Review: Zero Dark Thirty

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Much has been written about Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s dramatization of the hunt for Osama bin Laden through the eyes of fictional CIA officer Maya Lambert (Jessica Chastain). By a wide-margin, it’s the best reviewed film of a year generally considered a pretty sturdy, upright twelve months for films. It’s been praised as a more-than-worthy follow-up to director Bigelow’s and screenwriter Mark Boal’s Oscar-winning previous release The Hurt Locker and at one point it was all but assured to win its year’s round of awards. Many consider it a seminal docu-drama on America’s role in the global sphere and its much-debated commitment to combating terrorism elsewhere in the world as well as what many would argue instituting its own form of US terrorism in its place. Whatever your opinion about that, it’s weighty material, and more than one person has claimed that Zero Dark Thirty will stand the test of history as a companion piece to the numerous books, documentaries, and journal articles written about America’s involvement in the Middle East during the past decade. Continue reading →

Review: Drive

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Edited

The day has finally come (or re-emerged after a long dormant absence, but more on that later). One of cinema’s most esoteric, obtuse sounding pairings has finally been realized. Drive, the new film from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, combines two very dissimilar cinematic worlds: the art film and the action film. It’s all kinetic action and flair, but particularly in the later half, it adopts a distinctly 70’s angular, stylized European moody crime film vibe more interested in abstract bodies in motion than bloodletting and tension. It’s about as strange a pairing as can be found in the modern cinematic landscape. Yet it’s wholly wonderful for the same reason, a peek into the past where genre fare did not imply smug grandiosity. And it could only have been made by Nicolas Winding Refn.

Driver (Ryan Gosling) drives. By day, when not working as a mechanic, he drives for films. But by night, he drives for anyone, no questions asked, as long as they pay. Naturally, this means he’s involved with criminals, but, just as he does with anything, he distances himself to keep from getting caught. He has no real friends to speak of, and he doesn’t have much of a way with words either. But one day he helps his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), and a bond develops between the two, matched only by an equally strong bond between Driver and Irene’s son Benicio. And, as is the case with any movie like this, their interaction changes (at least one of) their lives forever. Continue reading →

Review: The Tree of Life

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The Tree of Life isn’t easily explained through conventional filmic analysis. I don’t have the resources within me, for instance, to explain why Sean Penn is in this movie, or why director Terrence Malick felt the need to spend thousands of dollars on a CGI-heavy recreation of the forming of the world. But, for every fault to be found in the film, none can replace the eternal face that I fell – positively, undeniably fell – under the director’s spell for just about every minute of the 135 minutes I spent watching this film, in a way I never have in a movie theater before. The human story found here doesn’t recall my own childhood in the slightest, and yet watching the film, I couldn’t help but feel connected to not merely the characters but the world they inhabit in a way I didn’t quite understand at first. I felt something that, if I may, might be the foremost (and perhaps only, but that says more about me than the film) spiritual experience in my life. I wasn’t so much watching a film as accepting it and letting it wash over me. I wasn’t “analyzing” shots or dialogue, as I tend to do in order to stake my claim as a film critic worth his salt. I was just there, and also not there – in some sort of weird limbo where I existed less as a physical body and more as conception of myself. It was an experience, but perhaps, a passive one. I let the film take me and it accepted – part of me is still swimming around in there. Continue reading →

Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel

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Edited

Two years after the quietly affecting Moonrise Kingdom, a film which highlighted the best aspects of Wes Anderson’s work (visual composition, whimsy, formal symmetry redefining the objects of childhood) while moving away from his sometimes stuffy pretentiousness, The Grand Budapest Hotel doubles down on rigid, intricate, potentially suffocating framing only to open up the seems a little and air out some of Anderson’s internal demons. Admittedly, it sacrifices some of the childlike whimsy which highlighted his last two films, Moonrise Kingdom and Fantastic Mr. Fox, for a more openly stylized, boxy, comedic farce that still maintains a deceptively sweet center. Yet, repeat viewings bear a different beast than the clinical monstrosity it initially feigns, revealing more about Anderson’s intent and the complexities lying within the dense yet cavernous hotel of the film’s title. This may not be Anderson at his finest, but it’s a stirring example of his filmmaking prowess which lies comfortably within his canon and carves out its own temperamental niche. Around the mid-2000s, it seemed as if Anderson was simply content repeating himself, but this late career renaissance has proven not only that he won’t rest on his laurels but that he is actively invested in a bifurcated, simultaneous self-critique and a lovely pushing of his aesthetic as far as it can possibly take him.

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Review: 12 Years a Slave

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As a history major in college, I’ve taken numerous classes specializing on slavery in the US. I thought I could understand something of the history, the pain, the suffering, the anguish. I thought, to whatever extent it was possible for a white kid in the early 21st century to know, I knew. I was wrong. Sitting in the theater watching 12 Years a Slave, I felt the inescapable grasp of history around my neck, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Never before have I felt so clearly and achingly the tragedies upon which America is built. I felt helpless. My reaction was visceral; I gritted my teeth, I began to shake uncontrollably, all the more so when I realized how, even with 12 Years a Slave, I still couldn’t “know” fully. 12 Years a Slave is the best “Oscar” film in the better part of a decade. But it isn’t just a great film, it’s a necessary one, and it is all the more so because it is painfully aware of what it leaves out of the story and what we may never know. As a story, it plays out in insinuating gazes and implicating glances, all fissures into history that demand that we confront the film not as an objective portal into the past but as a subjective interpretation of it. Continue reading →