Author: Addison Engelking

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Hard To Be A God


Hard to Be A God (2014; dir. Aleksei German)—You’re probably gonna need some strong coffee and a long, hot shower after this one. German’s fifth and final film—a pessimistic reimagining of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s SF novel about a Russian historian (Leonid Yarmolnik) sent to a parallel Earth that’s stuck in the Middle Ages because the Renaissance never happened—is less a movie than a compendious, punishing sensory assault designed to show that humanity is the lowliest, crudest, most pathetic life form in the cosmos. The sounds of struggle and survival frequently overtake the perambulations of its main character: with two crucial exceptions, the soundtrack is dominated by a ceaseless concerto of sniffling, coughing, puking, pissing, farting, moaning and wailing. The visuals are equally dense and alienating: aside from the Russian historian’s inexplicably white shirt, everything else worn or seen is tainted by sweat, saliva, mucus, rain, mud, sleet and snow. Garbage, fetid mists, animal carcasses and human entrails drape the screen, fog the camera lens and foul up the many persecutions and power struggles that drive the film’s plot.

So here’s where I try to convince you that Hard To Be A God is great, because I think it is. First, that endlessly variegated and phantasmagoric production design sets it apart from nearly every other recent SF or fantasy film I’ve seen. The tactile, fetid universe German and his collaborators fashioned looks nothing like the depthless, sanitized, CGI-heavy landscapes that blight everything from The Hobbit to Avengers: Age of Ultron. Second, German’s philosophical and social criticisms do emerge from the muck after a while, although they are hard to recognize at first. In spite of the misery it put me through and the revulsion and despair it conjured up—or maybe because of those things—I’m really glad I saw it in a theater; as soon as I finish the Strugatskys’ novel, I’m going to enter its universe again. And because Hard to Be A God is now available on numerous instant video platforms, you can do the same.

Grade: A

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Mr. Hulot’s Holiday

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953/1978; dir. Jacques Tati)—It’s finally summer time, which means it’s finally time for you ditch your job for a while and have a little fun in the sun. Yet in today’s entertainment- and distraction-crazed modern world, trying to have fun is often as spirit-trampling as several weekends’ worth of unpaid overtime. For far too many people, Gang of Four’s question remains unanswerable: “The problem of leisure/what to do for pleasure?”

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Jacques Tati’s take on the agonies of vacation, accurately diagnoses this condition. His film also offers some potential remedies—but he’d never dream of telling you which set pieces represent the problem and which ones represent the way out. Tati’s sweetly funny, discreetly melancholy second feature also introduces the heroically indifferent Mr. Hulot (played by Tati himself)—an inscrutable middle-aged Frenchman loved by children, tolerated by dogs and almost always out of step with the uptight, status-conscious, overly busy, overly bourgie adults around him. Hulot says maybe two dozen words during the film, but his tottering, stiff-legged physical comedy mirrors the sheepish timidity and brazen entitlement in foreign places that distinguish tourists from locals the world over. Mr. Hulot’s Holiday is also an epic of absent-mindedness and misunderstanding; it unfolds in a sunny climate but is aided by a steady drizzle of visual and auditory jokes that don’t register as jokes until you’ve watched the movie a half-dozen times. (One of my favorite gags relies on the Orion’s-belt symmetry of a phonograph record, the back of Hulot’s head, and a piano stool.) Just like your own vacation, it’s restorative and boring and aimless and overplanned and too long and not long enough.
Grade: A

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Film Features Film/TV

Saint Laurent

Although it’s two-and-a-half hours long, Saint Laurent is, thanks to its brilliant surfaces and luxurious aimlessness, pleasurably sensuous and frustratingly sketchy. You probably won’t feel anything but boredom and relief immediately after you’ve seen it, though. But give it enough time to slink around inside your brain and caress your neural tissues and its pleasures eventually emerge.

Surprisingly, director/co-writer Bertrand Bonello’s epically mundane picture about 10 years in the life of a great fashion designer is the second Yves Saint Laurent biopic released in the last two years. Jill Lespert’s 2014 Yves Saint Laurent managed to win both the approval of Saint Laurent’s business partner and former lover Pierre Bergé and the right to use some original designs and outfits from the YSL archive. Bonello’s film is thus the “unauthorized” version of Saint Laurent’s life, but its refusal to follow the biopic’s traditional rise-and-fall sine curves more than compensates for any sartorial inaccuracies or knockoffs.

Gaspard Ulliel

Much like Mike Leigh’s enlightening and exhausting Mr. Turner, Saint Laurent attempts to get at its subject (embodied here by Gaspard Ulliel) through the work he did rather than the stories others told about him. Instead of rehashing those inspirational triumphs against all odds that we’ve come to dread from such films, Bonello offers several isolated scenes of unexpected pithiness and power. An early split-screen montage of Saint Laurent’s influential 1968 and 1971 lines juxtaposes sleek gamines modeling his latest creations with news footage of Black Panthers and anti-war riots. Interesting times, those — one group dressed like soldiers to battle injustice while another group dressed like scientists to contemplate sleeve lengths.

At every turn, important information about Saint Laurent’s life and career trajectory is ignored, abstracted, or repeated until it loses all meaning. During one crucial business meeting, the focus slowly shifts from a discussion of branding and intellectual property to the straggly bangs and bored countenance of a female translator. “Who is this woman?” replaces “Will YSL be able to secure his naming rights?” as the scene’s chief mystery. We never get an answer.

Similarly, Saint Laurent’s mastery of all things stylish is always assumed. But Bonello includes only one long take where Saint Laurent transforms a woman (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) from a mousy lady to a regal diva with a few short instructions that reaffirm his elfin confidence and his impeccable taste.

One of the few concessions to conventional biopics involves Saint Laurent’s affair with Jacques de Bascher (Louis Garrel), a dangerous type whose free spirit enrages Bergé (Jérémie Renier). But the film succinctly explains YSL’s attraction: his drugged make-out session with Jacques is far sexier than an earlier game of sexual hide-and-seek with his friend.

In short, Saint Laurent is like a volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time if Proust was a nearly silent figure whose genius was expressed not through long sentences but through fabrics, colors, and patterns.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Fargo: Season 1

Fargo (Season One) (2014; dirs. Randall Einhorn, Adam Bernstein, Colin Bucksey, Matt Shakman, and Scott Winant)—Last year, HBO’s True Detective introduced millions of TV viewers to the pleasures of well-constructed, stand-alone crime serials and Matthew McConaughey’s drawling, freshman-year gibberish about What It All Means. So if you’re looking to kill some time between now and True Detective’s Season Two premiere this Sunday, might I suggest that you binge-watch FX’s ten-episode riff on one of the most overrated Coen brothers movies? Trust me, it will be worth your while.

I’m a film guy first and foremost, but it’s pretty much indisputable that Fargo the series is visually richer and more imaginative than Fargo the movie. For once, the tight, slick, mostly motionless close-ups that caulk most TV dramas conjure menace and mystery instead of underscoring their bland, plot-driven functionality and expediency. The episode directors can do flashy and tricky, too: there’s a two-minute massacre shot from the exterior of a building that simultaneously recalls Robert Bresson’s sound-over-image primacy and an extended joke in a Droopy Dog cartoon.

But executive producer and head writer Noah Hawley’s debt to recent, much better Coen brothers films like No Country For Old Men, True Grit, Burn After Reading and especially A Serious Man is apparent. Like those films, Hawley’s Fargo cultivates an atmosphere of spiritual exhaustion and existential resignation. The good people in his show also struggle mightily with perhaps the key question of human existence: in a world where crime, violence and general human venality are without measure, what’s the point of trying to fight it?

Although stubborn, resourceful Bemidji police deputy Molly Solverson (the miraculous Alison Tolman) is less concerned with this dilemma than bumbling Duluth police officer Gus Grimley (the seldom-better Colin Hanks), both of them bond over their numerous frightening run-ins with the snakes and predators at large in their respective necks of the woods. Solverson’s chief nemesis is the insurance salesman-turned-murderer Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman, wondrously furtive and unlikeable), while Grimley’s boogeyman is the sadistic, sardonic Anton Chigurgh clone Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton, wondrously terrifying and unstoppable). Realism is shown the door after the first episode, which makes the series’ fabulist elements go down easier and makes the opening-shot assertion that “THIS IS A TRUE STORY” funnier every time it appears.

Most importantly, Hawley’s storytelling and characterization actually dignifies the aw-shirr folks of the upper Midwest instead of setting them up for cheap, you-talk-funny laughs. His dialogue reveals both the heroic stoicism of the expression “Aw, geez” and the hidden poetry of monosyllabic dialogue. (Some examples: “Here it is. You’re screwed”; “I don’t want to die in this way”; “You know what wolves do. They hunt; “God told you not to park here?” ; “You live in the world. What do you think?”) How good is this show, then? So darn good I watched the whole thing straight through twice.

Grade: A

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

City Of Gold


City of Gold (2015; dir. Laura Gabbert)— I used to think Los Angeles was a smog-choked, characterless place where burnouts and sellouts spent what Faulkner described as “changeless monotonous beautiful days without end…unmarred by rain or weather.” But thanks in large part to the tireless, hyper-informed and hyper-informative efforts of Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, L.A. is now one of my favorite cities in America and my favorite place to eat in the whole wide world. Although City of Gold is peppered with appreciate commentary from the numerous hyphen-American L.A. chefs whose reputations were made by one of Gold’s empathetic raves, its recipe is simple and easy to follow. For most of the film Gabbert plants her camera in the passenger seat of Gold’s truck while he cruises the nooks, crannies and strip malls of the Los Angeles megalopolis in search of good food and street-level cultural knowledge. Imagine a 96-minute episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives hosted by Guy Fieri’s intelligent, articulate, humble and possibly mildly autistic twin and you’ll have some idea of what it plays like. Unfortunately, it’s only popped up at film festivals and on the West Coast; hopefully it will find better distribution soon.

I haven’t eaten at all of the restaurants mentioned or profiled in City of Gold, but I’ve eaten at most of them. So I can heartily recommend whatever Ludo Lefevbre is making at Trois Mec—that is, if you can score a ticket through his hyper-competitive, every-other-Friday-at-10AM-Central-Time online reservation system. I can also vouch for the Ethiopian doro wat at Meals by Genet, any of the moles at Guelaguetza, the osh at Attari Sandwich Shop, the chicken and tamarind nahm prik at Jitlada (pronounced Jit-la-DAH—act like you know), the kimchee quesadilla from the Kogi trucks, and as much of the daily menu as you can get into your belly at Guerrilla Tacos.

Grade: A-

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Iris

Iris (2015; dir. Albert Maysles)—At long last, definitive proof of the link between shopping and immortality: Iris proves that the one who dies with the most toys doesn’t win because the one with the most toys apparently never dies. This fun, flirty, casual documentary about businesswoman/interior designer/high-class clothing empress and all-around sweetie Iris Apfel is both a glossy portrait of a great New York City character and an object lesson in the long-term health benefits of retail therapy. Apfel, a self-described “octogenarian starlet” who’s actually 93 (but who’s going to blame a pretty girl like her for fibbing about her age?), treats Maysles’ camera like an intimate acquaintance she’s known for years; she’s chatty, witty and curious but never gossipy, sarcastic or nosy. It’s easy to see why Carl, her centenarian husband of 66+ years, looks at her with ageless, amused enchantment.

It’s also easy to see why Carl lets her dress him up in whatever she thinks he looks good in. Her vaunted sense of style, like her gigantic, infinity-symbol-shaped black glasses, is loud, joyous and liberating; at times she pads herself so heavily in brightly colored fabrics, feathers, necklaces, bracelets and costume jewelry that she looks like a cross between a benevolent gay witch and a little kid sticking her head out of an overstuffed toybox. Her age-defying joie de vivre is no passing fad or put-on for the smitten cameras that surround her, and her gnarled, tree-root hands aren’t a sign of decline—they’re simply two additional accessories that go well with nearly everything.

Iris is a communal experience; watch it with a bunch of friends or in a theater with a large audience so you can enjoy the waves of delighted chortles and flabbergasted barks that break whenever Apfel appears in a new outfit. Maysles’ final film offers grandiloquence with a smile and a wink. It’s the cat’s pajamas.
Grade: A-

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Korengal

Korengal (2014; dir. Sebastian Junger)—Here’s the second paragraph from author and former CIA man Ray McGovern’s article “How To Honor Memorial Day,” which was published a couple days ago on Antiwar.com: “First, let’s be clear on at least this much: the 4,500 U.S. troops killed in Iraq—so far—and the 2,350 killed in Afghanistan—so far—did not ‘fall.’ They were wasted on no-win battlefields by politicians and generals—cheered on by neocon pundits and mainstream ‘journalists’—almost none of whom gave a rat’s patootie about the real-life-and-death troops. They were throwaway soldiers.” And here’s what American combat veteran Brendan O’Byrne says to anyone who tells him he shouldn’t feel guilty about his Afghanistan tour because he did what he had to do when he was over there: “I didn’t have to do shit.” O’Byrne is just one of many soft-featured young men with thousand-yard stares and true war stories to tell who were interviewed in Junger’s remarkable sequel to his 2010 documentary Restrepo, which chronicled the daily lives of several soldiers stationed in a remote, hostile and unforgiving Afghan outpost named after a beloved medic killed in action. Restrepo trafficked in immediate, spontaneous, unpredictable wartime experience; Korengal is a more
meditative and complex work that asks for—and often receives—both truth and some measure of reconciliation from its subjects. By giving these men the time and space to articulate and explore their personal codes (“You have to respect the enemy”), their provisional joys (“What’s not to like about a giant machine gun?”) and their ever-present fears (“Damn! Life is getting weird up here…”) Korengal performs an invaluable public service. Their many and varied testimonials wind up saying the same thing all meaningful war memorials say: never forget. Grade: A

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Film Features Film/TV

Good Kill

CREDIT: Good Kill

Behold the gaunt, bony, rodent-like face of Ethan Hawke, who often spackles his strongest performances with the feints and dodges of a scared, reluctant rule-breaker too dim-witted to completely cover his tracks. Hawke’s distracted, sad shiftiness — which makes it seem as though he’s trying (and failing) to pull one over on you — serves him well in Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill, a crisp, smart, talky film about the escalating absurdities of the ruthless, endless war on terror.

Although Good Kill is set in 2010, its hand-wringing over combat ethics and shell-shock remain current. Hawke plays Major Thomas Egan, a middle-aged Air Force pilot whose latest tour of duty is part flight simulation and part desk-jockey drudgery. From inside a cramped, windowless mobile bunker on a military base not far from his suburban Las Vegas home, Egan and his fellow airmen sit at their computers and watch live UVA (unmanned aerial vehicle) video footage of potential targets in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. Whenever Egan and company are given the order to strike, they abstract their actions and its destructive consequences by repeating a grim mantra: “Missiles away. Time of flight: 10 seconds.” They are then rewarded with footage of faraway people, places, and buildings blowing up.

It’s clear that the job is getting to Egan; the coals in his backyard grill at night remind him of the fiery destruction he helped unleash during the day. Plus, he no longer feels like a soldier — he misses the “fear” of actual manned flight. His drinking is getting worse, his relationship with his wife Molly (January Jones) is falling apart, and he can’t seem to explain to himself why he’s following the orders he’s being given.

Egan’s dilemma is not lost on Lieutenant Colonel Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood), his superior and occasional confidant.

In contrast to Hawke’s hoarse underplaying, Greenwood imbues his weary philosopher-coach role with swagger and gusto. He gets to curse and rage at new recruits while standing in front of a giant American flag, and he also gets some of the film’s most self-consciously aphoristic dialogue: “Drones aren’t going anywhere. They’re going everywhere.” Although Johns is too on the nose a bit too often about the subtle catch-22s of the new war technology, his willingness to think about the paradoxes of his job seem visionary when contrasted with the devastatingly cruel orders given in perfectly scrubbed English by a CIA member (Peter Coyote, literally phoning it in) whose directives push Johns, Egan and others into grayer, darker moral corners.

Niccol keeps his ideas about war in the foreground while the suspenseful action unfolding on the monitors remains chillingly remote and abstract. The drone strikes and explosions are both devastating and completely silent, and there’s some artsy stylistic rhymes thrown in, too: Through Niccol’s use of extremely high-angle establishing shots for both rural villages and suburban backyards, the parallels between Vegas and Afghanistan grow more obvious. People may live and work in these places, but the eye in the sky sees no meaningful distinctions.

Good Kill
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Pitch Perfect 2

Pitch Perfect 2 is more self-aware and self-consciously “edgy” than its not-entirely-wholesome predecessor. However, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if this hugely profitable sequel fails to engender the same levels of love and affection as the original film: the drop-off in quality is sad, and it too often replaces the joyful noises of group singing with the sickening thud of easy jokes falling flat.

Released in 2012, Pitch Perfect’s best qualities—its non-stop sass, its coy takes on college romance, and its generous female characterizations—were explicitly linked to unhip, old-fashioned notions of community, cooperation, solidarity and democracy. Whether they were squabbling or singing their hearts out, the all-girl Barden Bellas often looked and acted like a good group that just needed to get it together. Their all-for-one spirit was most visible in Pitch Perfect’s two defining musical numbers: a “riff-off” in a drained swimming pool that revives “No Diggity” as a modern American spiritual, and a final number that—and believe me, I wish this wasn’t true—brings tears of joy to my eyes every time I watch it.

Pitch Perfect bounces along like a great Lily Allen album; Pitch Perfect 2 stumbles along like a thrown-together collection of demos, outtakes and solo experiments from any pop star who wants to be taken seriously. This is a careless, placid, steer-like entertainment which bides its time and chews its cud as it awaits the online butchering that will give the masses shorter, tidier, easily consumable clips. Anna Kendrick will endure no matter what, though: she’s a sotto voce wiseacre who overcompensates for her tiny, sticklike stature—she’s always looking up at someone—by spitting lines at His Girl Friday speed until either she or whoever she’s talking to runs out of gas. But Rebel Wilson, a.k.a. Fat Amy, doesn’t escape as cleanly. Her natural deadpan and comic timing hint at vast reservoirs of mischief that lend her both grace and a certain wry dignity, but she constantly undercuts these traits every time she falls down or runs into something. (Which may be the joke, but it’s a dumb one.) Still, her Pat Benatar number is probably the musical highlight of the movie.

The rest of the wreckage—which includes David Cross, Clay Matthews, Keegan-Michael Key, the rest of the supporting cast, and a Snoop Dogg Christmas mash-up—is too dreary to contemplate. This disappointing musical reinforces an old, deeply-held conviction: whenever performers sing just to hear the sound of their own voice, they’re really obnoxious.

Grade: C

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Film/TV TV Features

Inside Amy Schumer

Like a buxom diner waitress who’s secretly slipping strychnine into the desserts, the third season of Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer cheerfully serves up its generous, sugary helpings of lethal satire to a hungry, trusting, and unsuspecting clientele that really should be larger.

So what if the ratings aren’t much different than they were? Schumer’s coming-out party feels imminent. Later this summer, she’s starring in the Judd Apatow-directed comedy Trainwreck, and as Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein noted on May 10th, this year the mass media finally sat up and took notice of her brilliant, disarming persona and the stinging, perceptive humor it serves.

For years Schumer has been poking at familiar subjects from unfamiliar angles by exploiting the contrast between what she talks about and what she looks like. No matter how often she tries to convince the world she’s not a pretty girl, she remains a size-six knockout — as one of Inside Amy Schumer‘s strongest sketches points out, Marilyn Monroe was a size eight — whose body of work often strikes you as gross and crass before it strikes you as wise and funny.

Yet to discuss or even acknowledge Schumer’s beauty is to plunge penis-first into two unavoidable traps. The first trap involves the idea that her talent depends on her appearance. This, of course, isn’t true; nobody’s pointed out that the younger, thinner Louis CK in Louie‘s opening credits looks very different from the bearlike left guard gone to seed with the red goatee bumbling through the ups and downs of season five. Nobody said Orson Welles lost talent because he gained weight.

Someone probably would say something if Schumer put on too many pounds, though — and that’s when the second trap is sprung. Her talent and opportunities don’t depend on her looks — unless she’s in the entertainment business, where they always have and always will. As a multi-talented female stand-up comic, she is forced to confront absurd, demented ideals of femininity and sexuality every day whether she wants to or not; could any multi-talented male stand-up comic say the same? Ironically, outside of the entertainment world Schumer might be the perfect woman — smart, funny, gorgeous. Inside the entertainment world, she’s a porcine, rabbit-toothed abomination with an infuriating ass whose every utterance is further proof that modern science still hasn’t found a cure for a woman’s mouth.

“Milk Milk Lemonade” and “Girl, You Don’t Need Makeup,” Inside Amy Schumer‘s pair of season-three viral-hit music videos, are catchy sing-along assaults on similarly ridiculous feminine-beauty standards. However, two longer sketches disguised as pop-culture parodies are even better: “Football Town Nights,” which explores the whole male-dominated “can rape be funny?” brouhaha by linking it to America’s obsessions with football, family, and winning; and “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer,” an episode-long parody of Sydney Lumet’s preachy legal drama wherein Paul Giamatti, John Hawkes, and a bunch of other pug-ugly dudes debate whether Schumer is hot enough to appear on television. Imagine it as a studio-executive summit and feel the burn. Underneath all four of these sketches runs a strong, clear river of rage that, if you can see it, is actually quite lovely.