Ti West’s The House of the Devil finds its sweet spot in the paranoid shadow of misdirection, so it’s best not to reveal much of the plot beyond what you’ll know from watching the trailer: it’s the 80s, and a sleepy college town is obsessed with an impeding eclipse, and a young, pretty co-ed in desperate need of some quick cash takes a mysterious babysitting job in a big, secluded manse, for a creepy couple who don’t actually have a kid. What actually happens is less important than what West teases could happen. Duality is the order of the day: there are two houses that could potentially be devilish, two girls — serious brunette Sam (Jocelin Donahue) and the more playful blonde Megan (Greta Gerwig) –– at the mercy of two men (Tom Noonan and AJ Bowen), each with two evident personalities. The final punchline even sets up a new twosome whose story could easily fuel a second film.

It would be easy to peg Devil as a superficial exercise in vintage pastiche –– the film non-ironically borrows the look and feel of the horror produced in the era in which it’s set — but West’s more impressive nod at classic horror is his mastery of misdirection. I was recently asked to make a list of my favorite horror films of all time, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to readers of this blog that all five films I chose were made before 1980, and three of them before 1950. If horror films weren’t unequivocably better before gore and graphic violence and were standard practices available to makers of mainstream scary films, a lot of the Code-restricted frighteners that have survived to become classics (cult or otherwise) are richer in subtext, more evocative of base human fears, and more effectively politically and/or philosophically provocative. In other words, in the classic horror and sci-fi films that I love, there tends to be more than one thing going on: there’s what we see, there’s what we don’t see but imagine or infer is also happening, and there’s what, as a product of the clash between the actual visible evidence and what our psyches produce as an extension or embroidery on what we see, there’s what we leave believing it all really means.

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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.

Lone Scherfig’s An Education is an extremely classy film –– classy as in modish, classy as in overtly concerned with class, and both ultimately at the expense of digging as deep as it could into the gut ugliness of first heartbreak. It’s about Jenny (Carey Mulligan), an Oxford-bound beauty in 1960s suburban London, the pet of an old maid-ish English teacher (Olivia Williams) and a worthy sparring opponent for her protective dad (a sharply funny Albert Molina), who takes a vacation from smart-girl responsibility in order to lose herself in the charms of the much older David (Peter Sarsgaard). David picks her up one rainy day and proceeds to insinuate himself into the schoolgirl’s boring, middle-class life, charming her unsophisticated parents into allowing him to take their daughter on weekend trips, tempting her with the lifestyle of the full-time consort, and eventually endangering her virtue, her standing at her uptight all-girls prep school, and her future.

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If you know nothing else about Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, which screened at the New York Festival on Thursday night just four months after the VHS cameras started to roll, you’ve probably heard it described, either positively or negatively, as “not really a movie.” As Korine himself put it before the screening, “I don’t know what it is. It was made to be more like something that was unearthed, or buried — something that was in a ditch, maybe. Like a VHS tape that was in a ditch. Or an attic. Or a drawer.”

It’s fitting that as Korine rambled, the words that came out of his mouth to define what he made became increasingly intimate in their connotation. In the span of a handful of sentence fragments, Trash Humpers went from something dumped like corpse, to something stored in a home, first hidden away in an attic, and then kept close at hand in a drawer. And this is exactly what Trash Humpers does in practice: in a series of vignettes, videotaped from an insider’s perspective, Korine introduces us to a world of inexplicable horror, and then slowly domesticates it. There may not be an traditional narrative intended, but if you make any effort at all to tie together the threads that Korine has laid out, it would be impossible to not see a beginning, middle and end to this 78 minute artbomb, a progression from dangerous grotesquerie to something more personal and almost — almost — sweet and nice.

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This review was originally published during the Toronto Film Festival. The Invention of Lying opens today.

The Invention of Lying begins with a voiceover by the film’s co-writer/director and star Ricky Gervais, referring in the third person to his image on screen as that of a “chubby little loser.” Various variations of this epithet will be thrown at the Gervais character, a failing screenwriter named Mark, throughout the film; even his love interest, the lovely but shallow Anna (Jennifer Garner), tells him they can’t be together because she doesn’t want to spawn “little fat kids with snub noses.” Anna is brutally honest because everyone in Lying is — the film is set in an alternate universe version of a small American city in which not only does no one know how to tell a lie, but they’re moved to speak each truth that pops into their heads. So on Anna and Mark’s first date, Anna tells him over and over again that she’s there not because she finds him attractive, but because she’s afraid of dying alone. Their waiter greets them not with a welcome, but with the admission that he’s “very embarrassed to be working here.”

Turns out a world without bullshit is a glum one indeed. Unable to spice up his movie about the Black Plague with creative embellishment, Mark loses his job, and unable to make excuses about the rent, he faces eviction. He goes to his bank to withdraw the paltry remains of his account, when a crazy idea hits him: in a world of absolute truth, there is no disbelief, so if he tells the teller his account balance is higher than it is, she’ll probably give him what he asks for. She does, and this sets off a chain reaction of lies for the greater good. The trouble starts when Mark soothes the fears of his dying mother by telling her that she’ll live better in death than she did in life. When these lies about the afterlife spread, Mark accidentally invents an international cult that looks a lot like Christianity –– to the point where the buildings erected for quiet contemplation of his “man in the sky” bear icons of Mark with his arms outstretched, not on a cross but presenting the pizza boxes on which he’s scrawled his prophecies. And still, Anna won’t date him. “Does being rich and famous change your genetic material?” she asks, without guile. He has to admit that it doesn’t.

Gervais and co-director/writer Matthew Robinson don’t exactly have infinite track to run with this premise, but they make the most of it, teasing both well-earned pathos and gut-busting laughs (the many indie A-list cameos help) out of the notion that humans naturally resist happiness. The mid-narrative segue into religious allegory is a bit rocky, perhaps because the rules of the game are so ill-defined; was there no religion whatsoever pre-Pizza Hut tablets, or no just no Christianity? Was there ever a human named Jesus Christ, and if his birth wasn’t an epochal, calendar-structuring event, then what bloody year is it? It’s more successful as a meditation on the paradox of success. Winning at one or two aspects of life may solve three or four problems, but it rarely if ever cures our biggest insecurities, and if the person you love prizes “genetic material” over all other attributes and yours doesn’t suit their fancy, there’s little your money can do to help you out with that.  By playing a chubby little man whose sense of himself as a loser can’t be changed by wealth and fame, Gervais rips open potentially autobiographical wounds, and also exorcises them. But it’s hard to write this off as mawkish public therapy — The Invention of Lying is just too damn fun.

I haven’t weighed in on the Roman Polanski clusterfuck, because I feel strongly that I shouldn’t add to the noise on any given scandale du jour unless I actually have something original, relevant and new to say. So far, I haven’t. But in trying to find an angle from which I could approach the story, I went back and read my review of Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which I saw and wrote about at Sundance in 2008. Much of what I could say now about the complexities of the case (and particularly the apparent divide between Polanski’s film industry supporters egotistically “demanding” his release and the — for lack of a better term — normal Americans who hadn’t given thought one to Polanski in decades but are now all over cable news accusing Woody Allen et all of condoning child rape), I already said in that review. So I’m publishing a slightly rewritten version of that review below the jump.

For the record: I had serious problems with the thread of Polanski apologia running through Zenovich’s film, and I personally support his extradition and some sort of jail time, but would hope that there would be a new hearing considering the tangible evidence of judicial misconduct before he’s re-sentenced. That said, I don’t operate under the delusion that my personal opinion actually matters, and the coverage of the case has made me wish that others felt the same.

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If you can imagine Mike Leigh directing an In the Loop-esque deadpan comedy embedded within a British version of The Sopranos, in which Tony is an embittered ex-hippie in passive-aggressive conflict with his pot-dulled but surprisingly ruthless adult son, then you might be able to wrap your head around Down Terrace, which won the juried Best Picture and Best Screenplay prizes in the Next Wave competition at Fantastic Fest on Monday.

At the start of the film, 30-something Karl (Robin Hill, who also co-wrote with director Ben Weatley) and his father Bill (Robert Hill) get out of jail and set to work finding out who ratted them out to the police so they can seek revenge. That logline implies that Down Terrace is a lot more action-packed than it is; in fact, most of the film features father and son sitting around the house, drinking and smoking, idly bickering, jamming on their guitars, and waiting for the two or three associates who they suspect may have had something to do with it to drop in for a drink. If these guys were ever truly on-the-ball criminals (Bill makes it hard to give them the benefit of the doubt when he starts name dropping Timothy Leary), lethargy has set in. Karl seems particularly resentful of his role in the family business. A typical lament: “I was thinking I should avenge his death but — is this bad? — I just don’t want to.”

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Frownland, Ronald Bronstein’s award winning, very nearly unbearably bleak ode to the white blind rage inspired by the mundane, will be released tomorrow on DVD by Factory 25. It’s rare that I get a chance to drop the phrases “award winning” and “unbearably bleak” in such quick succession in conversation about the same film, but Frownland is a especially rare bird. Essentially a series of vignettes on the topic of hostility, particularly its manifestation amongst young, broke New Yorkers too mired in dreary, crippling solipsism to enjoy the dubious protections of the trappings of counterculture, Frownland’s greatest achievement is an absence: flipping the protagonist/antagonist relationship on its head several times, it deliberately deprives the audience of a comfort zone.  I watched Frownland last week for the first time in awhile, and couldn’t help but think about how odd it is that this film impressed awards bodies, even the ostensibly broad-minded indie factions at SXSW, the Indie Spirits and the Gothams. It’s a testament to Bronstein’s total commitment to drawing out the toxicity of human interaction that smart viewers don’t recoil from a film that amounts to a spit-take to the face.
All that said, Frownland is actually fun when viewed with the right crowd — once one person picks up on its sick humor and audibly responds, the laughing gets contagious — so pick up the Factory 25 DVD and invite over some friends. If you go for the limited edition package, you’ll be rewarded for your hospitality by a wealth of extras: a copy of the hand-scrawled comic-book drawn by Mary Bronstein’s character Laura; “a booklet of an insufferably long-winded email exchange between [roommate characters] Keith and Charles”; and a vinyl record of Paul Grimstad’s Moroder-freaked soundtrack, including tracks with titles like “Au Hasard Frankenstein” and “Impossible Piece of Shit.” Details here.

Everyone Else is a film in which a German couple travel to Sardinia and watch, almost as if helplessly, as their seemingly solid relationship erodes upon contact with foreign forces. Director Maren Ade, in her second feature,  shows an uncanny ability to produce a queasy irony from the twinning of surface beauty and interpersonal ugliness. Ade bathes her pale, freckled actors in ultra-hot golden light, and the camera casually lays in wait, watching them burn. It’s an unforgettable look for a film that stands as a new standard bearer in the hardly marginal genre of films aiming to mirror a certain kind of post-romantic passive-aggression between young lovers who, despite all mounting evidence to the contrary, persist in the delusion that they’ve found a partner for life.

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As Don Argott’s documentary The Art of the Steal informs us more than once, Henri Matisse called the Barnes Foundation, Albert C. Barnes suburban Philadelphia shrine to his own hot-shit art collection, “the only sane place to look at art in America.” A proudly one-sided vilification of the collaboration of state and corporate forces in an effort to move Barnes’ collection five miles from a private institution in Lower Merion to a public museum in Philly proper, The Art of the Steal dismisses the possibility that the relationship between common perceptions of sanity and the socio-economic support systems for looking at art may have evolved since Matisse last visited America. It’s a “Little Guys vs. The Big Corporate Bad” story, which spins on the irony that the little guys are feverishly trying to protect a rigid set of regulations spawned from resentment over rejection by “the elites,” while the descendants of said elites are ostensibly using their capitalist prowess to aid The People. And, of course, make a profit on said aid.

A working-class Philadelphian who made a fortune off the sale of a VD vaccine, in the early 1910s Barnes began investing his money in the best works of European modern masters, some of which, over the next couple of decades, the Depression allowed him to pick up for a song. He opened his foundation in 1922, and in 1923 hosted a public exhibition which was panned by the Philadelphia elite. Burnt by their rejection, Barnes subsequently went to great lengths to exclude the art establishment from having access to his work. Refusing to allow the pieces to be lent, moved or sold, he accepted visitors on an application basis, and was known to brush off anyone identifiably elite or powerful with a rejection letter “signed” by Barnes’ dog. Against the institutional limitations and biases of art history, Barnes strongly desired for his collection to remain separate from the art world’s model of canonization and commodification, and accessible to art appreciators with backgrounds like his own.

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Capitalism: A Love Story begins with a brilliantly edited montage equating our current state of despair with the fall of ancient Rome. This leads into a typically Michael Moorean voiceover pondering what our civilization will be remembered for centuries after our demise: funny cat videos, or the forced evictions resulting from the mortgage crisis? The actual answer is probably either “both” or “neither,” but the question is a rhetorical device. Capitalism: A Love Story is primarily an examination of how the country’s romance with free markets spectacularly soured, and secondarily an ode to the ways in which the masses have made their heartbreak visible, including viral video. Moore wisely spends less time intervening into the action here than he did in Sicko, often letting public eruptions of frustration speak for themselves.

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