Blindness (review)

Blindness
Directed by Fernando Meirelles

Reportedly retooled since its less-than-stellar debut at Cannes, Fernando Meirelles' third feature is both his loftiest and most intimate. Based on José Saramago's acclaimed novel of the same name (unread by me), Blindness is a film it's impossible to be ambivalent about - Meirelles, along with screenwriter Don McKellar (Last Night, The Red Violin) have constructed a film that is by turns maddening, provocative and confounding in its construction.

When the population becomes stricken with the "white illness," a disease that turns its victims blind - capable of seeing only blank whiteness - they are forcibly quarantined and kept in facilities where they are forced to fend for themselves. One inhabitant, however (Julianne Moore), appears to be immune to the disease - a secret she keeps to herself and her husband, an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo).
Also in the building: a high-end prostitute (Alice Braga), a thief (McKellar), a bartender with a vicious streak (Gael Garcia Bernal, playing sharply against type), and an older man who was blind before the disease came (Danny Glover, forced to tread into Wise Negro territory with some ill-advised, but thankfully intermittent, narration).

The film's first act is a complete mess, with many of the initial scenes involving the characters first turning blind inciting guffaws than was certainly intended, and at disastrously distracting cameo by Sandra Oh as a global leader...of some sort. Once we arrive in the compound, however, the film finds a sickening groove as conditions worsen and quickly turn desperate. A sequence involving prostitution for food is dizzying in its torment but artfully staged, all stage-darkness and single-file degradation. Most importantly, the film works hard to retain its characters' dignity in the face of mounting desperation - even as characters slip on fecal matter and fellate tyrants, there's never a sense that they're doing any less than what's necessary to survive, and as such we never lack sympathy, although we might wish someone would just put them out of their misery.

Meirelles, along with his usual cinematographer César Charlone, opted to depict its titular symptom as literally as possible, filling the film with bright whites and deep blacks as long and as frequently as possible. While the approach works in some respects - it's certainly disorienting, and works by proxy to highlight its' stars every pore and bead of sweat as they strain to survive - but its most lasting effect is just that it hurts your eyes. (It's like the My Bloody Valentine reunion tour, only you bring sunglasses instead of earplugs.) Many will be unable to accept that approach, as well as the almost blatantly allegorical nature of the plot, but I for one found it to be stirring rather than didactic, evoking the best and worst in human impulses, and doing justice to the extremities of both.

Simon Howell

Apaloosa (review)

Apaloosa
Directed by Ed Harris

Every resurgent genre needs a set of pale imitators to go with its breakthroughs, and to that end we have Apaloosa, a staunchly traditional Western helmed by Ed Harris, who also co-stars and co-wrote the film's screenplay. That means he's partially to blame for the film's greatest setback: its unimaginative plot and lazy characterization.

Harris and Viggo Mortensen play a two-man peacekeeping force operating in New Mexico territory in the mid-1800s. They help stabilize budding towns by becoming the town's legal enforcers, then move on when there's no more money to be made. They arrive in the eponymous town seeking to contain a fast-drawing hoodlum (Jeremy Irons) who's wanted for multiple murders. Things get complicated - in the most contrived possible fashion - when a lonely widow (Renee Zellweger) arrives and pais up with Harris' grizzled gunslinger, despite his protestations that "feelings get you killed."

The screenplay's problems are legion, and most involve a lack of dramatic exploitation. There's always fun to be had when you've got Irons in a fiendish capacity, but he's not given anything to work with beyond a capacity for a quick draw and a few dry quips. There's potential in the idea of these roving "peacekeepers" and the ways in which they establish and enforce laws of their choosing, but that dimension lays unexplored. Most egregiously of all, however, is the inclusion of Zellweger's character Ally - one of the least useful love interests in recent memory. She pouts and philanders seemingly without motive or method beyond the idea that she simply goes for the alpha dog - even by Western standards it's a ridiculously misogynistic character, and Zellweger is stuck grimacing her way through it. A major disappointment.

Simon Howell

The Tiger`s Tail

The Tiger`s Tail (John Boorman)

* 1/2

A hybrid made up of so many constituent parts as to render the whole ineffectual. Stalwart Irish character actor Brendan Gleeson stars as a contented, wealthy real estate developer keen to give Ireland its first proper football stadium. There is lingering opposition to the project, given the increasingly desperate plight of the poor in Ireland and the lack of affordable housing. Gleeson's life gets derailed when his "doppelganger" arrives, a man of his exact likeness who follows him around and taunts him relentlessly. After some intriguing early scenes, the film loses steam quickly when it becomes apparent that this figure is not, in fact, a hallucination, but instead that most treasured of soap opera conventions, the long-lost twin. Nevermind that the underlying facts we must accept about the manner in which the "evil" twin was cast aside are contrived at best. There are bigger problems to deal with, anyway - mostly involving the hamfisted attempts at political commentary that are intermittently - and inappropriately - shoehorned into what amounts to something very nearly approaching a shaggy dog story. Meant to be an elaborate parable about the scocio-economic divide in Ireland, it might have worked as satire, but takes its ludicrous plot machinations far too seriously. And it must be said - Kim Cattrall as trophy wife we can believe, but as Irishwoman?

She's a Boy I Knew

She's a Boy I Knew (dir. Gwen Haworth)

* * *

After a shaky start, She's a Boy I Knew emerges as a keenly felt doc on the consequences of replacing one person with another. Director Haworth charts her progress from her life as a handsome young man named Steve to her new life as Gwen by interviewing those closest to her at length. The first twenty minutes are messy, with Haworth's narration feeling overly present, suffocating the opinions of her external subjects. Over time, however, her grip loosens, and the film explores tricky emotional ground, particularly when we spend time with Malgosia, Gwen's beguiling ex-wife, who admits both her initial anger towards Gwen (then Stephen) for her decision, and later confesses her diminishing sexual interest, finding herself unable to convince herself of the "superficiality" of Gwen's changing body in the face of the still-present "essence" of the person she loves. There's also a lingering sense of heartbreak in scenes with Gwen's tight-lipped Mountie father, who looks for clues in his parentage as to how his son may have gone "astray" - yet simultaneously recognizes something in Gwen that he himself withheld in his youth. Through it all, Haworth exhibits a sense of inclusiveness, fleshing out their histories as well as her own, always seeking to empathize even when there is a lack of mutual understanding. I could have done without the animated segments, but they're brief, and are made up for with the inclusion of some surprisingly frank images of Gwen's post-op transformations - an important inclusion, reminding us that the ignominy that may come with her emerged gender awareness is hardly the only trial she faces.

Man On Wire

Man On Wire (dir. James Marsh)

* * * 1/2

Through an artful blend of staged reenactments and archival footage, James Marsh has assembled a compelling look at Philippe Petit, a mischievous high-wire artist who performed a series of breathtaking wire walks, culminating in his walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Much of the film is focused on the mechanics of pulling off the stunt - an act compared to an elaborate bank heist, complete with a motley crew of like-minded conspirators. The film gets a lot of deserving traction out of the idea that it is necessary to circumvent society to create true moments of beauty. Petit's work is indeed beautiful - only a hardened cynic could look upon his midair grace and not be moved - but Marsh doesn't idealize his subject, refusing to gloss over a key moment of betrayal that is at once tragically in-character and completely callous. As it turns out, however, Petit's art is far larger than his hubris, and we can only delight in witnessing his accomplishments.

Choke

Choke

Clark Gregg

U.S.A. , 2008

Actor-turned-director Clark Gregg hopes he is as adept behind the camera as in front of it with Choke, a dark comedy about a mother and son and about sexual compulsion.

Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) is a sex-addicted med-school dropout who keeps his increasingly deranged mother, Ida (Angelica Houston) in an expensive private mental hospital. At night he runs a scam where he deliberately chokes himself in upscale restaurants to form relationships with the wealthy patrons who "save" him via the Heimlich maneuver.

During the turning point of the film in a rare lucid moment, Ida reveals that she has withheld the shocking truth of Victor's father's identity. Victor must enlist the aid of his best friend, Denny, a recovering chronic masturbator, and his mother's beautiful attending physician, Dr. Paige Marshall, to solve this mystery before the truth of his possibly divine parentage is lost forever.

As opposed to most dark comedies that have a sustained tone, Director Clark Gregg found Choke to be more tonally complex, and said that he wanted it to veer between "extremely dramatic moments" and "absurdly silly ones". The director sought to find a way to combine the two elements, drawing inspiration from such films as Harold and Maude, Being There, Secretary and finally Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. However unlike all four of these films, all of which are considered breakthroughs, Choke is not an easy film to swallow.

To put it simply Choke is disappointing not so much for what it was but more so for it's failure to be all it could. The film at times is funny and it has it's moments but it seems that the director just didn't have the balls to go all out and make it as dark as it should have been. This film suffers greatly from it's problems with pacing and little sense of forward momentum. The pacing is completely off and at times feels as if the motion in this motion picture is dying down much like a music cassette whose reel has been caught in the tape recorder and is slowly being chewed apart. His unstable direction made it unclear as to how I should to feel while watching the film. Director Clark Gregg has all the pieces in the puzzle in front of him but unfortunately he fails to put the puzzle together. Gregg's unstable direction makes it clear he was indecisive as to what sort of film he was trying to make and worse makes it unclear as to what I should feel while watching it.

Individual scenes go on way too long and are quite repetitive. At times a good twenty minutes could pass without the story evolving and when it finally does unravel, everything comes crashing down in just a few minutes.

Maybe this stuff works in the pages in the novel, but Choke is awfully tough to digest on the screen. It's a seriously over cluttered movie with nothing much to look at. He fails to cut down on the subplots and focus on the major theme at play and as a director he has no vision nor an eye for the camera.

Jimmy Dean

Eagle Eye

Eagle Eye
Directed by D.J. Caruso

Like the mutant offspring of Michaels Bay and Mann, D.J. Caruso fancies himself both a master of pyrotechnics and a crafter of thinking man's thrillers. Unfortunately, his actual levels of focus and craft are strictly on the level of the former, no matter how much he tries to convince us otherwise. with Eagle Eye, he once again (after the dreadful underworld "drama" The Salton Sea and blockbuster Rear Window update Disturbia) tries to have it both ways, and in this case he falls short in spectacular fashion, flailing and simply failing in equal measure.

A hopped-up hybrid of a dozen movies you've seen before, and ending up in a place that can only be described as 2001 meets 24 (2025?), Eagle Eye starts with a surprisingly unnerving, if typically glossed-over, scene in which an American helicopter blows up an entire Iraqi funeral due to the suspected but unconfirmed presence of a sought-out terrorist leader. We then cut to the U.S., where perennial underachiever Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) is mourning the death of his Air Force-trained twin brother in a car accident, and single mother Rachel (Michelle Monaghan) is preparing to send her young son off to Washington to perform at a government recital. They then both receive strict instructional phone calls from a mysterious and unseen presence, coercing them to trek out on a mission of indeterminate aim. Jerry is framed as a terror suspect and Rachel's son is apparently placed in harm's way, limiting their options to a laughable, videogame-like degree.

Eagle Eye isn't the worst movie I've seen this year, but it might be the most insulting - not only to its audience, but to its actors as well. LaBeouf, growing a little more likeable with each passing performance, gets a lot of traction with his honed sad-puppy droop and half-hinged glare. Monaghan, a very talented actress quite used to being shouldered with thankless roles (The Heartbreak Kid, Made of Honor), gets to inhabit a trite role (hard-working, put-upon single mom with a single-minded, selfless devotion towards her child) with a palpable sense of desperation, and together they make for a compelling pair when they share screen time and actually get to interact. That accounts for roughly a tenth of the film. The capable supporting cast (Billy Bob Thornton, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis) is made useless through pointless, talking-head roles that serve little to no purpose. Particularly puzzling is the casting of Chiklis as the Secretary of Defense - why bother casting someone with such an imposing physical presence as a suit?

Make no mistake, though, the movie does insult the audience too. We're asked to swallow one ridiculous premise after another, even as the movie's tone turns increasingly preachy and self-serious as the "motives" of the "force" at work are made clear and the plot threads - along with any semblance of logic - are not only let go but placed in a box and set on fire. Worse yet, the preachiness (a lot of highfalutin nonsense about the Constitution, technological dependence and individual responsibility) drains the movie of most - though admittedly not all - of its camp value, and the hyperactive editing make the potentially exciting chase sequences (particularly the first vehicle chase) a chore to watch - especially at a hair under two hours. What's worse than a dumb thriller? A dumb thriller that thinks it's smart.

Simon Howell