orson welles' F FOR FAKE (1974)

what a strange cat Orson Welles was. F For Fake isn't so much a documentary or even an essay as a hyperactive meditation on trickery and fakedom; Welles imposes an assaulting, visually and narratively convoluted approach on what begins a portrait of two master tricksters and eventually devolves into hammy expressionism. but aside from the obvious inflation of the film's running time (there's little more than an hour's worth of good material), the pretentious self-indulgence of it all does nothing to allay his brilliance...or vice versa. IMDb indicates this was his last proper directorial effort, but the bravado that was there from the start still bleeds from every frame decades later.

eli roth's HOSTEL PART II (2007)

it's hard for me to decide just how i feel about Eli Roth, but one thought struck me while watching Hostel II: he's smarter than i am. smarter than me, smarter than his audience, smarter, certainly, than most of his peers in the world of cinematic horror. that's not to say that Hostel's sequel has quite as much going on upstairs as its predecessor's wry politics of exploitation; no, this time around we know the name of the game, if not all the rules, so Roth whittles his goals down to wit instead. it's been clear since Cabin Fever that much of Roth's dangerousness lays in a command of tone that doesn't find terror and laughter at odds with each other - it may be comic, but it's not relief. (i think an understandable misperception of "flippancy" is what sends so many film critics, who should at least acknowledge the man's craft, into indignant Culture Critic mode. c'est la vie.) here, of course, there isn't much room for overt textual humor, but Roth's ruthless talents still bring a giddiness to the proceedings, from his carefully ironic sense of montage to a narrative that consistently delights in subverting our lazy Horror Flick expectations on several levels, often at once.

oddly enough, it's these stymied conventions (in collaboration with Roth's stomach-turning fearlessness) that give Hostel II such an atmosphere of doom. our protagonists' fates aren't going to hinge on the stupid decisions that drive so many slasher films, nor will they escape by pure luck or panicked cunning; their doom is signed, sealed, and delivered the moment their passports cross the hostel's front desk. but within these confines, the audience, too, is cornered, subject to the film's cruel, largely unpredictable whims, from the harrowing, nauseating Bathory centerpiece (followed, true to form, by a sharp Eisensteinian gag) to the mercilessly nutty ending. Hostel II is in no uncertain terms unfit for general consumption, but it also reaffirms Eli Roth as horror's reigning enfant terrible, revitalizing the stagnant gere while beating its hacks at their own game.

toshia fujita's LADY SNOWBLOOD (1973)

as easy as it is to see the Lady Snowblood influence in Kill Bill, it's even easier to see why. on one level, it's a typical revenge story, as a young woman born to reap revenge stalks the aging bandits responsible for the fate of her mother and would-be father, and gallons of spewing, strawberry-hued blood are presumed to fill the void carved out by shallow characters and unimaginative scenario. but there are isolated moments of wit, creativity, and distinct visual panache (Fujita's composition and control of color can be inspired, though my favorite single image is young Snowblood's ponytail whipping around as she rolls down the hill in a barrel) and the explicit four-act structure is only slighty offputting narratively. it's not a great film, but there's a lot of ideas, and a fair bit of revenge-fueled fun.

judd apatow's KNOCKED UP (2007)

after Rock Hunter so impressed me, it's nice to see a contemporary comedy with a little respect for its audience, and for the medium. Knocked Up is heavier and looser than Apatow's The 40-Year Old Virgin, but the somewhat lower concept serves his honest, character-driven humor fabulously; it's exhilirating to see a film unleash such relentless howlers without stooping to the contrivance (and mean-spiritedness) that taints so much mainstream comedy. (there's some pop culture humor that may or may not date well, but it stems from the characters, and where their conversations and in-jokes might believably stray, as opposed the reference-fest dreck of "Family Guy" or, say, the Shrek movies.) but Knocked Up is in essence as much a relationship drama as a bawdy romantic comedy, and Apatow's keen verisimilitude proves just as strong an asset on the serious side of things - undoubtedly the key to his strengths as a humorist. the two couples at the center of the film are painfully sharp sketches of both the politics of modern romance and the precipitous psychological divide between men and women, and each character is written with a careful emotional intelligence. a lot of recent screen humor has trended toward the exaggeratedly uncomfortable comedy of errors, but with Knocked Up Judd Apatow outdoes the best of them not only in sheer laughs, but also, and more profoundly, in a spirit of fearless insight.

frank tashlin's WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? (1957)

i'd been curious about Tashlin since reading his name mentioned in the same breath as Tati's, and Rock Hunter didn't disappoint, though i couldn't have known what to expect. with precious few exceptions, nimble comedy and "serious film" seem to have gone their separate ways decades ago, so it's always a joy to discover an auteur like Tashlin with such carefree aptitude for it; it's true that he betrays a background in animation through his pacing, control of the frame, and mildly surreal zaniness, but what's most impressive is how he manages to fold it all into an affable (but wholly sharp-witted) consumerist/celebritist satire with such little trouble. i'm eager to see more of Tashlin's work, Jerry Lewis be damned.

gore verbinski's PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST (2006) and AT WORLD'S END (2007)

the first Pirates Of The Caribbean film was, against all logic concerning how good an adaptation of a theme park ride ought to be, a hell of a good time at the movies. cautionary tales like Cutthroat Island aside, it's almost suspicious that it took until 2003 for Hollywood to trot out a big, dumb pirate movie revival, but they got it right, exploring and seemingly exhausting nearly every idea we could have wanted to see in a $140 million supernatural swashbuckler. the last ten months, though, suggest that screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio had enough material for three or four more films...and chose to cram them all into two.

neither of the sequels is bad, of course. both are just as entertaining as the first, and do their duty as sequels to up the ante with new characters and increasingly strange voyages. but the narrative thread Elliott and Rossio have split between the two films is so crushingly maximalist that it often verges on collapse, and occasionally pulls the films down with it. on one hand, they've built an impressive self-contained mythology, rewarding those viewers who pay closer attention to the films than may seem necessary; on the other, the films sometimes have trouble staying afloat carrying such convoluted cargo. no less mutinous is the six-act structure of the story, which in retrospect leaves far too much hanging in the balance between the two films for either to feel complete in and of itself -- the "see you and your money next summer for the rest of the movie" angle does more than anything else to insist on the films as simple commerce instead of carefree entertainment.

yet i can't help being impressed by Gore Verbinski, who has shown himself to be an extremely talented, loving shepherd for mainstream cinema, from his astouding translation of The Ring to Pirates' giddy spectacle. he doesn't quite have the storytelling chops to rival Peter Jackson's grab for Spielberg heirdom, but keeping everything so engaging amidst the narrative chaos (even during World's End's laborious, 45-minute long climax) is a feat no simple technician could have gotten away with. added to Rick Heinrichs' pitch-perfect production design, uniformly stunning effects work, Keira Knightley's insuppressible good looks, and the combined scenery-chewing of Bill Nighy, Geoffrey Rush and Johnny Depp, it would be somewhat of a feat to dislike the films outright; here it will have to be enough that the good far outweighs the bad.

the coen brothers' RAISING ARIZONA (1987)

as the Coens' mainstream debut, Raising Arizona is a work of extreme gall, an assured live-action cartoon that sees their comic sensibilities emerge full-grown. the most impressive thing to me has always been the opening sequence, as Nic Cage (never better than he was here) narrates a relentless expository montage of visual wit and assured scene-setting that maintains its energy to the bitter end, as the opening titles finally cease the fast-forward. but the film as a whole is vintage Coen: brilliantly dedicated performances, warm eccentricity, and a script as poetically airtight as it is madcap.

alexandre aja's THE HILLS HAVE EYES (2006)

this is one of the very few films i've ever walked out of at the theater. it was on kim's initiative, but i can't say i wasn't myself inclined - and it's for that reason i've retained a curiosity about The Hills Have Eyes. i've got a reasonably high threshold for Horror's darker territories, but the film exists in such a perfect storm of nihilism and moral filth that it very honestly, deeply offended and affected me, and because of that i've no place denying it as a work of art. poor existential taste does nothing to dull Aja on a technical level; he stretches the first act out almost unbearably, but does so with such confidence that doom's dull roar has grown deafening by the time the film's brutal, balls-to-the-wall centerpiece siege yanks the narrative into oppressively high gear. part of me was bothered by the genuinely crass sexual violence, uncomfortably misogynistic in its deployment as little more than a cheap scare amplifier. but another part of me was terribly compelled by the film's sullied slickness and fearless sociopathy, and how they dare to combine in the form of entertainment.

watching the rest of the film from where i left off more than a year ago, it's an inevitable disappointment that soon afterwards The Hills Have Eyes declines into a Troma Team remake of Straw Dogs, and never again reaches the fever pitch of the scene that sent us (and another couple a few rows behind us) back to the lobby. it's still engaging, and fx stalwarts KNB work their usual magic on the desert colony of sun-baked mutants, each uniquely horrific. but after the tension and release of the first half, the rest of the film can't help but color pretty much within the lines, which makes it a little harder to hate, and much harder to respect. still, it's been a long time since a horror movie bothered me as badly as Aja did here, and on its own terms that makes it a roaring success.

paul verhoeven's BLACK BOOK (2006)

Paul Verhoeven’s career arc has been a strange one: after establishing himself in the Netherlands with thrillers like Soldier of Orange and The Fourth Man, he arrived in hollywood to direct a curious, sensationalistic string of popcorn movies belying an obsession with the extremes of both violence and sexuality. some were good (Robocop and Starship Troopers are as fun as sci-fi satire gets) and some weren’t (remember Hollow Man? on second thought, don’t) but all of them reflect surprisingly deeply on a slick artist undaunted by america’s cineplex conservatism. And though it was perhaps inevitable that Verhoeven would return to Europe and his filmmaking roots, few could have expected the resulting Zwartboek (Black Book), which stands as one of his finest achievements even as it out-hollywoods his american work in many key ways.

Black Book tells the story of german jew Rachel Steinn (Carice van Houten) as she hides out among the dutch resistance toward the end of world war II, gradually taking on an active espionage role after she befriends german officer Ludwig Müntze (The Lives Of Others’ Sebastian Koch) and is offered a job inside SD headquarters. to elaborate much further would be both confusing and a disservice to the film, as Verhoeven and co-screenwriter Gerard Soeteman pack the film with a serpentine, almost Hitchcockian series of twists and turns that constantly confront Rachel (spending most of the film under the pseudonym Ellis de Vries) as she pursues not only safety but justice.

being a Paul Verhoeven picture, of course, the film is steeped in both graphic, affecting violence and unabashed sexuality, but where his american work seemed to revel in its excesses and indulgences, Black Book folds these preoccupations organically into the story, and lets Verhoeven concentrate on its telling. and it’s here that the hollywood influence shows – not in any of the ways his american films might suggest, but a more classical sense, from the austere period sensibility and low-key glossiness to Anne Dudley’s pitch-perfect score and van Houten’s rapturously confident, star-making performance. the most potent contribution to the film’s americanized aesthetic, though, is a decided emphasis on entertainment over the themes and grand ideas we’ve come to expect from european resistance dramas: Black Book is a thriller, plain and simple, and a rousing one at that.

still, there’s a creative maturity in the way such an entertainment is approached. sentimentality is one hollywood tradition that Verhoeven never had much use for, and Black Book is little different in that respect, putting forth a comparatively chilly narrative tone that doesn’t manipulate its audience by lingering unnecessarily on the emotions in play. one of the more obvious dividends of this approach is an enhanced brutality, most noticeable in the harrowing firefights but also observable on an emotional level throughout the film, particularly in Rachel’s subtly escalating psychological humiliation at the hands of the SD officer unknowingly responsible for her family’s deaths. more crucially, this lack of sentimentality also allows for an enriching idealistic relativism; both the subtext and the story itself are informed by the notion that all people, even in times of such great wickedness, tread the gray waters between good and evil.

(from the KNOXVILLE VOICE)

robert altman's THIEVES LIKE US (1974)

this came out on DVD two weeks ago, but apparently not in Knoxville, so i had to catch it in lousy, compressed full-frame on cable. still, it floored me: as with most of his early work, Altman approaches a well-trod premise (here a tale of Depression-era bank robbers) from an angle that momentarily perfects it. he compensates for a necessarily restrained visual approach by playing with diagetic sound much in the way he did in MASH, but to a different end; where MASH's loudspeaker announcements helped reinforce an ironic distance, Thieves Like Us' omniscient radio crackle pulls us in emotionally while serving its more basic (and equally effective) role as aural set dressing, perfectly evoking a time and place. the film takes on an easygoing, naturalist pace, budgeting more time for scenes of silence and quiet psychology than it does for its antiheroes' antics, and accordingly telling an old story as well as anyone ever has. but it still takes itself seriously as a crime film, albeit a different sort of one, as Altman's primary preoccupation seems to be the state of mind that forces three men to define themselves according to their sociopathic behavior. the film's title weaves itself informally and offhandedly through each character's speech over the course the film, and even as the most sympathetic of the trio (a superb Keith Carradine) goes through the motions of grasping at legitimacy through the strength of young love, we realize along with him that he's not built to be anything but lowdown. it's sad, yes, but it's also as close as Altman has come to naked reality.

sam raimi's SPIDER-MAN 3 (2007)

what happened here? the third Spider-Man seems to have been systematically purged of everything that made the second one such an unmitigated creative success. attention to character, thematic unity, careful pacing, performance, and, most crucially, expert storytelling...every one jettisoned in favor of bloat and lazy spectacle. it's not a bad film, really, but it wrestles fruitlessly with a mediocrity that, at this point in the series, should never have been part of the equation. (i'm tempted to elaboate on its weaknesses, but it would be little more than a long list of the small mistakes and miscalculations that undermine the film from start to finish.) Spider-Man 3 is a $250 million dollar first draft of what it could have and should have been, and nothing less than a colossal disappointment.

doug liman's MR & MRS SMITH (2005)

i'll take another gimme on this one. it's a narrative mess, but the script plays pretty sharply with gender politics, the leads look good together, and there's a pretty burly car chase.

kevin smith's CLERKS II (2006)

i'm surprised, and impressed, by Kevin Smith. Clerks is the only film of his i've retained any fondness for, and as much as i'd written him off in recent years, he' s really done an admirable job of following it up. if the original helped redefine "indie film" as the medium quickly democratized, the second one is in many respects a good example of what Indie Film has become, for better or worse, twelve years later: a quiet, emotionally intelligent ensemble piece. (albeit that very special sort of ensemble piece that climaxes with man-on-donkey action.) Smith still doesn't have quite enough good taste to plug every sentimental or self-indulgent leak in his script, but he shows a remarkable flair for drama in several scenes, and Clerks II seems a lot more comfortable with itself than his previous work, particularly compared to the original's offputting (but endearing) staccato. and though the obscenity-as-comedy bit has worn thin over the years, Smith's casual, conversational (if sometimes overwrought) writing trusts his actors to elevate the material, and here it pays off more often than not. Smith himself would probably admit to being a bit of a hack, but twelve years after his debut he's come as close as ever to matching it, and made his most winning film to date.

ken loach's THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (2006)

the world could use more artists like Ken Loach. over the past forty years, the iconoclastic British director has produced seventeen feature films and countless works for television, each of them brimming with the distinctly activist social conscience that’s seen him pegged as an unpatriotic agitator and kept more than a few projects off of the BBC’s airwaves. he’s also steadfastly resisted Hollywood’s beckon as it snatched up contemporaries and collaborators, and for good reason: his films seek to engage and enlighten rather than entertain.

thankfully, though, his talents have always struck a balance with his convictions, and as such adventurous, patient film fans have found much to love in his dramatic social realism. this is certainly the case with his most recent film, the Palm d’Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley (as yet unreleased in Knoxville but currently available On Demand from Comcast), which sees Loach returning to history’s battlefields for a rich examination of the social economics of war and peace. set in early 1920s Ireland, Wind follows would-be medical student Damien O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy) as the brutality of British occupational forces spurs him to forego his studies and join his brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) in the Irish Republican Army.

the two fight alongside each other for their cause, but a new conflict begins to arise from within even before the eventual military truce: Damien sees Ireland’s need for not only sovereignty but also a fresh socioeconomic start, while Teddy’s approach to expelling the Black And Tans is pragmatic and shortsighted, focusing only on tangible, immediate victory. when Ireland and Britain finally do sign a treaty ending the struggle (leaving Northern Ireland under British rule and the remaining Irish Free State conspicuously under the royal thumb), Teddy becomes an officer in the Irish government while Damien joins a growing coalition discontent with simply changing “the accents of the powerful and color of the flag.” The resulting Irish Civil War thus sets forth the perennial tragedy of brother against brother on the battlefield.

this isn’t unfamiliar territory for Loach, who probed similar ideological disconnect in the trenches of the Spanish Civil War in 1995’s Land and Freedom. but where that film followed a group of British volunteers into an increasingly hopeless foreign conflict, Wind strikes a far more personal tone as the O’Donovans see nationalism and familial love irrevocably clash, and this emotionally intimate angle on the politics of revolution is well-served by Loach’s typically naturalistic approach. the largely inexperienced Irish cast infuses the film with a passion rooted in the cultural repercussions of the Civil War that continue to haunt their country generations later, and though the O’Donovan brothers are certainly the center of the story, the script continually allows for an ensemble approach that pushes the historical and psychological detail to immersive levels.

the one drawback to Loach’s socialist fervor, however, is that he’s distinctly uninterested in presenting any viewpoint besides his own, and as a result the film sometimes feels like more of an ethics lecture than a history lesson. though by all accounts the Black And Tans were certainly ruthless, Wind presents them as caricatures of pure barbarity, drawing a thick black line between Good (the Irish) and Evil (the Britons). and while this low-key propagandizing certainly isn’t fatal, it does set up a problem for the final act: once the film’s sympathies shift to Damien’s side of the Civil War, Teddy’s initially lionized character is muddled by Loach’s continued inability to separate his cause from his content, and as a result the final scenes are robbed of the resonance they deserve.

otherwise, The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a remarkably nuanced, poignant essay on military occupation and the cultural and economic implications of rebuilding a nation in the face of continued war. it champions humanism and basic welfare as the building blocks of healthy nations, and laments that the horror of what we fight against can overshadow the intricacies of what we’re fighting for. and while it’s a shame that Ken Loach continues to blind his work to conflicting ideas, it’s some consolation that, forty years into his career, he’s still able to express his own with such eloquence.

(from the KNOXVILLE VOICE)

williams street's AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE COLON MOVIE FILM FOR THEATERS (2007)

though it can be self-indulgent and overly juvenile, ATHF is honestly a pretty brilliant show, standing on the shoulders of Space Ghost Coast To Coast's sublime, revolutionary absurdity and somehow taking it a step further in both popularity and sheer strangeness, if not quality. but it can also be exhausting, and even in fifteen-minute installments it constantly verges on narrative implosion, so it was a pleasant enough surprise that Colon Movie Film For Theaters afforded itself a fair bit of breathing room without losing too much of its verve. as with the Reno 911 movie, it would have been interesting for the show to step out of its comfort zone a little, but there's also something to be said for sticking with what works, and for an epic, stoned non sequitur it works pretty well at feature length.