Danish soldiers in Afghanistan experience the moral free-fall that is war.
By Eric Hynes
TROOP GRIT A Danish soldier sweats it out in the combat zone.
When the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, the term embedded reporting suggested an all-access pass to military might. But with last year’s Restrepo and this astonishing thunderclap of a war doc, proximity puts you flush in the face of an unfolding tragedy. Armadillo follows a group of Danish soldiers for a full tour of duty in the region, where they regularly engage the Taliban in close-range firefights. By day, they dodge IEDs and sniper fire; by night, they watch porn, play computer war games and pop motorcycle wheelies in the dust. When they ambush and mercilessly “liquidate” a group of insurgents hidden in a trench, questions over the ethics of combat and the brutality of men come uncomfortably to the fore. Meanwhile, ordinary Afghans are constantly caught in the crossfire, and suffer no matter who prevails. “The country is exhausted,” says a farmer.
Director Janus Metz Pedersen has the scruples of a journalist but the sensibility of an artist, using the camera to interpret and complicate his subjects even while doggedly recording them. Invasive close-ups widen out to horizon-line landscapes, a queasy military-green palette briefly yields to a red desert sunset, and madness reconciles into just cause. It’s a sickening but stunning portrait of combat that looks past notions of bravery or brutality, guilt or innocence, to bear witness to a thoroughly besieged humanity
A slice of Soviet life at the end of the Party demands attention.
By Joshua Rothkopf
NEW KIDS ON THE BLOC Soviet youths play pioneer.
A documentary filled with lovely, unlikely ideas, My Perestroika wastes no time confounding expectations: “I was completely satisfied with my beautiful Soviet reality,” recalls Lyuba, now a schoolteacher and mother, without a trace of irony. We see the grainy footage of massive parades, uniforms and smiling citizens of the “country of happy childhood.” Apple-cheeked ice skaters skim through the 1970s, a boy learns how to ride a bicycle, pageants celebrate the start of the school year. It all looks like tons of fun. Agrees Lyuba’s husband Borya, “Everything somehow seemed better.”
The scrim of nostalgia doesn’t blind these modern-day subjects, who came of age just as the system was collapsing. Rather, the tone here is light and nonjudgmental, rare to sociopolitical docs. Lyuba and Borya share their home movies with their geeky son, growing up in a Russia of Pizza Huts and cell phones; subtly, through a haze of cigarette smoke, the pragmatism of their cramped apartment brings them closer.
Director Robin Hessman, an American who traveled to Russia in 1991 as a Brown freshman and ended up staying there for a decade, builds her multiperspective profile with no narration, just well-chosen archival footage and an ear for tender parental exchanges. (Hessman is also responsible for producing Russia’s Sesame Street.) Ruslan, once the leader of a popular punk band, reassures his nervous kid that he, too, will be cool one day; meanwhile, Olga, the school beauty, lives a lonely life, resigned not to self-pity but to that distinctly Russian sense of cynicism. Thus comes My Perestroika’s most sophisticated idea: Day-to-day family struggles have a way of trumping even the most profound political change. Don’t miss this.
Directed by Kaspar Heidelbach
(Germany, 100 min, 2009) The story of Jewish athlete Gretel Bergmann and her attempt to compete in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Germany. The Nazi party attempts to have her replaced by an athlete later discovered to be a man.
December 31, a night best spent free and clear of the out-of-town crowd. So you’ll seek refuge in a place they’d never think to look: a movie theater. But not just any movie theater. One showing the Eddie Murphy classic, Coming to America, at midnight. You supply the McDowell’s; they’ll supply the Sexual Chocolate.
411:
Dec 31, midnight, The IFC Center, 323 6th Ave, 212-924-7771
You know a thing or two about experimental cinema (your production of David Lynch’s Home Alone will change everything), but you’re still bound to have your mind at least partially blown by this collection of Andy Warhol screen tests and shorts. Featuring the likes of Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper and a full frontal… Campbell’s soup can.
Perhaps the most controversial film of the ’90s, this murderers-run-amok satire (from a story by Quentin Tarantino) may leave impressionable filmgoers with the irresistible urge to kill the inventor of the Avid digital-editing system. Still, for those studying the cinema of overkill (1990s division), it’s truly essential viewing.
If you’ve been looking to catch U2 at midnight, in concert with Ziggy Stardust, this is your spot. The inaugural Doc NYC festival, which also includes live conversations with Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, kicked off yesterday. U2 is tomorrow night at midnight. Ziggy is Saturday. And Sunday you’re on your own. We had to cut you off at some point.
In its fourth unearthly year, Scary Movies returns with an onslaught of spine-tingling premieres, rarities, and classics. See the world premiere of Village of Shadows, with the director Fouad Benhammou in person! Chill to the New York premieres of Jim Mickle’s fresh festival favorite Stake Land and Christopher Smith’s bubonic-era Black Death. Don’t miss two electrifying films from Australia’s new wave of genre mavens: James Rabbitts’ The Clinic and Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones.
Rare repertory revivals include a double dose of fright from star cameraman Freddie Francis (The Creeping Flesh and Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors), as well as the classic multi-tale Dead of Night. And what Halloween would be complete without dear, dear Carrie?
Scary Movies 4 is programmed by Laura Kern & Gavin Smith.
Save with a Three-Film Pass!
$30 General Public / $21 Students & Seniors / $18 Members Buy your pass now! >>
OPENING NIGHT Stake Land
Jim Mickle, USA, 2010; 96m
In person: director Jim Mickle, writer Nick Damici, actor Connor Paolo, and actress Kelly McGillis! New York premiere!
Forget Twilight and True Blood and all those other touchy-feely vampire soap sagas—Jim Mickle’s down-and-dirty Stake Land brings the horror back to the blood-sucking genre, with a vengeance. Read more…
CLOSING NIGHT
The Loved Ones
Sean Byrne, Australia, 2009; 84m
New York premiere!
Winner of an audience award at the Toronto Film Festival, this choice piece of prom-night horror shows the gory good times to be had from low self-esteem. Read more…
Black Death
Christopher Smith, U.K./Germany, 2010; 102m
Magnet Releasing
New York premiere!
As if the bubonic plague that swept mid-14th-century Europe wasn’t ghastly enough, Black Death injects apparent necromancy into the mix. Sean Bean and Eddie Redmayne respectively play knight and monk sent with a team of mercenaries to investigate a village mysteriously unscathed by the pandemic. Read more…
A couple on a road trip in the middle of the outback makes a pit stop at a sketchy motel… Sound familiar? Don’t be fooled, for everything that follows this seen-it, done-that setup is anything but routine. Read more…
Dead of Night
Charles Crichton, Alberto Cavalcanti, Basil Dearden & Robert Hamer, U.K., 1945; 103m
Films like Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (not to mention shows like The Twilight Zone) owe everything to Dead of Night, the granddaddy of the horror omnibus. Read more…
Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors
Freddie Francis, U.K., 1965; 94m
A wonderfully wicked Amicus anthology film made up of five stories comprising a fistful of horror staples: lycanthropy, vampirism, killer vegetation, voodoo, and disembodied hands. Read more…
Clive Barker’s stylish feature debut, adapted by Barker from his own novella “The Hellbound Heart,” first introduced Pinhead—a now iconic figure in modern horror—to the screen. Read more…
The Legend of Hell House
John Hough, U.K., 1973; 95m
Four brave souls accept the offer to spend one week at Hell House, the “Mount Everest” of haunted houses in this “Mount Everest” of haunted-house movies. Read more…
In a tiny coastal ghost-town, a woman searches for her estranged painter father amidst undead residents in otherworldly surroundings—shot in Antonioni-esque wide-screen. Read more…
The Mutations
aka The Freakmaker
Jack Cardiff, U.K., 1974; 91m
Paying homage to Tod Browning’s classic, Freaks, cinematographer Jack Cardiff’s The Mutations relies on real-life carnival attractions to propel the action in this peculiar and intensely creepy tale. Read more…
Village of Shadows (Le Village des Ombres)
Fouad Benhammou, France, 2010; 103m
World premiere! Q&A with the director.
France’s cinéma fantastique renaissance continues with this supernatural variation on Ten Little Indians, strong on atmosphere and light on gore Read more…
Dir. David Fincher. 2010. PG-13. 120mins. Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake.
Facebook isn’t such a great subject for the movies—too much typing. And heroic computer hackers have never, ever inspired cinematic thrills. (Remember Sandra Bullock in The Net? Exactly.) Mainly, though—and let’s see how many film critics admit this—Facebook has quietly left Hollywood in the dust. Not even James Cameron can claim 500 million friends for Avatar, and that’s people returning on a daily basis. We’re the movie now, and it’s a dumb comedy about what sandwich we just ate.
So consider it a wondrous turn of events that The Social Network, a lightning-fast dramatization of the disputatious founding of Facebook, represents not just a revenge of the onscreen nerd, but of those behind the camera, too. It’s a grandly entertaining reminder of everything we used to go to the movies for (and still can’t get online): sparkling dialogue, thorny situations, soulful performances, and an unusually open-ended and relevant engagement with a major social issue of the day: how we (dis)connect. Forget about damage control—if I were billionaire site exec Mark Zuckerberg, I’d be down on my knees in gratitude for an origin story this brainy, suggestive and, yes, flattering. Sort of.
The future CEO himself is portrayed as a furiously snippy Harvard “asshole”—that word becomes something of a theme—by Adventureland’s Jesse Eisenberg, fully breaking the bonds of Cera-dom. Reportedly, the real Zuckerberg lent zero access to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (who tops even The West Wing for mile-a-minute nowness), but he’s been supplied with a fully believable class complex, chafing at the traditions of the university’s exclusive “final clubs.” Giving us a taste of Hollywood’s future Lisbeth Salander, Rooney Mara cuts down her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend thusly: “What part of Long Island are you from, Wimbledon?”
Drunkenly, the computer whiz demolishes her with a passive-aggressive online stunt, “Facemash,” setting up the whole story (and, subversively, Facebook itself) as an offshoot of dumpee rage. Mark soon finds himself hated campuswide, a Shylock courted by two unlikely Antonios, the crew-rowing goy twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played with delicious entitlement by Armie Hammer). They want to apply Mark’s gifts to their own hookup site and help him rehabilitate his image. “Wow. You would do that for me?” the unkempt programmer asks them in their frat’s bike room, resentment brewing.
Sex, money, Jewish paranoia, algorithms—this is merely the movie’s first half hour. The Social Network zings along like nothing attempted since the heady days of Paddy Chayefsky. (We might be looking at the heir to his darkly dazzling Network.) Splitting into deft complexity, Sorkin’s tale toggles to ominous legal conference rooms, developing a pair of shoulder angels for Mark to hear out: his betrayed cofounder, Eduardo (Garfield, the heart of the film); and larky Napster flirt Sean Parker (Timberlake), inviting him to dream bigger. Never preachy, the film becomes a referendum on pushy ambition, both in business and private matters, that’s the signature of Facebook itself, turning a nation of users into self-promoters. These characters will, one day, be us: alienating our “friends” while linking with the world. Do movies ever attempt to analyze the entire weave of life? Now they do.
To think that we once didn’t know what to do with David Fincher. Was he a Kubrickian fussbudget? A stylish torture master picking the wings off Brad Pitt? The bad-boy director of Fight Club and Seven might still be both of those things. But ever since 2007’s ghostly Zodiac (a veiled indictment of Bush-era fear culture), there can be no doubt of Fincher’s seriousness. He wants to make the big films—the ones about everything. The Social Network affords him opportunities for flash: A boat race scored to a computerized version of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” is as puckish as anything in A Clockwork Orange. Yet here, too, is a Fincher first: his most alluring, full-bodied lead performance, via the beautifully arrogant Eisenberg. It took a bastard to understand Zuckerberg; to turn him into a cryptic Pandora, lonely with his laptop, took a master.
Hollywood’s dream factory gazes into the mirror with the sci-fi mindblower.
By Joshua Rothkopf
Dir. Christopher Nolan. 2010. PG-13. 148mins. Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
So this is what $533 million buys you. Before I get into hot water: That’s not the budget of Inception, a luxurious slice of future shock that still has room for a preponderance of lovely sun showers. Rather, it’s the domestic box-office gross of writer-director Christopher Nolan’s previous movie, The Dark Knight. With that bruiser, Nolan, an intellectual prone to wearing trench coats, was vaulted into an echelon occupied only by James Cameron. And like Cameron, the barely-40 filmmaker has now bet the farm—all of his industry clout—on a fantasy. We may be living in the riskiest of Hollywood days.
Inception, though, is no Avatar—instead, it’s the movie that many wanted Avatar to be. In a roaringly fast first hour, we’re introduced to a new technology that allows for the bodily invasion of another person’s dreamworld. Leonardo DiCaprio has been doing this to his female fans for years. Here, as the haunted Dom, a corporate spy, the actor might finally be shorn of that last hint of baby fat that’s larded his adult roles. Dom steals secrets, the big billion-dollar ideas. He’s also something of a pill, estranged from his children and a source of worry to his mentor, Miles (the purring Michael Caine, an Alfredian holdover from The Dark Knight): “Come back to reality,” the elder urges.
Um, right. Nolan, who worked on his script for a decade and preserved most of its secrets, knows that nobody, least of all the audience, wants that to happen. Inception thus commits to that hoariest (if enjoyable) of conventions, the “one last job,” in which Dom will do the bidding of a mysterious Japanese energy magnate (Ken Watanabe) who hopes to fend off a younger competitor (Cillian Murphy) by simply having him quit the business. Dom could plant such a notion in his head, and as the film assembles its crazy team of ultraserious geeks—like a chemist named Yusuf who makes the necessary sedatives (Dileep Rao) or a maze-building architect (Juno’s Ellen Page)—you’ll be reminded of such pseudoscientific larks as The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. (And if you haven’t seen that bit of cult wonderfulness, get cracking.)
How can it be that a bunch of people sitting around scheming nonsense can prove so compelling? Only David Fincher knows how to take a studio’s money and spin it as stylishly as Nolan. First and foremost—and with breathtaking verve—out go the laws of physics. As in dreams, these cities fold in on themselves and bridges rear up like pissed-off cats. The plan has not yet begun and already, we’ve gotten an eyeful of slo-mo vertigo.
Yet Inception would be all guff if it didn’t strive for the romantic poetry of the great subconscious fantasias, movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Chris Marker’s immortal La Jetée. There is a woman, lurking on the periphery of Dom’s visions. She has tears in her eyes; sometimes, they hold a saboteur’s glare. Mal is her name (she’s played by the mighty Edith Piaf portrayer, Marion Cotillard) and we soon learn that she is Dom’s wife, and dead. Are these manufactured dreamscapes a bold frontier for him, or a private hell of memory?
Suddenly, the game is on—and my advice to you would be to throw away the rule book. Has any movie so lavishly committed to its dream logic as Inception? Certainly not at the multiplex. And honestly, for all its audacity, this might not be a ringing endorsement. A train comes barreling out of nowhere (that’s not a metaphor; one really does). Several unconscious characters float weightlessly in an elevator shaft. Page—who’s never allowed to be funny, a mistake—gets ski-lodgey in winter whites as a snow fortress is besieged by an armed militia. In short: Help.
But how refreshing it is to be consumed by a raging ambition, not merely the whoosh of a theater’s air-conditioning. Escapism is the goal of the summer season—indeed, maybe of cinema in general—and Nolan has honored that pact considerably while also asking much more of us. His latest, like his 2000 breakthrough, Memento, turns our viewership into a prickly challenge of catch-up: Even though Hans Zimmer’s score blares its tubas with the ominousness of a James Bond soundtrack, this is no mere good-versus-evil shoot-’em-up.
The “kick” is what Dom calls the moment when his team is jerked awake from its mission. Nolan has made a livelihood out of crafting such kicks (in The Prestige, it was an unfortunate bird, crushed in a magic trick). Does plunging through Inception’s many layers of kicks, symbology and interrupted bliss-outs bring us any closer to a higher truth? Maybe not. But oh, to have such dreams.
