Machete

Vaya Con El Diablo

2010 // USA // Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis // September 6, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

B- - Among the fake trailers that played in the theatrical version of the Robert Rodriguez / Quentin Tarantino joint Grindhouse, the grainy, tobacco-yellow glimpse of the Mexploitation bloodbath Machete was distinguished by how little it left to the imagination. Directed by Rodriguez himself, the trailer essentially gave us the entire plot of the film: day laborer and former federale Machete (Danny Trejo) is hired as an assassin by an American politician, is subsequently double-crossed, and then proceeds to extract a grisly revenge with his titular weapon of choice. The trailer was punchy and funny, especially the tagline ("They just fucked with the wrong Mexican!"), but it didn't exactly demand to be expanded into a feature-length film. Nonetheless, Rodriguez has done exactly that, heedless that the endeavor undermines the wry cleverness of the whole fake trailer premise. Co-directed by Ethan Maniquis, a veteran of the editing shop at Rodriguez' Troublemaker Studios, Machete necessarily loses some of its jagged pithiness when expanded to 105 minutes. Moreover, there's no getting around the fact that the film is howlingly silly in a manner not seen in any non-Spy Kids Rodriguez venture since From Dusk Till Dawn. Unlike that film, however, Machete is unswerving in its tone: balls-out cheesiness with a slathering of Latino Pride. What sets it apart from slightly more vacuous guilty pleasures (e.g. The Losers) is its languid self-awareness, its cheeky attention to detail, and its crude but timely political consciousness. It also has Michelle Rodriguez in a beret, eye-patch, and bikini top, wielding a big fucking gun. Need I say more?

It's hardly worthwhile to recount the details of the plot, given that Rodriguez characteristically disregards narrative cohesiveness, preferring to giddily string together schlocky set pieces like combo punches in a fighting game. Suffice to say that Machete finds himself targeted by a vast conspiracy encompassing a reactionary Texas state senator (Robert De Niro), his wealthy PR svengali (Jeff Fahey), a border-patrolling vigilante (Don Johnson), and the Mexican drug lord (Steven Seagal) that just happens to have slaughtered our hero's family. In Machete's corner are his shotgun-toting priest brother (Cheech Marin), an idealistic ICE agent (Jessica Alba), and the aforementioned Michelle Rodriguez as a taco truck entrepreneur waging a secret guerilla war for illegal immigrants' rights. It's Rodriguez' revolutionary—archly referred to in Guevara-inspired iconography as "She"—who rallies a network of immigrant workers to Machete's side from Texas hotel rooms, restaurant kitchens, and garden tool sheds.

Rodriguez' persistent limitations as a filmmaker are unfortunately evident in Machete. The film harbors the customary groan-worthy dialog and disharmonious, slapdash storytelling that has been the director's stock and trade for some time. The latter is all the more apparent here, as Machete bears the often harsh seams of a film written around the scenes and one-liners established in the original trailer. Nonetheless, Rodriguez remains inimitable in his ability to strike a frantic pose directly on the thin line between the satirical and the legitimately ludicrous. Machete is clearly a winking enterprise overall, but how exactly are we to take the sight of Lindsay Lohan as a revolver-packing nun, sneering out the line, "In the name of the Father—I forget the rest"? Is it intended to invite a snort of disbelief or a guffaw of guilty delight? Perhaps both?

Cheese though it might be, Machete is an unabashedly populist film, in the rough manner of the exploitation films of yore. Its politics are hardly sophisticated stuff, manifesting primarily as fist-pumping affection for the Latino underdog in the face of racist cracker bogeymen. Rodriguez makes his villains easy to hate, his heroes easy to like, and puts all the lusciously hot women in the latter category. It would be crass as hell if it weren't so lip-smackingly mindful of its crassness, or so pointedly unconcerned with gravitas. Simply put, the film doesn't contain a jot of sobriety. Even a dreadful speech from Alba that shamelessly riffs on Malcolm X is played primarily for its intrinsic goofiness.

With his sun-cracked leather visage and wildcat manner—the solid physical presence, drowsy menace, and spitting fury when riled—Trejo seems born to play Machete, even if the character proves to be little more than a badass Mystery Man. Fahey and the achingly sexy-tough Rodriguez are also highlights, but let's not perpetuate the misconception that fine acting is the primary draw here. Machete is a film about a guy who kills people with machetes (and Bowie knives, and meat cleavers, and surgical saws...), and the fact that it's executed with vitality and brazenness doesn't mitigate its inherently lowbrow nature. Indeed, there's something invigorating about a film that's such stupid-fun and also boasts so many cunning flourishes. These include subtle touches like the green-brown bruises on Lohan's forearms, as well as screamingly obvious metaphors like the crucifix built from closed-circuit security monitors. Perhaps Machete's most cutting gesture is that every character—including the film's bigoted villains—is seen wolfing down Tex-Mex cuisine with gusto, suggesting that those who rail against a cross-border incursion are already a tad behind the curve.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start

2010 // USA // Edgar Wright // August 16, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza)

B - There's no denying that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World seems engineered to tap into the brainstems of Gen-Xers raised on The Legend of Zelda, tickling their nostalgia centers with a blend of hipster banter and sheer awesomeness until they submit, giggling with delight. More broadly, the film presents a romantic comedy that doesn't just name-check slacker cultural touchstones such as comics, video games, and indie rock, but earnestly drapes itself in their idioms and aesthetics. Based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, and set in a wintery, shabby Toronto of indeterminate era—characters fiddle with their Nintendo DS Lites, but also visit CD stores (how quaint!) and wrestle with AOL dial-up—Scott Pilgrim follows the amorous travails of the titular character, an awkward twenty-two-year-old played by Michael Cera (a bit redundant, I know). Director Edgar Wright previously showcased his droll wit and rapid-fire stylings in the genre-tweaking, deliriously funny Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, co-written with leading man Simon Pegg. Here his writing partner is actor Michael Bacall (last seen playing separate characters named Omar in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds), but Pegg's absence hasn't diminished Wright's facility for maintaining a cutting and relentless comic cadence while slathering on outlandish spectacle.

Scott is unemployed (naturally), shares a mattress on the floor of a one-room basement apartment with his gay roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin), and plays bass in a White Stripes-esque band called, somewhat sheepishly, Sex Bob-omb. (If you get the joke, congratulations: you're part of the target audience.) Somehow, despite his chronic whining, crippling insecurities, and abject dorkiness, Scott has managed to attain a spitfire seventeen-year-old pseudo-girlfriend, Knives Chao (Ellen Wong). Everyone around Scott seems to regard this relationship as slightly skeevy and exceedingly pathetic, from his meddling sister Stacey (Anna Kendrick) to doubtful bandmates Kim, Stephen, and Young Neil (Alison Pine, Mark Webber, and Johnny Simmons). Fortunately (or perhaps not), Scott is soon smitten by one Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a rollerblading American with a tangled neon dyejob, recently arrived in Toronto with a plethora of "battle scars," as Scott's acquaintances tell it. Ramona is too sarcastic and taciturn to qualify as a Manic Pixie, but Scott has nonetheless resolved that she is his Dream Girl, clumsily dropping Knives in order to pursue her.

Despite the story's vaguely banal outlines, the screenplay is razor-sharp, bursting forth with a kind of machine-gun alacrity that has become something of a Wright signature, complemented by equally breakneck editing.  Even more conspicuous is the film's design, which borrows shamelessly and earnestly from the visual language of video games, comics, and anime to sculpt a world as seen through eyes conditioned to visualize environments (and relationships) as pixelated, four-color, and replete with speed-lines. The approach is more amusing than audacious; Scott Pilgrim isn't striving to be a formalist experiment within a Hollywood frame, in the manner of, say, the Wachowski Brothers' Speed Racer. Wright's film is simpler, more adorable, and more approachable. From the cartoon RIIIIINNNNGs that leap from trilling phones to the way locales in the Toronto slackerverse seem to morph and bleed into one another, Scott Pilgrim poses an alternate reality governed by an unfocused mind with its own defiantly nerdy vocabulary. Often, there is an element of furtive, shamefaced communion between the filmmakers and audience at work in the flourishes. (Who in the post-Sims world hasn't occasionally thought of their bladder needs in terms of a yellow "Pee Bar"?)

Up to a point, one might regard this unabashed, witty embrace of the fantastical as a product of Scott's geeky fixations. However, at a Battle of the Bands where he hopes to impress his Object of Desire, things get a little... heavy. Scott is confronted by Matthew Patel (Satya Bhabha), a flying, flame-chucking, demon-summoning ex-boyfriend of Ramona's. Unfortunately for our hero, she neglected to mention that she has seven "evil exes" who must be defeated by any prospective boyfriend.  Scott, being a video game aficionado, rises to the challenge, although he remains shrilly exasperated by Ramona's reticence about the super-powered exes. These include skateboarder-turned-actor Lucas Lee (Chris Evans, hamming it up with a Christian Bale growl), who has stunt crew do all his fighting; and Todd Ingram (Brandon Routh), whose psychic powers (and stupendous hair) stem from his self-righteous veganism. Scott cuts through them one-by-one in a series of Street Fighter-style battles, permitting Cera some choreographed martial arts action and Wright an excuse to pepper the frame with points, power-ups, and explosions of gold coins.

Were it merely a glitzy collection of in-jokes meant to appeal to former latchkey kids with fond memories of Final Fantasy II, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World would be an endearing amusement park ride, but little more. Fortunately, it's also consistently funny, in a way that transcends mere pointing and squealing at its abundant pop references. Cera's slouchy, self-effacing manner (which has almost worn out its welcome) is the antithesis of Pegg's tightly-wound grimacing and goggling. However, Wright handles his new leading man quite well, plopping the slow-witted and spineless Scott into a universe populated by friends and enemies who, in contrast, speak and act with precision. Romantic comedies don't often feature protagonists who are so clueless, negligent, and fundamentally cowardly, and part of what makes Scott Pilgrim unconventional is its determination that its hero emerge a better person from his romantic tribulations, not just his old self +1 girlfriend.

Ramona is unfortunately a bit of a cipher—and her attraction to a milquetoast like Scott a mere Nice Guy fantasy—but she does serve a rather pointed role in our hero's arc. Namely, she snaps Scott out his mopey self-pity and forces him to confront his own moral missteps. In one crucial scene, when Scott bellyaches yet again about the vengeful exes left in Ramona's wake, she points out all the broken hearts he's left behind, and which he never acknowledges, because he prefers to be the put-upon underdog. It's not exactly a resoundingly feminist film—Ramona is reduced to the role of the proverbial Mushroom Princess by the end—but it is atypical in some extremely gratifying ways. When Scott finally confronts the dreaded seventh ex, slimy record producer Gidegon Gordon Graves (Jason Schwartzman), his flaming Power of Love sword fails him. (Shameless, reckless devotion only counts for so much, after all.) The power-up he unsheathes instead? Why the Power of Self-Respect, of course. If you'd read the strategy guide, you'd know that.

Inception

Dream a Little Dream a Little Dream a Little Dream

2010 // USA // Christopher Nolan // July 22, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

B+ - "Ambitious" is a term frequently affixed to films solely due to the scale or complexity of their production, whether the work in question is one of the opulent, magisterial epics of old or a contemporary blockbuster that recruits battalions of computer wizards for its virtual world-building. One could say that Christopher Nolan's Batman films warrant the label, if only because of their fulsome design and dizzying scope. However, Nolan's taste for the ambitious is focused foremost on narrative, as epitomized in the disorienting, reversed chronology of his breakout art-house noir, Memento. Two years after The Dark Knight trampled everything in its path, that film's sprawling, relentless, and often preposterous plot nonetheless endures as a grueling feat of sustained anxiety and twenty-first century terror. Now we come to Inception, the first feature written solely by Nolan since his 1998 debut Following, and it is, if anything, a doubling down on the director's fascination with convoluted storytelling. Who else but Nolan could weave a tale that unfolds simultaneously in four linked dream worlds, where time dilates to varying degrees but always ticks inexorably forward? Who else would have the heedless ambition to even attempt such a thing, to convey such an elaborate scenario through the language of film? Who else but Christopher Nolan would even want to try?

Set in the unspecified but not-too-distant future, the film introduces us to Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a pair of "extractors": black-market mind-hackers who are skilled at ferreting out a person's most closely guarded secrets, preferably without their knowledge. To accomplish this, the sleeping victim is shunted into a dream world constructed by the extractors, who them attempt to outwit the victim and recover the secret, quite literally in their sleep. Given that this is a Christopher Nolan joint, the process is a good deal more complex than this straightforward description might suggest. Most of the first forty minutes or so of Inception are occupied with elucidating the rules of the film's central science-fiction conceits, although the exposition continues in dribbles well into the third act. One might expect this to render the film almost unbearably talky, but Nolan does a characteristically masterful job of blending together the showing and the telling, cutting across past and present and weaving in voice-over. This approach has been a essential aspect of the director's dramatic arsenal since Batman Begins, but the effect remains engrossing, propulsive, and a little cheeky, as if Nolan were daring us to keep up. The principles governing the process of extraction are bent (and often broken) as quickly as the film establishes them, providing little accommodation for viewers who stumble over the conceptual twists and turns.

During an extraction in the mind of a Japanese tycoon named Saito (Ken Wanatabe), Cobb and Arthur are stymied when their victim reveals that he is wise to the pair's tricks, which include a dream-within-a-dream ruse. They soon learn that Saito is actually auditioning them for a more challenging task: a reverse extraction known as an inception, which entails planting an idea so deeply in the victim's mind that they believe it to be their own. Saito wants Cobb to subconsciously convince Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the son of a billionaire rival, to break up his family's empire following his father's death. Moreover, Saito insists on tagging along during the inception in order to protect his investment. Despite his misgivings, Cobb accepts the job, chiefly because Saito pledges to eradicate his criminal record, arrange for his legal entry into the United States, and reunite him with his children.

This sets up the rest of the story, which, when you strip away the mind-bending sci-fi trappings, is essentially a heist film. True to the form of the genre, Cobb and Arthur set off on a globe-trotting mission to recruit an international team of experts for this unlikely feat of mind-hackery. Their team includes Eames (Tom Hardy), an undercover operative who poses as one of Fischer's confidants in the dream; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a pharmacologist who devises a specialized sedative; and Ariadne (Ellen Page), a prodigy skilled at constructing the custom dreamscapes the team utilizes for the inception. These dreamscapes are decidedly crisp affairs, more akin to virtual reality simulations than the fluid, surreal environments of real dreams. All the same, Nolan makes ingenious use of the familiar uncanniness of our sleeping world, lending credibility to the notion that the film's slick, stylish vistas are actually dominions of the mind. Confronting a man in the dreamscape, Cobb poses the question, "How did you get here?" The dreamer can't answer, because dreams don't ever seem to have real beginnings, do they? You're hailing a cab on a street corner, sitting in a hotel bar, standing on a snowy mountainside, and you're off. Moreover, time dilates in the dreamscape, such that an hour takes only five minutes in the real world, a detail that seems spookily accurate given my own dreaming experiences.

Saito arranges for the team to be alone with Fischer in the first-class cabin of a trans-oceanic flight, where they drug him and begin the mind-hack. As if their task weren't challenging enough, Cobb explains that in order to shield the team from detection, they must create three successive layers of dreams and escort Fischer through them in order to seed the notion of a corporate breakup at the "lowest" level: a dream within a dream within a dream. The events in a higher dream echo downward, such that a dreamer spattered with water in Dream A will find it begins to rain in Dream B. Moreover, this nesting of dreamscapes results in greater and greater time dilation the deeper the team goes, which is basically a clever excuse for Nolan to indulge in some phenomenally inventive, vertigo-inducing storytelling. To cite the most conspicuous example, roughly the final hour of the film takes place during the few seconds it takes a van to fall from a bridge into a river. As bewildering as it can be to keep up with the multiple storylines and different rates of time, Nolan somehow manages to continually tighten the vice, such that the entire heist essentially plays as a stacked series of action sequences, each one dependent on the outcome of the next. The story's complexity is nothing short of breathtaking, with Nolan pulling off the narrative equivalent of a plate-spinning act.

The final wrinkle comes in the form of Mal (Marion Cotillard), a spiteful hobgoblin that lurks in Cobb's subconscious and is based on memories of his wife. She—who, of course, isn't a "she" at all, but actually a fragment of Cobb's own mind—has a nasty habit of maliciously sabotaging his dreamscapes. Cobb hasn't revealed this to his team, but Ariadne quickly tumbles to the fact that he is hiding crucial details about his past and endangering them all. This aspect of the story inevitably calls to mind Shutter Island from earlier this year, in that both films feature DiCaprio in the role of a man whose guilt has psychologically mutilated him. However, the success of Scorsese's film rests to a large extent on the palpable rawness of DiCaprio's anguish, while Nolan asks little of the actor other than sheer conviction. This isn't inconsistent with Nolan's post-Memento mode: evocative and moody, often with a bitter-sour tang, but lacking a truly poignant connection between character and viewer. Such a negligent approach to character needn't be a failing, given that a convoluted action film executed with acrobatic deftness has a purity all its own. However, it does betray that Nolan himself never quite accepts the supposed emotional potency of Cobb and Mal's tragic story, which invites the question of why the viewer should care. Inception's real strength is that of an exigent science-fiction thriller that pushes the limits of storytelling, the sort of grand cinematic contraption that seduces with its sheer baroque audacity. Nolan's vision may be more polished and literal-minded than a genuine state of dreaming, but it nonetheless leaves you breathless, unsteady, and wondering what just happened.

The Killer Inside Me

What's It Like to Be the Bad Man?​

2010 // USA // Michael Winterbottom // July 12, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

B - Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1952 noir novel The Killer Inside Me is not an enjoyable film, at least as one usually applies the term to a movie-going experience. Nor is it without vexing structural flaws. And yet it is an undeniably fascinating work, an absorbing and unnervingly insistent portrayal of a murderous mind that joins the ranks of cult notables such as Mary Harron's American Psycho and John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. However, the gaze of Winterbottom's film reaches back to a more distant point. Specifically, to Psycho, whose particular cinematic genius the film cannibalizes and assimilates into its own strange approach. Working from a screenplay by director John Curran, Winterbottom maintains a literate awareness of Hitchcock's seminal thriller throughout his film, without resorting to shameless appropriation or self-conscious homage. Thompson's novel has made the jump to the screen before, in a 1976 Stacy Keach vehicle directed by Burt Kennedy. However, the new film does not carry the telltale odor of a flimsy remake, nor that of an adaptation overly beholden to its source material. This new take on The Killer Inside Me is insolent and distinctly cinematic. It ambles along a lurid, eccentric path on an unsettling mission: to convey both the hideous normalcy and incomprehensible disconnection of the psychopathic mind.

The film presents the tale of Lou Ford (Casey Affleck), a clean-cut, gawky deputy sheriff in rural 1950s Texas. Lou doesn't carry a service revolver; the most hazardous part of his job entails placating local bigwigs such as construction mogul Chester Conway (Ned Beatty) and union boss Joe Rothman (Elias Koteas). Lou is well-mannered and soft-spoken, a country boy who spends his nights reading while listening to opera, when he's not romancing his sweet-as-sugar girlfriend, Amy (Kate Hudson). Lou is also a coldblooded murderer, as the film's title and promotion make abundantly clear. Where you or I have empathy and remorse, Lou has... nothing. He's a Hollow Man. In flashback, we learn that Lou's masochistic mother nurtured a streak of sexual sadism in the boy from a young age. It's not clear whether this abuse stunted Lou's moral development, or merely exacerbated what was already a disturbed mind. It doesn't really matter. There's no struggle between saint and sinner beneath Lou's canted Stetson; he's a monster through and through. The only tribulation that he even seems to acknowledge is the sheer challenge of evading capture for as long as possible. Fortunately for Lou, he's an excellent liar, the sort of aw-shucks bullshit artist who can improvise on cue and has an answer for everything.

In the film's opening scenes, the sheriff (Tom Bower) sends Lou off on something of a shit task: convince a local prostitute, Joyce (Jessica Alba) to pull up stakes and leave town. Lou's confrontation with the woman escalates to a brutal assault that satisfies his taste for sexual violence, and then turns on a dime into a bout of mutually enthusiastic screwing. The pair begin to make a regular thing of this game, but complications ensue: one of Joyce's clients is Elmer Conway (Jay R. Ferguson) the lunkhead son of the aforementioned construction mogul. Daddy Conway wants Lou to act as a bagman and pay off the whore who has beguiled his son. Instead, Lou hatches a scheme wherein Joyce will abscond with Elmer and the money, then ditch the dupe and rendezvous with Lou later. Incidentally, Elmer's shoddy construction work may or may have not resulted in the death of Lou's half-brother, a fact that the union boss uses to tweak the deputy. I said it was complicated, didn't I?

Ultimately, this elaborate and often aggravating plot is essentially just the set-up for Lou's sudden and unspeakably brutal betrayal of Joyce, whom he beats to death in one of the film's most disturbing and audacious scenes. Not that violence perpetrated by men against women is all that uncommon in cinema, but it's rarely portrayed as unflinchingly as it is here, without the glamorization or weird elision that characterizes action film editing. Instead, what we get is several nearly unbearable minutes of a man pounding the head of a defenseless, essentially unresisting woman into bloody hamburger with his bare fists. This is presented with the steadiness one might normally exhibit when observing a man painting a fence. Right about now, you probably already have a fairly robust notion of whether there is any chance in hell of you ever seeing this film, so there's not much point in attempting to convince the doubters that this graphic violence is essential, even if it is repulsive. However, I will proffer that it enhances the dissonance that pervades the rest of the film, which is mainly concerned with the lengths that Lou must go to in order to conceal his role in the murder. He has to tell lie after lie, attempt to rectify a handful of crucial blunders, and commit more crimes, whose cover-up demands still more crimes, and so on.

Winterbottom's model here is, of course, Psycho, with its superbly cunning shift in sympathy from the slain femme fatale to the quiet man who is protecting her murderer. The savagery of Lou's violent impulses only heightens the film's rising sense of disorientation and gnawing unease. "This guy can't be the story's hero, can he?" Eventually, it becomes apparent that there are no heroes in this world, not even a laconic private eye to ferret out Lou's sins. The deputy's antagonists are a smug district attorney, an opportunistic vagrant, and that devious union boss. (The latter leans on Lou with his Peter Falk routine, but he isn't looking out for anyone but himself.) Winterbottom offers no emotional handholds in this story but those that project from Lou himself, which I suppose is a kind of artistic sadism, but also magnificent in its ruthlessness. Following along from a monster's point of view engenders a sense of helplessness that is only enhanced by Affleck's performance. Lou is languidly charming in public, urgent and vicious in the bedroom, and coolly blank in private. He is a cipher, and doesn't ask for or want our understanding. The film hints at what might be going on behind those reptilian eyes—finding dirty pictures of his mother in a family Bible, Lou calmly burns them—but there is no psychologist to offer a concluding exegesis here. We can only sit in stunned silence and wonder at how a human brain can break so bad.

The flaws that afflict The Killer Inside Me are mainly pacing problems. They are particularly conspicuous following a pivotal murder, after which Winterbottom seems to lose his capacity for linking scenes together coherently. The passage of time becomes ambiguous, and the story begins to feel disjointed and even clumsy. More generous viewers might regard this as consistent with the delusional aspects of Lou's madness, which eventually begin to intrude directly into the film. I'm inclined towards the simpler explanation: standard-issue third act narrative aimlessness. That said, the corrosion of reality is perhaps inevitable in any work that approaches madness from a first-person perspective. Curran's screenplay indulges in escalating strangeness as Lou's final fate draws near, and by the time it descends into soap opera silliness, it's abundantly clear that the film has fractured to match the deputy's mind. We're dwelling entirely within Lou's diseased headspace by the end, and the events that unfold reveal a vacant mind that echoes with obsessions, a place where virtuous love and violent depravity have the same tune.

Toy Story 3

This Is the End, Beautiful Friend

2010 // USA // Lee Unkrich // June 21, 2010 // 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli)

A- - I've previously observed that the most gleefully gratifying aspect of Pixar's triumph over the realms of American feature animation has been the burgeoning thematic sophistication of its films, which have evolved from wholesome entertainments into nimble and sensitive works of art. However, I've also long held the perhaps heretical view among Pixar aficionados that Toy Story and Toy Story 2, despite their charming qualities and seminal status in animated cinema, seem, shall we say, slighter than the later-model Pixar efforts. The first two chapters in the saga of Woody and Buzz Lightyear are unambiguously lesser films when held alongside subsequent films. Little in the first two Toy Story films compares to Ratatouille's virtuoso storytelling, WALL●E's sweeping sci-fi explorations, or Up's adroit blending of giddy thrills and profound sorrow. For this reason, there is a rich sense of fulfillment to be had in Toy Story 3, quite apart from its inherent sensory and emotional pleasures. Director Lee Unkrich—here taking solo helming duties for the first time—expands the scope of the studio's most familiar franchise to encompass delicate matters such as emotional abuse, the sting of betrayal, class-based tyranny, and the specter of mortality. Yet Toy Story 3 never loses sight of the fundamental appeal of pint-sized adventure in the perilous wilderness of suburbia, nor of the essential pathos of growing up, here handled (as always) with the utmost care. The third chapter in the Disney / Pixar behemoth reveals itself to be the best: gorgeous, intricate, a little frightening, and shamelessly touching.

The film opens with a ticklish flashback sequence that visualizes a child's frenetic fantasies on a grand scale, as young Andy (Charlies Bright) casts Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen), and the other toys in an outlandish adventure. In the present day, however, the toys are lamenting their long state of disuse just as seventeen-year-old Andy (John Morris) is about to depart for college. The inevitable emotional separation from his grown-up owner haunted Woody in the second film, but it seemed a distant thing. At the outset of Toy Story 3, this slow-motion calamity has finally come to pass for all of Andy's playthings. (Oddly enough, only Woody, as the designated Best Friend, has a chance to tag along to college as a keepsake, a privilege that engenders resentment from the other toys.) Banishment to the attic is the toys' most likely fate—a dull prospect, yet preferable to the landfill—but a series of mix-ups and hasty gambits lands them in the donation bin at Sunnyside Daycare. There they meet a faction of second-hand toys led by the genial magenta teddy bear, Lotso (Ned Beatty), who speaks glowingly of the never-ending cohorts of playmates at the daycare. Naturally, not all is as it seems at Sunnyside: Andy's toys discover to their horror that as "new recruits" they've been relegated to a gaggle of savage toddlers who only know how to bite, bash, and break. (The recommended age metric, it would seem, is less about the safety of the child than that of the toy.) It turns out that Lotso, jilted by a former owner and seething with bitterness, is running Sunnyside as if it were a prison, complete with a rigid caste system and fearsome punishments, such as banishment to the dreaded (Sand) Box.

Consistent with the previous chapters in the series, the narrative of Toy Story 3 is essentially a framework for an extended slapstick adventure tale, although the threat of outright destruction has never been as acute for the toys as it is here. The urgency of a reunion with Andy propels the story forward through a landscape fraught with peril for our eight- to twelve-inch heroes. However, their owner's nascent adulthood heightens the ambiguity of such a reunion. Whereas the primary villains of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 were humans who failed to recognize the sentimental value of the toys to their rightful owner, this outing's antagonists are other playthings who have been traumatized and hardened by their past experiences. On another level, however, the true villain of Toy Story 3 is mortality itself, which menaces our little heroes in a manner that is almost disconcerting for a children's movie. The emotional earnestness of the Toy Story films has always seemed a bit suspect—Can we truly be moved by the travails of plastic junk, no matter how robust the allegorical aspects of their story?—but here the dread of abandonment is paired with a genuinely frightening threat of outright annihilation. One of the film's most affecting scenes confronts the compulsive need to struggle against oblivion, and, with superb poignancy, reveals our heroes' grim resolve to face their demise hand-in-hand. (Their eventual salvation by means of a deus ex machina only moderately detracts from this sequence's potency.)

Needless to say, the visuals of Toy Story 3 are tremendously lush and vibrant. The animators paint a setting of colossal corridors and vast playgrounds, where everything pops with a level of detail that puts even Ratatouille's magnificently realized kitchen to shame. There is an element of undistilled delight in seeing characters created fifteen years ago given life within a reality that finally feels settled and seamless. The script is admirably witty, although the film flirts with raunchy and scatological humor to an unfortunate extent not observed in prior Pixar films. There are plenty of gags that are unmistakably geared towards the adults in the audience, but the film's bountiful cinematic allusions are far more memorable and stimulating. Much of the extensive Sunnyside segment of the film plays as a riff on The Great Escape, but there are abundant nods to influences ranging from Cool Hand Luke to The Ten Commandments, from The Return of the Jedi to The Exorcist. However, Unkrich maintains a generous focus on the story at hand, such that these elements never attain the air of stilted homages or winking novelties, but rather signify a disciplined use of generic tropes to tell a sentimental adventure yarn.

Mawkishness is an obvious risk when one's very subject matter is childhood nostalgia, yet Toy Story 3 evades it with grace by showing us—more so than its predecessors—the authentic creative joy of kids, where the toys are beloved but the act of play is what endures. The film poses that while the relics of our past might exert a powerful magnetism over us, nostalgia is ultimately wrought from emotion and memory, not objects. The authenticity of the film's final scenes, as Andy at last lets go of his old friends, is rooted in the clarity and pain of his sudden revelation that his childhood is gone forever. If there is a spot of comfort, it lies in the notion that Woody the Cowboy is still out there somewhere, riding alongside another little buckaroo.

October Country

This American Life

2009 //  USA // Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher // June 5, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[October Country is being featured in a limited engagement from June 4-10, 2010 at the Webster University Film Series.]

B+ - On its weather-beaten surface, October Country is a straightforward documentary in the "anthropological study" vein. Surprisingly deft and arresting, the film profiles a blue-collar family living in the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York, and marks co-directors Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher as emergent talents in documentary film-making. Emulating Errol Morris' signature approach—restive, slightly distanced, and ever-conscious of their medium's artificiality—the directors chronicle a year in the life of Donal's extended family, observing their tumble-down surroundings and listening to their stories with sorrowful attentiveness. Undeniably, the Moshers' tale is a bleak one, characterized by wartime ghosts, criminal betrayal, domestic violence, cruel estrangement, foolish decisions, and perennial economic hardship. What's remarkable about October Country is how Palmieri and Mosher elevate the story beyond voyeuristic goggling at misfortune to achieve something far more intricate. In its finest moments, the film serves as a bitter rumination on the cyclical quality of family history, as well as a cinematic séance, not only with the Mosher clan's particular demons, but with the Puritan shades that still haunt the American experience.

The film follows four generations of the Moshers for a year, from one Halloween to the next, gradually revealing not only the ever-shifting landscape of their travails, but also the surprising and often heartbreaking texture of their personalities and relationships. Dottie is the resolute but also palpably saddened matriarch, determined to keep her family afloat despite mounting evidence that its fate is almost entirely out of her hands. Her husband Don is a taciturn Vietnam veteran, a man who returned from the war hardened and withdrawn. He seems to be the most level-headed member of the clan, but his resentments and his untreated (and virtually unacknowledged) PTSD consume him. Their daughter Donna is a domestic abuse survivor who gave birth to a daughter, Daneal, when she was still a teenager. Daneal, in turn, has repeated her mother's mistakes, and is fighting for custody of her two-year-old daughter Ruby with the girl's abusive father. Daneal's eleven-year-old sister Desi is both smart and a bit of a smart-ass, pushing nonchalantly against the constraints of her kin and her town. Other family members lurk around the periphery. Don's obese, arthritic sister Denise is a cemetery-skulking Wiccan, shunned by her brother for her religious beliefs and her "attitude". Their own familial problems notwithstanding, Dottie and Don have taken in a foster son, Chris, a swaggering shoplifter who is painfully aware he is on the wrong path, and yet seems unwilling to change his ways. Everyone chain-smokes.

Palmieri and Mosher permit the family to paint the contours of their story in their own words, intruding only rarely with an off-camera question or two. Similar to Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's stunning feature, Trouble the Water, the directors avoid domineering narration in favor of a shared storytelling approach with their subjects. In contrast to agitprop documentarians, Palmieri and Mosher's artistic arsenal is first and foremost that of the cinema: photography, sound, music, editing, and always the faces of the family. Their visages command the frame, simultaneously seeking the camera's approval and ambivalent about how anyone but God (or the dead) perceive them. The film's understated revelations are as compelling as anything in the worthiest fictional feature, such as when ex-cop and war movie aficionado Don is shown laboring in his attic woodshop on, of all things, delicate dollhouse furniture. However, where Lessin and Deal's film forged a triumphant sense of perseverance from calamity, Palmieri and Mosher are working in a far more poetic mode, one that is unabashedly melancholy and offers no easy answers. Consumer culture, globalization, misogynistic violence, abortion rights, and imperialistic war all feed into the Moshers' tribulations like raw, knotted timber, but the film is not ultimately about such matters any more than it is about the Halloween holiday that serves as a backdrop to the opening and closing scenes.

Repeating patterns figure heavily in the thematic landscape of October Country, and the "turn of the seasons" framework—cogently but modestly presented—resonates with the cycles that crop up in the lives of the Moshers. Daneal is following in her mother's ill-fated footsteps, but resists the hard-won wisdom of the older woman's bruised experience, preferring the simple myth of villainous mom and saintly (absent) dad. There are boyfriends, one after the other, always possessive and abusive and always trashing the family before leaving it, like a cheap hotel room. Chris is a habitual criminal who has no intention of straightening out, even as he speaks glowingly of the Moshers' generosity and love. He promises that he will eventually hurt them, and he does. Everyone looks at Desi, on the verge of adolescence, and wonders aloud if she will repeat their mistakes. The girl just snorts, rolls her eyes, and turns back to her video games: "I'm smarter than any of them." There is an aura of Old Testament doom that permeates the film, a sensation that nothing that was ordained by unseen forces can be escaped. Will I always be a bad person? Will I always love bad men? Do I have to grow up and get a shitty job in this shitty town and eventually die here?

Palmieri and Mosher pose their film not just as record of personal despair in twenty-first century America, but also a communion with something more profound in the national fabric. Deep in its chilly bones, October Country represents a fragment of our ongoing cultural struggle with our Puritan forebears, those English exiles who valued stoicism, saw the Devil's hoof-prints everywhere, and still hiss of the futility of escaping that which God has written. What would those forebears say, the film implicitly asks, of the plastic witches and artificial cobwebs of the Moshers' Halloween party? What would they say of Family Dollar and Ninentedo, of family court and disability checks? What would they say of Denise, with her unicorn paintings and loneliness, standing with a camcorder in a graveyard and asking the phantoms, "Anybody want to talk to me?" Whether our Puritan past has any salience in this age of modern uncertainty and desolation is debatable, but October Country is persuasive in its assertion that—to paraphrase Faulkner—the past is not past at all. It's a sentiment written on every careworn and hard-bitten Mosher brow.