It’s one of those months when I have stories in a bizarre array of magazines at once. This time: Fashion, Today’s Parent and Movie Entertainment (a cover story on Jason Momoa). And as part of my not-so-new-year resolution, I wanted to make sure I put up links to fresh reviews on The Grid site for Goon, Rampart, Act of Valor and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. I’m also pleased with my current film column for The Grid, which I’ve re-posted below.

Must’ve been in a patriotic mood lately. I had a hand in two new Canada-centric pieces for Cinema Scope magazine. The first is a terrific roundtable on TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten. The other is a round-up of a trio of notable first features from Quebec. The latter is not available online as of yet but there’s plenty of excellent fresh reading on the site.

Cinema Scope’s website has just published my long review of Hugo. Enjoyed that very much (the writing and the viewing). Other recent writings include my Grid column on the Muppets’ vaudeville jones and my regular Projections column at the Toronto Star.

Finally beginning to work through my backlog but here’s a smattering of reviews from recent weeks. My column on the pleasures of watching very long movies is here in The Grid. Other recent columns will make their way up here soon. In the meantime, here are recent short-ish reviews of Melancholia, The Mysteries of Lisbon and J. Edgar, all from The Grid.

MELANCHOLIA

Joining the illustrious company of Emily Watson, Björk and Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst is the latest woman to suffer bravely and beautifully in a film by Lars von Trier. And even though the Danish director’s jokes about Nazis and Jews at a press conference for Melancholia caused a stir at Cannes in May, the jury saw past the Führer furor to award top honours to Dunst for her portrayal of Justine, a depressed young bride whose latest round of personal trials coincides with what may be the end of the world.

Just like the others who’ve endured von Trier’s demanding directorial tactics—including Antichrist’s Charlotte Gainsbourg, who appears here as Justine’s level-headed sister Claire—Dunst delivers a performance of great power and nuance. And yet the rest of Melancholia is too turgid to really deserve her contribution. Arguably von Trier’s most restrained effort, Melancholia marks a shift from Antichrist’s psychosexual horror show to a mystic brand of science fiction closely associated with one of the director’s heroes, Andrei Tarkovsky. Echoes of Tarkovsky’s similarly doomy 1986 swansong The Sacrifice are hard to miss, as is von Trier’s use of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration as a model for the disastrous country-house wedding scene that dominates Melancholia’s first hour.

With Dunst and Gainsbourg getting great support from Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgård, these early episodes of familial warfare are terse and compelling. The same can’t be said for the later section’s stab at quasi-religious transcendence as the Earth veers dangerously close to a planet named Melancholia. Rarely one for subtlety, von Trier tries to give greater gravitas to his apocalypse fantasy by enhancing it with music from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde and the startling slo-mo visual tableaux that open and close the film. But even though Dunst and her castmates contribute many moving moments, Melancholia is ultimately less than the sum of its parts. Von Trier has always been a director with a god complex, but he’s never before regarded his own creations with so little feeling.

THE MYSTERIES OF LISBON

Remarkable for its narrative richness, elaborate structure and ever-growing gallery of characters, Mysteries of Lisbon boasts qualities that viewers may associate more with novels than movies—even movies as long as this one (it’s four and a half hours). Indeed, the experience of watching it may evoke a variety of literary associations in the minds of viewers, especially those unfamiliar with the 19th-century Portuguese epic that the film is based on.

The opening scenes set up expectations for a Dickens-style tale of an orphan’s quest to discover his origins. In this case, the lad is Pedro da Silva (played as a youngster by João Luis Arrais), who lives under the protection of Father Dinis (Adriano Luz), an increasingly mysterious priest who—like nearly everyone here—has more than one identity. The sad stories of Pedro’s parents soon come to light but, as the storyline subdivides itself into lengthy digressions and flashbacks within flashbacks that reveal the secrets of Lisbon’s aristocratic class, it all comes to seem as tricky as Tristram Shandy. Yet there’s a distinctly Proustian flavour to the ruminations on love, memory and fate that dominate the final stages of the saga.

That last note isn’t so surprising given that director Raúl Ruiz was responsible for Time Regained (1999), the greatest stab at adapting Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past for the screen. Making the most of every moment here, the Chilean-born auteur—who passed away last August, depriving cinema of one of its true mavericks—has rarely had a better opportunity to indulge his fascination with social dynamics, unconventional storytelling modes and opulence of every kind. At once a magnificent example of an epic period drama and a deft deconstruction of the same, Mysteries of Lisbon more than justifies its length with its juicy intrigues and wicked wit.

J. EDGAR

It takes some doing on Clint Eastwood’s part that J. Edgar’s weirdest moment does not occur when the legendary G-man learns of President Kennedy’s assassination while listening to a surreptitiously recorded audiotape of Martin Luther King Jr. getting busy. Indeed, there are far queerer sights to be found in the director’s biopic of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director who was arguably more powerful than any of the presidents he served. Hoover is portrayed here by a bulked-up and made-up Leonardo DiCaprio as a tightly wound closet case whose flair for paranoid rants and police-state tactics made his last boss, Richard Nixon, look like an amateur.

Working from an often clever but overambitious script by Milk writer Dustin Lance Black, Eastwood is less interested in delving into Hoover’s shadowy historical role than in recasting his saga as the story of a tormented, if mostly unrequited, gay romance between Hoover and Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), his dashing second-in-command.

This approach may succeed at humanizing a figure generally thought to be a vain, vile toad, but exactly what we’re meant to learn about the man is hard to parse. Black and Eastwood seem stymied by their subject: The sly cynicism and devious wit of the craftiest scenes giving way to a finale that reeks of craven sentimentality (the excess of hokey old-guy makeup doesn’t help). Even so, there’s much to relish about the film’s steely look, DiCaprio’s tenacious performance and Eastwood’s surprising willingness to flirt with camp—Dirty Harry has rarely seemed dirtier.

OK, so there’s my best excuse ever for not updating this blog. A baby as cute as Violet demands attention!

But I do have reviews of recent films from The Grid plus a longer version of my Toronto Star feature on Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant’s new screenwriting guide…

CAPTAIN AMERICA

I’ve published the usual torrents of copy in various publications but had no time to collate them here. So sue me. No, really, try to sue me — that’d be hilarious. Plus, I love courtrooms and judges and gavels so it’d be a total thrill for me.

More exclusive copy will eventually show up here but in the meantime, here’s a variety of recently published reviews in Eye Weekly in Toronto and FFWD in Calgary. Also very proud of my piece on Quentin Dupieux and Rubber in the new issue of Cinema Scope.

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN

With its unabashedly tasteless array of grisly kills and creative cusswords, the new feature version of Hobo with a Shotgun more than lives up to the grimy standard set by its first incarnation as a fake trailer created by a posse of Haligonians back in 2007. And since it’s a more cunning simulation of exploitation movies of the past than the Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez features with which it was first packaged under the Grindhouse banner, it might also be the only recent example of cinematic retro-sleaze that could plausibly be mistaken for a piece of straight-to-video nastiness that has been collecting dust on a shelf since 1983.

Whether that counts as a significant artistic achievement depends largely on your level of movie geekiness, as well as your threshold for on-screen decapitations, impalements and shotgun blasts to the gut. Audiences get plenty of all three once the titular hobo (played by Rutger Hauer with a genuinely tragic air) gets down to the business of cleaning up a very dirty town.

Director Jason Eisener and screenwriter John Davies successfully expand on the trailer’s template by providing some choice villains—including The Plague, a sinister pair of supernatural bad-asses in iron suits—along with a suitably soppy subplot about the hobo’s relationship with a golden-hearted hooker (Molly Dunsworth).

Though the result is sometimes indistinguishable from the average Troma Studios gorefest from the ’80s—as well as other near-forgotten inspirations like Street Trash and The Exterminator—Eisener displays considerable finesse as an action director. His movie’s occasional moments of wit also take some of the edge off the otherwise assaultive nature of this exercise in scumbag cinema.

CERTIFIED COPY

The ostensible topic of the lecture in the opening scene of Certified Copy is how difficult it is to ascribe authenticity to even seemingly “original” artworks. Yet many of the statements also serve as caveats about the ambiguous and elusive nature of the story that Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami tells in his first narrative feature in nearly a decade (and first ever in English).

Just as James Miller (William Shimell)—a British writer who has come to Italy to promote his book, also named Certified Copy—claims in his talk that there are “no immutable truths to fall back on,” there is no way for viewers to know anything for sure about the relationship between the lecturer and the unnamed French woman (Juliette Binoche) with whom he spends the rest of the day, ambling through Tuscany.

Details in their conversations variously suggest that they’ve just met, that they are lovers reunited, even that they’re married. What Kiarostami has done is essentially condense a whole array of romantic (and not-so-romantic) scenarios into one stream of talk. Much of that talk is enchanting, insightful and intellectually provocative, while some is as curt and maddening as any marital tiff.

This central mystery has been polarizing critics and viewers ever since Certified Copy debuted at Cannes last year. That’s possibly because many of us like those immutable truths—indeed, getting the opportunity to be certain about something (or someone) is one reason we go to movies. But to lament their absence here is to deny many pleasures, from Binoche’s wondrously dexterous performance, to the lovely Tuscan scenery, to the moments of sly humour that give Certified Copy the same oddly effervescent feel as Close-Up, the equally slippery film that introduced Kiarostami’s work to the west in 1990. That his latest is able to say so much about art and life (and men and women), and do it with such a light touch, should be all the proof you need of Certified Copy’s own value.

OUTSIDE THE LAW

In his sixth feature, Rachid Bouchareb uses Algeria’s battle for independence from its colonial masters through the ’50s and early ’60s as a backdrop for a Godfather-scaled saga of sibling conflict and divided loyalties. For his troubles, the Paris-based director recently earned his third Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film, though Outside the Law fared poorly in France, both with critics who challenged its portrayal of still-contentious events (such as the massacre of Algerian protestors in Setif in 1945) and with audiences who preferred the more rousing WWII heroics of Bouchareb’s previous hit, Days of Glory.

Indeed, the extent of Bouchareb’s ambition here proves to be his new film’s undoing, though Outside the Law’s best sequences have the requisite sweep and swagger. Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila—also the three leads in Days of Glory—play brothers who become part of the Algerian independence movement in France, raising funds by often nefarious means to finance the fight back home. As the characters soon learn, there’s little to separate the Algerian expat community’s political and criminal elements. Given their shared penchant for ruthless tactics, the difference between bespectacled radical Abdelkader (Bouajila) and mustachioed gangster Saïd (Debbouze) may purely be a matter of semantics.

It is ex-soldier Messaoud (Zem) who most keenly feels the erosion of his soul due to the violence he commits for the cause. Yet Bouchareb’s canvas is ultimately too wide for their individual fates to have much weight. And while the film’s shadowy, Gordon Willis-like cinematography and lavish period design are plenty pleasing to the eye, the crowded scenes and even busier narrative don’t leave much room for the characters to make an impression. Still, the actors’ deft performances give Outside the Law considerable power, as does Bouchareb’s willingness to portray the ugliness on both sides of the battle for Algeria.

PAUL

Warning: the new comedy Paul contains wanton scenes of nerd abuse. The most agrant instance occurs when Jason Bateman—playing a sinister man-in-black type in hot pursuit of a little grey alien who’s escaped from Area 51 and sounds a lot like Seth Rogen—dresses down an underling who’s made the mistake of expressing an affection for comic books.

“You know you’re a grown man, right?” the head baddie asks in a withering tone. “Shave, pay taxes, have pubic hair?”

Like many scenes in Paul—written by co-stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who also paired up in the much-loved cult flicks Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz—this one seems designed to trigger memories of other screen moments that are already treasured by prospective viewers. Elsewhere, there are cheeky references to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Aliens… hell, even the dimly remembered Mac and Me gets a shout-out.

In the case of Bateman’s quip, it’s the infamous Saturday Night Live sketch in which William Shatner instructed a room full of Trekkies to “get a life,” a joke so rich that the ex-Captain Kirk has been pretty much riding the laughs for the last quarter-century.

Bateman’s stab at nerd abuse may boast the same edge of cruelty and condescension as Shatner’s, but the sting is gone. The fanboys and fangirls in Paul’s audience know that they’re now relatively immune to such easy contempt. After all, they’re too valuable to the formerly contemptuous grown-ups in Hollywood who now spend billions of dollars courting their affections.

A generation ago, having an obsessive interest in superheroes, supernatural creatures or interplanetary visitors made you a dweller of our culture’s fringe. Now, this demographic has come to dominate—and indeed, inform—which lms get made for mainstream consumption. Consequently, the market is glutted with products designed to satisfy the tastes of comic-book collectors, action-gure addicts, superhero wannabes and other people who know how to cuss in Klingon. In other words, the nerds have had the very sweetest revenge—they’re now the people to please, not scorn.

Yet in its efforts to please those nerds, Hollywood may actually be selling them short with films that have little of the ingenuity that used to be the lifeblood of genre moviemaking. With their coy games of spot-the-reference, lazy movies like Paul and Fanboys rarely step outside a well-defined comfort zone. Besides feeling limited in scope, the resulting films reek of a certain air of geeky self-congratulation.

Nowhere is that scent more palpable than in San Diego, where the nerd elite gathers every July. No longer just another of the many conventions that take place in the comic world, the Comic-Con International has become a Hollywood extravaganza, one with enough movie-star photo-ops to rival any major festival. (By contrast, the Toronto event—taking place March 18-20 at the Direct Energy Centre—has to make do with Billy Dee Williams.)

Since Paul is tailor-made for the average attendee, it’s only fitting that the film begins and ends with scenes set at Comic-Con. Pegg and Frost play Graeme and Clive, two buddies who are clearly thrilled to make the pilgrimage not just to the comic world’s mecca but to other sites of nerdy importance. On a dark night near Area 51 in Nevada, they encounter Paul, a big-headed, grey-skinned creature who asks for their help in evading the government agents who’ve been keeping him cooped up ever since his ship crash-landed on Earth 60 years earlier.

Paul’s central gag is that the titular alien—voiced by Rogen—is no cuddly E.T. type, but a foul-mouthed jerk. For all its F-bombs and jokes about anal probes, the movie doesn’t push the idea much further than the average episode of ALF. Moreover, Paul quickly settles into a groove already carved out by other attempts to combine the most familiar tropes of comedy and science fiction. Inoffensive and only occasionally inspired, the results land somewhere between the first and second Men in Black movies.

Of course, that still makes it a fair sight better than Evolution (or Mac and Me, for that matter). But since the roster of talent involved includes not only Pegg and Frost but Superbad director Greg Mottola and SNL wonder woman Kristen Wiig, even staunch Comic-Con regulars may feel underwhelmed.

The summer schedule is lling up with superhero entries, designed to become franchises (next at bat: Thor, Captain America, Green Lantern); it would appear that the Comic-Con legions still have enormous sway over what movies get made in Hollywood. At the same time, many of the comic-spawned examples that most precisely targeted that audience’s tastes and inspired the most fevered anticipation—Watchmen, Kick-Ass, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World—failed to make a larger impact in the mainstream marketplace.

The blogger raves and Twitter love just weren’t enough to save those near-misses. And for all of its efforts to earn more of the same online kudos, Paul may ultimately become further proof that Hollywood is wrong about the Comic-Con tastemakers’ influence on the mainstream. If that’s the case, the jocks and bullies may soon be out to exact some revenge of their own.

ALAMAR

Chances are the father in Alamar has a rather more casual attitude than most parents do when he sees a crocodile edging toward his son as the boy plays in the water. “It’s getting near and can eat you,” says Jorge (Jorge Machado) with a note of mild concern before he returns his attention to cleaning his boat. Even for a five-year-old, Natan (Natan Machado Palombini) is impressive for his fearlessness. But then maybe he also senses that something special is happening here in this place with his father, something that ensures his protection from things with sharp teeth.

It’s an extraordinary moment in a movie that comes to feel more than a little magical itself. A film by Mexican director Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio, Alamar (“To the Sea”) is an intimate portrait of a father and son as they spend several months together on the coast of Mexico. Modest though its scale may be – the film was made by a crew of two, González-Rubio working only with a sound recordist and a cast of non-professional actors who essentially play themselves — Alamar is remarkably complex both for its blend of fiction and documentary filmmaking techniques and for what it has to say about the ways we forge relationships with other people and with the world around us. Of course, Jorge and Natan don’t get hung up on any of those subjects — they’re mostly focused on each other and the task at hand, be it fishing, snorkeling or spending time with an unusually friendly egret.

In Alamar’s opening moments, we hear the voices of Jorge and Natan’s mother Roberta (Roberta Palombini) as they talk about how the breakdown in their relationship has not impaired the joy they feel about Natan. Roberta goes so far as to suggest that their time as a couple only happened “so that this specific boy would be born with this specific story in this specific part of the world.” The trouble is, his parents now occupy two very different worlds. Though he lives most of the year with Roberta in her native Rome, he has come to experience his father’s more rural and more elemental existence in Banco Chinchorro, a coastal area with deep Mayan roots as well as Mexico’s richest coral reef.

The differences between these worlds are not lost on the boy. “I bet you don’t have that in Italy,” his father says as they dig into a lunch of fresh barracuda. Natan thinks about that for a moment before noting “the fish is already bought in Italy.”

To his credit, the boy is not a fussy eater. He also has a taste for new adventures, whether that means snorkeling alongside his dad or getting close and personal with Blanquita, the egret whose periodic visits lend a kind of narrative throughline to the events depicted here.

The fact that Natan is also a temporary visitor adds a note of melancholy to what is otherwise a joyful, big-hearted story. Equally poignant is the notion that this stunningly beautiful region – along with the traditional fishing practices performed by Jorge and his equally easy-going father (Nestor Marin “Matraca”) – is endangered due to rapid development in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. If Jorge’s world were to disappear, it would be a tragedy for more people than he and Natan.

Here’s a series of relatively fresh reviews from Eye Weekly and The Toronto Star, some in longer versions than ran in those publications (not, like, ridiculously longer, though). Cinema Scope’s site also has my review of the very fine Putty Hill.

THE GREEN HORNET

That a souped-up espresso machine counts as The Green Hornet’s coolest gadget is one indication that the year’s first superhero movie has a different set of priorities than most of its predecessors. A freewheeling adaptation of the masked-urban-vigilante saga first launched as a radio serial in the ’30s, The Green Hornet has an anarchic streak that’s a mile wide. It will most definitely find its cult of devotees by dint of its idiosyncrasies—even the Comic-Con types who’ve been preemptively trashing it for months may not hate it outright.

But despite its flashes of inspiration—mostly thanks to director Michel Gondry, whose usual visual wizardry is limited to a few experiments with slow motion and split-screen—this is a half-assed effort considering the calibre of talent involved. What opens as a 21st-century variation on Hudson Hawk (and I mean that as a compliment) soon trades in its gleeful weirdness for a Pineapple Express–style blend of rote action and abrasive, unfunny comedy.

Here as both star and co-writer, Seth Rogen plays Britt Reid, a dim-witted playboy who inherits a newspaper from his newly deceased dad (Tom Wilkinson). He also gains the services of Kato (Taiwanese music star Jay Chou), who soon graduates from making cappuccinos to equipping a series of black Chrysler Imperials with crime-fighting doodads.

Much of the humour is derived from the ways in which the duo’s campaign to undermine underworld kingpin Chudnofsky (an amusing Christoph Waltz) are imperilled by Britt’s stupidity. Tensions over the hero/sidekick arrangement also foul up a relationship that can be quite endearing—Chou’s sweet yet sly performance certainly makes it easier to endure Rogen’s schmucky jibber-jabber for the umpteenth time.

That’s why it’s disappointing to watch the movie lapse into the smug, incoherent ultraviolence of Kick-Ass. The suspicion that Rogen and Evan Goldberg wrote the thing in 15 minutes while chugging Jägerbombs also bears out. Lord knows 2011 will yield worse superhero movies, but it takes a lot to love this one.

THE DILEMMA

The Dilemma’s dilemma is it doesn’t know what it wants to be, which is a common crisis for Hollywood comedies that strive to be more about adult problems than “adult” humour. Buried underneath this movie’s misleading Apatow-style marketing, its outbreaks of crass slapstick and star Vince Vaughn’s strained efforts to repeat his motor-mouthed glories in Swingers and Wedding Crashers is a surprisingly sincere attempt to consider more troubling matters of marital strife, addiction recovery and personal ethics.

The trouble is, that doesn’t make The Dilemma wise or funny. Instead, it’s dead in the water pretty much from the get-go, director Ron Howard and his cast failing to get a handle on a script that plays out like the most complicated Three’s Company episode ever. Vaughn plays Ronny, a Chicago guy whose dilemma begins when he sees another man with the wife of his business partner and best friend Nick (Kevin James). That Nick’s missus Geneva (Winona Ryder, who steals all her scenes with a weirdly heroic aplomb) turns out to have some sound reasons for stepping out is one of many complicating factors. Ronny’s struggle to keep it on the down low also affects his relationship with chef girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Connelly), who worries that Ronny’s gambling problems have kicked up again.

If the movie had been made 35 years ago, all this might have yielded a half-decent Paul Mazursky movie starring Richard Dreyfuss as the conflicted pal. (The raggedy DNA of John Cassavetes’ Husbands can also be discerned in The Dilemma’s more dramatic moments.) No such luck in 2011, when any regards to consistency in character or plot can be tossed out in order to fit in more broadly comedic set pieces that reek of desperation. Since it’s up to Vaughn to try to keep this train on the track, it’s no wonder he looks so damn tired.

LONDON RIVER

A modestly scaled but effective drama by Franco-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb, London River combines the real and the fictional to portray the devastation wrought by the suicide bombing attacks on the U.K. capital on July 7, 2005.

The real comes in the form of news coverage of the events in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, in which coordinated explosions on three subway trains and one bus left hundreds injured and 56 dead (including the four bombers).

Using these horrific circumstances as the basis for London River’s fictional narrative, Bouchareb shows how the tragedy blighted the lives of people living far from London as well.

Brenda Blethyn plays Elisabeth Sommers, a widow with a farm on the island of Guernsey. After seeing reports on television, she leaves the first of many worried voicemail messages for her college-age daughter, who lives not far from where the bus bombing took place. Having received no response for several days, she sets off for London to find her.

Elsewhere in Europe, another parent has become concerned about the whereabouts of his child. But whereas Elisabeth has a close relationship with her daughter, Ousmane (Sotigui Kouyaté) barely knows his missing son, having left him and his mother in Africa to go work in France many years before.

The rest of London River traces their respective – and ultimately collective – efforts to find out what has happened to their children. Elisabeth must also cope with culture shock as she learns more about the multicultural neighbourhood where her daughter lived. “This place is absolutely crawling with Muslims!” she exclaims with no small amount of fear in her voice to someone back home.

Her prejudices inevitably come into play when she meets Ousmane, himself a Muslim who has been aided in his search by a local imam (Sami Bouajila). She goes so far as to have Ousmane investigated by the police when he shows up with a picture of their children together at an Arabic-language class. In fact, the youngsters were a couple, unbeknownst to either parent.

An attempt to touch on the myriad religious, cultural and political differences affecting cities in the age of terror, Bouchareb’s story can sometimes feel too neatly packaged. Yet it’s consistently elevated by the sensitivity of the performances and the sense of anxiety and anguish that weighs over the whole film.

An Academy Award nominee for her roles in Secrets & Lies and Little Voice, Blethyn is on excellent form here even when speaking in French, the language she speaks with Ousmane. A celebrated stage and film actor from Mali who worked extensively with theatre director Peter Brook, Kouyaté lends a quiet dignity to his performance, which won him an acting prize at the Berlin film festival last year. (It was also his last screen role – he passed away in Paris last May at the age of 73.)

And whereas Bouchareb prefers a more blustery style in his other features — including the Oscar-nominated Days of Glory, about the travails of four North African men fighting in WWII – he proves to be very astute when working in a subtler register here.

Nor does his film take the same tack as other movies about strangers who find solace in one another during a time of tragedy. London River’s closing moments make the extent of these two characters’ devastation all too clear.

NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT

Reputedly the driest place on the planet, Chile’s Atacama Desert boasts a unique set of environmental and atmospheric conditions that attracts two very different sorts of visitors.

The first are the astronomers who come to enjoy stunningly clear views of the heavens above, which can be enjoyed with either a high-powered telescope or the naked eye. The second are relatives of the thousands of Chileans who “disappeared” during the country’s 17 years under the rule of General Augusto Pinochet. These women come looking for the bones of their loved ones, the dictatorship having favoured the Atacama as a site for mass graves and as the location for an enormous concentration camp.

Since both groups are looking into the past for answers, they’re really not so different. A new documentary by Patricio Guzmán, Nostalgia for the Light continually demonstrates this notion to intelligent, elegant and often very moving effect.

Guzmán has devoted much of his career to the task of investigating and recording Chile’s recent history. His landmark ’70s doc, The Battle of Chile, explored the events surrounding the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government by Pinochet’s army in 1973. In the director’s latest, he creates a fresh and stimulating context for his favourite subject.

It helps that he’s discovered a place where, as one subject says, “the past is more accessible than elsewhere.” But more powerful is the way in which he compels viewers to contrast our more idealistic attitudes toward the distant pasts of celestial bodies with the feelings of pain, shame and anger caused by historical traumas of our own day. In other words, the ideas in Nostalgia for the Light are nearly as big as the Big Bang, but Guzmán’s wise and lovely film maintains a careful balance between matters both macro and micro.

BREATHLESS

A South Korean indie drama now starting a Toronto run after receiving much acclaim on the festival circuit and considerable success at home, Breathless pummels viewers with nearly the same ferocity and frequency with which the characters assault each other.

In fact, Yang Ik-joon’s debut feature can feel like an unrelenting series of serious beatdowns. The punishment commences with the film’s opening moments, in which a man who’s hitting a young woman is himself attacked by another man. To top it off, this new assailant then goes over to the woman, spits on her and slaps her face repeatedly. “Why do you just take it?” he asks contemptuously.

As ugly as it is, his question points to two of the film’s key themes: the toxic dynamic that can develop between abusers and victims and the manner in which the resulting cycle of violence across generations poisons families and communities alike.

That the scene concludes with the thug getting struck from behind is another firm indication that Breathless is not meant for viewers with delicate constitutions.

Nevertheless, it’s a bold and impressive achievement for Yang Ik-joon, who wrote, edited, produced and directed his movie on a shoestring budget.

He also plays the central role of Sang-hoon, the bruiser we meet in the opening scene. An enforcer for hire, he dispenses beatings with an oddly diffident air whether he’s busting up a student demonstration or collecting debts from cowering deadbeats.

Though his capacity for violence clearly comes in handy in his line of work, his boss is increasingly exasperated with Sang-hoon’s penchant for beating up his fellow enforcers, too.

Finding anyone willing to stand up to Sang-hoon is an obvious challenge. When that person turns out to be a stroppy teenage schoolgirl, the story heads in some unexpected directions.

Though Yeon-hee (Kim Kkobbi) initially ends up on the receiving end of Sang-hoon’s abuse, she proves to be just as combative as he is. They soon forge a relationship that’s not quite a friendship and definitely not a romance, even if Yeon-hee bolsters her self-esteem by claiming to be his girlfriend.

Their connection also compels Sang-hoon to look at the horrific family circumstances that made him what he is today. Soon enough, he’s taking a greater interest in the lives of his young nephew, who Sang-hoon tries to toughen up with wrestling moves, and his own abusive father, who has recently finished his jail sentence for his role in the deaths of Sang-hoon’s mother and sister.

The fact that Sang-hoon is not the monster he first appears to be is not much of a surprise. However, the movie’s core of tenderness is. And while Korean cinema may have no shortage of tough-guy heroes — directors like Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk have made a specialty out of violent portraits of two-fisted sociopaths – Yang fashions something fresh, compelling and even moving out of Sang-hoon’s evolution from animal to human being.

The result is one of the most daring and startling Asian movies in recent years. That said, viewers would be wise to keep a bag of frozen peas handy lest they catch a stray punch.

Been exiled from my house due to reno madness for three weeks. I had lots of time for movies, evidently. Here’s a batch of fresh reviews compiled from this week’s movie sections in Eye Weekly and The Toronto Star. Lots o’ year-end Top Ten stuff to come next week! I promise!

TRON: LEGACY

Entering the digital world of the Tron movies doesn’t look as painful as it once did. In the most unsettling sequence from the 1982 original, a laser beam strikes Jeff Bridges’ character Flynn in the back, freezing him in a posture of agony. What followed was no gentle Star Trek–style teleportation in a radiant bath of light—this was an exacting and excruciating matter of pixelization, of flesh de-atomized bit by bit.

As seen in Tron: Legacy—a sequel/reboot that essentially retells its predecessor’s story of a human interloper battling it out with avatars in the world that exists inside your Dell—the journey to the other side doesn’t seem nearly as trauma-inducing. Having discovered a secret lair inside his long-missing father’s old arcade, Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) barely has time to familiarize himself with Pop’s old keyboard before he too is enveloped by a beam and sent into “the grid.” This time, the process is almost instantaneous.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the transition between the material and digital realms is so much smoother for the younger Flynn. (He also adapts much more swiftly to the rules of the games than his father did.) After all, it’s become that way for us and our movies, too. The boundary between those realms has become so permeable, we hardly notice it. (Or maybe, like the human characters in The Matrix—one of many films that owe a great deal to Tron in terms of both form and concept—we’ve come to prefer the comforts of the artificial.)

It’s been 28 years since Disney released Tron, a box-office flop that was notoriously outgrossed by its arcade-game companion during its original release. Though the film has since become revered for its pioneering use of computer animation, it wasn’t the first feature to use CGI—the Yul-Brynner-as-killer-robot-cowboy thriller Westworld earned that distinction nearly a decade before.

Yet Tron was the first to really recognize the potential impact that the technology would have on the medium. Indeed, the drive to create the roughly 20 minutes’ worth of CGI in the film pushed the field of computer graphics forward by several years. If not for Tron, we might’ve had to wait longer to witness the fluid creatures in The Abyss or the raptors in Jurassic Park. Who knows? Hollywood’s FX wizards may not have figured how to stick the face of Marlon Wayans on a baby’s head in time to make Little Man.

But as vanguard as the original Tron was on a technical level, it may have been even more influential on a conceptual one. What Tron director Steven Lisberger sought to visualize was a “computer world” (to borrow the title of the Kraftwerk song and album, released only a year before), a place we meatbags had barely begun to colonize in the early ’80s. Again, Tron wasn’t the first movie to send characters into a machine-made simulation (among its predecessors was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s recently rediscovered 1973 TV mini-series World on a Wire), but it most certainly set a trajectory for the likes of The Lawnmower Man, The Matrix and eXistenZ.

And what an elegant place the computer world was back then—all clean, orderly, with spacious grids and everything gleaming in bright primary colours. Eventually, we’d make a mess of things, replacing Tron’s spectral, vector-graphic landscapes with the cluttered simulacrum homes and streets of The Sims, Second Life and Grand Theft Auto.

Maybe that’s why it’s such a pleasure to experience the visual environment of Tron: Legacy, which soups up the realm that Lisberger envisioned in 1982 without making any significant alterations. Vector graphics rule once again, which is also a boon for the new film’s action set pieces, devoid as they are of the visual noise and clutter that make the conflagrations between digital adversaries in Marvel Comics adaptations or Transformers movies such a chore to watch. Here, the light cycles zoom along with exquisite grace, their velocity enhanced by the similarly retro-futurist score by Daft Punk. (The helmet-wearing French duo make a wry cameo, too.)

It all looks and sounds so gorgeous that it’s almost easy to forgive Tron: Legacy for having a storyline so slight, it makes Avatar seem like War and Peace. The movie loses much of its momentum not long after Sam is reunited with his father—the latter is again played by Bridges, though judging by how he ends every sentence with “man,” he seems to be channelling the Dude rather than his character in the original. (Sample dialogue: “It’s biodigital jazz, man!”)

The pair’s chief adversary is Flynn Sr.’s computer-world counterpart, Clu, a humanoid overlord who is supposed to look like a younger Bridges but more closely resembles one of those creepy dead-eyed children in The Polar Express. The Hitlerian overtones of the perfection-obsessed, genocidally inclined Clu add an unnecessarily sinister real-world aspect to the proceedings.

Really, it’s a shame that director Joseph Kosinski and his team inserted a story at all when what mostTron devotees want is a chance to immerse themselves in the shiny, uncomplicated, vector-graphic realm of their youth again. An essentially nostalgic vision of futures past (it’s Proust by way of Atari), Tron: Legacy provides that opportunity in spades. The computer world has rarely felt cosier.

RABBIT HOLE

It’s ironic that Nicole Kidman and her old Dogville director Lars von Trier would both make pet projects out of stories about parents grieving the accidental death of a young boy. Content to let Charlotte Gainsbourg suffer Von Trier’s latest round of torments, Kidman opted for a gentler take on the subject by producing and starring in this adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s acclaimed play. That makes Rabbit Hole a rather easier experience for audiences than Antichrist (then again, what isn’t?).

But while Rabbit Hole’s middlebrow trappings — such as an excessively twee musical score – mark it as seasonal Oscar bait, it also proves to be the most satisfying showcase of Kidman’s acting prowess since her showdown with the mad Dane. Her performance as Becca – a shattered suburbanite whose grieving methods are very different than those of hubby Howie (Aaron Eckhart) – is distinguished by the same unfussy precision found in John Cameron Mitchell’s direction and Lindsay-Abaire’s own screenplay adaptation of his Pulitzer winner. And thanks to its rich vein of wry humour and welcome sense of restraint, Rabbit Hole is largely free of the sentimentality or predictability typical of other movie portraits of damaged folks eager to let the healing begin.

It might’ve been nice to see Antichrist’s talking fox in here somewhere. But it’s still a pleasure to watch Kidman and her collaborators hit the right notes without resorting to such extreme measures.

HOW DO YOU KNOW

In the latest dramedy by the creator of Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets, James L. Brooks mostly resists his usual urge to get all deep and meaningful by giving somebody cancer or someone else a guilt trip over being rich. Instead, the characters here get off relatively easy, which might reduce the respective actors’ chances of winning Oscars but certainly adds an appealing effervescence to a movie that’s occasionally as deft as it is inconsequential.

Reese Witherspoon mounts a largely effective charm assault as Lisa, a softball player coping with the sudden end of her sports career. Paul Rudd stays just as firmly nestled in his comfort zone as George, a nice-guy corporate type who’s under investigation due to shady business moves by his pa (Jack Nicholson in the kind of role usually bequeathed to George Segal). Owen Wilson has the most fun as a baseball star who clearly outguns George in the competition for Lisa.

Taking their cues from Brooks, the four leads never threaten to break a sweat but their looseness gives How Do You Know a ramshackle charm that counts for quite a bit. In its best moments – for example, a heartfelt, hospital-bedside exchange between two minor characters that takes a weirdly self-reflexive turn – it has the kind of offhand magic that’s the life blood of any half-decent screwball comedy. Whether the movie needs to last two hours is another matter. But hey, Nancy Meyers or Judd Apatow would’ve let it run on for another 30 minutes so count your blessings and move along.

YOGI BEAR

Yogi may still be smarter than the average bear but there’s little exceptional about this big-screen revamp for the most famous resident of Jellystone National Park.

A live-action/CGI hybrid in the vein of the Scooby-Doo and Alvin and the Chipmunks movies, Yogi Bear tries to stay true to the spirit of Hanna-Barbera’s original animated show but the fun fizzles out long before the movie’s brief running time is through.

That’s especially unfortunate considering the level of talent involved, both in regards to the flesh-and-blood cast members and the unseen stars supplying the voices for Yogi Bear and his sidekick Boo-Boo.

Filling the role of Davis Butler — the voice of Yogi from the character’s debut in 1958 until Butler’s death in 1988 – Dan Aykroyd hits the right note of good-natured braggadocio as the talking bear who’s continually scheming to relieve campers of their pic-a-nic baskets.

More bizarre is the presence of Justin Timberlake as Boo-Boo, though he too acquits himself well. Indeed, the movie’s most memorable moment may arrive when Boo-Boo apologizes for his slightly crooked bowtie by sheepishly explaining, “My mornings are a little rushed.”

Alas, the movie feels equally rushed. There’s barely enough time leftover for any basket-snatching thanks to the slapdash storyline that pits our furry bipedal friends and their usual adversary Ranger Smith (Tom Cavanagh) against a venal mayor (Andrew Daly) who wants to close Jellystone and sell it off to loggers.

Valuable time is further wasted on a so-so romantic subplot about Ranger Smith and an animal researcher (played by the ever-underrated and seldom well-used Anna Faris).

It all culminates in a hectic finale that’s admirable for its environmentally conscious message but not much else. Though director Eric Brevig helped usher in the current wave of 3D kids’ flicks with his 2008 hit Journey to the Centre of the Earth, he brings nothing fresh to the formula here.

As a result, young kids may feel sufficiently caught up in the movie’s momentum but are unlikely to bond with Yogi with the same fervour that their parents once did.

That doesn’t bode well for future attempts to reintroduce Hanna-Barbera properties to a new generation of viewers, unless maybe Justin Bieber can do a credible impression of Huckleberry Hound.

RARE EXPORTS: A CHRISTMAS STORY

“The Coca-Cola Santa is just a hoax,” says the little boy hero of Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a Finnish movie that dares to expose the truth about the holiday season’s most popular geezer.

In fact, the real Santa is a wizened supernatural creature who “spanks kids to pieces” and boils them in cauldrons when given half the chance.

That’s why the Sami people did the world a favour when it captured Santa and trapped him in a mountain thousands of years ago. But we can’t ever let well enough alone, can we?

Expanding on a series of successful shorts that provide an alternate history of Father Christmas, Finnish director Jalmari Helander has crafted what is surely the strangest holiday movie you may see this December.

Nevertheless, Rare Exports turns out to be as heart-warming as Miracle on 34th Street, albeit in its own twisted little way.

The boy who discovers the truth about Santa is Pietari (Onni Tommila), a little Laplander who lives in the Korvatunturi mountains with his father Rauno (Jorma Tommila).

Pietari’s suspicions are raised by the presence of an American crew doing a seismic study on a nearby mound. While his elders blame wolves for the mysterious slaughter of the local reindeer, Pietari figures out what’s really going on. The situation grows more serious when Rauno and his friends capture a weird bearded man who has a weakness for gingerbread.

More of a comedic fantasy flick than a seasonally themed tale of horror, Rare Exports has a milder nature than Helander’s more anarchic short films. But it’s still good fun as an imaginative revisioning of Santa mythology from around the world.

And after seeing Helander’s version of Saint Nick, you may find yourself following Pietari’s example by leaving a bear trap in the fireplace before heading off to bed on Christmas Eve. Remember: it’s not the milk and cookies he’s really after.

Just noticed that the Eye Weekly site does not contain the full version of my Burlesque review, which I wrote while still recovering from the experience of watching the year’s only true camp spectacular from the front row of an overcrowded theatre. Seeing Cher and Christina from that close amplified the film’s perceptual impact in ways I could not have anticipated.

Here it is in full. Read it while drinking heavily.

BURLESQUE

Historians of the future will have angry debates over the exact point at which Burlesque reaches its full ripeness as a rare and delectable piece of movie cheese. Could it be the moment when fresh-faced Ally (Christina Aguilera) arrives in L.A., having apparently taken the same bus from the Midwest as Axl Rose does in the video for “Welcome to the Jungle”? Is it when the camera first chances upon the molded, life-sized plastic figurine that answers to the name of Cher? Or is it when Alan Cumming – wearing his old Cabaret makeup for no reason except to mess with gay minds – threatens to wash Ally’s mouth out with Jagermeister? How about when the audience notices that Kristen Bell is channeling Gina Gershon in Showgirls with the same intensity as Stanley Tucci is channeling Rip Taylor in your favourite episode of The Gong Show?

And that’s all in the first 15 minutes, people. Forget about Unstoppable – Burlesque is the runaway train full of toxic chemicals you’ve really been waiting to see. That this thunderdome of backstage-musical clichés, G-rated bump-and-no-grind routines and inept line readings is all that any connoisseur of crap could have hoped for is a downright Herculean feat.

But what makes Burlesque a true camp spectacle is its sincerity. You can feel that somewhere in its pea-sized brain is the belief that it’s just as Oscar-worthy as Chicago – what’s more, it probably has a point, given how Rob Marshall has been rewarded for sins as grave as anything you see here.

An actor turned filmmaker whose appropriately bizarre CV ranges from directing Girlicious videos to co-creating the Pussycat Dolls’ competition reality show to dating David Geffen to starring in The Goonies, Steve Antin directs the movie with the air of someone who is continually distracted by urgent phone calls. He breaks new ground for the musical genre by inserting plot-furthering montages and irrelevant dialogue in the middle of even his biggest production numbers.

Not that the songs are too good to interrupt – the fact that they’re so rote is perfectly in keeping with the desperate, deluded nature of this weirdly lovable endeavour. Note to Crossroads, Glitter and Coyote Ugly: bitches, you just got served.

I continue to churn out fresh movie reviews and copy like there’s still a readership for such things. Huzzah! Below are recent reviews of Morning Glory for the CBC, Kisses for the Toronto Star and my feature on Jia Zhang-ke’s I Wish I Knew for Eye Weekly. I plan to have the whole Jia interview transcript posted soon-ish.

On Morning Glory

Rachel McAdams stars as a TV producer trying to convince an august newsman, played by Harrison Ford, to soften his image in the comedy Morning Glory. (Macall Polay/Paramount Pictures)