Month: December 2010

Afghanistan’s Oscar Entry: The Black Tulip, A Film Worth Supporting Even if The Academy Won’t

By Joe Bendel. The Taliban are not what you might call big movie buffs. Of course, anything involving free expression is pretty much a non-starter for them. After shutting down Pakistan’s cottage Pashto film industry, for example, they did their best to harass the cast and crew of Sonia Nassery Cole’s The Black Tulip. Yet she persevered, eventually completing the only film produced in Afghanistan this year.

Though duly submitted as the country’s official submission for best foreign language Oscar consideration, the Academy unfortunately disqualified Tulip on grounds that seem highly debatable.

Since Cole and company are presumably working to secure festival slots and theatrical distribution, a review as such would be premature. However, having seen it two weeks ago at a New York Times event, one hopes more people will have a chance to share the experience. As writer, director, producer, and lead actress, Cole was nearly a one man band. Still, she and cinematographer Dave McFarland produced a slickly professional looking film that bears no resemblance to zero-budget Pashto films featured in George Gittoes’ jaw-dropping documentary The Miscreants of Taliwood (trailer below).

Rejected by The Academy on questionable grounds.

In fact, Cole displays a real talent for pacing and shot composition. Conversely, her acting is not exactly at the same level. To be fair, she was reportedly a last minute substitution when the Taliban hacked off the feet of the woman she had originally cast as the protagonist, Farishta. Naturally, the same New York Times has devoted a fair amount of article space to those who dispute this account – largely it seems, because they prefer not to deal with its implications. Had Cole had an actress like the great (and great really is the word) Shohreh Aghdashloo in the lead, the mind reels at what could have been. Perhaps the film’s greatest revelation though, is the consistent quality of the Afghan cast, particularly Haji Ghul Aser as her husband Hadar.

There are many reasons why Tulip is an important film. Indeed, it is truly fearless in its portrayal of the Taliban’s savagery. Even more controversially, it also depicts the American military as a positive presence in Afghanistan, forging links of friendship with average citizens. Yet, the most valuable aspect of Tulip is the window it opens into an Afghan middle class most Americans probably assume does not exist. Tulip shows audiences that not all Afghans are toothless mujahedeen with a Koran in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other. Rather, there are many people like Farishta and Hadar, who simply want to work hard and raise their family.

Considering the state of filmmaking in the region, one would think the Academy would try to support films like Tulip as best they can. However, they disqualified Tulip from the best foreign language film category – apparently because Cole, an Afghan expatriate working with a largely American crew, were not deemed authentically Afghan enough.

Yet similar issues could be raised regarding the Algerian Oscar submission, Rachid Bouchareb’s Outside the Law. Bouchareb was born in France to a family of Algerian immigrants. And aside from the opening scenes, the film is also set entirely in France – featuring French movie stars, like Roschdy Zem and Jean-Pierre Lorit.  Somehow though, this was apparently forgivable to the Academy given that the film is a critique of French colonialism.

Law is an excellent picture that deserves to be in Oscar contention, but if it meets the foreign language division’s criteria, it is hard to understand why Tulip would not. Maybe Cole’s film can still qualify for consideration in the best song category. Natalie Cole (no relation) recorded three originals for the soundtrack, including one legitimately stirring anthem with a popular Farsi vocalist.

Contact your local film festivals and societies about Tulip, because a film like this will need a groundswell of support.

Posted on December 15th, 2010 at 11:40am.


In the Wake of the Mumbai Terror Attacks: Paranoia

By Jason Apuzzo. We’ve gotten out of the habit here at Libertas of showing you short films, and I wanted to get back to that when we have the opportunity.

This new short film above from a group of Indian animation students has won a variety of awards, and was just uploaded to Vimeo about two weeks ago. Its subject matter is terrorism, and fears associated with the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks. The film is interesting, and unpredictable. Make sure to watch it all the way to the end.

The premise of the film is simple and powerful, as with any good short film. A guy is traveling home on a late night Mumbai train. The passenger car is empty, except for one sleepy passenger. Suddenly, a man who matches a description of a terrorist – carrying a briefcase – boards the train and decides to sit directly in front of our protagonist. Suspense ensues …

The interesting question the short seems to raise is: whose expectations are being played upon here – the passenger’s, or the audience’s? Another way of putting it is: is the title intended ironically, or not?

For more information on the film, visit its Facebook page.

Posted on December 15th, 2010 at 10:56am.

Whitewashing History: Communist China’s Oscar Entry Aftershock in IMAX

By Joe Bendel. The 2008 Sichuan earthquake was not simply a tragedy—it was a scandal. Average citizens were appalled by the government’s ineffectual response and the corrupt state building practices that amplified the quake’s severity. Yet what most outraged many survivors was the extent to which the Sichuan quake and its controversies paralleled that of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake. Clearly, lessons had not been learned. However, the People’s Liberation Army and a liberal dose of revisionist history ride to the rescue in Feng Xiaogang’s disaster drama Aftershock, which China has officially submitted for Oscar consideration in the best foreign language film category.

From "Aftershock": smiling PLA parents.

The summer of 1976 began as a happy, peaceful time for Yuan Ni and her family. Evidently, there was no Cultural Revolution to worry about in Tangshan, but the devastating earthquake made up for it in spades. Saved by her husband at the expense of his own life, Yuan Ni is faced with a devastating Sophie’s Choice. Both her twins are trapped under a concrete slab, but to save one child, the other will surely be crushed in the process. This being China, she chooses her son Fang Da.

Cruelly, his sister Fang Deng hears her own mother consigning her to death. Yet, through some twist of fate, Fang Deng lives, discovered relatively unscathed within a mountain of corpses. Having understandable abandonment issues, the young girl claims to have no memory of the traumatic events when asked by her adopted parents, a kindly couple serving in the PLA. Years pass and much melodrama happens, but when the 2008 quake hits Sichuan, both Fang Deng and Fang Da rush to join the Tangshan survivor volunteer relief workers. Right, you should definitely be able to guess where the third act is headed from there.

Aftershock is billed as the first commercial IMAX film produced in China. While the first fifteen minutes or so are probably pretty cool, as the Tangshan buildings fall like houses of cards, the next two hours of family drama must feel like overkill on the giant screen. Though relatively brief, Feng’s Irwin Allen scenes are tense and convincing. Indeed, he is a talented “big picture” director, but he is also something of a propagandist for the PLA. 2007’s Assembly, a well done war film that follows a grizzled army officer as he fights in the Chinese Civil War and the Korea War (against us), is a case in point.

The young Zifeng Zhang is absolutely heartrending as Fang Deng. As the adult Fang Deng, the striking Jingchu Zhang also tugs on the heartstrings quite effectively. Unfortunately much of the plot depends on characters deliberately making life harder than necessary, which quickly taxes viewer patience. It’s as if the film hopes the overblown angst can somehow fill up the giant IMAX screen.

Of course, there was plenty of heaviness going on in China during this time, but Aftershock scrupulously ignores the death rattle of the Cultural Revolution, the downfall of the Gang of Four, and the Tiananmen Square massacre. However, scenes of Mao’s funeral are shown with reverence and PLA soldiers are regularly hailed as heroes of the Tangshan rescue effort. Granted, not every film needs to address political issues, but the lack of context in Aftershock is as glaringly obvious as a film set in 1940s Germany that never mentions the National Socialists.

Though not wholly unwatchable, thanks in large measure to its Fang Dengs, Aftershocks is definitely a flawed film. Too long and too white-washed, it is more of a curiosity than a contender in this year’s foreign language Oscar contest.

Posted on December 14th, 2010 at 10:20am.

The Genius Child



By David Ross. I make my living stumping for high modernism, so I am not exactly an enemy of the avant-garde and the experimental, and yet I am diffident about the extraordinary reputation of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), the Brooklyn-born Haitian-American wunderkind who during the early eighties vaulted from graffiti artist to Warhol protégé and Madonna boy-toy in a mere ten years before dying of a heroin overdose.

I turned to Tamra Davis’ documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2009) for a glimmer of an explanation. The documentary turned out to be a trove of vintage footage and articulate commentary provided by those who stood just at the perimeter of Basquiat’s spotlight, but in the end I could find no trail of breadcrumbs to lead me out of the postmodern funhouse in which fame multiplies by some hidden law of light and reflection and desire. Basquiat wrote meaningless koans with spray paint and became famous; he founded a band with some downtown types, none of whom could play instruments, and become even more famous; he mooned around the trendiest clubs and become more famous still. He painted childlike hieroglyphics on whatever he could find and became a superstar. Dying young, he became a legend, which is precisely what he had set out to be.

Really, though, what is the substance of his achievement? His art is certainly vivid and energetic, and its neo-expressionist assault on the minimalism and conceptualism of the seventies is impossible not to cheer (“white paintings, white people, white wine” is how one interviewee recalls the pre-Basquiat era). And yet his art does not – for me at least – resolve into meaning. Its presumptive symbol language is too private and haphazard, and it is not tantalizing enough on its face to rouse my analytic energy and resolve. We kill ourselves to make sense of Finnegans Wake because we intuit that there is sense to be made; Basquiat’s art demands a gamble of time and energy that seems to run against the odds of an ultimate payoff.

The film’s numerous interviewees note Basquiat’s influences: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, William Burroughs, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning. There’s something to be said for each of these connections, but Basquiat’s art seems to me closest to that of De Kooning: stark, nightmarish, garishly and luridly childlike, suffocating in its self-enclosed logic. I would say, though, that De Kooning’s punch is more concerted and harder thrown, his vision more ordered and hefty. Basquiat may have been more talented – I have no idea – but I doubt he had reflected nearly as carefully about what he was up to or exercised the same kind of winnowing intelligence. He seems to have worked by spontaneous trial and error, adding, subtracting, and overlaying in accordance with some inner sense of arrangement and meaning. This kind of improvisation can be electrifying when executed with supreme technical command (Keats, Coltrane, Pollock) but Basquiat was very far from virtuosic.

I can comprehend Basquiat only as a talented and perhaps semi-inspired cipher whose most superficial accouterments – name, hair, race – won him the role that had to be filled one way or another: that of the boy genius, the tragic naïf, with royalties and two-hundred years compounded interest owed to Keats. Basquiat was particularly suited to this role, being soft-spoken, dreamy, and vague in a way that might be misinterpreted as poetic. In comparison to Patti Smith, perhaps the only genuine genius of the punk-era downtown scene, Basquiat seems flimsy; his flourishes may or may not dazzle, but they are never more than flourishes.

The film, incidentally, adopts as epigraph Langston Hughes’ bad poem “Genius Child”:

This is a song for the genius child.
Sing it softly, for the song is wild.
Sing it softly as ever you can –
Lest the song get out of hand.

Nobody loves a genius child.

Can you love an eagle,
Tame or wild?
Can you love an eagle,
Wild or tame?
Can you love a monster
Of frightening name?

Nobody loves a genius child.

Kill him – and let his soul run wild.

The suggestion that the world “kills” the “genius child” in a snit of aggressive philistinism or atavism is ludicrous and particularly ludicrous in this case. Everybody loves a “genius child” and certainly everybody loved Basquiat. He was surrounded by benefactors. They paid his rent, slept with him, bought him paints, canvases, whatever he needed, furnished him with studio space, collected his paintings from the very start. Basquiat, in his early twenties, was fast on his way to substantial wealth and permanent celebrity. Had Basquiat lived only a few more years he would have been showered with a MacArthur Genius Grant and other remunerative goodies, and he would have wound up splitting his time between a downtown duplex and the south of France, with occasional appearances on Oprah to pontificate on the strain of being a genius.

Has society ever genuinely killed a “genius child”? It’s very hard to think of a case. Shelley initiated the accusation in “Adonais,” his bloated elegy for Keats, alleging that John Wilson Crocker’s savage review of Endymion in the Quarterly Review had done in the young poet. He writes in his preface:

The savage criticism produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgements from more candid critics of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wontonly inflicted.

Hating this kind of misty whining, Byron did his best to stab the trope in its cradle. His wry retort comes in Don Juan (Stanza 60, Canto XI):

John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,
Just as he really promised something great,
If not intelligible, without Greek
Contrived to talk about the Gods of late,
Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate:
‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.

Byron did his best, but it was no use. Every suicidal, immuno-compromised, coke-snorting, sport-car-gunning boy-genius would be laid like some pierced fawn on society”s doorstep.

The only figure who begins to make sense of Hughes’ silly poem is Oscar Wilde, though his genius was only part of the problem. Wilde was genuinely destroyed; all of the others – from Shelley himself to Michael Jackson – destroyed themselves for reasons of their own.

Posted on December 14th, 2010 at 9:45am.

Ballerina as Careerist: Black Swan

By Patricia Ducey. Darren Aronofsky’s new film, Black Swan, is not The Red Shoes, the original ballet and madness movie that spawned many imitators – and it’s not a thriller (as it’s billed), either. It’s pretty clear early on that our heroine’s worst enemy is her own shaky self. Ballet movies like The Red Shoes and its progeny explore the Romantic ethos of the artistic life; to live, and perhaps even to die for art, is the highest calling of humanity – if we are to believe them.

But Black Swan tosses dance aside. We never do understand why ballet is so important to our heroine Nina (Natalie Portman) or even to autocratic artistic director Thomas (Vincent Cassel). The dancing (even if I had not recently seen the electrifying Mao’s Last Dancer), is sadly pedestrian, even after Natalie Portman’s yearlong marathon of training. Aronofsky’s camera instead focuses mainly on the physical toll to the dancers’ bodies as they joylessly go through their paces. His characters never express dance as any sort of intellectual or spiritual vocation. They do not seek transcendence – they want to be stars! And our doomed ballerina Nina apparently suffers from the worst case of such careerism and perfectionism. We wonder for two hours whether she will make it to stardom, or whether her neuroses will destroy her main chance. This is not so much an opera as an after-school special – albeit R-rated -about self-esteem.

As in his previous films The Wrestler or Requiem for a Dream, Aronofsky eschews coherence or depth in his stories and instead uses narrative merely as a frame, as insubstantial as gossamer, on which to hang his feverish and sometimes arresting images. Tellingly, most of the images in Black Swan are not of the ballet itself but of sex (sex with a sadistic boss, in a dirty toilet, between lesbian rivals) and gore (flesh peeled off fingers, feet broken by dancing, guts ripped open by mirror shards).

With such explicit focus from the director on sex and death, what’s left for the actors to imply by nuance or expression? Not much. The arc-less script is not interested in nuance or emotional truth, and this hampers the performances of our two leads. Nina begins the movie as a tightly wound child and ends there, too – she is not destroyed by the dualities of the Black Swan/White Swan at all. She might just as well have been a lawyer or a housewife; the ballet is only a backdrop to foreground her neuroses.

Vincent Cassel does his best as the autocratic sexual-predator director (of course) who has no feeling or opinion on dance at all, and his character stays here as well. Thomas recites his leaden, James Cameron-style dialogue with as much brio as he can: “I don’t think you have it in you!” he bellows over and over to Nina. Yet he chooses her for the starring role anyway, because she shows “spirit.” The evening before, he clumsily and arrogantly attempts to kiss her and she bites his lip in a panic, drawing blood.

What is an actor to do with such nonsense?

Natalie Portman as Nina.

The swan chorus, meanwhile, is a bunch of Mean Girls who sound like foul-mouthed high schoolers rather than skilled, focused artists. So Mila Kunis as Nina’s chief rival doesn’t take all this dance stuff so seriously, ya know? She can go out on the town, down some shots, a little blow, and show up fresh faced the next morning at rehearsal. Yet Thomas continually compares her nonchalance and resultant superior acting/dancing to Nina’s. Why doesn’t he then choose her then for the Swan? At least she’s interesting.

In Aronofsky’s Brutalist school of moviemaking, disgust is all: he despises his weak, needy characters. Why bother with love stories (Requiem) or families (Wrestler) or transcendent art, he seems to ask, since we’ll all be worms’ meat soon enough! In Black Swan he delivers another dollop of the old ultra-violence with close-ups of bleeding skin, broken limbs and even more broken mirrors – but this is more Petit then Grand Guignol: the gore in Black Swan exists for its own sake, completely uncoupled from dramatic context. With each gruesome image, he delivers pain and stimulation and little else; when the story slows down and Nina inspects her self-mutilation scars, you shut your eyes. In The Wrestler, at least, Mickey Rourke’s broken body served the narrative about his broken dreams.

Perhaps Aronofsky, the inveterate bombast, cannot identify with the constraint and tradition and nuance of the ballet aesthetic. To him, striving for the unattainable in love or art is masochism. What’s left for him, then, is merely a simplistic psychologizing of the Swan myth: the good Nina can’t handle her bad Nina. It remains a mystery, though, how this timorous child/woman could ever have risen to the top ranks of any company when her personality continually stunts her performances.

Vincent Cassel with Natalie Portman in "Black Swan."

And so we wait for Nina’s inevitable disintegration – because we no longer expect happy endings from movies, and we’re not surprised when that inevitable disintegration comes. We simply passively wait for it – but this isn’t enough to sustain a long movie.

Aronofsky almost redeems himself in the end – too late, though, to save the film. Nina finally snaps and ‘becomes’ the Black Swan. She dances with all the vigor and sexual energy Thomas has been calling for. The camera follows her as she finally surrenders to her role and leaps out onto the stage, where she appears to molt her human identity and change into an actual living swan. She greets the increasing transformation of her body with joy and she dances, for once, with abandon, and she triumphs. As the camera silhouettes her final bow against the stage lights, the unity of image and psychology and story is simply breathtaking. What a movie this might have been, if Aronofsky had been half as rigorous for the preceding two hours.

There is hope, then, that this ambitious, reckless filmmaker will one day rise – like Nina – to live up to his own artistic potential.

[Footnote: My Christmas present from Hollywood was seeing the trailer for The Tree of Life, Terence Malick’s new film, which promises that in 2011 we will be treated to a film by an artist in full command of his many gifts, one who actually understands and respects the complexity of the human soul.]

Posted on December 13th, 2010 at 2:17pm.

Vanity, Thy Name is Jolie: LFM Reviews The Tourist

By Jason Apuzzo. When you’re the biggest female movie star in the world, and your personal man-servant is Brad Pitt, you can order up a film like The Tourist – more or less as you would order up room service at The Ritz.

That’s the ‘truth,’ such as it is, behind the new Angelina Jolie star vehicle that opens today, co-starring – technically, at least – Johnny Depp, and directed (so the advertising claims) by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.

Because if the phrase ‘vanity project’ has any meaning, then it applies with full force in describing The Tourist.

That’s not necessarily such a bad thing, in so far as Ms. Jolie is a genuine star – albeit, occasionally a star in the same way that Medusa was a ‘star’ of Greek mythology, earning her points by way of force rather than charm. But in the strange world we live in, in which people like Sandra Bullock or Reese Witherspoon are routinely and incorrectly referred to as ‘stars’ (rather than as what they are, which is ‘actresses’) Angelina Jolie is the genuine article, and The Tourist only confirms that. If there ever was a woman the camera loves as she walks into a crowded ballroom, or as she skeptically raises an eyebrow at a would-be suitor, or as she fixes an appraising gaze on a man she intends to possess – and destroy? – then it’s Angelina Jolie.

The problem is, star vehicles don’t always make for good films – and at a certain point, they also corrode the star’s image. (Ask John Travolta about that.) The Tourist is almost – if not quite – a disaster, a woeful and expensive attempt to mimic charming romantic espionage capers of the past like North by Northwest, Charade or Arabesque; and in the generally misogynistic calculus of today’s Hollywood, Jolie likely can’t afford many more films like it.

Angelina Jolie, with some guy.

There’s more to The Tourist than that, though. There’s also a kind of snarky, dismissive tone taken by the film toward America and Americans that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. More on that below. The bottom line is that whereas I was ready to pass this film off as a harmless failure, an expensive lark – now I’m actively rooting for it to fail.

Frankly, I hope The Tourist tanks.

I’ll go through the motions and describe the film’s ‘plot,’ although ‘plot’ in this film is strictly an afterthought. We start with Jolie, who’s in Paris being surveilled by Scotland Yard for reasons as yet unknown. The Scotland Yard team is led by Paul Bettany and Timothy Dalton (highly underrated as James Bond, I might add) – just two members of this film’s expensive supporting cast, which also includes Steven Berkoff and Rufus Sewell. Jolie gives Scotland Yard the slip, and finds herself on a train bound for Venice where she picks up Depp as a decoy to keep her pursuers guessing. Complicating matters is that a crime lord (Berkoff) who’s also pursuing Jolie mistakes Depp for a criminal who recently made off with about a billion dollars’ worth of his dirty money. Double-crosses, pseudo-adventure, predictable revelations and passing glances at romance ensue.

What non-chemistry looks like.

A few other things ensue, as well. One of the film’s motifs is that of Depp acting out as a bumbling, graceless and naive American in one of Europe’s most exotic and resplendent cities: Venice. (It’s simultaneously one of Europe’s grimiest and crassly commercialized cities; even Goethe was complaining about it back in the 1790s, long before there were Americans around to ruffle anybody’s feathers.) Depp plays the 2010 version of the ‘ugly American’ overseas, although in this case he’s more like the bumbling, gauche American – and The Tourist tries to play his ‘fish-out-of-water’ status for as many cheap laughs as possible.

It’s pathetic, and none of it works. It also happens to be obnoxious – a ‘look at the dancing American monkey’ routine – and immediately reawakened my dormant contempt for all-things-Depp.

By why restrict my venom to Depp? How about the director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck? You can stick a fork in him. His 2007 film The Lives of Others was a breath of fresh air on a challenging, politically incorrect subject (i.e., the legacy of communism in Europe). Whatever good-will he established with that film has now been swiftly squandered – and for what? To play personal valet to big-dollar American movie stars on a European holiday? To indulge in cheap anti-Americanism, so he can fit in better with the Malibu gentry?

A fairy-tale Venice, with no tale to tell.

Donnersmarck does not appear to have ‘directed’ his stars here at all, actually. Perhaps he was over-awed by the talent suddenly put at his disposal. Jolie swans through the film doing her usual routine – which is fine, it’s a good routine, except that she lacks the vulnerability here that she shows in her better roles. As for Depp, he really needed to be directed because – conventional wisdom to the contrary – he is neither Cary Grant nor Laurence Olivier, and needed to bring more discipline to his performance (beginning with cutting his hair, and getting a shave) in order to be convincing as a math teacher from Wisconsin.

The deeper problem here, though, is that Hollywood is long out of practice making films like this – and it shows. The Tourist feels like a tourist ride through other, better films – films with higher stakes (as during the ideological struggle of the Cold War; one thinks here of Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews), or with more style (say, Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik). Donnersmarck doesn’t want to take too many chances here, though, and potentially risk his shiny new Hollywood career; ironically, his career may now get scuttled by this film.

The temptation to ‘go Hollywood’ is a strong one, one that only the most willful and stubborn can withstand. It’s probably very tempting even for an Oscar-winner like Donnersmarck, with serious things on his mind, to become – in effect – little more than another member of Angelina Jolie’s livery.

There are no doubt worse fates, but some of us were hoping for more from him.

Posted on December 10th, 2010 at 6:14pm.