Diverted

It’s official: I’m on hiatus from In Review Online and from film writing in general until late late summer 2011. The dissertation will be done then, and I’ll have the creative juice, and the time, to spare once again for my second love. Until then, the books have me. – Ranylt Richildis

Stinky Links

Due to a much needed server switch at In Review Online, some links to my original reviews, features, and capsules on their site are broken. We’re working to fix that now. — RR

Seraphim and Burials in the American Revisionist Western

Way back in the summer of 2010, the InRO staff planned a series of articles that each paired two recent (i.e. post-2000) Westerns. The project fell through, but not before I’d written my assignment: a retrospective on Seraphim Falls and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. My editor at InRO recently posted that article to celebrate the release of Meek’s Cutoff.

The spectre of death is as present in the Western genre as leather, horses and guns, and it nearly always comes in the form of homicide. Characters don’t die by accident or illness — if you own a ranch or a saloon in the classic American West, or if you wear a badge or ride where the wind takes you, expect to meet your maker with the help of a bullet. Death at the hands of another is inscribed onto every plot and every finale, a solution to treachery and wrongdoing of all stripes, an art practiced by the good and the bad. The genre’s images of death are loud, dusty and sudden, but they aren’t always as cut and dried as a gunshot at high noon. In some Westerns, death isn’t a full stop but a beginning, of sorts. The leather and the dust lose materiality and give way to the supernatural, while the landscape onscreen reveals itself to be a halfway space between the hard world and the afterlife, where matter itself is doubtful, and where characters set for a time to sort through their differences, which almost always amount to questions of honor and revenge.

Full retrospective and comments below the fold.

By By, Baby

Jane Russell died yesterday and it hit surprisingly deep.  I say surprising since I’ve never seen most of the big Jane Russell pictures, including The Outlaw. But I’ve owned Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for as long as I’ve collected film, and I watch it once a year. Something about this movie keeps me rapt besides the fashion, the bodies, and Marilyn’s signature number, which pops like a cosmic champagne cork even for someone who’s generally indifferent both to Marilyn and musicals. I’m pretty sure it comes down to Jane — to Dorothy Shaw, the fearless, sex-positive, I-am-who-I-am foil to Lorelei Lee’s grasping material girl. To Dorothy who only wants a true relationship and prefers that riches not factor into the equation. If Gentlemen Prefer Blondes mines Lorelei’s gold-digger stereotype and its essentialist bits about men and women for humour, Dorothy’s sensible-girl stereotype mitigates it all.  She wants men: she wants men’s bodies, she wants men’s bodies for sex, and she wants to let everyone around her know she wants men’s bodies for sex, until she finds a good heart and a great wit in one of those fine male bodies. And the movie never shames her for it.  It privileges not only her judgment but her desires and proves that sense and sensuality aren’t mutually exclusive in a woman. Moreover, it shows the value of sticking with your best girl, even if your best girl fucks up or — worse, in my mind — reinforces negative female stereotypes we’d all be better off without. This is life for the Dorothy Shaws of the world, and because it’s life even in 2011, sometimes, Jane’s Dorothy is eternal and unimaginable with any other actor in the role. – Ranylt Richildis

Burlesque

Dilettante Steve Antin proves the adage that persistence counts for more than talent in Hollywood. His resume is a scatter of acting, writing, production, and directing credits, all seemingly acquired by the skin of his teeth. The directing credits add up to exactly two since the opening of Burlesque, a vehicle for the distinct vocal stylings of Christina Aguilera and Cher. This latest endeavor won’t see Antin vaulted into the VIP room at long last, however — although, given the moderate success of some of its musical numbers, Burlesque might open a few doors for him as a Broadway choreographer or music video director. And that’s by no means a dig. Say what you will about the dead space between those numbers, where dialogue ails and characterization gasps for life; those sassy jazz-hands moments count for a lot when, as with porn, they’re really the only moments your audience anticipates going into the film, or recollects a day later.

Full review and comments below the fold.

One World Film Festival

Bacha's "Budrus" takes on the Israel Separation Border

For the past 20 years, Ottawa’s been home to the One World Film Festival, which raises awareness about social and global issues while exposing audiences to great documentaries. Now in its 21st year (and co-chaired by a friend of mine, so pay attention), the fest is the brainchild of World Inter-Action Mondiale (WIAM), a non-profit org that uses art and film to spread its message about economic, political, and environmental challenges the world over. That message — and its medium — has proven to be popular; 21 years is a lion’s age for a volunteer-run film festival, and its organizers year in and year out have our gratitude.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Full disclosure: I’ve never been an Oliver Stone adherent, not even in those embryonic days of cinematic discovery, when our prospect is limited and our idea of “good film” comprises mainstream projects that seem to (but don’t really) flirt with the fringe. This is Stone all over: a flatulent bomber who drops controversial topics from screaming aircraft and seems inordinately proud when they land like duds. I’ll cop to a fondness for Talk Radio, which has more to do with my ambivalence towards the kinetically churlish Bogosian than anything (pitch-perfect casting will take a movie further than it can go under its own steam), but by and large Stone’s projects have as much meaning as a toddler’s grocery-store meltdown — while insisting they have much, much more. Perhaps some viewers spot insight in Stone’s anxious bluster, but all I see is a rather inarticulate man reduced to communicating his frustrated entitlement with clenched fists, all in the guise of Telling the Truth^TM. Stone’s signature shot — a swooping, revolving Steadicam maneuver that he uses in most of his confrontational scenes — is a trick that lends a false sense of mastery, I think, to his projects. The shot itself is appropriate and even thrilling, slick and attractive, but it’s all the director really has. It’s a visual whoop-and-holler that creates a pounding in our aesthetic ear that substitutes for significance.

Full review and comments beneath the fold.

Devil

An abiding love of lore compels horror fans to wade through countless bad and mediocre movies looking for something that gets it right. Folklore is in my blood — a taste that’s somehow been enhanced, rather than eradicated, by my extreme skepticism. It’s axiomatic: those who love both folklore and film can’t help being drawn to horror movies however so often they fail to entertain or even interest us. And of all the horror subgenres, the occult subgenre fascinates me most of all because it invests a great deal into tonal affairs while purveying mythic exegesis. For some of us, atmosphere is everything; if it doesn’t brood, it’s crude. This bias of mine is what permits me to look back on M. Night Shyamalan’s breakout hit, The Sixth Sense, with something like gratitude — it marked Hollywood’s return to mood-drenched horror pieces after long years of over-shiny horror-comedy projects like Scream that lacked the brood and the mood and the subterranean fissures. Earnestness has been undervalued in recent years, in part because it’s so damned hard to pull off. Shyamalan’s own body of work proves this adage; from Signs on down, his films have failed to convince a growing number of viewers to follow his earnest train. A decade after The Sixth Sense revived the eerie brood piece, its director’s name inspires what’s come to be known as the Shyamalan Groan (the sound of communal derision we hear in movie theaters whenever his name appears onscreen). That Shyamalan produced and co-wrote Devil is enough to generate cynicism, but the curious horror fan soldiers forth despite it all, determined to investigate all comers.

Full review and comments beneath the fold.

Euro-Horror Project: Anatomy

(Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2002) German student Paula (Franka Potente) wades into a stew of eugenics, vivisection and arcane cabals when she accepts a place at a prestigious medical school and winds up mired in a murder mystery. While Anatomy‘s thrills are enough to sustain attention, and while its narrative is sufficiently taut and its clinical atmosphere moodily appropriate, the movie’s more renowned for what’s on set: the plasticized corpses made famous by the controversial Korperwelten exhibit, created by Heidelberg’s Dr. Gunther von Hagens. Along with the impact of seeing Von Hagens’ anatomical art up close and eerily lit, the film also delivers scalpel-sharp grue and deboned stereotypes (like the blonde bombshell with the genius IQ) — and for the most part it succeeds. Part of a suggestive pattern in retrospective, Anatomy is one of several millennial Euro-thrillers that focus on biomedicine and its uneasy psychological imprint, filmed as Western minds weighed the fate of humankind in the next one thousand years (see The Crimson Rivers). –Ranylt Richildis

What’s the Euro-Horror Project?

Tourner Ailleurs

Claude Chabrol died today, and though some will accept his passing with a Gallic shrug, it still feels like a loss, and that despite the fact that he leaves behind dozens of films — not all of them good. Given his role in the founding of the French New Wave movement and his spot on a historical-creative nexus, his death collapses part of the larger web of ideas. If his work remains, we’ve still lost a presence and the archival memory of one who not only lived through but who fully grasped a certain era. One of two men who had to endure the “French Hitchcock” label (along with Clouzot), Chabrol wound up being considered by some to be a genre director rather than an auteur, however thoughtful and influential his early pieces were. But just because Les Bonnes Femmes — an ambivalent glimpse at Parisian shopgirls and the men who groped them in 1960 — ends with a woodsy murder scene doesn’t nullify the commentary that preceded it or weaken Chabrol’s New Wave thrust. This man could create a mood, and he could direct an actor like nobody’s business — we rarely see performances like these in thrillers, or such an attention to dynamic detail, or the disturbing unspoken that percolates in the background scenery or in the pauses between words and acts. Chabrol’s catalogue is intimidating in size, but Les Bonnes Femmes, Les Biches, La Rupture, The Butcher, The Cry of the Owl, and the The Flower of Evil are evidence of his strengths, mixed in however much they are with his weaknesses. I’m only 20 films or so into his oeuvre (I still haven’t seen Le Beau Serge or This Man Must Die), but I’ve already determined that it’s his better films that are indicators of what it is we’ve lost today. – Ranylt Richildis

Related: a retrospective on The Butcher.

Further reading: Mubi’s Chabrol overview published earlier today, and NPR’s memorial.