A.V. Club Blog

Day 5

Okay, so it’s 1 a.m., I’m working off four hours of sleep last night,

I have a 9 a.m. screening tomorrow morning, and the last two days have been

loaded with disappointments. What does that mean for you, dear reader? A bunch

of quick hits, with my fingers never leaving the keyboard. Day 5 was my shortest

and worst day here so far—three films, one middling and two outright embarrassing.

First up was Darren Aronofsky’s The

Fountain, which may well be the artiest film released by a

major studio since Solaris, and not in a good way. I appreciate Aronofsky’s

audacity and vision; with its intense, unrelenting miserablism, Requiem

For A Dream pushed the form nearly to the breaking point. The Fountain

isn’t nearly as in-your-face (to its detriment, really), but it goes

out on a limb again, interweaving multiple timelines and even a peculiar metaphorical

bubble to tell a story about the search for eternal health. Yet for all its

considerable pretensions, it’s really just about a guy trying to stave

off his wife’s death. This entails Hugh Jackman weeping a lot, sometimes

with no hair. Only the closing minutes hit the operatic highs of Requiem;

the remainder is tedious beyond reason.

With few appealing press screenings all day—the big drawback of a top-loaded

schedule are maddening conflicts on the first weekend and blank spots thereafter—I

decided to wrap things up early with a pair of forgettable slot-fillers. The

Half-Life Of Timofey Berezin opens in the former Soviet Union

in 1995, where a nuclear plant technician (played beautifully as always by Paddy

Considine) gets exposed to a massive dose of radiation. When he discovers that

the level of exposure is lethally high—a fact covered up by his employers,

who add insult to injury by firing him for negligence—Considine steals

some plutonium and smuggles it to black market dealers in Moscow. His chief

contact is a scruffy low-level gangster (Oscar Issac, also fine) who runs with

a crew of comically bungling thugs. The film cuts between the two main characters

before they eventually come together and they may as well be in separate movies:

Considine is on an earnest quest to score a financial windfall for his family

before passing; Issac and his boys bounce from one hare-brained scheme to another,

fucking them up at every turn. In the end, the mix of tones grows to be disappointingly

incongruous.

Omnibus horror films (or omnibus films of any kind, for that matter) are usually

a mixed bag, but Midnight Madness entry Trapped

Ashes doesn’t even manage that, despite a pedigreed

list of directors that includes Ken Russell, Joe Dante, and Monte Hellman. Dante

handles the thankless task of directing the wraparound story fairly well, though

it certainly won’t make you forget Homecoming, his brilliant

entry in Showtime’s recent Masters Of Horror series. Russell’s

puerile contribution, about a would-be Hollywood starlet with killer breasts

(literally), could not be a cruder example of camp horror, but at least it might

engage the midnight crowd with cheap laughs and T&A. Noel found some things

to like about the Hellman, which is a tribute of sorts to his “friend”

Stanley Kubrick, but I thought it went hand-in-hand with the other three entries,

which lacked style and purpose, or even the goofy hooks of an average Tales

From The Crypt episode.

Day Six

I didn’t think I’d see a movie at the festival worse than the stillborn

All The King’s Men, but along comes All

The Boys Love Mandy Lane, a risible Midnight Madness film

that inspired some madness from Dimension Films, which apparently picked it

up for $4 million. (That makes it the most lucrative pick-up at the festival

to date, which is too depressing to think about.) Like Cabin Fever,

which closed the festival a few years ago, Mandy Lane is a throwback

to those ‘80s stick-horny-teenagers-in-the-middle-of-nowhere slasher movies,

but it goes about its business without a hint of irony or perspective. It’s

established early and often that the gorgeous, virginal teen of the title drives

boys (and girls) wild; nonetheless, she heads off with a group of them for a

weekend of boozing, pot-smoking, and fucking on a ranch. One by one, they stupidly

set themselves up for the slaughter, and in keeping with the film’s retrograde

Friday The 13th sexual attitudes, they’re punished for their

promiscuity. After a girl gets a double-barreled shotgun jammed in her mouth

mere moments after blowing her boyfriend—shades of Beyond The Valley

Of The Dolls—I probably should have fled while I had the chance.

Following years of enormous cachet as a grad-school hero—for the longest

time, I thought his films existed to help English majors get laid—Hal

Hartley has been on the downward slope for some time. So it’s especially

curious to see Hartley make Fay

Grim, a decade-removed sequel to Henry Fool that

treats the Hartley universe a little like Kevin Smith’s Jay And Silent

Bob Strike Back. But does anyone still care? Fortunately, Hartley’s

self-reflexive movie has plenty of laughs, especially in the first half, and

it evolves into a reasonably fresh goof on the international spy thriller. But

the thing about goofs is that they’re too inconsequential to sustain much

more than 90 minutes and Fay Grim goes on another 30 minutes more,

thanks to Hartley’s (again, Smith-like) inability to trim the fat.

The losing streak finally ended with Black

Book, director Paul Verhoeven’s returns to filmmaking

after a six-year absence and his first film made in his native Holland since

1983’s The Fourth Man. Some naysayers might write the film off

as Verhoeven’s The Pianist, a bid for middlebrow respectability

from a filmmaker renowned for his perversions. But what a surprise to witness

a rousing, old-fashioned WWII spy thriller that’s still recognizably a

Verhoeven film—lots of kink, a little degradation, and a lead performance

by a beautiful (dyed) blonde (Carice Van Houton) that’s every bit as iconic

as Sharon Stone’s in Basic Instinct or Renée Soutendijk

in his early Dutch work. Though Verhoeven sneaks in some sly political commentary

about shifting wartime allegiances and the endless persecution of the Jews,

Black Book is first and foremost a rip-roaring spy thriller—and

one with a gloriously loose association to the “true story” on which

it’s based.

The evening ended with a one-time-only added screening of Jia Zhang-ke’s

Still Life, which won top prize at the Venice Film

Festival a few days ago and was hastily added to the schedule here. Jia (Platform,

Unknown Pleasures, The World) is a superstar among many alt-weekly

critics and cineastes I respect, but I still have some persistent reservations

about him. Put succinctly, I think he excels at evoking time and place, but

his characters are generally walking zombies, so wracked with ennui that they’re

doomed to wander a narrative that’s completely unmoored. Still Life

is the fictional companion to Dong, a documentary that’s also

at the festival (and that I haven’t seen), and it takes place in the areas

surround the Three Gorges Dam, a massive public works project that, when completed,

will submerge much of the surrounding area in water. The film’s images

of dispossession and demolition are frequently awe-inspiring; now, if Jia had

just nudged those characters of his out of the frame, he’d have himself

a masterpiece.