard home to her husband and two young children. The husband gently seduces his wife with a story about them making love in the forest before plopping her down on his "branch." Then, Denis abruptly cuts to the forest outside as an old man bathes in a waterfall with his dogs nearby. Idyllic, panoramic views of the man, Louis Trebor (Michel Subor), contrast with shaky, hand-held POV shots of some scarcely seen stalker, particularly when Louis floats in a lake (Denis loves to shoot people floating in water; it makes people so serene, yet so vulnerable).

Then, the old man does some strokes in the lake, and something at last happens. Clearly, he has a heart attack while swimming, only just making it ashore to ride out the pain. A bit later, he heads to an abandoned shack in the same secluded area as his own tucked-away cabin and leaves a message in Russian that he needs the emergency procedure. There's a hint of playfulness to this skullduggery, Denis' way of misdirecting the audience to make something that should, frankly, be fascinating -- the heart transplant Louis requests from this sinister black market -- cinematically palatable before burying the thriller aspects in indecipherable opacity. The Intruder may not have a narrative, but the director will at least be kind enough to tease us with one.

But her main focus, as with the source essay, are the philosophical implications of receiving a heart transplant. Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, man himself can now become a metaphorical Ship of Theseus, an object whose parts are replaced until one questions whether it remains the original subject. Louis not only requests a heart from the shadowy organization tailing him but a young heart, ensuring that he inherits the flesh of someone totally different than him (ultimately, he receives a young woman's heart, further emphasizing the split). The Ship of Theseus quandary forces one to ask whether an object whose parts have been systematically replaced can still be thought of as the original source. In these cases, we must not only ask whether Louis is the same person but whether he even is a human being anymore.

Ergo, the heart becomes an intruder in Louis' body, though if it does corrupt and alter Louis, it's doubtful anyone would mind the change. Though we receive marginally more clues about his past than any of the side characters who flutter about as if the cast of a fever dream, Louis tacitly reveals a dark past, possibly as a murderer. Occasionally, the camera moves not into moments of fantasy but subjective perception, showing Louis suddenly stabbing his pharmacist lover, only for the next shot to show her breathing in bed next to him. That disturbing side exacerbates the feelings of disconnect he emits when he travels abroad, first to Korea for the surgery, then to Tahiti to track down a long-lost son (thus intruding on his child's life).

The changed locales bring out the flip side of intrusion and secrecy: intense loneliness. Louis' harsh intensity makes him a fit for his secluded cabin in the wilderness, but the urban bustle and politeness of South Korea makes him look like a freak. Even the businessmen who meet with him are convivial and ingratiating. The cool blue that hung over the first act gives way to a neon glow that washes out Louis' menace. When he leaves for Tahiti, Denis gets away with infusing the film with one of her biggest themes, post-colonialism. Korea, never a Western colony but once under Japanese rule, looks more sophisticated and wealthy than the backwoods of France from whence Louis came. Tahiti is poorer, to be sure, but the bustle is electric. Tahiti's incandescent waters prove even more of a bad fit for Louis than Korea.

Still, for all of Louis' isolation, there exists possibilities for communication that would not have been possible in the colonial days. The old man meets a Korean as an equal in a restaurant when the kind Korean man briefly bonds with the protagonist over an Elvis song. The secret organization's ability to move back and forth at will across the landscapes reveals how easily one can now travel the world, a convenience that exacerbates feelings of loneliness by rapidly thrusting people into alien environments but also opening the possibility of connection. Louis might simply be too old to readjust.

Like memories, L'Intrus can capture minute, trivial minutiae in exacting detail but also leave massive, glaring omissions in linearity. The poetic realism allows for straightforward shots that morph into abstractions without warning or transition. The Russian woman who intoned the opening lines heads the team of covert operatives who trail Louis interacts with him and appears to be instrumental in securing the old man's new heart, yet she takes on an otherworldly quality. She hangs over Louis like death, or maybe his conscience, finally come home to torment its master. Though she has dialogue and direct contact with other characters, she reminded me of the silent young man outside the apartment complex in Kieslowski's The Decalogue, the spectral observer who looks upon the other characters with grave judgment. Denis' camera can form unconventional yet suggestive pairings, mixing the freckles on the pharmacist's face with the liver spots on Louis' back as the two make love or turning money into both the common denominator among the various locations and also the object that most separates people.* Her camera never sits still, and when it does slow down, it's only to capture the intense inner movement and turmoil behind the characters' eyes.

Even the more natural and real moments of the film have their stretched dimensions. Louis heads to Tahiti to find the son he never knew, but the man wants nothing to do with him. It's possible that the son isn't actually in Tahiti, and even that Louis doesn't have a son at all. Maybe this Tahitian lovechild is just Louis' way of not taking care of the estranged son who definitely exists (the husband of the border guard back in France) A friend from Trebor's past then holds auditions among local men to play the part of Louis' son. The people who come and stand before a panel cannot be actors: they're too shy, too confused by the whole thing, to be extras mugging for their five seconds. But the nature of their auditions is so odd that it turns this bit of documentary into one of the most ephemeral and abstract moments of the whole film.

Furthermore, the use of film history reveals the director's ability to place the questions her film raises within a larger context of cinematic metaphysics. Denis never uses film quotation out of the enthusiasm that marks, say, De Palma or Scorsese's reverence, but she has the same ability to reshape meaning from canon films. A shot of the Russians back around Louis' empty shack hunting vaguely recalls The Rules of the Game, while Denis uses clips from an unfinished film by Paul Gégauff, 1965's Le Reflux, to provide flashback material for Louis' time in Tahiti as a younger man (the clips feature a young Subor). This trick, reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh's flashback tactic in The Limey, recognizes Subor as a distinct entity from his character, suggesting that the actor intrudes upon the character's life and that the complicated pasts of everyone involved should be considered. By admitting that someone else occupies the character, Denis can deepen her questions of the nature of the soul and the sense of profound loneliness that pervades the film. Louis already exists as a heartless man, someone whose immoral past corrupts him until he finally gets a functioning heart, which softens him for a time until his body at last rejects the organ. The split between Subor and Trebor compounds the unalterable course of this hollow man: he has no soul, and if someone else does not possess him, he's even more directionless.

The film, particularly its last, tropics-set act, owes a debt to the work of Paul Gauguin, and L'Intrus unfolds as a post-impressionist, principally synthetist, work. It is a film of lines and colors but no shape until it all the elements come together. Thus, The Intruder always feels as if it's still being assembled to the end, underlined by a minimalist score from frequent collaborator Stuart Staples of Tindersticks that also feels as if it's still in the writing phase. Denis is honest about this construction, revealing her aims in the manner in which she displays the title: she has a flashlight dart wildly over a black screen, revealing portions of the letters that make up the title until the red letters finally glow in full. Then, for a brief moment, she returns to the initial method of showing the word, suggesting that even when we get the full picture, we must still suss out some aspects of the film's makeup. It might explain why the film ends not on the somber, unseen and unremarked finale of Louis' life but on a shot of his neighbor (Béatrice Dalle), a young dog trainer he unsuccessfully attempted to seduce, sledding with her dogs. It's as much of a throwaway as any scene in the film's collage of moods and feelings over concrete images, but it somehow fits even as it raises yet more questions about this dense film I cannot yet hope to answer. However, it's always helpful when films like this make the prospect of repeated study seem so delightful and irresistible.



*Money is the only thing that keeps Louis and his genuine son together back in France -- the son calls his dad a lunatic but pockets the latest conciliatory payment as he does all the rest -- yet Louis' attempt to pay off his "son" in Tahiti leads the local hired to impersonate the mystery man to balk and run away. For Louis, still unaware of the truth behind the young man who visits him in the hospital, this signifies his son rejecting him just as his heart rejects his body.

Steven Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

After the garish, overly frenetic and borderline offensive Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg tried to make amends by producing what was quite possibly his best film to that point, Empire of the Sun. When that also failed to light audiences on fire, Spielberg returned to his adventure franchise to win back the crowd. Given how simple Last Crusade turned out, it's amazing to think that initial ideas, even drafts of the film involved haunted mansions and Scottish ghosts. At last, Spielberg acquiesced to George Lucas' proposal, to have Indy search for the Holy Grail. Oh, and sprinkle in some Nazis while you're at it. There's a good lad.

Of the four Indiana Jones films, Last Crusade may the most inane but also the best embodiment of the escapism the series sought to repackage. Raiders is such a masterpiece that you spend as much time breaking down each immaculate shot as reveling in the overall effect, but Last Crusade is sloppy enough to make it more relatable even as it injects Spielberg's usual themes into a franchise that previously existed to honor the serials of Spielberg and Lucas' youth.

The opening segment, a flashback to Indiana's youth, finds him as a Boy Scout riding horses in Utah. He and a friend stumble upon grave robbers uncovering the Cross of Coronado, causing Indy to swoop in and grab the artifact to place in a museum. After a lengthy chase that involves, for whatever reason, a train carrying circus animals (and some piss-poor animatronics, truth be told), Indy makes his way home, only to be shushed by his father, who wants to hear nothing of his son's adventures. The sheriff comes by and reveals himself to be bought by the thieves, and the head robber, dressed as Indy later will, expresses his admiration for the kid and even gives the boy his fedora. We never see the father, but we get plenty of looks at this man dressed the way our hero will later pattern his iconic outfit. In an instant, Spielberg moves from the silliest moment in any of the Indiana Jones films thus far -- though I am invoking the "chilled monkey brains" exemption -- to something that recalls his more serious aims as a filmmaker, and the sudden move from wide, John Ford-esque vistas and moving shots to static, cramped, uncomfortable moments inside the Jones household communicates how much freer Indy feels when anywhere away from his father.

Back in the present, Indiana, long estranged from his dad, returns to university after finally reclaiming that artifact that got the giant stone ball rolling in Indy's life. As usual, he can barely get through a class before getting the itch to go back in the field, and the verdant, tranquil grounds of the college look odder and more out of place behind Jones than the matte paintings and composite backgrounds that frame Indy's typical actions. So, when an old colleague, Donovan (Julian Glover), stops by to assign Jones a new task, he jumps at the chance. Even better, it concerns the artifact his father devoted his entire life to: the Holy Grail.

A spiritual line runs through all of the Indiana Jones movies, Last Crusade is the first to take anything seriously. Raiders of the Lost Ark only got down to the nitty-gritty of Jewish theology when it directly concerned the ark; everything else focused on the traps of ancient civilizations. Temple of Doom made a fun house roller-coaster of Eastern spirituality, recreating the racist caricature of old serials without ever commenting on it. Yet Christian imagery dominates Last Crusade, from giant stained-glass windows containing clues to specific religious instructions for avoiding booby-traps. Even the father-son dynamic, a conflict between a seemingly all-knowing father and the son who devotes his life to pleasing him, has a Christian undertone.

That Spielberg should take a more serious tack is amusing when you consider that Last Crusade is, by a long shot, the most comedic and lightweight of the four Jones movies. Even the slapstick of Temple had a veneer of dark horror to it, but Last Crusade works best as a comedy on a grand scale, effectively returning to 1941 and finally figuring out how to balance pratfalls with Spielberg's epic canvas. This is only more true when we are finally confronted with Henry Jones, none other than Sean Connery. The mismatch between Ford and Connery, only 12 years older than the actor playing his son (and, more importantly, Scottish), is inherently comedic. But Connery himself appears to have signed on for a comedy, all goofy faces and dry one-liners. The hackneyed dialogue that makes the early parts of film stilted suddenly gives way to an unlikely double act that livens up the proceedings immensely.

Compare the gallows humor of the German being sliced by an airplane propeller in Raiders to the farce of Henry shooting down the plane he and Indy are flying by tearing up the tail. The catacomb crawling with rats just isn't as terrifying as a floor covered in serpents, and the creepy-crawlie sequence here comes with its own punchline when Indy and his latest lover, Dr. Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody), emerge in the middle of a Venetian café. Perhaps the funniest aspect of the film is how befuddled and clumsy Henry is; you begin to question why Indy feels the need to prove himself to this dolt, until the son makes his own slip-ups. When the two are first reunited, Henry beams that his son picked up his research and successfully hid the diary containing all his Grail research from Nazi capture, only to learn immediately that his son brought that diary all the way back to the lion's den. "I should have sent it to the Marx brothers!" Henry spits. Besides, the fact that they both slept with Elsa makes for a surprisingly complex take on Spielberg's usual father-son relationships. I mean, you don't see that in E.T.

The action sequences are not as impressive, nor as numerous, as I remember, as if Spielberg intended it to be a comedy all along. A chase involving a tank is more funny than suspenseful, and the final challenge tests Jones' intellect over his ability. And yet, the film never flags, kept alive by its silliness and genuinely engaging performances from both Ford and Connery, actors not normally known for comedic timing. The Scottish accent Ford puts on in a hilariously misguided attempt to dupe a castle servant slays me, and I love that he can beat up a blimp usher five inches shorter than him, steal his clothes and emerge with a perfectly fitted outfit. It's also nice to see Spielberg questioning just what happens to Indy's archaeology class in his absence, as students swarm his office when he returns begging for their long-overdue midterm grades. Even the young women who fawn over him would rather get their essays back than spend a lovely evening with the good doctor.

The climax is grandiose enough to appeal to everyone but takes the material serious enough to give the franchise an emotional stake for the first time. Wounding Henry gives Indy a concrete reason to go after the grail where previous films have relied solely on Indy wanting an artifact to have it -- Temple, with its subplot of enslaved children, was too murky to effectively create tension. Spielberg ingeniously shoots the immortal knight deep within the cave that holds the cup in ghostly white that clashes with the golden hues of the burning fires and light reflecting off the ostentatious adornments surrounding the true Cup of Christ as decoys, communicating the dark side of eternal life in an instant.

The most significant development in the film, however, is the introduction of a more positive side to Spielberg's usual theme of absent fathers. For the first time, the director opens the possibility to reconciliation. Roy Neary left his family behind to go to space. Elliott's dad remained removed. James finds his way back to his family, but he's too scarred by life in an internment camp to ever readjust. Here, Spielberg slowly comes around: maybe a distant father and a son can reconcile, but so far this can only happen far down the road, after a rotten childhood is set aside. It would be a few years yet before the director would let a child forgive his father.

Winter's Bone

Winter's Bone might be compared to Deliverance, what with its hellish look into the America neglected by everyone fortunate enough to have never stepped into a particularly poor area of the Ozarks. Yet as I looked at its bleak gray skies, stripped trees and barren landscapes, the film that came most often to mind was Threads, the what-if faux-documentary that questioned what nuclear war might mean for the world.

Dirty, broken down objects litter each yard of the decrepit, rotting houses. Meth production and usage is rampant, and high schools appear to function less as preparatory facilities for college than recruiting stations for the military. That raises questions about the fairness of voluntary enlistment, but for those growing up in this situation, a hostile Middle Eastern desert might seem a tropic getaway.

Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) also has dreams of joining the Army to get the $40,000 signing payment and to get the hell away. But when her father, Jessup, goes on the lam, Ree knows she'll never be able to leave, forced to care for her younger siblings and a brain-dead mother. To make matters worse, the local sheriff (Garret Dillahunt) comes 'round to inform Ree that Jessup skipped out on his bail, and if he doesn't show up for his hearing, the bondsman will come and collect the house Jessup put up as collateral.

Winter's Bone unfolds as a mystery, yet the core of the story veers off the path of the usual thriller. When we learn Jessup made meth, the film instantly ceases to be about Ree trying to find out what happened to her dad and simply a story of her looking for the inevitable corpse. Yet it's also not a whodunit: Jessup's brother and Ree's uncle, Teardrop (John Hawkes), knows what will happen if word gets out, and at one point he sternly whispers to Ree that if she ever finds out what happened to Jessup to never tell anyone, not even him. If the grim setting were not macabre enough, Winter's Bone is ultimately the quest of a young woman to find and recover just enough of her father that a forensics lab can identify.

There can be no doubt that director Debra Granik, working from Daniel Woodrell's novel, exaggerates its characters and conditions. It is a work of drama. Yet the film sidesteps the usual garish stereotyping that befalls and grim absurdity of backwoods horror, digging into a serious issue plaguing these economically crippled areas. Ree has an admirable fearlessness, but the deeper she travels into the complicated, deadly web of drug production and insular community, the more her courage becomes a liability.

Avoiding garish, gory displays of violence and cheap scares, Granik and cinematographer Michael McDonough instead create a constant sense of unease, as if the world is slowly collapsing until we suspect time and space might bend and form a noose around this young woman's neck. Not even family is much help to Ree, and everyone she encounters, whether they have anything to hide or not, exudes a threatening aura. The people of this region have aged prematurely: deep wrinkles threaten to make mole people out of the middle-aged. Stringy, oily hair hangs in clumps.

That's what makes Lawrence stand out. Granik doesn't "prettify" her -- Lawrence has the same messy hair as everyone else -- but for all the emotional maturity she conveys, there's a youthfulness to her appearance that no one else shares. Though fit from constant hard work and a few too many missed meals on account of money, Ree still has a lining of baby fat that retains her youth in a way that even her peers do not enjoy. Her friend Gail, already saddled with a baby, lost all her pregnancy weight but looks as if she aged about 10 years from delivery, and while the husband from her shotgun wedding still wears jerseys and plays video games, he simply looks foolish trying to hang on to his teenage years to get away from the responsibility thrust upon him. Previously known for playing the daughter on The Bill Engvall Show, a tidbit already destined for a "before she was big" clip on a future episode of Inside the Actor's Studio, Lawrence turns that program's gentle, pandering Southern stereotypes on their head, getting at the dark side.

Lawrence has enjoyed about as big a wave of critical praise this year as any actor, and she earns every plaudit. She plays Ree as if a put-upon straight (wo)man who hasn't been informed she's in a horror film and not a comedy. Even her body language communicates an exasperated sigh, as if she knows everything she's about to do is ill-advised but to hell with it, anyway. Encountering characters so grotesque and misshapen that they become the mythological beasts in this Greek drama, Ree never flinches, even after she proves that flinching is not an indication of weakness but an important instinct to protect oneself from harm. Only once does she fully break down, and it's in a moment so horrific that to only shed tears is itself a sign of courage. So natural is Lawrence in the role that she can be in the middle of a monologue and interrupt her train of thought to say "Bless you" with concern when her little brother sneezes.

The sociological implications of Winter's Bone are clear, its setting evoking some East European, post-Communist hellhole that never stabilized when it really occurs in a section of the United States that has been neglected for decades. (When an American flag appears in the reflection of a windshield, it seems a cruel, nagging joke.) Yet Granik has the presence of mind to temper what could have been a parade of clichés -- meth heads, pregnant teens, incestuous communities -- into something that eerily taps into the feelings of hopelessness felt even in the affluent cities during this recession. Furthermore, Granik ensures we admire Ree, who at 17 appears more capable of taking on the world than damn near anyone I've met in college (and that absolutely includes myself). If anything, we're meant to bemoan the fact that Ree will never be allowed to move into the bigger world and contribute, which explains why Granik does not build up the Army as a scapegoat or a strawman image of opportunistic feeders. The dark truth running under the narrative is that, if Ree fails to clear the family, social services will take away her siblings. However, if she succeeds in keeping the house, she effectively binds herself to it forever. But Ree never wavers, and it's a good thing too, for you'll need her strength to face the terror she confronts on a daily basis even from the safe distance of artifice.

Paranormal Activity: Since x For

This movie is terrifying. It does not have any violent bloody scene, but it is extremely tense and gripping. It is about a couple who have been haunted by an entity and decide to buy an amateur camera to shoot the paranormal events that usually take place while they are sleeping. The scene is purposefully dark, because it is supposed to be an amateur footage. Critics hated it, but I enjoyed it a lot. This scene is perfect to practice the use of since and for, because it shows times and dates. The scene does not contain any violence at all, my students loved it, but mind your own audience to see if it is an appropriate segment for your group.





I. Talk to a group of students about the following questions. Then share your opinions with the class.



1. Do you believe in paranormal phenomena? Which ones?

2. Do you know anyone who is a psychic? Do you believe in psychics?

3. Have you ever experienced anything that you considered paranormal?

4. Would you like to see the spirit of someone you used to love very much when he (she) was alive? Why (not)?

5. Are you scared of paranormal phenomena? Explain it.



II. Watch the movie segment now. Match the times and dates shown in the movies with the events that took place during the scene.



1. September 17th, 2006

2. October 6th, 2006, 1:34:00 am

3. 1:34:15 am

4. 3:04:42 am

5. 3:04:51 am

6. 3:05:13 am



( ) The other bedroom lights are turned on.

( ) The other bedroom lights are turned off.

( ) They started filming the events.

( ) The couple were sleeping.

( ) The sheets move by themselves.

( ) They wake up.



Answer key: 4,5,1,2,3,6



III. Now complete the blanks of the exercises below with FOR or SINCE, based on the information in exercise II.



1. They have been filming the events ______ September.


2. They have been experiencing paranormal activities _______ at least 19 nights.


3. They had been sleeping _____ a few hours when the sheets moved.


4. The lights in the other bedroom remained on _________ about 10 seconds.


5. When the lights turned off, the couple kept on sleeping ________ more than 2 hours.


6. They had been sleeping ______ 1:34:00 am without noticing anything strange during the night.


7. With the lights on, she said that she felt that someone had been watching her _________ the moment she woke up.


WORKSHEET

Answer key: 1. since - 2. for - 3. for - 4. for - 5. for - 6. since - 7. since

Monterey Pop

D.A. Pennebaker, having already followed Bob Dylan through the artist's whirlwind reinvention (complete with Dylan's ironic take on the whole mad process), should have been prepared to go out and film a gathering of counterculture heroes and fans for a music festival out in Monterey, California. Yet not even he could have adequately foreseen just what the festival would symbolize. Hell, on a basic level, not he nor anyone else could even hope to capture all the great music there for a theatrical release.


The film Monterey Pop condenses three days that shook the world to a scant 79 minutes, a reflection of its original intent to be shown on ABC, a plan that naturally fell apart the second anyone in a suit saw the footage Pennebaker obtained. How could even a ratings-hungry network allow themselves to air this frightening display of youth madness on its section of the broadcast spectrum? If the station wanted to scare people, it could just do a news story on the perils of some vaguely defined social evil starting to enter the public consciousness. It needs rock as a scapegoat. What could ABC hope to accomplish by airing the ultimate explosion of mid-'60s music, a collection of tunes so listenable that even a stuffy old audience would be as excited by the rock as those in attendance?

The occasionally frustrating time limit of Monterey Pop actually works to its advantage in this respect, separating us from the audience by not only truncating the show but playing clips out of sequence, yet also capturing the overwhelming feeling that something changed across these three days. Preceding the actual concert with the defining single of the Haight-Ashbury scene, Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)," playing over images of artists arriving and roadies erecting the equipment. Pennebaker devotes the entire film to performances, not milling about the crowd the way Michael Wadleigh and his arsenal of editors and camera operators did at Woodstock, yet the brief moment before the festival begins provides the snapshot into the mentality for the entire event, even the movement.

Pennebaker interviews a young, attractive woman, a vision of the innocence and naïveté of the hippie movement. With wide, saucer-like eyes, she breathlessly conveys her expectations for the festival. "I think it's gonna be like Easter and Christmas and New Year's and your birthday all in one, you know?" she says in the loopy, sincere voice of the casual drug user, but whatever she might be taking to prepare herself for a trip that covers no spatial distance, she certainly seems to know that they're all about to go somewhere. From her giggly, eager talking head comes McKenzie's song over the montage, then come the songs.

I long ago discovered I am not the holdout minority on this opinion, but I must confess: I always found the music at Monterey Pop to be vastly superior to that of Woodstock. Culturally, Woodstock was of course the apotheosis, the pinnacle of the hippie movement and its ultimate display of social relevance. Yet today one can more clearly see the cracks forming in the dike, portending the flood unleashed at Altamont. Monterey, however, is where the secret got out, where the various rivers of protest and social revolution converged into the same mouth. Those waters may have overflown later, but everything's just groovy here, baby.

That is not to say that everyone who played at Monterey was good. Outtakes reveal a number of groups so meandering and zoned-out that they border on the infuriating. Some group called The Blues Project commits two unforgivable sins: engaging in an endless drum solo and ruining the electric flute. Speaking as someone who loves the flute and has a close friends who is amazing at it, the latter was especially disheartening. But this is confined to the outtakes; Pennebaker may have given a number of acts the short end of the stick, but he knew exactly what to leave in and how to arrange it to maximize flow.

Pennebaker eases us into the concert by started at the end. Mamas and Papas, who sound a bit dated in their druggy shuffle before settling into the irresistible groove of "California Dreamin,'" a song as fresh now as it was then. Pennebaker jumps from the last performance of the festival night back Saturday morning to capture Canned Heat's frenetic take on the blues standard "Rollin' and Tumblin,'" a version that's a bit too unhinged to properly harness that song's fierce riff -- even I, a consummate anti-fan of Eric Clapton, must say that Cream perfectly captured it and shame most who try to put their own spin on it. Cut back to Friday night for Simon and Garfunkel, a sly move by the director to let the mood rise and fall instead of front-loading the film with Friday's more laid-back material.

For the most part, however, most of Monterey Pop is an extended crescendo. Hugh Masekela's acid jazz/Afrobeat is the first example of the organizers' admirable desire to spotlight more than just the San Francisco scene. Masekela's trumpet, played over the same experimental collage of colors and dissolving "skins," sounds ahead of the curve Miles Davis was establishing for jazz fusion even though Masekela and his band play traditional instruments and not electronic devices. He doesn't offer the audience any chance to slowly acquaint themselves with a style they've never heard, opening with African screams over a beat that begins at a frantic pace all will only spiral further into madness from there. Ironically, his is the first outright electric performance, pushing two traditional sounds -- jazz and African music -- to propulsive relevance. Masekela isn't the only world music artist to appear at the festival, and it's strange to think that they perhaps tap into the underlying atmosphere of musical liberation and psychedelic frenzy better than almost any of the Western pop acts there specifically catering to that sound. Just consider how well the film flows from Masekela to one of the more brilliantly far-out San Francisco bands, Jefferson Airplane. It's one of the smoothest transitions in the film, but Pennebaker must also move from the Airplane's incendiary "High Flyin' Bird" and "Today" to Big Brother & the Holding Company's "Ball 'n Chain" just to capture the full range of passion and aesthetic in the South African trumpeter's music.

By the time The Who take the stage, oh forget it. There's no better indication of the goodies left to come than the fact neither the concert nor the film ends with their performance. Justifiably perched near or at the top of any list of the greatest live performers (generally forming a trinity with James Brown and Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band), The Who certainly come to play, thundering through "My Generation" before demolishing their equipment. That's not unusual for the band, of course, but you get the feeling they tore up their stuff out of the frustration of knowing they'd been beat. For during the planning of the schedule, Pete Townshend noticed the name of another performer, one upstart ex-pat returning to his homeland after honing his craft in England, and refused to go on after the guitarist. A coin flip decided the matter, and Townshend had to settle for being the opening act of James Marshall Hendrix. The fact that The Who were scared of letting the Jimi Hendrix Experience go on after them, but in retrospect it might have been even more damaging had Hendrix gone on first. Either way, while The Who broke into American stardom at last through this performance, it was Hendrix more than anyone who made his name at the festival, and his combination of a bold new sound and an outlandish stage presence condensed everything about the counterculture into one unstoppable act.

Pennebaker would wisely go back and put Jimi's entire set on video at a later date, but even with his sole contribution of "Wild Thing," Hendrix invents the modern guitar, coalesces a scene into one unified and beautifully squall and unleashes the sexuality of rock music. Blowing The Who out of the water is just the cherry on top. Hendrix combines the best aspects of the other acts, fusing Jefferson Airplane's otherness, Joplin's searing emotion (hers delivered through her voice, his through the guitar), Otis Redding's explosive R&B and The Who's anger. He also lays down the blueprint for playing the rock guitar, that is to play it as if an extension of the penis. But Hendrix molds that style into something orgasmic and shared, not a masturbatory exercise. When he sets his guitar on fire at the end and genuflects over his god/demon at it screeches death throes through its pickups, Hendrix says more about sexual liberation than any sociopolitical tract.

Of course, the hilarity of Townshend's fears over Hendrix showing him up are moot in Pennebaker's sequencing, because he rearranges the appearances to let two other show-stoppers come after: Otis Redding, the King of Soul, steps out for the first time before a predominantly white crowd, and if the outdoor festival had a roof, he'd have blown it off the sucker. One of the great tragedies of Monterey was that no Motown artists were featured thanks to a moratorium by the label's founder, Berry Gordy, who made as many terrible decisions as brilliant ones (this was one of the former). Redding, favored son of Stax/Volt, appears to pick up the slack left by the omission of so many R&B artists, and while The Who may usually deserve the term "maximum R&B," the energy Redding brings to Monterey leaves Townshend and co. in the dust. If Hendrix knocks you on your ass with his ability, Redding makes it impossible to sit down. He didn't have nearly the dancing talent as James Brown, but that hardly matters, as it is Redding's goal to make you dance, not him.

Bounding out on the stage launching into "Shake" without hesitation, Redding couldn't look more out of place. Standing in front of a white, middle-class audience with that same trippy film running behind him that fit so well with, say, Jefferson Airplane, it's a fish out of water moment that could have derailed another artist. By the end of "Shake," no one watching can deny that he belongs there, or at least no one would wish to be denied the potency of amped-up soul. Even the cameramen can't stop moving along to the groove. Redding himself justifies being at the event with a bit of banter preceding his next number: "You're the love crowd, right?" he teases the hippies. "We all love each other don't we?" Then he launches into his simmering, pleading "I've Been Loving You Too Long," a piece as maddening and frothing in its despairing seduction as Brown's "Please Please Please." Doubling over as if in agony, Redding squeezes out each syllable in dry sobs until you just can't take it anymore.

In Redding's full set, also released by Pennebaker to complement Hendrix's show, the energy is even higher, moving into a fiery version of "Satisfaction" and ending with a magnificent rendition of "Try a Little Tenderness" that should have made all the other performers grateful no one else had to go on Saturday night. The overlapping of the montage of young women around the festival on top of the music is the clearest demonstration of how unprepared everyone was for Redding's set; shoved at the end of Saturday's roster as the act few in attendance would know, Redding took to the stage as the film crew had already shot their stock for the various hippie acts that day. One can only imagine the terror with which Pennebaker and co. tore up their supplies looking for extra stock when Otis blew up the festival. When he jubilantly yells "I got to go, y'all!" at the end of his set, I've let a pained "No!" escape my lips more than once.

The final performer in the film's sequencing, Ravi Shankar, actually played on Sunday morning, before The Who, Hendrix and The Mamas and the Papas brought the proceedings to a close that night. Shankar gets 18 minutes, an eternity compared to the one or two singles afforded to the pop bands but not so gargantuan when one considers his set ran for nearly four hours. Shankar, invited at the insistence of his disciple, George Harrison, is more out of place than either Masekela or Redding. Yet his droning sitar instantly fits the psychedelic mood of the Summer of Love, and if the entire concert as staged by Pennebaker seems one long crescendo, then Shankar is the perfect embodiment of that approach. His raga builds and builds, layering drones and fast runs until you think it cannot possibly get louder or faster, then it does. With Shankar flanked only by Kamala Chakravarty on the droning tambura and longtime collaborator Alla Rakha on the tabla, the trio fill the stadium and have everyone in attendance staring in awe -- one of the best shots in the film is Hendrix looking on with reverence as Shankar blisters his fingers. Shankar's music, though drawing upon centuries-old classical forms, somehow feels as if it were created to move the sound of the '60s forward, a building to emotional catharsis that draws out for minutes, a prolonged orgasm that feels at least as daring as anything cooked up by these bands to fight the Establishment, and in some ways more so. The crowd absolutely loses it when Shankar cuts off, and it's hard not to leap to your feet as well, transformed by this most spiritual of music.

The film of Woodstock would spend more time with the people, more interested in what they believed and how they perceived the world. By reducing crowd interaction to a bare minimum, Pennebaker puts all the emphasis on the music, not what it symbolizes. The crowd exists mainly for reaction shots in his mind, montages of heads slowly bobbing along to the more psychedelic acts or going crazy for the energetic bands. As such, Monterey Pop has held up as well as the music it spotlights, undated by the absurdity of the hippie worldview and some of the more unbearable acts that can be plainly seen in outtakes. Perhaps something can be read in the fact that the '60s plays best in this 80-minute special, nearly 1/4 of which belongs to an artist removed from American hippie-dom by half a planet, but Monterey Pop is as hopeful as Woodstock without that faint air of fate hanging over it. Pennebaker had already documented one of the major artistic shifts of '60s pop, and it's funny how Don't Look Back feels more epic than this. Maybe that's because he'd finally gotten into the music himself, and, like us, he just wants to sit back and enjoy the tunes.

White Material

White Material is what Apocalypse Now might have been like if it were entirely from the perspective from the French plantation owners. They reside on the land of their fathers, aware of the world crumbling around them but steadfast in their desire to remain on what they feel is rightfully their property. When someone points out the futility of the situation, they spit at the idea of surrender.

The same holds true for Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), a coffee plantation owner. Claire Denis opens her film without any establishment of Maria's plantation and the social structure of the unnamed African country in which she lives. Instead, White Material opens as the country plunges into civil war, the camera gliding over horrific sights such as burning buildings and bodies laying in a line as if even a mass grave is too good for them. Child soldiers, government troops and marauding rebels/pirates scour the landscape.

At the center of them is Maria, who insists upon seeing her crop through to harvest. A helicopter reminiscent of the last chopper out of 'Nam circles over her, begging her to get out while she can. This is the first we've seen the helicopter, but the man with the megaphone says this is his last warning. To drive the point home, he throws down some survival kits as a final measure, the tiny, rectangular packages dropping like massive clumps of volcanic ash on a dusty road that suddenly feels even more arid and desolate. With a vague smirk, Maria continues on home.

Shot mostly with hand-held cameras on grainy stock, White Material initially gives off a hint of realism until Denis begins to twist and bend that aesthetic into her usual, more poetic style. There can be no mistake of the underlying politics of the film -- a vicious attack on European arrogance and privilege concerning Africa and other developing areas of the world -- but the loose plot allows it to broadcast its pedantic message while fleshing it out more subtly through the delicacies and nuance of Huppert's performance.

Saddled with a husband, André, (Christopher Lambert) who attempts to sell the plantation behind Maria's back to "save her from herself" and a feckless son (Manuel, played by Nicolas Duvauchelle) who uses the closing of the schools by rebels as an excuse to sleep in all day, Maria finds herself not only separated from an increasingly hostile indigenous population but from her own family. The only person she enjoys any relationship with is The Boxer (Issach de Bankolé), a rebel leader who hides out on the plantation to recover from a gut wound. Their bond, never particularly spoken, nor even communicate through body language -- both Huppert and de Bankolé are too rigid in their facial expression to let anything but strength radiate from them -- yet they enjoy the most complex relationship in the movie by virtue of one being a rebel seeking to tear down the other's way of life.

Wearing lightly colored clothes that make Huppert's fair skin seem even whiter, Maria looks almost alien among the African people. However, like those plantation owners in the long cut of Apocalypse Now, Maria sees no other option for herself. But in that fatalism lies a grim sense of Eurocentric pride. Huppert, with that stiff upper lip that would have served her well had she been born across the Channel, walks with a steely resolve and never backs down. When a band of rebels stop her truck and demand $100 to pass, she stares down their guns and calmly reminds the young men that she knows their parents as if she caught them trying to T.P. her house. By staying, Maria can look down upon the whites (and even some natives) who flee, but when she heads out to replace her vacated help with some more workers like an American heading to the nearest Home Depot to solicit manual labor, we see through her hypocrisy and realize that she will never be a true native of the country.

Maria says she does not wish to leave for France because she will grow soft and complacent. It's a defiantly feminist moment, and one that darkly suggests that a chaotic situation such as this is the only place where a woman can handle something as big as a plantation by herself. Yet the comforts of her own home far outstrip those enjoyed by poor Africans, and her attitude, delivered with a conviction that might signal her as heroic in another movie, here seems predatory. Along with that vile grin she gives the warning helicopter, this downplayed moment reveals the beast within, a woman who might actually get off on civil war because it allows her to feel superior. She continues to believe that persevering will win the respect of the natives, but they will never see her as one of them. Nothing exemplifies this more than José, the son of Maria's black ex-husband. Implicitly, Maria sees José as proof that she belongs in Africa and dotes upon him, but when she goes to collect him from school she reveals that she has no blood relation to José, nor any bond through marriage now that she and the boy's dad are divorced. She simply appropriates him the way she does everything else; hell, she even asks the boy to help in the field. When he later helps with the mounting mischief around the plantation, it becomes inescapably clear that no one wants Maria to stay.

Just as 35 Shots of Rum made up for its elliptical narrative by anchoring the film in locations, so too do recurring images form the tether that roots us to White Material. André drops his gold lighter, which child rebels pick up and show to The Boxer. The lighter is asinine, expensive and gauche, and it matches the eyesore that is the Vial plantation, parts of which are painted in awful golden-yellow. A gate with a chain and lock is meant to keep the plantation safe, but the guard ran off with the key leaving the padlock undone. Still, people continue to make as if securing the gate, though there are so many holes in the surrounding fence that even the show of pretending the gate works is a waste of time. Hand-held radios broadcast agitprop from a rebel presenter, a presenter who labels all Europeans "white material" and rails against the plantation owners. However, he also has a playful side, and at one point he even stops railing and plays music, bobbing along to the beat in his secret studio. When the official military finds him, they assure the airwaves that everything is under control, only to deliver a message more fearsome than anything the rebel broadcast. (This is foretold earlier in the film when a soldier acts as if Maria's cooperation in paying rebels' tributes makes her worse than the bandits.)

Already a political screed and a character study, White Material also morphs into a horror film through Denis' direction and Yves Cape's cinematography. The use of child soldiers dispenses with the more sensational aspects of City of God to capture the full terror of someone too young to have fully developed empathy being given authority to decide on the lives of others. I've always balked at the idea that children are the portraits of innocence, as that lack of developed empathy makes them selfish, and that romanticized innocence is but a sign that social conditioning and decorum have not been instilled. To see them simply appear on hills in beautifully scary shots engenders a gripping feel, a sense of unstoppable corruption and unyielding bloodlust. So mad are these children that they in turn drive the son, Manuel, to insanity when they beset the plantation and torture the young man with a disturbing mixture of premature hardness and a warped form of childhood playtime.

If White Material is occasionally too cynical and defeatist for its own good, the layers present in Huppert's performance and Denis' politics create a tone poem out of didacticism. One can easily draw parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan from the movie, seeing as how the white person continues to gently exploit indigenous people while hypocritically viewing herself as an equal (but an equal who's better than others), but the core theme of the film is the danger of pride in all its forms. Maria may indeed be too tough for France, but this unspecified country is certainly tougher than her, and the land itself appears to reject her like an immune system to a foreign contaminant. The final moments reveal that White Material's first shots were technically its last, only cementing the sense of inevitability to the destruction that awaits these characters. So set in stone is Maria's fate that when she at last breaks down, I did not react in shock so much as question what took her so long to see this coming.