Not Coming to a Theater Near You
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
After seeing Spike Lee’s Katrina documentary, When the Levees Broke, I figured I had (vicariously) experienced the hurricane and its aftermath in as tight a focus as I ever would. But Trouble the Water zooms in even closer, telling the story of Katrina through the experiences of one remarkable couple, Kimberly and Scott Roberts. Kimberly presciently started filming the day before the storm, and her shaky home videos from her house in the ninth ward — first from the ground floor, and then from the attic — form the core of the film. Cut throughout are short, well-chosen news clips tracking the story as the rest of the world saw it unfolding; professional footage of Kimberly and Scott dealing with the fallout from the storm, in the weeks and months following, rounds out the documentary.
What’s most amazing is the extent to which the experiences of one couple encompass all the ugly layers and complications of the Katrina story: at various points, they’re in the attic, they’re on the interstate, they’re at the FEMA offices in northern Louisiana. Kimberly has a brother trapped in an abandoned prison, and a grandmother in hospital. They meet New Orleanians who plan to return, and others who don’t. They have moments of despair and hope, of wanting to return (or not) themselves. Somehow, they hold the entire messy story within them. And while Trouble the Water is not quite so emotionally wrenching as When the Levees Broke, it does clearly demonstrate — perhaps better than any other work I’ve seen on Katrina — the ways in which Louisiana’s existing poverty, the extent to which some people are allowed to fall through the cracks, was exposed and exacerbated by the storm. Katrina didn’t create those problems, but she certainly did bring them home to roost.
by Eva Holland | Source: DVD
27 Feb 2009 11:25 PM | Submit Comment
As my friend Greg pointed out to me, a remarkable thing about this remarkable movie is that it takes place entirely within the school, mostly, in fact, within the titular classroom. (The French title captures this sense of spatial retriction more precisely: Entre les murs, or Between the Walls.) So what we know of the students, and even of the teacher/protagonist (François Béaudeau, a real former teacher, who also wrote the novel on which the film is based), is solely confined to their official institutional activities; whatever loose humanity emerges (and plenty does, to be sure) is always rigorously framed by the context of the institution’s functioning. In another movie about an inner-city school, in other words — and it doesn’t even have to be one as lousy as Blackboard Jungle or Dangerous Minds — the possible expulsion of an unfocused student would be the source of drama; here, it’s the occasion for the convention of committees, careful deliberation, and eventual disciplinary action. (The one conventionally dramatic scene, a heated encounter between the teacher and his students in the recreation yard, is the exception that proves the rule.)
There’s something typically French about this: the commitment to passionate bureaucracy, laced with an underlying skepticism. Like Laurent Cantet’s previous Time Out, in which a man loses his job and refuses to tell his wife about it, The Class is a film about how one’s job inevitably shapes one’s identity. For Cantet, this is a social fact, one he neither opposes nor assumes, but just carefully investigates. Thus The Class has something of the quality of a Frederick Wiseman documentary, giving us a coolly objective portrait of “the class” more than any strong subjective sense of the principals who inhabit it.
But on the other hand, and lest I make this totally engrossing movie sound boring, and as any current or former teacher or student should know, the classroom situation is inherently dramatic: more than any other “ordinary” situation I can think of, it’s agonistic, dialogic, based on frequent exchanges by actors with clearly defined roles (teacher/student) and, beyond that, roles within roles (know-it-all, shy kid, tough guy, class clown). And in this particular class situation, we are dealing also with a complex array of cultural backgrounds — students of African, Algerian, Hispanic and Chinese descent, among others — and a general cynicism and resistance to discipline that adds tension and energy to even the simplest lesson. The really extraordinary unself-consciousness of Bégaudeau and the young student/actors, coupled with Cantet’s skillfully unobtrusive framing and editing, together produce a truly extraordinary technical transparency: you not only forget you’re not watching a documentary, you sometimes even forget you’re watching a movie. (And when you have to read subtitles, this is a real trick.) At any rate: the best film about pedagogy I’ve ever seen.
by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
26 Feb 2009 2:13 PM | Comments (1)
Few films deserve the grand appellation “piece of shit,” and I am perhaps even more recalcitrant than other filmgoers to throw that kind of judgment around loosely; after all, I do not subscribe, as many do these days, to the almost default critical persona that assumes a condescending superior distance to any work of art being reviewed simply because you, the critic, has not had the audacity, and well, frankly, untoward self-defined perspicacity, to actually create something (John Simon and his ilk are in my mind, like dogs who lick their own privates); on the contrary, I feel the more appropriate critical positioning is one of humility, an acknowledgment that someone has worked feverishly or spent years of their life to attempt to deliver something to you meaningful, or entertain you, or make you angry or uncomfortable, or make you feel turned on; so when I use this phrase it contains not merely a dismissal but a real and deep engagement with the quality of “shittiness” imbued in what I am watching. I think it was Roger Ebert who noted in a review that as he walked out of Caligula, Bob Guccione’s magnum opus scatologicus (which cost something like $14 to see in 1980, adding to its, um, “stature”), that a deflated woman exiting the movie next to him exclaimed with great and memorable discouragement about the future of humanity, “what a piece of shit.” Other films that come to mind along these lines are Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, precisely because it aspired to such wonderful, ambitious things and couldn’t quite launch anything cohesive in the end; or Showgirls, whose screenwriter, one of the highest paid and worst in history, aspired to such depths of purposeful scuzz that he gave birth to a classic not quite of unwitting camp but more the victory of cynical, renumerative schlockmeistering over any attempt at a logical or plausible evaluation, sexy or vital or funny or surreal or otherwise etc., of humanity itself; in other words, yes, true “pieces of shit” must rise to the level of twisting the basic demands and functions of art into some hybrid between inspiration and commercial pressure (be it external or internal)… some unfortunate beast born of a conjugal visit between the creative impulse on the one hand and the assembly of a numbly manufactured product for the damned and dull on the other. And so it is with these instances in mind that I announce Catherine Breillat’s shocker Fat Girl as one of the greatest shitpiles in recent memory.
If it were indeed physical feces, it would not be of the relatively fresh, innocent, lightly smelling variety pushed out by your average infant; it would be the lingering, fermenting turd of an dirty old man living in a back alley of Paris who has been reading, and literally eating the pages from books by Camus and Sartre and Camille Paglia: for this is pretension, French pretension, at its most inept and banal and weary. If you are going to shock me, then do it: make me sick to my stomach and heart; but just do it thoughtfully, with a mastery of the ramifications of shock. Do it like Gaspar Noe, another provocateur of French language film – with skill, mystery, imagination, and risk. But don’t do it like a cruel, errant schoolboy who doesn’t understand the effects of a badly concieved prank he has just foisted on the class, without any grasp of the responsibility that accompanies and annunciates shock and makes it powerful in the first place, and who creates effects and consequences that spiral away from him, as he watches helplessly.
Imagine you are sitting in a bar and your typical college Frat Dude is telling you about a film he’d like to make; excitedly, he tells you the basic story is this: there is this really hot and beautiful teenage girl, see, who’s not particulary likable or interesting, but is awakening to her budding sexuality and having an affair with a college guy vacationing near her family’s summer home (he’s no prize conversationalist either, by the way); problem is, she’s got this younger sister, who is harmlessly chubby in the way many twelve year old girls are before they enter adolescence, and she’s not so likable or interesting either, maybe a bit more interesting because once in a while she sings French songs wistfully to herself, but not that much—and while hot sis is trying to get it on with college guy in her bedroom late at night, her younger sibling is in the same room, tossing and turning and grumbling because she has the nerve to think she shouldn’t just bear it while these two moan and fumble and speak in long rambling dialogues that are supposed to skirt the line between ponderous and profound, or more accuratley plumb the depths of ponderousness for its profundity, but just wind up being badly written; anyhoo, this problematic situation goes on for awhile, and along the way we also realize mom and dad too alienate chubby sis and resent her because she’s not hot sis, and everyone generally treats her miserably in a vacant way, and then hot sis and chubby younger sis and their mother drive around for awhile, with lots of tension and portentous atmosphere thrown in, until at the very end, at a gas station on the highway, a crazy maniac rapist jumps on the hood of their car out of nowhere, clubs hot sis to death, kills mom, and then drags chubby sis into the woods and rapes her on the ground.
The thing is…well here’s the clincher, the Frat Dude tells you, kind of leering and leaning forward, obviously aroused by his own cleverness…the end of the story is really bizarre and provocative because this rape verges on being portrayed as having a rustic kind of sensuality and tenderness, and afterwards, once the rapist has fled and left chubby sis alive, there’s a strange look and almost-smile on her face because even though she’s a twelve-year-old who’s just been violently raped by a stranger, the event turned out to be a kind of esoteric, European-like rite of passage that breaks the smothering grip of evil mean hot sis and mom on her life, and all the envy and emptiness we have witness is distilled into and given catharsis by a transgressive and ugly but ultimately transformative trauma, which signals a kind of dark coming-of-age and ushering into womanhood and self-discovery, because finally someone wants to bed her and she is the center of attention, which every child longs to be…even though the flattery icomes from a serial-killer type at the local fill-up station. In summary, the closing sequence is a blurring of stark reality and dream-like fantasy wish fulfillment all at once…and should keep people whispering argumentatively over their cocktails for many a year to come…
Now, Frat Dude adds, all of this is gonna be thrown at you without any backdrop of developed, intriguing characters containing dimension, which might, by some stroke of GOD, allow the perverse, climactic reverse deus-ex-machina closer to have some combination of horror and pathos and grotesque vulnerability in it; no, it will come after one and half hours of meandering, pompous screenwriting that gives ennui a bad name and during which we do not build the necessary empathy for, connection with, or insight into Fat Girl, so that just in case she does get assaulted by a violent rapist serial killer out of nowhere at a gas station, her honest, frustrated, confused, and dangerous ambivalence might be truly provocative.
Well….whaddya think? Frat Dude finally asks you, obviously satisfied with himself, and the only thing you can think of is to report him to a mental health clinic, the prominent feminist group on campus, a screenwriting seminar, and the local authorities. Now… to paraphrase Matthew McConaghy at the end of the trial in A Time To Kill… pretend that instead of it being a Frat Dude who was regaling you at the bar….pretend you are at a chic café and the person who just told you this story is a well-known female “vanguard” French filmmaker, a supposed daring provocateur. Now open your eyes. In my mind, it wouldn’t make much of a difference: either way, hearing this story pitch or seeing the film made from it, you would want to righteously tell the narrator to go fuck himself.
Matt’s review
by Simon Augustine | Source: The Criterion Collection DVD
22 Feb 2009 2:01 PM | Comments (15)
Yet another literary classic savaged by Hollywood’s unfeeling adaptation machine. Or something like that.
by Eva Holland | Source: 35mm Print
17 Feb 2009 8:46 PM | Submit Comment
I have to respect He’s Just Not That Into You for sheer chutzpah: it takes a pair to spend ninety-plus minutes building the case that there is no such thing as a happy ending, before giving your audience precisely that. In fact, I might go so far as to call the movie a work of sadistic genius.
The central tenet is simple: you are not the exception, you are the rule. That girl — you know, your cubicle-mate’s cousin’s friend? — whose philandering man-child of a husband finally turned over a new leaf? She is the exception. But you (you and everyone you know) are the rule.
There’s a liberating quality to this revelation. Suddenly, you’re freed from the Hollywood-imposed dream of a Mr. (or, more rarely, Mrs.) Right inevitably coming along. What a blunt, refreshing, straight-talking little movie! (You think, 75 minutes in.) But then, somewhere along the way, director Ken Kwapis pulls the switch. You’re not sure where it happens exactly, but there’s a point at which you shift from a satisfied, cynical smirk to a hapless, wet-eyed smile. The good guys get what’s coming to them, and the bad guys do, too. The credits roll. And you walk out thinking: “Maybe, someday…”
by Eva Holland | Source: 35mm Print
17 Feb 2009 8:35 PM | Comments (7)
