Reviews

Whew--I'm sooooo relieved to know that most of the real evils of the Antebellum South can be mostly laid at the feet of evil white women, who are either blind or insanely jealous. And of course it's a relief to know that there were some upright and well-meaning white male plantation owners--isn't it? Even if they did tend to hand out fiddles and keep the shotguns for themselves... Sigh. In a sentence? This movie is long and painful, in more ways than one. Of course it had to be made--and the fact that it needed to wait until 2013 to GET made is a horrific indictment of this country--but we don't have to pretend it's well made. This is an obvious mess, as heavy-handed as...naaah, I won't say it. The characters are each less than one and a half inches deep and Chiwetel Ejiofor is (I hope) going to win an Oscar for breathing through his mouth and looking unhappy and bewildered for over two hours. Much of the film feels like an homage to Quentin Tarentino (and as Django was itself an homage this is a quote of a quote...). I know people PC enough to have sat through it twice--and I know people who ought to be made to watch it more times than that (though, frankly, it might just come to have a numbing effect). It would have made a perfect PBS special. See it, or see part of it, or at least buy a ticket--and read the book, which is of some real historical importance, as is the story itself.

A thrilling and extremely unsettling frottage across layered binaries, Aronofsky's Black Swan is likely to be one of the best and most powerful feminist films of the decade if not the (so far) century. Obviously the film is an important addition to a long tradition of dance films, mostly for and about women: it's clearly in conversation with Michael Powell's 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes, whose hectic fevered eeriness it escalates. But half a century has gone by and the exploration of the way in which a rigorous and heavily stylized art form (ballet) both allows for and deforms women's sexuality has taken a drastically darker and more savage turn--although (and this will destabilize feminist claims for the film) we haven't managed to change the (spoiler ahead) ending. But what's new here is the way Aronofsky uses the jagged edge of each reflection / comparison, so that the tired tale of woman-as-commodity has the fast vicious bloody pace of an ugly bar fight. (That strobe light dance sequence in the club, all red and black, is the secret pace of the film as a whole--just what the choreographer, with his exquisite French impatience, is trying to hold his slow star to...) A strobe light might be, in fact, the secret method or measure of the film as a whole: good / evil, black / white, old / young, innocent / experienced, alive / dead, clean / dirty, whole / broken, hetero / homo--and so on (off / on / off...)--flash each against their opposite so quickly that, in my experience, the subject who watches comes close to knowing the situation of the subjectivity watched. In the bathroom, after, I swear I thought I saw a splash of blood where...it wasn't--and it took me awhile to stop shaking. (I'm not sure I've fully stopped.) This is a Director (and a writer) who knows something about what it means to lose body--and mind--in the effort to be perfect, as perfection appears to shrink to a brutally sharp (penetrating) point. But is the virgin / whore binary really complicated here or only (once again) exploited better than it's ever been before? "Was I good?!" One character calls out to someone who only dreamed of being loved: the answer is yes / no.

I'm trying to decide whether "The American," as envisioned by the movie of that title, is a fantasy or a piece of nostalgia...and really, why choose? Of course the figure Clooney most resembles is Jean Pierre Melville's exquisitely hermetic and lonely "Samurai," but there are over-laps, as the heavy-handed Leone ref. makes clear, to more recent cowboys--though none recent enough to be real. But let's take the ways this guy is NOT American from the top down: he's a craftsman (we barely make anything ourselves), he's not hooked on television (?!!)--or anything else (we are addicted...), he doesn't have a hand-held device (unless you count the ho, or his pistol) or a social network (ditto) & he wears grown-up (hard-soled, dress) shoes. I'm not half through! He reads (hello?): he reads BOOKS (hello!), he cares about the environment and he doesn't seem to know any jokes or watch any sporting events (or care about sports at all). He's not over-weight, he doesn't seek out junk food or stash candy in his room. Let's talk about his room: it's not ostentatious...and there aren't any apparent brand names or big ticket items (where's the ROLEX, huh?): Americans don't feel like they exist unless they are surrounded by brand names (& "Fiat" won't do). He throws--here's the spoiler, stop now--away a cell phone... Was this guy raised in the former Yugoslavia or something? He speaks enough of a foreign language, gracefully, to get by in...he doesn't just shout "beer" at the waiter (in fact--spoiler--he doesn't drink any beer at all). What then makes this man "American"? His isolation? His casual willingness to kill and the fact that, apparently, no one can even talk to him about the issue with the dead bodies--the way they tend to mount up, and attract attention in a small town? The fact that he is, as the Priest says, "living in hell"? (Actually Clooney uses the film to eke out every nuance of an expression I'd call "Disgruntled." At the very end--spoiler--he looks panicked, up until that point he looks like a man w/ a bad case of piles...) The American seems not to live in hell but only a purgatory at once boring and nerve-wracking...but there are lovely long takes that seem to come straight from commercials for automobiles...