Monthly Archives: March 2014

In Streaming Choices, I take a quick glance at the world of cinema available on Netflix Instant, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services.

Rating: Four stars (out of five)

William Friedkin’s The Exorcist would have looked like an entirely different film without Fritz Lang’s influence.  The shadows in the bedroom, the ominous staircase, the classic poster image with the bright light cascading down on the silhouetted priest, and plenty other visual flourishes owe much (everything?) to Lang classics like Metropolis, M, and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.  Interviewing Lang a year after his own hit horror classic hit theaters, Friedkin tries to pick his hero’s brain about the meanings, influences, and craft of his greatest works.

But Lang has different ideas.  The shop talk moments — intriguing in their own right, although often undercut by Friedkin’s jittery zooms, jostling camera, and cuts implemented like a bored child — give way to something more powerful and vital.

After an extended discussion of how “you cannot live in a country which has lost a war without being influenced,” Lang tells the story of how he left Nazi Germany in 1933.

While preparing for The Testament of Dr. Mabuse’s release, Lang was informed by “the yellow shirts” they would confiscate his film because of his blatant critiques of Nazism in it.  In the film, the titular Dr. Mabuse spews messages of how his crime syndicate will reign for 1000 years, recreating, almost word-for-word, Hitler’s own predictions for his Third Reich.  Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels “invited” (ordered) Lang for a meeting, at which Lang figured he would have to explain himself for the allegory.

The way Lang tells the story is astounding in its immediacy.  You can see that he feels he’s experiencing it again, his expression one of relived fear and disgust.  He describes in absolute detail the dress code he was required to wear to the meeting, the way the concrete looked in the Propaganda Ministry, and the way sound echoed off the walls.  He’s there, reporting to us what he sees.  Friedkin’s irritating camera and editing finally get out of the story’s way as he holds in a tight over-the-shoulder as Lang deadpans, “It was disagreeable.”

The tale features rising and falling action and story beats that feel like his movies and less like an extemporaneous retelling of a moment in a man’s life.  The suspense he sews in us while Goebbels sits with him to discuss his summons is up there with the opening of M.

And just like every good storyteller, Lang hits us with a surprise that simultaneously releases tension by answering in the negative the initial question (would he be jailed, or worse, for criticizing the regime?) with one that creates a grander, terrifying one: Goebbels offers Lang the job to be the German filmmaker of the Third Reich.  He tells of the sweat that soaked his body and the daydreams of withdrawing his savings and leaving immediately.  Lang informs Goebbels that he has Jewish blood, something which Goebbels brushes away with a flippant response that shows the pick-and-choose ideological bankruptcy of Nazism: “Mr. Lang, we decide who is an Aryan.”

Lang is remarkable for not even considering the deal with the devil such a high perch would give him.  He just wanted out.  He doesn’t pat himself on the back for his morals; they are simply there.  He left the next day on a train out of the country on his way to becoming one of the finest film noir directors of the ensuing decades.

You can watch Fritz Lang Interviewed by William Friedkin on YouTube.  Embedded below is the video for the first part.

Sometimes things — ideas, experiences, nouns in general — require more than a knee jerk reaction.  In Revisiting the Recent, I look at pop culture from the not-so-distant past to see how my opinions have grown or changed.

Rating: Five stars (out of five)

This movie adheres to the idea that the most damaged people make the greatest art, usually through force of will alone. Nina (Natalie Portman) alternately rejects and embraces her worst impulses again and again, figuratively (literally?) killing herself for perfection she cannot achieve.  It’s a theme that grow more with the passage of time, and Black Swan reveals itself a perfect vessel to deliver it.  The more life we experience, the more failure we experience.  We want to give up — our jobs, our relationships, our art — but the briefest of hopeful moments reminds us to keep going, then we hit worse snags than before.  It’s both a hopeful message (“If we just try hard enough, we’ll get there eventually.”) and a horrifying prospect (“What if we never get there?”).  If we don’t keep our heads on straight and succumb to our demons, like Nina does here, that hope recedes entirely.

The process of Nina cracking up is done in the tautest way, not wasting a moment. It runs 108 minutes, but it feels far shorter.  The script, from Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John J. McLaughlin, trims all unnecessary fat; there are no wrenching speeches.  We know Nina’s mother, played by Barbara Hershey, gave up her own ballet career, but this information is dropped organically, through tense comments between mother and daughter.  When Nina snaps, “You were 28,” it’s a devastating takedown, more than just implying — but without being completely overt at the same time — her meddling mother was never going to reach the heights Nina finds herself immersed in, perhaps not entirely because of her own talent.  Editor Andrew Weisblum shapes these moments just right, never stepping on the script or performances, and yet he scoots the narrative along at a snappier pace than typical awards season fair, which this film was plopped in the heart of.

Director Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler, this weekend’s Noah) implements CGI minimally, which lands harder than a blockbuster’s computerized saturation could.  The reason this works is because the handheld immediacy of the camerawork gives us the false sense that this world is real.  The camera swoops around these intense dance sequences, the ballerinas soaked in sweat, their breath heaving, their joints straining from constant punishment, then the reality drops out in almost cruel fashion to shatter our hold on the film’s reality.  Nina bursts magnificent black feathers, her eyes turn crimson, her legs reverse grotesquely at the knees, and she floats around the stage as sexual menace.  And just as quickly, she reverts to the familiar figure of Natalie Portman.  Aronofsky knows to keep the audience unsure of Nina’s mental health and therefore her reliability as a narrator.

Even more impressive is the almost total lack of jump scares Aronofsky uses to frighten the audience. It’s a terrifying picture, but this results from building suspense in which we know Nina’s losing it.  Seeing her react to her oncoming insanity is scarier than any monster popping up behind her.  Portman creates this stressed wreck of a girl, kept from adulthood by her overbearing mother, her initial lowly place in the dance company, and what is likely an inherent emotional instability.  But she gets invited into this world of attention, backhanded affirmation, and the scary specter of sex, and she can’t keep all the plates spinning.  Growing up is a frightening thing and we don’t all handle it well.  Nina’s on the extreme side of this, and she offers us a glimpse of the worst we can get when we don’t deal with our hangups.

These elements create an environment to deepen the film’s appeal, four years later.  The shallower fears one experiences during first viewing– the visual grotesqueries of Nina’s shattered psyche, her mother’s jarring appearance during Nina’s “homework assignment” — are stretched during rewatches into a mounting dread of inevitability.  Nina’s “What if I never get there?” insecurity would be heartbreaking if it weren’t plumbing the depths of horror.  To her, and Aronofsky, failing at one’s chosen art form is the worst, most evil thing that could happen, and Black Swan brings this notion home in the most visceral sense.

In Streaming Choices, I take a quick glance at the world of cinema available on Netflix Instant, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services.

Rating: two and a half stars (out of five)

Courtesy of Cinemaautopsy.com

Anthologies rarely fire on all cylinders. Four Rooms is no exception to this, though it features plenty of likable elements, particularly Quentin Tarantino’s riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (and namedropping of an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode with Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre), which features a roving camera with very few cuts and an absurdist drunken bet.

Tim Roth’s Ted the Bellboy provides the connective tissue as the only character to appear in all four segments, written and directed, respectively, by Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Tarantino. Maybe it’s unfair to say this and I’ve been biased by a critic-created narrative, but it’s not surprising that the sketches get better as they go from relatively unknown filmmakers (Anders has done a number of television episodes for series like The L Word and Sex and the City and Rockwell a handful of small budget indies) to the hyper successful Rodriguez and the Hall of Famer Tarantino. They utilize Roth to different degrees, but his “speaking Mr. Bean on cocaine” performance is unlike anything I’ve seen him do. It grates at times, but in the latter two stories, he becomes the perfect vehicle for farce and a surprisingly effective straight man (albeit with a greedy streak) for the crazies in the penthouse.

It’s not all rosy, of course.  The animated spells and practical effects of Anders’s segment look atrocious, like imports from an educational children’s show.  They’re not supposed to be taken seriously, but they come across as the product of a filmmaker struggling to care about the material; Anders very well could have been roped into doing it, and it shows.  The witches in the coven, including Madonna, vacillate between trying to exude campy fun and stifling yawns.  In Rockwell’s section, he toys with noir genre staples like the femme fatale driving her man mad, and Roth gets stuck in between them during a psychosexual spat involving a big handgun, some rope, and a mouth gag.  It’s a confused, unsuccessful attempt to walk the tightrope between the noir of the setup and a spoof embodied by Roth’s everyman stand-in.

Rodriguez and Tarantino do what they can with their stories, and each is fun, but they’re both genre exercises without much to say about the world beyond, “We’ve seen farces (Rodriguez) and thrillers (Tarantino).”  Luckily the filmmaking collective here knows not to overstay their welcome, and each section is tightly edited.  The movie scoots along at just over an hour and a half, but doesn’t leave much to think about after it’s over.

Four Rooms is currently available on Netflix Instant.