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Reviews
Sylvia (2003)
Sylvia (2003)
"Sylvia" splices and smudges with the sugary fingers of a binging college girl attempting to finish a presentation overnight. There's a distracted fluster about it, a wasteful, listless quality that seems to flick away its own subjects disinterestedly, like flies. The film appears to have been filmed under the cataract of a glazed cosmological eye by a director ailing with some chronic and/or terminal illness that makes her too exhausted to come to work much, much less care about any work she does manage to get done.
Right from the get go, people and situations are veritably hurled at us without recourse, pretense, or explanation. Never are characters allowed to develop and establish a basis for their actions, which in themselves are not even given enough time to become subsequent. Gwyneth Paltrow's shrill Plath & Daniel Craig's listless Hughes have all the chemistry of two plates, and the edgy contempt that permeates their affair from the get go dashes their "marriage of true minds" myth to bitters on the rocks. Never, even in the beginning, do the two display any real tenderness towards each other, and never is the important historical union of their dual artistry illuminated. Thus, not being convinced of their love...nor, more importantly, of Plath's intense vulnerability...we cannot, of necessity, mourn its or her final disintegration. Director Christine Jeffs does not even succeed in making Plath an unlikable character...her Sylvia is too embarrassingly one dimensional to be anything but "flat, ridiculous, a cut paper shadow..." though she devotes a good deal of time to perpetuating the image of the poet that appeared in Anne Stevenson's notoriously biased biography "Bitter Fame".
It is very difficult to imagine a movie that downplays with more tactical error the genius and dimensionality of its subject. The film boasts one of the frankly worst screenplays ever penned
much of the dialog is downright tacky, right out of its own Saturday Night Live parody (see the scene where Plath gushes, like a glazed Pollyanna, "I reeeally think God is speaking through me!") Finally, the movie poster for the film is significant in itself. As Sylvia Plath (flanked by the mortifyingly tasteless tagline, "Life Was Too Small Too Contain Her") Gwyneth Paltrow's eyes are so blue they seem almost colorized...stunning; the focus of the picture. Plath's brown eyes have been alluded to in memoirs, in Hughes' poems, and her own journals, and can be seen in photographs of her. A petty detail, so say some...but it's not. By not even bothering to outfit the star of the show with a friggin pair of color contacts, Jeffs is telling us that her film is going to be as she likes it; that attention to the life and death of a very real, very public figure is only incidental...and secondary...to artistic license. The problem is, this isn't true; and so we can only shake our heads and mutter, like Voltaire, "one owes respect to the living; to the dead only truth."
The Doors (1991)
The Doors (1991)
Oliver Stone, a director notorious for rewriting historical events to suit his own agenda, is in typical form in this epic aggrandizement.
Though Stone is often regarded as one of cinema's foremost chroniclers of the 60s, The Doors seems aimed not so much at those who "were there," & who might thus be expected to view the film from a nostalgic as well as a critical perspective, as it is at young people liable to be seduced by the film's idealistic glamor without questioning its historical validity. I know; I was one of their smitten multitudes at the time it came out. Hence the movie finds Stone (as usual) simply doing whatever he wants, with a kind of indulgence that can only be described as adolescent
from having Jim Morrison quit UCLA Film School when he actually graduated from it to attributing the words of French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud to Morrison himself. It wouldn't have been out of line if he'd marketed his film in conjunction with meal deals and "Doors" action figures, because that, in spite of star Val Kilmer's best efforts, is precisely what the script makes this story into. Peppered with cringingly bad but campishly fabulous dialog like "We're gonna fu*k death away, baby" and "Would you forget about The Doors? It's you they want
Jim Morrison, the god of rock" Stone's script might have easily come right out of Spinal Tap; even if, in all fairness, 20-something rock stars in the prime of their careers do tend to be clichés...whether they're prodigiously brilliant lyricists or not.
By most accounts, there seems to be no doubt Morrison was probably as excessive as Stone portrays him here. In fact, the rock star's theatricality fits...and mostly conveniently renders superfluous...the director's penchant for the same. But even with so much real-life luridness to work with, Stone doesn't hesitate to repeatedly insert inventions.....such as in the scene where a jealously raging "Jim" locks a heroin-droopy "Pam" in the closet and sets it on fire.
On the positive side, Val Kilmer does a wonderful job here. His is one of those rare performances that is more psychic channeling than homage, and his physical resemblance to Morrison is uncanny. But Meg Ryan as the 18-24 year old Pamela Courson, Morrison's "cosmic mate," is absurd, and Kathleen Quinlan as his wife-by-Wiccan handfasting ceremony Patricia Kennealy is even more off the mark. The innately eccentric Crispin Glover as Andy Warhol is an interesting choice, and one that might have worked, if his hairpiece had only looked less like an Eva Gabor catalog accessory. The cinematography, as it is in most of Stone's films, is stunning, evoking other campy but beautiful road films like Easy Rider & Zabriskie Point.
Those who care enough about The Doors to inquire further are advised to read Danny Sugarman's biography "No One Here Gets Out Alive." As for Stone, 18 years later, he's still in a Tim Drummish/Peter Panish haze, and his penchant for action figurey
from entertainers to politicians
.is strong as ever.
Inland Empire (2006)
Inland Empire (2007)
In "The Mind Of The Maker", Dorothy Sayers likened a writer allowing free will to his characters to God allowing free will to mankind. No filmmaker has taken that premise to such surrealistic and beautiful lengths as David Lynch, that Annie Sullivan of consciousness, who still, by his own admission, has nothing but the vaguest of ideas of what some of his unanimously brilliant films are even about.
Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) and her co star, Devon (Justin Theroux) learn that the film they've just been slated to star in is actually a remake of a feature that was never finished...the two original leads having been murdered. The plot of their film itself, in fact, is revealed to be based on an ancient legend of the old country. It is a tale that is reputed to be cursed...to mean death for those who take on its roles.
A love affair may or may not be taking place. A subplot involving prostitutes may or may not be crossing through time from sepia tinted 1930s Poland to materialize on a harsh Hollywood street in the 21st century. Infidelity...with nemesis, self, or lover...may or may not have culminated in a succession of horrific crimes of passion.
The characters who populate "Inland Empire" are living in the moistness of a nightmare, so dissociated and terrorized that they move about brightly in its smears like blurred lights. There are hollow, empty shots of harsh, iridescent late night inner city streets...that sickish, slick sheen streets have when one has nowhere to go, and is very tired. Other scenes...filtered through a strange, muted, unearthly sunlight (as in "Mulholland Drive" and "Lost Highway") seem to be hung ...to borrow a phrase from Flannery O' Connor...behind cobwebs. At other times, the graininess of digital video works perfectly for Lynch.
"Inland Empire" could be said to be about reincarnation, karma, or a Tibetan Book Of The Deadesque trip to heaven via various stages of atonement (like a series of seemingly impossible tasks given to a princess in Grimm); like most of Lynch's films, it has an overriding message of redemption and an extraordinary, schizophrenic religious beauty. It is also (& surely unknowingly) a very profound exploration of the nuances of post traumatic stress, though in a way that's virtually impossible to classify: it's much like one would imagine being under hypnosis would be. There are multiple layers in the film, and each viewing peels back another. Laura Dern plays two, three, possibly more characters overlapping themselves, sometimes simultaneously; and she does it nothing short of brilliantly....this is, hands down, the performance of her career. Grace Zabriskie....best known as Mrs Palmer in "Twin Peaks".... is terrifying as a garbled persona exuding a malice absorbed by broad daylight. Her eyes...bulging, homicidal....seem to roll the house call she makes on Dern in the film's beginning around in their irises like lost marbles.
"Inland Empire", however, is not quite effortlessly seductive: it's a commitment. If you're not prepared to see the film a minimum of three times, you will miss 90 percent of it. Like Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York", it is so crammed with sensory imagery & subliminal messages, it's simply too much to process in a finite viewing. Its only downside is that it does suffer from serious editing issues in the upper to mid first half of the film (which 2 hours and 50 minutes long) the interminable tracking shots of corridors and superfluous footage of the making of "On High In Blue Tomorrows," the story's film within the film, quickly become tedious, but they're more than worth waiting out.
The DVD is a gem, and contains 75 minutes of deleted scenes, several of which absolutely should have been in the film in lieu of the aforementioned gratuitous footage; they essentially constitute a second movie unto itself. There's also a making of featurette (much of which was later used in the recently released "Lynch 1" documentary). A couple of whimsical side tidbits including a cooking lesson with Lynch & a spin with a ballerina and you've got yourself hours of viewing that's "wspaniały."
Twentynine Palms (2003)
Somewhere in the Sands of the Desert: Bruno Dumont's "Twentynine Palms"
While working in the California desert, French auteur Bruno Dumont (Flanders, Humanite, The Life Of Jesus) "suddenly became afraid." Thus blossomed Twentynine Palms, a mesmerizing, allegorical, terrifyingly unclassifiable foray into the Mojave and the problematic center of Yeats' The Second Coming.
Ostensibly, Palms is the story of an American photographer, David (David Wissak) and his European girlfriend, Katia (Yekaterina Golubeva of Leos Carax's Pola X) on assignment in the Joshua Tree desert. Hobbled by a Babelish communication barrier, their interaction limited to sex, and a mutual, rapidly disintegrating co-dependence, the couple is moving deeper into no-man's land on some kind of aimless and encroachingly sinister vision quest.
An exquisite road picture interspersed with long pockets of drifting, expansive dreaminess, Palms has moments of serenity and meditative calm. But make no mistake: it's moving closer to something awful in every frame, its sense of what's approaching disarmed rather than exacerbated by the landscape
the opposite strategy of pictures like Peter Weir's Picnic At Hanging Rock, another brilliant nature film in which the natural world becomes oppressive and claustrophobic despite the freedom of sky and open spaces. The film benefits enormously from the perfect physical appearance of its leads: Wissak has alarming eyes and a face that seems to have disaster imprinted into it...one of the most brilliant achievements of the film is the way the faces of both leads keep fluctuating from dead to alive, without any noticeable outward changes in makeup or lighting.
The concept of Palms as a love story, as some have called it, falls hard. The film is loaded with sex
intense, wailing, despairing sex that foreshadows in every way the horror that is to come at movie's end, though exactly what kind of a statement Dumont was trying to make with this remains unclear; one is inevitably moved to question his motives in the same way many questioned Gaspar Noe's in Irreversible (a film to which Palms has been infrequently compared). But Dumont's superb sense of artistry and restraint has noting is common with Noe's adolescent appropriation of philosophies too sophisticated for him and his fascination with cruelty and sadism cloaked in frantic & flashy concept art. Instead, Twentynine Palms presents us with the problem of evil accompanied by a sense of profound and deep sorrow, a mourning for a fate that may or may not be implied as inexorable, playing out under the unchanging beauty of land and sky.