The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper: Krishanu Ray

Simon Killer: An Insidious Thriller About an Exasperating Man-Child

Krishanu Ray — Wed, 01 May 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Simon Killer: An Insidious Thriller About an Exasperating Man-Child by Krishanu Ray

Antonio Campos’s insidious thriller is a study of a particularly pathetic and unsettling character. Simon is a recently graduated American in Paris, retreating from a breakup with his girlfriend of five years. Staying in the apartment of a family friend, Simon spends the days in the street, listless and roaming. When cigarettes and self-pity prove insufficient company, he finds himself with a young prostitute named Victoria, who after several visits he befriends and moves in with. As needy financially as he is emotionally, and showing no sign of being accustomed to the concept of consequences, Simon proposes that Victoria begin blackmailing her clients, and, out of greed or desperation or lack of will, she acquiesces. The thing that’s disgusting about Simon is his reliance on others, not simply because it’s juvenile, but because it’s born out of a sense of blind entitlement. The thing that’s terrifying about him is his stupidity, because it makes him an unpredictable and destructive force. His actions are sharp, and he flashes the intensity of something feral, but his motivations are opaque and seem unknowable. Simon isn’t a killer, but it’s hard to tell what he is as he whimpers on the phone to his mother. Maybe a child?

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

To the Wonder: A Beautiful, Beguiling Journey to a Dead End

Krishanu Ray — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0700

To the Wonder: A Beautiful, Beguiling Journey to a Dead End by Krishanu Ray

The trailer for Tree of Life was my pick for best film of 2011. It's visually dazzling, spiritually fulfilling, under two minutes long, and available in its entirety on YouTube. The feature-length version was decent, too, but as an oft-beleaguered, self-doubting Terrence Malick apologist, I found it harder to defend, and it didn't speak to me with the same emotional urgency. To the Wonder, Malick's latest movie, seemed like trouble from the beginning. Even the title evokes memories of the vague, overbearing spirituality that has weighed down his films in the past, and after seeing only a couple moody promotional stills, I found myself mentally assembling a defense for this potential misstep. After seeing the film, I'm not sure I'm up to the task.

Neil (Ben Affleck) returns home to Oklahoma with French girlfriend Marina (Olga Kurylenko) and her young daughter. Ennui sets in. Enter Neil's childhood friend Jane (Rachel McAdams), all grown up. Meanwhile, in a thematically but otherwise unrelated storyline, a local priest (Javier Bardem) is enduring a period of spiritual doubt. McAdams and Affleck are questionable casting decisions, and considering that Malick wrote virtually no dialogue for either of them (or for Kurylenko), they must rely almost entirely on body language to develop character. Unfortunately, they look a bit more like props than people, entangled in strange, stilted physical misunderstandings with one another that neither resemble reality nor evoke any known human emotion. In lieu of dialogue, an inordinate amount of voiceover narration is wallpapered over the film, mostly in French or Spanish (with English subtitles), which quickly grows tedious. The film has a bit to offer visually, but fails to top any of Malick's other works here as well. It's clearly a work of unrepentant idealism, and I admire that, but it feels like his search for meaning may be leading us down a dead end.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

The Silence: A Rubik's Cube of a Crime Procedural

Krishanu Ray — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 04:00:00 -0700

The Silence: A Rubik's Cube of a Crime Procedural by Krishanu Ray

A red car turns off the main road and down a dirt path in the German countryside, following an 11-year-old girl on a bicycle into a wheat field in the middle of the day. The bike stops, then the car stops, then the driver gets out of the car and rapes and murders the girl. The crime remains unsolved until a near-identical event occurs in the exact same spot on precisely the same day, 23 years later, and the case becomes a subject of renewed focus and pain for policemen, parents, murderers, and accomplices. A diorama miniature of the original crime scene, one of the most vivid visuals of the film, is retrieved from police storage: The murderer's car beside the fallen bicycle, meticulously crafted icons of a killing, are once again under the scrutiny of detectives. Later on, while examining the room of one of the victims, a police investigator picks up a Rubik's Cube. A puzzle composed of distinct, brightly colored pieces that slide past each other and lock into place: bicycle, car, wheat field, man, girl. There's something very clean and crisp about the visual language of this film, and it operates in glowing primary colors, not what one expects from a crime drama about pedophilic murderers, but a defining quality of the film.

In this feature debut, director Baran bo Odar withholds very little information about the crimes from the audience, and consequently the tension that builds has more to do with this distinct atmosphere than with the revelation of individual plot details. It extrapolates the puzzle outward from the crime and into the world as a whole, along a matrix of intersecting lines: cars fitting into garages, houses fitting perfectly next to each other, concentric circles on an umbrella. Everything starts to feel, eerily, like a component of the same architecture, equally complicit in the crime. Performances from the actors, in contrast, have an appropriate air of detachment that allows them to sink into their environment. You might forget the killer's face, but you won't forget that red car.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Like Someone in Love: Another Entrancing Puzzle from Kiarostami

Krishanu Ray — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Like Someone in Love: Another Entrancing Puzzle from Kiarostami by Krishanu Ray

The camera likes to linger on the subjects of this warm, melancholy drama from Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami: a young call girl named Akiko, her fiancé, and an elderly scholar she’s sent to see one night. The film patiently observes the conversations and silences that arise between them, and, poignantly, the assumptions that they make so willfully about one another. The plot is so light that to discuss any of it would be to reveal most of it, but the unfolding of character—overheard in side conversations, deliberated on during taxicab detours around the block, or glanced at in reflections—steadily brings the emotional weight of the film into focus for the viewer. The film is set in Tokyo and features a small, all-Japanese cast who are more than capable of conveying the subtleties the script demands. The glowing color palette, coupled with an ambient murmur of soft music (or traffic, or footsteps, or even the sounds of a mechanic’s garage, all imbued with muted, lilting rhythms), provides an inviting sensory backdrop to the performances. An excellent example of Kiarostami’s quiet, minimalist style.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

A Place at the Table: This Is What Hunger in America Looks Like

Krishanu Ray — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 04:00:00 -0800

A Place at the Table: This Is What Hunger in America Looks Like by Krishanu Ray

Perhaps the most fascinating and unsettling thing about hunger in America, the subject of this new documentary from the makers of Food, Inc., is how invisible it has made itself. The social stigma around admitting an inability to provide for your family, about accepting government assistance (if it's even available), creates a certain silence that muffles the issue. And to an ignorant viewer like myself, the hungry children featured in this film certainly don't look very hungry. They are well-clothed, live in houses with pets, go to school, and seem like they're getting by just fine. Some of them are even fat little kids, the kind more likely to be pegged as a bit overfed. But it takes only a bit of digging below the surface for the film to completely realign that perspective.

What the documentary exposes are the systems that perpetuate malnourishment and food insecurity while maintaining the trappings of abundance. The massive grain subsidies (which make nutrient-poor foods so accessible and affordable), the urban and rural "food deserts" that isolate people from fully stocked grocery stores, the limitations of economic safety nets: These are structural reasons why obesity, hunger, and poverty are so intertwined. A Place at the Table is not an incendiary or angry film; it presents a tangible problem that doesn't lend itself to procrastination and equivocation the way more abstract issues like climate change seem to. Despite emphasizing the forces working to maintain the status quo, the film never makes the issue seem unsolvable or inevitable, as many cause documentaries inadvertently do, and that's why it may well be an effective call to action.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

John Dies at the End: Spoiler Alert, It's a Mess

Krishanu Ray — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 04:00:00 -0800

John Dies at the End: Spoiler Alert, It's a Mess by Krishanu Ray

David (Chase Williamson), a guy in his 20s, is relating extraordinary events to a journalist (Paul Giamatti) in the booth of a Chinese restaurant. David has had experiences with a potent, venomous street drug called "Soy Sauce," which temporarily gives the user the ability to perceive the unperceivable—"like if you hooked your brain up to one of those interplanetary SETI antennas"—but also causes insanity and death. The movie is primarily composed of David's flashbacks while in the restaurant, and the whole thing reads a bit like a gory, cartoonish Philip K. Dick parody made by 19-year-old boys who found out about free online Adobe After Effects tutorials moments after skimming the Wikipedia article for "Drugs."

A horror-comedy that's neither scary nor particularly funny is uniquely challenging to enjoy, because after a certain point of asking yourself, "Is that supposed to look green-screened? Is that guy's accent supposed to sound so stupid? Am I laughing at this because it's bad or because it's trying to be bad?" you might realize that you were never, in fact, laughing in the first place. At any rate, David and his pal John (Rob Mayes) get mixed up with the Sauce after some Jamaican guy gives it to them at a concert, and soon they're seeing monsters, blowing up cars, and generally starting to unravel. Eventually, a paranoid plot coalesces around the drug being the byproduct of an evil force invading from another dimension, and at some point around here, the film shifts from being tolerably disjointed to just being formulaic and caught up in its own plot. John and David have to go through a portal, à la Bill and Ted, where they're met with 10 minutes of expositional backstory about why there are two universes, followed by some more paranormal antics, and on and on. I'm pretty sure that all of this is supposed to be funny. I have a feeling the book is better.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Adulterated Love

Krishanu Ray — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 04:00:00 -0800

28 Hotel Rooms: One Complicated Affair by Krishanu Ray

A man (Chris Messina) and a woman (Marin Ireland) encounter one another in a hotel cafe and stumble into an extended love affair. Their story, told entirely through the titular conceit of 28 short vignettes, becomes increasingly complicated as their personal lives develop outside of their relationship, and yet simultaneously they become more emotionally entrenched with one another. It's a tightly focused portrait that relies heavily on the naturalistic performance of the two lead actors, who are also the only credited actors in the entire film, so you're going to be seeing a lot of them. In fact, you're going to be seeing almost all of them at several points throughout the film, before the weight of their angst starts to encumber their lovemaking.

The hotels, within which their relationship is required to exist, are at first a playground for the two but inevitably become a prison, and the sterility of the rooms is drawn in sharp contrast against the traded fantasies of a shared life on the outside. Just the look of a hotel coffee mug sometimes can be the most depressing thing in the world, as a bleak morning light shines on it through those long, weird, dangling vertical blinds. And yet intimate moments happen in these spaces, intimate drinks shared from those mugs, and a failure of decisive action from either party allows this existence in limbo to be drawn out, through both of their marriages and the birth of a child.

Throughout all of this, the characters' vulnerabilities and fears are on full display and drive the film's most moving moments: the emotional gambits, the double-blind second-guessing, the free-floating frustration. As Messina's character yells, nakedly, from a hotel roof, "It's a fucking puzzle, help me put it together."

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

War of the Buttons: The Coziest Film You'll Ever See about Nazi-Occupied France

Krishanu Ray — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 04:00:00 -0700

War of the Buttons: The Coziest Film You'll Ever See about Nazi-Occupied France by Krishanu Ray

In some ways this film is the platonic ideal of light cinematic entertainment. It's a balanced, polished, well-paced little thing, in which everything functions so adequately that it can't help being pleasant any more than it can avoid being dull. Despite being set in Nazi-occupied France, the film is marinated in the sort of golden-sunlight sentimentality that makes everything look correct and pretty. Even the occasional SS raid manages to look somewhat idyllic. This approachable war-torn setting provides a backdrop for the titular war, an ongoing turf battle between neighboring gangs of provincial 10- to 12-year-old boys, who push each other into lakes, spar with wooden swords, brandish pocketknives, and, most notably, de-button the garments of enemy "POWs" as a form of shaming.

The story is adapted from a novel written in 1912 as a piece of pacifist literature by a reluctant French soldier, and most of what is poignant and worthwhile about this film can be credited to the source content, which provides enough sincere commentary on war and human nature to weather even the most bland, pedestrian retelling. The decision to nest this narrative within the context of a larger, more "real" war is unique to this adaptation, however. The film uses the parallel narratives to draw lines between the behavior of the adults and that of the warring children, and goads the audience into speculating how much the former's concepts of militarism and nationalism influence growing strains of barbaric tendencies within the latter. The energy that the film dedicates to telling the adults' story (a burgeoning resistance movement led by unlikely characters in the town), which is given almost equal screen time, dilutes the edgier Lord of the Flies–ish elements with fairly hackneyed WWII tropes, but there's no denying that the two plots are woven together well and are thematically complementary. An easy movie to watch, but ultimately about as life-changing as a short nap.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Spanish Extremes

Krishanu Ray — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 04:00:00 -0700

Genre-Hopping at SIFF by Krishanu Ray

You won't find any straightforward rom-coms or family dramas at the 2012 Festival of New Spanish Cinema, landing at SIFF September 27–30. The seven films vary widely, and all concern themselves with beyond-the-norm subjects—one takes place entirely in a bathroom.

Carmina or Blow Up is a salty, colorful comedy about a working-class bar owner, Carmina, and the supporting cast of her life: her daughter, her goat, her real and imagined debts, her wino husband, her pantheon of Catholic saints, and, perhaps most consequentially, her claims adjuster. But it's mostly about Carmina, who's a tough old turkey. Brash, lively, crass, disgusting, playful, and always human, she elbows her way through life fueled by grit, humor, and what appears to be no less than a pack and a half of Pall Malls every day. The well-paced 70-minute film is structured around interview-framed monologues from her and others in her brood, as well as various boisterous episodes in Carmina's life. If you're looking for a cultural snapshot of a subsection of Spain, this is it.

Sleep Tight isn't for everyone. It's the story of César, a lonely apartment concierge who just wants to feel happy for once in his crummy life. Unfortunately for one unlucky tenant of his building, César's happiness can only be derived from gradually, clinically tormenting and torturing her in some of the more disturbing ways imaginable over a period of several weeks. Confiding only in his dying, unresponsive mother about his nightly intrusions, César develops a sadistic routine that grows to a gradual crescendo, despite the efforts of a nosy 11-year-old and an encroaching police investigation. It's one of those dimly lit, green-tinted thrillers that's awash in the buzz of fluorescent lighting, but there are unexpected kinks in mood and tone that inject freshness and unpredictability into this piece, and there's plenty of real tension, if you can stomach it, owing in large part to a very strong lead performance by Luis Tosar.

Representing the culture clash genre is Wilaya, in which a young woman named Fatimetu returns home to her family, which is living in a refugee camp in the Algerian Sahara, after spending 16 years in Spain with a foster family. Her Western sensibilities are constrained by the conservative patriarchal society and the general refugee-campness of the refugee camp, but she maintains her independence by getting a job as a delivery truck driver. The film is light on plot and heavy on angst, and dialogue delivered to Fatimetu is routinely answered only with a thousand-mile stare out into one of the world's largest deserts. The striking landscape is certainly worth more than a glance, though, and the atmosphere of sepia monochrome it creates is perhaps the most compelling aspect of this film.

For a full schedule of films and screenings, see www.siff.net.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Murder for Hire and Sight Gags

Krishanu Ray — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 04:00:00 -0700

Killer Joe: Unquenchably Perverse by Krishanu Ray

A hit man isn't precisely the sort of role that Matthew McConaughey is known for, but in Killer Joe, he handles it so well that it's hard to imagine anyone else fitting the part. The character almost seems like some dark essence exorcised from deep within the shirtless, charming, vaguely sleazy McConaughey persona of the perennial rom-com—a subtext that's been lurking below the surface all along.

Calling Joe a crooked cop is an understatement, considering that he moonlights as a murderer, and though his straitlaced appearance and polished manners smack of Southern gentility, as the film progresses, we realize that he does make the occasional significant breach of etiquette. In the hands of McConaughey, Joe's presence is undeniably large and arresting. His appearance is manicured, he has a patient, sinister gait, and his emotions are virtually changeless. The character is a bit like a chromium-glazed Frank Booth—just as sadistic and volatile, but more pointed, focused, and calm.

In Killer Joe, a squirrelly, debt-ridden Texan named Chris (Emile Hirsch) decides to put a hit on his mother in the hopes that her life insurance will secure his financial freedom. Lured by the prospect of easy money, the man's oafish, emasculated father (Thomas Haden Church) conspires with him to hire a killer. And as the murderous gears are set in motion, we realize it's only a matter of time before things start to unravel.

Though this is a classic film-noir setup, director William Friedkin is not interested, as the Coen brothers were with Blood Simple, in writing a simple Texas noir. When Killer Joe arrives on the scene, he commandeers the plot away from this known arc, guiding it into very different territory. The chronically incompetent Chris, unable to pay Joe's fee up front, strikes a somewhat unorthodox deal with Joe: Chris's young sister, Dottie (Juno Temple), will be kept as a retainer until the debt is settled.

As Joe's relationship with the underage Dottie progresses and he becomes further entrenched within the family, Chris's rising frustration at his own inability to extract Joe from the household precipitates a power struggle that drives the remainder of the film. Details of the plot are best experienced firsthand, but as the mounting absurdity of the situation begins to wrest control of the film, the tone becomes increasingly unclassifiable. Darkly comic moments and outright sight gags intermingle with scenes of complete depravity and violence. Friedkin, of the classic thrillers The Exorcist and The French Connection, never allows the tension to fully break. As with a campy exploitation film, he's constantly treading a line of believability, keeping the audience uncomfortable with their own laughter.

The Southern Gothic style is heightened to the point of parody as the family sits down to dinner among the wreckage of their lives, bloodied and mangled from various altercations, and the film ends on a delightfully ridiculous crescendo that subverts all expectations. Though it may be difficult given the NC-17 rating it's forced to wear like a dog muzzle, Killer Joe is best enjoyed when approached with as few preconceptions as possible.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Ruby Sparks: Building the Perfect Girlfriend (with Your Brain)

Krishanu Ray — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 04:00:00 -0700

Ruby Sparks: Building the Perfect Girlfriend (with Your Brain) by Krishanu Ray

When we meet Calvin (Paul Dano), he's wallowing in a sophomore slump. Having been thrust into the limelight by the success of his first novel, he now finds himself unable to follow his own opening act. Calvin spends days of writer's block wandering the airy, sterile apartment in which his small dog offers the only consistent company. Occasional visits from his married brother, run-ins with fawning fans, impatient agents, and obligatory book signings all conspire to undermine his creative spirit.

Inspiration finally strikes, however, in the form of a recurring dream. Ruby Sparks, as he names the subject of his nightly fantasies, soon becomes the subject of Calvin's writing as well. After he's spent weeks obsessively typing out the minutiae of her character, she manifests herself in his living room, insisting that she's his girlfriend. Perhaps he's lost his mind or perhaps he's experienced a miracle, but after Ruby's existence is confirmed by a third party, Calvin is fairly content to enjoy his circumstances without further questioning.

Though Calvin can dictate every detail of Ruby's being with a stroke of his quirkily anachronistic typewriter, the film generally relegates this detail to the background. Fantasy elements are invoked economically, but Ruby's magical existence serves less as an ongoing magic show than as a vehicle for exploring the nature of happiness within the context of romantic relationships. We watch Calvin and Ruby settle into the malaise that real relationships invariably face, and we're prompted to wonder how long happiness can last in any situation, even a literal dream come true, before it yields to ever-creeping discontent.

Dano, a gangly, slouching, boyish figure who generally looks like he's either entering or exiting a sneeze, is well cast and easily embodies the bookish, self-effacing Calvin. His performance is engaging enough to carry the film through weaker moments, such as a weekend trip to Big Sur to visit Calvin's caricatured new age mother (Annette Bening) and her equally outlandish chainsaw-artist boyfriend (Antonio Banderas). Primo bit parts from Steve Coogan as Calvin's slimy agent and Elliott Gould as his shrink are both fitting additions, and perhaps the most interesting casting decision is Zoe Kazan, who not only plays Ruby but is also the film's screenwriter. Kazan's performance as the powerless, objectified creation of Calvin's imagination gains added depth when we remember that she is the ultimate architect of the story, the writer writing the writer who writes her. Dano may be the star of the show, but it's Kazan's dual performance that make this film an effective and moving critique of relationships and the stories we tell ourselves about them.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Crazy Eyes: One Long, Boring Rape Joke

Krishanu Ray — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 04:00:00 -0700

Crazy Eyes: One Long, Boring Rape Joke by Krishanu Ray

The primary argument that one can imagine being made against Crazy Eyes is that every single character is wholly repugnant, unable to elicit any measurable amount of sympathy from the audience, and that there isn't enough substance among the lot of them combined to fill a very short conversation. This is all fairly irrefutable. Viewers will likely find themselves at a loss when confronted with the human specimens in Crazy Eyes. They're wealthy and ambitionless enough to devote their lives to binge drinking and passionless promiscuity, yet dull enough that none of their antics develop into the kind of opulent debauchery that's fun to watch, instead remaining in the realm of trashy everydayness: bar fights and alley puking.

Our hero is a young, alcoholic playboy named Zack (Lukas Haas), and his dream is to bed the one lady in town who continually evades his advances, Crazy Eyes. The film is structured around them repeatedly getting drunk together and him, sometimes forcefully, trying to extract sex from her despite her protestations. Those interested in the emerging discussion on rape jokes should take note of the hilarious term "struggle fuck," which Zack offhandedly employs when referring to his brand of drunken date rape. Come to think of it, about a third of this movie could be considered a rape joke. It is important to note that unsympathetic characters are not necessarily bad characters, but when the audience is asked to laugh along with their crassness, search for profundity in their inane voice-over narration ("I tried to drown the monsters, but they learned to swim" and "It's all whiskey under the bridge" come to mind), and see hints of redemption in their clichés, a film condemns itself to tasteless vulgarity.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Tonight You’re Mine: Handcuffed to Mediocrity

Krishanu Ray — Wed, 30 May 2012 04:00:00 -0700

Tonight You’re Mine: Handcuffed to Mediocrity by Krishanu Ray

No more than 180 seconds after the opening credits finish rolling, a nameless character appears in a golf cart bearing the tired plot device that the remainder of this movie will use to prop itself up: a pair of handcuffs destined to connect two people who hate each other. The victims of this prank are a couple of bickering twentysomething rock-and-rollers camping out at a muddy music fest in Scotland where their respective bands are slated to gig. She's a girl with an attitude, and he's a guy with an attitude, and if their big, empty personalities didn't leave much room for each other before the cuffing, how will they fare when they're only an arm's length apart? And how will this affect their personal and professional lives over the next day and a half? An unlikely romance, perhaps? No less than a third of this movie's paltry 80 minutes is composed of transition montages and lengthy crowd shots, which makes one wonder if it wouldn't have been better realized as a nonnarrative concert documentary.

Excise the flimsy plot and the poorly acted, uninteresting characters (undo the handcuffs of narrative demands?), and what remains is a fairground teeming with life, energy, and cinematic potential. The lights of the amusement rides and LCD ads blurred in the perpetual twilight of the clouds and mist or refracted through plastic cups of watery beer, the swaths of campground detritus, the muted hues of the countryside—all are photographed well, but they're presented only as intriguing establishing shots, a backdrop quickly marred when our shackled, whining protagonists drag each other into the frame, unwelcome reminders of an otherwise easily forgotten story line.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]