My latest batch of movie annotations, humbly submitted, and on time, too!

Ballast, a homegrown indie, observes the tentative attempts at human connection between three emotionally wounded working-class individuals in rural Mississippi. Almost defiantly (and certainly unfashionably) subdued, it draws its strength from the bleak expressiveness of the locale—overcast skies, muddy fields, rows of depressing trailer homes, and other such mundanities. Lance Hammer, the debuting writer-director, shows promise as an image-maker, taking some of the more annoying trends in low budget filmmaking (an unsteady camera, wobbly focus) and using them to his advantage. As a storyteller he is on less sure footing (a subplot involving a gang of drug dealers is awkwardly ditched), and the film turns out to be something of a mixed blessing. Better than no blessing at all.

It’s that time again. 

Rachel Getting Married is a smallish drama about a black sheep in a fractured family of four, fresh out of rehab, who returns home to attend her sister’s wedding. Despite the ragged digital video, the film is actually a disciplined study in human brokenness, keen and discerning. Jonathan Demme, the director, is a filmmaker sensitive to fragile shifts in tempo, and he fully exploits his felicity with actors. (Notice how quickly a dishwashing competition turns sour.) Good performances are plentiful (especially by Hathaway as the returning sister and Bill Irwin as the father of the bride), though almost everyone is guilty of a little too much emoting.

City of Ember is the latest family-film from that veritable family-film factory—Walden Media. This costly adventure tale, set 200 years from now in a subterranean city lit by electricity, follows the attempts of two teenagers (Saoirse Ronan and Harry Treadaway) to find an exit to the outside world. Wrought with intelligence and feeling, and niftily designed as a network of pipes and tunnels, the film holds the attention thoroughly and honestly, without resorting to melodrama or sentimentality. Bill Murray has a funny role as a corrupt mayor, and there are a few nicely executed special effects including a beastly half-seal, half-earthworm creature destined to give kids nightmares. Gil Kenan (Monster House) directed.  

Harvesting the first of what will hopefully be a bounteous fall crop:

A Girl Cut in Two is a coolly distanced, mischievously closed-off French thriller from a man who knows the territory: Claude Chabrol. As director and co-writer (splitting screenwriting duties with step-daughter Cecile Maistre), Chabrol frugally reveals insight into the desires of his heroine (Ludivine Sagnier), a young woman who must choose between two equally dangerous men (Benoit Magimel and Francois Berliand). Since this is a Chabrol film, it’s not until the very end that you realize you’ve been watching a thriller. By holding back until the very end, Chabrol is able to convey a sizable amount of impact with a single act of violence—a neat trick.

Momma’s Man is a micro-budget comedy about a young man (recently married, lately upgraded to father) who swings by his parents’ New York loft for a brief visit and can’t bring himself to leave. The premise has a touch of Bunuelian absurdity, but Azazel Jacobs’s film flowers into a sublime tribute to the agony of growing up. The term “personal film” is given special meaning by the casting of the director’s real-life mother and father, longtime avant-gardists Ken and Flo Jacobs, but the deep well of emotions into which the film taps are for anyone who’s every agonized over adulthood. The loft itself, a spontaneously arranged jungle of artsy bric-a-brac, is an off-kilter space that continually rewards attention.

Truckin' through August, rounding up summer's dying embers:

Brideshead Revisited is a luxuriously heavy exercise in passionate glances and tacit emotion from the other side of the pond (think of last year’s Atonement and you’ll be in the right neighborhood) directed by Julian Jarrold. By muting the Catholicism of Waugh’s novel, the film doesn’t have a compelling reason to exist—the class struggles are no longer relevant, and the “enlightened” depiction of a gay character, while tactfully handled, is a touch self-congratulatory. Emma Thompson easily dominates her scenes as Lady Marchmain, and Patrick Malahide is grossly convincing as the protagonist’s unfeeling father (first glimpsed playing chess with himself).

Pineapple Express is a likeably scrappy (or scrappily likeable) stoner comedy, at least for a spell. After a promising start, the freewheeling plot turns transparently formulaic, culminating in an overlong gun battle in a lone warehouse. The inspired pairing of Seth Rogan and James Franco (with Danny McBride shuffled in as a wildcard) reaps modest rewards, but it’s Craig Robinson’s performance as a sissyish hired goon that pries open the barrel of laughs. Produced by Judd Apatow (who else?) and directed by David Gordon Green, who once possessed something approaching a personal style.

More quickie reviews, cooled from weeks of neglect:

The simple appeal of the first Hellboy can be found in its paradoxical protagonist: a demon with a gentle spirit who fights on behalf of the good guys. In Hellboy II: The Golden Army, director Guillermo del Toro does almost nothing with this conceit, showing little interest in the interiority of its characters while fanning his obsession with elaborately designed monsters. Like his overrated Pan’s Labyrinth (whose fairy tale atmosphere was patronizing), there is a lot to distract the eye, but little to engage the head or heart. Briefly, fleetingly, the film will seduce you with its majestically dark vision of a supernatural underworld, but this vision is undermined by the silly comic book plotting, which basically comes down to a lot of martial arts-style skirmishing. Still recommended for the memorable appearance of a legless Irish troll, a butt-ugly creation that finds the right balance between humor and terror.

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Trying to keep up with yesterday's news:

Once upon the early ‘70s, Italian director Dario Argento excelled at fashioning elegant, sinister, psychologically unsettling horror mysteries (“giallo” films, as they were often called), but a steady decline into sadism drove him underground and out of critical esteem. Three decades later, he’s still up to his old tricks, only now the violence has escalated to new extremes while his filmmaking has atrophied, perhaps even taken a few steps backward. Mother of Tears (the ostensible final entry in a series of three, following Suspiria and Inferno) feels obsessively depraved, even for an Argento film, with plenty of eviscerations and exposed brains to offend the eye. It’s unquestionably degrading (for audience and filmmaker alike), but also unexpectedly hokey—a coven of punk rock witches inspires more sniggers than shivers, and Mater Lachrymarum herself is nothing more than a lascivious model in a skanky tee shirt. It seems very unlikely that the trilogy will become a tetralogy.

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The folks at Pixar have created a filmmaker’s utopia. Working almost entirely without obstruction, they’ve established a work ethic in which artistic integrity is of primary importance, and where a personal vision is given room to flourish. It is an auteur’s paradise—never before has a studio placed so much faith in individual imagination. Each new film has a different feel compliant with the quirks of its director. (Hence, The Incredibles, though clearly the handiwork of many talented craftsmen, is distinctly Brad Birdian both for its aggressive nostalgia and its emphasis on the nuclear family.)

Pixar’s latest project also bears the unmistakable stamp of individuality. The writer-director is Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo), and he’s fashioned an entirely worthy hero-cum-artistic-foil in WALL·E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), a lonesome robot with binoculars for eyes and the soul of a romantic. To see him is to love him.

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I’ve got a review of Wall*E in the pipeline, but for now, here’s the remainder of my all-time top twenty, which seems to reveal a liking for gloomy thrillers. Strange, I don’t feel gloomy…

Knife in the Water—A master of sophisticated unease, Roman Polanski specializes in macabre, moody thrillers (often with an occult theme) of a peculiarly personal strain. A thorough understanding of his idiosyncratic filmography begins with this stripped-down drama. Set almost exclusively aboard a tiny yacht and featuring a cast of three characters (a husband, his wife, and a hitchhiker they pick up), it’s a meticulous study in triangular tension, and perhaps Polanski’s finest, subtlest work.

Le Boucher—Claude Chabrol has often been called the French Hitchcock, but that title doesn’t really do justice to this neglected member of France’s New Wave. Chabrol’s thrillers are more relationship-oriented, and less emphatic in their suspense devices. This might be his most perfectly realized film, a deceptively serene chiller about a schoolteacher and the lonely town butcher, who may be a murderer. It builds to a climax that invites and repays close scrutiny.

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Making my rounds…

Iron Man, another superhero franchise kick-off from the Marvel stable, has the privilege of being the first in line at the summer box office. It sets the bar high. Helmed by Jon Favreau and starring a buffed-up Robert Downey, Jr., the film is strong where most other blockbusterly films are weak: in its pacing, wit, and character development. The storyline and moral questioning are comic-book simple, yet the film craftily manages to critique America’s penchant for slaughter without succumbing to liberal piety. Good fun.

David Mamet’s Redbelt functions as a rebuke to the traditional Hollywood martial arts picture, taking the well-trod theme of the moral hero tested by corrupt influences and finding fresh meaning in it. The film is full of the pleasures of Mamet—his rhythmic, precise dialogue, honed to near-perfection and spoken confidently by a well-appointed cast; his patient, temperate, invisibly intelligent direction which rarely (if ever) calls attention to itself; his ability to take clichés and make them seem as new.

Two anticlimactic reviews, to be filed under “T” for tardy.

What was I saying about the Narnia movies? Oh yes. By now audiences have had ample time to accept that Walden’s contributions to the fantasy genre will be homogenized, sanitized, and above all commercialized versions of C.S. Lewis’s fragile children’s books. But once that important step is taken, one can begin to enjoy them for what they are: buttered popcorn. Fractionally less involving than its predecessor, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is still a high-class family film, though languidly paced and lacking a villain on the order of Tilda Swinton’s white witch Jadis (the very mention of which sends an appreciative quiver up the spine).

Among its virtues is a graspable depiction of a faithless Narnia in which Aslan is nowhere to be seen, a situation that lends itself to explorations of faith—specifically Christian faith—in a seemingly wicked world. The film lacks the medieval literacy of Lewis’s prose, but director Andrew Adamson occasionally stages a scene that outdoes its source in excitement. The emergence of a wolfish assassin (“I am hunger, I am thirst.”) is shudderingly effective, and the scene leading up to Aslan’s first appearance (in which the very trees fall into line in allegiance) is dreamily atmospheric.

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