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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
Some critics with advanced allergies to ironic storytelling understood "Ghost World," the dramatic debut of "Crumb" director Terry Zwigoff, as yet another snarky hipster attack on Middle America. If anything, this tale of the awkward life-zone after high school, based on the comic books by Dan Clowes, is a satire with at least as much to say about the self-fulfilling nihilism of hipster culture as about the mainstream. (Yes, the attack on lame Caucasian blues bands and those who love them is utterly gratuitous -- and very funny.) Enid (the remarkable Thora Birch from "American Beauty"), a wannabe artist who dresses like a 1977 punk, begins to drift away from her best friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) and into an awkward relationship with a 40-ish record collector named Seymour (Steve Buscemi), who is easily the most compelling portrait of an emotionally stunted, middle-aged subculturite ever set on celluloid. The result is a finely nuanced, wonderfully acted and finally heartbreaking study of cultural exile.
The Others
Not an work of innovation so much as a reclamation project, Alejandro Amenábar's "The Others" marks a return to the finest traditions of supernatural film, in which the principal special effects (and often the only ones) are script, characters, atmosphere and editing. A Gothic classic set in a grand and isolated house in the British Channel Islands, "The Others" follows the increasingly neurotic Grace (Nicole Kidman) in her efforts to protect her photosensitive, hypersensitive children from whoever or whatever is haunting them. Like Robert Wise's 1963 "The Haunting" or Jack Clayton's 1961 "The Innocents" (an adaptation of Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw," clearly an influence here), "The Others" is a tale of sexual repression and the evils it can produce. Kidman's daring and masterful performance is matched by Fionnula Flanagan as the leader of a trio of mysterious servants who show up on the estate and clearly know more about "the others" inhabiting Grace's house than they let on.
More has already been written about this film in this publication than about any other cultural product of the past decade; if nothing else, "Mulholland Drive" makes it clear that David Lynch has returned from near-irrelevance to the center of the movie world. As ever, Lynch's tale of switched identities, mysterious entities, unexplained apparitions and erotic hijinks risks seeming incomprehensible or ridiculous. But unlike his hallucinatory 1997 "Lost Highway," which came apart at the seams and proved impossible to reassemble, "Mulholland Drive" has an undeniable thematic and emotional coherence. For what it's worth, unlike my esteemed colleagues Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein, I see the film's dreamlike first two hours as just as "real" as its drearier concluding scenes. To impose a single interpretation on Lynch is fundamentally to miss the point of his movies. You can justifiably call him a postmodernist, a deconstructionist or any other five-dollar name you like, but for him the movie screen is a state of rapture, a sacred and serious space where all kinds of magic become possible, where truth and lies, reality and illusion, are intermixed and indeterminate. Of course, it's also a place where he can display an abundance of naked pseudo-noir babes getting it on and convince us that it's art.
Hampered by an unhelpful title and unsympathetic reviews from mainstream critics, this soaringly ambitious debut from writer-director Richard Kelly has so far failed to find the wide audience it deserves. So I'm instructing you now not to miss this hallucinogenic fable of teenage mental illness, time travel and/or doomed love, all set to hits by Tears for Fears and Echo and the Bunnymen. Kelly's sweeping, tragicomic vision of American family life circa 1988 clearly belongs alongside such second-wave indie directors as Darren Aronofsky ("Pi," "Requiem for a Dream") and Wes Anderson ("Rushmore"). But he also has one foot in the bittersweet-candy universe of John Hughes' '80s teen-romance classics and the "Back to the Future" films; maybe teenagers thought this was an art film and grownups thought it was a teen adventure. They were both right. As with "Mulholland Drive," questions of fantasy vs. reality seem beside the point here. Is titular teen Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) simply losing his mind, or can he really bend time and space with the help of the sinister rabbit-demon who visits him at night? Answer that however you like, but Kelly's passion -- for life and for the movies -- resonates through every scene of "Donnie Darko," whatever its flaws.
