Monday Reviews: The White Ribbon and Others

Boy, do things change quickly, and I don't just mean the sudden but schedule-savvy switch of my Friday Reviews series into its new Monday timeslot. Last year, I earned my highest-ever attendance on this blog by live-blogging the Golden Globes, which I had also done for that strike-canceled ceremony in 2008. This year, not only no live-blog, but in fact, I have been so checked out that I didn't even know until Sunday morning that the Globes were happening this weekend. Apologies if I am flagrantly avoiding what my regular readers would like me to post about, but just now, clicking over to IMDb to peruse the winner's list, I cannot say I am sorry to miss a ceremony where Avatar and The Hangover got crowned as the year's great achievements in cinema, and where proficient, face-saving turns in films as desolate as The Blind Side and Sherlock Holmes scored top acting honors.

My only bit of Globe-related activity today was finally seeing Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, a front-runner for the Best Foreign Language Film award. Indeed, it copped that trophy tonight, but as per my general dyspepsia throughout this season, I was mostly disappointed in the movie, whatever its strengths. With only The Lovely Bones and The Last Station left to see in the 2009 awards cycle, it's getting harder and harder to drag myself out to the cinema. In general, I've been having much more luck renting a whole slew of films from 1944, as provoked by the recent Best Pictures from the Outside In installment featuring Going My Way. I've written short pieces about the Joan Fontaine-Orson Welles Jane Eyre and Jacques Tourneur's nutso mystery Experiment Perilous, while continually working my way toward a richer and richer sense of 1944 as a whole. Stay tuned for more dispatches from this interesting vintage.

And incidentally, though I wish I had more auspicious content with which to mark the occasion, happy fifth birthday to this blog! I certainly didn't expect while writing this first post amid a flagrant bout of procrastination that this blog would last out the rest of the winter, much less emerge as the primary portal through which a lot of readers find their way to Nick's Flick Picks. Thanks so much to all of you who keep reading, responding, and linking.

Cannes Winner Realities

As I believe I indicated before proceeding into a massive list of errors, I am awesome at forecasting the prize winners at Cannes. You're probably reeling from my uncanny knack for prognostication. Granted, if you lop off my two top predictions for the Palme, neither of which scored a single thing, nor did the one film that I predicted to cop two awards, I cited most of the right movies but in the wrong contexts: my "this is too obvious" canards about The White Ribbon and A Prophet translated into denials of the obvious, and the jury got excited about Wild Grass, Fish Tank, and Kinatay. I always wish the Technical Grand Prize were compulsory, and I haven't heard anything about the Ecumenical Jury's pick, which is usually interesting—all the more so since I just yesterday saw Adoration, their '08 selection—but all in all, this slate of prize winners (indexed in greater depth here) promises some provocative nights at the movies in the next, oh, 18 months or so that it will take American distributors to get them all into theaters, if even then. Hold out hope.

(Note: The awards don't do much to change my relative enthusiasm for the Competition titles, though I do have to credit Isabelle Huppert with even more chutzpah than I thought she might have. Not for her, to go out of her way to avoid giving top prizes to famed collaborators or to French countrymen. Screw how it "looks"—and one must admit, the two best-reviewed Competition movies scored the two top prizes, even though lots of the other awards defied critical consensus in various ways.)

Theater 1, Film 0

Okay, so I'm officially back in Hartford after a month away. There is nothing in my fridge or pantry, there is next-to-nothing in my checking account, and there are only five days before the next semester gallops apace. How is any of this possible?

I did get to spend a good long weekend in New York City on my way back up here, during which I saw five movies, but none of them were as good as the production of Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro that Derek and I saw at the Classical Theatre of Harlem, up on St. Nicholas Ave and 141st. Admittedly, Funnyhouse of a Negro is probably my favorite American play, top five easy, and yet it's so rarely staged that I probably would have been tickled by any production. But director Billie Allen, the star of the original 1964 off-Broadway production, has done exquisite justice to the rich figures, the starkly beautiful language, the brutal historical kaleidoscopes, and the frightening Artaudian cruelties of the piece. How many American plays are this rich in narrative and character but also invite, even require, such stunning attention to movement, voice, sound, masking, and makeup? The full cast of actors—not just the brave lead actress Suzette Azariah Gunn but, even more so, the exemplary artists who embody her historically-derived alter egos—are in stunning control of the text and its ritualistic choreographies. The piece is perfectly suited to the small, dark space of the Harlem School for the Arts, and the play's heavy demands on the lighting and tech crews are fully met across the board. New Yorkers and nearby outliers, you have until Feb. 12 to buy a ticket and better your life.

In the wake of this event, the movies I caught were bound to be also-rans, although Michael Haneke's Caché (which I was lucky to catch with Nathaniel) works very proficiently as a paranoid thriller and a probing character study. Eventually, the thematic implications become a bit cut-and-dry, not as textured as what Haneke achieved in The Piano Teacher or as chilling as his underrated Time of the Wolf. Still, Haneke's images retain their formidable obstinacy, somehow implying that they are staring you down much more forcefully than you are staring at them. Watching the movie at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas is sort of a kick, because the social caste that Caché critiques is basically the same one plunked down in front of it; I was fascinated to sense the moments when the audience's enervated glee paled into a kind of nervous disavowal of the film.

In other news, I found Duncan Tucker's Transamerica to be a rather winning experience, without too much of the mushy sentiment that adheres to adjectives like "winning." The actors are good, even when creaky story-motivations require some surmounting, and the pressure to affirm the heroism of the protagonist or to simplify the perspectives of the people who surround her is much less than this kind of movie often demands. Moving down the ladder of value, Merchant-Ivory's The White Countess boasts a very strong performance by Ralph Fiennes, a bewitching sound mix, a typically good score by Richard Robbins, and a preposterous screenplay that keeps threatening to sink the whole thing. If Ivory had directed the verbal repetitions, stock figures, and clunky social collage so that they felt more purposefully irreal—as in some of screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro's more dreamlike novels, like The Unconsoled—then things might have hung together. Unhappily, The White Countess starts as a polished film with quaintly banal notions of history, before lowering itself into the truly unpardonable dialogues and contrivances of its finish.

It gets worse from there. Mrs. Henderson Presents sells out its virtues to its inanities in an even more galling way than The White Countess does, because at least what works in The White Countess is unexpected, idiosyncratic. Mrs. Henderson Presents is much more conventionally dispiriting: a period comedy with luscious costumes and make-up and an agreeable song score, all vainly recruited into the kind of movie that espouses nude vaudeville as a soulful protest to the indignities of global war. Judi Dench's protagonist isn't a character so much as a machine for prodding guffaws at her faux-outrageous quips. Jennifer Aniston puts much more effort into her lead turn in Rumor Has It, but without the slightest wisp of anything to play, she can only sell individual lines and moments. There isn't a single thing tying this movie together except its uniform garishness of tone, look, and scenario, all of them bordering on the lewd. You know the kind of "romantic comedy" where you wish the beleaguered boyfriend would file a restraining order against the protagonist instead of reconciling with her? This is that sort of gig.

Tim R. has correctly diagnosed me as an "Oscar completist," which is the only reason I would pay to see a movie like Mrs. Henderson Presents, and why I'll almost certainly squeeze in Memoirs of a Geisha, Casanova, and, God help me, The Producers before the nomination announcements January 31. (Note: "Oscar completism" transcends the high-profile categories and requires seeing anything short of The Polar Express or Bicentennial Man that might swipe even an Art Direction or Original Song nod.) The only major milestone of 2005 still to arrive to my eyes is Terrence Malick's The New World, which finally opens in Hartford this Friday—quite possibly in a re-edited version, given that the film was yanked from all of its metropolitan screens early this month and that rumors have run rampant about Malick and/or the studio tinkering with the tepidly-received epic. As a dyed-in-the-wool Malick devoté, I'm hoping for the best. In any event, my Top 10 list for 2005 will be posted once I've seen it, with the Nick's Flick Picks honorees in all categories soon to follow.

Let's Start Picking Some Flicks

Halloween is still eleven days away, but already October has been plenty haunted for my tastes. The personal dramas, ranging from the annoying to the genuinely scary, are too much to get into—most recently, my brother, a former Army lieutenant, received a summons to duty in Iraq by "mistake," though it sure required some frightening phone calls to clear it up. After being repeatedly spooked all month, I'm needing some pleasant and private distraction to get my days off to a calming start. Plus, it wouldn't hurt to reinvigorate this blog and my languishing website a little. Double plus, Nathaniel's recent countdown of the Top 100 Actresses of the '00s was such a kick in the pants—but is now so sadly but sweetly concluded—that I need to fill up the hole it left, and I'm inspired to do something similar.

So, in the wee hours, when work is finally "done" hahahaha and it's already too late to call anyone—or else while I'm waking up, like now—I've drawn up a list of Nick's Picked Flicks, a ranked list of 100 movies, give or take some joint entries, that inspire and energize and delight and provoke me for reasons beyond standard artistic criteria. (Not that anyone knows what those really are.) The idea was actually born as I got ready to do my every-two-years revision to my website's list of the 100 best movies I feel I have seen...which is always a blast to compile and haggle over, and which reliably generates some fascinating e-mail, but which inevitably leaves out movies that I madly love even if they don't quite make the cut as "greats." Setting those 100 aside (though some titles hereby hop from one list to the other), these Picked Flicks are 100 movies that it just makes me feel good to write about, think about, and recommend. They're like my own personal People's Choice Awards, whereas the Top 100 are the National Film Registry, if you dig.

'Course, Nat's kind of scooped me here, too, since he just started a great sidebar feature recommending some favorite classic movies. That fella has really gotta cool it when it comes to beating me to every punch. ;)

If I time things right, I'll finish the backward-unveiling of these 100 just in time for New Year's, when the revised Top 100 will start its own roll-out, all of them with (egads!) actual capsule-length write-ups instead of just titles and grades. I don't expect anything like the outpourings of passion and spirit that Nat's actresses elicited, but I hope people who pass through the site will enjoy getting this weirder and more intimate sense of the movies that make me "tick." So, without further ado, here's #100:

Nothing like The Piano Teacher to get this list off to a savage start, proving that just because I love a movie enough to include it on a list of personal causes célèbres doesn't mean that it's easy to snuggle up to. I am a sucker for razor-sharp formal control, and The Piano Teacher certainly has that, freezing the camera at moments that are just as difficult and unexpected as the furious violence, emotional and otherwise, that often engulfs its three major characters. I always go in for conceptual dramas, and the way Haneke wrests a bold meditation on music and a cultural snapshot of Viennese schizophrenia out of this scalding character study is a subtle and breathtaking achievement. I am a pushover, apparently, for movies about pianos. And, just as obviously, I relish nothing more than watching any world-class actress tearing into a complicated part, and the ferocious precision of what Isabelle Huppert concocts here—vengeful, expert, supercilious, tamped-down, lonely, and volcanically perverse—is something that no other actress in years has equalled. (Most actresses could wrangle with this script for a decade and be too shallow or else too shy to forge the Erika Kohut that Huppert uncovers.)

In combination, these separate marks of the film's distinction yield images and sequences so blunt and shattering in their affective immediacy that the film is that rare thing—literally unforgettable. I do not have the greatest memory in the world, but at the level of individual scenes, The Piano Teacher finds a needle-sharp line right into the mind's cradle. Here is Erika, punishing a promising student with a grotesquely planted ambush of broken glass. Erika, abjecting herself for sexual attention on tile floors, and abandoning herself to ecstatic violence in her own apartment. Erika, her face tight and austere as a hangman's rope, withering in her estimation of her pupils' musical abilities. Erika, ducking into a viewing stall for a quick, hot dosage of the kind of pornographic voyeurism that Haneke himself keeps threatening but miraculously avoids. Penultimately, Erika, literalizing the wounds of her heart in one of the most shocking close-ups I've ever witnessed, capturing Huppert in a look of raw agony that is utterly, irreproducibly her own. And lastly, the music hall, the performance space, the indifferent scene of a death or a near-death, a massive edifice that Haneke has taught us over two hours to read as both an emblem of trained sophistication and an altar to the obscene. The Piano Teacher, so justifiably proud of its performances, is nonetheless bigger than all of them. It is a film of Artaudian cruelty, and a boundary-breaker in the cinema's exploration of its own erotic and artisanal id. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Cannes Post-Script

Okay, I wasn't done on the Cannes beat. Right now, in the two non-profit theaters in Ithaca, two of last year's Cannes victors—Hirokazu Kore-eda's Nobody Knows (Best Actor) and Agnès Jaoui's Look at Me/Comme une image (Best Screenplay)—are just now making their local premieres. So it may not behoove me to get too excited about the prospect of seeing this year's slate of contenders anytime soon. Still, Cannes is nothing if not appetizing for the future, and these were the films from this year's crop that I am most eagerly anticipating at an arthouse near me:

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#1 A History of Violence David Cronenberg is one of my absolute favorite directors, as well as the subject of my first dissertation chapter—the chapter on which, incidentally, I completed my final revisions today. (Yay!) Any new Cronenberg movie is enough to get me excited, but especially when the reports are so bewildering. Even the bullishly intrepid Mike D'Angelo couldn't quite decide on a number rating for this one. If it's as weirdly discomfiting—and therefore as compulsively watchable—as Dead Ringers or Naked Lunch, color me ecstatic. (IMDb Page)

#2 Manderlay "Most anticipated" movies are not the same as the ones I expect to be good, and I must say I have some serious skepticism about this project. I enjoyed Dogville quite a bit, and I've found that it holds up to repeat viewings, but it seemed to me like more of a one-off than a solid premise for a trilogy. Still, whenever anyone's got anything to say about race, class oppression, the history of slavery, etc., I'm hooked, even if what they have to say is nonsense. Topics covered + Lars' history = I'm ready to pay attention. (IMDb Page)

#3 Hidden/Caché My experience with Haneke is a little scattershot: I've only seen Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, and Time of the Wolf, which made my Top Ten list last year when it opened Stateside. (The Piano Teacher would have done the same if 2002 hadn't been such a superlative movie year.) The reviews for this film were exceptional, I love a solid formalist thriller, and French-Algerian relations are another one of those subjects for which I have a standing weakness. Which reminds me, is anyone ever going to swing a US release for Tony Gatlif's Exils, the French-Algerian drama that won Best Director at last year's Cannes? At least Caché already has US distribution in place. (IMDb Page)

#4 The Wayward Cloud This one has been building huge buzz since Berlin, and I can only live so much longer without having seen any of Tsai Ming-liang's movies. They sound right up my "Weird" alley, with a camp/homoerotic bent (always a plus). And look what happened when I went searching for a photo: I found this image of what is, indeed, a man either caressing a woman's vagina with a watermelon, or possibly trying to insert it. Whaa? Color me intrigued. Incidentally, The Wayward Cloud was only in the "Market" section of Cannes, not in any of the official programs, but Mike D'Angelo and others still wrote it up, and I'm still stoked. Which reminds me: what am I going to do next year without Cornell cinema?? (IMDb Page)

#5 The Child/L'Enfant Any film that won the Palme d'Or would have a leg up on my viewing list, but my interest in the Dardennes' work has been steadily growing. Thus far, I've only seen Rosetta; their last picture, The Son, was a critical favorite around the world, but it played for two seconds in Ithaca, while I was out of town and then took its good time coming to DVD. So I'm actually eager to see any of the Dardennes' recent work, up to and including this latest. I love filmmakers who can squeeze a lot of affect out of a seemingly simple aesthetic, which is different than squeezing a lot of affect out of a fussily "simple" aesthetic, as with most of the Dogme films. (IMDb Page)

#6 Match Point Remi Adefarasin! Say it three times fast, 'cuz he's the genius cinematographer behind the ice blues of Onegin, the inky shadows of the palace in Elizabeth, and the high-society chilliness of The House of Mirth. Now, he's working for Woody, who, say what you will about his lack of a stable aesthetic, at least works with some interesting D.P.s. And Remi showed he knows how to light Scarlett Johansson in this winter's beguiling In Good Company. And, if all the reports are true, it seems that Woody remembered how to write. Say that it's so! (IMDb Page)

#7 Don't Come Knocking I will see any movie where Jessica Lange plays a long-lost flame, and that's lucky for me, because there were two of them at Cannes. I am particularly excited about Don't Come Knocking because, like Lange herself (maybe my favorite American actress), writer-star Sam Shepard and director Wim Wenders are such mercurial talents. Sometimes they just... stall. And other times they generate something really interesting, like the last Shepard-Wenders collabo, Paris, Texas. I didn't love that film, and there's a self-romanticizing streak in both men's work that can spoil even a good thing, but I'm still intrigued by what this movie's got to offer. (IMDb Page)

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#8 Three Times As I wrote earlier, Hou Hsiao-hsien's appeal kind of eludes me. I did think A Time to Live, a Time to Die was lovely and involving, especially in the final sequences. Maybe I was just tired, but I remember The Puppetmaster being quite a slog, and I usually love long, quiet movies. Millennium Mambo had me for a while until that film, too, seemed to get stuck in an endless rut of gossamer mood accents. But I'm always hoping I'll come around, because so many people see so much in Hou's work, so if Three Times ever makes it to an American theater—with Hou, you can never take that for granted—I, for one, will show up. And I'll try. I'll at least take three bites before I decide I don't like it. (IMDb Page for Hou Hsiao-hsien)

#9 Down in the Valley Some interesting reviews are building behind this film, which none of the critics seem to describe quite the same way, and whose secrets they seem to be glad to preserve. Hmmmm. Edward Norton and I have been seeing other people for a few years now. Am I the only one who thought he started sending out this weird Self-Importance vibe, right around the time he started turning in the same performance in film after film? Even in 25th Hour, a film I really liked (and apparently he did, too), he seemed bored and uninspired to me. If this film restores the Edward I loved, I'm prepared to take him back. Also, I'm getting these nasty, risky, Blood Simple sensations from reading the write-ups, and if that's a fair comparison, it's a good, good thing. Oh, and Ellen Burstyn's in this, too. Yay! (IMDb Page)

#10 Battle in Heaven/Batalla en el cielo Also known as, when bad reviews create unwittingly good buzz. I kept reading that this project was way too self-consciously arty, full of gratuitous and overly explicit sex, recycling the same old shit about modern anomie and the spiritual emptiness of existence, and marred by director pretension. In other words, it got the reviews that Pola X and L'Humanité got at Cannes '99, and demonlover and Irréversible got at Cannes '02. I loved three of those, and thought L'Humanité was just fine (sorry, Manders). So, as these rotten-tomato reviews piled up, my stomach started growling. (IMDb Page)

#11 Broken Flowers By all rights, this film should be higher on this list. If Jessica Lange isn't my favorite actress, Tilda Swinton is, and they are both in this movie. [This is the sound of Nick's head exploding.] Plus Sharon Stone and Julie Delpy, two good eggs, and Frances Conroy, who I'd been writing off until her sharp work as Kate Hepburn's snootily progressive mama in The Aviator. But one of my qualms is named Coffee & Cigarettes, Jim Jarmusch's last picture, which somehow thought that 11 arch vignettes about people who are bored with each other would be something besides arch and boring. And my other qualm is called Bill Murray, who has somehow found his way onto the Tom Hanks fast-track as Our New Beloved Actor. Yeah, Murray was great in Lost in Translation, but when people I trusted started plugging his "brilliant" work in The Life Aquatic, I felt like the schmo who's trying really hard to see the Virgin Mary face in the pancake syrup. It just ain't there, man. I'll be there on opening weekend, but more Ghost Dog and less Rushmore would be a good recipe for pleasing me. (IMDb Page)

#12 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada I figured this would be the Life and Death of Peter Sellers of this year's festival, especially since it got slotted into the same, ignominious last-day press screening. But reviews were kind, I'm a Barry Pepper fan, and the project sounds like it's going for that whole Cormac McCarthy revisionist-border-mythology thing. I got a little churlish about the prose in All the Pretty Horses but had to confess after I finished it that the book had a soul, and a memorable kick. If Jones' movie has one or both, more power to him. (IMDb Page)

If anyone is wondering about some conspicuous absences, I am only half-excited about Last Days, even though it seems like a better subject for Gus Van Sant's recent aesthetic (ya know, kinda formalist, kinda gauzy) than either Gerry or Elephant provided. The French thriller Lemming sounded interesting, especially with Charlotte Rampling and Laurent Lucas in the cast, but Caché sounds much more inventive and much more topical. Atom Egoyan pretty much lanced my mid-90s interest in his films with the grueling duo of Felicia's Journey and Ararat. If I ever get around to his earlier films I have on tape (Calendar and Family Viewing), I might get piqued again, but if indeed that happens, Where the Truth Lies doesn't seem like the kind of film I'd want as a follow-up. And the Jury Prize notwithstanding, Shanghai Dreams sounds like the sort of wistful, overly stylized Chinese cinema that tends to bore me to tears (see: Springtime in a Small Town, Zhou Yu's Train, etc.)