the Richard Larson blog

Precious?

Ed Gonzalez at Slant Magazine:

Precious might have been passable if not for these slick, fatuously filmed sequences—visions of its main character dancing, singing on stages, and walking down red carpets with a light-black-skinned hottie, even seeing herself in the mirror as a white girl—that only succeed at simplifying its young protagonist's feelings of insecurity and yearning for escape, as well as highlighting Daniels's contrived thoughts on cause and effect. At Each One Teach One, where Precious is sent after it's discovered that she's pregnant, images of African-African political chutzpah and attainment, including a speech by Malcolm X, are green-screened onto window blinds and chalkboards. This is after a trip to a museum and schoolwork that involves nothing deeper than writing letters of the alphabet on the chalkboard. So, between Precious and An Education, Lone Scherfig's horrid BBC Afterschool Special, we now have the official theme of the upcoming Oscar season: the uplift of the races and sexes through higher learning.

If this movie by the director of the insipid Shadowboxer, which I had the unfortunate opportunity to work publicity events for during its New York release a few years ago, is anything as arrogantly presumptuous and shameless as An Education, I have absolutely no interest. Which begs the question: which films identified early by general critical concensus as Oscar contenders for this year are actually any good?

An Education

Lone Scherfig's An Education was completely stupid, redundant, unnecessary, and embarrassing. Stylish and with decent performances but completely without substance and in possession of absolutely zero personality. Stupid, stupid, stupid female characters, and really, isn't the whole thing supposed to be about women? Why should I care that the women in this movie are lied to, abused, and forced to suffer for the sake of others if they're all so ridiculously annoying? I could go on, but I'd rather go listen to a Celine Dion album, write bad poetry about my high school English teacher, and cut myself.
 

Jane Campion's Bright Star

Punctuated by a beautiful script detailing the last days of Romantic poet John Keats' life through the lens of his troubled and tragic love affair with the young Fanny Brawne, Jane Campion's Bright Star is also a true achievement of aesthetics; never has onscreen love looked so colorfully nuanced. Foreknowledge of Keats' upcoming death by tuberculosis only makes witnessing the affair a more desperate experience for the viewer, the feeling of dreading the inevitable even as one hopes that things can somehow turn in a happier direction (the kind of wish-fulfillment unabashedly on display in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, for example) for the characters being depicted. But alas, no; this is no alternate history: rather, it is a celebration of one of the greats from a very personal, intimate perspective.

From their first moment onscreen together, Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw perfectly navigate Fanny and John's obsession with one another on their road to love, and Campion displays this for us in fantastic yet subtle displays of brightness; for example, when Fanny receives a letter from Keats in which he likens her to a butterfly, she employs her siblings in capturing butterflies from the fields in an effort to turn her bedroom into a butterfly sanctuary, and we see her lounging on her bed, butterflies everywhere, literally lost in love. The butterflies are used brilliantly as metaphor; when Fanny's mother comes to try to rouse her daughter into action, she becomes overwhelmed by the butterflies and has to leave the room, closing the door quickly behind her as to not let any of them out into the rest of the house. Thus, Fanny is shut away with her obsession, her family not knowing quite what to do with her.

Early in the film, as John Keats is trying to explain to Fanny the nature of poetry, he responds to her desire to learn how to "work poetry out" with a beautiful analogy to the experience of being in a lake. When we jump into a lake, Keats explains, we are not immediately concerned with swimming back to shore; we want, rather, to enjoy, even for just a little while, the feeling of being in the lake, of existing in the water, still blissfully caught between the act of immersion and the act of return. Poetry, then, is not about figuring out the answer to a puzzle, but is rather about being lost in the puzzle itself, letting the words create an experience all their own. And this, ultimately, is the joy of Bright Star: the experience of getting lost in Jane Campion's remarkably beautiful and vividly rendered world, even for just a couple of hours.

Antichrist!

I'm attending a press screening next week of Antichrist, the new Lars Von Trier film, and it's impossible not to be excited (or at least curious) when the early reviews call it "a horrible combination of extraordinarily unpleasant elements. It's offensively misogynistic. It's needlessly graphic in its use of violence. And its maker almost certainly needs psychiatric help" (Christopher Tookey). And also "a garbled, appallingly misogynistic fantasy that makes little sense and plays like torture porn cloaked in artistic pretensions" (Allan Hunter). Watch the trailer!

While I don't necessarily enjoy the experience of watching his films, Lars Von Trier certainly deserves kudos for exploring his themes to their fullest extent. I remember being completely horrified during the ending of Dogville, and not always in a good way. But still, I remember it so vividly, now more than five years later, and my memory of films is not usually so visceral. Which I guess doesn't bode well for me being able to get this image out of my head any time in the near future:

The Orphanage

 

So, I finally got around to seeing The Orphanage, and... wow. Legitimately creepy (I spilled my wine!) and I even cried at the end. The film is shot beautifully, and the narrative is structured in such a way as to foreshadow the scariest moments, even as that foreshadowing makes them all the scarier. (When the game that the children are playing at the film's opening is brought back later in the narrative, the outcome is so predictably scary that I was exclaiming "Oh no, oh no" well before the actual scare.) Knowing that you're about to fall out of your seat is even more fun than actually doing it. And on an emotional level, the way the effect of losing a child is portrayed by the film is illuminating, surprising, and quite touching. The ending ("All the lost children...") was so pitch-perfect that I forgot I was watching a horror film. Juan Antonio Bayona, in his feature debut, displays the skill necessary to become a major player in the genre, specifically for the ways in which he exploits traditional shock techniques and well-trod narrative fodder for a heightened emotional/intellectual response difficult to match in contemporary Hollywood horror. While I would've enjoyed more complexity (the film wraps itself up rather neatly in the end) I feel that any attempt at artistry within the world of genre filmmaking is worth noting and, of course, celebrating.

District 9

Neill Blomkamp's District 9 is a thoughtful, provocative, and thrilling science fiction film which reminds viewer's of the genre's ability to express contemporary preoccupations in extreme, exaggerated ways, while still remaining true to the idea of film as a narrative art designed to take us to places where we have never been before. Aliens have come to Johannesburg and have been quarantined in "District 9," a militarized, fenced-in area that quickly becomes a slum. The film picks up when Wikus Van De Merwe, an employee at Multi-National United (a company devoted to alien welfare), is assigned to lead a mass eviction campaign, seeking to remove the aliens from District 9 and set them up in reservations "like concentration camps." The film wears its racial allegory on its sleeve, but the adventure that follows -- as Wikus enters District 9 and endures a strange transformation, both physically and in his worldview -- is as exciting as anything coming out of Hollywood this year. A film about aliens being treated poorly by mankind becomes a very human story about survival, love, and redemption.

Thank you, Madison Brookshire

I have (perhaps loudly) declared Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, to be the best film of last year, and this, apparently, is controversial (but, Nick Schager!). Even more controversial, however, have been the many scathing reviews of the film by a number of prominent critics, perhaps most notably Rex Reed of The New York Observer who, somewhat famously, did not even finish watching the film. Madison Brookshire, in a sort of review of reviews of the film (published in Bright Lights Film Journal), takes Reed to task for his offhanded dismissal, and also lets us know that "the best review of the film belongs to Christopher Orr and appears in The New Republic. Other writers might note the fact that, before committing his thoughts to paper, Orr actually watched the whole film — twice." Yay.

Observe and Report

How depressing, and yet, how interesting. Deeply, increasingly, disturbing. But to say anything more would really serve to forecast a response that you should really just allow to happen on its own. If you only see one mall cop movie this year, this should be the one.

The Last House on the Left

I went to a press screening last week of the remake of Wes Craven's brilliant '70s vigilante/family horror film The Last House on the Left, and while I don't understand a few of the changes from the original and I absolutely hated the film's closing moments (a needlessly gratuitous splatter killing), it was a genuinely worthwhile remake, capturing the urgency of the original's message while layering the story more successfully with tension and, perhaps more surprisingly, emotion. While I feel that the two major changes (*) are likely the result of producers worrying that the film would be too bleak for mainstream audiences, I still left the theater feeling like Hollywood has finally given something back to serious horror fans. Also, I may just not be remembering this aspect of Craven's original, but I really enjoyed the way class plays out in Dennis Iliadis's remake; the good, innocent family at their country home is coded as decidedly rich and privileged, while the roving criminals harbor an obvious resentment towards wealth (at one point the only woman in the "bad family" makes verbal assumptions about the girls they have kidnapped, saying something along the lines of "Girls like you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth"). The fact that the poor are driven to criminal activity based on social circumstances is a tangible force here, and when they are driven back and destroyed by the privileged class, there is a sense, however brief (as the criminal acts are truly horrendous and shocking), that something has gone terribly wrong in the fabric of the American class system when we are rooting for the resumption of the seemingly "natural" distribution of privilege.

* Mary, the film's original tragic victim, survives here, allowing for a wrenching moment as her father (a doctor, already treating her for a gunshot wound) realizes that she has been raped. Also, Justin, the young man in the "bad family," turns on his father's influence in this remake and is then rescued by Mary's parents, whereas the original film sees him as permanently corrupted, ending up as collateral damage in the struggle between good and evil.