At once a howling abyss and a succulent morsel of semi-absurdist humanistic comedy, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North is a film of wonderfully unresolved, immanent contradictions and multivalent constellations of primordial beauty. The most obvious dormant tension that requires surfacing is that it isn’t a documentary, at least insofar as the conventional scripture would bequeath it. No, this slice-of-life tale of “Nanook” (actually Allakariallak), an Inuit in the arctic regions of Canada, as filmed by filmmaker-explorer Robert Flaherty, was largely an ahistorical concoction fabricated to feign allegiance to the Western ideology of the Inuit as a backward Other whose life was governed by genial amusement and befuddlement at any and all Western artifacts. Many of these technologies objects were well-known to Allakariallak, a genuine Inuit who was “in” on the production of the film, as Inuit culture by 1922 had advanced well beyond the spear-wielding icon curated by Flaherty for white America’s racial memory. Continue reading
Films for Class: Nanook of the North
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I meant to get to this a bit ago, obviously, but this review is in memorium to the dearly departed demon of cinema Seijun Suzuki.
Decades in the cinema business have rotted Tim Burton’s teeth with candy and softened his fangs. Where his films’ runtimes were once pecked down by vultures eating away any festering fat or excess, the estate Burton now commands comes with an electric dome that keeps the birds at bay and lets his ego wax outwards well past its sell-by dates. Like all of his recent efforts, Miss Peregrine is sporting a muffin top, the luxury afforded by engorged budgets comforting Burton in his decision to spare the screenplay none of its expository calories. None of his films since Sleepy Hollow have sported enough genuine achtung to occupy that oh-so peculiar spot between a carousel and an asylum that his earliest films haunted. In this capacity, the name on the tin of his newest film – “peculiar” – is only rubbing salt on his failure to genuinely be peculiar for the past twenty years or so. 
So as to avoid the tension: this post is enormously indebted to Ray Carney and based on the original 1976 cut of the film. 
A handful of small impact tremors in the horror genre under his belt, Ti West, the only so-called mumble-gore director worth a damn, taints the Western with his particular brand of suggestible, dark energy in the gravidly-titled In a Valley of Violence. A nomadic firecracker of a film that recalls the existential-crisis minimalism of Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting, this slice of vintage pulp fiction eschews the grandiloquent game of Once Upon a Time in the West for a kind of taciturn swampy pop-art. With the intro credits slinking like a pink panther gone feral, the spirit of the ‘60s hang high here, looming over this parched throat of a film like a sun that just won’t set. Thankfully, reverence to the past never feels like a noose held around the film’s neck. There’s an analog spirit here, but West never loses himself in the wayward mire of classical pastiche or overly-hagiographic reference to Westerns past. This is West’s West, not a feeble attempt to ape Leone’s or Ford’s. 
Although mostly cottoning to Mark Twain’s insouciance and witticisms rather than his gothic, mortally wounded ruminations on society (so it’s more Tom Sawyer than the superior Huck Finn), Band of Robbers gets us partway toward what anointed the early Coen Brothers as the cinematic exhumers of Twain’s rascally, still-kicking corpse. Recasting Tom (Adam Nee) and Huck (Kyle Gallner) as modern day slackers (the latter recently released from jail and the former a lethargic police officer), the film’s decision to revise Twain’s prose as a rattle-snake of a heist film is not exactly inspired in an age where that genre is an easy target for indie success. But that doesn’t make it ineffective. Obviously, it reeks too of filmmakers-of-a-certain-age basking in the warm glow of Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, but Band of Robbers is spunky enough and clearly enjoys the old-fangled spirit and the messy malarkey of childhood campfire tales, not to mention their more ruminative underbellies. 
Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent constricts itself with the sinister snake of history – venomous, elusive, alluring, and difficult to unravel – about as tightly as a film can. It’s not perfect; Guerra once or twice drowns in a swamp of historical allusions and metaphors that are never really allowed the free space to lash out as dangerously and free-associatively as they could. But his film at least allows history to vibrate rather than remain trapped in a film’s distanced reverence like a waxworks display. A provocative, even downright brash film, Embrace of the Serpent is wisely emboldened by its stylistic and political radicalism. Even when it sinks into symbols like quicksand, it is at worst “a nice try” or a near-miss rather than an outright failure, and, frankly, its missteps are only as hurtful as they are because of the potential lurking in the film’s head. This is not timid cinema, and it burrows un-hesitantly into the post-colonial mindset with more aesthetic vigor than most other morally-charged films would know what to do with. For all its flaws, there’s something essential about it, and not only because its political fangs are so often unsheathed. Like the mythical psychedelic flower that is a kind of MacGuffin for director Guerra’s robust scrutiny of cinematic depictions of the “Other”, Embrace boasts enough of a visual pull to send sparks every which way, even if the prospect of truly igniting is ultimately left off the table. 
I do not know that I can meaningfully defend The Protector 2, which is why it is for the better that no one involved particularly seems to respect my opinion at all. Less a feature film than the Tony Jaa variety hour, The Protector 2 is disarmingly free of stakes, coherency, and even tension. It is, as drama, almost disturbingly inept, entirely daffy in the way it tortures a narrative out of scenes of mayhem and malarkey. There’s a focus on wholly inadequate compositing shots that is endearing in its disregard for common courtesy and the social propriety of visual logic. At times, the shenanigans on display approximates an anti-narrative hostility that is nearly inspired in its casually self-effacing “plot”. The RZA took Tony Jaa’s elephant, and you don’t take Tony Jaa’s elephant. 
Disney clearly has a fetish for manning the bellows to raise old properties teetering on the edge of irrelevance, especially to the tune of spending several hundred million dollars on them. Often (John Carter, The Lone Ranger), this resurrection quickly mutates into a séance: the properties remain dead, and the best we can do is ask the characters why Disney is affronting them by not allowing them to rest in peace. Yet Disney’s most recent such semi-forgotten property carries the Marvel brand, which means commercial success for once. At least this skeleton back-from-the-dead has a little visual meat on its bones and a couple of fascinatingly splintered compositions, but that isn’t enough to truly salvage the nefarious acolyte of science and nerd-cred bolster Dr. Steven Strange. If the prospect of one of the world’s most monolithic and voluminous corporations resurrecting a wiry little swashbuckling B-comic from the ‘70s raises any false alarms in your head, well, consider yourself intelligent. Lest you think that the title is a harbinger of things to come, Marvel’s one-size-fits-all aesthetic is as plastic and only superficially strange as ever in this new film. In breathing life into a product from the Bronze Age of comic-dom, Marvel continues to package and primp their creation in service of creating something masquerading as malignant, dangerous, and different. And something ultimately too benign to last past the 90-minute mark. 
Just when it seemed that the premier ‘00s national cinema for delivering international audiences into darkness was ready to find the light, Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing is here to raise some cain. With its bounty of sensory delights and cavernous, existential troughs, it warps its style so far past the safety regulation that South Korean cinema feels just about covered in full for a good decade or more. Swaggering and shaggy, The Wailing is a vibrant devil-in-a-new-dress tale of great lateral expanse and gothic grandeur, a wonderfully devilish repository of human foibles and elemental disturbances. It also offers a deep descent into humanity’s awkwardly slovenly attempts to fumble through traumatic and unexplainable events as grandiloquent gloom meets its mortal enemy: human imperfection. 
The Long Take 