Crazed Fruit
Thanks to the writer’s strike, my deadlines loom a little less imposingly, and so I blog anew. Aphoristic money-line movie reviewing, for consumables viewed late October, early November:
The Descent (2005): Sensational display of creeper-jeeper mechanics, if all that proves in the end is that gotchas are much easier than mustering the slightest semblance of a convincing line reading from an action-figure cast.
Casshern (2004): Greenscreen meta-anime chaos, shamefully overlooked here, and far more bedazzling than 300 or Sin City or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Zazie dans le Metro (1960): Was child molestation ever this fall-down unfunny? Read more!
You Kill Me (2007): Unfinishably smug film-school-screenplay tosh, with Tea Leoni deigning to screw alkie assassin Ben Kingsley because, apparently, they live on Lemnos, and he’s the only man alive.
Redacted (2007): DePalma doing post-Blair Witch combat mock-doc in Iraq?! DePalma doesn’t do realism, folks. The only thing real-seeming about this ham-handed Casualties of War remake is the ordnance.
Manufactured Landscapes (2007): Photographer Edward Burtynsky shoots massive industrial waste-scenes, filmmaker Jennifer Baichal dollies around shooting him do it, who’s the expressor? Is Baichal expanding the art or just chronicling it? If, say, Billie Holliday paid such high stakes for her art, what did Diana Ross pay when playing her in a movie? If Holliday is worthy of a sentimental, teary movie of her life because of her singing, why isn't Ross? If Ross gets her biopic someday, who will sing Ross singing Holliday?
Sixty Six (2006): If the director of Leonard Part 6 and City Slickers II can still snag, and immolate, new projects like this soft-soap Yiddishe drischla, you can, too.Beaufort (2007): Recalls The Desert of the Tartars, soldiers hanging out on an ancient but very real Mid-East fortress and waiting. But without the existential chill.
Starting Out in the Evening (2007): Conventional NY lit stuff, but Frank Langella believes in it. Pretentious doctoral students belong under cars.
What a Wonderful Place (2004): Predictable Israeli remake of Crash. Or Alila.
Our Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977): Like a mastodon finally lumbering out of a time machine doorway, Syberberg’s bad boy finally hits the everyday slipstream – and keeps dreaming. More on this later.
Into Great Silence (2005): Monks, not talking. Rorschach blot doc, with a double dose of Accupril.
Lady Chatterley (2006): What the fuck? Literally. She’s less "awakened" here than trapped in the mouth-breathing mind of an incurious preteen, and he’s a mopey ape, and the vaunted sex was better in Brokeback Mountain.
Nuit Noire (Black Night) (2004): German brooder Olivier Smolders essentially remakes Eraserhead, but with large and weird European bugs.
Sicko (2007): He’s annoying only to those soulless goldbrickers who don’t care that’s he’s right.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007): Is Sidney Lumet even Sidney Lumet? He hasn’t been since 1990, at least (since then, A Stranger Among Us, Guilty as Sin, Night Falls on Manhattan, Critical Care, Gloria; before that, we were blessed with Garbo Talks, Power, Family Business, The Morning After... oy gevalt). Here, a typical Arriaga-shuffle newbie script carries the load, the actors fume and spume and sweat, but there’s at least one moment – the shot of Marisa Tomei at the door as she dares to leave – that even Michael Winner would’ve been ashamed of.
Lust, Caution (2007): Lugubrious? Maybe, but also serenely crafted, with 50% of the plot work executed via glances and eye lines. And the sex looked real to me.
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980): Only halfway through – is there a way out of this madness?
Killer of Sheep (1977): The best American film of 2007, all '70s-loving irony intended? Betcha!
Michael: Please feel encouraged to post those money-lines (which sounds so much grottier than "pull-quotes") as you think of 'em. Really, I don't see how you can keep up your busy writing schedule and see all those DVDs--plus "Berlin Alexanderplatz"?! Plus press screenings? Anyway, I'm always happy to read your musings (and would love to know why you think Fassbinder always packed a copy of the "platz" on his considerable person).
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Your self-hatred is amazing. You keep on blaming Americans for the very sectarian violence that our soldiers are trying to stop, in a shameful leap of logic that actually perpetuates the bloody cycle. Radical groups like al-Qaeda recruit young Muslims by convincing them that Iraqi civilians are under attack by the American forces in Iraq. It is this terror pipeline of suicide bombers and other architects of violence which (ironically enough) constitutes the only real threat to Iraqi security and self-reliance.
The grain of truth in your propaganda is that a number of Iraqi civilians do die each year from the collateral damage of American bombs and bullets intended for terrorists. The Arab and Muslim media do an impressive job of exaggerating the number of victims by providing inordinate attention to the portion of the violence to which Americans are held responsible. As a result, the Arab street opposes “U.S. policy in Iraq” and talks as if the Americans are largely behind the 75,000 or so civilian deaths that are reported by IBC and various news agencies.
But this isn’t true. The percentage of Iraqi civilian deaths killed by collateral damage from American attacks is currently running between 1 and 2% of the overall number. This means that the vast majority of civilians killed are dying at the hands of Islamic terrorists recruited to “save” their fellow Muslims from the “occupation.”
A few months after TROP posted its informal findings (that just over 1% of Iraqis were dying from American collateral damage, according to IraqBodyCount’s own database. Beneath the public moralizing, it appears that anti-war groups have an underlying political agenda that is not always in line with their purported motives. Although operating under the cover of compassion, the success and welfare of the Iraqi people is of secondary concern to America’s failure.
Reprehensible as well is the sanctimonious posturing of much of the Islamic world outside of Iraq, which demonizes America and her allies for the problems on the ground - even as its only contribution to Iraqi progress is the very Mujahideen who thwart it.
But this is what happens when moral superiority becomes an end unto itself. Having problems to blame on America becomes more important than resolving them, even if it means sacrificing Iraqis to the god of anti-American bigotry.
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Where has the Sidney Lumet who made "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" been hiding himself? Now 83, the legendary director had lost his way in recent years; the epic moral street scenes of "Dog Day Afternoon," "Serpico," and "Prince of the City" seemed to have given way to a long run of mediocrity, from 1993's "Guilty as Sin" to 2006's "Find Me Guilty."
With his new movie, though, Lumet seems to have rediscovered his storytelling innocence. He has also discovered digital filmmaking and has spoken in recent interviews of how the lightweight equipment and small crews took him back to his lithe, improvisatory work for live television during the 1950s. "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" - the title comes from the back half of an Irish toast - is compact, nasty, and altogether wonderful, a tale of brotherly greed and New York comeuppance that shows an old dog dusting off old tricks using new technology.
There's no larger message other than that greed gives us something to hold on to even as it kills us. Greed's the salve that numbs the pain of all the disappointments - of life after childhood, of life after marriage, of life in New York. A dead man's wife (Aleksa Palladino), one of the movie's gallery of small, incisive character studies, mourns her husband by saying "he paid the bills," and it's a eulogy everyone here understands. "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" pares urban existence down to pure survival instinct, even as it peels Lumet's narrative skills back to the bone. Let's pray the man has a few more ones like this left in him.
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Great list, I usually don't comment on blogs but your posts are amazing. I'll be here reading for a while.
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