THE BEST OF 2012: #11-15

#15 Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino):

It's really difficult to pick a favorite Tarantino flick , but, as far as I'm concerned, Django Unchained is absolutely a contender to the throne.  With it and, to a slightly lesser extent, 2009's Inglorious Basterds, Q.T.'s moved from merely referencing the films he loves to a place where he's fully operating within the genres he worships.  With this shift, he's traversed the distance between throwing knowing winks up on the screen and perpetrating full-blown homages to some of the greatest and lurid works of the past.  The latter path ends up being so much more satisfying, cohesive, and mature.  

There's still plenty of dark humor and energetic, bizarro fun to be had here; Tarantino's still Tarantino, after all, but it's also much easier to be lost in Django Unchained as a proper film than it was with the (still massively impressive) Kill Bill films.  For my money, this is the best thing he's made since Jackie Brown.  And I'm still having a hard time believing how good Jamie Foxx and Leo D-Cap are in this film.   

Django Unchained is currently still in theaters.  Hit up Mr. Movie Times to find out when and where.


#14 The Fairy (dir. Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, & Bruno Romy):

A wonderful surprise of a film, completely magical and moving, if you allow yourself to be swept away by it.  It's silly, surreal, and visually reminiscent of the best work of Robby Müller.  I've seen it twice now and it still holds up on a second viewing.  The Fairy is one of those films that I feel like I could recommend to anyone, regardless of taste.

Read my review of The Fairy here. 

The Fairy is available on DVD & Blu-ray and can be streamed via Netflix and Amazon Instant Video.


#13 Looper (dir. Rian Johnson):

There's never enough intelligent sci-fi released in any given year.  For every Primer, there's a dozen duds like Johnny Mnemonic.   Looper wasn't just the 2012's best foray into the genre, it's the best science fiction release since 2009's Moon.  Director Rian Johnson built a film out of various spare parts borrowed from other classic entries (Blade Runner, La Jetée, Akira), and he's smart enough to layer and sequence those influences into a clever and mostly unpredictable script that reminds the viewer why, despite the tons of poorly orchestrated sci-fi that fans have had to put up with in their lifetimes, we still go and see these kinds of film, holding out hope that every once in a while we'll stumble upon one of them that is actually kind of great.  Looper is one that justifies such patient optimism.

Looper is available on DVD & Blu-ray and can be streamed via Amazon Instant Video and VUDU.


#12 Café de Flore (dir. Jean-Marc Vallée):

Here's a film I nearly skipped out on seeing all together because every single synopsis out there (including the one in the PIFF 35 catalog or even the tagline of the poster) made it sound middling at best.  It starts out as a story about a narcissistic dj (Kevin Parent) who's abandoned his family for a hot chick.  Trust me, that's the awful part, but it's not what the film's about at all.  There's another story thread featuring Vanessa Paradis, which soon gains equal footing with all that rotten dj nonsense.  It's when the stories begin to influence and creep into each others space that things get really interesting. 

Unfortunately, Jean-Marc Vallée's (The Young Victoria, C.R.A.Z.Y.) film never really got the word of mouth or audience it deserved here in the U.S.  It's currently in distribution limbo and, thus, difficult to see.  If you are able to track down a screening or import dvd, I'd recommend going into it without much knowledge of plot, since it's the twists that count in this film.

Read my review of Café de Flore here.

Café de Flore is currently unavailable in Region 1 on DVD & Blu-ray.  There are import dvd options out there, but you'll want to make sure you can play discs from outside your region before importing.


#11 The Turin Horse (dir. Béla Tarr):

If Béla Tarr is truly stepping away from making films, The Turin Horse is one hell of a way to do it.  The film feels like both like a farewell to the medium and Tarr's interest in communicating with humanity.  From the first long tracking shot on, it's apparent that we're in the hands of a world master, and that the Hungarian auteur intends to make us aware of what we're losing with each moment of this final, funereal masterpiece.

Read my review of The Turin Horse here. 

The Turin Horse is currently available on DVD & Blu-ray and can be streamed via Netflix.

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THE FILMS OF NICOLAS WINDING REFN: PUSHER (1996)

Fifteen years before Nicholas Winding Refn thrilled audiences with the genre-inspired hit Drive, he kicked off his career with Pusher; the first entry in an eventual triptych focused on the misfortunes of street-level drug dealers in Copenhagen.  Looking at the Pusher trilogy now, it's possible to trace Refn's rapid advancement as he learned the tools of his trade, accumulating the distinctive flourishes (especially those based in lighting, cutting and camera placement) that characterize his work to this day.

In his first film, Refn relays the tale of Frank (Kim Bodnia), a bottom-rung dealer who owes money to Milo (Zlatko Buric), a local drug lord who's just as likely to call you his friend as he is to order his muscle to go to work on you.  Despite having delayed payment on a prior loan, Frank convinces Milo to front him a large amount of heroin, certain that he's on the verge of a lucrative sale to an old acquaintance from his prison days.  The police intervene before Frank can make the exchange, leaving him in the lurch--without the dope or the money--and hopelessly in debt to Milo.

Pusher is a gritty, downward spiral of a tale, captured in a visual style that reminds one of a television police procedural; Morten Søborg's handheld camerawork seems unafraid of swooping into dark corners where dark ambiance is sometimes favored over fine image detail.  This run-and-gun shooting strategy places Frank and his accomplice Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen) in a dismal world filled with obstacles; the largest barrier to success being their own stupidity.

That last detail is worth hammering home: these are not the brightest or most likeable of characters, although Refn never foregrounds such judgments.  Frank and Tonny's conversations may reflect a post-Pulp Fiction, criminals-are-everyday-people-too aesthetic, but the dialogue never crackles with the confidence and panache displayed by Tarantino's iconic thugs.  It's not because Refn couldn't necessarily pen such dialogue but, rather, because his characters aren't intended to be read as closet intellectuals.  They're misogynistic, boorish and unpleasantly base fellows through and through.

Pusher is essentially a neo-noir where the set of circumstances visited upon Frank feel earned, rather than the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  After spending the first half of the film watching Frank make awful choices, there's a righteous thrill in seeing him being dealt the consequences.  The film tells the tale of one man's ruination.  And Refn invites us to smugly watch as Frank's life story goes south.

Pusher will screen at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) on March 8 & 9th at 7pm.  The film is part of the retrospective series, Driven: The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn.

Related links:
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death  
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Fear X 
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Drive 

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AMER - A Bitter Pill to Swallow

French film-collaborators Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's supremely self-assured feature-length debut hits dvd and blu-ray this week.  Channeling the nervous energy and visual-style of the classic giallo, Amer lovingly remixes the elements of that Italian-horror sub-genre in a manner that brings to mind Quentin Tarantino's career-long use of grindhouse schlock to inspire and inform his work.  Cattet and Forzani, like Tarantino, have clearly absorbed their inspiration, even going so far as to construct an aural accompaniment to the film made up of music works from classic giallos.  The end result of their sampling from that very specific toolbox is a film that aesthetically pays tribute while intellectually interrogating the conceptual trappings of that original source.

Whereas, for instance, the films of Dario Argento openly accept and hyper-utilize the nearly standardized leering found within cinema (especially horror cinema) as it displays and thus mediates and broadcasts uniform (and, one should note, almost exclusively sexualized) notions of the female body, Cattet and Forzani adopt the gaze (a quick primer on feminist film theory and the male gaze here) as a means of challenging the presumptions inherent within both the form and the audience itself.

Constructed of vignette-like segments that chronicle the life of a woman named Ana, Amer follows her transformation from a curious child into the particular type of oversexed woman that typically populates trashy, b-grade European cinema.  The filmmakers exploit this (over)familiarity with lurid depictions of gender to steer us towards assuming that this will be just another giallo in the tradition of Argento, Bava, Fulci and their peers.  Yet the biggest surprise about Amer is its dogged resistance to being a by-the-numbers horror film.  If there are aspects of horror contained within this work, it is the horror of being both the unwilling victim and active manipulator of the gaze, constantly held fast within an atmosphere of potential violence predicated upon one's habitation of a gendered body and the expectations that are thrust upon it.

The result is a fairly confounding concoction of psychosexual titillation mixed with a rote ramping up of tension that tricks the viewer into expecting a violent release at the end of each sequence.  Instead, the filmmakers deny the audience the expected relief, extending the anxiety beyond each of the micro-narratives embedded within the larger piece.  To a certain extent, Cattet and Forzani have it both ways with Amer, exploiting the viewer's weakness for this particular flavor of naughty cinema while actively scolding them for being drawn in by its depictions of raw female sexuality.

 

And it's the straddling of that line that will lead many viewers to call out the film as being merely sexist pap.  More discerning viewers, especially those who have already digested a good deal of 60s and 70s Italian horror, will likely find themselves peering a bit deeper into what Amer has to offer.  Beyond its magnificent combination of visual and montage techniques, the film reaches beyond mere stylistic flair to grapple with some fairly heady and provocative content.  I, for one, cannot wait to see what these directors come up with next.

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