Gomorrah
An adaptation of Roberto Seviani’s best selling and no-doubt-scintillating Neapolitan expose of the Camorra crime syndicate (by virtue of which the author now lives in hiding), Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah is interwoven, multi-tier storytelling at its very best, filled w/ stylistic swaths of blue-green alloy and a handheld camera that seems to move as effortlessly through tight crawlspaces and the backseats and trunks of cars as it does through the never-cutely-connected web of narratives, up and down the criminal food chain from micro to macro and back again, nothing here resembling the groaning pinwheel horseshit of convenience that makes such claptrap hokum as Haggis’s Crash or, say, Babel so utterly laughable. Convenient narrative connections remain totally unnecessary here because each storyline finds its different characters, struggling towards their own various lesser-faire ends, each differently (but similarly) trapped in what critic Cristoph Huber of Cinema Scope so eloquently (and alliteratively) calls “the stranglehold of a predetermined pattern on the proceedings.” The story that most holds the attention is of a couple of young, duderheaded freelance badasses who remain unaware that they are even caught up in this machinery until it fills them w/ lead, these clueless olvidados too busy playing kindergarten Scarface to take account of the stakes. The higher up the chain we go the more of the same we see. Even the big players are walking a tightrope, nobody willing to pay for the bill of goods sold to them in order to certify their compliance. But comply they must, as the odds of walking away from the system are nil. That’s how capitalism works, sucka: once you buy in ain’t nobody gonna pay you out – not beyond the price of a bullet. Kent Jones, as usual, puts it better than I could: “Gomorrah is just the movie for a country that has installed a true despot in office not once, not twice, but three times.” Indeed, this is the ultimate crime movie for Berlusconi’s fascist-fuck-you Italy and, as such, the best and most prescient Italian crime-as-big-business film since Francesco Rosi’s 1973 masterpiece Lucky Luciano. A near-masterpiece, this one, from a national cinema presumed dead in the water. If the elliptical structure leaves some audience members confused, just imagine how the cops must feel (or the ones who aren’t being paid off anyway).8/10
The Lark
The debut feature of the U.K. theater group calling itself the War-rag Collective, The Lark is an occasionally riveting psychodrama early on because it throws us right into an expressionistic nightmare world of psychosis and confusion and doesn’t apologize for refusing to explain anything, but the more everything coheres and we begin to think outside of the protagonist’s boxhead the more this warehouse fever starts to feel old-hat cloying. Balls-out expressionism has never worked well on a miniscule budget or w/ excruciatingly stagy set pieces (what can you expect from a theater troupe?) and, ultimately, that is the problem. Having dabbled in psychosis I can tell you right now that the hallucinations that The Lark presents to us are seriously fucking lightweight, but how could they be otherwise? What it does get right, however, is the resultant confusion, which is why the film loses all of its appeal when it starts waking us up from the nightmare and providing the obvious answers we see coming a mile away and are not, I would hope, too stupid to figure out for ourselves. Groan. Why do we always have to have this shit rammed down our throat? Why can’t a movie fuck me up and leave me that way? I prefer a meltdown that keeps on giving. No need to see this one. If you want British expressionist crazy, you would be well advised to dig into Simon Rumley’s flawed too-eager-beaver but vastly superior 2006 med-skipping The Living and the Dead. I’m still scared of that one.
5/10
Confessions of a Porn Addict
A truly hilarious and charming-despite-itself peon to Canadian repression, anxiety, and class-A narcissism (the audience here was at capacity and truly in on the joke, Kevin Smith's new porn movie also having sold out across town) starring the always ridiculously self-righteous-no-matter-how-self-abasing Spencer Rice (of Kenny vs. Spenny, TV’s current number one no-you-didn’t-just-_____ fad), Confessions of a Porn Addict is as wonderful a waste of yr time as yr likely to come across in the malnourished landscape of current Canuck cinema. An increasingly self-and-sex-obsessed – though still fundamentally neutered – culture gets the jackboot treatment from Rice (playing “My name is Mark Tobias and I am a porn addict”), director/editor buddy Duncan Christie, and their coterie of comic collaborators, some unwittingly so (famous porn guru Rob Black who appears to believe in the old adage that no publicity is bad publicity) and some so in on the joke they fucking steel it (Yuk-Yuk’s founder Mark Breslin in the comic performance of the year as Tobias’s in-over-his-cock’s-head sponsor). Tobias has a court case pending, having been caught manhandling himself in his favorite video store after an adult video’s cover pushed his buttons, and has hired a film crew and entered rehab in the hopes of showing the judge that he is at least making an effort (ps: never show anything like this to a fucking judge). All well and good until another self-abuser sees a picture of Tobias's estranged wife and recognizes her as Felice-Shayo, star of a recent Rob Black production in which she gets her first anal from a man in a bunny mask. Needless to say, this doesn’t sit well with our hero, though he was too busy watching porn to pay attention to the missus when she was actually, you know, like, around. So they all decamp for the San Fernando valley to find Mark’s wife and infiltrate the porn world (both in this production and as this production), whereby a male Marilyn impersonator in the throws of a crack binge, and a resolve-testing massage later, our couple is reunited during the filming of an extreme bukaki party. Needless to say the romantic kiss of reconciliation had half the audience howling w/ laughter and the other half retching, most people doing one or the other (or both) whilst rolling in the aisle, my national pride having been briefly reawakened.
A truly hilarious and charming-despite-itself peon to Canadian repression, anxiety, and class-A narcissism (the audience here was at capacity and truly in on the joke, Kevin Smith's new porn movie also having sold out across town) starring the always ridiculously self-righteous-no-matter-how-self-abasing Spencer Rice (of Kenny vs. Spenny, TV’s current number one no-you-didn’t-just-_____ fad), Confessions of a Porn Addict is as wonderful a waste of yr time as yr likely to come across in the malnourished landscape of current Canuck cinema. An increasingly self-and-sex-obsessed – though still fundamentally neutered – culture gets the jackboot treatment from Rice (playing “My name is Mark Tobias and I am a porn addict”), director/editor buddy Duncan Christie, and their coterie of comic collaborators, some unwittingly so (famous porn guru Rob Black who appears to believe in the old adage that no publicity is bad publicity) and some so in on the joke they fucking steel it (Yuk-Yuk’s founder Mark Breslin in the comic performance of the year as Tobias’s in-over-his-cock’s-head sponsor). Tobias has a court case pending, having been caught manhandling himself in his favorite video store after an adult video’s cover pushed his buttons, and has hired a film crew and entered rehab in the hopes of showing the judge that he is at least making an effort (ps: never show anything like this to a fucking judge). All well and good until another self-abuser sees a picture of Tobias's estranged wife and recognizes her as Felice-Shayo, star of a recent Rob Black production in which she gets her first anal from a man in a bunny mask. Needless to say, this doesn’t sit well with our hero, though he was too busy watching porn to pay attention to the missus when she was actually, you know, like, around. So they all decamp for the San Fernando valley to find Mark’s wife and infiltrate the porn world (both in this production and as this production), whereby a male Marilyn impersonator in the throws of a crack binge, and a resolve-testing massage later, our couple is reunited during the filming of an extreme bukaki party. Needless to say the romantic kiss of reconciliation had half the audience howling w/ laughter and the other half retching, most people doing one or the other (or both) whilst rolling in the aisle, my national pride having been briefly reawakened.7/10
XXY
A tremendous film which, unfortunately, is too cloistered and not nearly emotionally expansive enough to be the masterpiece that it could have been, XXY is nonetheless another indicator that Argentinean cinema remains, alone w/ the cinema of the Philippines, the most neglected national cinema on earth. Sharing with Gomorrah a jet-chrome palette of extreme, mournful blues, one cannot help but conclude that this is precisely how the coast of Uruguay actually looks and feels, and Inés Efron as intersexed Alex (she of the titular glandular confusion, sporting both sets of genitals) gives the performance of the festival so far, or maybe just her unbelievable eyes do, and she looks quite a bit like both Carla Bozulitch (of the Geraldine Fibbers and Scarnella) and Tracy Wright (women the contents of whose pants I’ve been repeatedly suspicious about over the years). The tragedy of Alex’s story is all the more powerful because her confused parents are never for a moment unsympathetic, their genuine love for him/her making the collective confusion all the more moving. Dad, however, seems more content to see Alex as a boy (particularly after he catches her ass-fucking a confused teenage interloper, son of the surgeon they have brought in to take a lay of the land) whereas mom, who once dreamt of having three daughters, a dream now inexorably on hold, veers the other way, hoping to keep her a girl. Alex clearly isn’t sure that anything needs to change at all but, as such, is, at fifteen, coming to terms w/ the fact that she will always be a freak and that any sexual chemistry she experiences will always strike her as emanating from her own sideshow sexual indeterminacy. Do you love me? or are you merely curious about the carwreck between my legs? We all feel that way at fifteen anyway, so we can all relate, though most of us didn’t have to live there forever, thank fucking Christ. I may have wanted more from this film, but that is probably my fault. It killed me softly, all the same, and everyone should try to see it. Roger Ebert, who is always more sympathetic than I (perhaps because, as one of the South Park guys once said, every movie has candy and popcorn), puts it quite nicely: “this is not a simple film but a subtle and observant one.” Perhaps all I wanted, then, was another twenty minutes or so of subtle observation. Hardly a damning critique really.7/10
Wuyong / Useless
It challenges the obliteration of memory, the over-exploitation
of natural resources, and the speed at which all this is happening.
- Jia Zhangke on Ma Ke's "Wuyong" fashion line
If anybody out there doesn’t think that Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke is one of the most vital cinematographic artists in contemporary cinema than they either are not doing their homework or they are blind and fucking def. Useless, his most recent proper doc (the same designation cannot quite be applied to his subsequent 24 City, which I, like most landlocked North Americans, have yet to see, as that film features actors like Joan Chen pretending to be documentary case-studies) steadfastly out-minimalizes the minimalism of his tremendously awesome fiction films by combining an opening tone-poem full of garment factory (read: sweat shop) tracking shots, and two sections of laid-back interactive documentary (only a few questions are ever heard being asked, but characters by and large address the camera directly in the latter two-thirds), to paint an abstract-expressionist portrait of China’s relationship to both high/low fashion and the day-to-day role of clothing and labor, suggesting how each become about different forms of bondage, but also about capital-L Life. From the sweat shop laborers to the Parisian models forced to stand as still as ghostly consumer-capitalist corpses atop glowing light boxes in Ma Ke’s designed-by-earth-and-decay line of titular clothing, made-up like they themselves were just drug out of the mud, whilst fashonistas gather around drinking wine and no doubt talking a load of shit, there is little sympathy here, as in all Jia, for those who do the outfitting, all of it reserved for those who sew and/or get sewn. The interview towards the end with a man who can no longer afford to make a go as a tailor, as a suit on the racks now costs less than a properly hardscrabbl’d one, and his touchingly shy wife unsure of what clothes her husband looks his best in, is one of the most sweet and moving scenes in all of Jia’s works precisely because no actors can reveal this much through their humble concealments, actors not tending towards humility. Though it moves like a snail and refuses to tell you what to focus on, this sublime piece of videography is amongst Jia’s most irrepressible works. Useless is never compelled to either dress up or explicitly dress down. It is refreshingly naked. Similar in some ways to Wim Wenders’ 1989 Yohji Yamamoto doc Notebook on Cities and Clothes but without the self-aggrandizing voice-over. A ridiculously underrated masterwork.
It challenges the obliteration of memory, the over-exploitation
of natural resources, and the speed at which all this is happening.
- Jia Zhangke on Ma Ke's "Wuyong" fashion line
If anybody out there doesn’t think that Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke is one of the most vital cinematographic artists in contemporary cinema than they either are not doing their homework or they are blind and fucking def. Useless, his most recent proper doc (the same designation cannot quite be applied to his subsequent 24 City, which I, like most landlocked North Americans, have yet to see, as that film features actors like Joan Chen pretending to be documentary case-studies) steadfastly out-minimalizes the minimalism of his tremendously awesome fiction films by combining an opening tone-poem full of garment factory (read: sweat shop) tracking shots, and two sections of laid-back interactive documentary (only a few questions are ever heard being asked, but characters by and large address the camera directly in the latter two-thirds), to paint an abstract-expressionist portrait of China’s relationship to both high/low fashion and the day-to-day role of clothing and labor, suggesting how each become about different forms of bondage, but also about capital-L Life. From the sweat shop laborers to the Parisian models forced to stand as still as ghostly consumer-capitalist corpses atop glowing light boxes in Ma Ke’s designed-by-earth-and-decay line of titular clothing, made-up like they themselves were just drug out of the mud, whilst fashonistas gather around drinking wine and no doubt talking a load of shit, there is little sympathy here, as in all Jia, for those who do the outfitting, all of it reserved for those who sew and/or get sewn. The interview towards the end with a man who can no longer afford to make a go as a tailor, as a suit on the racks now costs less than a properly hardscrabbl’d one, and his touchingly shy wife unsure of what clothes her husband looks his best in, is one of the most sweet and moving scenes in all of Jia’s works precisely because no actors can reveal this much through their humble concealments, actors not tending towards humility. Though it moves like a snail and refuses to tell you what to focus on, this sublime piece of videography is amongst Jia’s most irrepressible works. Useless is never compelled to either dress up or explicitly dress down. It is refreshingly naked. Similar in some ways to Wim Wenders’ 1989 Yohji Yamamoto doc Notebook on Cities and Clothes but without the self-aggrandizing voice-over. A ridiculously underrated masterwork.9/10
Alone
Horror movies, as everybody and their uncle knows, are about the return of the repressed. As an ontological materialist, the only way I tend to be able to digest ghost stories (as I find the supernatural about as scary as the devil w/ horns and his fucking pitchfork, The Exorcist having only made me laugh at how scary puberty and female arousal are to religious people) is if they skew towards the psychological (Lee Soo-Youn’s amazing and unsung The Uninvited) or are just utterly fucking unnerving (Ju-on, duh, the original – I never want to sleep in a strange bedroom again). Bi-directed Thai siamese twin contribution Alone (already set for American remake purgatory) tries a little of both, to its credit, but falters on both fronts. It sells out its psychological context w/ some truly daffy red herrings involving a sane character experencing ghostly epiphenomenon (which can perhaps be chalked up to a contact high, though that's seriously stretching credibility), and yes its ghost gets awfully scary at times, in one instance in particular I could imagine milk shooting out of an off-guard viewer’s nostrils, the tension remaining higher than in most of these genre exercises, but that tension is founded entirely on things we have seen before, which is the real problem w/ these damned ghost movies. Ghosts are just too easy, and we’ve come to expect them to be jumping out of closets and mirrors, grasping suddenly out from under linen, when we “least expect it.” Tired. Seriously tired. It’s a given that stories about ghosts, family, and righteous comeuppance go back into Asian culture long before Christopher Columbus let alone Poe, but that certainly doesn’t make these kneejerk mechanics any more novel, quite the contrary. As Alone starts off in Seoul, it is not surprising that it ceaselessly plays full-frontal homage to recent K-horror exports, most of the time coming off as the Coles Notes version of Tale of Two Sisters, replacing that film's near-comic whirligig of third-act-twist-and-turn brain freezes w/ one mighty clunker that a ten-year-old can see coming a mile away (though why you would bother to see it coming is beyond me, unless maybe you were ten; I know I couldn’t be). I’m probably being to hard on it, because Alone is actually brisk and fun if a bit lame. It’s short running time assures that nobody is likely to find it all that irritating, it does a wonderful job of burning down its creepy-cool house (an apparent must in these films) during the denouement, and the lead actress is well on the hot side of the hot/cold piece of nasty ratio. Go ahead and see it, maybe snort some milk out yr nose once or twice. See if anybody cares. Least of all you.6/10
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