Navel Gazing Through a Telescope
Terrence Malick’s Failed Experiment Leaves a Black Eye
Terrence Malick still hasn’t made a remarkable film since 1978. That was the year he made “Days of Heaven” — not to be confused with “Heaven Gates.” Although the “Heaven” movies do have something in common: they ruined their respective filmmakers’ careers — Michael Cimino made more of a splash because he took United Artists down with him. Malick went overboard by shooting most of the movie during the gloaming — a 25-minute period at dusk that Malick referred to as the “magic hour.” He then spent three years editing it.
“To the Wonder” is a shorthand cinematic poem told with such slightness that there is nothing for an audience to identify with beyond some vague apologia about God’s ability to put human beings through as much heartbreak as they can endure. It’s an airy cinematic sermon that mumbles for two-hours. Atheists will be bored; believers will scratch their heads. Pretentious film critics will out themselves.
Malick has made an experimental movie that fails because it’s all agenda and no substance. There’s so little character development or narrative cohesion that the viewer feels alienated through the whole experience. The filmmaker’s oh-so-deep philosophical musings, as tinged with religious inflections, are oddly apolitical. Malick’s micro-meta bubble is small and foggy. It’s a fundamental rule of screenwriting to never preach to your audience. Terrence Malick breaks that rule with impunity.
In Paris, Neil (Ben Affleck) courts Marina (Olga Kurylenko), a sensuous Ukrainian woman with a ten-year-old daughter named Tatiana. The Eiffel Tower, the gardens at Versailles, and Mont Saint-Michele make for plenty of postcard-perfect compositions via Malick’s handheld camera. Dialogue is sparse, very sparse. Malick flits between indulgent shots of streaming sunlight on suburban landscapes to fill in copious narrative blanks in his script.
The would-be family moves to Neil’s hometown of Bartlesville, Oklahoma to reside in a cloistered suburban housing community bereft of personality. Neil is giving Marina a relationship trial run. Is she marriage material? Tatiana certainly thinks so. However, Marina’s mood swings make her seem bi-polar in a “Betty Blue” kind of way. Languorous episodes of romantic harmony give way to ugly, if muted, outbursts of anger. A devil’s advocate vantage point could view Malick’s film as an unintended observation on the toxic effect of American suburbia on romantic relationships. But that would be a stretch.
Javier Bardem creeps around the story as Father Quintana, a priest who worries over the limits of his ability to help the impoverished and ailing Americans who live around him. During a sermon, he tells his parish, that a husband “does not find” his wife “lovely.” Rather, “he makes her lovely.”
Neil isn’t really that into Marina. Without explanation he sends she and Tatiana packing. The unreliable protagonist briefly dallies with Jane (Rachel McAdams), an old romance from childhood. Like Marina, Jane is needy to a fault.
A romantic reversal occurs. Marina abandons Tatiana to her father’s family and returns to Neil in Oklahoma to start their lives together. Domestic troubles percolate and boil over around moot narrative details. I suppose, if you’re a believer, “To the Wonder” will bring you closer to God in as much as it will push you two-hours closer to your ultimate demise. Personally, I’d rather watch Malick’s “Badlands” (1973) or “Days of Heaven.” There was a time when Terrence Malick made incredible movies. Those days are gone.
Rated R. 112 mins. (D) (One Star – out of five/no halves.
After the failure of his insufferable last film “Dogtooth,” Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos refines his minimalist approach to absurdist satire. However confounding on first blush, “Alps” is a provocative think piece about the nature of loss, memory, DIY psychotherapy, and emotional fulfillment.
Inside an empty gymnasium, a group of four hands-on therapists — a nurse, a paramedic, a gymnast, and her coach — take turns practicing to act as surrogates for recently deceased people, whose personalities they will mimic during visitations with bereaved family members. The group name themselves “Alps.” They take their work very seriously. This is piecemeal method acting gone wild.
The talented ribbon gymnast (Ariane Labed) pleads with her coach (Johnny Vekris) to allow her to dance to modern music.
The stern coach snaps back, “You’re not ready for pop.” "Raise your voice at me again," he says calmly, "and I'll take a club and crack your head open. And then I'll break your arms and your legs." An uncomfortable strain of father-daughter substitution runs through their relationship. The film’s humor comes in a glass of ice-cold water.
The nurse (Aggeliki Papoulia) loses herself too much in her work. Monte Rosa — as she calls herself — starts to carry out her own freelance proxy work to satisfy an emotional void. The coach also crosses a line of emotional sharing in his encounters with clients.
“Alps” is a backhanded commentary on the ways in which people exploit chosen occupations to fulfill personal fantasies. It also refers to the fetishized aspects of relationships and their limited scope of sexual necessity. Anyone can be a surrogate.
Not Rated. 90 mins. (B) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)
Robert Persons's humorless depiction of the world's ruination is glimpsed through a large area of the South between Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. Droning ambient organ chords sustain under Persons's meditative monologue about the "vast and wild middle South" where "deer trail becomes Indian trail becomes county road." William Davidson reads the repeated text like a man out of time. A fish out of water gasps on the ground for an extended period. We're left to wonder at the cruelty of a filmmaker whose belief in the Lord harbors no patience for characterless grey cities where he believes everything will end. Although he never says it, apocalypse is in on the filmmaker's mind.
A fundamentalist bent of Christianity takes hold. "The Lord loves a broken spirit." "In April you can feel that something is pushing against things." The opaque reasoning of Persons' weird old-timey logic is circular to a fault. Recurring lines hint at an obsessive compulsive disorder that alienates more than it attracts. The film fixates on a courthouse that sits as a compass touchstone for everything that Persons views as virtuous and true. It doesn't take much to see the hypocrisy in Persons's warped view of reality and disdain for modern culture.
"General Orders No. 9" is an experimental film that is more art instillation than feature film. "Peculiar Flatulence 173" would be just as apt a title—and it would add entertainment value. Pastoral vistas clash with cold visions of freeways and endless colorless corridors. Think of it as a poor relation to Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life." Its poster shows the silhouette of a rabbit smoking a pipe. He looks kind of cute. Perhaps if the filmmaker had left out the voiceover narration and included a rabbit with a tobacco fetish in his storyline, the movie wouldn't be so insufferable.
Not Rated. 72 mins. (C-) (Two Stars - out of five/no halves)
Goddard's vaguely accessible collage-essay on the ennui of the modern existential moment, "Socialism" is an inarticulate bestiary of bullshittery. The film's overarching theme of its repressed social condition derives from a caption that informs us "the bastards are sincere." A lot of two and three-word slogans come at regular intervals to express Goddard's cryptically coded editorial political commentary. "Palestine Access," "Love Yourself Silly," and "Napoleon Burning Moscow" are some of the ideas Goddard splinters apart with characters speaking just such stilted language. Much of the film's first-act action takes place on a mammoth gambling cruise ship. Rock poet Patti Smith shows up briefly--she's onboard with her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye. Inexplicably, Patti only shows up in a couple of brief scenes where she barely speaks. Patti's subplot is never returned to again even if her presence is the only thing that promises a soothing poetic voice to augment Goddard's revved-up barrage of international media-styled fictional situations imposed with some touch of political anarchism. An obligatory visit to the modern-day Odessa steps is intercut with a clip from Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin." "Socialism" might work as a long piece of installation art, but it doesn't hold up as a prime example of experimental cinema.
Rated R. 109 mins. (C-) (Two Stars - out of five/no halves)
"The Tree of Life" is a bold but flailing attempt to create a transgressive experimental cinema of cosmic proportions. Terrence Malick introduces this lush but unsatisfying odyssey of '50s Americana with a biblical quote from the Book of Job. The hyperbolic text sets the abstract narrative that follows in thematic quicksand.
"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?When the morning stars sang together,And all the sons of God shouted for joy?" For long stretches the film fawns over Hubble-inspired images from the vast reaches of space. Mammoth, colorful, nebulae groove in iridescent delight. Billions of stars twinkle. The Earth's sun erupts with gargantuan volcanic ferocity in extreme close-ups that put the viewer smack in the middle of boiling lava. Perhaps Malick is making an oblique case for intelligent design. If so, he plays his narrative cards too close to the vest to tell. Think of the wallpaper movie as cinematic Xanex. No amount of coffee will keep your eyes from wanting to shut. As for the inevitable comparisons critics will be tempted to make with Stanley Kubrick's "2001 A Space Odyssey," beware. No such comparison is appropriate. Inevitable, yes. But not appropriate.
Malick is clearly making a statement about the impermanent speck of astral dust that humanity represents against the infinite and expanding continuum of the cosmos. His meta-meta-micro vision does achieve the desired effect of making the audience feel small. It also makes us feel like we're being preached to by a filmmaker with not much more to express than how insignificant humanity is. If this sounds like a revelation, as it must have to Malick, you've come to the right place.
Artist/filmmaker Johan Grimonprez's experimental film is a bold postmodern cinematic provocation that sets up a confluence of dualities around the Cold War era of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" (1963) and Hitchcock's popular '60s television program "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," toward a damning indictment of U.S. politics that extends to Hitchcock's Reagan-era death in 1980. Although stylistically akin to "Atomic Cafe," Grimonprez's film is a far more entertaining and poker-faced experience. The filmmaker's carefully cloaked intentions don't fully reveal themselves until the film's post credits coda when a song by the Dead Kennedys puts things concisely in perspective. "Double Take" shows exactly how the medium is the message. Indeed, there's nothing mashed-up about the precision at work here.
Early on, in a sound studio, we see the actor impersonating Alfred Hitchcock's voice for the purpose of voice-over narration that fills in a noir inflected sub plot about the renowned director coming face to face with his double in a hotel during the "Birds" production. "If you meet your double you must kill him, or he must kill you." "By the end of the script one of you must die." There's Hitchcock's repeated definition of a MacGuffin, that plays into the cloaked political rhetoric of the era. We see Hitch and his lovely actress Tippi Hedren making their appearance on the red carpet in Cannes for the premier of "The Birds." We hear from the master that the title that was reduced from three words to two when the first word "For" was taken out. At least that what Hitchcock tells journalists at a packed press conference. Folgers coffee commercials announcing the product "good as fresh-perked" interrupt Hitchcock's living room conversations with his television audience. We get chummy with Hitchcock look-alike Ron Burrage as he tells of his acting jobs impersonating the great master. Interspersed are clips from the famous 1959 "Kitchen debate" between then Vice President Richard Nixon with Nikita Khrushchev where Khrushchev mopped up the floor with his feather-weight Western opponent. Atom bomb tests offer an astonishingly deadly context to Hitchcock's comparatively tame film about underestimating Mother Nature. Johan Grimonprez ("dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y" - 1997) proves himself a master of the art of montage as he balances compounding strands of logic in a seemingly staggering display of seamless critical analysis. "Double Take" is an art film of the highest order. Don't miss this one.
Intended as an airy allegory about familial and media inflicted disinformation, "Dogtooth" is a piece of experimental exploitation cinema that collapses under the weight of its own abstract provocations. Greek enfant terrible filmmaker Yrogos Lanthimos doesn't bother to give names to the five members of a family whose parents home-school their three now-teenaged children who have never set foot outside their home compound. The father (Christos Stergioglou) works at a sterile factory of unknown product from which he hires the company's female parking lot security attendant Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou) to service his son's sexual needs. Bisexual Christina stirs up a hornet's nest when she starts bartering sexual favors from the two daughters, who in turn try out their newly learned skills on one another. The children's heads have been filled with plenty of erroneous information by their poker faced parents. The children believe that cats are man-eating beasts and the word "pussy" means "light switch." This undeserving winner of the 2009 Cannes Festival Un Certain Regard award comes across as a smug exploration of non-sequitur minimalist cinema. There is no rigor here, only cold intentionality. Not Rated. 94 mins. (D-) (Zero Stars)
Francis Ford Coppola's first self-penned film since "The Conversation" (1974) is hampered by lack of forward momentum in a narrative of familial betrayal and rivalry. Filmed in lush black-and-white by cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr. ("Youth Without Youth"), the story consists of a contentious reunion of brothers in Buenos Aires' artists filled La Boca district where would-be writer Tetro (Vincent Gallo) took up residence ten years ago after abandoning his family. Tetro's 18-year-old brother Bennie (well played by newcomer Alden Ehrenreich) unexpectedly arrives at Tetro's apartment dressed like a Naval cadet--he's fresh off a visiting cruise ship where he works as a waiter. Tetro has changed his name from Angelo to an abbreviated version of his last name Tertocelli after a falling out with his famous symphony conductor father Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer). Now living with his dancer girlfriend Miranda (Maribel Verdu), Tetro hobbles around on crutches recovering from being hit by a bus, and his condition adds to his character's metaphysical kinship to similar thematic material like Tennessee Williams "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." Bennie's idealized vision of his brother quickly evaporates as he discovers buried truths revealed in Tetro's code-written manuscript that Bennie furtively deciphers. Coppola brings in flashes of color with flash back and musical sequences that give the film an operatic flare that tips the scales too much in a direction of self-aware commentary. Nonetheless, there is a communal joy in performances from the film's vibrant female cast members, that include Leticia Bredice and Sofia Castiglione. Stylistically, "Tetro" has its strengths, but it fails to connect with an emotional core before its overwrought third act comes crashing down. Not Rated. 127 mins. (C) (Two Stars)
Minimalist independent cinema doesn't get much more low fidelity than debut writer/director Tony Stone's garish vision of 11th century Vikings discovering North America.Two lone Norsemen, Orn and Volnard, are the only survivors of their exploration group after an attack by Anenaki Indians wipes out the rest of their party. The two men chop down trees with a nordic fury reflected in the film's brittle heavy metal musical score from the likes of Judas Priest and Morbid Angel. As they slowly travel north and we witness them killing, cooking and eating various game before becoming separated when Volnard goes off with an Irish Christian monk to study his teachings. Tony Stone's unintentionally mocking attempt at inventing a poetic piece of bogus historical meandering is as overwrought as they come. Clearly inspired by Gus Van Sant's trilogy of time-in-the-desert films, Stone produces a similar cinematic dung heap.
(Heathen Films) Not Rated 107 mins. D- (Zero Stars)
Glorified experimental student films don’t get anymore cheesy than Jaime Rosales’ movie that leaves out all audio dialogue as a way of distancing the audience from a non-existent story. The conceit might have worked if he had written it as a silent movie and included subtitles, but watching a middle-aged Spanish man going through the surface motions of his mundane life before committing an inexplicably violent act, is just a bore. "Bullet In the Head" was the weakest of the 18 films I saw at the festival.
Director Brent MacKenzie’s black-and-white documentary/narrative genre blender about urbanized Native Americans in 1961 Los Angeles is a cold glass of cinematic water drawn from the same well as Joseph Strick’s "The Savage Eye" (1960). MacKenzie uses editorial voice-over narration to elaborate on his reckless characters’ existential lifestyle during a night of carousing amid LA’s impoverished Bunker Hill neighborhood where the steeply inclined "Angel’s Flight" trolley car delivered passengers into the thick of its disenfranchised community. Bold in its visionary attempt to capture an essence of American Indian reality that is evermore significant today for its strangled condemnation of America’s betrayal of a people it murdered and displaced before such war crimes became articulated in our common vernacular, "The Exiles" is a one-of-a-kind film.
If the future of American Cinema is, as Werner Herzog proudly states, Harmony Korine’s vision, then it is a tuna carcass dressed in a nun’s habit with a retarded white guy standing over it yelling obscenities. I admit to having loathed "Kids" (Harmony Korine wrote the script), I liked "Gummo" for its gothic humor, and I detested "Julien Donkey Boy" for being insidiously depressing. For "Mr. Lonely," I was just bored. Korine designs a purposefully artificial narrative contrivance with characters that are celebrity impersonators living in a rural castle in Scotland. Diego Luna is a Michael Jackson dance artist in Paris who strikes poses for money, and always dresses in costume. Michael’s already slim prospects diminish when he’s lured to an impersonators’ commune by a Marilyn Monroe lookalike (played by Samantha Morton). James Dean, Abe Lincoln, Madonna, the Three Stooges, Little Red Riding Hood, and a pockmarked Charlie Chaplin are some of the personalities Michael joins at the castle where the compound’s flock of black sheep come down with a disease that insures their necessary execution. Werner Herzog has a secondary role as a crazed Catholic priest who flies food-drop missions over Costa Rican villages, and he briefly commands the film whenever his unrelated subplot rolls around. Think of it as a cinema-of-the-infantile and you’ll be better able to stomach the utter boredom that goes along with Korine’s prepubescent logic.
"Lost In La Mancha" directors Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton take a flailing mockumentary shot at a convoluted narrative about a pair of conjoined twins-turned-punk-rock-duo. Based on the 1977 illustrated novel by Brian Aldiss, the movie mixes faux documentary and interview footage with the movie-time narrative to tell an incomplete story set in black comedy trappings. Band manager Zak Bedderwick (Howard Attfield) takes twins Tom (Harry Treadaway) and Barry (Luke Treadaway) from their impoverished life on England’s eastern coast to turn them into a pop music sensation called "Bang Bang." The punk rock circus act is sidetracked by the inevitable influence of drugs, alcohol and a divisive woman. The Treadaway brothers give inspired performances as the joined-at-the-side brothers and their sincere efforts, in the face of the filmmakers’ vague narrative intent, drives the entertainment element of the misguided picture.
