Black Coal, Thin Ice, Diao Yinan’s third feature film, employs a bifurcated narrative about multi-furcated corpses to expose a world that has been furcated so many times that pieces of the whole are rendered enigmas, no more recognizable as distinct entities than so many lumps of emotionless coal. Sure, the individual chunks exist – like the individual humans – but the oppressive weight of the leviathan conglomerate of empty humanity inundates all individuality. People in Black Coal, Thin Ice tread on thin ice, but their fate is even more precarious because the girth of the world hangs over them, cracking the ice with every strained step. The post-industrial haze of northern China suffused the air long ago, and the gravid lethargy of billowing smoke laying its fate down on every person is omnipresent in the film. Humans don’t stride with confidence and purpose. They crawl through a somnambulant world that displays little interest in slapping anyone awake. Continue reading
Review: Black Coal, Thin Ice
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Michael Dougherty deserves all the money he can bamboozle from Hollywood. Thus, Krampus, regardless of quality, is only fair. Only his second feature film release, it enters the world long after his first film Trick ‘r Treat was unceremoniously denied an impending theatrical release and was banished to the no man’s land of straight-to-DVD horror.
So it was with the raving success (by barely-budgeted, cave-dwelling B-movie standards) of Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn that Michigan backwoods filmmaker was granted access to the secret gilded chamber of the Hollywood machine. His goal? Not to spit shine the cogs, nor to tear them to shreds, but to rearrange them, to warp them, into a slightly more feral, crazed mad scientist’s contraption. Well, maybe not quite that far, but he was at least about to switch out a few gears and spruce up the place with his own signature cartoon-ghoulish paint brush. 
At the center of Eyes of Laura Mars lie a pair of vexing, pallid portals into terror and gender power dynamics. They are two objects staring on at the crossroads after selling their soul to the devil. They are the titular objects of the film – eyes – and they engage in the everyday dialectic of stunted privilege and latent oppression in their daily ritual of photographing women who are as likely to be clad in gilded chic as bloody crimson terror. The eyes adorn the face of Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway, fresh off her Oscar win for Network), a fashion photographer in the glitzy Disco era of the late ’70s, who has taken to coiling together sex and death in garish photographs of women stricken bloodless by murderous killers. Or women otherwise strewn about, dead, on the carpet. The women are not actually dead – they are models in staged photoshoots – but they might soon be. An unseen killer stalks them, and he or she seems to have it ought for the eyes of Laura Mars by transforming her art into reality, torturing her eyes and implicating her in the violence by turning her eyes into inadvertent weapons of sorts. If she continues to shoot, he will kill the object of her lens. 
The Long Take 