Natsu: Crystallization

Onishi Gallery

The Japanese artist bridges interior design, arts and crafts, fine art and fashion in sculptures formed from sparkly strung plastic beads. This show features meteorites, figures that are simultaneously mesmerizing, threatening and life-sparking, stoking fascinations over our origins and possible demise. In Natsu’s hands these sublime celestial bodies are all the more bewitching, turned into shimmering skeletal forms casting fantastic colorful shadows that remain vaguely ominous and unknowable. Closes 6/28.

This review will appear in the June 4 issue of The L Magazine.

War, Inc.

Directed by Joshua Seftel
John Cusack, Marisa Tomei

This must be the pandering liberal Hollywood circle-jerk studio execs wanted when they poured millions into David Kelly’s Southland Tales. Action unfolds in near-future Turaqistan (brilliant, right?), where a corporation-run war is destroying all things local then rebuilding for billions, American-style. There are also terrorists, CIA agents, and Hillary Duff as a Middle-Eastern pop star (who ends up being American, so it’s okay). Such simplistic satire becomes scenery wherein Cusack’s emotionally-injured corporate head-hunter reaffirms his manhood and gets the girl (two girls, in fact).

This review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.

Let The Right One In

Directed by Tomas Alfredson

They don’t come much more stylish than this Swedish hybrid of vampire and adolescent sexual awakening genres. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s elegantly composed shots and Jessica Fridén’s retro-cool costume department create an aesthetic somewhere between a fashion spread and a music video. Director Tomas Alfredson, and production designer Eva Norén work in a kind of icy blue-gray palette throughout the film’s Scandinavian modernist locales in suburban Stockholm. The hard geometry and morgue-like tiling of the housing complex setting nonetheless harbors a rag-tag community of friends and gossipmongers that we come to know well. This set-up of community life arranged around a courtyard recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window, particularly as suspicions multiply and home invasions increase.

But such adult concerns (murders and other meddling problems) serve mainly as backdrop in Let The Right One In’s child-centric narrative. Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is our vaguely girly leading lad, living with an emotionally absent mother, and whose (perhaps gay) father resides in the countryside. Oskar is relentlessly bullied at school, and his budding knife fetish suggests he’ll soon seek a violent solution to his social problems. Mysterious Eli (Lina Leandersson) moves in next door, and a relationship of mutual growth and support evolves.

To call the mix of child sexuality and tactfully deployed vampire action that ensues a genre hybrid is reductive though. The two narratives aren’t grafted onto each other for novelty’s sake. Rather, they carry each other into more interesting territory – not unlike the way Oskar and Eli push each other into greater confidence and maturity. Vampirism as a metaphor for sexuality is nothing new – with Interview With A Vampire and Buffy as only the most recent iterations of a trend already firmly established by the time Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released in 1897. But that tradition is wonderfully adapted here as a vessel for exploring the too often taboo subject of children’s sexual awakening.

Not that Let The Right One In is all psychosexual allegory, but that dimension is very present. The portrayal of the housing complex’s depressed adults is also well-rendered, and provides a kind of crystal ball onto the future that makes Oskar and Eli’s evolution into even-keeled individuals all the more important. How depressing it would be if these conflicted but endearing kids ended up like the adults they’re growing up around. Let The Right One In places firm hope in its young duo, and does so with a mix of visual and narrative flair that’s original and entertaining.

This review appeared on The L Magazine's blog as part of that magazine's coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, and can also be read here.

Fermat’s Room

Directed by Luis Piedrahita & Rodrigo Sopeña

Equal parts David Mamet double-cross thriller (House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Heist) and quasi-metaphysical math-themed sci-fi (Cube, Cube 2: Hypercube), this stylish Spanish story of four math geniuses stuck in a shrinking room doesn’t have the narrative chops to sustain its tension to the end. Piedrahita and Sopeña create a nail-biting scenario over the first hour, but as Fermat’s Room enters its final phase leaps in logic and overwrought explanations make for a disappointing ending. Also, the riddles these supposed geniuses are made to solve in order to avoid compaction are old favorites most of us learned as teenagers. Does this mean Americans have finally climbed to the pinnacle of logic and mathematics education, vastly outstripping these Iberian lackeys? Doubtful. More likely Piedrahita and Sopeña weren’t ballsy enough to write a script of completely mumbo-jumbled equations that we would never have bothered to investigate.

After expository introductions, the four main characters are invited via mysterious letters to a meeting of great mathematically-inclined minds in the titular room. Our four protagonists quickly fall apart and reveal their secrets as the walls push them together. There’s the old-world aristocratic professor, the working-class engineer, the egocentric young math star (such a thing exists apparently, in Spain), and the uppity woman they pass around more or less metaphorically. This is where the film falters, as elaborate back-stories are provided to connect these characters who function much better as archetypes without fully-developed personalities.

Fermat’s Room is strong where Cube and its sequel were weak (acting, art design), but could have benefited from mimicking their disregard for narrative explanation. Referring to past events and having characters recount injurious stories slows the pace more than the additional information justifies. This background data does little to heighten the tension. If putting four essentially likeable characters into a deadly trap doesn’t make us care about them (which it had), finding out they’re alternately lying, cheating, lecherous and murderous won’t help.

Beyond its over-determined audience identification and over-simplified riddles, Fermat’s Room is an enjoyable film. The narrative is engaging until the last third, and there are no glaring weaknesses. It’s more polished and big budget-looking than many international entries at Tribeca this year, with snazzy locations and sets, and stylish cinematography. The opening credit sequence, incidentally, is a close second to Simon Brand’s Paraiso Travel for the Festival’s coolest.

This review appeared on The L Magazine's blog as part of the magazine's coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, and can also be read here.

My Winnipeg

Directed by Guy Maddin

The latest from the Manitoban mystic known for his inventive prairie expressionism is a kind of “Dear John” letter to his hometown. Maddin combines family anecdotes, local history, regional legend and pure fantasy to create a portrait of himself and Winnipeg. The result is an endearing collage of public and private insights that privileges revealing fictions over hard facts. The otherwise disparate elements are held together by the movements of a sleep train around the hushed city – Winnipeg has ten times the national rate of sleepwalkers, we are told – and the charming deadpan of the director’s commentary (recounted at one remove by Darcy Fehr, who acts and narrates the part of “Guy Maddin”).

Early moments in Maddin/Fehr’s voice-over narration recall another filmmaker who tends to append personal narratives to documentary subjects. As Maddin introduces his sleepy city, Michael Moore’s recurring visits to Flint, Michigan come to mind. Luckily the likeness is momentary. The earnestness of Maddin’s strangest claims (that, for instance, sleepwalkers who re-enter previous homes must be welcomed by the current inhabitants) undermines the vanity a project like My Winnipeg inevitably suggests. These and other citywide pronouncements (“everything that happens in this city is a euphemism,” was a personal favorite) flow smoothly into ruminations on the director’s family, especially his mother.

In fact, for those familiar with Maddin’s trademark style, the visual integration of My Winnipeg’s original material and stock footage might be its most impressive achievement. Whether showing archival film from the early 1900s of horses frozen in the local river, re-enacted domestic scenes or the recent implosion of the city’s storied hockey arena, the disparate materials of My Winnipeg all adhere remarkably to the Maddinian aesthetic.

Beyond visual coherence, My Winnipeg mobilizes many metaphors to string its materials together. Aside from the sleep train, Maddin’s vehicle for exploring and leaving the city (“what if I film my way out of here?” he asks early on), the most interesting is his Native-informed interest in The Forks. According to local legend The Forks – where the Assiniboine and Red Rivers meet – is a churning pool of discordant energies. This geographic intersection shapes Winnipeg’s layout, but for Maddin its upheaval of imperceptible powers is the generative force behind many of his hometown’s idiosyncrasies. This fork imagery also evokes Maddin’s career. If My Winnipeg is a kind of therapeutic exercise, it will be interesting to see what direction the director takes from this juncture.

This review appeared on The L Magazine's blog as part of the magazine's 2008 Tribeca Film Festival coverage, and can be read here.

Sangre de mi Sangre

Directed by Christopher Zalla

Part relentlessly dehumanizing immigration movie, part identity theft thriller, Christopher Zalla’s stylish Sundance-winning debut (originally titled Padre Nuestro) picks apart its male protagonists’ fractured psyches. An outstanding Latin drum-fueled opening chase – only the most obvious similarity between this film and 2002’s City of God – sets the terms of their personality crises. The pursuit of money hurtles Zalla’s male trio across borders, through life and identities.

Evading his chasers, Juan (Armando Hernandez) befriends Pedro (Jorge Adrian Espindola) in a Northbound shipping container. Upon arrival in Brooklyn, Juan finds Pedro’s estranged father and poses as his son. The film then charts the two men’s (mis)fortunes, Juan’s relationship with Pedro’s father Diego (Jesus Ochoa), and Pedro’s fraught exchanges with local squatter and sex worker Magda (Poala Mendoza). Though Sangre’s immigration politics are well developed, the gender issues raised by the Magda character remain frustratingly unexplored. Throughout, the action unfolds in moody monochromes, with alternately blue-, gray- and golden-hued scenes. Cinematographer Igor Martinovic puts his artistry on full display, reveling in expressive zooms, instinctual handheld movements and an isolating focus.

Such technical prowess reinforces characters’ unstable situations while Zalla’s hybrid immigration and identity theft script keeps the moving parts in flux. After all, what better occasion to remake oneself or replace another than the complete identity erasure experienced by so many undocumented entrants? The three men – hulking hardworker Diego, trusting loser Pedro and trickster Juan – assume different compromised identities formed in response to the demands of a society driven by the bottom line. If money makes the man, these marginalized characters are never completely themselves – or someone else, for that matter.

A similar version of this review appears in the May 13 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.

"Rising Down" by The Roots

Def Jam

If dissent is “in,” The Roots have their finger on the body politic’s pulse. That said, their tenth album’s intense pessimism has bubbled for years. Just look at literary intertexts referenced in the Philly-based group’s recent album titles. Where The Tipping Point and Game Theory name-dropped concepts for forming consensus and resolving conflicts, Rising Down quotes William T. Vollman’s massive treatise on politically-motivated violence. This album’s a work of incredible synergy, connecting local, national and global crises over urgent beats propelled by mostly percussive and electronic instrumentation.

Black Thought and guests rap with captivating immediacy over ?uestlove’s stripped sounds. The title song features Styles P and Mos Def (spitting his best verse in much too long), while Thought warns of class-determined disaster: “you in trouble if you not an Onassis.” Later on “I Can’t Help It,” he laments having to sell discontent like another product. “I’m feeling like I’m making a sales pitch,” Thought complains, “I got too many options, it’s so many toxins.” We’ve been sold on The Roots for years now, and as their formula sheds toxins every outing, where better to get well-crafted, politicized hip hop?

A similar version of this review appears in the May 14 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Poultrygeist: Night of the Living Chicken

Directed by Lloyd Kaufman
Jason Yachanin, Kate Graham

In true Troma form, no taboo is left unexplored, no stereotype unquestioned, no bodily secretion un-spewed in this biting indictment of just about anybody who opens their mouth in contemporary American discourse. Poultrygeist is card-carrying low-class art, and the crass context gives the filmmakers license to go after everyone. Kaufman expertly balances political satire and all-out parody (and musical numbers). Throughout unrelenting class-conscious, military-theme zombie chicken action, only the fast food industry comes out completely vilified, but everyone gets at least a little dirty.


This review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.

"When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold" by Atmosphere

(Rhymesayers)Over their recent albums (including the outstanding Strictly Leakage, free at rhymesayers.com) Minneapolis duo Atmosphere – producer Ant and MC Slug – have relentlessly re-made their brand of indie hip hop. On the two previous discs Ant has been the duo’s shape-shifter, his production working through contemporary rap staples into a funk-suffused golden era Heavy D-like style. His latest mutation features stripped melodic beats, with a small core of live instruments providing a backdrop for Slug.

The MC is more obviously the focus on When Life Gives You Lemons’ minimalist soundscapes (some tracks feature only one or two instruments), and Slug steps up accordingly. His voice is more musical, his cadence more varied, and his narratives continually subvert the conventions he’s set up over the years. “The Skinny,” for instance, stories a woman’s addiction to cigarettes as if she were an abused sex worker. Indeed, this album marks a shift towards adulthood, where alternating self-deprecation and boasting gave previous efforts the tinge of prolonged late-adolescence that’s all-too commonplace in rap today. So for example, “Yesterday” sounds like a ballad for an alienated friend (think 2Pac’s “I Ain’t Mad Atcha”), but turns out to be about the rapper’s recently-deceased father.

Parenthood is undoubtedly among the album’s main themes. Even more promising, though, is Slug’s feminism, which has been implicit in Atmosphere albums for a while, but now takes center stage. After all, the opener features the line “we made her drown in a lake full of patriarchy,” and roughly half the 15 tracks on When Life Gives You Lemons are about women or feature female protagonists. If this album’s not as immediately gratifying as Atmosphere’s previous work, it’s certainly more rewarding. And, after all, what musical genre needs a talented feminist voice more than hip hop?

A similar version of this review appears in the May 14 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Tamara Kostianovsky: Actus Reus

Black & White Gallery

Turning this Maritime Building gallery into a meatpacking plant for beef cuts made of tightly bound discarded clothing, the Israeli artist stages a critique of consumerism as exemplified in the manufacturing of garments and meat products. Familiar labels intimating sweatshop labor jut from simulated bovine innards hanging unceremoniously on meat hooks. The visceral violence of the meat imagery completely overpowers the DIY softness of the medium.

Closes 5/24.

This review will appear in the May 7 issue of The L Magazine.