Archive for the ‘FILM REVIEWS’ Category

More than just the Hollywood It girl of the moment, Emma Stone is a real actress, and in The Help, she gets an ostentatious, Oscar-baiting Big Scene in which to prove it. Stone is, to borrow a phrase from Bret Easton Ellis‘ Twitter account, thoroughly post-empire — she doesn’t need this kind of relic of old-school Hollywood to show off her chops. But this is the kind of thing The Help is best at: forcing easy, organic charm to glimmer through a few layers of ancient dust.

A fast-talking, eye-rolling snarler, Stone wears a truly terrible perm to play the allegedly dowdy Skeeter, a smart but naive recent college graduate who returns to her family’s Mississippi plantation in the summer of 1962. She is shocked to discover that, in her absence, not only have her school friends become the casually, cruelly racist white establishment but her beloved childhood maid (Cicely Tyson) has disappeared.

Skeeter decides to write about her hometown from the perspective of the black women who work in every white household. Her ins to that world are Aibileen (Viola Davis), a dutiful maid who develops unusually intimate relationships with the white children she’s paid to take care of (“You’re my real mama, Aibi!” a cherubic toddler cringe-worthily exclaims, the second her mom is out of earshot), and Minny (Octavia Spencer), whose inability to become wallpaper/doormat at work has cost her a few jobs, most recently and spectacularly in the home of the town’s coolly despicable queen bee, Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard).

The Help, based on Kathryn Stockett‘s best-selling novel, is so sincerely invested in the tenacity and nobility of Aibileen and Minny that to accuse writer-director Tate Taylor of pushing the dreaded Magical Negro button would be a low blow. These women are not merely wisdom-spouting ciphers who exist only as devices to teach white characters lessons. They are that — they actually say things like, “Fried chicken just tend to make you feel better ’bout life” as pretty blond women look on, beaming — but they’re not just that; they’re also victims of fairly realistic character flaws, almost as much as they’re victims of circumstance.

Skeeter, of course, has her own, somewhat less urgent civil rights battle, signified by the fact that she’s the only white woman in town who has a job, while her commitment to her career guarantees her inability to get and keep a boyfriend (a “struggle” still being fought in the average romantic comedy set today). She’s led to believe things are different in glam Manhattan, but even her long-distance NYC mentor, a short-skirted book editrix played byMary Steenburgen, is shown business-lunching with multiple men — and, pointedly, going to bed alone.

Maybe it’s because her project is partially self-interested — she’s not writing about these women only to help their careers — that Skeeter, and the film, neglect to answer sufficiently what’s posited as the book-within-the-movie’s key question: Why do little white girls who are raised lovingly by black maids turn into raging racist assholes once they’ve grown to run their own households?

The psychology of this query is too complicated for a film so hell-bent on jerking easy tears and capturing a wide audience. Instead, we get a fairly typical Hollywood flattening of history, with powerful villains and disenfranchised heroes. In one corner, there are contemptibly cowardly conformists like Hilly’s gang of girls and their seemingly interchangeable husbands. On the other side are outsiders of many stripes — the black servant class; Skeeter the un-glam brainiac; Celia (Jessica Chastain), a presumed strumpet whose heart is as big as her exaggerated bosom; and assorted white matron figures who seem to have the freedom to buck the norm only because they’ve outlived their usefulness as women — whose recognition and support of one another lift all of their boats simultaneously.

Taylor seems to be less interested in the stories of these working women than he is in the mechanics of storytelling — the ways in which reportage and gossip serve, er, separate but equal functions in shaping narratives. The Help is plainly a film about how talking becomes writing, which becomes activism, which turns into history. The night Medgar Evers is killed, Aibileen tries to comfort a paranoid Minny: “We ain’t doin’ civil rights, we just telling stories like they really happened” — a downplaying that rightly makes her friend laugh. The characters are well aware of the portent of their story swapping, as is the film.

The Help is able to transcend its own puffed-up self-importance only in those few moments when two people on the margins — by choice or by birth — see their own struggles reflected in the other, their individual hardships fading into a shared compulsion to fight back.

THE HELP | Directed by TATE TAYLOR | Written by TAYLOR, based on the novel by KATHRYN STOCKETT | Dreamworks Pictures | Citywide

Written by:

Karina Longworth

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Say what you will about 19th-century literature, they had stories in those days (and stories within stories). None of the 260 books authored by Camilo Castelo Branco (1825-90) is available in English, but this madly prolific Portuguese novelist provided the material for two imposing movie epics: Manoel de Oliveira‘s 1979 breakthrough, Doomed Love, and now Raul Ruiz‘s scarcely less remarkable and equally long Mysteries of Lisbon.

Convoluted does not begin to describe this four-and-a-half-hour movie, which, given the filmmaker’s straightforward if subtly distanced embrace of Branco’s sprawling, three-volume novel, might be calledMysteries of Mysteries of Lisbon. A sort of ethnographic time traveler, Ruiz dramatizes every outrageous plot twist with serene equanimity — treating the hopelessly old-fashioned as the new avant-garde. The tale of the illegitimate “orphan” Pedro’s search for his origins is embedded in a thicket of concealed identities, unexpected confessions and madly proliferating nested narratives. Boasting of “coincidences so great no novelist would invent them,” the story advances as it retreats; the movie’s most often repeated line is “I’ll explain later!”

Adapted from a six-part miniseries (or soap opera) produced by longtime Oliveira associate Paulo Branco for Portuguese TV,Mysteries of Lisbon is a fitting companion to Ruiz’s triumphant 1999 adaptation of the thought-unfilmable Time Regained, which, rather than approximate Proust’s prose, addressed his modernist use of simultaneous multiple perspectives. As Time Regained was a 20th-century movie about a 20th-century novel, Mysteries of Lisbon is a 21st-century adaptation of a 19th-century chronicle. Placing the very notion of narrative between quotation marks, it’s at once matter-of-fact and outlandish, anachronistic and contemporary, a movie of fluid long takes and static compositions in which all of the action might be set within the paper theater given to the young hero by the aristocratic woman who, 20 minutes into the movie, turns out to be his mother and then …

Leisurely and digressive, this generally exhilarating saga (“a storm of misadventures,” per Ruiz) variously suggests Victor Hugo, Stendhal and (thanks in part to the unnatural, emphatic yet uninflected acting) Mexican telenovelas. The score is richly romantic; the period locations are impeccable. Secondary characters come unexpectedly to the fore, as the past perpetually introduces itself into the present. War breaks out — 20 years before the story opens. (Like just about everything in early-19th-century European intellectual history, every event can be traced back to the historical rupture of the French Revolution.)

Mysteries of Lisbon has no shortage of incidental absurdism, although the suggestion that human existence is an enigmatic divine plan carried out by priests and penitents is a reminder that literary surrealism was largely the invention of lapsed Catholics. Slightly less self-effacing than God, Ruiz signals his own presence (if not necessarily his intentions) with some intermittently eccentric camera placement and strategic mirror reflections, repeated scenes of servants spying or eavesdropping on the affairs of the oblivious aristos who employ them, and occasional bouts of hysterical, unmotivated laughter. The ability of characters to recognize each other after lifetime-long separations is a source of humor, as well as mystery: “The winding roads we had to travel, my son, to meet again!” (or to make sense of Branco’s master plot).

The more Pedro learns of his past, the more confused and morbidly alienated he becomes. Ultimately, Mysteries cuts its own Gordian knot to wrap with a magnificent, looping closer — a blaze of white light that metaphorically conflates the end of literature, theater and cinema. The nothingness is Olympian. A child is born, a man dies (still living in that child’s imagination) and the movie feels majestically disinterested — once set in motion, it hardly cares if you watch.

Written by:

J. Hoberman

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“Rise of the Planet of the Apes” was the top banana this weekend, swinging past industry expectations to easily conquer the box office.

The prequel to the 1968 classic, which stars James Franco and a handful of digitalized simians, grossed a strong $54 million domestically, according to an estimate from distributorTwentieth Century Fox. Heading into the weekend, those who had seen prerelease audience surveys had projected that the film would collect around $35 million.

Unfortunately for Universal Pictures, the weekend’s other new film in wide release, the R-rated comedy “The Change-Up,” performed about as expected: pretty badly. The movie, about buddies played by Ryan Reynolds and Jason Batemanwho accidentally trade lives and end up in the other’s body, mustered a weak $13.5 million.

Both critics and audiences seemed to love “Apes.” The big-budget film received surprisingly strong reviews, earning an 81% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and went over well with crowds this weekend. Those who saw the movie assigned it an average grade of A-, according to market research firm CinemaScore. (Men made up 54% of the audience.)

Ticket sales for the film dropped an astoundingly low 1% from Friday to Saturday, which Fox‘s vice president of distribution, Chris Aronson, said spoke to the movie’s ultimate playability.

“A confluence of events made this film a success, starting with exceptional reviews that I think highlighted how groundbreaking this movie really is,” said Aronson, referring to the film’s use of motion-capture technology to create realistic-looking apes. “When movies do something that has never been seen before, audiences respond — and that fueled tremendous word-of-mouth for us.”

The solid start for “Apes” is good news for Peter Chernin, the former president of Fox’s parent company, News Corp. In 2009, the executive left his post as Rupert Murdoch‘s top lieutenant to launch his own entertainment company — and “Apes” is the first movie the new entity has produced. The film, which depicts how apes acquired the intelligence to take over Earth, was financed by Fox and partners Dune Capital Management and Ingenious Media for $93 million.

After the original series of five “Apes” films came to a close in 1973, Fox relaunched the brand again in 2001 with a Tim Burton-directed version of “Planet of the Apes.” The movie was disliked by critics but did good business. A decade ago, the film had an even bigger opening weekend than the latest “Apes” movie, debuting to $68.5 million and ultimately grossing $362.2 million worldwide.

“Rise of the Planet of the Apes” also opened this weekend in 25 foreign markets, where it raked in a decent $23.4 million. Audiences in Spain responded most to the film, as it sold $5.2 million worth of tickets there.

Raunchfest “The Change-Up” is one of the few in its genre to stall at the box office this summer. Audiences have embraced R-rated comedies such as “Bad Teacher,” “Bridesmaids” and “Horrible Bosses,” all of which opened to about $10 million more than “The Change-Up.” Those films were also less expensive to produce, because Universal and Relativity Media spent about $52 million to make the picture — a higher-than-average budget for a comedy.

While most critics seemed to loathe the movie, audiences didn’t, giving it an average grade of B. Universal is hoping that score will fuel positive word-of-mouth in the coming weeks.

“Ryan and Jason are a hilarious pairing in this film, and R-rated comedies often have playability,” said studio spokesperson Kori Bernards, adding that its film “Bridesmaids” earned a similar CinemaScore of B+. That film turned out to be a sleeper hit, grossing $256.3 million worldwide since its release in May.

About half the crowd that saw “The Change-Up” was under age 30, and 59% was female. Some of those young female moviegoers may have shown up to see one of the movie’s attractive leading man, Reynolds, who has had a rough summer at the box office. The lackluster start marks the star’s second disappointing opening in recent months — the first was his turn as a superhero in “Green Lantern.”That movie, which cost about $200 million to produce and opened in June, has collected only a weak $154.6 million globally.

Original Story

Written by:

Amy Kaufman

Photo:

WETA / 20th Century Fox

Miranda July clutters her speech with a surplus of “likes” and “you knows,” conspicuous even for a 37-year-old living in a quasi-bohemian enclave of L.A. These tics are so omnipresent in modern language that they tend to fall into a kind of conversational white noise, but spending time with the artist-author-filmmaker got me thinking about what they actually mean. Coming from July’s mouth, it’s impossible to ignore that the rhetorical “You know?” is a fundamental signal of insecurity, a sign of a constant quest for connection, recognition, approval. And every sentence fragmented with a “like” — “It’s, like” instead of “It is,” “She was, like,” instead of “She said” — takes an implicit stance against definitive declaration.

But this tendency toward heavily qualified conversation seems appropriate: July may be contemporary art and film’s most committed chronicler of neediness and suspended development. Throughout her 15-year career as a working artist, July has explored the mysteries of human communication and connection with a disarming sincerity, all through a persona that’s as savvily crafted as they come.

July’s name has come to serve as a kind of shorthand for what constitutes “hipster” as much as, say, Zooey Deschanel or Dave Eggers — and like the indie film actress and the author-publisher, there’s something about July that inspires the use of words likeprecious and precocious as pejoratives. Her work — in its faux-oblivious dodging of sarcasm and cynicism, its use of childlike affectation to explore the invisible, mutable line between juvenile and adult, and its often proudly literal stating of anxieties that usually go unspoken — inspires eye-rolling and even bullylike behavior from a cool-kid crowd more comfortable with snark and ironic appreciation. The push against such disaffection is part of July’s wider project.

“To me, it’s like, otherwise, how do you know if it’s good, you know? Unless it’s true,” July says. We’ve met for lunch on a Friday inSilver Lake, near the home she shares with graphic artist–turned-filmmaker Mike Mills(Beginners), her husband of two years. It’s her last quiet afternoon before a flurry of activity surrounding her new movie, TheFuture, and “Eleven Heavy Things,” a sculpture show she would later install on the lawn in front of MOCA’s Pacific Design Center. “I write plenty of stuff that isn’t totally sincere, and that’s the part I cut out.”

The Future, which opens tomorrow in L.A., is July’s second feature film as writer, director and star (after 2005′s Me and You and Everyone We Know, which won prizes atSundance and Cannes). It concerns the interwoven dramas of a precocious little girl, a randy single father, an eccentric (yet wise!) old man, a talking cat named Paw Paw and a Los Angeles couple who, faced with the prospect of a small dose of responsibility entering their lives in one month’s time, quit their menial jobs in order to live life to the fullest for their last 30 days of true freedom.

As much as these elements might skirt saccharine, indie-film stereotypes, July transcends the familiar, largely by taking an undeclared turn, in the film’s second half, into the realm of sci-fi–tinged surrealism. July also has incorporated the visual language of performance and video art seamlessly into the story, exploring highly specific, minutely observed emotions with deep resonance, while at the same time playing with the possibilities of what American indie narrative cinema can be and do.

The Future begins with a black screen, forcing focus on timorous narration from Paw Paw, a wounded stray cat (voiced by July) who explains that his life was saved by a young couple who promised to come back to the “cagetorium” to adopt her when her injuries healed. That couple is Sophie (July), a 30-something teacher at a dance school for kids, and her long-term live-in boyfriend, Jason (Hamish Linklater).

When we first meet Sophie and Jason, they’re sharing a couch in their ramshackle railroad apartment, each focused on a Mac laptop, the computers pinning them into their seats. They argue over who should get up and get a glass of water, and fantasize about a combination of gadgets and magical powers that would allow them to turn the tap on and fill a glass without actually having to move.

“You can’t really do anything special with your mind,” she scoffs. His comeback: “Except stop time.”

While this banter is happening, its “spontaneity” scans as unnatural —  the kind of precision cuteness that attracts July’s detractors like dogs to raw meat. But as with much of what may seem like affectation in The Future‘s setup — the very existence of a talking-cat narrator named Paw Paw; Sophie’s habit of greeting a waking Jason as “Hi, Person”; the “character” of a yellow T-shirt/security blanket Sophie calls “Shirtie” —  the film’s second-half veer into deadpan metaphysical fantasy casts this exchange in a different light. And ultimately, Sophie and Jason’s desperate attempts to delay the inevitable will lead them to carelessly cause senseless, far-from-cute tragedy.

Sophie may be nearing the end of her natural fertility, but she and Jason essentially live like college students, working thankless, low-commitment day jobs. So the impending arrival of Paw Paw is a big deal; it gets the couple thinking about time. They’ll soon be 40 and, as Jason puts it, “After 40, you’re basically 50, and after 50, it’s basically loose change … like, not enough to get what you really want.”

In a queasy limbo between childhood and adulthood, Sophie and Jason are ostensibly free of parental minders but far from ready to do their own minding. As July puts it over lunch, “One friend of ours became a mom. We still think of ourselves, the rest of us, as daughters, but our friend is a mom — you know, like, she graduated. I know people whose parents are dead, and on some level they’re still doing things to impress their parents, you know? It’s like you don’t ever have to stop that.”

Sophie and Jason’s campaign to make the most of “our last month ever” leads to Jason bonding with a dirty limerick–writing, happily married elderly man whom he meets through the classified rag Penny-saver, played by an actual elderly man whom July met through the Pennysaver while working on a project documented in the book It Chooses You, to be released in November by McSweeney’s.

Meanwhile, left a month to pursue her heart’s desires, Sophie first attempts to launch a bid for YouTube stardom. When that proves to be a nonstarter, she falls into an irrational affair with older, single dad Marshall (David Warshofsky).

The affair is one element of The Future that went through several iterations via previous July creations. In a short story in July’s 2007 collection No One Belongs Here More Than You, “Mon Plaisir,” a wife compiles a list of topics that she and her husband do not broach: “Important Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely Are Not Going to Talk About.” That story foreshadowed July’s live performance piece, Things We Don’t Understand and Are Definitely Not Going to Talk About, which she mounted at the Kitchen in New York in 2007. Every night, July would “cast” a real couple and a single guy in the audience to play the troubled couple and the wife’s lover. It gave her an opportunity to workshop some of her less conventional ideas (like the T-shirt and the anthropomorphized cat) before writing The Future‘s screenplay.

July’s scenes with Warshofsky can be painful to watch. The characters have little chemistry, and physically they look as odd together as July and Linklater are an obviously matched pair. But it was important to July that this not be an evenly balanced love triangle.

“I really wanted him to seem so wrong,” she says. “In the performance it was often, like, a really cute guy. At that point I was still interested in it as an affair. I think I was just committing to this big relationship [with Mills], and still kind of freaked out, whereas by the time I got to the movie I was, like, whatever.”

Though Sophie and Marshall do have sex, physical attraction is clearly not the key motivator for her — in fact, she seems fairly repulsed by his “sleazy” style. One of their dialogue exchanges cuts right to the heart of the affair’s appeal:

Marshall: “It would make me very happy to watch you all the time.”

Sophie: “If it was really ‘all the time,’ I wouldn’t even have to try!”

Marshall [shaking his head]: “I had you totally wrong. I thought you were more … independent.”

When I ask July what Sophie gets from the affair, she describes Marshall’s gaze as “like fame.”

“Ten years ago, wanting attention was still shameful and getting it was hard for most of us,” July writes in her director’s statement for The Future.

Despite her seemingly naive persona, July has always treated her career as serious business. She was born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger and adopted her stage name in high school. She was raised in Berkeley by publisher parents who taught her to be comfortable with intimate expression. “My dad expects, when we talk on the phone, that I’m going to tell him about my internal world,” July says. “And if I don’t, I’ve kind of, like, failed a little bit in the conversation. It’s a little superficial.”

She dropped out of UC Santa Cruz at age 20, in part, she says, to force herself to make art without a net. “That was exciting because whatever I made would be real. It wouldn’t be a student thing, it wouldn’t be like an internship.”

She moved to Portland, Ore., put on plays in punk clubs and hooked up with the K Recordsscene in Olympia, Wash., performing in the mid-’90s with a band called The Need and recording two experimental solo records. She became a big fish in these proudly countercultural ponds, but she always wanted more.

“The first play that I did, I was probably just as into making the poster and putting the ad in the paper as writing the play. Those activities were part of the reason to make this stuff,” she recalls. “Maybe it seems sort of self-promoting, but to me it was like, well, on the other hand, isn’t it kind of silly to just expect people to show up to this?”

Ten years ago, July was best known as a video artist. Her 2001 short Getting Stronger Every Day, starring Sleater-Kinney‘s Carrie Brownstein, plays today as a vague aesthetic precursor to The Future. July also was renowned as a small-batch film distributer, having launched a project called Joanie4Jackie, which compiled short films made by women and created an infrastructure through which they could be sent around the country, chain-letter style.

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Written by:

Karina Longworth

Images:

Kevin Scanlon

Between AMC’s The Killing and the Lisbeth Salander trilogy, we’re in the midst of a Scandinavian Invasion. Hang on to your Prozac

I own one movie by fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman, because I have to. You can’t be a movie critic with a collection of six or seven hundred DVDs that includes everything from Tokyo Story to Poison Ivy: The New Seduction and not have a Bergman movie. The one I have is 1957’s The Seventh Seal—in which Max von Sydow’s medieval knight famously plays chess with Death—because if you have to have a Bergman movie, that’s the one you have to have. (Spoiler alert: Death wins!) Even if you haven’t seen The Seventh Seal, you’ve seen it. The influence is so vast and insidious, every image of a black-robed, white-faced Death is a rip or parody of The Seventh Seal. Before his big board duel, von Sydow spends the movie procrastinating, roving the literal and figurative hills and dales of his past until there’s no longer any putting off the inevitable. The Seventh Seal made a huge impact around the world; Hollywood snatched up von Sydow, rendering the obvious Christian metaphor of his knight more obvious by casting him as Jesus in 1965’s The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Of course the news of Death’s triumph spoils no plot, because if any Scandinavian were actually to win such a contest, he would demand a rematch. It’s in our nature; we don’t spend a whole life getting through life just to have to get through more of it. In a way, all Scandinavian movies are descendants of the original Scandinavian Christian-metaphor movie, Danish director Carl Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the seven or eight best films ever made and impossible to watch more than once. Quintessentially Scandinavian in its unrelieved dread, it was ahead of its time in rigor and austerity; it’s difficult to imagine a video from the year 1431 being more authentic or immediate. Twice as old as the real Joan, Renée Falconetti in her only screen appearance gives what’s considered by some the single greatest performance in cinema, so immersed in the girl-warrior’s trial and execution that she never made another film and reportedly went a bit screwy afterward. Naturally this is because she was French. With all that joie de vivre, she was asking for it; a Scandinavian actress would have taken it in stride. Life is an existential and meaningless ordeal that shakes the foundations of faith and plunges one into an abyss of metaphysical imponderables and miserable absurdity? Welcome to my world, Joan, or, as Death would have it, rook takes queen, checkmate.

A couple of generations ago, Ingmar Bergman aside, movies from Scandinavia began reflecting its utopianism and sexual anarchy, Sweden in particular having morphed into the world’s most civilized society a millennium after all those rapacious Vikings. Such is the upside of a relentless rationalism that can be traced back to my own forebear, who was not, as with most Ericksons, the notorious Erik the Red but rather the designated stay-at-home Viking Erik the Well-Read, content to make up the plundering in his writing rather than do any of it. The most scandalous examples of these movies from the 1960s and ’70s were I Am Curious (Yellow) and I Am Curious (Blue), causes célèbres in the censor wars and something of larks, or as close to a lark as Scandinavians get, which is to say garden-variety dreariness interspersed with indifferent sex on an hourly basis. The newly socialist Sweden’s newly socialist Bergman made Fanny and Alexander, a childhood holiday memoir that attempted lightheartedness, dare one say warmth, so alarmingly out of character you would suspect it as a work of cinematic forgery if it weren’t bookended in Bergman’s oeuvre by Scenes from a Marriage, in which the titular relationship rots over the course of four hours, and Cries and Whispers, in which one woman is dying of cancer and another mutilates herself—the Scandinavian equivalent of John Belushi’s “Toga!” moment in Animal House.

*****

In terms of sheer epic Nordic grimness, however, the recent “Millennium” movies—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest—and the new AMC series The Killing are revelations nonetheless. There’s a line in a Björk song, “I thought I could organize freedom / How Scandinavian of me.” The Lisbeth Salander trilogy is a portrait of utopia, sexual and otherwise, not merely decaying but cast into hellacious havoc, the semblance of civilization not merely collapsing but doing so in a maelstrom of depravity. Tellingly, the late Stieg Larsson’s novel on which The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is based originally was called Men Who Hate Women, drawing on the author’s experience of having witnessed at the age of 15 a gang rape that he failed to stop. The first film of the trilogy is being remade for stateside audiences by David Fincher, and you wonder on the one hand whether it can hold the same shock for barbaric Americans, and on the other hand whether, as with the sexual liberation that Scandinavian films commemorated in the ’60s, it will go further than what Americans can stand. There are scenes in Dragon Tattoo that are unwatchable for both men and women, and leave each gazing at the other across the gender chasm, stricken guilt stranded on one side and barely contained fury on the other. In her vengeful righteousness, the Swedish film’s Noomi Rapace is contemporary cinema’s most persuasively feral force; Rooney Mara, who won the American role over Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson (and was last seen in The Social Network telling Jesse Eisenberg to take a hike, thereby inspiring Facebook), will be hard-pressed to replicate it. Uneven as the trilogy becomes, the trial near the end, where Lisbeth finally gets justice for the lifelong sexual violence inflicted against her, is as viscerally satisfying as any half hour in recent movies, though it comes too late to restore the woman’s capacity for trust and intimacy at their most basic.

If anything, The Killing is richer, closely based on an acclaimed Danish series in terms of plot, character, and locale, taking place as it does in Seattle, which of course is the Scandinavia of the United States. Leads Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman even look Scandinavian (Kinnaman is half Swedish, Enos is half French). As a crime story about a teenage girl’s murder, The Killing is composed of stock motifs: A veteran (female) cop is literally hours from retirement before the case gets under her skin; a cocky young rookie (male) three decades from comprehending the difference between attitude and wisdom is a loose cannon; a wedding that we know is doomed to never happen is put on hold; a young idealist’s political campaign has a secret connection to unfolding events that represent the corrosive corruption of the social by the personal. From Prime Suspect to The Wire, other English-language series over the past two decades have done this better. What distinguishes The Killing has nothing to do with police procedural; rather it’s the nearly unbearable drama of a family coming to terms with a daughter’s death that is inexplicable only because those of us who are mothers and fathers can’t acknowledge the demons in our teenagers. As the parents of Rosie Larsen (note the homage to the Millennium novels’ author), Michelle Forbes and Brent Sexton steal the show; TV’s resident badass femme in Battlestar Galactica, 24, and True Blood, Forbes is the more devastating for a grief and helplessness we’ve not seen in her. Nothing about The Killing is more impressive than when the American sleuthing stops and the Scandinavian coping begins.

In the dusty small-town Texas of Amy Wendel‘s All She Can – the centerpiece movie of the weeklong Latino-themed Maya Indie Film series – the options are predictably bleak for high school grads: Join the army, work on an oil rig or enroll at a local community college. And for Luz Garcia (Corina Calderon), teenage weightlifting champion, there’s the off chance of a scholarship to the University of Texas, provided she pumps the most iron at the state competition. There’s no question that Wendel’s movie treads familiar sports-as-the-way-out territory. But in its attention to the details of the lifters’ routines (hanging upside down or starving oneself to make weight) and its evocation of both the desolate beauty of the scrubby Texas countryside and the sense of quiet desperation it engenders, the film proves that closely sketched specificity can trump pedestrian plotting. At least, that is, until steroids rears its ugly and inevitable head and the film veers into morality play and, finally, inspirational uplift. What’s dispiriting about that turn is that it entails a movement away from the exact observations of the movie’s first half, forcing Luz into moments of increasingly improbable self-assertion, all in an effort to show, after an initial resignation, her unshakable, awe inspiring determination. (Sunset 5)

Written by:

Andrew Schenker

Image source

If nothing else, Nine Nation Animation proves that there’s a lot more to the animator’s art than either the cutting-edge ultrarealism of Pixar or the flat functionality of sitcoms likeThe Simpsons. The nonet of brief films on display in the latest anthology from the World According to Shorts offers a virtual catalog of the tools available to the animator — stop-motion, CGI, rotoscoping — with the techniques often combined in a single imposing display.

But while each film has something to recommend it — the mordant wit ofDeconstruction Workers, the witty nostalgia of Home Road Movies — virtuosity too often trumps communication, with the mind-bending visuals propping up unproductively abstract narratives.

So for all the advanced technique on display, best-in-show goes to the most lo-fi of the lot,Jonas Geirnaert‘s Flatlife. The title is a triple pun, referring simultaneously to the lives of the film’s apartment (or flat) dwellers, the banal nature of those lives and the two-dimensional technique of the animation. Splitting his screen into four squares, Geirnaert cannily charts the inter-apartment annoyances that result from the supposedly private activities of people co-existing in too-close proximity to one another, a situation all too familiar to anyone who’s ever lived in an apartment building. —Andrew Schenker(Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills; July 29-Aug. 4)

Written by:

Andrew Schenker

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We begin in classic saddle-sore terrain. A lone stranger with a mysterious past —Daniel Craig fills the boots here — rides into a godforsaken town in the Arizona territory. More familiar archetypes are waiting for him there: the grizzled rancher-potentate (Harrison Ford‘s Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde); his feckless, rowdy wastrel of a blood heir (Paul Dano); and his worthy and doting but unappreciated ranch foreman (Adam Beach), an adopted son enviously looking on — the dynamic from Anthony Mann‘s The Man FromLaramie. On the periphery are Sam Rockwell‘s meek barkeep and Olivia Wilde as a strangely out-of-time elfin beauty with a gun belt.

This motley bunch of people are soon at each other’s throats, but when an attack from the outside ends with loved ones kidnapped, the squabbling parties must circle the wagons and work together on a rescue mission. Forty years ago that attack certainly would have come from “alien” men called Apache, Sioux or Comanche. Today’s enemies are, however, literal aliens; the cowboys-and-Indians rivalry the film’s title plays on has fallen out of fashion. There are Apache on hand inCowboys & Aliens but, after initial tension with Ford’s gruff old soldier, they band together with townsfolk and outlawry alike to take a common stand for humanity.

Director Jon Favreau‘s experiment in genre crossbreeding — a Western/sci-fi mash-up pumped full of inspirational all-in-this-together spirit — is a cute, crowd-pleasing idea, though more decadent than a revitalization of either genre. The sci-fi element is such standard-issue space-invader stuff as to be hardly worth consideration as anything other than a gimmick. The Western tropes are more lovingly dealt with, but here the genre, which has long striven toward maturity, is made “fun” again through dislocation from historical fact.

Violence is likewise freed from any moral dimension, with very grotesque extraterrestrials providing new, definitely nonhuman targets that can be guiltlessly exterminated. (In one curious intervention of history and morality, though, there’s a brief shot of piled pocket watches and gold teeth accumulated by the gold-harvesting aliens — it seems to equate the invaders with Nazis.)

Abstracted, the Western’s ideals and rituals become meaningless clichés. When ex-Yankees and Confederates unite under the Stars & Stripes at the bitter end of Sam Peckinpah‘s Major Dundee, there’s weight to the rapprochement. When Favreau bands together unlikely allies against the Others, it’s under the gray flag of something-for-everyone popcorn entertainment.

It should be noted that Favreau is a capable storyteller among blockbuster blowhards. As with his handling of the first Iron Man, he displays here the rare ability to patiently lay down the track along which his narrative will move, and he gets some good work from his performers. Ford, enlivened by dude garb, seems to enjoy himself in front of a camera for the first time in decades, and his scenes with Beach have real reverb. They stand out amid rambunctious “summer fun” pyrotechnics, which are much the same every year, like on the Fourth.

COWBOYS & ALIENS | Directed by JON FAVREAU | Written by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby | Universal Pictures | Citywide

Written by:

Nick Pinkerton

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An earnest, ethereal riff on the one-night-in-a-high-school-caste-system interwoven-narrative ensemble piece, writer-director David Robert Mitchell‘s feature debut spans the last night of summer in a cloistered Michigan suburb. High schoolers Maggie (Claire Sloma, a pierced punkette) and Beth (Annette DeNoyer, perfectly just-pubescent nerdy) bike between a tame sleepover and a cool-kid kegger; new girl Claudia (Amanda Bauer) swiftly finds herself tangoing with the local mean girls; incoming freshman Rob (Marlon Morton) quasi-stalks a blonde mystery girl; and Scott (Brett Jacobsen), home from college, pursues a pair of just-graduated twins (Jade and Nikita Ramsey).

When it comes to the atmospherics of that fertile transition point between school years, this pre-cellphone period piece — hazily innocent even as it’s sketching out the odder, darker corners of adolescent desire — gets a lot right. The constant presence of music — think Dazed and Confused, with the Magnetic Fields swapped in for Foghat — nails both the teenage fantasy of living life to a personal soundtrack, and a high schooler’s heightened hunger to experience everything all at once.

An editor by trade, Mitchell shows more talent for defining situation and feeling via crosscut gazes than he does through dialogue, which here is often conspicuously precise. But of the uneven young non-actor performers, Sloma is always interesting to watch: She’s even almost credible when tasked with delivering the film’s thesis in the form of a lesson learned. —Karina Longworth

THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER | Written and directed by DAVID ROBERT MITCHELL | SundanceSelects | Nuart

Written by:

Karina Longworth

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The second film in her planned trilogy of subverted fairy tales, Catherine Breillat‘s latest topples the tyranny of pink and princesses. The Sleeping Beauty, like last year’sBluebeard, is based on a classic legend from Charles Perrault‘s 1697 collection Stories or Fairy Tales From Bygone Eras. But in freely incorporating elements from Hans Christian Andersen‘s 1845 tale The Snow Queen and her own provocative thoughts on the prison of childhood and adolescent desire, Breillat reimagines the slumbering heroine as a gender insurrectionist, freeing her from her most retrograde and enduring cultural representation:Disney‘s passive damsel.

“A little girl’s life is really boring,” 6-year-old Anastasia (confident, not fatally cute Carla Besnaïnou) announces in voice-over, sharing the same lust for adventure that the younger of the two sisters in Bluebeard (the director’s own childhood surrogate) possesses. Despising dresses and any other traditional feminine trappings, the tiny tomboy climbs trees and proclaims her new identity: “I’m Sir Vladimir.”

Cursed at birth by a warty old hag to die young, aristocratic Anastasia had received a reprieve from three nymphet fairies, who modify the newborn’s fate so that she goes into a centurylong deep sleep at age 6, not to wake until she turns 16. After she rebels against having to don a fuchsia kimono, a tutu and elaborate maquillage as part of an all-girls ballet recital, Anastasia’s hand, as preordained, is pierced by a sharp object — the injury that leads to her 100 years of repose.

Her body may be at rest, but her dreams are filled with derring-do. In staging Anastasia’s REM escapades, Breillat proves, as she did inBluebeard, that an extremely limited budget and modest scale are no impediment to carrying out her ideas. After the headstrong half-pint outwits a boil-covered ogre, she boards a train that takes her to a farmhouse, where she will spend a blissful few months romping around with a barely pubescent boy, Peter (Kerian Mayan), who eventually departs, succumbing to the seductions of the Snow Queen — and the promise of adventures of his own. In her quest to find her beloved “brother” (the two share a bed, resembling not so much devoted siblings as a newly-in-love couple), Anastasia meets dwarves who appear to have jumped out of Las Meninas; young albino regents who treat her to a feast of pastel meringues; and a knife-caressing Roma girl.

In the film’s final third, centered on the 16-year-old Anastasia (Julia Artamonov), Breillat revisits one of the defining themes of her work: the sexual appetite of young women, earlier explored in A Real Young Girl (1976), 36 Fillette (1988) and Fat Girl (2001). As pale as the moon, the teenage Anastasia fits uncomfortably in the modern world. “What species are you?” asks 18-year-old Johan (David Chausse), Peter’s great-grandson, when he fingers her whalebone corset. Far more predisposed to feminine accoutrements than she was as a child (“For beauty, you must suffer”), Anastasia is just as willful as her 6-year-old self. “No one dares contradict me!” she shouts at Johan, with whom she has a tempestuous relationship — after she’s bedded by the older incarnation of her Gypsy friend.

Though The Sleeping Beauty ends ambiguously, it remains consistent with the logic Breillat has laid out: A girl’s childhood and adolescence often are culturally sanctioned confinements. But the prisoners aren’t always victims; the jails can be escaped through the courage to “go alone into the world.”

Breillat’s clarity stands out even more when compared with the half-thought-out, postfeminist notions in Julia Leigh‘s Sleeping Beauty, which premiered at Cannes and will be released by IFC Films in October. And her vision undoubtedly will embolden the announced final installment in her fairy-tale trifecta, Beauty and the Beast — a classic 1946 film by Cocteau that’s also been Disneyfied.

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY | Written and directed by CATHERINE BREILLAT, based on the story by Charles Perrault | Strand Releasing | Sunset 5

Written:

Melissa Anderson

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