Brand Upon the Brain!
dir. Guy Maddin
Cinerama, Oct 10—11
For a dire stretch of time this spring and summer, after the Seattle
International Film Festival and the producers of Brand Upon the
Brain! failed to agree on a price for a full staging of Guy
Maddin’s “one-of-a-kind cinematic spectacle,” it looked like our city
was going to get screwed. The “live” film screening, which includes an
orchestra, a narrator, and a couple of Foley artists demonstrating
their deceitful sound collage before your very eyes, was set to travel
to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—but not Seattle, where the
project was originally commissioned (by the formerly local outfit The
Film Company, which has since decamped to Brooklyn) and filmed (using
plenty of local talent, including cinematographer Ben Kasulke and the
adorable offspring of some prominent figures in the Seattle film
scene). I like to think Guy Maddin—the protagonist of the film,
not the filmmaker, who shares his name—would have been horrified.
Brand Upon the Brain! tells the story of Guy’s return to an
obscure island home and to the demented circumstances that stitched the
fabric of his psyche. Might the movie not find some worthwhile
psychological residue in its birthplace, too?
If that sounds inordinately fanciful, you’ve clearly never seen a
Maddin film. From his fervid horror debut Tales from the Gimli
Hospital to the stout Russian constructivist tribute The Heart
of the World to the sweetly eccentric The Saddest Music in the
World, Maddin is all about pushing fancy to its outlandish limits.
And if that fancy involves prurient Freudian speculation about the
circumstances of one’s conception? So much the better. But back to the
“live spectacle.” Northwest Film Forum has come to the rescue,
installing the live version of Brand Upon the Brain! as the
finale of the Local Sightings festival, its annual showcase of local
film. Musicians and silent-film boosters Aono Jikken Ensemble are doing
the Foley, and Karen Black and Guy Maddin are narrating on October 10
and 11, respectively.
The plot of Brand Upon the Brain! is crowded with familiar,
even kitschy elements. In flashback, Guy (Erik Steffen Maahs) remembers
a childhood spent with his teenage sister, Sis (Maya Lawson), on an
island occupied by his parents, their lighthouse, and their mom-and-pop
orphanage. Something creepy is going on with their charges: The kids
all have holes drilled into fleshy welts in the back of their heads and
clomp in formation up the lighthouse stairs at night. One child (the
adorable Kellan Larson) is frail and twitchy and suffers a full-on
epileptic fit after being kissed during a game of spin the bottle.
But Guy (now played by Sullivan Brown and his serious, dark eyes)
has other matters on his mind. From a crow’s nest in her phallic tower,
Guy’s mother (Gretchen Krich) spies on her children—when she
isn’t entertaining them with the gruesome story of her birth. (She was,
like Shakespeare’s Macduff, “from her mother’s womb untimely ripped.”)
And from the depths of an awfully vaginal “aerophone” (played by the
horn of a phonograph) the voice of Guy’s father issues commands and
keeps them obedient. Things are looking bleak on the island, but then a
pair of androgynous crime-solving twins come ashore to investigate.
Crossdressing and confusing crushes ensue.
The kitsch would be unbearable if it weren’t so pleasurably
excessive, and that makes it a good match for Maddin’s
characteristically overheated filmmaking. Neither too coy (The
Saddest Music in the World) nor too curdled (Cowards Bend the
Knee), this post–Twelfth Night, post-Gothic,
post–Hardy Boys mashup gets terrific mileage out of Maddin’s
pushy iris shots and fluttering images. And if you feel that narratives
of sexual formation are a bit too cliché for exclamation-studded
intertitles, the dastardly things the parents are doing to the orphans
will set you straight. Brand Upon the Brain! is pure pastiche,
but it’s also brilliant. The live show should be great. ANNIE
WAGNER
Also recommended at Northwest Film Forum’s Local Sightings:
The Church on Dauphine Street (a documentary about Hurricane
Katrina) and the opening-night party, Thurs Oct 4 at 7 pm;
Stumptown Sap (a shorts program featuring the work of Portland
filmmakers including Gus Van Sant), Sat Oct 6 at 7 pm; The Bitter
Ash (an archival film made in Vancouver, BC, in 1963), Mon Oct 8 at
7 pm; and Experimental Methods (an experimental shorts program
including work by Matt McCormick), Mon Oct 8 at 9:15 pm.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert
Ford
dir. Andrew Dominik
Pretension—to borrow/steal outright a line from
Stranger contributor Michael Atkinson—is the wreckage
created by artists who can’t drive their own monster-truck ideas. The
much-anticipated revisionist Western The Assassination of Jesse
James by the Coward Robert Ford, as evidenced by its chewily
purple title, has a lot on its plate—too much, possibly. The
result is a film with sustained passages of eerie, Malickian beauty (an
early sequence involving a train robbery feels like one of the reasons
that film was invented), mixed with increasing stretches of
self-conscious artiness. Whether you should see it or not may
ultimately depend on your tolerance for shots of windswept wheat and
time-lapse clouds. Still, when it works, it works absolutely.
Adapted from Ron Hansen’s novel, director Andrew Dominik’s
(Chopper) script tells the tale of the declining, increasingly
paranoid folk hero Jesse James (a very good Brad Pitt) and his volatile
relationship with fawning hanger-on Robert Ford (Casey Affleck,
sporting a creepy ventriloquist-dummy stare), culminating in the rather
large spoiler of a title. Throughout, Dominik spends too much time
dealing with the secondary members of James’s gang (despite some fine
performances by the likes of Sam Rockwell and Paul Schneider) and not
enough exploring what makes the title characters kick. Nearly three
hours later, James and Ford remain gorgeous, frightening ciphers.
(Matters are not helped much by a broad voiceover of the tell, don’t
show variety.)
So is this a recommendation or not? I’m not sure, exactly. Hours
after viewing, all I can say for certain is that the movie’s
combination of tedium and genuinely exquisite moments evokes the sort
of frustration that can only be generated by a talented filmmaker who
shoots ambitiously for the moon, and can’t quite make it. It casts a
spell, but only intermittently. ANDREW WRIGHT
Sweet Smell of Success
dir. Alexander Mackendrick
Approaching New York City for the first time in 1945, the European
architect Le Corbusier declared: “It is hot jazz in stone and steel!”
Watching the opening shots of the 1957 film noir Sweet Smell of
Success for the first time, my mind couldn’t help thinking:
“Modern jazz in glass and steel.” The music, the crowds, the
aerodynamic automobiles, the newness of the towers, the concentration
and extraordinary organization of human energy: What we are watching is
not hot but modern jazz.
Even the cinematography, by the great James Wong Howe, has about it
a modern or experimental edge. Though the characters often go out of
focus, the lighting emphasizes the straightness of the suits worn by
the men and the lines of the dresses worn by the women. Everyone in the
world of Success throws a sharp shadow. People are fast
becoming like the Miesian tower that looms in the corner of the frame
near the movie’s opening.
The jazz in Success is performed by the Chico Hamilton
Quintet. When the quintet ends a set, the musicians are not confronted
by drunks or easy women but by sober, educated women who want to
discuss music theory. The tension of the main characters represents a
tension between two periods: the modern age (1947 to 1968) and the jazz
age (the 1920s). On the modern side is a young woman (Susan Harrison)
and her lover, a jazz musician Martin Milner (who is famous for his
role in the TV program Adam-12); on the jazz-age side is a
sleazy columnist (Burt Lancaster) and his sleazy press agent (Tony
Curtis). The jazz-age men have no respect for women. They either treat
them like whores (Curtis), or want to completely control their lives
(Lancaster).
The modern world, on the other hand, treats women like human beings.
It also respects black men. Chico Hamilton (who plays himself) speaks
like a person with a brain, wears handsome suits, and stands on the
same social and class ground as other whites of the modern age. The
struggle between the old and the new, the sleek modernism of the
interiors and exteriors, the experimental cinematography—all of
this places Success in the higher regions of post-WWII
American cinema. CHARLES MUDEDE
Michael Clayton
dir. Tony Gilroy
In the same way it is easy to recognize a movie directed by someone
with a background in theater, or a movie directed by a film actor, it
is easy to recognize a film directed by a screenwriter. Such is the
case with Michael Clayton, a movie that, coincidently, stars a
Hollywood actor who has directed a couple of films, George Clooney. The
reputation of Michael Clayton‘s director, Tony Gilroy,
completely rests on the scripts he wrote for the Bourne trilogy. Outside of this trio of very successful, commercial scripts,
Gilroy has written nothing of real value—only Bait,
Armageddon, Proof of Life, and so on. The purpose of
Michael Clayton, then, is to showcase Gilroy’s hidden talents.
This is the screenwriter’s moment to shine; his moment to show us the
stuff he is really made of; his moment to make it clear once and for
all that he is more than a mere Hollywood machine.
Because Michael Clayton has this incredible task (to expose
Gilroy’s true greatness), the substance of its story is very
weighty—corporate corruption. And because important, heavy
scripts always involve a character who makes a psychological journey
from a low to high moral position, the main character of the movie,
Michael Clayton (Clooney), is a fixer, a fallen lawyer, a man who
exists in the twilight between the complete darkness of the underworld
and the light of the world of law and order. If you have a messy legal
problem, you hire Clayton to fix (or clean) it. But then something
really bad happens: Clayton’s close friend (Tom Wilkinson) is murdered.
The death presents the fixer with two big choices: either ignore the
murder and continue his low and morally bankrupt life or rise to the
occasion by risking his life and solving the murder. In general,
Michael Clayton is slow and somber, with occasional flashes of
brilliant writing. It isn’t a movie that the world will remember, nor
one that will prove that Gilroy is much more than a Hollywood
screenwriter. It is, however, one that fans of Clooney’s appearance and
manner will enjoy. CHARLES MUDEDE
Ira & Abby
dir. Robert Cary
Even though he’s been through 12 years of analysis, 32-year-old Ira
Black (played by the handsome Chris Messina) remains a helpless,
indecisive mess. He fails to follow through on anything. He’s smart,
but he’s been working on his dissertation for years; he’s young and
attractive, but he’s barely surviving the same
on-then-off-then-on-again relationship with a semiattractive woman he
doesn’t love. Dude can’t even order breakfast without having a mild
meltdown (“Eggs… no pancakes… fuck it, just bring me coffee”).
He’s miserable, he makes everyone around him miserable, and if the
movie were based solely on his character, it’d be the most insufferable
piece of shit film in the world.
But then he meets Abby (writer Jennifer Westfeldt). When Ira meets
Abby he becomes loveable. Abby loves his face, Abby loves his paunchy
little tummy, and Abby asks him if he wants to get married within six
hours of meeting him. He says yes, they have sex, they meet each
other’s parents, and then he goes home and dumps his girlfriend via
voice mail.
It sounds a lot like that Dharma & Greg bullshit,
right? Nah, Ira & Abby is funnier and smarter, and even
though Abby is a quirky “free spirit” from a hippie household, she’s
not nearly as annoying as Jenna Elfman. Plus she has better hair.
After a few months of marriage, things stop being quite so cute.
Ira finds out Abby has been married before (TWICE!) and he blows a
gasket. And Ira’s parents’ miserable marriage starts to infect Abby’s
happy mom and dad. Everyone’s relationships go to shit and they all
begin to question monogamy, marriage, and what it really takes to be
happy in love. Luckily, in the middle of all this stupidity, Chris
Parnell (as one of the movie’s many therapists) is being funny. MEGAN
SELING
Lust, Caution
dir. Ang Lee
The WWII espionage thriller Lust, Caution is Ang Lee’s
follow-up to Brokeback Mountain, and at first they don’t seem
to have anything in common. The films strike opposite tones—where
the 2005 film spilled over with sentiment (and featured the demurest
suggestion of butt sex ever set to celluloid), Lust, Caution is bloodshot and sadistic (this is one NC-17 rating I have no quarrel
with). But they both mess with genre conventions for political ends.
Brokeback Mountain‘s gay humanism was achieved by combining
the signifiers of a Western with the mechanics of a melodrama;
Lust, Caution unites a perverse coming-of-age story with a spy
thriller, and throws in a little film noir for good measure. But while
the Western and the melodrama complemented one another (the one
stereotypically masculine, the other conventionally feminine), the
coming-of-age story and the thriller fit awkwardly. It seems a little
silly to want to know everything about the psychology of a femme
fatale.
Following a pitch-perfect prelude set in 1940s Shanghai, where the
clink of lacquered nails against mah-jongg tiles can’t drown out the
hum of jealousy in a circle of privileged wives, the narrative scoots
back to the late 1930s. One of the wives (Tang Wei)—now a college
coed with a half-ponytail and the name Wong Chia Chi—is being
persuaded to audition for a patriotic play. The girl falls in love
first with acting and the rush of heartfelt applause, and only then
with political action against China’s Japanese occupiers.
Encouraged by her drama-group friends, the girl, now calling herself
Mak Tai Tai, insinuates herself into the social circle of a
collaborator (Tony Leung, brilliant) and his wife (Joan Chen,
underused), intending to seduce the traitor so he can be isolated from
his bodyguards and assassinated. Her lust for performance is absolute:
The student idealist disappears completely beneath the powdered skin of
the society lady she’s imitating. More annoyingly, Tang the actor is
careful not to let us see any cracks or communication between the two
layers of character (until the script, belatedly and all at once,
demands it). The press notes reveal the extent of the problem. Asked
how she dealt with “playing a character who herself is playing a role
for much of the movie,” Tang responds: “It was very complicated. So I
would not think about Wong Chia Chi but about Mak Tai Tai. I could not
think, ‘I am Wong Chia Chi as Mak Tai Tai,’ I was just thinking ‘I am
Mak Tai Tai.'” We’ve seen Wong Chia Chi grow up and get herself into
this mess, but she remains a total cipher.
So despite Ang Lee’s insistence that Lust, Caution is told
“from a woman’s point of view,” it’s hard to understand her point of
view—how Wong Chia Chi could fall in love with a man she’d prefer
to murder than fuck, a man who basically rapes her the first time they
have sex. The suggestion that she likes it rough is painfully
insufficient; her weakness for pink diamonds is just insulting. The
individual parts of the film—coming-of-age story, mah-jongg
jousts, cuts to fierce-looking German shepherds at inappropriate
moments, Tang Wei’s two separate performances—are often quite
interesting. And the film’s basic outline isn’t implausible. But, like
its elegantly contorted sex scenes, it’s unconvincing on screen. ANNIE
WAGNER
Great World of Sound
dir. Craig Zobel
Great World of Sound tells the story of two would-be record
company A&R men, Martin (sympathetically played by Pat Healy) and
his cohort Clarence (caricatured by Kene Holliday), who find themselves
“scouting talent” for the dubious Great World of Sound record label.
Great World of Sound is actually a fly-by-night scam, a kind of pyramid
scheme, and Martin and Clarence are both its unwitting con men and its
marks. They travel from town to town doing their bosses’ dirty work,
auditioning aspiring musicians out of budget motel rooms and convincing
them to part with a few thousand dollars for recording costs.
The scheme is two scams in one, and both are predicated on a
distinctly American sense of entitlement: Martin and Clarence imagine
themselves as music-industry executives, the people they audition fancy
themselves stars, everyone dreams of quitting their day jobs, and only
the scam’s originators get rich. It’s called “song sharking,” and it
was the occupation of director Craig Zobel’s father for a time in the
1970s.
But this movie is neither a farce of the music industry nor a
revealing examination of an old con. Rather, it’s an unbearably
plodding odd-couple comedy. Scene after tedious scene of bad
auditions—using real-life respondents to newspaper ads placed by
Zobel’s production and improvisation from the actors—are meant to
evoke the schadenfreude of watching American Idol rejects but have none of that show’s slick car-wreck appeal. The film’s
half-narrative, half-verité style fails on both counts, lending
the film neither the weight of a documentary nor the pace, arc, or
quality of dialogue one expects from a fully scripted film.
At best, Great World of Sound is like its
subjects—deluded, wishing to be something better and more artful
than it is capable of. At worst, it’s more like the film’s song
sharking—a rip-off.
ERIC GRANDY
Delirious
dir. Tom DiCillo
NYC indie auteur Tom DiCillo has amassed a humble but considerable
body of work—Living in Oblivion, Box of
Moonlight, The Real Blonde, and others—out of
movies that are better than their premises would indicate. This is
again true of his latest, Delirious, which pairs a hubristic
paparazzo named Les (Steve Buscemi) with homeless naïf Toby
(Michael Pitt), who starts as his errand boy, but soon becomes his
subject matter.
It would take an overactive empathy gland for anyone to muster much
compassion for a celebrity-ambush photographer, and DiCillo knows it.
Buscemi and his fellow shutterbugs are shabby vampires, lurking on
sidewalks, jostling for shots, backbiting all the way. Fortunately, the
stars they shoot, like K’Harma, a Britneyesque pop star (Alison Lohman,
inspired) and their handlers, aren’t much better. The hierarchy is
clear: As an ingenious Elvis Costello cameo illustrates, paparazzi
invade the stars’ lives; the stars treat the paparazzi like peons; and
then the paparazzi resent the stars for thinking they’re still
important. DiCillo mines this irony for laughs and cringes alike.
At first, Les just hires Toby—the only person in New York
worse off than he is—so he can feel like a big shot. But as the
layers of pride and bravado peel away and a fraternal/paternal
relationship emerges, DiCillo invests Les (even his name is a
humiliation) with the pathos that comes not only from never making it,
but being too scared to try.
By the time Toby is discovered by a reality TV producer (Gina
Gershon) and becomes a star in his own right, the satire begins to
overreach into total absurdity, and thus, the ending feels pat. But the
job has already been done: DiCillo has again made a warm, smart,
affecting movie out of elements that would’ve been cynical and dumb in
another artist’s hands. SEAN NELSON
David & Layla
dir. Jay Jonroy
This jaunty, low-budget romantic comedy is set in New York City and
begins with a series of shots establishing just how Jewy the city is.
This is soon followed with a bit scene in which a man in a yarmulke and
a man in a Muslim prayer cap are walking in opposite directions and
have to go around one another. As the Muslim man passes the Jewish man,
he mutters to Allah.
That’s when you realize the movie is a farce. The two main
characters are a Jewish guy named David who has a TV show on a local
cable channel called Sex and Happiness (and is—wait for
it—unhappy in his own sex life) and an Iraqi Kurdish woman named
Layla who dances in a Middle Eastern club and has overstayed her artist
visa by a couple of weeks. She has no immediate family (they were
gassed by Saddam Hussein) and is staying with wealthy, conservative
relatives who have no idea she’s a dancer and are contriving to arrange
a marriage so she can stay in the country. David has seen her walking
down the street and is infatuated with her, and so one night the
cameraman from his TV show convinces him to climb a ladder to Layla’s
window with a bouquet of flowers. Layla shrieks and hits him on the
head and the ladder falls backward, and then while giving him CPR she
starts making out with him.
But he’s Jewish! And she’s Muslim! And neither one wants to convert!
And their respective families are up in arms! And so on! The premise is
pretty much the only thing here. The lead actors are fine, but the
dialogue is predictable and the characters thin. It’s just another
movie that won’t stand out in your mind. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE
