The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) is so eclectic in its mish-mash of genre styling that it occasionally creates a sense of confusion. Yet, even as this blend of hodgepodge fails the film at times, there is enough unexpected delight to Anderson’s work that the film never slackens.

Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is a burnt-out sea-film auteur/oceanographer who swears revenge on the jaguar shark that killed his partner. Ned Pinkerton (Owen Wilson) claims that Steve is his father, and tries to revive a bond that never was, becoming a part of the Zissou crew. Amidst mutiny, pirates, and other assorted dilemmas that would be too taxing to enumerate, the film charts Steve’s growing awareness of his love for his son.

Since Anderson’s previous film was largely an ensemble project, there occasionally seems to be too many conceits going on in this otherwise small film, and those tangents occasionally trouble an otherwise interesting narrative that Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach concoct between Steve and his (extended) family. Yet the lunacy of pirates and the Zissou crew charging an island are too madcap not to resist, and present an odd sense of intrigue, since you never know where the film is going next.

Since the beginning of the film does, unfortunately, drag, it’s the last twenty minutes that make this film. As the Zissou crew descends into the deep and pursues the mythical jaguar shark, Anderson revels in the pursuit, so that it becomes celebratory rather than mournful (i.e. no undercurrents of Moby Dick here). As a result, I found myself enjoying a narrative that even I realized was burdened by extraneous characters. And the film utilizes a snippet of one of Sigur Ros’ best songs, so you know it can’t be all bad.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou: 7.5/10

All the Real Girls

David Gordon Green's All the Real Girls (2003) is a rumination on the idealistic impressions we all have of our first love. Concerned with the atmospherics of a first love, Green film’s examines what happens when two people desire different things in a relationship.

As a summary, it's almost too simplistic: Paul (Paul Schneider), the town Lothario, likes Noel (Zooey Deschanel), the virgin back from boarding school; Paul and Noel go out for a while; Paul loses Noel in a betrayal; Paul and Noel try again, but to disastrous results. Having already been the sexual adventurer in his past, Paul now desires affection and something greater than himself, and he sees that in Noel’s innocence. Unfortunately, Noel is altogether trusting in her desire to lose her virginity.

The film is comprised largely of short impressionistic scenes which, when taken together, reveal a North Carolinian rural community entirely deprived of genuine love. Couples rarely last and instead rotate sexual partners. Ordinary people struggle to articulate their mistakes, and more often end up traversing metaphors that are seldom apt. This inability to negotiate language results in the continual misreading of romantic situations, so that the right word is always articulated at exactly the wrong time.

The film’s cinematography is stellar, and the film plays like an ode to the classical structure of silent film. The virginal Noel leaves Paul and the town for a weekend and in turn loses her virginity, and when she returns home neither she nor Paul can reconcile their feelings with her betrayal, something that is akin, in Paul’s words, “to a mistake in nature.” Yet the film explores the falsity inherent to expecting another person to be the one who offers a cure to your own failings, since both Paul and Noel are ultimately damned not by each other, but rather by their own utterly human mistakes.

If there is a flaw to the film, it comes in our empathy in the final encounter between Paul and Noel, when both realize that they would have been perfect for one another at another time in their lives, just not at this time. The dialogue each character presents is so earnest and sincere that we mourn their failed relationship, and that the film does not end there, but rather drags to an end some minutes later on a more random shot, so that while this ending suggests an openness and a continued action, is a shame, since it is not the strongest shot.

Still, All the Real Girls is a film that is alternatively lyrical and thoroughly, purposefully mundane, and the cast of actors, including the always excellent Patricia Clarkson as Paul’s mother, beautifully realize every caveat of the film.

All the Real Girls: 10/10

Funny Games

Austrian writer/director Michael Haneke is a filmmaker who loves to polarize his audience. He wants to lure the audience into complicity with what we are watching, but he then, like Jean-Luc Godard before him, wants to remind us of the artificiality of all that we see onscreen. As such, his films often manipulate our emotions to create a more emotional response to the images on film. Funny Games (1997) is the second Haneke film I’ve viewed (The Piano Teacher being the first), and if they continue to be up to this quality, I’ll keep seeing more.

Concerned with a family who vacations at their lake house, Haneke gives us a brief glimpse of their everyday interaction before launching into the existential horror. Two twentysomething men soon terrorize the family, shattering the father’s kneecap with a golf club, and eventually hold the mother, father, and young son hostage. All this occurs while the villains, Paul (Arno Frisch) and Peter (Frank Giering), occasionally talk to the camera and note the necessary conventions for the family’s survival. This breaking of the fourth wall creates an odd dissonance, since we are thus reminded of the archetypal nature of the characters, yet they are so primal that we remain nonetheless invested in them.

Once the villains begin to kill the family off, though, Haneke reveals just how he has exploited our assumptions. As Paul steps out into the kitchen, a shot is fired and Haneke refuses to immediately show us who has been murdered. Haneke wants to hold out the suspense of who was shot a moment longer, which signals our understanding that we as an audience yearn to know the dirty details. That the death is finally revealed to be the family’s son is just that much more disconcerting. We get one single take, without cut scenes or close-ups, for the next four to five minutes, and the suspense here as the parents work to escape is indeed riveting.

Though the images are frequently grotesque, they are never exploitative without a purpose. Haneke often frames his camera in long shots, holding our eyes on disconcerting images until we are not so much viscerally fascinated but emotionally repulsed that we ever wanted to see the image. That is why the infamous “Where’s the remote control” scene is so effective. It suspends our preconceived understanding while remaining true to Haneke’s brutal vision--delivering an uncompromising story of brutality minus any redemption.

In many ways, this film is a precursor to David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence in that it utilizes genre archetypes, lets us know that the filmmakers know that they’re utilizing them, and then subverts them. Yet the film is more articulate in its dissection of the dual nature of vengeance, both as it corresponds to the characters in the film and to the audience, and it is masterfully aware of every sensation that it elicits from moviegoers.

Funny Games is recommended to anyone who is adventurous in their viewing habits, or to anyone who wants to have an in-depth conversation following their viewing. It’s a punishing but rewarding film (and it should be seen before Hollywood releases the remake of it next year, directed by Haneke no less!).

Funny Games: 8/10

Bullets Over Broadway

Woody Allen has long been concerned with the intersection between philosophical questions and entertainment, and his oeuvre documents this interest. Bullets Over Broadway (1994), while generally concerned with farce and pleasantry, is nonetheless formulated around a single philosophical imperative: questioning which is ultimately more important—a work of literary art or a human life?

Utilizing this construct, Allen writes a story wherein playwright David Shayne (John Cusack) can only get his newest work onto Broadway if he accepts mob funding, and if he allows the mob boss’s girlfriend, the horrendously untalented Olive Neal (played to perfection by Jennifer Tilly) a part in the play. While the other performers are all more than capable, Olive consistently mangles the lines and the integrity of David’s work. David receives unexpected help, though, from Cheech (Chazz Palminteri), a mob bodyguard assigned to protect Olive, who slowly helps David shape his play away from something artificial and into something that is dynamic and more realistic.

However, Cheech eventually becomes so invested in the refashioning of David’s play that it becomes Cheech’s work more so than it is David’s play. As such, the butchering that is Olive’s acting endangers all the brilliance that Cheech has brought to the play. Cheech recourse is simple: kill Olive so that the work can prosper. Consequently, we arrive at one answer to the philosophical imperative.

Within this framework, there is also the subplot of David sacrificing his supportive and loyal girlfriend Ellen (Mary Louise Parker) to be with the actress Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest). When Cheech kills Olive, though, David has his spiritual awakening and goes to reunite with Ellen. As such, David has accepted in his heart that, unlike Cheech, he values human life over all the pretenses and artificiality that are generated from art.

Within this perspective, since David is our narrator, it would appear that David’s ideal is the one which should be more valued. But since Cheech brings such life and vitality to the film, it seems to put the film into a philosophical quandary. Yet, in his review of the film, Jeff misconstrues the two contradicting answers for the lack of a single decisive answer.

When one understands that Allen is fundamentally a pessimist it becomes clearer that Allen the filmmaker does not side with the naïve protagonist David. Instead, his sympathies lie with Cheech, the character who is most alive and fully-rendered, who manipulated all of the characters in order to fashion the most perfect literary art. Even Cheech’s return to the Broadway opening night, after his mob boss suspects him of killing Olive, helps further the play. As gangsters mow him down backstage, the gunfire ironically accents the action onstage. Moreover, even in dying, Cheech is concerned with refashioning the play to create a perfect ending.

Having attempted to defend Allen’s dual answers as subterfuge for letting the audience side with David and, thus, able to leave the film contented rather than disheartened, I still cannot praise the film without reservation. Though the film is philosophically sound, at times the scenes with David and Helen carry on far too long, and since Cheech is the most interesting character in the film, one wishes there was even more focus on him. Also, since David chooses life over art, one wishes that there was a more dynamic relationship between he and his girlfriend so that we could care about their future fate. However, the dialogue in the end, where couples shift loyalties and banter about sexual politics, is quite enjoyable, and Bullets Over Broadway does figure in as one of Allen’s stronger 90’s films.

Bullets Over Broadway: 7/10

Career Girls

Mike Leigh's Career Girls (1997) comes so soon on the heels of the magnificent Secrets and Lies (1996) that it is impossible not to be disappointed by the scope and range of it. Yet, to be perfectly blunt, to dismiss this film as merely a minor work trivializes everything that Leigh and his actors get right. And they do get a lot right.

The film is conceived as a story where two former college roommates, Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) and Annie (Lynda Steadman), reunite after being apart for six years. Given the title, it is apparent that these women are materially successful, but, as they soon reminisce, their personal lives are still as damaged as they were in college. In this respect, the repetition of past traumas coalesces into the present, which is a prominent theme that Leigh handles with taste and subtlety.

Given that this is a Leigh picture, the strengths of Career Girls lie in the writing and the performances. Cartlidge is as dynamic as ever, as when Hannah and Annie go loft hunting. Stumbling upon an awe-inspiring loft inhabited by a perpetual stoner (Andy Serkis), Hannah’s barb at him is wonderfully vitriolic: "I suppose on a clear day you can see the class struggle from here."

Leigh intersects their stories with their college days, and events naturally unfold that link these scenes, so that time is but an equilibrium between the two periods. Unfortunately, since the college day scenes feel more cursory and concentrated around mannerisms than they feel like legitimate scenes, they do impede on the film’s pacing a bit.

The film is at its best, then, when concentrating on Hannah and Annie’s present-day lives, and in the interplay between them and a disturbed college classmate (Joe Tucker), now grown up in his own right. Given how their traumas still haunt them, it is telling that Tucker’s character does not remember either of the women, though he had a relationship with both of them in college. These realistic details give the picture a greater complexity and allow it to move out of the box of a woman’s picture.

At the end of the day, Leigh’s Career Girls cannot match the brilliance of either Secrets and Lies or Naked, but it is still a strong film worth seeing for the dialogue and for its study of the affects of time upon character.

Career Girls: 7/10

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion

Woody Allen’s The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) is one of Allen’s stronger millennial efforts, though it is still a far cry from his masterpieces of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and, taken in context with the full filmography of Allen, is really a rather slight film. Having said all this, though, it has still has plenty of laughs, engaging characters, and the memorable quotes that make the Woody persona so enjoyable to watch.

Taking place in the 1940s, Woody plays CW Briggs, an insurance investigator who is the best of his business. Naturally, then, his boss Chris Magruder (Dan Ackroyd) has begun making changes at the office, including his recent hire of Betty Ann Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt). Briggs and Fitzgerald verbally spar with each other, and their insults provide much of the charm of the film. My favorite: Briggs telling Fitzgerald that "I took you to this smoky bar because I knew that you'd need less make-up."

In terms of the plot, Allen and Hunt’s characters are both hypnotized at a business party one evening, and their hypnotist uses the hypnotism word to force them to conduct his jewel thefts late at night. When they wake up in the morning, they have no memory of the theft. Particularly enjoyable is when Briggs must undertake a theft elsewhere while Laura Kensington (Charlize Theron), a classic femme fatale, is waiting on his bed. Allen’s bidding adieu to her is beyond hilarious.

Save for the critique of how a hatred of someone commonly holds an intense love for that person underneath all the anger, there’s not much depth here. Yet the film is enjoyable as a screwball comedy that harkens back to the classic verbal sparing of the 1930s and 1940s. If you’ve seen all the Woody Allen classics (Annie Hall, Love and Death, Husbands and Wives, Manhattan), you might check this out. It's not essential viewing, though.

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion: 6/10

Platoon

Despite the praise lavished on Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) as a film that reality made, rather than Hollywood, this Vietnam War film has not been treated kindly by time. As an examination on the poetics of war, for better or worse, The Thin Red Line placed its hand on the mantle, while Saving Private Ryan possesses a gritty realism in its opening that may never be rivaled.

With this breakthrough feature, though, Stone has fashioned the obligatory story of soldier Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) whose naïveté about life and war are slowly shattered. Even as he suffers under the constant psychological bombardment of a soldier’s daily life, he also witnesses his two superiors, SSgt. Bob Barnes (Tom Berenger) and Sgt. Elias Grodin (Willem Dafoe), battle over the treatment of prisoners, about whether it is justified to torture them for information.

Within this structure, there is a betrayal, which leads to the film’s justifiably strong climax (see the film’s cover). Yet, after this point, the intensity of the film withers under Sheen’s less than impressive acting chops. Additionally, the film contains Sheen’s voiceovers off and on, and these lines offer little to a visual narrative that often states that which the voiceover stated in a more profound way minutes later.

Moreover, though Stone explicitly mentions the nature of Chris’s two superiors in the infantry, this duality is always far too evident and contrived. These two factions are split into the stoners (good) and drinkers (bad). As such, there is never complexity, save for Elias, since evil-cowardice goes punished and good-cowardice is rewarded. Such simplistic notions are not expected in a film that constantly argues for its realism.

Keith David is, however, the epitome of all that is awesome, and his presence restores energy to the piece. The film is worth a viewing if you are at all interested in war films, but for the more discerning viewer: look elsewhere (like Apocalypse Now).

Platoon: 6/10

Before Sunset

Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (2004) follows its predecessor by nine years in terms of both the real-time and film-time that has elapsed since Before Sunrise (1995), so that the reunited characters of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Cèline (Julie Delpy) are now in their early thirties. Meeting up at a Parisian book signing where Jesse is promoting his fictionalized account of that night so many years ago, the two again roam the streets and talk in the few hours before Jesse returns to America. Here in this film, though, the conversations are weighted by the irreversibility of time and guarded by the emotional damage that each has sustained. Before Sunset shatters the idea of an idealistic romance even as it creates one.

We learn that Cèline was unable to meet Jesse at the train station those six months later, since her grandmother had just passed away. As a result, Jesse returned to America heart-broken and put his time into constructing the novel that recounts their extraordinary night, and, additionally, is married and has a son, while Cèline became involved in the environmental protection group Green Cross.

Whereas their conversations often revolved around idealistic impressions in the earlier film, now more adult questions of marriage, responsibility, time, and care dominate their discussions. These intimate details slowly reveal how much each still loves and desires the other, so that when one of them glances away from the other for a moment, the other is always moved to touch them. This, of course, leads the audience to realize that the responsibility of marriage must not be all that binds a couple together, that there must be genuine love and appreciation behind that responsibility, otherwise all the commitment is barren of its pure intent.

Their scene in the taxi brings about the film's first peak, when the words of Jesse and Cèline become imbued with pain and hatred. The easy rhythm that both characters have been operating under is suddenly revealed to be falsehood, and each character no longer talks around their regret, but instead thrusts that regret against the other, willing them to react. It's a powerful, naked moment of disclosure, and perhaps the best scene in the film.

Before Sunset unfolds under real-time narrative, so that the audience always knows that Jesse and Cèline’s encounters will soon be cut short, that, as the sun fades, so too does the chance of the two finding peace. Yet Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy (who all co-wrote the screenplay) love their characters too much to surrender to a melancholic ending, and give their characters the send-off that audiences have waited nine years for, even as it forces those same audiences to come to terms with the morality of that decision.

Recapturing the most magical moments of the first film (witness the parallel between the wordless glances back and forth in the record store listening station in Before Sunrise and the stairway sequence in Before Sunset, when their attraction is mutually realized), while creating new moments (Cèline’s waltz that she plays for Jesse), Before Sunset is a masterpiece of contemporary adult romance, identifying all that we love about film and rewarding us with a vision that is never condescending to romance or life itself.

Before Sunset: 10/10

Before Sunrise

Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) masquerades as another entry in the cynical twentysomething quest for individual identity (see the embarrassingly bad Reality Bites (1994) for a further understanding of this archetype from the early 1990s). However, Linklater uses this conventionality to arrive at something more elementary than distaste for the bourgeois masses in that he attempts to understand how two strangers can interact and fall for one another amidst cultural, philosophical, and, often, ideological barriers.

Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American college student coming back from a failed reunion with a girlfriend abroad, starts a conversation with Cèline (Julie Delpy), a Frenchwoman returning from a visit to Budapest to see her grandmother, in the middle of a train heading through Europe. They speak naturally but delicately around their affection for each other, and soon Jesse offers the proposition that Cèline get off on the stop in Vienna and spend the day talking with him before he heads back to America the next day.

Roaming Vienna, Jesse and Cèline talk and talk and talk some more. In this respect, the film tips its hat to middle era Woody Allen, creating a romance out of genuine intrigue for the other person’s thoughts. Moreover, the film never tries for slapslick comedy, but is always situated in terms of its natural romantic aura. We see Jesse’s initial over-reliance on his charm, but soon understand that this dependence actually masks his past insecurities of rejection. Cèline, for her part, allays all of Jesse’s fears, though she remains critical of his cynicism.

None of this brief description does justice to the breezy exchange of dialogue. There are fundamental ideas that Linklater is examining in Before Sunrise’s realism, questioning the nature of love and relationships as Jesse and Cèline work to understand one another. Having initially sworn off any future meeting, the two are unburdened of the constraint of a future rendezvous, which gives them the freedom to confront the stereotypes and worries that burden all relationships. Yet, can two young people who understand each other so easily really commit to never seeing each other again?

All good conversation yearns to be continued, just as all love yearns to be unending, and the scenario that Jesse and Cèline settle upon as they depart at the train station the next day is justifiably realistic, and gives them the opportunity to reunite in six months at the train station. Whether they will reunite is answered in the sequel Before Sunset (2004).

In terms of a film that understands young love and commits itself to understanding its characters vis-à-vis their dialogue, Before Sunrise is a very good watch, and deserves a viewing for all viewers interested in the exchange of ideas.

Before Sunrise: 8/10

Exotica

Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994) carries its innermost secrets the closest to its labyrinthine structure. Francis (Bruce Greenwood), an accountant, attends the gentleman’s club Exotica almost nightly, keeping a vigil with one of the dancers, Christina (Mia Kirshner). Meanwhile, the DJ at the club, Eric (Elias Koteas), who once slept with Christina, seems to internalize his jealousy as he watches her interact with Francis, but this internalization festers and seemingly threatens to become something more dangerous.

Egoyan introduces what feels like subplots to this scenario, as we discover that Francis’s daughter and wife were both murdered in separate incidents. This realization transforms the sexual need that we initially perceived in the relationship between Francis and Christina into a need that is simultaneously more pathological and devotional. Meanwhile, throwaway characters become more integral to the story, and this leisurely pace lets Egoyan slowly unveil each new development so that each character reacts organically rather than with mechanical predetermination.

Yet Exotica is centered in its psychological realism. Francis touchingly has his niece (Sarah Polley) babysit the house whenever he is at Exotica, even though there is no one to babysit. Moreover, as we discover that Eric and Christina found the body of Francis’s daughter in a country clearing, we come to realize that Eric’s terrorizing of Francis is not out of petty revenge, but something closer to a transcendent offering of himself so that Francis can find in himself absolution.

As a result, the film ultimately works in terms of how it intercuts all that the audience understands about the fundamental characters of Eric, Christina, and Francis. All of them undergo shifts in psychology as their lives are continuously changed by the knowledge they share. Christina’s offering to Francis becomes all the more tragic and quasi-religious as the film reaches its climax, yet Egoyan refuses to let the film descend into a revenge killing. Instead, Egoyan closes the film with an image of communal healing, while offering up a potent image from Christina and Francis’s past that beautifully underscores the currents which now guide their lives.

Psychologically rich and filled with tremendous vision, Exotica works as a character study, but also as a film that tells of communal forgiveness and acceptance.

Exotica: 10/10

Clerks II

In Clerks II (2006), we find Randal (Jeff Anderson) defending his loyalty to Star Wars in the face of the Lord of the Rings nerd-slaught, while Dante (Brian O’Halloran) must choose between his loyalty to New Jersey or a new start and marriage in Florida. It’s likely there is a meta-comment in here from Smith about his loyalty to his audience over appealing to the middlebrow, but who cares about such semantics here. The question is whether the film works as a comedy, and indeed it does, though its restrictions are also always evident.

Enjoying a Kevin Smith film pretty much means that you must have an encyclopedic knowledge of pop and worldwide web culture. The more averse you are to the things most people find endlessly entertaining on the web, the less likely you’ll be entertained by what’s on the screen. Everyone can appreciate Dante realizing his love for Becky (Rosario Dawson) to the tune of Jackson 5’s “ABC”; however, a lesser number of viewers will find Randal’s presentation of “interspecies erotica” funny. Since I lie, for better or worse, in the category of those amused by Clerks II’s scenes of bestiality, I was impressed with how Smith nonetheless refrained from going all Farrelly Brothers on the audience, and never pushed for that extra scene that, at the end of the day, would reduce the film to gross-out cinema.

However, the film doesn’t get a free pass, either. Elias (Trevor Fehrman) never quite understands the lyricism of Smith’s dialogue, and Fehrman’s delivery of his lines often conflicts with the more naturalistic delivery that O’Halloran, Anderson, and Dawson use. As a result, those scenes where Elias is featured become bogged down by contradicting acting styles. Also, Dante’s fiancée is too much of a caricature, so that the audience never really empathizes with her in light of Dante’s betrayal.

Yet Smith still clearly enjoys his characters, and his enthusiasm for them is contagious. It is always a delight to see Jay and Silent Bob around, and the repartee between Dante and Randal is still as engaging as ever. Even Anne Frank could see the infectious enjoyment that this film offers. Well, she could, if she wasn’t blind.

Clerks II: 7/10

The Virgin Spring

Though much of it is predicated on an understanding of human weakness and tragic foreknowledge, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960) is nonetheless one of Bergman’s most spiritual films. Centered around a 14th-century Swedish fable where young Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), a spoiled but pure girl, is entrusted with bringing candles to church one afternoon, the serenity of the day soon gives way to rape and murder as Karin is first befriended but then tortured by wandering swineherds.

After pillaging Karin’s clothes and belongings, the men seek to lodge in a peasant town, and are welcomed by Karin’s parents, Töre (Max von Sydow) and Märeta (Birgitta Valberg), who only know that their daughter is missing. This shifting dynamic of alliances is fluid and it generates most of the tension in the film’s second half as Bergman contrasts the initial examination of innocence with a new examination of tragic vengeance.

However, the matter of a truly guilty party is not so pat. Problematizing the issue of guilt is Karin’s half-sister, who intoned a pagan curse on her that morning before Karin departed for church. Moreover, Töre all but mandated that his daughter deliver the candles as a form of penance for the previous night that she spent out dancing, allowing Bergman to posit that Karin’s (and, by extension, everyone’s) blind trust can lead to a tragic fate, but so can an overzealous idolatry.

Once the swineherds unknowingly reveal themselves by offering Karin’s clothing to her mother as trade for their food and lodging, Bergman probes his characters for vengeance. Märeta informs her husband, but now Töre must bear the weight of enacting retribution. Though he ultimately does kill each of the swineherds, with his wife’s sad blessing, Töre’s moral-conflict is largely internalized and subsumed until the end, when his emotions lead to a break-down and spiritual questioning, quoted below:

Töre: "You see it, God, you see it. The innocent child's death and my revenge. You allowed it. I don't understand you. Yet now I beg your forgiveness. I know no other way to be reconciled with my own hands. I know no other way to live."

Witness the physical collapse of Töre after the murders (beautifully handled by the veteran von Sydow), and contrast it against his newfound spirituality at the end, and you will behold a sight to marvel at. This realization is somber yet transcendent, and so is the final image of the film, where Karin’s parents find her body and lift it out of the makeshift burial that the swineherds gave her. This moment, which will not be spoiled here, is filled with such communal spirituality that Bergman transcends the morality fable that the material is based upon. It is a powerful moment, and does justice to a haunting, evocative film.

The Virgin Spring: 9.5/10

Dirty Harry

Capitalizing upon the iconic cynicism that spews from Harry Callahan’s (Clint Eastwood) mouth, Dirty Harry (1971) revolutionized the action film, giving it an unprecedented brusqueness. Depicting a cop who cares more about the ends than the means, Eastwood captures that amoral sense of justice while circumventing police and political bureaucracy.

After Dirty Harry’s introductory sequence demonstrates just how much of a badass Callahan is, whereupon we arrive at the classic “You have to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?” line, the narrative kicks in and positions Callahan against Scorpio (Andrew Robinson), a budding serial murderer who also lacks any conventional system of morality. Though the film hesitates to highlight this parallel and refuses to suggest that little actually separates Callahan from Scorpio, it is nonetheless implicit in any psychological reading of the film and its characters.

Linking Callahan up with a partner, Chico Gonzalez (Reni Santoni), who exists pretty much as the audiences’ stand-in to remind us of how innocent we are and what a badass Callahan is, we are slowly initiated into the realization that Callahan’s treatment of criminals is more justifiable than our own naïve conception. Alas, characters (namely, Gonzalez’s wife) do sometimes feel like the means to gathering out expository details from the past of the laconic when not iconic Callahan.

However, the idea of victims’ rights is developed and commented upon, both in positive (Scorpio’s victims) and negative (Scorpio himself) connotations, which lets the film aim for something higher than nonchalant, mechanical justice. And the film is thrilling, using each set-piece to further the story, rather than feeling like the formula that this process has since become.

As a result, though the film gets bogged down in highlighting Eastwood’s iconic cynicism, so that the dialogue occasionally feels more like a set-up to Callahan’s total badass par excellence, Dirty Harry works beautifully as an action film, creating a emblematic character and an adrenaline-charged experience.

Dirty Harry: 7.5/10

Naked

In the 1990s, Mike Leigh had the best decade ever. Although differing in their portrayal of English life and the varying classes, Leigh’s films possess a sophistication of theme and dialogue that harkens back to the experimentation of the 1970s. Naked (1993) begins appropriately dirty enough, as a handheld camera scurries through the Manchester dark and settles upon a couple having sex in the shadows, until we realize that the man must flee for London. Giving one of the best performances of the decade, David Thewlis plays the man, Johnny, a restless bohemian who is alternatively a psycho and a savant.

He settles upon a former girlfriend’s house, Louise (Leslie Sharp), for his refuge, and there he meets Louise’s roommate, Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge), a woman who is somehow more damaged and lost than he. Their struggle for intimacy and passion in their sex is heart-breaking. Take pure nihilism and multiply it by three. It’s simply flesh pounding against flesh, when Sophie in particular needs it to be so much more. Indeed, Sophie becomes the apotheosis of sorrow, confusion, and uncontrolled devotion to Johnny, even though he refuses to surrender himself in this way to any other person.

Though the film could settle into a tragi-comedy detailing Johnny’s misfortune in sleeping with Sophie while trying to woo back Louise, Leigh has a different story to tell. Johnny wanders the streets of London, conversing with a night watchman about the Holy Bible and the coming apocalypse, exposes and threatens to unravel a waitress’s insecurities after her kindness to him, and suffers several beatings. Through it all, Leigh’s characters struggle to survive with society, but, except for Louise, all of them recoil and flee from the potentiality of change and hope. The closing tracking shot is inevitable, yet still excels in eliciting a pained silence as life continues as it must.

Though we may revel in the escape that Louise has chosen for herself, there are so many characters we have been exposed to in this film who are adrift and in despair that the film maintains its bleak worldview even as it demonstrates a possibility of light that is there, if the characters only commit themselves.

While Naked is full of degradation and callousness, it is nonetheless a masterpiece of contemporary cinema that is endlessly vital and alive.

Naked: 10/10

In The Company of Men

In the Company of Men (1997) is screenwriter/director Neil LaBute’s depiction of the psyche of corporate machismo in the mid-1990s. Having been emotionally battered by women he cannot understand, and unable to quote unquote stand up for himself, Howard (Matt Malloy) finds himself prey to Chad’s (Aaron Eckhart) suggestion to “hurt someone.” This utterance sanctions their ability to turn a love relation into something more manipulative, into a place where testosterone and narcissism circumvent openness and honesty.

Their manipulation of Christine (Stacey Edwards), a deaf coworker, is based on both befriending and romantically wooing her, and the plan is to later break her hopes by revealing the whole courtship as a ruse, whereupon they will contaminate her pureness, exploit it, stain it, and altogether desecrate it. In this guise, Howard and Chad are marked as predatory pigs, while Christine becomes the vulnerable “damsel in distress.” However, LaBute knows that Christine too is guilty of pride, for she welcomes the advances of two men instead of immediately letting the other know of her commitment to the first. While we sympathize with her, and later with Howard, this knowledge deepens Christine’s own psychological need to be loved.

All of the relationships in the film become contaminated, to some degree (and by a large degree for Chad), by self-interest. As such, Foucauldian power relations centers Chad’s place in the film, since we find that he possesses no reason to enact this revenge fantasy other than that the fact that, in his words, “I could.” This lack of rationalization mediates Chad’s character, in that there is no moral or ethical code to his being, but only curious ambivalence. Lacking any ethical burden, Chad feels no guilt or remorse, and consequently he never gets hurt. This is probably one of the most fascinating aspects of the film, since traditional storytelling suggests that Chad would awaken to some deeper realization, that he would find some auspicious reality beyond his initial nihilism, but LaBute’s film prohibits any transition into morality for Chad. Instead, he accomplished all that he wanted and walked away, clean and free.

More penetrating than his follow-up Your Friends and Neighbors (1998), and less meta-narratological than The Shape of Things (2003), In the Company of Men is LaBute’s scathing portrait of those damaged souls who wish to make another feel their pain, if only fleetingly, and a deeper examination of one person who is unburdened by traditional ethics.

Though the musical jazz interludes occasionally disrupt more than they emphasize the mood, LaBute’s film is troubling, knowing, and altogether haunting.

In the Company of Men: 9.5/10

Peeping Tom

Inherent to the idea of cinema (and, indeed, all stories) is the idea of voyeurism. Caught in the throes of film’s misé-en-scene, we find ourselves emotionally invested in the lives of those on screen. Michael Powell’s ground-breaking Peeping Tom (1960) takes this emotional engagement and subverts it, so that the film in fact critiques our complicity.

The main character, Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), is an example of the unimaginable damage that comes from childhood abuse. Mark’s father continually forced him to assimilate images and sounds of fear, and the damage this inflicted upon Mark’s psyche is now irreversible. Though Mark works as a focus puller at a British movie studio, he has begun killing women with a knife attached to the end of his camera’s tripod. However, he also films the women as they die, so that they must watch their own death vis-à-vis a mirror he has at the end of the camera. (Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) extends this idea in a horrifying manner.)

After showing the first murder of a prostitute, Powell begins the credit sequence by looping back to the murder as seen through the camera lens that Mark now watches at his development studio. This implication immediately sets up the critique of the audience as willing participants in the death of the prostitute, which was obviously an unsettling thought in 1960. However, it was also revolutionary. Hitchcock’s Psycho would come out six months later and likewise invert our sympathies, but Peeping Tom executes this idea with contemporary sophistication.

Most interesting is Mark’s relationship with one of the tenants in the house, Helen (Anna Massey). Though Mark is a recluse, her efforts to reach out to him and understand him demonstrate an awareness on his part that he may be able to recover from the abuse and affliction that haunts him now. Much of the film’s strength comes from Helen’s purity and Mark’s struggle to never taint that purity. The end is inevitable, but the investment that Powell creates is masterful.

Long appreciated for its thrills and suspense, and it has plenty, Peeping Tom is now recognized by feminist writers as one of the first cinematic examples of how the camera’s gaze is inherently male. As a result, those classic films which have always threatened an innocent woman now became consciously exploitative, capturing the panic, fear, and horror of imminent death with raw power.

Peeping Tom is a classic that endures, and, moreover, it is a film which is just as demanding and rewarding as when it was first released.

Peeping Tom: 10/10