The Island
dir. Michael Bay
I had high hopes for The Island. I’m well aware this smacks of lunacy; Michael Bay has always been about as subtle as an oozing lip sore, and to expect anything different from him is certifiable. And yet there I was, stuffed inside the theater with several hundred of my fellow saps, anxiously waiting for the lights to dim. Why? Because truth be told, part of me has always enjoyed Bay’s work. Chalk it up to the latent frat boy in me—or perhaps the culprit bears the initials THC—but from the Bad Boys films to The Rock to Armageddon, his almighty bruising thunder and disdain for coherent continuity rarely fail to entertain me. His movies are indefensible as art, but that doesn’t mean they’re not fun.
The Island, though, is not your typical Bay. It has many of his marks (of the beast), including impossibly pretty framing, nonexistent character depth, and editing that debilitates the senses. But the core of the film, its heart, is far out of his league. For one thing, the story betrays a dash of intellect, a quality that has no business near this director’s lens. For another, save for only a handful of moments (including a plummet from a skyscraper that beautifully shatters any and all credibility), the majority of the film is surprisingly, and fatally, earthbound. Bay’s strengths are in blowing shit up and colliding heavy objects at reckless speed—so why then does he want to get all deep on us?
By now you’ve seen the trailer, which gives away pretty much everything: In a technological marvel of an underground city, a fella named Lincoln Six-Echo (Ewan McGregor) meets a puff-mouthed girl named Jordan Two-Delta (Scarlett Johansson). Both want bigger things—she wants to win the lottery and a trip to “The Island,” where freedom is promised on the last uncontaminated spot on the planet; he wants her ample rack—but control over their lives is strict. Diet, career, pleasure—each is dictated for them by those in charge, specifically (and unbeknownst to them) by a crackpot scientist named Merrick (Sean Bean), who has big plans for everyone underground. These plans consist mainly of organ harvesting, which Merrick feels is morally tolerable given the fact that both Lincoln and Jordan, along with everyone else underground, are clones.
As derivative sci-fi plots go, things could be worse. If Bay had focused on the paranoid dread built into such a yarn, the film might have turned out all right. But he didn’t; kicking THX-1138 to the curb after stealing its set design and wardrobe, he chooses instead to focus on the chase. The result is an ungodly creature—half musings on the role of morality in science, half preposterous stunt collage—and by the time it arrives at its end (some 140 minutes later), the entire enchilada has been served overbaked. There are some truly cool moments in The Island (one car chase involving a semi, two-ton train wheels, and numerous crashes is a triumph of bang for bucks), but all the absurd spectacle we look for from a colorful hack like Bay is undermined by his ridiculous and transparent desire to be taken seriously. BRADLEY STEINBACHER
Hustle & Flow
dir. Craig Brewer
“We can sit there and put social commentary on that—is that right, is that wrong? But there it is: I mean, it does exist. I’m not necessarily writing from a place of progress… It’s a sticky world.” That’s Craig Brewer, writer/director of Hustle & Flow, addressing his film’s troubling cultural milieu. DJay (Terrence Howard) is, among other things, poor, black, and on the make as a Memphis ghetto hustler. To make ends almost meet, he sells drugs and, uh, forces women to have sex with strangers for money. Down at the heels though he is, DJay is nonetheless a pimp, and pimps, despite their current pop chic, are the lowest vermin on the planet.
This, of course, makes DJay a problematic hero for what is, at heart, a classic redemption story. Hustle is also super-entertaining and, in its way, full of heart. But the centrality of pimp life—ultra-low-budget-style pimp life at that—makes the film a real challenge to reckon with. (The fact that MTV Films is distributing it only makes its contradictions richer.)
Though he has no hope of ever achieving his dream, DJay nurtures a secret fantasy of becoming a real live rapper. The way Brewer introduces us to his inner life—a crackhead gives him a toy synthesizer in lieu of payment—is a great touch. Howard’s identification with the disused Casio is poignant and human. By chance, he bumps into an old friend (Anthony Anderson), who knows how to record music, and before long, they hatch a scheme to make a crunk-ass demo. The only problem is: Where will they get the money? Uh, by forcing women to have sex with strangers for money. Again: complicated.
You could never say the film glamorizes being a pimp—everything in the lives of DJay and his girls (screaming babies, sticky heat, constant emotional assault) is super depressing. And the degree to which they all band together to help DJay’s dream come true is plausible, despite being fraught with a certain compound pathos (is anything sadder than seeing an abused person bend over backwards to embrace her abuser?). The songwriting scenes are super compelling; music films seldom give a convincing presentation of the means by which music is conceived and recorded, and you can see why the girls, especially Shug (Taraji P. Henson), are so enthralled just to be near it.
What’s tricky is that the terms of the genre—as well as the fantastic performances—demand that we also get behind DJay, and in order to do that, we either have to overlook or forgive the fact that he’s basically one step up the moral ladder from a slave owner. Still, as Brewer states above, this context does exist; the film would be a lot less watchable if the girls’ victimness was all there was to see. Everyone here is a victim—of poverty, power, religion, class, race, gender—and not all victims get to rise up. Like the man said, it’s a sticky world. SEAN NELSON
To read the complete transcript of Sean Nelson’s interview with Craig Brewer, log on to www.thestranger.com.
Saraband
dir. Ingmar Bergman
Never the happiest of campers, Ingmar Bergman has done anything but mellow out in his old age. Saraband, the 86-year-old director’s rumored curtain call (and his first full-length feature since 1982’s Fanny and Alexander) finds even the mild optimism of his Wild Strawberries burned away, in favor of a startlingly downbeat resignation toward the human condition. Bergman has threatened retirement before, but this screamingly intimate continuation of his 1973 classic Scenes from a Marriage feels like a natural coda to a lifetime of shockingly clear-eyed bitterness. As an endgame, it more than delivers.
Told in 10 chapters, Bergman’s monastically lean script follows the earlier film’s protagonist (Liv Ullmann, still luminous after all these years) as she travels on a whim to her ex-husband’s summer home after 30 years of silence, only to find that his misanthropic tendencies have, if anything, deepened. As her stay inexplicably extends, however, the focus shifts to his widowed son, living penniless in a nearby cabin and entangled in an uncomfortably intimate relationship with his teenage musical prodigy of a daughter. Tenuous family ties soon get put through the wringer.
This is all possibly even more of a bummer than it sounds, but the director’s iron control behind the camera and ability to dredge the depths of his actors (special kudos to Börje Ahlstedt as the widower, who drags his persona from pitiable to monstrous, and back again) makes for a strangely cleansing, overall cathartic experience. True, the meticulously rigorous process of character laceration can often feel overly schematic, and occasionally downright dull. But then a scene arrives like the one where a character wanders through thigh-high muck while barely holding back a primal scream, and the emotions feeding the filmmaker’s bracing worldview gets thrown into sharp, fierce relief. Staggering out of the theater, sunlight feels like a novelty. ANDREW WRIGHT
Last Days
dir. Gus Van Sant
Gus Van Sant’s Last Days owes its style to Alexander Sokurov’s masterpiece Mother and Son. That 1997 movie described the last day of an ancient woman who is lovingly cared for by her son. Though quiet, the weight of her death is heavy. What Russian director Sokurov manages to visually communicate is that the end of any life is a tremendous event, an apocalypse. When one person dies, six billion lives—the entire population of the planet and the known universe—go with them into the dark.
Dealing with the death of a rock star like Kurt Cobain is a tricky business because it was a major news event to begin with. Everyone saw his death. Everyone talked about it. Everyone laughed and cried. The director’s task is to somehow take Cobain’s death out of the glaring lights of the media and the public, and transport it to the quiet spaces, bedrooms, and living rooms of the existential, to the house of being. Because he needed to add lots of weight and heaviness to the death of Cobain, Van Sant borrowed the visual language, the wide and seemingly loose rhythms, and deep and detailed focus of Sokurov. As a result, Last Days is slow. It’s also beautiful. The rock star, named Blake (Michael Pitt), never talks, merely mumbles as he walks about the crumbling mansion. Early in the morning he’s already stoned. In the afternoon, he plays the drums. At one point Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon pays him a visit and says a few worried things. Then evening falls and the rock star goes out for his last walk in the city. Nothing particularly striking or weighty happens on Blake’s/Kurt’s last day on earth; all the way to the end of the movie, he is as light as a feather, as high as a kite. And so it is the style of the film, much like in Sokurov’s, that gives these quiet moments their substance. CHARLES MUDEDE
5 x 2
dir. François Ozon
François Ozon’s newest film is in some ways the mirror image of his early work. Continuing the transformation that turned the flagrant mayhem of Sitcom into the melancholy, heterosexual camp of Under the Sand (I regard Swimming Pool as an unfortunate aberration, and 8 Women as a halfhearted throwback), 5 x 2 is cool, strenuous, and off-putting. Calculated where his other movies are flamboyant, precise instead of disorderly, 5 x 2 is the kind of carefully crafted film you have to admire. It’s also almost impossible to enjoy.
The movie tells the history of a rather ordinary couple (the two in the title) in reverse chronological order, using discontinuous but revealing episodes (five in all). The conceit may be derivative, but Ozon’s work usually is—that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s flawed. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s Marion is appealing and pathetic in equal measure: the kind of role she does best. Stéphane Freiss plays opposite her as the cold, inscrutable Gilles.
In the first (i.e., sequentially last) episode, Gilles divorces and then basically rapes his ex-wife. Psychologically, the scene is elegant, but it’s hardly the way to make you engage with the two main characters. As the film progresses, these two flawed individuals throw painful, sexually conflicted parties; have a baby (well, Gilles flees the hospital as soon as Marion goes into labor); fail to consummate their marriage; fall in possibly lopsided love; and flirt. The preponderance of what you might call “warning signs” about Gilles starts to verge on the grotesque. Before your eyes, an asshole sheds his facial hair and grows backwards into a younger, nicer, but obviously irredeemable guy. Gilles loses any hope of the audience’s sympathy in the very first scene, but you still have to sit and watch him for another hour. It isn’t any fun at all. ANNIE WAGNER
The Devil’s Rejects
dir. Rob Zombie
My charm-school upbringing has kept me frightfully busy with trying to think of ways to disregard my own opinions about Rob Zombie’s new movie, and instead write something generous and supportive. The best I can manage is that—while tiresome and overwrought—The Devil’s Rejects manages to hit a few notes of sickly sweet decadence that show genuine effort on the part of its maker.
The story begins with a bloody police raid: A team of God-fearing cops attack the home of the Devil’s Rejects, a group of Satan-worshipping murderers who come complete with a pile of rotting bodies in their basement. After a stormy showdown between the forces of good and evil, the Rejects escape, and for the rest of the film they’re pursued by a vengeful policeman while terrorizing unsuspecting country folk at dusty truck stops. Gratuitous pagan violence ensues: Women are sexually violated with pistols while their husbands are forced to watch, and supporting actors are breezily shot in their heads, terminating any potential Oscars for performances as “Obviously Doomed Roadie” and “Loudmouth Husband with Deathwish.”
In the end, however, Zombie takes the plot in a surprising direction: utterly decadent dissolution. I honestly expected him to pull the old “evil people can be heroes too” cliché, maybe showing the Devil’s Rejects holding hands and scampering over a hill into the sunset. Instead, moral ambiguity and the cruel natural law of force take over. The killers are betrayed by their closest ally; the good cop regresses to a state of self-serving bloodlust, torturing his captives; and the remaining murderers escape—only to be gunned down by police backup. The last 20 minutes is a violent orgy, and neither side of the moral struggle emerges triumphant.
That much impressed me and struck me as evidence of a surprisingly sophisticated artistic vision. But the rest just came on like an extended branding campaign for Zombie’s slimy, scraggly, troll-shaman persona. Unfortunately, that hackneyed aesthetic transfers effortlessly to film, and leads to stereotypes like the serial killer/clown and the ruthless Midwestern femme fatale. Ultimately, being outdated is not taboo—it’s just awkward for the rest of us. EVAN JAMES
