Medicine for Melancholy, which you’ve had to endure me raving about since virtually the beginning of this blog, comes out on DVD today. Here’s another look at my review…

Visually more sophisticated than the bulk of features to yet come out of the new wave of DIY independent American cinema, narratively smoother and yet still boundless in mold-breaking ambition, triple-Independent Spirit Award nominee Medicine for Melancholy offers a self-contained rebuttal to claims that precious, naturalistic dramas about the existential dilemmas of hipster singles are exclusively a white man’s game. But the most exciting thing about the film is that director Barry Jenkins doesn’t seem interested in rebutting anything, or in playing any sort of game but his own. His mission: to talk about what it feels like to be young, black and artsy in a city in which people who fit that description make up a minuscule fraction of the population.

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Antichrist stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a married couple (they’re never named) who lose their only child in a freak accident, which they were present for but failed to stop; the operatic sex they were having at the time was something of a distraction. After she spends some time in a psychiatric ward dealing with her grief, Dafoe, a therapist, convinces Gainsbourg they should retreat to their house deep in secluded woods (they call it “Eden”) so that he can teach her how to face her fears. Totally coincidentally, this house is where the wife used to go to work on an academic thesis on Gynocide — which the film defines as archaic and semi-mythic violence against women, witch hunting and like practices through which, as Gainsbourg’s character puts it, “nature causes people to do evil things to women” — before her husband dismissed her subject and thereby discouraged her ambition. Overcome with the guilty feeling that her own sexuality caused her son to die, the woman essentially internalizes the texts she’s studied and becomes an embodiment of the “evil,” manifested mainly through total sexual hysteria, that she once dedicated her life to critiquing. And hilarity sort of ensues!

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Hebba (Mona Zaki) is sort of a sex pot Tim Russert. With bright red lips and tight Eurotrash-girl-reporter get-ups, she intimidates the powerful guests of her politically controversial late-night talk show by all but crawling across the desk to interrogate them. Newly married (for the second time, as is repeatedly pointed out, lest we forget that this is the apparently 30-something’s Last Chance At Love) to an ambitious flunky at a State-run newspaper, Hebba submits to her husband’s aggressive request that she tone down her implicit criticism of contemporary Egyptian government by devoting her show to “stuff you can’t blame the government for” –– at least until he secures a key promotion. After an encounter with a shopgirl who cuts a glamorous Western-esque swath by day only to don a hijab to walk through streets littered with burning trash at night, Hebba figures she can give her husband the superficial human interest stories he wants and still slip in a bit of hard truth. The sob stories of Egypt’s everyday women turn out to be so politically incendiary that their fallout hits Hebba where she lives. Literally.

The existence of Yousry Nasrallah’s Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story within the contemporary Egyptian film industry mirrors the uneasiness of storytelling in a less-than-open state that’s at its story’s core. Both visually and politically provocative, the film has managed to triumph over controversy and censorship to become a huge critical and commercial hit in its home country. A triptych-within-a-story revealing women as the invisible victims of the Muslim world’s pains of growing into modernity, the epic drama sometimes wears its muckraking intentions a little too plainly on its sleeve, but its fusion of campy/soapy pleasures into serious social satire is unforgettable.

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Since first premiering at Berlinale in February, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s The Shock Doctrine has itself absorbed a couple of major shocks. In the intervening months, the film has been recut (or, as Whitecross put it when introducing Shock in Abu Dhabi this week, “finished”) for fine tuning and to add material about the global financial crisis. Shortly before this altered version of the film premiered on UK television in September, the author of the book that inspired the film, Naomi Klein, made headlines by disassociating herself from the project. Because there was not “complete agreement between the directors and myself about the content, tone and structure of the film,” she told The Independent, she chose not to narrate the film or accept credit as its writer. The paper spun this as a falling out between the writer and the filmmakers; Klein then published a statement on her website softening the impression of conflict, saying that the she and Winterbottom “came up with a compromise: that someone other than me would narrate and that it would be clear in all materials that this was not my film but rather Michael and Mat’s adaptation of my book.” Whatever the production circumstances might have been, the adaptation lacks Klein’s gift for untangling relatively complicated webs of social, political and economic history with graceful persuasion.

Klein’s theory begin with the economic philosophy of University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman, which postulated that governments could take advantage of disasters to increase their power and decrease the freedoms of the governed, because “only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.” The film meticulously (if too briskly) outlines how notions of Friedman and his disciples (called the Chicago School) were exported — with full knowledge and help of the US government, and the implicit support of the Nobel foundation –– to places like Chile, Russia and, um, England, resulting in disastrous dissolutions of governments, near-total hijacking of democratic freedoms, and economies fueled by fear. Moving quickly from one Chicago School application to the next, Shock really only slows down for long sequences of incredible archival footage of the urban warfare in which this socio-economic “shock therapy” inevitably results.

After the MEIFF screening on Sunday, Whitecross elaborated on the split between the directors and the author. Acknowledging that Klein had wanted to produce a work of investigative journalism, covering new ground and shooting loads of fresh material while Whitecross and Winterbottom were more interested in “translating” her analysis of recent world history by plumbing media archives, he insisted that Klein was “involved all the way to the end,” up to and including the portion of the film about the financial crisis produced after Shock’s premiere at Berlinale. The film doesn’t feel disingenuous to Klein’s ideas, but it does seem like it could make better use of her. She appears on screen in two modes: b-roll shows her scribbling notes “on the ground” at disaster zones from Baghdad to New Orleans, while documentation of Klein’s various panel appearances and lectures serve as the most concrete, precise delivery systems for her actual talking points. The entire argument really only comes into crystal clear focus fairly late in the film, via a lecture clip in which Klein appeals to the audience’s “feelings” about 9/11 and the ensuing expansion of government — something we can all understand, that swiftly and simply allies the viewer on an emotional level to the Chileans and Russians previously screwed over by the work of the Chicago School. This single moment renders most of Kieran O’Brien’s barking narration superfluous.

Throwing out the show-don’t-tell rule, Whitecross and Winterbottom show, tell, show again and then yell. While images of Thatcher supporting her “friend” Pinochet as he’s arrested for murder in Britain go miles further in suggesting her guilt than the long section of the film equating her crimes (union breaking, the sale of public-owned industries) with his (mass murder, torture, kidnapping, censorship…) The Shock Doctrine suffers from the same problem that weighed down Whitecross and Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo (which remains the more elegant, focused, fascinating film): their material is so powerful that the filmmakers could essentially just thread it together and their polemical argument would state itself, but they weaken their case by beating us over the head with “evidence” that their chosen villains — particularly Friedman, Thatcher and every American Republican politician of the past 40 years, but there is also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bashing of the Clinton administration for supporting Yeltsin — are not just politically questionable, but unquestionably evil. If much of the footage here could beautifully speak for itself, a few frames of Donald Rumsfeld apparently smirking in front of the still-burning 9/11 Pentagon crash site just pushes the argument into the realm of cartoon.

As a work of anti-fascist propaganda, The Shock Doctrine might have felt refreshing several years ago, when audiences starved for angry media were forced to make do with Michael Moore. But at this point, how many more airless, humorless indictments of British and American political wrongdoings do we need to see from members of the villains’ own voting republics? The question that The Shock Doctrine and all similar films seem to revolve around is, “How could this happen in our democracy?” The weak answer usually offered is “Because the idiots who don’t watch films like this voted for the wrong people.” The Shock Doctrine, almost accidentally, reveals this as the false solution that it is. There’s a clip towards the end of the film of Obama’s election night acceptance speech, which he began by looking directly into the camera and saying, “Hello, Chicago.” By showing this as Barack Obama’s first public words as the President elect, the implication is that this is the guy who will finally break from the pattern set up by the Chicago School, this is the guy who finally look at real bad guys dead in the face and destroy their dominance. If only he had shown such strength in real life!

Clowns to the left, jokers to the right. Flattening popularly elected leaders into smarmy supervillians while essentially picking a hero at random, The Shock Doctrine offers evidence that liberal polemics have devolved into a cycle of caricature that’s indistinguishable in form from the media produced by the opposite side.

When I first saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, I walked out of the theater and felt like something was … off. I rushed to my computer and wrote a dismissive review. “Quentin Tarantino,” I wrote, “has never seemed to strain so hard to just make A Quentin Tarantino Film.” I complained about the film’s pacing, the quality of its dialogue, the excessive exposition. “Basterds plays almost like an assembly edit, defiantly presented as-is,” I concluded.

And then I saw the film again, this week, in New York, in a version different from the one I saw at Cannes. Some scenes are said to be shorter, although I couldn’t tell you specifically which ones; one scene excised before the French premiere has been reinstated. After that screening, I went back and read what I wrote about the film from France, and cringed. The review of Inglourious Basterds I wrote in May simply does not apply to the film I saw with the same title this week.

This happens sometimes. We don’t talk about it much, but it happens. Sometimes movies change — and Tarantino and The Weinstein Company have made no secret of the fact that Basterds has changed sine its Cannes screenings. But critics change, too.
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Kevin Lee’s vigorous defense of Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax in reaction to its reception at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival included a thematic interpretation of the film’s title. He wrote that Beeswax, a picture which has nothing directly to do with either bees or wax, was titled as such as “a tip to the film’s depiction of life as a hive, where people passive-aggressively fall on each other for support in the face of life’s overwhelming choices, and in doing so both limit and enable choices to be made.” It’s right to shine a light on Beeswax as a film about a community’s interconnectedness — and probable that the nuances of that specific community, Austin, might feel like flat, mundane Americana to an eye hoping for a retread of the classically cool “disaffected rocker in black and white” vibe of Mutual Appreciation. But the title also seems like something of a multi-layered reference to the film’s ambitious leap ahead of Bujalski’s previous filmography. Having built a following based on two finely calibrated odes to linguistic imprecision, Bujalski’s third film moves away from messy, non-committal “mumbling”, in order to cleverly examine the double-speak of slang, simile and idiom that flows through American conversation without interrogation. As a moniker for this crayon-colorful (and beautifully shot by regular DP Matthias Grunsky) comedy steeped in colloquial American English, the title Beeswax feels less like a metaphor for anything bees do in public, than a veiled reference to private lives - as in, “mind your own beeswax.”

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I spent the weekend at the Traverse City Film Festival, the fifth annual event presided over by Michael Moore in the waterfront town where the filmmaker lives and works in Northern Michigan. Though he and his staff were editing Capitalism: A Love Story across the street from the festival’s main venue around the clock all week, Moore himself introduced nearly every event I attended, including one where he unveiled both a trailer for the almost finished latest film and the entirety of the rarely seen film that gave Moore his first experience in front of a film camera (more on that later). At most of these events, he’d take the stage and talk at length to an entirely adoring crowd, casually making reference to his new film, his reputation and past career, and his future plans. A scoop from the later category: Moore said he’s planning to star in a one-man show on Broadway, presumably along the lines of his 2002 shows at the Roundabout Theater in London, “sometime in the next 24 months.”  He promised to give the show a tryout first at the film festival  — “because if you kill ‘em in Traverse City, you’ll kill ‘em anywhere.”

Outside of Moore’s shadow, Traverse City’s vibe as a festival is along the lines of Telluride and True/False — small town, secret screenings, celebrity/legendary filmmaker guests who blend in with the locals and lesser known attendees while giving each installment of the invent a specific character — but with a dedicated emphasis on comedy. In addition to the panel which I already reported on, in the three days I was in town TCFF hosted an afternoon course on the art of comedy, a preview of the long-anticipated upcoming season of Curb Your Enthusiasm hosted by festival board member Jeff Garlin, and Moore and the festival co-founders handed special prizes to the Funniest Fiction Film and Best Comedy Documentary (to In The Loop and Winnebago Man, respectively), and gave the “Stanley Kubrick Award for Bold and Innovative Filmmaking” to Bob Byington, who was the first director to have two films in the festival — both of them no-frills comedies. I’m not complaining, but one does wonder how Moore’s just-announced comedy festival will actually differ from the film festival in practice.

The full list of TCFF 2009 winners is after the jump.

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Whether or not you “like” their work, if you’ve spent any significant time this decade at film festivals (or reading the blogs that cover them), you’d be hard pressed to deny the impact that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have had on recent art cinema. With traces spottable in films as diverse as Berlinale winner About Elly, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler and Jacques Audiard’s over-praised A Prophet, the Dardenne style (handheld camera kept close, hyper-naturalistic performances, real locations, a general hard-on for brutality wrapped in the mundane) has become the dominant style of serious movies about ordinary people. This is what happens when you win two Palme D’ors in less than ten years, I guess — other filmmakers presume that you’ve cracked the code. The dirty secret, of course, is that the audience for an actual Dardenne brothers film consists almost entirely of other filmmakers and critics, and neither group has done a sufficient job of persuading that this shouldn’t be the case. This decade’s key art film phenomenon is — ironically, considering the Dardennes’ preferred subject matter — virtually completely inaccessible to any sort of audience outside of the elite circle that made it a phenomenon in the first place. If you are reading this, you are probably part of that elite. If you are not reading this, you probably hear the phrase “Belgian film about poor people” and run as fast as you can in the other direction, and frankly, I don’t blame you.

That said, the Dardennes’ follow up to the Cannes-winning L’enfant is of interest for two reasons: with a pulp kick giving way to psychological intrigue before the globo-political thesis kicks in, it’s more entertaining on a base level than “a Belgian film about poor people” has any right to be, and it reveals why the Brothers are not only worthy of emulation, but also why they do what they do so much better than their pretenders.

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Judd Apatow’s Funny People feels like an attempt to graft the writer/director/producer’s patented brand of semi-raunchy character comedy of latent male adolescence on to the template of a certain kind of studio film rarely made today — think 1980s Oscar bait, like Terms of Endearment, The Accidental Tourist or even Beaches: the gently melancholic dramedy in which someone in early middle age is suddenly forced to reconcile their lives. This unlikely hybrid serves as the vehicle for a meta-epic work of autobiography that pays tribute to one of the writer/director’s oldest friends/collaborators, diverges into a love letter to his wife, contrives to get the wife and the friend in bed together, and then drags in Eric Bana to get them out. All the while, Seth Rogen is milling about, mostly as a surrogate for the filmmaker, until he suddenly switches over and starts speaking for the audience — during the film’s draggiest stretch, he is very vocal about not wanting to be there.

If this sounds bizarre, it is. What’s more bizarre is that this mix of personal project-as-product actually succeeds — at least intermittently. Though not formally bifurcated, Funny People practically plays out in two sections (another 80s flashback: it feels like the kind of film that used to come packaged on two VHS tapes). It peaks emotionally at about three-quarters of the way into the first section, makes good on track laid in that scene about a third of the way into the second section, and then rapidly devolves from there into a domestic sitcom that can only resolve itself in a “girls may come and go, but bromance is forever” fade out. The film is so self-referential, so quick to pounce on and twist what the audience thinks it knows about Apatow and his players (from multiple references to Seth Rogen having recently lost a lot of weight to Adam Sandler repeatedly begging Rogen to show him his dick) that to reaffirm the bond between two men this way almost seems like an act of defiance. “Yes,” Apatow seems to be saying. “This is a movie about me, and yes, my primary concern as an artist is platonic male love. So … suck it.”

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Can the San Diego Comic-Con really make or break a movie? That’s a yearly question asked in the days leading up to the annual geekfest, and few experts ever provide a definite answer. Most people point to weak Con receptions of footage from ultimately failed films like The Spirit and Catwoman as proof of the event’s influence. Meanwhile, there’s the corresponding recognition that positive buzz at the Con for certain niche titles like Twilight and 300 led those films to boffo box office.

But despite the few times Con attendees have been on the same wavelength with the rest of the moviegoing public, it’s important to remember the many movies that had geeks excited in San Diego but which couldn’t garner much interest from mainstream audiences in theatrical release. After the jump, we take a look at ten such movies that buzzed well at Comic-Con only to fizzle at the box office.
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When it was just the Adoption Community protesting the marketing of Orphan, a hackneyed horror flick about yet another evil adoptee, it was merely another minor controversy incited by a select interest group. But now members of the U.S. House and Senate have gotten involved with a letter campaign to Warner Bros. condemning the studio’s seemingly anti-adoption advertisements for and message in the film.

Is this really necessary after so many years and so many stories containing fucked-up orphans? Sure, Hollywood has given us too few Annie types in cinema over the past few decades, but certainly ‘80s television made up for this history with the likes of Diff’rent Strokes, Webster, Small Wonder, My Two Dads, Punky Brewster, et al. And adoptions were on the rise for most of that time, only dropping slightly in recent years, possibly due to the dwindling economy.

That isn’t to say we agree with cinema’s consistent misrepresentation of orphans or adoptees, so to expose the unfair reputation of parentless kids, we take a look at ten types of screwed-up orphans, which potentially keep more people from adopting them. Check out our list of characters and films after the jump:
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Fox Searchlight’s latest pop-indie festival pickup, (500) Days of Summer, is promotionally packaged, as is typical for the distributor, with a hip soundtrack featuring multiple songs from The Smiths and Regina Spektor, as well as tunes from Feist, The Doves and the obligatory Simon and Garfunkel. Though heavily dependent on music, the movie is not a musical, yet like other Searchlight releases it has that one moment where the line between non-musical and musical is just barely crossed.

In the past we’ve seen this moment restricted to diegetic circumstances, whether a dance performance or an in-scene duet of a Moldy Peaches song. But this year Searchlight’s titles have been venturing even further, first with the non-diegetic, Bollywood-influenced song and dance in Slumdog Millionaire and now with an equally fantastical sequence in (500) Days, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt struts about to Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams,” joined by a surplus of extras and an animated bluebird.

Musical numbers in non-musical movies can certainly work, as is evident in Citizen Kane and many David Lynch and Adam Sandler films, but there’s something very forced and cliché about the sequence in (500) Days. Never mind that it seems lifted out of Enchanted, a movie we very much despise, and never mind that we prefer our Zooey Deschanel movies to feature musical interludes performed by the singer-actress herself rather than lip-synced by her costars (director Marc Webb acknowledges the mistake of not including her in the scene); this number is just completely over-the-top and unoriginal.

In response to the scene, we’ve selected five of the worst musical numbers from non-musical films to show what kind of horrible company (500) Days of Summer is in.
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I’ve been accused in the past of having knee-jerk negative reactions to crowd-pleasers, and those accusations have not always been without a kernel of truth: it’s true that I tend to be skeptical of movies which instantly entertain but never ask us to ask what they’re really up to, and of that, I’m not ashamed. But this is not a problem with the tough-to-resist Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s whip-smart, uproariously funny comedy, in which a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare serves as the in point to talk about, amongst other things, the inevitable loss of self in long term relationships and the ongoing conquest to reconcile who we really are with who we’d like to think we could be.

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Virtually since the production of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was announced, various parties have expressed concern that the video fetishism of Collateral and Miami Vice would make a less than appropriate presentation format for a glammy gangster piece set in the 1930s. If *only* Public Enemies looked more like Miami Vice — if only Mann had brought back cinematographer Dion Beebe for a third consecutive collaboration/experiment in pushing the limits of what high quality digital video can do. Lensed by The Insider cinematographer Dante Spinotti, Public Enemies is a drab looking film, its shaky-cam aesthetic coming off as less considered — and far less explicable — than that of any number of indie dramas employing similar run-and-gun techniques on a millionth of this film’s budget. Add in a wildly uneven performance style, an unnecessarily attenuated running time and a sound mix that’s problematically muddy even after evidently excessive after-the-fact dubbing, and the result is a severely miscalculated marriage of style to subject. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Public Enemies is essentially a really expensive mumblecore film with ADR and guns — and the M-word comparison is not merited solely by its conspicuous form. It’s also a film in which the world of work and general era-appropriate social consciousness is conquered by an emphasis on love. And that, in the end, may be the only thing Public Enemies does right.

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