Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine, 2011)

Getting the chance to sleep for a few days on Paddy Considine's feature debut Tyrannosaur didn't do the film any favors. While I still felt it distanced itself somewhat from the limited constraints of the miserable kitchen sink genre in which it operates, the film doesn't do enough to break from the traditions it seeks to transcend. Too often, it just feels like horror overload, and not even the remarkable performances from its three principal players can fully alleviate the near-tedium of its unrelenting atrocity. Nevertheless, the thread of affirmation that runs through all but the most savage moments redeems the film, and I look forward to seeing where Considine goes next.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood, 2011)

J. Edgar is a film about a legend who cared only for respect, made by a man who seems to care only for awards. Clint Eastwood, the most shameless Oscar-baiter currently working, has nothing to say about J. Edgar Hoover, infamous founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nor does he even try to tell his deflated narrative well. This is painting-by-numbers biopic, not even its limp "twist" subverting its schematic use of flashbacks and theme-articulating moments in twilight years. Judging from the mixed reception J. Edgar received, however, Eastwood's increasingly stale approach might finally be rubbing critics the wrong way.

Written by Dustin Lance Black, J. Edgar lacks the passion the writer brought to his script for Milk. One can understand his more ambiguous feelings toward Hoover, but Black finds himself caught between sympathy for the man and clearly critical thoughts on his seedier tactics, and his own mixed thoughts inform the film's presentation of its protagonist. If you think Hoover's brand of "keeping us safe" justice is something this country could use again, you'll be disappointed by its depictions of Hoover's egomaniacal shadow takeover of government. If you see Hoover as the precursor to Patriot Act politics of paranoia and fear, you'll hate its attempts to make an unpleasant man sympathetic. But don't make the mistake of thinking this lack of extremes means that Hoover emerges a rounded, complex human being. Instead, he serves as a repository for lazy screenwriting summaries of character, and Eastwood, famously lazy when it comes to fixing the drafts he's given, does nothing to alleviate the hollow revelations of J. Edgar's character.

One could argue that, given this is a film about Hoover trying to erect his own deluded self-image as legion, the fact that no one in this film never looks his or her intended age is a wry visual commentary. But that ignores Eastwood's status as a no-nonsense workman, and one glimpse at Leonardo DiCaprio earnestly trying to look 24 dispels any notion of play. To fit DiCaprio's middle age, Eastwood has to overemphasize his grim, joyless color palette even during Hoover's ascendancy. The director's modern output has generally been sapped of its pigment, but J. Edgar takes the desaturation to absurd new lows. Everything here looks rubbed down with ash, with such errant use of shadow that evocative use of shadow takes a back seat to mere incoherence.

Nevertheless, DiCaprio gives it his all as Hoover, valiantly working against a leaden script and (in Hoover's old age) cocooning latex makeup in a futile search for complexity. Two things set Hoover's tongue uncontrollably wagging: sex and justice. The former makes him stammer with nervosa (even revulsion), the latter with unchecked excitement at the prospect of fighting enemies. When the lad rushes to the scene of an anarchist bombing on the attorney general in 1919, his determination masks a sense of relieved satisfaction, his paranoid fears of radicals finally confirmed. DiCaprio never delves into the depths of Hoover's fears and vendettas, but he nearly captures the contradictions of the G-man, finding the personality link between the fearlessness of walking into the Oval Office every few years to blackmail a new president and the quivering shyness that comes with being asked for an innocent dance.

DiCaprio certainly escapes the tedium of Black's script with more aplomb than any of the other principal cast. Naomi Watts arrives early as Helen Gantry, the secretary who served under Hoover nearly all of his professional life, but she has nothing to do except follow orders with only the rarest suggestion of unease, which barely registers at the level of seeing someone put a drink on a table without a coaster. Poor Armie Hammer has it worst of all. Playing Hoover's second-in-command (and rumored lover) Clyde Tolson, Hammer does not have the luxury of portraying a human being. As a strapping young lad, he is the projection of Hoover's clear homosexual fantasies: a clean-cut, well-tailored man who makes catty comments about fashion and will also make the first move Edgar is too terrified to pull. As an aged, disillusioned agent, Hammer sports some of the most hysterically bad makeup it's impossible not to feel sorry for him. He looks as if someone used his face to scrape the spackle off a putty knife, latex flesh hanging off him in tumorous clumps.

But damn it, Edgar still loves him, and anyone who takes this film as remotely true to Hoover's life will be flummoxed as to how the man could intimidate anyone with his career-killing secret so plainly visible. The relationship of the two men is chaste, but Black still devotes huge portions of the film to the sexual tension between the two men, even as he isolates it from relevance to the rest of the story. He does not, for example, even float the idea that Hoover's latent homosexuality might have been a motivating force in his obsessive quest for shameful dirt on others. And this is from Black, who had no trouble whatsoever suggesting that such self-loathing was not merely a factor but the factor in Dan White's assassination of Harvey Milk. Instead, we are treated to the almost comical sight of Hoover's mother (Judi Dench), a domineering wench who speaks solely in dolorous thuds of guilt inducement. She even addresses her son's all-but-open sexuality by darkly reminding him of a cross-dresser in their town they called a "daffodil," a word said with hilariously misplaced gravity.

The mother becomes just one more haphazardly inserted element in the film's incessant leaps between desperate grabs for thematic purpose. An amusing split between the director's and writer's age sensibilities come into play here highlights the problem: Eastwood thinks he's making Citizen Kane, the story of how a man's grasp on the American Dream later becomes a chokehold that forces out the grotesquerie of what he loves. Black, on the other hand, is looking to one of that film's clearest progeny, The Social Network, which works on a smaller scale yet aims even higher, seeking to precede Kane by showing how such creation myths as the American Dream begin. J. Edgar thus tries to be both, but in treating Hoover as the product of his own creation myth, the film betrays an unwillingness to either straighten out the inconsistencies in vision or to pursue this ouroboric theme to its ambitious conclusion.

As such, J. Edgar is but the latest film to embody the detached laconicism of Eastwood's actor persona. For all his formal chops, Eastwood seems increasingly indifferent to the quality of his own work even as almost everything he does feels cynically calculated to get some tacky statue. His last film, the even more dismal Hereafter, boasted some truly awful moments of crystallized directorial laziness, embarrassingly simple mistakes a man of Eastwood's stature and age should not have made. J. Edgar has one such moment in a flashback to a horse race where Edgar and Clyde bonded, or at least, that's intended to be the focus of the shot. My attention was directed to what the camera itself was focused on, which is to say, the railing in front of every human being in the shot. This is a blunder I expect a sandals-and-black-socks-wearing father with a Flip cam shooting the family vacation to make, not Eastwood and his cinematographer Tom Stern. And for the love of God, will someone stop letting him make his own scores? His wretchedly plodding piano notes sound less like an evocation of Hoover's inner pain than a drunk slowly pounding the same four keys in a stupor.

Hereafter was spectacularly bad, but J. Edgar feels like every issue I've had with late-career Eastwood—weak script, formalism so stiff it's banal, an overinflated sense of importance—put into one film. The best I can say for it is that, while taking everything else from Changeling, at least the movie didn't port over that film's overwrought melodrama. But I might have actually liked some more weeping and shrieking, if only to wake up the audience. As the story of a man's life, J. Edgar fails miserably. As a thematic statement on how a man chased the idea of America with such force that he actually corrupted the very ideal he wished to embody, it fares even worse. Sporting the worst framing device since Saving Private Ryan, turgid cinematography, and actors left without a clue how to progress, J. Edgar proves so dull one cannot even say it spins its wheels. Hell, it doesn't even shift out of park.

Spirit - Stallion of the Cimarron: Onomatopoeia

Teaching figures of speech are occasionally necessary. This is a fun way to practice identifying onomatopoeia. REMEMBER:

Onomatopoeia is a figure of speech that employs a word, or occasionally, a grouping of words, that imitates, echoes, or suggests the object it is describing, such as "bang", "click", "fizz", "hush" or "buzz", or animal noises such as "moo", "quack" or "meow".

I. Match the animals or things below and the onomatopoeia you believe the sound they make suggests. There may be more than only one matching for each of the items. Try to figure out the "sound" the verbs may have to identify the corresponding noun.




1. Wind

2. River

3. Wings

4. Bird

5. Eagle

6. Geyser





( ) rumble

( ) swoosh

( ) flutter

( ) screech

( ) chirp

( ) spout

( ) blow








II. Watch the movie segment and check your answers:











WORKSHEET

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - STALLION SPIRIT OF THE CIMARRON




Answer Key:


river: rumble

wings: swoosh, flutter

eagle: screech

bird: chirp

geyser: spout

wind: blow

bird: chirp

The Mill and the Cross (Lech Majewski, 2011)

I cannot say that The Mill and the Cross fully captivated me, for I confess I was lost during some stretches of its plotless reverie. Nevertheless, at no point did Lech Majewski's film fail to fascinate me. As a work of criticism that explicates Bruegel's painting The Way to Calvary, it reminds me of some of Godard's most structuralist early-'70s work, breaking down and giving voice to each component of the composition. As an experiment, its striking use of digital animation to blur the line between reality and painted backgrounds makes for beautifully unique CGI as that technology grows increasingly stale.

Majewski inhabits Bruegel's painting as the artist (played by Rutger Hauer) conceives of the opus. Offering no grounding element for the audience, the director launches immediately into a reality-blurring recreation not only of the painting but the historical context around it. Juxtaposing Bruegel's conception of the painting with the lives of the people it depicts, The Mill and the Cross blends its aesthetic critique with a historical one, making a subtle but unmistakable case for the importance of art as a reflection of culture even as it carves out new paths for that culture to follow.

The film can be impenetrable for those not familiar with the painting, so a quick word on that. Bruegel's Calvary recasts the Passion in contemporary Flanders, then under the rule (and persecution) of Spain, which acquired the county after the Eighty Years' War. Reacting to the wave of Protestant conversion that swept Flanders, the Catholic Philip II enacted a brutal repression of the Flemish with the approval of the Inquisition. Bruegel's painting, at its most basic level, recasts the Spanish (and, by extension, the Catholic Church) as the pharisaical force quelling a radical, but peaceful and loving, new religion.

But it is about so much more that, as we learn from Bruegel's discussions with the art collector and investor who gives the artist patronage. Hauer, hunched over his sketches, eyes darting up to get another survey of the land, speaks with all the intensity he brings to his other roles. Yet he speaks only of the painting and of the meaning of each aspect of it. Drawing lines to the focal point of the cross he places in the middle distance, Bruegel assigns symbolic and thematic meaning for everything around that center. The city seen in the top life comes to represent life; the circle of spectators already waiting for the execution at Calvary stand for death.

Majewski then fleshes out the elements of the painting even more as he slips into the tacit, unforgiving lives of the people seen in each aspect of the arrangement. We see the "tree of death" erected when Spanish guards capture a man and beat him to death, tying him to a wheel that they then hoist on a giant pole for the sport of crows. The woman playing the role of the Virgin Mary (Charlotte Rampling) whispers in voiceover about her doomed son, Rampling's impassive face quivering from the effort of holding back her grief. Then there's the miller residing in that precariously perched mill overlooking the painting; even before Bruegel clarifies the man's role in his painting, the miller resembles God in his silence and food-giving occupation.

Over time, the lives of the people in the painting bleed into the "reality" of Bruegel's present, and eventually everything sublimates into the artist's subjective perception, which places those painted backgrounds into the open air of the countryside and forces the bourgeois collector into emotional involvement with the Christ figure he comes to mourn. In the film's most incredible scene, Bruegel signals to the overlooking miller, who halts the Earth with a wave, Bruegel's own creation now offering divine inspiration for the painter. It's a beautiful visual statement on how the artist views the world, as well as the way that reality and imagination combine.

Granted, it can be hard to follow the film at times as it drifts between the world within the painting and without. Those who found The Tree of Life confusing would likely explode at this film's plotless movement. But Majewski's direction makes for a fascinating work of art-as-critique, exploring The Way to Calvary as not merely a picture but a crystallized moment. Obtuse as it can be, The Mill and the Cross is an excellent way to introduce people to the concept of analytical criticism, of viewing a work of art as more than a surface-element recreation and analyzing its content, its form, and its context. As I walked out of the theater, I heard no fewer than four people say something to the effect of, "Well, it looked pretty but that story was awful!" Judging from that, we could use a few more films teaching us about what truly goes into crafting a piece of art.

Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2011)

For a film that can be so smart, Incendies sure does suffer from some amateurish mistakes. A mystery concerning the unraveling of two twins' lives in the wake of their mother's death, Denis Villeneuve's film splits its focus between past and present as we track the family tree from the Middle East to Québec. Fundamentally, however, this has the effect of not simply either showing or telling the audience the importance of the mother's life and the depth of her secrets but doing both. Essentially, the audience gets every key piece of information twice, if not more so; Villeneuve presents the final twist in at least four different ways, draining the moment of its impact.

The story begins in Québec, with Simon and Jeanne Marwan (Maxim Gaudette and Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) meeting with their late mother's notary (and former boss) as he reads the will. The man calmly reads out the woman's unorthodox wishes, which ask the children to seek out the father they thought dead and the brother they did not know existed. Simon, petulant and nursing a clear resentment for his mother, wants no part of this ridiculous goose chase and leaves his more amenable sister to track down her mother's past in a fictionalized stand-in for Lebanon during its civil war. What Jeanne finds will upend her and her brother's lives.

Villeneuve and cinematographer André Turpin film Incendies with the crisp, almost brittle texture that informs desert-set films these days. Flashbacks place the mother, Nawal (Lubna Azabal), amid build-ups of armies and militias, the wide, jagged space of rural and rocky areas offering so few places to hide from any number of roving bands who each have their own special reason to kill whomever they stop. Villeneuve arranges haunting shots of static atrocity, from still-smoldering ruins of bombed orphanages to a bus filled with murdered passengers set on fire by extremist Christians.

But the film's real horrors are of a more personal nature. The film moves from a flashback of the mother just before her death to the first glimpse of her early life, and the first thing we see is Nawal's family murdering her Palestinian refugee for getting her pregnant. The brothers nearly kill her as well for shaming the good Christian name of the family, and even though the grandmother spares the young woman from death, she too disparages and attacks Nawal, banishing her after the baby is delivered and taken away from the family. This proves one of the less disgusting tragedies to befall the poor woman, so ignored by the children who do not remotely understand her story.

Incendies works best when it remains firmly with Nawal, patiently absorbing her growth from intelligent but naïve college girl to embittered warrior fighting against her own Christian sect to express her hatred for their actions. Azabal routinely finds untapped reservoirs of strength, her eyes turning ever more steely and her whole body coiling like a caged animal looking for an impossible escape. Nawal's indefatigable resolve in the past only makes her catatonic death in the present all the more mysterious and unsettling. And while the narrative requires the film to keep returning to the children, these constant oscillations hurt the film for distracting from Azabal's intense performance.

They also bring up the aforementioned repetition between exposition and demonstration. We are told in the present of Nawal's torture in a political prison, only to be shown it in the subsequent scene. Alternately, visual clues alert the audience to a revelation minutes before Villeneuve painstakingly makes them clear in dialogue as if he expected no one to fully put it all together until a character openly addressed the issue in dialogue. I can't tell if Villeneuve doesn't realize the dramatic error he's committing or if he just has that little faith in the audience. Either way, the disturbing truth underneath this dysfunctional family mystery loses all of its stomach-churning implications through its constant restatement.

Not that it's a particularly resonant truth, at least outside providing an initial gut reaction. In many ways, Incendies reminded me of Park Chan-wook's Oldboy as played for drama, not thrills. This is not merely for the way in which the film springs a perverse reveal but in the manner it surprisingly serves as a kind of revenge movie. Rather than giving any insight on the Lebanese Civil War or even a deeper understanding of its characters, Incendies is fundamentally a mechanical exercise that cares only for its shocking but meaningless twist. It's a shame, for the film boasts many fine elements, from its solid pacing (even taking into account the overlap that should have been trimmed) to Azabal's fantastic work. For a film that broaches the rarely filmed subject matter of the Middle East's entrenched sectarian violence—as opposed to its oversimplification of religious extremism—Incendies proves frustratingly conventional, casting aside its moments of depth to pursue its myopic narrative to its conclusion. I'm sure I'd have heard gasps from an audience had I seen Incendies in a theater, but I was more engaged gasping at the real horrors of war than the ludicrous development that shoves that conflict aside.

Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within (José Padilha, 2011)

I hated the first Elite Squad so much I could barely deign to give it a capsule review. The sequel, which initially seems like more of the same, thankfully redeems itself after the first act and makes this franchise at least interesting, if still deeply flawed aesthetically and morally. In moving away from its fascism, it now has the problem oscillating haphazardly between reactionary politics and more liberal rumination. It's still clumsy, but at least you can stomach it.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011)

[Warning—contains spoilers]

I can think of no useful way to break down Pedro Almodóvar's stunningly transgressive The Skin I Live In without using spoilers. Like Vertigo, The Skin I Live In features a twist that changes the entirety of the film's meaning, not simply on a cheap narrative level but the thematic subtext itself. Also like Vertigo, Almodóvar's film deliberately divulges its secret with an entire act to go, necessitating a discussion of that upheaval to truly unpack the film's offerings.

The Skin I Live In is a horror film in which everyone, on some level, is a monster. Some behave monstrously, while others see themselves as creatures. The only real distinction between the monsters is gender, which becomes the crux of the entire story. Almodóvar's film is remarkable for many reasons—the outlandish plot; its enticing blend of florid, rustic and aseptic color palettes; the ever-thickening atmosphere—but none more so than its ingenious, audacious, incisive commentary of gender identity.

The director wastes no time shaking up the audience. He introduces us to Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), a skilled surgeon working on "transgenesis," experimenting on human DNA to improve the species. In his house he keeps a woman, Vera (Elena Anaya), whom he locks in an upstairs room and denies her any sharp objects. Clad in a flesh-toned body stocking, Vera looks like an animated medical textbook drawing, anatomically correct but blank. Her presence disturbs the tranquility of Ledgard's villa, an offsetting feeling only exacerbated by the surgery clinic the doctor built on the grounds that resembles the secret lab of a mad scientist (which it is). These touches disrupt the film before it has truly begun, and things only get worse from here.

We learn that Ledgard, inspired by the suicide of his wife after a car accident left her horribly scarred, is trying to create a form of human skin resistant to burns. He tests this new flesh on Vera, and Almodóvar stresses her guinea-pig state with a beautiful, dreamy, but horrific fade from a headless medical dummy with lines marked for patches of skin to Vera lying in the same chair with the same lines marked on her. Almodóvar, along with cinematographer José Louis Alcaine, never oversells the sadism of these scenes, instead creating a lush but eerie feeling that fits with the melodramatic flourishes of revenge that slowly filter into the film, matching two dissimilar patterns along the same beat.

That oneiric approach informs even the twist, revealed through a flashback clearly rooted in Vera's perspective. While she sleeps, we see in her dreams not the woman but a young man, Vicente, a cocksure, self-consciously masculine boy who preens like a '50s greaser. Perhaps compensating for working as a seamster in his mother's shop, he hits on the lesbian clerk and later rides out to a wedding clearly looking to pick up a girl. He succeeds, chatting up Ledgard's daughter and taking her out to the garden to get some action. But his aggressive come-ons go too far, and the already shaken Norma goes completely insane and eventually kills herself. Ledgard, now wholly insane, kidnaps the boy and, as we see through a series of surgeries, turns him into Vera.

Does the reveal truly count as a twist, though? In a narrative sense, absolutely; it reconfigures the character dynamics and plunges the film into even darker territory. But it's hardly a twist the way we think of it, with a sudden reveal calculated to send the audience reeling. Anyone paying attention will put together the truth a few minutes into the extended flashback, but that in no way spoils the mood. The truth underneath The Skin I Live In is shocking, but Almodóvar does not simply drop it on the audience, instead elongating the jolt into the same sustained, sinking feeling that permeates the whole film. Almodóvar, having refined his flourishes over the years, is one of the few people who can cross as many boundaries as he does while still displaying a clear amount of restraint.

Furthermore, by not staging this as a quick reveal, Almodóvar gives the audience time to rethink the entire film to that point and what follows, which allows for a deep consideration of gender politics. We've already seen how gender affects the type of monstrosity shown in this film: Ledgard cages Vera, watches her on surveillance monitors, and has his way with her when he pleases. Contrast that active villainy to the wife, whom we see post-accident in flashback. Scarred beyond all recognition, she recoils when she finally sees her reflection and cannot bear to live. Where Ledgard hides his monstrosity beneath a handsome and soft-spoken veneer, the wife sees herself as a hideous beast.

Vicente/Vera bridges the split and clarifies the commentary. Vicente, though not evil, is brash, arrogant, defiant and sexually aggressive. He feels remorse for going too far with Norma, but he also thinks he can just move on with his life. Vera, however, is submissive, not only to Ledgard but Zeca, the half-brother who ran off with Ledgard's wife. Zeca returns and, mistaking Vera for the wife, proceeds to break into her room and rape her. After a time, Vera even defends Ledgard when suspicions begin to mount. His real face now obscured through surgery, Vicente internalizes his new feminine state and acquiesces to that gender role. It's worth noting that most of what aggression Vera still exhibits is self-directed in the same way that the wife and Norma take out their agonies on themselves where Zeca and Ledgard brutalize others.

Through Vicente/Vera, Almodóvar makes plain that gender is merely a social construct. The degree to which Vicente accepts the submissive role of the female is stunning, and it starts from the moment Ledgard gives him a vaginoplasty. Marilla, Ledgard's servant, functions as the steely matron, complicit in Ledgard's atrocities. But when she comes to the villa in flashback to look after Vera, we see her elect to wear a servant's uniform, willingly stepping back into her role as caregiver, and she even sacrifices her son in the present to maintain order for the child who grew up to be her master. As men, Ledgard, Zeca and Vicente are bestial, indulging their appetites without a care in the world. But it is the women who are made into creatures, be it Vera's lab rat, Marilla's beast of burden or the wife's hideous alien. To further stress the role gender plays in the characters' behavior, Almodóvar sparks the violence of the falling action from a glimpse Vera gets of her old self in the paper, triggering a last vestige of masculine self-determination that breaks the spell of submission.

This elevates The Skin I Live In from a first-rate genre mash-up to one of the most daring films in recent years. Almodóvar doesn't chuck in transgender forms for the sake of shock but to examine the ways that the binary opposition functions and enslaves us. This explains the stylistic intermingling feminine melodrama and masculine horror-thriller, and why neither style offers a respite. In this film, color—the passionately red blood, the offensively bright yellow of Zeca's Carnival costume/disguise—signals trouble as much as the sterility of Ledgard's lab or the ascetic conditions of Vera's sparsely decorated room.

Faces play a key role in The Skin I Live In, with Almodóvar routinely placing a male face in front of a surveillance monitor of Vera. Sometimes the man looks down upon a tiny screen, other times Vera's face looms over the watcher on a giant TV. In both cases, some force pulls each face toward the other, enticing the male, bracing the female for what she knows is coming. Almodóvar's films routinely delve into feminine oppression, and not always by evil men (Vicente has that same perverted innocence to him as Benigno from Talk to Her), but The Skin I Live In explicitly deals with the gender split and its primal, horrifying impulses better not only than any of his own movies but any film that comes to mind. Brilliantly paced and thematized, The Skin I Live In is the probably the most unorthodox, most entertaining distillation of feminist theory ever made by a man.