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Armond White’s Mid-Year Awards

Armond White — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 14:05:53 +0000

Carole Bouquet and André Dussollier in Unforgivable.

2012’s best so far and Sarris remembered

This year, I want to do the Mid-Year Reckoning differently, as a tribute to film critic Andrew Sarris’ recent passing. It was Sarris, during my grad school years at Columbia, who wisely advised that the percentage of good movies has not changed from the old days; now that the output is larger, the significance of sifting out the trash is more important than ever. Sarris’ indispensable work The American Cinema, first published in 1968, used the Nouvelle Vague’s notion of auteurism (cinema authorship) to categorize all Hollywood film history up to that point.

Sarris’ commentary on over 200 directors was an awesome feat, combining scholarship with sharp perception. His extraordinary assessments should still structure anyone’s thinking about movies, American or global.

Because The American Cinema emerged from cinema’s first half-century, it preserves aesthetics and values (pillars from Griffith to Sternberg) that have been lost in the recent years of criticism’s decline, in which media and box-office presence is given importance over the individual visions that Sarris knew were what made cinema an art form. He articulated that belief with idiosyncratic precision that to this day—when both Hollywood and the critical “community” have lost self-respect—is still awesome to read.

Each summer, my mid-year assessment has been a way to keep track of the movie year’s deluge, which, given the dozen or more films that open every week, is more than can be reviewed. Perhaps the reckoning might this time benefit from following Sarris’ model, as a reminder of the standards a film-lover has every right to uphold.

I take great exception to the TV pundit whose memorial to Sarris cited that he “loved movies.” Sarris’ work was greater than any fanboy obsession—everybody “loves” movies, but Sarris turned his interest into teaching, study and personal expression, the things that make criticism valuable, an art in its own right.

With continued respect for Sarris, one of the two critics who have meant the most to me, professionally and personally, I repeat The American Cinema’s first nine top-tobottom categories, citing the work of individual directors. It could help to understand how 2012’s best films so far might ultimately rank in film history or, as Sarris crucially demonstrated, in a personal pantheon rigorous enough to share with the world.

Pantheon Directors
Unforgivable (André Téchiné)—a tumultuous view of private lives as society and society as family.
The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies)—examines the linkage of desire and despair to find the value of personal resurrection.

The Far Side of Paradise
Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman)—the rare campus comedy genre visits private worlds that reflect the eccentricities we recognize deep down.
Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)— compares the innocence of youth and maturity.
Dark Horse (Todd Solondz)—tragedy found in the comedy of hopes squandered by misguided fashions. The Skinny (Patrik-Ian Polk)—clarifies the blur of sex and friendship that gay life faces straight-on.
A Thousand Words (Brian Robbins)—a Hollywood satire so casually profound it scared off the industry and its fans.

Expressive Esoterica
Americano (Mathieu Demy)—an Oedipal odyssey that finds cultural heritage in family legacy.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor)—addresses action movie tropes to satirize the deficiencies of contemporary genre excess.
The Lady (Luc Besson)—eloquently acted political biopic, refined non-comic-book heroism.
The Flowers of War (Zhang Yimou)—common tragedy and possibility, rapturously envisioned.

Fringe Benefits
Detention (Joseph Kahn)—traces moral chaos throughout recent pop history. Chronicle (Jonathan Trank)—youth’s visionary search for meaning.
Wanderlust (David Wain)—audacious mockery of Occupy sentimentality and its outdated hippie heritage.
That’s My Boy (Sean Anders)—empathy, heredity and its discontents.

Joyful Noise (Todd Graff)—the anodyne effects of music and the movie musical.

Less Than Meets the Eye
Roadie (Michael Cuesta)—great performance by Ron Eldard.
The Kid with a Bike (Dardennes brothers)— modern neuroses given fairytale attention.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Timur Bekmambetov)—trash made uncommonly spectacular.

Lightly Likable: Being Flynn, Darling Companion, Man on a Ledge, Where Do We Go Now?

Strained Seriousness: The Turin Horse, Safe, Neil Young Journeys, Magic Mike

Make Way for the Clowns: Ted, The Dictator, Casa de mi Padre

Oddities, One-Shots and Newcomers: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Gerhard Richter Painting, Locked Out, John Carter

To read more from City Arts click here.

Armond White: Boss Ladies

Armond White — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:01:21 +0000

The Political Masks of Yeoh, Newton and Streep

“You may not think about politics,” Aung San Suu Kyi (portrayed by Michelle Yeoh) tells one of the guards keeping her in house arrest in The Lady. “But politics thinks about you.”

Use of that famous quote proves that director Luc Besson thinks about politics even when exhibiting his well-practiced action-movie chops. Yeoh’s quote of a quote is part of the semiotic mask employed in the most interesting film portrayals of politically strong women, boss ladies.

Given the biased media’s celebration of comedienne Tina Fey’s derision of Sarah Palin, the prospects for serious female characterizations has been limited–as if to punish all women for political assertiveness and thinking for themselves. When Julianne Moore tried to split the difference between partisanship and artistic fairness when playing Palin in HBO’s Game Change, her efforts meant little.

This problem may have started with the media’s refusal to promote Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. (Not even black-targeted magazines like Essence, Ebony, O or Sister 2 Sister featured Rice on their covers before or after she held the highest position of any female in the country. Now that Michelle Obama has become cover girl of choice, it’s only as a clothes horse, never a woman of clear efficacy, or “agency“ as female academics like to boast.)

The Boss Lady in art has needed a semiotic mask–whether the kind Evita indicates (“Eyes!/Hair!/Mouth!/Figure!/Dress!/Voice!/Style!/Image!”) or such as Thandi Newton’s comically shrewd Rice in Oliver Stone’s W–perhaps the smartest black woman on screen since Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy and with a similar habit of seeing through the white folk (competitive male Cabinet members) surrounding her. A comparable histrionic cunning distinguished Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Critic Dennis Delrogh cited a camp quality in Streep’s impersonation–and indeed, Streep’s neigh-perfect singsongy British cadences were delightful, but never in a way to detract from Thatcher’s political force. She charmed one into fealty. Streep’s Boss Lady demonstrated assertiveness with contours of feminine prudence–especially her marvelous “habits become your character” speech.

It is an appreciation for political women’s habits that define their character in films like W, The Iron Lady and now in The Lady. Besson takes Chinese action movie legend Michelle Yeoh in the opposite direction of her butt-kicking gymnastics to play the pacifistic Aun Sang Suu Kyi and the surprising result is a stunning, subtly physical performance. What Quentin Tarantino failed to do for Pam Grier in Jackie Brown (transform a pop icon into a paragon of womanly discretion), Besson succeeds in doing with Yeoh. Of course Yeoh is a better actress than the wonderful Grier (when I first met Tarantino he sincerely referred to Grier as “She’s the Queen of women!”) but Yeoh is also playing a role of real depth and political complexity–if not mystery. Her facial expressions and poise are crucial to keeping one interested in a character who mainly walks about spouting platitudes (“Democaracy will only work if you include everybody. I encourage you to exercise democracy and the defense of basic human rights.”). The display of stress, wifely devotion, motherly passion, has to come through balletic mime.

To read the full review at CityArts click here.

AS WRITER-PRODUCER IN TAKEN, LUC BESSON PROVES HIS MASTERY OF THE ACTION FILM

admin — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:50:34 +0000

If French producer-director Luc Besson worked in Hollywood, he’d have won his Irving G. Thalberg Award by now. That particular Oscar, presented to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production” previously went to Darryl F. Zanuck, David O. Selznick, Walt Disney, Arthur Freed, Cecil B. DeMille, William Wyler, Albert R. Broccoli, Steven Spielberg, Billy Wilder, George Lucas, Clint Eastwood and Dino De Laurentis and—hear me now—Besson is in their class. Over the past two decades, attentive moviegoers witnessed Besson refine and revolutionize the action film. Those who saw La Femme Nikita, The Professional, The Fifth Element, the Transporter series, Ong Bak, Unleashed, District B-13 and Revolver know it. His impact could also be seen in War, Crank and Hitman—all innovative, intelligent and sleek. Maybe critics didn’t rally to Transporter 3 because at 100 minutes—and with the airy brilliance and wit of a Calder mobile—it seemed insubstantial in the midst of overlong, groaningly serious year-end Oscar bait.

Liam Neeson has a “big, John Wayne purpose” in action-thriller Taken.

Critics may have lost the taste for Manny Farber’s dictum that “space is the most dramatic stylistic entity.” But action-movie aficionados know to look forward to Besson’s spatially energized productions, and the new film Taken maintains his high standards. Going by its ads, Taken looks like a routine revenge drama circa 1990s Mel Gibson. Former CIA agent Bryan (Liam Neeson) uses his espionage skills to hunt down Paris-based prostitution thugs who abducted his teenage daughter (Maggie Grace). But the aplomb and political resonance of this familiar plot illustrates how Besson has transformed it. Director Pierre Morel (who previously directed District B-13 and was cinematographer on Transporter, Unleashed and War) is one of Besson’s wunderkind adepts; attuned to the meaning of movement—unlike emptily flashy TV commercial and music-video directors.
Taken has startling efficiency different from the incessant, agitating blur of the Bourne movies. Bryan’s odyssey happens in the shadow of international politics yet always highlights personal obligation. He can’t retire; global threat invades his domestic life and he is compelled to act. This familiar tale must be heightened. Besson, along with co-writer Robert Mark Kamen, ingeniously combine the freshest kinetics with topical unease. Upgrading the action tropes established by Hong Kong cinema and James Bond Euro-sizzle, he turns cinematic know-how (the look of things that is the specialty of his cinematographer-turned-directors) into sensitivity. Transporter 3 was supremely farcical in the way Frank Martin (Jason Statham) was gradually humanized. Taken’s hero is similarly gallant, not merely kick-ass.
Bryan’s pell-mell vigilantism is close-to-funny in its choreographed unstoppable fortitude. Revisiting the scene of his daughter’s capture, Bryan intuits images of her panic. It’s not a J-horror psychic-vision gimmick, but goes back to D.W. Griffith’s depiction of empathic emotion. Besson’s films find modern morality in the masculine will to act. This was once well understood in earlier eras of Hollywood genre-making—it explains why audiences have responded to the heroic banalities of Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino—but Besson realizes how the Iraq War has changed people’s expectations of what defines masculinity in troubled societies. He isn’t a funky hipster like Tarantino but shows a deeper, neo-traditional morality. The always-strapping Liam Neeson now has a big, John Wayne purpose—defending the hearth (if not the American way). And the revival of this challenge is deeply thrilling.
Sexy Anglo-Saxon Jason Statham is but the figurehead of the Besson revolution (as was Rie Rassmussen, the hot chick star of Besson’s 2007 Angel-A). Its essence is apparent as Neeson’s Bryan applies CIA skills to uncovering an Albanian underground, outwitting the duplicitous French secret service (Mathieu Busson) and going sensationally mano a mano with East European gangsters. He revives modern man’s basic social conflicts with a violent, sexual audacity that is amusing in a lighter way than the metaphysically inquiring Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Taken streamlines post–Iraq War anxiety. Not guiltily twisted like Eli Roth’s Hostel movies, Besson flips Hostel’s stolen-Americans concept. Personal angst redeems Bryan’s actions in what would otherwise be Gitmo torture-porn. This isn’t just excitation, the alarm it rouses has cultural roots: When Bryan finds his daughter’s jacket on a Parisian prostitute, the talisman evokes John Ford’s The Searchers, which was remade by Paul Schrader as the father/daughter porn-industry tragedy Hardcore. Eventually Bryan’s revenge becomes a brothel slaughter that evokes Scorsese’s 1976 Taxi Driver, another remake of The Searchers.
Besson’s refinement of action-movie formula helps Taken reassess post-9/11 principles. While the grandstanding Syriana exploited torture for cheap liberal righteousness, Besson and Morel dramatize Bryan’s struggle as a conscientious resistance to human degradation. Taken doesn’t inflate its sociological “significance,” but its genre refinement is what will make Besson’s movies (once people see them) outlast the Bourne films. Crank and the Transporter trilogy already have sizeable followings, and the aesthetically innovative editing of those films is displayed when Bryan takes his daughter’s cell phone memory card and zooms in on images of miscreant behavior.
Bryan’s 96-hour window to find his daughter teases the efficiency of Besson’s 90-minute plots and their emotional satisfaction. The gloomy, overlong Dark Knight denies audiences the fulfillment of catharsis and resolve. Its nihilism made it obnoxious; we need The Joker to be smashed. And that’s the moral beauty Besson assuredly delivers. As a producer, he works in the Val Lewton tradition without false sociological “significance” yet Taken is as morally, politically relevant as Fritz Lang’s two-fisted The Big Heat. Taken’s drama of vigilante action, with Neeson’s Bryan no different than John Wayne’s ultra-American Ethan Edwards, makes the Obama Inaugrual promise: “We will defeat you!” Luc Besson proves that the simplest movies can carry the deepest needs. Do they give Oscars for that?

Taken
Directed by Pierre Morel
Running Time: 94 min.

TRANSCENDENT THRILL DRIVE

admin — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:53:22 +0000

Nothing in cinema this week is more important than Transporter 3. It’s been a long time since a new movie has been so spiritually and aesthetically exhilarating. Producer Luc Besson, director Olivier Megaton and star Jason Statham work at the top of their imagination and abilities—not like they’re completing a formulaic sequel but reinventing the action movie genre.

The chase sequence, the fight scene, the love scene are performed with a rare skill that analyzes the visual, generic components while snapping them into place with new rhythm. Every sequence whirls like ingenious choreography. It tells a story—in movement—of Transporter Jack Martin (Statham) forced to escort a Ukrainian politician’s daughter Valentina (freckly Natalya Rudakova) across Europe while dragged (kicking and flying) out of his steely macho isolation. (No star runs in character better than Statham, whose agile body is superbly sculpted while his voice remains tender—despite gruff edges).

The Jason Statham crush continues with the release of Olivier Megaton’s Transporter 3.

Transporter 3 affords viewers a similar romantic evolution. For all the violent movie conventions we endure and standard CGI imagery with that stale, storyboarded look, Besson, Megaton and Statham make action movies exciting again. Watching Martin outmaneuver a ruthless Trump-quoting businessman (Robert Knepper) isn’t “dark”; it’s a joyous good vs. evil exposition. Aficionados will appreciate the humor of a goon’s “Are you the smart one?” retort. Snobs will misunderstand the progress before their eyes. When Megaton makes Godardian symbolism of Martin’s hand retrieving a key from Valentina’s, Transporter 3 evinces greater art than Van Sant’s studied poetic effects.

The old thrill-ride phrase is obsolete, it denotes passive movie watching; Transporter 3 is a thrill drive. It demands audiences intellectually appreciate its construction. Sequences where Statham cycles down a rail across a sweatshop work table, plays piano with a man’s head and drives a car kitty-corner between trucks are all applause worthy. These intricately edited movie jousts aren’t about speed but narrative, capturing instantaneous action, rescuing a moment and imprinting it. Movement is given comic-book efficacy and cubist energy. It’s true visual wit. These are not stunts; they’re objets d’art. Somewhere, Buster Keaton is smiling and Spielberg should take notes.
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Transporter 3
Directed by Olivier Megaton, Running Time: 100 min.
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