Thu 7 [Blog entry.]

Hana (Hirokazu Kore-eda): 48

Idiocracy (Mike Judge): 72

12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu): 92
[It’s always intimidating when an early film sets impossible standards, but Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest, winner of the Camera D'or at Cannes earlier this year (and given said prize by the estimable Dardenne brothers), fires on all cylinders: formally and dramatically impeccable, minute in its development of theme and character, it might be a masterpiece. Like last year's Romanian fave The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, it projects resignation in the face of national incompetence, an attitude that may just have been inherently conducive to great art. Other commonalities between the two include alcoholic men who take their grudging wives for granted, though this is no tendentious attack on the nation's ills-or even, as Lazarescu was, a plea for adequate public services-but instead an attempt to salvage remnants of national pride from a new and not-so-improved era. Said grumbling alcoholics are the heroes of 12:08, shambling to gather evidence of a local revolution circa the fall of Romania's Communist government, with the irritable Jderescu interrogating the chronically unreliable Manescu on an amateur talk show that may have benefited from more planning. Middle-aged nostalgia and the displacement of the younger generation comprise Porumboiu's unresolved death-match. Formally, however, he tries to convey a sense of the characters' lives more than the overt concepts he's wrestling with, harking most overtly to Rohmer in a My Night at Maud's-like shot of a car, tethered to a Christmas tree (harking back to the Christmas when the car’s two passengers were a Santa and a boy), driving as firecrackers pop in the background and specks of rain drip down the lens-so much significance in such an inconspicuous grab-bag of details. But Porumboiu’s also joined the troop of bipartite directors for the sake of confronting his own weaknesses: the first half, using static set-ups and shifting locales, has a sense of grinding inertia that constantly reasserts itself; the second, seen from the cameras of the inept cameraman filming talk show, proves that both the static long-take (read: concentrated, passive observation, a la the characters' tedious lives, filled with self-abnegation and a fear of luxury) and editing and movement (read: a searching sensibility, and an ostensibly active attempt to find the "heart" of an event, a la whether Manescu was the town square, and whether that constitutes a revolution) leave out some of the most important pieces-in the first place, collective knowledge, and in the second, personal knowledge. The two together give history meaning; this film is a futile, but infinitely admirable attempt to reconcile them.]

Lights in the Dusk (Aki Kaurismaki): 66
[In contrast, Lights in the Dusk is far less ambitious, but satisfying in its rote way. The final part in a so-called Loser Trilogy, Lights' loser is Koistinen, a security guard hampered by his weakness for and distrust of women. Kaurismaki’s efforts to make Koistinen’s emotional wounds plausible are the opposite of painstaking: just by saying "hi," the hero invites disdain from a bevy of onlookers at a bar. So our identification with the poor soul is a given, but the film rides by on a deceptive surface bent on neutralizing the value of images; Kaurismaki locates great epiphanies in small gestures-the inserts of hands here are near-Bressonian-and winkingly elides pain, holding his camera on a doorway to suggest violence. But finally, Kaurismaki’s real accomplishment is making Koistinen’s sexual frustration meaningful rather than pathetic: we root for him to concede to doubt and faith in different situations, and in doing so we experience rather than simply witness his inability to reconcile affection and malice, projected in the form of a blank, occasionally menacing stare.]

Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan): 42
[I took issue with Ceylan's prizewinner Distant when I first saw it a few years back, but couldn't articulate why the ostensibly artful and distanced film wasn’t on my wavelength. Now after seeing his new Climates, I’m confident in labeling Ceylan a pale shadow of his forebearers (Distant : Tarkovsky :: Climates : Antonioni). Seemingly delving into autobiography, Ceylan has cast himself as a passive-aggressive artiste prick with a disintegrating marriage to a woman played by his wife, Ebru Ceylan, and if this is the rough outline of their relationship, he unintentionally justifies the real-life wife’s perspective wholesale by rendering his own null. Ceylan employs the standard arty affectations in perhaps the least productive way possible; it's one thing to renounce your human faults, using the cinema as a confession, and another, more revealing thing to integrate those faults into your film’s aesthetic fabric: both Ceylan the filmmaker and character have a landscape fetish-mined in the film for what feel like interchangeable declarations that his characters are isolated by the bigness of it all. They’re also both insensitive to women, as evidenced in Ceylan's misguided use of ellipses in a rape scene seemingly bent on carrying us from the woman's Fear, to Seduction, to Terror, to Complicity, rather than those fuzzier, in-between moments. I'm usually glad when auteurs display humility, letting their weaknesses shine, but this scene rubbed me the wrong way: Ceylan resembles that douchebag we’ve all encountered who finally rationalizes, in describing a forced sexual encounter, that she was ultimately "totally on me," and I’d assume that only rigorous denial could sustain such an attitude.]

Born and Bred (Pablo Trapero): W/O
[I was intrigued by Pablo Trapero's 2002 El Bonaerense, which to paraphrase myself, was "Terrence Malick does Training Day." His new Born and Bred isn’t inept, but it (or what I sat through of it) is bad: from the rest of what I know of Trapero's career, it seems he’s grown progressively conventional over the years, the interesting parts of his work eroding into incoherence. I was suspicious from the first few minutes when an elaborate sequence shot took great care to reveal that the life of an overworked young professional with a wife and kid had a-surprise!-pretty tense life. By the time Trapero used this sole self-evident character trait as a means to make a cheap, explosive plot twist additionally cheap and explosive, I knew I was in trouble. But I only had the chutzpah to bail on the film altogether when Trapero's aesthetic of subjective angst became overbearing, using a man's grief to give me grief.]

Kinshasa Palace (Zeka Laplaine): 61
[Confession: I'm almost certain Laplaine's Kinshasa Palace is a documentary, but I wouldn’t go beyond the 80% range as far as placing bets. All I’m sure of is that it involves some guy looking for a brother named Max, splicing together found footage and family interviews in an effort to understand if not locate him. The unnamed narrator, presumably Laplaine, is also practically unseen, at least from the face; legs, hands, and silhouettes, on the other hand, keep popping up at a regular clip. It's a personal documentary in the mode of Citizen Kane, a self-consciously vain pursuit to encapsulate a life through the words of others. Max's parents and siblings offer testimony; his children are his Rosebud. Most of the witnesses have undergone some form of displacement: Max's father laments not being able to adjust to a new culture after 50 years of living in Portugal, whereas Max's sister was sent from her African homeland to a ritzy European boarding school at an early age and remembers years of longing for a more gregarious, co-dependent environment. The underlying impression, then, is that we long for the life we're accustomed to, and although the convictions of youth are held so loosely-e.g., Max’s little son, asked of his father’s absence, mockingly suggests that Max should have to account for his location but then bursts out laughing, passionate but thinking himself too young to be authoritative-they're bound to resurface. It's almost appropriate that Laplaine's film makes such an effort to be inclusive and all-encompassing at the expense of comprehensibility, since at heart it is simple and regressive, evoking our first desire to love openly and exploring its hindrances.]

The Host (Bong Joon-ho): 54
[If nothing else, Bong's The Host made me reflect on the way Koreans cry out in pain, which is seemingly more effusive than stateside weeping by default (for counterexample, European tears are by and large more subdued than ours). This revelation came as I tried to distinguish between the innate aspects of Korean culture and the more overtly stylized elements of Bong's work, and had considerable trouble parsing. But in his 2003 procedural Memories of Murder, Bong held the Korean police force accountable for its deficiencies-either an surplus of power or intelligence-and in Host the targets are cross-eyed, down-talking Americans, inexplicably driven to dump formaldehyde in the Han river, which inexplicably creates the titular monster. There’s a lot left unexplained here, but the ambiguity tends to obscure rather than expand motivation; an explanation beyond "'cause they’re from Bush’s America" would be nice. But sparks fly when Bong hones in on his countrymen, per usual. Our heroes, a rambunctious extended family determined to find their daughter (presumably captured or eaten by the Host), make Little Miss Sunshine's band of misfits look functional by comparison. Maybe it’s just that Bong has the balls to milk their commiseration over the little girl for lugubrious comedy, or to push the deadbeat dad’s irresponsibility beyond decency by offering his precious a beer. Indeed, The Host is funnier than it is exciting—there's actually a rather ugly, sadistic aspect to the way Bong kills characters off, cheaply setting up tranquility only to watch it be rudely interrupted for the unfailingly bloodthirsty midnight crowd. Such concessions are Host's downfall; however fun it occasionally is, it lacks a certain something: a unifying reason to exist.]

Toi, Waguih (Namir Abdel Messeeh): 43

These Girls (Tahani Rached): 50
[If her subjects were more scantily clad, Rached might qualify as Egypt’s own Larry Clark; at first, her documentary These Girls seems to vacillate between ethnography and reveling in the pleasures of youthful oblivion like no film since Wassup Rockers. Rached captures personality first, cultural symptom second, most evident in her portrayal of the slum's resident spunky badass Tata. Tata talks about using her physical strength to dodge rape, and we nod our heads in approval. Tata runs around psychotically hitting guys with water bottles, however, and we're not quite sure. While Tata deserves a feature of her own, many of the film's observations rely on a similar dynamic between abstract issues and specific situations. As expected, there are numerous descriptions of social customs, but each is followed by a relevant piece of drama-e.g. we hear that scars honor men and dishonor men, informing a tomboy's demands that her friend slice her cheek with potent ambiguity. Even better, the heft doesn't consist purely of feminist outrage: just as Rached blames absent families for girls entering into prostitution, one of their clients testifies that he only resorts to hookers for lack of having what it takes to raise a family. The movie only suffers from a scattered, inconsequential quality-while consistently illuminating, Rached needlessly ups the dramatic ante, emphasizing her subjects' biggest hopes and fears without recognizing her own observational talents.]

Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako): 34
[At its best before anyone says a word: the first witness has his say by saying nothing, and it's instructive to note that one of the few times Sissako has told his actors to keep their mouth shut actually registered as poetic, for me. There is a conflict here, namely between keeping with the greater order and projecting a singular voice, but the problem is that Sissako is unable to inflect performances with this dilemma. Indeed, all of these speeches are "impassioned," and that's the problem: letting my mind wander away from the prosaic proceedings, I realized that a debate on globalization had an emotional rhythm indistinguishable from Annie Get Your Gun's "I Can Do Anything Better Than You Can," consisting of a kind of bloodless antagonism that is the result of a filmmaker unwilling to present the oppressed in a less-than-symbolic light for lack of purposefulness. But even the film's lighter moments struck me as either coy or simplistic. I enjoyed the opening and closing musical numbers, but only on grounds of infectious funkiness, and I was bothered by the implications of a subtitle-free rendition of a folk song by an effusive old man; the song is deliberately stripped of so many potentially revealing meanings only to demand emotional face value: feel this now. No thanks. And a mock-western starring Danny Glover, Elia Suleiman (!), and Zeka Laplaine (!!), features the most condescending edit of the year: an onscreen "a film by" credit is followed by a villager sitting against the side of a dilapidated building. Translation: "My films are 'by' the people." Good filmmakers embody this philosophy rather than flaunt it; Sissako’s brand of selflessness is masturbatory.]

V-R (Kyle Canterbury): 64

18 Videos; #8 (Kyle Canterbury): 68

PSA Project: 09 Body Count (Cynthia Madansky): 24

PSA Project: 10 Occupation (Cynthia Madansky): 24

PSA Project: 14 Target (Cynthia Madansky): 24

hysteria (Christina Battle): 49

Kristall (Christoph Girardet and Matthias Muller): 6

Nachtstuck (Peter Tscherkassky): 65

Afraid So (Jay Rosenblatt): 63

Memo to Pic Desk (Chris Kennedy and Anna van der Meulen): 47

Roads of Kiarostami (Abbas Kiarostami):

Tsuioku (Yuiko Matsuyama): 44
[My first foray into this year’s Wavelengths collection kicked off with its most challenging, rigorous pieces, both by Michigan video artist Canterbury. His V-R and 18 Videos; #8 are thoroughly abstract works shifting shape, color, and geometry in patterns by turns dazzlingly musical and rigidly mathematical. The latter is especially impressive, making light inextricable from depth and washing its plane of verticals and horizontals in waves of color. Another artist with multiple pieces in the program, however, embodies the most simplistic uses of the avant-garde medium. Madansky’s PSA pieces are only notable for their facile bluntness. "Stop the killing," she tells us, to which I responded, "Okay, Cynthia, sure, I promise I won’t kill any more people from now on." hysteria is a disorienting assemblage of eroded drawings of condemned women that gets a little interesting when the imagery flows fast enough to disarm viewer cognition, but on the whole it’s dismissable. Kristall seemed merely empty-headed at first glance, approximating an Academy Awards montage of "Moments in Shininess," with myriad clips assembled with an total disregard for their compositional qualities or emotional timbre. But its long ellipses of black punctuated by... LOUD NOISES struck me as viscerally upsetting and totally indefensible. You made me uncomfortable; live with the shitty rating I gave your film like I had to live with the anxious feeling that it’d give me a heart attack. Tscherkassky presents a counterattack to the preceding idiocy with Nachtstuck, a fine-tuned mash-up to Muller’s careless mix-tape; the way film-stock is altered and layered here is more hallucinogenic than abrasive. Afraid So is a funny-tragic accumulation of inferences, brilliant for its suggestiveness, timing, and use of Garrison Keiller’s PowerBar-dry vocals. Memo to Pic Desk, some kind of rumination on the relationship between photojournalism and copy-editing, remains fuzzy and elusive, a puzzle I simply couldn't crack. Roads of Kiarostami-evidently not a paean to humility-hardly belies its self-aggrandizing title. Roads is unintentionally hilarious enough to enjoy, but I’m not prepared to reject New Kiarostami purely on grounds of pretension and ridiculousness. Indeed, pretension should seem to directly oppose the ideals to which Kiarostami aspires, namely an aggressively modest aesthetic perhaps even more impoverished than Luc Moullet's "cinema of poverty," remarkable for its lack of effort; a sequence in which Abbas runs after some birds makes you wonder if a severely autistic little boy would do any differently. Kiarostami's new work, then, seems to ponder whether elegance is compatible with intelligence, and comes up empty. His biggest fans, one of whom told me to shut up after I'd burst into uncontrollable laughter for the nth time, should learn to laugh, however. Just because he's deliberately abject and believes in the poetry of every little thing, some people seem to believe Kiarostami is the second coming of Christ; to others, Roads is more instructive in inciting the mentality behind the crucifixion. I’m in the middle of the road-because some roads, we must remember, are winding, while others are straight. Lastly, Tsuioku is nostalgic, and pretty, and stuff.]

Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog): 40
[Herzog's latest follows a slate of documentaries that skillfully blend ethical restraint and subjects whose passion lends great contrast to that restraint. But in a fictional context, he lets his own passions override any distance he might have had, to Rescue's great detriment. Bale's Dieter crosses the line between appealingly affable and simply uninteresting; he's heroic in virtually every imaginable way, ratcheting up a truly absurd number of labels ripe for admiration, memorably Savior of Midgets, Consumer of Worms, and Nice Guy Who Compliments the Girlfriend Back at Home for Being Intelligent as Opposed to Hot. In addition to being superfluously awesome, Bale is badly directed: he tells an interrogator, "I never wanted to fly!" with such agreeably modest confidence that we can only imagine that Herzog is trying to give his close late friend the benefit of the doubt, rather than that he actually believes Dieter’s convictions were that unambiguous and likeable, because that's just dumb.]

The Bet Collector (Jeffrey Jeturian): 37

Rain Dogs (Ho Yuhang): 52

7 Years (Jean-Pierre Hattu): 70

Blessed Are the Dreams of Men (Jem Cohen): 65

NYC Weights and Measures (Jem Cohen): 68

Building a Broken Mousetrap (Jem Cohen): 51

Offside (Jafar Panahi): 45

Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo): 86

Fiction (Cesc Gay): 64

The Dog Pound (Manuel Nieto): 43

Bliss (Sheng Zhimin): 58

Circa 1960 (Chris Curreri): 64

The Zone of Total Eclipse (Mika Taanila): 65

Seascape #1 Night, China Shenzhen 05 (Olivo Barbieri): 68

Silk Ties (Jim Jennings): 59

Song and Solitude (Nathaniel Dorsky): 79

Summer '04 (Stefan Krohmer): 77

Days of Glory (Rachid Bouchareb): 25

Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais): 69

Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina): 67

Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke): 53

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-Liang): 60

Belle toujours (Manoel de Oliveira): ZZZ

Fantasma (Lisandro Alonso): 39

The Untouchable (Benoit Jacquot): 59

Private Property (Joachim Lafosse): 71

Black Book (Paul Verhoeven): 56

The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky): 46

Dong (Jia Zhang-ke): 41

Exiled (Johnny To): 49

Day Night Day Night (Julia Loktev): 68

August Days (Marc Recha): 42

Summer Palace (You Le): 44

Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul): 51

To Get to Heaven First You Have to Die (Jamshed Usmonov): 65

Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa): 55

Flanders (Bruno Dumont): 76

Invisible Waves (Pen-ek Ratanaruang): 69

Taxidermia (Gyorgy Palfi): 52

Fay Grim (Hal Hartley): 62

The Black Dahlia (Brian de Palma): 53