Many have gone out to bat for Foxcatcher’s particularly dour format of carefully positioned gloominess, and they are right to focus on the film’s meticulous craft. It’s a stolid, compartmentalized film, assured and close to perfectionist in its specific, highly detailed character, its rigid delineation of human frailty, and its formal precision backing up an intentionally cold-and-clinical dissection of American inequality. Grotesque millionaire John Du Pont (Steve Carrell) fancies himself an American hero and plays with Olympic wrestler Mark Scultz (Channing Tatum) from beginning to end, but director Bennett Miller would not have you think of it as play. Through his eyes, the film is as detached and despondent as humanly possible, perhaps fitting for the films’ themes of mechanical people sleepwalking their way through life with bored non-momentum. Yet style and story clash and never occupy the same film, smothering clinical precision with the film’s weepy, drippy “important story” narrative and sacrificing the sweat and spit of genuine emotion for a staid waxworks show. Foxcatcher is a perfectionist film, but it gives perfectionism a bad name. Continue reading
Review: Foxcatcher
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Although the material, and director Pablo Lorrain’s muck-racking credentials, would beg to differ, No is no glum, morose drama. Far from it, in fact. It takes a shot of endorphins and battles the lows of the human experience with the highs of sharp, provocative filmmaking and an effervescent not-so-dark comic streak, tackling a serious subject and having a small, self-contained blast doing it. Kudos to Lorrain for following in the spirit of his main character and infusing politics with spunk and pizzaz, even if he runs into a few queasy moral calms along the way.
Ernest and Celestine
Rob Zombie is not a particularly nuanced filmmaker, but then nuance isn’t everything. Sometimes, a parade of bravura, shoot-for-the-gutter images and sounds is all you need, and if nothing else, The Lords of Salem is a fairly stunning little devil of images and sounds lined up for us by the naughtiest ringmaster this side of Italian giallo. After all, and at the risk of sounding too classicist, early cinema was nothing more than a parade of images to amuse and titillate, to vex and induce wonderment, and to distill and massage emotion out of the purity of look and feel. Those were the wild years of cinema, a period of looking to the future. Of course, Rob Zombie, here and always, looks to the past. But in it he finds something no less woolly, no less feral, and no less sensitive to the primitive power of feverish film imagery at its most direct.
The Long Take 