Guy Maddin, gone too long? With The Forbidden Room, a mind-boggling witch’s brew of cinematic primeval swill, psychotropic kitsch, mental dicombobulation, the kitchen sink and the bathtub too, Maddin intends to show us where he’s been. The simplest answer is down the rabbit hole of forgotten cinematic, recklessly compiled in research halls, forlorn still images, and in the dankest depths of cinematic archival libraries. Hard at work reconstructing (and most deconstructing) a series of early lost films from scratch, Maddin has released The Forbidden Room, a love letter to the out-of-the-way cinema that haunts modern digital filmmaking sheen like a phantom-like specter. Love is a plaything in Maddin’s world through, and the ostensibly archaic concoction bubbles and burns into cinematic liquid as Maddin’s love of cinema flies far away from mere recreation and into a psychotic opium-laced crosshatch of memory, trauma, and the collapsing back alleys of the human mind. No more pastiche, The Forbidden Room is a living, breathing, fighting, joking performance art piece, rejiggering the past and transforming it from waxworks show into a cinematic scalpel cutting into the human mind. Continue reading
Review: The Forbidden Room
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Edited for Clarity
Or “philosophy and poop”, “sanctimony and shit”, “destabilization and, I don’t know, dingle-berries” in Jean-Luc Godard’s effervescent cross-stitch of deconstructive cinematic formal language and spastic human communication. At just a pinprick over an hour in length, Godard – ever the enfant terrible – dynamites the singularity and totality of visual communication, audio communication, and cinematic communication as expressions of understanding. 
The Good Dinosaur
In comparison to Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion, only one film in all the annals of cinema evinces a more thoroughgoing and vividly cinematic perspective on the role of public artifice and presentation in everyday life: The Rules of the Game, the film Renoir directed only two years afterward. Although this earlier film does not quite boast the dexterous, unkempt camera vivacity of The Rules of the Game, nor does it apply that camera so singularly to dissect the “on-stage” and “off-stage” realms of human life, The Grand Illusion remains one of the most enormously well-threaded cinematic experiences nonetheless, as well as one of the most desperately humanistic. 
It’s a sly, sinuous, steamy trip down the Mississippi in Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Mississippi Grind, a not-so-buddy film with a road that doesn’t end and a trip that never truly happens. When middle-aged gambling addict Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) meets younger traveler Curtis (Ryan Reynolds, applying his smarmy world-weariness better than he ever has) in Iowa, the two hit it off on a boozy, woozy gambling venture with a destination in New Orleans. But it’s the journey that matters, right? 
Robert Bresson’s second film, A Man Escaped, begins with a prelude of ruthless, unimpeachable clarity as totalizing and blunt as the film’s title. A man, Fontaine (Francois Leterrier), is trapped in a car, the camera perilously perched at the level of his hands, which threaten to open the door of the vehicle. We pan left to his fellow trapped compatriot, presumably another member of the French Resistance to be sent, like Fontaine, to a Nazi prison. We cut to Fontaine’s view of the front of car, dissected by two Nazis in the front seats claustrophobically denouncing Fontaine’s view to freedom. The door opens and Fontaine runs, but the camera stays trapped on the prisoner next to him, sullen and stagnant and aware that escape is futile. Fontaine is denied agency, rendered passive by a camera that refuses to follow him toward escape. When he arrives at the prison, Fontaine will be sequestered into angular frames, torn to bits by characters who pass in between him and us, secluding him in the frame and denying his supremacy as a character. His face will be forever denied to us by a camera that moves not with him as a friend but against him, around him, as an agent of destruction. 
This being the first of two reviews of David Bowie’s most prominent on-screen roles. 
Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter is a delusory fairy tale of equal parts fanatical wit, hallucinogenic desperation, silent whimsy, and unbalanced psychosis. Lurking beneath a disquietingly malevolent innocence lies a scathing critique of US cultural imperialism. Intercepted by fragmented images of the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo, here invaded by enough static to make you question if the film really existed at all, or if it was simply a hypnotic VHS lovers’ fever dream, Kumiko uses that great barren white desert Northern (like a Western, you get the idea) as its own horizontal, false American Dream. 
Most race-based films propose a bonfire, a false prophet of equality, a nominally no-sided geometric shape where all can sit in harmony nonetheless replete with sinister jagged edges. Chi-Raq, a riposte to such staid, socially-sanctioned respectability, is no bonfire; it’s a molotov-cocktail with an eye for all the rough edges it can find. With a script pitched at the level of a Public Enemy breakdown and filmmaking as shambolic as a rattlesnake in a rave, Chi-Raq is a cinematic DJ of equal parts braggadocio and bleakness. That it is Lee’s most invigorating film in at least a decade alone makes it essential cinema; that it is great cinema as well is merely a nice bonus. 
The Long Take 