Moon

Moon is a thinking person’s sci-fi movie (read: not Transformers) focused on an isolated employee harvesting new age fuel components on the far side of the moon. For all that it echoes classics such as Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Moon does ultimately emerge a unique little gem paying generous homage to a series of predecessors (and occasionally quoting their language to mislead its audience). If you think you know where the film is going when you sit down to watch, you are wrong. Or psychic. It has an unknowable trajectory that while not as major or as epic as the classics above, is fairly satisfying and worthwhile.

Sam Rockwell gives a tour de force performance that requires him to flex his character chops and master more than a few special effects complexities that might otherwise have led to a stiff or unconvincing performance. Most gripping about his work is the common reality he captures in a setting so defined by the surreal and unimaginable. He makes spaceships on the moon seem perfectly normal, the usual 9 to 5 daily grind. There’s no question that the whole film hangs on his shoulders, for more than one reason.

Director Duncan Jones adapts a wonderfully minimalist style here that keeps the characters and story at the forefront, a rare achievement in modern sci-fi. Baring the occasional quirk, plot hole, or misstep the film is a real treat that is as fresh as it is familiar, particularly to an audience who recalls an earlier, less CGI-dominated era in American science fiction.

Grade: B+

Up

The latest from Disney’s unstoppable Pixar is by far one of its most exciting adventures. Not quite the meditative masterpiece that Wall-E was, the film is more story-driven and plumped with action. A few very welcome juvenile touches (talking dogs!) make it feel like kid fare but there are so many adult ripples that one wonders how much of this children would understand or appreciate. In classic Disney fashion, we open with a tragic death. And it is perhaps the truest and least candy-coated cartoon fatality. Neither animal, nor spectacle, it is a quiet and sophisticatedly rendered human death from natural causes.

We then speed ahead to the present where Carl Frederickson, still grieving the loss of his darling wife Ellie, has blossomed into a first class lovable curmudgeon. A former balloon salesman specializing in making things take flight, Frederickson chooses to adorn his rooftop with a bundle of helium floaters and take off into the sky to avoid a bleak nursing home fate. Having promised his wife in childhood to take her to South America, he decides this new adventure is the perfect opportunity to plant the house on the spot they had discussed for their whole lives (one involving the legend of an old-time adventurer who recurs in truly strange ways). Along the way, he accidentally picks up a boy scout named Russell, who nobly attempts to earn his “helping the elderly” badge. Together they somehow end up on a totally enjoyable yet utterly incomprehensible South American adventure involving a renegade explorer, an endangered bird, and an army of dog soldiers. All the while having the floating house tied to their backs. Quite a feat.

It’s no mystery why Pixar has been so successfully at tapping both audience and Oscar voters. There films are potent blends of fun and adventure mixed up with sharp style and narrative nuance. Up is a fine addition to their mounting catalogue of future classics.

Grade: A

The Girlfriend Experience

Most people consider Steven Soderberh a man with two modes: commercial and artistic. I’d opt for a third category (or at the very least a subsection of the latter). He has his collection of blockbuster hits (think Ocean’s Eleven) and his epically polarizing artistic experiments (think Che, all 5 hours of it) but in addition to his grand scale art indulgences he has a mounting collection of equally unique lo-fi art gems (think Bubble) shot on digital video with hardly any working budget and absolutely no recognizable stars. The Girlfriend Experience falls into this third category. Not just an artistic work but one of Soderbergh’s extreme art works which seem opposed to the pleasure principle of cinema and exist only to toy with an audience on an intellectual scale. While Bubble was a triumph of fly-on-the-wall aesthetics and environment submersion (with a compelling murder mystery twist), The Girlfriend Experience is a frigid, off-putting and utterly cold to the touch cinema experience offering minimal narrative and even thinner character portraits.

The film’s heroine, Chelsea (Sasha Grey), is an upscale escort living and working in New York during the period leading up to the 2008 election. We also meet her boyfriend who works as a personal trainer for the city’s elite. Both workers are luxuries for the hard-working and entitled, a social class significantly preoccupied with economic downturn. If you’ve ever wanted to be given a front row seat to prattling stockbrokers in a private jet bitching about their money losses…you’re in for a treat!

Like all things Soderbergh films, The Girlfriend Experience is beautiful to look at. And despite some controversy over her adult film past, Sasha Grey is a perfectly able lead. The problem is her character is such a blank slate, and each encounter she has with a client is such a monotonous and unspectacular business transaction, that the experience of watching her feels futile. This is a remarkably antiseptic and unsexy film not really about sex as the press materials suggest but about American industry in an era of decline. That sex amounts to little more than common industry is its basic, highly unoriginal conceit. Any deeper insight is a mystery to me. Perhaps it is short-sightedness or perhaps Soderbergh really has crafted a piece so slight it can run a sparse 80 minutes and hardly make a dent in one’s psyche.

Grade: C

The Brothers Bloom

In his well-received debut, Brick, Rian Johnson raised homage to an art with a completely derivative yet wildly original high school-set noir flick. The Brothers Bloom furthers Johnson’s love of genre-play and this time he’s replaced Chandler-like moody mystery with fun con man intrigue and exploits (not to mention a little twist of Homer and Dostoyevsky for the sheer big-headed fun of it). The Brothers Bloom opens like a fairytale, with a narrator detailing (in rhyme no less) the sad tale of brothers Stephen and Bloom as they grew up bouncing from foster home to foster home, turning into small-time grifters on their way to adulthood.

By the time we meet up with them again 25 years later, Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) has burgeoned into a true con man mastermind. He doesn’t just execute cons for the cash reward but for the challenge of scripting a narrative so believable as to fool all involved and, as is his motto, give everyone what they want. Bloom (Adrien Brody) is slightly less thrilled with his circumstance. He begins to feel the weight of being a manipulator and craves “an unwritten life,” something real. Stephen pitches Bloom one last con to end all cons. They’ll win the affections of eccentric recluse heiress Penelope Stamp (Rachel Weisz), swindle her out of a cool million, and in the process give the wallflower a chance to shine in the adventurous role of her lifetime. Of course, Penelope is a real gem, a collector of talents (everything from juggling to break dancing) who has barely traveled beyond the walls of her Xanadu-type mansion. Her vast knowledge and quick wit make her the brothers’ toughest mark yet, and her will to improvise sets their simple con on its head and into several surprising subsequent storytelling phases.

Entering into The Brothers Bloom is a pure joy but it’s also something like falling into a bottomless pit. The film is about plans gone awry and thus at the end of each executed plan, a second, recovery operation must be forged. The result is a trail of false-endings that will either cause utmost jubilation or deep and sincere discontentment. It’s an Odyssey, no less, through the perils of the con world and then back to Penelope. The ins and outs are slight and vague, sometimes bordering on incomprehensible. But the journey is so fun that one need not question the importance of each tangent. To do so would utterly collapse this farce and ruin the fun. Johnson is a sculptor of stylish tales, not a master of linear narrative logic. Half his skill is in the roundabout, joyously goofy and surprisingly sophisticated way he brings you in circles to your sheer delight.

Case and point: Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi). A near silent Japanese explosions expert who appeared mysteriously one day to the brothers’ satisfaction and may yet disappear as mysteriously as she arrived. Does there need be such an enigma on the team? No. Does it distract from a core plot? Yes. Is it also the comic highlight of the film? Of course. Kikuchi whose tragic, silent performance in Babel stole the show proves here that she can also use those expressive eyes to steal the laughs too. She does silent disdain, inquisitive probing, and unspoken superiority like a pro. Watching her reaction to almost anything that happens is well worth your time. Not only is her every inflection an attractive ripple about each frame but her presence also helps solidify the movie as an absurd and original concoction.

Johnson is at play here in a scheming, chaotic confection of fairytales, 70s heist pictures, and Russian lit. Despite ups and downs and a dumb character named Diamond Dog, the trip is well-worth taking. As with any inordinately quirky comedy (think Wes Anderson or the Coen Bros.) not every strange obsession is a home run (that thunder makes Penelope horny is a weird and obvious clunker). Still, a bad time at a film as stacked and intricately weird as this would shock me.

Grade: B+

Drag Me to Hell

Drag Me to Hell - director Sam Raimi's highly anticipated return to horror - explodes onto the screen in very fine form. In a nod to older works (including his own Evil Dead franchise), Raimi opens with a vintage Universal logo as a stylistic and tonal indicator. This is a an adrenaline fueled roller coaster ride of a horror piece that is committed to hard scares and good fun and has absolutely nothing (NOTHING) to do with tourists who get lost in Europe and end up having viking milkmaids skin them alive to drink their blood. It is truly of a different, pre-Saw and even pre-Scream era in which sadistic torture and ultra-ironic audience nods are altogether out of the equation. Point of order: Sam Raimi and brother Ivan penned the script in 1993 and then shelved it for all these years. Thankfully, the piece was not lost completely. Drag Me to Hell is some of the most masterful pulp of this or any decade and bears no shame for its commitment to a passe style. In fact, if all is right in the world, Drag Me to Hell will make what is old new again. I'd gladly see a dozen more Raimi-like low-camp high-chill romps than any number of Hostel-like abuse tomes.

The film's story is simple. Wonderfully simple. So simple that you bask in its simplicity and find yourself wondering why other films feel so compelled to muddy their collective narrative waters. Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a good girl. A Southern belle even. One who lived on a humble farm working her humble fields and living a humble life until the universe threw her a curveball and she escaped to the city where she now works as a bank loans officer, ever self-conscious of her less than urban chic past (we meet her practicing her vowel sounds in a mirror and eliminating ever last trace of that drawl). She is dating a very affluent and intellectual professor (Mr. Mac himself, Justin Long) who is her polar opposite and whose judgmental parents she has yet to win over, as she offers him no social mobility. By the wild whimsy of fate, Christine ends up responsible for the claim of the very old and very decrepit Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) who wants a third extension on an already well overdue loan. In order to appease her vindictive boss, who holds the possibility of a promotion over her head, Christine turns the woman down as a means of showing that she is no pushover. Unfortunately, Mrs. Ganush is really a crazy gypsy hag and she places a deadly curse on Christine, one that leaves her to be plagued by a demon for 3 days and subsequently dragged into the depths of hell for eternity. Simple, really.

Raimi owes much of the film's success to cinematographer Peter Deming as well as the expert sound and production design crews. I've always believed horror, more than any genre, depends on the atmosphere setting elements of sound and lighting to achieve maximum effect. Yet the genre's status as a low cinema form tends to saddle it with the lowest of the low in talent and cheap hacks. It takes a combination of cinematography, set design, and sound design to make a vacant parking lot authentically creepy as opposed to just another horror movie cliche. Ditto for the sound of a creaking gate, or the shriek of an off-screen cat. What would be cheese in most features, plays here to surprisingly strong results. It its one of the most cleverly produced horror features I have ever seen, most notably the bustling, clanking, and genuinely unnerving sound mix which does the most work to keep the audience on its toes.

That's not to say that Raimi doesn't have his hand in the proceedings. He puts his stamp all over the film. Not for the humorless or the queasy, Drag Me to Hell specializes in gross out stunts and darkly funny scares. Raimi's preoccupation with bodily fluids touches almost every scene, occasionally too much so. So too does his very uncompromised sense of the demonic. In a horror landscape marked mostly by teen slashers and unfriendly ghosts, Raimi stokes the fire of truly dark and satanic subjects not touched by a Hollywood horror film in years.

His visual style depends partly on participating in cliche and elsewhere inverting the expected. In one his most masterful sequences, Raimi places Christine in a dark house. First comes the initial suspense of her probing its shadowy halls. Then a creaking sound. A slow tracking shot as Christine investigates. The typical false alarm front gate blowing in the wind. It takes only a second following this release of tension for Raimi to break the stillness with the rush of actual demon-shaped shadow creatures and the rattle of pots and pans as they get torn from their shelves by a vicious intruder. Like an emergency alarm of fire bell, the house is now the sight of catastrophe and adrenaline flows. This is only the beginning of the sequence. More developed horror is to follow.

Excusing the slightly juvenile sense of gross-out glee and a twist-ending that can be seen from a mile away, Drag Me to Hell is an absolutely perfect Summer treat. It's scary, complete fun, and genuinely unpredictable (the rarest of words to be associated with commercial Summer cinema). It takes no time at all to getting going and once it starts it never stops. Truly the best American horror film since The Sixth Sense.

Grade: A

R.I.P. David Carradine