Repo! The Genetic Opera

Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

Cleverly conceived but poorly executed, this grab-fest of pop culture allusions doesn't have the narrative depth or musical style to make good on its promises. Repo! The Genetic Opera guns very blatantly for "cult" status (midnight screenings, sing-alongs, costume contests, etc.), squandering its rich story and setting along the way. As a result, it winds up lost between Rocky Horror Picture Show-style camp send-up and the self-conscious horror fun of Land of the Dead.

Like that George Romero zombie-fest, Repo's future (2056) is one of stark class divisions marked by urban wastes where crime, corporate greed and hedonism run equally rampant. Responding to an epidemic of organ failures, big pharma patriarch Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino) has taken over the world with GeneCo. The company sells replacements to people whose organs are failing, then repossesses the vital body part when customers can't make their payments. It's so much like the mortgage crisis that it's surprising the connection is never drawn.

The set-up is full of such possibilities, as is Repo's cast of pop culture demi-icons. Sorvino adapts his usual mob boss typecast into a terminally ill, legacy-obssessed CEO. Paris Hilton plays herself exquisitely: the spoiled, trend-setting, surgery- and painkiller-addicted, aspiring pop star daughter to Sorvino's businessman-emperor. Anthony Stewart Head plays Nathan Wallace, father of demure heroine Shilo Wallace (Alexa Vega) and (secretly) GeneCo's gut-spilling Repo Man, manipulating audiences' built-in adoration from his years as Giles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
But for all this zeitgeist-tapping wink-nudgery, Repo leans too heavily on third rate music and witless writing. The songs – with a few exceptions – are virtually indistinguishable hard rock pastiche with no style or logic except putting bad dialogue to music (something they barely succeed in doing). To make matters worse, the script being harmonized is overwhelmingly uninspired, especially compared with the clever double entendres and tireless pacing of ostensible forbearer Rocky Horror.

Finally, the world presented by Repo writers Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich remains frustratingly unexplored. The film's core is a melodrama involving the aspiring GeneCo heirs and divergent father figures Nathan and Rotti, while a fascinating civilization on the brink of extinction remains little more than an atmospheric background. It's as frustrating as the idea of Children of Men unfolding entirely inside the Tate Modern's upper-class fortress. How pointlessly limiting! Given our cultural moment's own anarchy anxieties, it's a shame that Repo stays couched in the plush upholstery of postmodern aristocratic farce when there's so much more to sing about.

This review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Stages

Directed by Mijke de Jong

European filmmakers have the uncanny ability to tease out the rhizoid extensions of middle class complexes, thereby underlining the clumsy finger pointing and theme-spelling of their American contemporaries. Hence Woody Allen was inspired by Ingmar Bergman, not competing with him. Following in that Swedish auteur’s tradition, Mijke de Jong's brilliantly restrained Stages is both a director’s film and an actors’ film. Beautiful cinematography and structure work tightly with the three stars, bringing into relief a fractured yuppie family.

Dinners between divorced parents Roos (Elsie de Brauw) and Martin (Marcel Musters) gradually reveal their knowing pushing and pulling, as conversations shift from their careers to their inexpressive son Isaac (Stijn Koomen). That same ordering of priorities – profession before parenting – has left Isaac a spectator to his own life. Incapable of direct engagement, he breaks into family homes to perform the rituals of a childhood nobody was around to share. On one such visit Isaac comes face to face with the kid he might have been, and, not knowing how to approach the stupefied child, flees clumsily without a word.

Isaac's hushed intrusions are presented in a stable, isolating style, immediately contrasted to the warm, floating close-ups of his parents' restaurant discussions. De Jong textures his divided family unit through structured sequencing that capitalizes on the actors' stage training, while showcasing cinematographer Ton Peters' appropriately sparse sense of composition and style.

Like another recent Northern-European release, Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In, Stages' aesthetics amplify the unspoken implications of its narrative. In contrast to loud Americans like Paul Thomas Anderson – whose There Will Be Blood shouts its mythic themes from the rooftops – De Jong whispers the epic implications of middle class narcissism across a cozy restaurant table. The result isn't just more heartwarming and tasteful, it's infinitely more effective.

This review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Slingshot

Directed by Brillante Mendoza

It’s tempting to deem Slingshot’s petty crimes on sweltering shantytown backdrops a Pilipino version of City of God. But where Fernando Meirelles charted the power dynamics within Rio’s favela-bound community of drug dealers and thieves, Brillante Mendoza devotes equal time to the larger forces keeping the populace on the run. These second class citizens of Manila aren’t suppressed so much as pulled and prodded by their ostensible civil and political guardians.

Slingshot opens with Mendoza’s shaky digital camera weaving through dim shantytown alleys while an aspiring local politician warns residents of an imminent police raid. This play for the all-powerful slum vote – the first of many throughout the film – shows that for Manila’s most cash-strapped populations, police and politicians are two sides of the same coin.

The raid also provides swift introductions to Slingshot’s characters, settings and style. Mendoza films his hustlers and thieves’ misfortunes in a jittery mode equally prone to ponderous long takes and flurries of percussive jump cuts. The French New Wave’s influence lurks somewhere in these congested alleys. Though while the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd were re-working film noir, Mendoza is playing with documentary aesthetics and rhetoric.

Color-drained and chopped up as Slingshot is, it preserves a frenetic pace and raw style whereby fiction repeatedly seems overrun by the all-too-real lived conditions of Manila’s poor. Between being chased by cops, harassed by lenders, nagged by relatives and hustled by friends, the few moments of calm in these characters’ lives come as welcome relief for viewers too. However, these interludes also tend to be sponsored by politicians looking to ingratiate themselves with poor young voters.

The insidious tactics used by Slingshot’s public office hopefuls – posting bail, handing out cash, sponsoring religious celebrations – recall the improvised Replacement Party campaigning in Robert Altman’s Nashville. The methods are more exploitative, but the sense of being followed by an unshakable force is similar. In Slingshot’s immersive urban geography, blind alley corners are equally liable to harbor a waiting thief, a raiding cop or a pandering politician. Even more impressive, by the film’s end, distinctions between the three come down to nothing more than different wardrobes.

In the interminable run-up to our own election, Slingshot’s extreme campaign measures have the added value of casting American voting season behaviors in a critical light. Where’s the line between responsible politicking and prodding paternalism, and are our candidates as clearly on one side of it as Manila’s hustler-politicians are on the other?

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Pride and Glory

Directed by Gavin O’Connor

A crime-thriller deeply invested in police mythology, Pride and Glory also speaks volumes about another pillar of repressive power: white middle-class families. Director-writers Gavin and Greg O’Connor (sons of an NYPD cop) present an Irish clan whose men in blue either tacitly accept or actively indulge moral corruption and greed.

Pride and Glory opens as said corruption and greed leaves four cops dead, bringing isolationist brother Ray Tierney (Ed Norton) to investigate the men under his brother Frannie’s (Noah Emmerich) command, including their super-evil brother-in-law Jimmy (Colin Farrell). The lot is done under the drowsy eyes of alcoholic police patriarch Francis Tierney (Jon Voight). Beyond providing the film’s chief social setting, families are also its principle bargaining chips. Threats to the department immediately threaten families’ welfare, while cops, robbers and cop robbers show they “really mean it” when promising violence to each others’ loved ones. In pronouncing those threats, the Tierney men show that the NYPD’s endemic amorality also plagues patriarchal capitalism’s favored family structure.

Expertly shot and paced, these twined self-destruction plots reveal the flaws and fractures of the Tierney and NYPD families. With both institutions’ moral compasses unhinged, the O’Connors take their criticism incredibly far – something only possible under cover of crime genre conventions – before the predictably recuperative conclusion. Pride and Glory’s problematic ending reheats a familiar, conservative status quo after 90 minutes of collapsing American power structures (sound familiar?). Still, the O’Connors should be proud, despite their inglorious ending.

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.

The Economy is Down, so Sex and Death Must Be Back

As our depression-destined city seems poised to regain some of its former seediness after fifteen years of corporate white-washing, how fitting that pockets of grime should already be growing in two of the city’s most clean-cut museums. Fans of dark doodles and macabre minutiae will be captivated by the somber dens of MoMA’s Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities group show (through November 10) and the Neue Galerie’s survey Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897-1909 (through January 26).

The former’s title, Wunderkammer, means “cabinet of curiosities” and refers to a household staple that was to 17th century European bourgeois homes as the mini-bar was to 1950s America’s suburban middle-class. The best families in the fiefdom were stocked with strange fetuses in formaldehyde and, accordingly, MoMA has amassed jars, cabinets, drawings and photographs by art superstars and unknowns from the 1860s to today. Damien Hirst’s dead animals and Louise Bourgeois’s deformed figures are obvious picks, as are the distortions of Dadaists like Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst and their precursors in the deathly visions of James Ensor and black absurdism of Odile Redon (whose "The Egg" is pictured below).


In fact, it’s between these last two that Alfred Kubin’s (1877-1959) absence from the MoMA show is most striking. Fusing Ensor’s bleak view of humanity with Redon’s whimsy, Kubin’s work has been unjustly overlooked (this is the first major exhibition of his work in the U.S., and only covers his early illustrations). The Austrian informed his Art Nouveau attention to ornament with a taste for the liminal and otherworldly, the lot fueled by life-long encounters with death and the kind of Oedipal issues that could sustain several New York City shrinks for decades (shortly after watching his mother pass on her deathbed, the child Kubin had a sexual encounter with a pregnant woman).

Taken together, these exhibitions prove the longevity of disturbing subjects for whom the works of David Lynch and Marilyn Manson are only the latest in a lineage of artful horrors. Expertly laid-out according to their respective thematic and chronological subjects, both Wunderkammer and Kubin achieve a kind of immersive, transporting effect. Walking through their sparsely illuminated rooms with dark-painted walls, viewers move among the sordid imaginations of artists and the darkest desires of art audiences past and present.

A similar version of this post appears on The L Magazine's Blog About Town, and can be read here.

Azur & Asmar

Directed by Michel Ocelot

This computer-animated European import is a frustrating succession of hits and misses, never completely pulling itself together and finally falling apart in its overblown conclusion. Its children’s book-style narrative involves blond-haired and blue-eyed Azur (French, we can assume), travelling across the deep sea (the Mediterranean, undoubtedly), to find the unceremoniously dismissed nanny of his youth, Jenane, her son Asmar, and the mystical djin of their childhood bedside stories.
Self-conscious moves to be fair and balanced in representations of intellectual Arabs, empowered women and noble panhandlers make Azur feel like a politically correct Indiana Jones. Chases through the desert, crowded marketplace antics and deadly obstacle courses confirm the Lucas-Spielberg source material. Certainly, other xenophobic, sexist precursors could be appended to Azur (a brief boating interlude quotes Titanic and a late crumbling bridge-jump recalls Lord of the Rings), but suffice to say this story is a revisionist quilting of things we’ve seen before.

Story conventions aside, seeing is certainly the operative sense in Azur. Characters are alternately blind, invisible, lost in fog or hidden in darkness, and the film’s ultimate message suggests looking beyond differences in appearance to prize inherent human similarities. While seeing works wonders for Azur’s characters though, it’s too often unpleasant for its viewers.

They don’t come much more un-cinematic than this hybrid of choppy videogame graphics (think The Sims meets Prince of Persia) and stunning storybook compositions. Most interior scenes are barren and sluggish, with unimaginative cinematography and ugly details that make Azur’s sweeping exterior tableaus seem all the more beautiful by comparison. Similarly, human characters come in tired and androgynous hourglass forms that seem unbearably conventional next to the mystical animals and stunning architecture that let Ocelot and his animators swing for the bleachers.

If the opening breastfeeding scene implies Azur will be an all-out expectation subverter, those promises never really pan out. Instead, the familiar learning-through-travelling trajectory is simply updated with PC details. In the end it’s admirable to be offering us something different from the usual irresponsible drivel, but Azur would have benefitted from more stylized animation, nuanced writing and a competent cinematographer’s insightful eye.

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.

What Just Happened

Directed by Barry Levinson



Intended as a meta-joke – about mainstream movies, Hollywood neoliberalism, film festivals and Robert DeNiro’s career, to name the obvious targets – What Just Happened seems more like a Freudian slip. Rather than feature-length “State of the Industry” farce, storied producer Art Linson’s adaptation of his memoir falls into most of the patterns it means to parody.


DeNiro plays aging producer Ben, whose career is jeopardized over two weeks while he grapples with a bungled action thriller and a badly begun blockbuster. Substitute “actor” for “producer” in the previous sentence and you get how this movie could poke fun at DeNiro’s recent decline (especially after two weeks ago’s bungled DeNiro-Pacino thriller Righteous Kill). Foregoing such insight, What Just Happened reduces Hollywood’s current artistic and commercial crises to two easily manageable problems: containing a manic-depressive director’s (Michael Wincott) dire vision and shaving Bruce Willis’s ZZ Top-caliber facial hair and girth.

Another misstep – Levinson’s apparent poke at Hollywood sexism in casting Catherine Keener as a castrating exec – only underlines the film’s masculinism. Keener’s comic talents are wasted, and Robin Wright Penn is shockingly under-used as Ben’s ex-wife. As a “movie about the movies,” Levinson’s entry hesitates between the dark cynicism of Altman’s The Player and the trenchant silliness of Steve Martin’s Bowfinger, coming off like a bad Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. Bruce Willis provides the film’s best moments as a parody of himself, but DeNiro’s performance as his irrelevant self is the closest What Just Happened comes to real insight.

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Body of Lies

Directed by Ridley Scott

With Body of Lies, blockbuster auteur Ridley Scott is lost without a roadmap in a genre whose conventions are still too murky for him to break. This disappointment has roots both in Scott’s career as a potentially (rarely) transcendent genre filmmaker, and the underwhelming string of terrorism-themed action films released since 9/11. As recent entries show, the anti-terrorism thriller remains on shaky ground despite its obvious poignancy. From Syriana, The Kingdom, The Traitor, all the way back to Collateral Damage and (arguably) Transformers, no director has succeeded in turning our culture’s CNN bombing footage-addiction into an intelligent action-thriller masterpiece of moral and political intrigue and explosions (except, one could argue, Alfonzo Cuarón with Children of Men).

Scott might have been the perfect man for the job, as his most vital work subverts traditions that have been branded into multiplex-going retinas summer after summer. Blade Runner, Alien and (to a lesser extent) Thelma & Louise began with a comfortable formula (sci-fi, monster, buddy road trip) before turning our expectations against us. Those films have informed every subsequent entry in their given genres, something Body of Lies can’t do for the overplayed, under-thought terrorism thriller.

Here, the Michael Jordan of counter-terrorism agents (Leo DiCaprio’s Roger Ferris) works the arms trade in the Middle-East, taking (or rejecting) cues from Bluetoothed CIA suit Ed Hoffman in D.C. (Russell Crowe, putting on a southern accent and looking his most slovenly and suburban since The Insider). Based on a novel by Washington Post writer David Ignatius and adapted by Departed screenwriter William Monahan, Body of Lies is rife with familiar plot points and untapped intrigue.

The action is centered on Ferris running into and out of enemy bases and tense alliances, making for encounters that recall Team America: World Police more often than Scott probably intended. Greater screen time for slimy Ed might have set Body of Lies apart from preceding terrorism blockbusters. Telling Ferris to kill one compromised informant after another while tucking his kids into bed and dropping them off at school, Ed dramatizes (hyperbolically, sure) the moral detachment of affecting a war on another continent without seeing its consequences. Sadly, how Ed reconciles child-rearing and war-mongering remains unaddressed.

How do we deal with the traumas and responsibilities of destruction elsewhere in the world when they’re so easy to tune out? Sounds heavy man, let’s watch the sweet Muslim girl (Golshifteh Farahani, stuck with the film’s token female role) fall for Leo and helicopter-SUV shootouts instead. Though he skews screen time towards DiCaprio’s familiar scowl while Crowe works much harder on the sidelines, some of Body of Lies’ set pieces remind us why Scott lives in the Pantheon of blockbuster directors.

It’s not quite Spike Lee reinventing the heist film with Inside Man, but Scott sure puts the Paul Greengrasses and Christopher Nolans to shame. He comfortably foregoes such schlocks’ disorienting shaky cams and nauseating editing, favoring gliding movements, patient establishing shots, expertly-paced action sequences and exquisite compositions. Ever the visual artists, Scott and favorite cinematographer Alexander Witt seem to overcompensate visually for Body of Lies’ mishandled script.

Not surprising, because when Scott can’t break from traditions he seems to settle on making them really good-looking. Classic Hollywood epic Gladiator is a perfect example of this habit, but Black Hawk Down and American Gangster fit the pattern too. Body of Lies seems destined to be the latest on that list. It’s stylishly average in a budding terrorism-thriller genre whose traditions aren’t sufficiently strong to be broken by the kind of artistic force Ridley Scott once wielded.

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.