Red Riding Trilogy

By rights, this sordid saga of a whole culture of corruption, perversion, and violence ought to be revolting and unwatchable.  Instead, it is immersive and compulsively watchable.  The three films -- aired first on Channel 4 in Britain in 2009, then theatrically released in the U.S., and now on DVD (with indispensable subtitles) – cover a decade of evildoing and official malfeasance in Yorkshire.  Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 was shot on Super 16 and directed by Julian Jarrold; 1980 on 35mm by James Marsh; 1983 on hi-def video by Anand Tucker.  Nonetheless they are very much of a piece, bound together in Tony Grisoni’s adaptation of David Peace’s cult-fave series of noir novels, collectively portraying a society going to hell under the toast and boast:  “This is the North.  Where we do what we want.”  Several serial killers are on the loose, and the police are more interested in exploiting the crime sprees than solving them.  People who investigate the web of corruption and fear are drawn in, chewed up, and spit out; primarily Andrew Garfield in 1974, Paddy Considine in 1980, and David Morrissey in 1983, leading effective acting ensembles in each, with peripheral characters moving to the foreground in sequence.  These films are like David Fincher’s Zodiac in using the pursuit of a serial killer as the key to understanding a whole community of characters.  Events always stay tantalizingly short of full comprehension, as the viewer stumbles through a universe without fixed points of truth or morality.  It’s grisly to be sure, even more in scenes of police torture than in the murders and sexual abuse, but not based on gratuitous shocks.  It’s confusing and meant to be, but dense with observation of personal and societal malaise.  (Apparently the confusion is enhanced because the novel 1977, which fills in the story of the Yorkshire Ripper, was omitted.)  The whole is a dark odyssey through a world of filth, and yet engrossing and perversely redemptive.  (MC-77)  If you want to get deep into the whole Red Riding cosmos, I recommend this essay by premier film historian David Thomson.

Agora

Alejandro Amenabar’s latest was a major disappointment to me.  The recreation of  Alexandria in the latter days of the Roman Empire, from Lighthouse to Library, is impressive and convincing, and the story of the philosopher Hypatia is treated with much more seriousness than the typical “sword & sandal” epic, but there is a failure to reanimate ancient characters in a believable way.  I expected more from Rachel Weisz in the lead role, and the three students who are “hot for teacher” remain vapid and opaque, as they grow up to become, respectively -- freed slave and Christian militant, Christian bishop, and converted Roman prefect.  This film has spectacle, but little intimacy or feel for the remoteness of the past.  Hypatia’s anticipation of the Copernican revolution that would a millennium later overturn the Ptolemaic system may be a bit of a reach, but it’s a reach few films would attempt.  And Amenabar seemed the man to do it, but alas, no.  I endorse the film’s look and ambition, and its larger lessons of the perpetual conflict between religious fanatics and citadels of learning, but find the drama inert, even drowsy.  (MC-55)

Casino Jack and other terrorists

Casino Jack and the United States of Money.  (2010, MC-68)  There’s a fine phalanx of committed documentary filmmakers working today, really making sense of vexed public issues, offering an antidote to Michael Moore.  Along with two Jareckis and Charles Ferguson, Alex Gibney is one of the best.  I found Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room both illuminating and infuriating, and Taxi to Dark Side definitely earned its Oscar, for its patient, thorough evisceration of Cheneyism.  Now he turns his attention to the most pressing issue of current American politics, the complete takeover of the electoral landscape by the power of concentrated wealth, the insidious and pervasive influence of campaign contributions.  Following the cohort of Abramoff, Rove, Reed, and Norquist from their College Republican days though their rise as idealogues of the Right to their full realization of the complete identity between their ideology and their own financial benefit.  If you want some idea of how the vortex of money and power swirls in Washington, flushing our democracy down the drain, this film is an excellent place to start – informative, inventive, funny, and well-paced.  I will warn you, however, that at the end of it, my first reaction was, “That movie makes me want to go out and burn something down.”   The competing feature, also called Casino Jack, starring Kevin Spacey, will be out by the end of the year, and will have to go some to better this documentary.

Gibney also directs My Trip to Al-Qaeda (2010, now on HBO, dvd date as yet unknown), which he turns into much more than a simple recording of Lawrence Wright’s stage piece of the same name, based in turn on Wright’s research for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, a Pulitzer Prize winner which certainly informed my understanding of its subject more than anything else I have ever read.  On stage and on film, Wright is every bit as convincing as he is in print, and the film does an excellent job of marshalling images in support of his argument. 

Bastards glorious and not

Richard Linklater ranks near the top of my favorite directors now in their prime, so I was surprised by my lukewarm response to his latest film, Me and Orson Welles (2009, MC-73), which has a surprising gloss and an equally surprising lack of heart or invention.  Christian McKay is definitely an impressive Orson Welles, odious but enthralling; on the other hand Zac Efron is a very bland Me, in this familiar backstage story of an ambitious teen falling in with the barely-out-of-his-teens (though you wouldn’t know it from this film) Welles, during the Mercury Theater’s inaugural with a stripped-down production of Shakespeare’s Caesar.  Claire Danes graces the film with her presence, as a Vassar grad determined to get connected in show business, and Joseph Cotten, George Coulouris, and John Houseman are plausibly incarnated to recreate the Wellesian repertory on and off stage.  There’s really nothing wrong with this film except for the hole at its center, and the overall sense of having seen this story before.  But I expect more of Rick – this is more like his remake of Bad News Bears than breakthroughs such as Waking Life, Tape, and the sublime diptych Before Sunrise/Before Sunset. 

Can a moral midget make a film of worth?  I doubt it.  Knowing the sensibility at work, I surmounted my aversion and watched Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds with a grudging willingness to see past my preemptive dismissal of what some consider one of the best films of 2009 (MC-69).  There was indeed some smooth moviemaking on view (and an Oscar-worthy performance by Christoph Waltz), with many nudges in the ribs of cinephiles, but the extreme ugliness of Tarantino’s temperament kept popping through, and surged in crescendo at the climax, reveling in revenge and essentially endorsing terrorism and torture.  So I got through it, but felt unclean afterwards -- say no more about it.  I will probably run the same experiment with Antichrist, by the equally loathsome Lars von Trier, when it comes out on dvd next month, so I can say I’ve seen all the so-called best films of last year as tabulated on various critics’ polls.