If there’s ever been a scene that requires no embellishment in the translation from page to screen, it’s Ebenezer Scrooge’s meeting with the melancholy crumble of bones that were once Jacob Marley. Yet in Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture update of A Christmas Carol, this most famous of narrative-inciting exchanges nearly bursts with overemphasis. Not content to merely moan and rattle his chains, this Marley is a veritable explosion of frights; when he tells Scrooge of the clanking irons invisibly wrapped around his own body and soul, wailing, “It is a ponderous chain,” the “p” is pronounced with such force that spittle and teeth fly out of Marley’s gaping mouth and directly into not only Scrooge’s face but also those of the audience members flinching behind their 3-D glasses. Then, when Marley retorts to Scrooge’s protestations that he was a good man of business with the heart-stirring speech, “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business,” the words emanate from its gaping, cracked jaw, and though the image is borrowed from Dickens, here it only serves to make such gorgeous prose a nearly indecipherable, garbled hiss. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky’s review of A Christmas Carol.
Many reviews of The Box will start out like: “After the disastrous reception that greeted Southland Tales, director Richard Kelly…” This opening apologia acknowledges the massive blunder that was Southland (though there are still a handful of defenders), and opens up wiggle room to reinstate Kelly as a filmmaker worth watching, regardless of the relative quality of The Box itself. His intelligence and ambition—perhaps even “vision”—will be referenced, his genre-mashing sensibility lauded, and even if the film might be not be any good (more on that shortly), Richard Kelly himself will likely emerge unscathed to fight another day. In reality, what should be said of The Box, especially in the wake of Southland Tales, is that when it comes to Richard Kelly there’s no there there, and likely never was. Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert’s review of The Box.
At the turns of decades and centuries, it’s fairly common for sky-is-falling prognostication to spike wildly. This angst often finds expression in popular entertainments, such as the appearance, as if on cue, of the clunky misfire Knowing and the upcoming sure-to-be tedious 2012. What these kinds of spectacles provide is something like diversionary exorcism—the world outside may seem bad, but there’s some comfort in recognizing that visual effects artists can always imagine even worse. These films are about as easy to dismiss as History Channel specials on Nostradamus, and probably less fun, so Chris Smith’s often unnerving documentary Collapse arrives as something of a minor key paranoiac balm. Based on real events and plausible conjectures, its world crisis feels terribly immediate. Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert’s review of Collapse.
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, Frederick Wiseman’s 38th film in about as many years, and his second about dance (after 1995’s Ballet), begins with a series of shots of Paris, immediately establishing the renowned company as subject to the city’s daily grind. Though La Danse features a number of administrative meetings and extended glimpses of finished performances, Wiseman’s primary interest is in the grueling rehearsals. Dancers run through their movements in mirror-lined rooms, usually to the accompaniment of a pianist in the corner, and choreographers, exacting and for the most part stinting on praise, pick those movements apart, suggesting ways to make them more expressive. What specific ballet is being rehearsed and who is doing the rehearsing are more or less beside the point. The fragments of performances shown, mostly in the latter half of the film, rarely correspond directly to the parts we see painstakingly practiced; even during the performances Wiseman and cinematographer John Davey seem determined not to acknowledge the presence of the audience. La Danse is less about the development of certain specific movements executed by the dancers than it is about the process of development itself. The emphasis is on the interplay between the able-bodied dancers and the usually older choreographers, more carefully attuned to the nuances of movements but not (or, perhaps, no longer) lithe enough to do the dancing themselves. Click here to read the rest of Benjamin Mercer’s review of La Danse.
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