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.
Four years ago, in one of its most notorious episodes, The Tyra Banks Show found its host on a mission to enlighten her audience on the issue of anti-obese bigotry. America’s top model did so by placing the burden upon herself, taking her fat-suit to the streets, onto buses, and into blind dates—and arriving at the conclusion that she had hit upon “the last form of open discrimination that’s O.K.” The idea of the show was for Tyra to heroically assert the dignity of a marginalized group, but her histrionic response to a few hours walking around in disguise only led us down the familiar paths of sensationalism. Director Lee Daniels’s second film, Sundance favorite Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, brings this daytime-TV construction of the ultimate oppressed subject to the big screen, and again the purpose is a universal, self-ennobling empathy. As the film asks us to dream ourselves into the skin of society’s least-loved (here, a 300-pound, illiterate black teenager named Precious, who lives on welfare with her abusive mother), we are encouraged to project our own struggles onto her victimization: as the film’s website address informs us, “We are all Precious.” Click here to read the rest of Andrew Chan’s review of Precious.
Now that you’ve been sufficiently scared all week, it’s time to party. Rarely has there been a better celebration of the spirit of Halloween than the magnificently unsettling “Night on Bald Mountain” segment from Walt Disney’s 1940 labor of love, Fantasia. Putting aside obvious narratives of how this terrified many a tot (coming after nearly two hours of plotless, dialogue-free, near abstract animated sequences, this piece de résistance sent kids over the edge, often from boredom into manic freak-out mode), this perfectly petrifying short film, based on Modest Mussorgsky’s 1860 composition, is simply the most effective hand-drawn spookshow of all time.
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