NOT SO FRIENDLY SKIES Last night I saw Red Eye with that Statler to my Waldorf, Vivian C. Wong.

Plot: Lisa (Rachel McAdams) is flying from Texas to Florida after her grandmother's funeral. She's the spunky, can-do manager of a large Miami hotel. Upon arriving at the Dallas airport, she learns that her flight has been cancelled. She winds up having a drink and some conversation with a nice-enough guy named Jackson (Cillian Murphy) at the airport's Tex Mex restaurant. When she boards the eventually-ready plane, Lisa discovers that she and Jackson are seated next to each other. They make awkward banter about the coincidence, and then the fun begins. You see, Lisa and Jackson haven't been seated next to each other by chance; he's actually some sort of terrorist guru, (or "manager," as he puts it,) and he wants Lisa to move the Deputy-Secretary of Homeland Security, who happens to be staying at her hotel, to another room so that his colleagues have a better chance of assassinating him.

Red Eye started off well, but faltered in its second half when it unwisely departed from the confines of the airplane. McAdams and Murphy are very good in their initial scenes with each other. The pre-flight scenes capture the awkwardness of travellers forced to make small talk and the scenes after Murphy reveals what he wants from McAdams are tense and menacing. But once the leads get off the plane, the film resorts to conventional chase scenes, which aren't bad, but aren't exactly riveting either. As the Vivster has observed before, there's a natural tension built-in to submarine movies due to the confines of the setting. There was a similar tension in Red Eye while the characters were on the plane that was lost when they left it. Imagine if, mid-way through a submarine movie, the ships surfaced and the characters chased each other on land. Pretty lame, huh?  ¶ 10:19 AM 1 comments

  SECRET Me, Myself, and I saw The Aristocrats at the Esquire on Friday afternoon. Ah, the pleasures of an empty movie theater! No cell phones ringing, no irritating conversations, no one kicking the back of your seat. Bliss! I found myself dreaming of owning my own movie theater some day. Would it be an art-deco movie palace? Or would I try something smaller and more intimate. Perhaps a theater in a bar, as the owner of the Ginger Man and I once discussed? Something secret, a speak-easy upstairs? You tell the bartender that you're looking for some interesting mise-en-scene or some good deep focus and he directs you to what looks like a storage closet in the back of the bar.

Anyhoots, The Aristocrats is a documentary about the ultimate comedian in-joke. The joke goes something like this: A man walks into a talent agency, asking to describe his act. The agent tells him that he has five minutes. The act consists of the man and his family, usually a wife, two children, and occasionally grandparents, performing sexual and scatological depravities upon each other. The man describes these shocking deeds at length and in excruciating detail. The stunned agent then asks the man what he calls the act, and the man replies with innocent aplomb, "The Aristocrats!"

The basic joke is mildly amusing, but what matters most, the film keeps reminding us, is not the joke itself, but how it's open to thousands of different interpretations and improvisations. Apparently, comedians have entertained each other for decades with different tellings of the joke; as one talking head says, it's like their secret handshake.

The Aristocrats is a pleasant-enough film, but nothing more. Some of the tellings of the joke, by Kevin Pollak, Mario Cantone, Eric Cartman, and Eric Mead, are very funny. Revealingly, (for me, at least,) these were interpretations of the joke that added something else beyond the incest and shit that most of the others comedians relied on. It's not that I think that sex and bodily functions aren't funny, it's just that after you've heard a dozen versions of the joke in that vein, it gets a bit numbing.

While I had a good time watching The Aristocrats, I left feeling curiously dissatisfied. The film doesn't do much beyond presenting different versions of the joke with commentary by various comics. At the risk of sounding stuffy, I would have like a little more depth or context to the film. There's an attempt to explore the psychology of the joke, but it's brief and not that interesting. How about a little more about the sub-culture of comics or an examination of what bad taste means? If this joke is so funny, is everything else fair game? Actually, I think that the main reason the Aristocrats doesn't quite work for me is that the joke really isn't so offensive. It's almost fable-like in its lack of specificity. All we have is a family doing these awful things to each other. It's disgusting, sure, but that's all. Nothing ties the joke to the real world, and consequently, it lacks bite.  ¶ 9:19 AM 1 comments

  BAIT AND SWITCH Saw Ingmar Bergman's Saraband at the Music Box on Tuesday night. Bergman has said that this is his last film and, although he's said things like that before, considering that he's about eighty-seven years old, we might want to take him at his word this time.

Saraband continues the story of Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann), the couple from Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Marianne has decided to see Johan for the first time in many years. She travels to his home in rural Sweden, finding him alone. Well, not quite alone. His more than middle-aged son, Henrik, and grand-daughter, Karin, live not too far away at a summer cottage that Johan owns. Johan and Henrik do not get along, as Henrik blames his father for having abandoned him years ago. It's unclear how long Marianne intended to stay with Johan, but she quickly becomes enveloped in this threadbare family's drama.

Saraband opens promisingly enough with a great scene between Ullmann and Josephson. The two actors do a fantastic job of conveying the mixed emotions of the characters upon seeing each other after so many years. They are by turns affectionate, cagey, bitter, and humorous. There isn't a false note anywhere. Then the film veers into unwelcome territory.

In the next scene, (one of ten parts), Johan's grand-daughter shows up in tears at Johan's home, startling a puzzled Marianne. We learn that Karin is a cello prodigy, tutored by her father, and that Henrik is a harsh taskmaster. But we later learn that Henrik and Karin have a messsy, quasi-incestuous relationship. It seems that Henrik's wife Anna died a few years before the action of the movie, a devastating blow. Henrik has since found a surrogate for his wife in his daughter. Now, if Bergman wants to make a film where two characters have an incestuous relationship, that's fine, but, at the very least, he could have made these characters interesting, and not just vehicles for dull, recriminatory speeches that sound like parodies of himself.

That's all we get for the rest of the film, speech, after speech, after speech. Karin rails against Henrik, Henrik rails against his father, and Johan rails at Henrik. As all of this hysteria swirls about, Ullmann is relegated to a by-stander's role, looking embarassed by all the sturm and drang. Occasionally, she utters some sort of vaguely wise advice, but that's about it. Ullman and Josephson are barely on screen together for most of the film. It's as if Bergman were not up to the task of examining Johan and Marianne again and decided to shoehorn Henrik and Karin's story into the film because he couldn't think of anything better to do. Maybe I'm bitter because I thought this film would be a final reckoning of Johan and Marianne's relationship, instead of a talky drama about a cello schoalrship, but all I could think after leaving the theater was, "What a waste!"  ¶ 7:27 AM 0 comments

  HOUSE OF SAND AND SAND AND SAND... Saw Woman in the Dunes with the Vivster at Doc Films last night. Viv and I were cruelly foiled in our first attempt to see the film at Doc a little more than two weeks ago. Everything was going just fine, and then, as the film was reaching one of its most dramatic moments, the lights came up and the screen's curtain closed. One of students in charge of the screening said something to the effect that since it was a long film, there would be a five minute intermission. The projectionist quickly contradicted this wag, stating that they had not received the third reel of film, so there would be no need for an intermission. We all grumbled to the pasty undergrads in charge and they promised another screening.

Doc did deliver another screening, but I don't think it was the full-length cut of the film. Oh, well, perhaps the folks at Criterion could take a break from transferring every frickin' Seijin Suzuki film to DVD and make time for this one.

Plot: An entomologist from Tokyo travels to a remote seaside region of Japan hoping to discover a new species of insect that will bring him fame in the bug world. As the sun is setting, local villagers approach him, asking him where he will stay for the night. The scientist realizes that he has missed the last bus back to his hotel and readily accepts the villagers' offer to put him up in one of their houses. Dude, baaad move. The villagers lower the entomologist by rope to a strange hut at the bottom of a sand pit. A woman lives there. She prepares food for the man and refers to him as guest or helper.

The next day, the scientist quickly realizes that he has been tricked into staying with the woman. The woman and he are expected to clear the sand that is constantly threatening to swallow her house. She tells the scientist that this will somehow prevent the other villagers's homes from collapsing. The man at first fights against this fate, but gradually comes to accept it.

I'm on the fence about Woman in the Dunes. Overall, I liked it, but I do think it's a case of style over substance. The film was shot in high-contrast black and white giving it a stark, but beautiful look. The director and photographer create a very palpable world out of sand, wind, and human flesh. The film has such physical immediacy that you think you can see each individual grain of sand. The actors are lit in such a way that their bodies have a sexy glow and the interaction between the sand and their skin becomes intensely sensual. A scene where the woman bathes the man is especially erotic.

The film's visuals are not only intensely real, but also abstract. There are enormous close-ups that focus in on parts of the actors's bodies or the patterns made by the wind on the sand. The film-makers seem to have delighted in making this film, in how light and shape look when photographed by a camera. But isn't that a problem? I think the point of the story is to make us feel uncomfortable in this strange world of sand, to make us feel how monotonous it looks and how maddening its sameness is. Instead, they make it look beautiful, undercutting the existential horror that is lurking in the background of the story. This leads me to a more subsatntive criticism of the film.

I took Woman in the Dunes to be an allegory about the meaninglessness of human life. The entomologist is at first shocked to discover that the woman's existence revolves around clearing sand from her home, but eventually realizes that his life has been just as pointless. He has devoted himself to the study of insects, is that any better than shoveling sand? He hasn't even been able to get his name in an entomology textbook. The scientist fights against this realization for a while, trying to find a way out of his predicament. He ties the woman up, drinks and smokes, refuses to clear the sand, and in one of the more exciting sequences of the film, briefly escapes the pit. All his flailing about is to no avail, and he gradually comes to accept his fate. The entomologist's accedence isn't portrayed in a positive light, he is a pathetic, broken figure by the film's end.

The problem with the film's argument for the meaninglessness of life is that it is shallow and contradictory. It's very easy to say that life is meaningless, in fact, it's somewhat irrefutable. Who really knows if life has any meaning? But the film-makers did seem to take quite a bit of pleasure in making Woman in the Dunes. Almost every shot is striking and carefully crafted. So, I wonder how the film-makers could go to such trouble to create something so beautiful, yet still insist that existence is meaningless. I guess this comes down to personal beliefs. I believe that life may very well be meaningless, but that you can find meaning in it. Whether it's stamp collecting, badminton playing, or even going to the movies, I think there's meaning to be had everywhere. The film-makers insist that all of life is meaningless, that you cannot find meaning in anything. By way of illustration, near the end of the film the entomologist discovers that water condenses in a bucket that he leaves out in the sand. He becomes fascinated with this process to the exclusion of all else. The film-makers choose to portray his obsession in an absurd, futile light. It's not just that his life and, by implication, our lives are pointless, it's that everything we do is pointless. I just don't agree with this idea. To insist that life is meaningless because we aren't told its meaning is just shallow nihilism.

By the way, I don't usually intend to review older films in this blog. It's, of course, not that I have anything against older films. It's just that I can see myself going from reviewing currently playing films, to older films, to really great films on DVD, to the Chronicles of Riddick. It's a slippery slope, people.  ¶ 10:26 AM 0 comments

  FANTASY ISLAND Saw The Island with Sniffian on Friday night. We opted not to eat out in Evanston this time, having had a more than adequate dinner at home courtesy of Trader Joe's.

The Island stars Ewan MacGregor and Scarlett Johannson as members of a not-too-far-in-the-future community that's isolated in a large fortress-like structure. Think a kinder, gentler Death Star. This situation has been made necessary by a mysterious "contanimation" that has made Earth all but uninhabitable. However, there is one blight-free spot on the planet named, you guessed it, the Island, and lucky lottery winners are the recipients of an all-expenses-paid trip there. It's kind of a permanent vacation. Get it? You see, MacGregor and Johannson aren't normal people trapped by environmental contamination, but clones whose sole purpose is to provide organs and other spare parts for wealthy citizens of the good-old, regular, real world, which we find out still exists. The clones are the result of a sinister corporation helmed by the even more sinister Sean Bean.

I generally liked The Island. I know, I know, it's directed by Michael Bay, the mention of whose name is supposed to inspire immediate vomiting in any true cineaste. But the film was a pretty solid action-adventure yarn with a decent premise. It's true that Bay and the screenwriters don't have anything interesting to say about the issues of cloning and identity, but so what? They keep the action coming fast and furious. Besides, I think we've all had enough Anakin/Batman seriousness this summer anyway, right? Truth is, I haven't found Bay all that offensive when he sticks to his overly-caffeinated, nano-second shot editing style. It's the streak of cloying sentimentality in his films that's made me want to retch. Think of Sean Connery stealing that car just to see the daughter he never knew he had in The Rock, the infamous scene with Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, and the Animal Crackers in Armageddon, or pretty much any scene in Pearl Harbor. It's for this stuff that Bay's DGA membership should be revoked. Thankfully, there were precious few attempts at tugging the heart strings in The Island and, for that self-restraint, I congratulate Mr. Bay.

P.S. I saw Armageddon in Astoria, Queens when it first came out. After the movie was over, the woman that I was seeing at the time had to use the bathroom. Upon exiting the rest, she infomed me that several teenage girls were in the bathroom bawling their eyes out over how Bruce Willis had sacrificed himself so that Ben Affleck could live and be with Liv Tyler. It just goes to show that this kind of crap actually works with some people.  ¶ 12:58 PM 0 comments