It seems to me that if I were the owner of the only independent-film distributor the general public has ever noticed or cared about, the company that brought the world "Pulp Fiction," "The Crying Game," "sex, lies, and videotape," "The English Patient," "Shakespeare in Love," "Chicago," "The Queen" and "No Country for Old Men," I might try to cash in on that brand name in perpetuity by making or selling some really good movies. Fortunately for all concerned, I am not the owner of Miramax Films, and in recent days the once-mighty indie empire founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 1979 has reached the end of the road, or pretty nearly so.
Actually, what's happening to Miramax isn't even as dignified as a public execution. Instead, now that its corporate overlords at Disney (owner of Miramax since 1993) have drained the company of its vital essence, it will be kept alive in shrunken, zombie-slave form. Reportedly, Miramax will be reduced to around 20 employees -- definitely not including current head Daniel Battsek -- and relocated from its longtime home in New York to the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif., where it will release something like three boutique-film titles a year.
I say again: Harvey's old company, the one that launched, catalyzed and perpetuated the indie revolution of the '80s and '90s. Three movies a year. In Burbank. That's not a studio or a distributor or even a "specialty division." It's a hobby, or an off-brand. It's like that weird brand of Pepsi they sold in the '80s that was neither regular Pepsi nor Diet Pepsi, the one that came in a sky-blue can and was flavored with lemon, and inexplicably had one calorie instead of none at all. That's Miramax.
It might seem utterly baffling, at least at first: Sure, the economy stinks, but Miramax's collapse comes less than two years after the company collected a big pile of Oscars and other awards for "No Country for Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood." Not only had Miramax fully recovered from the 2005 split with the Weinstein brothers (it seemed), but post-Weinstein head honcho Battsek was riding high, pushing forward with an aggressive list of productions and acquisitions. "When you think about how glowing it looked for Battsek just two years ago," says longtime indie guru John Pierson, who partnered with Miramax on various projects in the Weinstein era and now teaches film at the University of Texas, "it's amazing that it could all fall apart so fast." (CORRECTION: In the first published version of this post, I described Pierson as a former Miramax executive, which is not accurate.)
As Pierson also notes, Miramax almost certainly didn't fall apart that fast. While no one inside Disney is talking (at least not to me), veterans of the indie industry almost unanimously suggest that the Miramax collapse was a long time coming. As filmmaker and distribution veteran Jeff Lipsky puts it, there was always "a lack of transparency" in the relationship between Miramax and Disney, meaning that we never knew for sure whether Miramax's supposed hits were adding anything to the corporate bottom line. "Since the day Disney bought Miramax, who knows whether they were bleeding red ink left and right?" Lipsky asks. "I would speculate that this might be a case of pure financial practicality, and Disney finally needed to stop the bleeding."
Pierson observes that when we saw Joel and Ethan Coen picking up their statuettes for "No Country for Old Men," or Daniel Day-Lewis winning the best-actor prize for "There Will Be Blood," we didn't see how much money was spent on publicity and advertising before those guys reached the stage of the Kodak Theatre. "You can easily get into a situation where you're spending money hand over fist in search of that glory," he says, "and along the way you're eroding whatever profitable bottom line you might once have had." Indeed, although those two films grossed more than $110 million between them, well-placed industry sources suggest, amazingly enough, that neither one managed to turn a profit.
Magnolia Pictures president Eamonn Bowles, who worked at Miramax in the '90s, sees the company's near-total desiccation as just another chapter in a lengthy and necessary restructuring of the film marketplace. Over the course of the last two years, numerous other studio specialty divisions and small indie distributors have disappeared, including Picturehouse, Warner Independent, Paramount Vantage, THINKfilm and New Yorker Films.
"The landscape has changed a lot since last summer, when all those companies closed down," Bowles says. "The market has gotten back to a more sustainable level. Those companies whose basic M.O. was to chase the Oscar at any cost created an absolutely false marketplace." He suggests that surviving companies like Magnolia, Sony Pictures Classics, IFC and Zeitgeist, who focus on marketing quality films to niche audiences, are now in a stronger position. "Producers are the ones who may be hurt by this, because there are fewer players with fewer resources, and it's a buyer's market. But we've done very well since last summer. It's inherently a more reasonable situation."
While the Miramax of the '80s and '90s was a legendary institution whose movies and mystique will linger for years to come, no one I spoke to this week expressed much nostalgia about the current edition, which has flailed around since its 2007 Oscar run, without finding an identity or any notably successful films. "Whatever the name brand was worth, once upon a time, it doesn't mean much today," says Pierson. "I think anybody who was smart enough to know about Miramax knew that the company meant Bob and Harvey, and unless they go out of business, you can't really say that Miramax is dead." (The brothers' struggling new entity, the Weinstein Co., was buoyed somewhat this year by the success of "Inglourious Basterds.")
During the Weinstein glory days, when the company made money, won awards and produced or distributed important films by everyone from Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith to Pedro Almodóvar and Krzysztof Kieslowski, Pierson adds, "Miramax changed the world, totally and completely. The closest analogy I can draw in film history would be United Artists, from about 1960 to 1972, where you're talking about winning Oscars, about bringing European films to America, about working with important auteurs and also making films for large audiences. Does that mean people will forget about Miramax in 40 or 50 years, the way they've mostly forgotten about U.A.? I don't know. Probably."
To a fan (and creator) of challenging art-house fare like Jeff Lipsky, the Miramax story is more about extraordinary marketing than extraordinary movies. "Harvey Weinstein has proven himself to be a marketing genius," he says, "and that's what the success of Miramax, and all the dollars it generated, were built on. He could take a movie that was savaged by the critics, like 'The English Patient,' attract huge audiences to it and then win best picture. As for 'Pulp Fiction,' I'm not sure that any other company could have done what Harvey did with that film. And, listen, it's an overrated film, in my opinion. But the marketing campaign they built around it -- that wasn't overrated at all."
Some Internet commentators have pronounced the Miramax collapse to be a symbolic death knell for independent film. On one hand, that's lazy, short-term meme-think from people who know little about business and even less about art. On the other hand, they might be right, in that a certain era of independent film -- the one in which it appeared as a hip, hot but fatally nebulous commodity -- is coming to an end.
"If you're in the arts there's always going to be independent work, and an audience that wants it," says Eamonn Bowles. "It's going to be more complex, it's not easy to synopsize and it's not easy to market. We're always going to have independent film, but is it going to be independent film as played out in the pages of Us Weekly? This isn't the end of independent film, but it might be the end of the large-scale tarting-up of independent film."
You probably don't need a movie to tell you that lightning can evoke something approaching religious terror in the most atheistic people, and can be seen as the direct work of God by the faithful. Maybe your own body told you that, the last time the hair on your neck and arms stood rigid while a bolt took down a neighbor's tree. (At our family's getaway house in central New York state, summer lightning strikes have more than once caused the phone to ring. As my wife once observed, if it's actually God on the line, what do you say?) Or maybe the fact that virtually every religious and spiritual tradition views lightning as a death-dealing instrument of divine power clued you in.
Nonetheless, that movie is here, and Canadian documentarian Jennifer Baichwal's "Act of God" is an undeniably provocative head-trip, laced with the most spectacular lightning-storm footage I've ever seen. (Baichwal got jobbed out of an Oscar nomination, in my view, for "Manufactured Landscapes," her film about photographer Edward Burtynsky and his remarkable work in China.) All those divided forks and curlicues and bizarre non-geometrical shapes are dreadful and gorgeous on their own terms, but you can't avoid the sense that there's something fundamental about them, and that they seem momentarily to open a window onto an understanding of reality you're not equipped to grasp.
That alone might be worth making a special trip to see this film on a big screen, or an expedition to the house of that friend with the really humongous plasma screen, once the DVD gets here. Beyond the amazing light show, don't expect Baichwal to take on lightning in direct or linear fashion; many viewers will be enthralled by "Act of God," while others may well be irritated. If you pay attention, you will learn a little about the basic physics of lightning in this movie. You'll also learn a little about how it mimics (on a macro scale) the transmission of electrical information within the human brain, and even how many scientists point to lightning storms in the primeval ocean as the source of the first chemical reactions -- and thereby the first life. But this isn't a science film, and the elliptical story Baichwal wants to tell is far more about our reactions to lightning -- the way we fear it and wonder at it, the way it appears to us as both random and divine -- than about lightning itself.
Her human subjects range from novelist Paul Auster, who has written about his near-miss with lightning as a teenager at camp (the boy directly in front of him was killed), to a Las Vegas death-and-dying guru who says his spiritual practice was activated by a near-fatal lightning strike, to practitioners of the Afro-Cuban Santeria religion, who view lightning as an attribute of the god Shango; and to a group of Mexican villagers struggling to understand an especially cruel act of the deity, when several of their children were killed by lightning at a hilltop shrine.
Baichwal's title, while it's meant to be suggestive, does not signify a religious interpretation: The term, after all, is used by insurance companies to describe lightning strikes, as well as by believers. To the devout Catholics in that Mexican town, "God doesn't make mistakes," and the incomprehensible deaths of their "angelitos" can only mean they were called away to some higher purpose. For Paul Auster, being struck by lightning is just one of the many chance events that we vainly struggle to fit into a pattern. Yet for all his talk about facing life as it is, and avoiding "fairy tales," he admits that the lightning incident has informed his writing career ever since. As Baichwal sees it, I think, this most elemental of elemental forces challenges whatever we do or do not believe about the universe. If it doesn't kill us first.
"Act of God" opens Nov. 4 at the IFC Center in New York, with wider national release to follow.
Alison Lohman in "Drag Me to Hell"
Maybe filmmakers have actually started to run out of ways to tell stories about the fact that we're all scared of dying (although we know it's likely to happen) and that we feel confused about sex. Maybe it's Hollywood's addiction to formula and nostalgia, and its corresponding aversion to artistic innovation. Maybe it's one of those cyclical, cultural things, that scholars a generation from now will start to figure out, like the disappearance of the western.
Whatever the reasons are, the mainstream American-made horror movie has been in dire condition for at least the last decade. A shambling corpse with rotting ligaments and lolling eyeballs, it just can't keep up with us. We want it to chase us away from the campfire and into the dark, deep woods, but it just shuffles around doing third-rate showbiz impersonations -- a little Jerry Lewis, a little George Romero -- and sinks back into its TV coma.
It was bad enough when horror movies just became unimaginative gore 'n' grossout spectacles, as in the "Hostel" period. It was worse when they became warmed-over formula remakes and celebrity rehab vehicles, as in the Paris Hilton/"House of Wax" period. Worst of all, most horror movies these days are both boring and careless, put together as cynical business deals aimed at separating young viewers from a few dollars and made by people with no feeling for the traditions, demands and highly discerning audiences of the genre.
With the release this week of Ti West's neo-retro, early-'80s-style "The House of the Devil," it appears that all is not lost. (A hell of a lot is lost, but not quite all.) Rather than assemble another one of those haunted-pumpkin lists of the scariest movies ever, which always tend to reshuffle the same 15 or 20 films, I thought I'd pick out a few recent horror highlights, and along the way argue for an enduring if unofficial alt-horror tradition. I'm not necessarily talking about ultra-low-budget indie films, although there are a few of those on this list. Mainly, I'm saying that horror movies based more in storytelling, character and psychological creepiness than in shock value and formula have never died, and you can find them in all kinds of places at all levels of production.
I'm not discussing here the enormous Japanese and Korean horror wave of the '90s and 2000s, which has been highly influential in Western horror but is really its own phenomenon. (And as eventually became clear, a lot of those movies were just as formulaic in their own way.) I am including a couple of Euro-horror films made in this decade because you should know about them if you don't already, and because the European take on classic American horror has helped bring the genre back to basics.
I am not writing about Rob Zombie (director of "House of 1000 Corpses," "The Devil's Rejects" and two "Halloween" remakes) because I don't like his movies that much and I'm not sure what to say about him. Make your own damn list, Zombie acolytes. As will be obvious, I'm giving a fair bit of credit for reviving 21st-century horror some of the credit for keeping horror viable to the New York indie scene around West and his producer Larry Fessenden, also a director, writer, actor and all-around genre-film Svengali. (West is also behind the IFC.com vampire-dating series "Dead & Lonely," and has made a still-unreleased sequel to Eli Roth's "Cabin Fever.")
Some of the movies on this list are more like instructive examples than shining moments in cinema history: I watched "Dark Mirror" because it was getting lots of eyeballs on IFC Festival Direct, and found that it was exactly the kind of mid-level, TV-grade, reasonably competent horror flick the cable networks used to make but don't bother with anymore. Let's begin, though, with the stuff that's absolutely terrific.
"I Can See You" This tremendous debut from writer-director-editor-composer Graham Reznick begins with the most familiar horror-movie plot device you can imagine -- a group of ill-prepared urbanites head out for a camping trip -- and ends up as full-on, post-Kubrick, experimental-film freakout. Produced by the ubiquitous Fessenden, who also appears as an increasingly sinister corporate pitchman from the distant TV past. What is that character doing at the rural retreat of a hipsterized Brooklyn, N.Y., ad agency, whose star designer (Ben Dickinson) is having some weird problems getting a painting of his father finished? There's no way to explain that until you see the movie, which goes from comic-realistic mode into full-on psycho meltdown with more terrifying adroitness than any other movie of this decade. Just out on DVD. See. It. Now.
"Drag Me to Hell" Nowhere near as obscure as the other movies on this list, but it's noteworthy that Sam Raimi's return to low-budget, '80s-style horror -- after much, much too long spent in the mind-deadening Peter Parker universe -- was met with widespread delight by both critics and paying customers. And can we just say that Sam and his brother, Ivan Raimi, were smoking some genius herb when they made their doomed main character (Alison Lohman) a loan officer forced to evict an elderly Gypsy woman and then face her mystical wrath? I hope Lohman's character is enjoying having her eyeballs boiled in Satan's cauldron, that's all I have to say. (Just out on DVD.)
"Trigger Man" This is the feature West made before "The House of the Devil," and although it has a fraction of the budget it may be even more effective. Yet another Fessenden production (and he appears in a brief, villainous cameo). Nearly wordless and plotless, "Trigger Man" follows two guys into the wilderness, where their manly getaway is interrupted by a mysterious sniper attack. Beautiful and genuinely frightening, this plays like an attempt to strip the rural-assault movie down to its basic ingredients. Oddly similar to both "I Can See You" (above) and to Kelly Reichardt's über-indie anti-bromance, "Old Joy."
"Murder Party" I'm actually surprised to realize that writer-director Jeremy Saulnier's urban-hipster horror-comedy doesn't have anything to do with Larry Fessenden. Ultra-cheap, loaded with gore and very funny throughout, "Murder Party" follows an ordinary schmo to a Halloween party held by a group of self-involved Brooklyn "artists," who've invited him there to kill him -- as, you know, a "project." Watching it, I kept thinking the broad satire was about to get unbelievably stupid, but Saulnier is spoofing the art world from the inside, and the relentlessly raunchy good nature of "Murder Party" is impossible to resist.
"The Last Winter" One last big dose of love for Fessenden, who directed this atmospheric Alaska-set eco-catastrophe thriller that channels, or so he claims, both John Carpenter's "The Thing" and Kurosawa's "Dersu Uzala." Frankly, Larry, the big spectral secret revealed at the end of the movie is pretty goofy, but that's made up for by the tense, near-future setting in which an isolated oil-field crew is drilling through the melting Alaska permafrost -- and things are starting to go very wrong. And that last shot, the one where this movie collides head-on with "An Inconvenient Truth"? Devastating.
"Calvaire (The Ordeal)" European horror directors offered all sorts of odd formula tweaks in the 2000s, but none weirder than Fabrice du Welz's psychotronic journey into "the Siberia of Belgium," where a low-rent, Tom Jones-style lounge singer is imprisoned by the way-too-friendly proprietor of a country inn. I really can't explain anything that happens in the movie after that; don't miss the homoerotic barroom-dance scene, set to quasi-avant-garde piano music. Continuing a venerable European tradition, du Welz followed this memorable and profoundly demented debut by making an execrable English-language film ("Vinyan") that went thankfully ignored. Back to the Walloon Siberia with you!
"Hardware" A minor cult classic made almost 20 years ago and only now appearing in a definitive double-disc DVD edition, Richard Stanley's post-apocalyptic "Hardware" may have struck early-'90s viewers (those few who caught it) as a low-budget blend of "Terminator" and "Blade Runner." Well, what's so wrong with that? Nasty, gory and tense, "Hardware" features future TV stud Dylan McDermott as the rakish scavenger who brings a disassembled android home to his metal-sculptor girlfriend (Stacey Travis). Of course the damn thing knows how to rebuild itself, and is trained to kill anything that's warm and moving. Hilarious hairdos aside, this is a dirty, atmospheric and nearly lost fragment of movie history. Cameos by Iggy Pop and Lemmy of Motörhead!
"High Tension" Speaking of foreshortened Eurohorror careers, French director Alexandre Aja made an international film-fest splash with this twisty, unusual take on the Yank psycho-killer genre. A pair of attractive college pals (Gallic starlets Cécile de France and Maïwenn), with some unresolved Sapphic business between them, are pursued by a slasher (in a vintage Dodge Charger with Confederate flag plates, of all things). Aja builds suspense briskly and effectively, and "High Tension" offers a narrative switchback I've never exactly seen before. Let's just say that the hulking, blood-spattered killer isn't quite who he appears to be. Aja then went on to make some dreadful-sounding Kiefer Sutherland vehicle that I haven't seen.
"The Descent" Although set in Appalachia and starring (mostly) American actors, Neil Marshall's all-female, ultra-claustrophobic spelunking adventure was actually made in England. "The Descent" begins with one of the most horrifying shocks I've ever seen in a movie, and the general mood is one of deep, dark unsettling dream. Protagonist Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) is taking the spelunking trip largely to forget a haunting tragedy, but her team of macho chicks will find that somebody, or something, in this unexplored cave really, really wants to meet them. Eventually becomes a standard chase-nightmare, but a highly effective one throughout.
"Dark Mirror" A minor film-fest and video-on-demand hit, director Pablo Proenza's nifty little L.A. gothic features a couple of attractive TV actors (Lisa Vidal of "E.R." and David Chisum of "One Life to Live") who find out that their lovely new Arts & Crafts cottage holds some strange secrets. I've never seen a horror film based on the principles of feng shui before, but I guess it was inevitable. Proenza handles the contrast between the sunny setting and the creepy occurrences ably, and although the script is indifferent I genuinely didn't see the big switcheroo coming.
A still from "Star Trek: The Animated Series"
Gene Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave. Or he would be if he had one; his ashes were shot into space in 1997. (Wait, I'm confused. Does that mean he's always spinning in his grave?) With Roddenberry and his wife, Majel Barrett Roddenberry (Nurse Chapel in the original "Star Trek"), now both dead, control over the "Star Trek" franchise has devolved onto a slithery nest of interlocking corporate interests. Which accounts for a troubling press release I received on Friday, announcing the creation of something called "Star Trek Live."
Although the "Trek" franchise presumably has renewed Hollywood viability after this summer's lively and successful J.J. Abrams prequel -- the 11th "Star Trek" movie overall -- it long ago entered a decadent phase of creative and marketing metastasis: Spinoffs producing spinoffs, actors becoming directors becoming authors. (I'm still waiting for a film version of "Star Trek: The Animated Series," or a Web-only series based on William Shatner's co-authored "Trek" novels. Somebody's probably working on them.)
That provides some context for the genesis of "Star Trek Live." But what the hell is it, exactly? My first guess, while cagily inspecting a press release that's crammed with merchandising buzzwords and light on specifics, was that somebody who hadn't been reading the paper lately was following through on some three-year-old scheme to launch a "Star Trek" Broadway musical. Now, that sounds like a pop-culture disaster of heroic and delicious proportions, so I'm sorry to report it isn't happening. With discretionary spending in free fall and the recent closure of "Shrek: The Musical," Hollywood studios are backing away from the Great White Way as an ancillary revenue stream.
No, "Star Trek Live" is something else, "an interactive stage show" that's "targeted for a run in theme parks and performing arts centers across the country." The show "combines cutting-edge special effects, unmatched audience interaction and an exploration of real space-age technology," taking "audiences of all ages on an exhilarating journey with Captain James T. Kirk and Vulcan science officer Spock."
Yeah, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: ZOMG! This is what Roddenberry's atheist-Apollonian vision of the future has come to! Unemployed dinner-theater actors in Kirk and Spock drag and plastic tricorders, doing a laser show for the kiddies! At Waldameer WaterWorld in Erie, Pa.! It will bear the same relationship to any actual "Star Trek" incarnation as that teeny-tiny Stonehenge in "Spinal Tap" bears to seeing Led Zeppelin play live in 1973! And you're absolutely right.
OK, OK, let me pay some lip service to journalistic fairness by reporting that "Star Trek Live," while a property of CBS Consumer Products, will actually be created by the Mad Science Group, a "science enrichment provider" that creates shows for schools, camps and other youth venues. It'll be some kind of hybridized edutainment product, in which Kirk and Spock train a fresh group of "Starfleet cadets" on their first day at the Academy. Learn, learn, learn; science, science, science. But wait, enough of that, shorty -- the Earth is under attack from unknown aliens! Put down those curly fries and shoot those bastards!
I'm not backing off my initial, bigoted assumption that this latest bastardized effort to grub a few more dollars off a canceled 1960s TV series is an idiotic debasement of the already-flaccid "Star Trek" legacy. But, hell, that's nothing new. And let's face it, fellow parents: If these people can bottle even 0.5 percent of the Trekker spirit, in a package that appeals to the science-nerd kids who are too chicken for the vomitous coaster rides, we'll all be grateful. If they can end it with a group line-dance number -- hopefully led by "Kirk" and "Spock" doing the Robot -- I take back everything I just said.
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe in "Antichrist."
It's tempting to respond to Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" purely as an act of provocation, when it's really a cry of pain, and as such not fully articulate or comprehensible. Throughout his career, von Trier has fed on strong reactions, even insisted upon them. When informed during a press conference conducted by videophone after a New York Film Festival screening of "Antichrist" -- the Danish director rarely travels, and has never been to the United States -- that there had been few, if any, walkouts during the film, von Trier sighed heavily: "Then I have failed." He got a big laugh.
I'm inclined to think that the only honest way to deal with a movie as dreamlike and filled with self-hatred and sealed off from the world as "Antichrist" is by resisting von Trier's shtick. In other words, by withholding and scrutinizing your own strong reactions, by working your way around von Trier's pathological longing to be pilloried by many and adored by a few. So I'm not here to tell you that "Antichrist" is a great film, however much I admire its beauty and daring, because I think it's too damaged and crazy to be a great film. I'm also not here to tell you that it's a misogynistic abomination made by a sadist, even though that's one of the reactions von Trier has set out to provoke, and even though many women (and many men) may well decide they don't want to travel down the dark road into these particular deep woods.
If you've heard anything about "Antichrist," then my telling you that it's beautiful probably sounds like an act of willful intellectual perversity. Very likely you've heard a list of gruesome highlights that make it sound like a nasty Internet video from Lithuania: an explicit sex act so violent that the man ejaculates blood, a hole driven through someone's leg with a power tool, a woman mutilating her own genitalia with a pair of scissors.
Those things all happen in the movie's grotesque final act, and they are undeniably shocking (and meant to be). Taken together, they probably account for a minute or so of screen time, about 1 percent of the movie. They don't define or encompass "Antichrist" any more than "The Godfather" can be boiled down to that severed horse head. In fact, I'd argue that these scenes of violence are far from being the worst scenes in the movie. They emerge from von Trier's original desire to make something close to a conventional horror film -- you can see traces of "The Shining" and "Rosemary's Baby" in "Antichrist" -- and they're only superficial or symbolic representations of the real violence between the unnamed central couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Taken as a whole, "Antichrist" is a gorgeous, mesmerizing construction, and almost every one of its frames shimmers with demented, imaginary life. (Cinematography mavens: Anthony Dod Mantle makes spectacular use of two new hi-def digital cameras, the Red and the Phantom.) It offers more proof, if we need any, that von Trier is one of the most accomplished cinema artists of our time, and also perhaps the most deeply trapped in his own head.
"Antichrist" is overcrowded with amazing ideas and images, but its plot -- a Pacific Northwest couple lose their child and spiral into violence and madness -- is so hackneyed it virtually doesn't exist and definitely doesn't matter. The movie also isn't really about the conflict between men and women, or the one between human beings and nature. Those, too, are metaphors for the real war waging inside one man's brain.
We begin with sexual ardor and its connection to death -- excuse me, Lars, there's a phone call from Vienna for you -- in a gorgeous, wordless, black-and-white slow-motion sequence set to a snippet of baroque opera (it's Handel's "Rinaldo"). Dafoe and Gainsbourg (known only as He and She) make passionate love in their marital bed, their bodies forming a graceful chiaroscuro composition. United thus in ecstasy, they don't notice that their 1-year-old son, Nic -- the only character in the movie with a name -- has escaped from his crib, wedged open the child gate and paused for a view of this primal scene.
From there it continues, as the erotic dream transmogrifies into nightmare: Sweeping aside allegorical statuettes of the "Three Beggars" -- Grief, Pain and Despair -- Nic slowly clambers atop someone's desk (Mommy's or Daddy's? We don't know), fascinated by the adjacent window and the falling snow outside. He pushes his stuffed bear over the ledge to get a better look, and then gets a better look himself, toppling, with exaggerated slowness and no apparent fear, out the window and down to the snowbound street. As both a parent and a movie critic, I indulged myself in all kinds of defensive, counter-narrative responses during this terrifying scene: Snow in Seattle? Not that common. Also, a lucky child might just survive that fall.
Of course we aren't really in Seattle. Although "Antichrist" is closer to the tradition of realistic narrative cinema than anything von Trier has made since "Breaking the Waves," there's only a cursory effort to make his European sets and locations look like northwestern North America (or like any other actual place). As for the child, he's never a character in the movie at all, and is only a necessary symbolic sacrifice, a key meant to unlock all the terror and pain held within his parents.
At Nic's funeral Dafoe walks behind the hearse, conspicuously blubbering, while Gainsbourg stumbles along a few steps back, stonefaced, before collapsing to the ground. The other mourners are blurred, indistinct creatures; even while He and She are still supposedly part of the metropolitan world, they've already withdrawn into a realm of private suffering. Furthermore, this scene establishes the dynamic between them: He is appropriate, rational, in control; She is isolated, unstable, unpredictable.
One of the answers to the von Trier-as-misogynist argument has always been: Check out his men! Dafoe's masterfully rendered He is a classic example, a witty, attractive and supremely controlling therapist who suggests that for Gainsbourg's She to work through her grief -- which is perfectly normal, he keeps assuring her in patronizing terms -- she needs to confront her worst fears. It's always a really good idea to serve as your bereaved wife's shrink, especially when you're a megalomaniacal asshole who's only dimly aware that you're suffering from paranoid delusions.
Well, her fears happen to involve the couple's remote cabin in the forest, where She spent some not-so-happy time with Nic the previous summer. (She was "working on her thesis," which is about "gynocide," the mass murder of suspected witches in the Middle Ages.) They call the place Eden, half in jest, and like so many stupid protagonists in so many horror movies before them, they decide to go there, just the two of them. Most of this couple's harrowing slide into self-destruction happens there, while von Trier follows a chapter sequence evoked in that opening scene: First "Grief," then "Pain" and "Despair," and finally "The Three Beggars." (This is supposed to be an astronomical constellation that comes with sinister medieval mythology attached, but as far as I can tell the whole thing is a von Trier invention.)
Let's see, a manipulative and half-crazy man, and a hysterical and full-on crazy woman, all alone in Eden. Can I get the Lord God Jehovah, and a serpent? Well, maybe. Those two entities, you might say, are everywhere and nowhere; they decline to reveal themselves in concrete terms. (Von Trier has described the film as a testament of atheism.) Both He and She become convinced that the natural world around them isn't just unconscious and uncaring but actively malevolent: Acorns hammer on the roof by the dozen; Dafoe sleeps with his hand out the window and brings it in crawling with snails. But then, von Trier draws no clear distinction between the movie's so-called reality and the characters' psychological world. Does Dafoe really keep encountering maimed forest animals, who approach him without fear? Does one of them actually talk to him? (A fox. It croaks: "Chaos reigns!") I don't believe these are productive questions.
If there are elements of distorted Genesis mashup in "Antichrist," perhaps mixed with the story of Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the Book of Revelation, there are lots of other things too: A writer's half-concealed private madness, as in "The Shining"; graphic mutilation scenes and ghost-haunted landscapes out of East Asian horror movies; the Freudian and frankly misogynistic marriage dramas of August Strindberg.
As von Trier has admitted, "Antichrist" originated as an attempt to struggle free from a deep depression, one in which he wondered whether he'd ever make another film. During that genial New York video conference, he said he hadn't exercised anywhere near his normal level of directorial and editorial control, and didn't feel completely happy with the finished product. When someone asked about all the explicit religious symbolism in the picture, he shrugged it off: "Normally I would have gone through the script and taken all that shit out."
He also said he identified strongly with both characters, with all their "violence and stupidity," with their efforts to punish themselves and each other for a terrible event that may not have been anyone's fault. Of course viewers can't rely on an artist's declaration about his intentions; the movie is all we really have. But those comments confirmed my sense that this isn't just the most personal film von Trier has ever made, but something like an unconscious film. As magnificent as Dafoe and Gainsbourg are, they're specters in a shadow play excavated from the deepest recesses of Lars von Trier's troubled psyche. It's an amazing place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
I keep vowing to publicists, editors and even a reader or two that I'll crank out these DVD roundups in something closer to a more regular fashion. But there's always some damn thing that trips me up, like the biological need for sleep and the fact that it's considered bad form to review films you haven't actually, you know, watched and stuff. (Check it out: One of the sets reviewed herein is an eight-hour documentary. In Czech. It was totally worth it and all, but seriously.) So suffice it to say there's way more stuff piled on the floor of the cubby I so laughably describe as my "home office," and I'll dig through some more of it soon. This time around we've got Chloë Sevigny, Kristen Stewart, Fiona Gordon and Sara Diaz, supplying a veritable feast of quirky, off-center gal performances. (No, the woman in "Audition" definitely does not count.)
"Adventureland" & "The Last Days of Disco" It's an early-'80s pop-apalooza double bill! Although made a decade apart in vastly different settings, Whit Stillman's "The Last Days of Disco" (a surprising but welcome new release from the Criterion Collection) and Greg Mottola's "Adventureland" are hilarious and often pungent chronicles of an era that can seem at once incredibly distant and also eerily resonant, an era when disco, punk, AIDS, gay and straight collided to create the first Frankensteinian stirrings of the perma-alternative culture we know today. I mean, admittedly I'm exactly the right age for this, but I love them both, a lot.
I don't know what to make of Stillman's career and never have. A Manhattanite from a prep-school, Upper East Side background, he made three effervescent, indifferently structured features that somehow split the difference between Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino and promised a tremendous career to come -- and hasn't made one since. "Last Days," Stillman's last and best film, chronicles the decline and fall of a legendary nightclub not unlike Studio 54, as seen through the eyes of an awkward, virginal Hampshire grad named Alice (perhaps Chloë Sevigny's signature role) and her pretty-roommate-from-hell Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale). It's both dry and passionate, which is the Stillman touch. Perhaps the most memorable scene in "Last Days" is the moral debate about the characters in Disney's "Lady and the Tramp," conducted between a hunky assistant D.A. (Matt Keeslar) and the drugged-out rake (Chris Eigeman) he's planning to bust.
If "Last Days of Disco" has almost been forgotten, "Adventureland" was released just a few months ago. But since Greg Mottola's yarn about an overeducated college grad (Jesse Eisenberg) washed up among the stoners, geeks and party girls of a suburban Pittsburgh amusement park failed to win the love of moviegoers the first time around, it deserves a plug. A formula picture rarely done well -- the post-collegiate period romance -- is handled beautifully here, with a mixture of winsomeness and broad comedy that lets you know Mottola knows his early-INXS, late-Bowie faintly rebellious suburban youth culture. Kristen Stewart of unfortunate and permanent "Twilight"-franchise fame is delightful as the tomboyish, deadpan love interest. I think my favorite scene is Margarita Levieva's slo-mo entrance as the park's queen-bee Popular Girl, but Ryan Reynolds is also priceless as the park's bohunk rock-god, the one who claims he once jammed with Lou Reed.
"Audition" As director Takashi Miike politely warns in his video introduction to this 10th-anniversary, double-disc set of his Japanese horror classic, "You may regret watching this movie." You may indeed, in that even after legions of bloody-minded imitations on both sides of the Pacific (most of them execrable), "Audition" still has the power to enter your dreams. Not a fantastically gory film, "Audition" is nonetheless a profoundly disturbing one, as much for its subtle portrait of the subterranean war of the sexes as for its infamous conclusion, when wounded widower Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) finally finds out what the 24-year-old, supernally gorgeous ballerina (model Eihi Shiina) he's been pursuing really wants from him.
Yes, "Audition" helped inspire the so-called torture-porn explosion, but Miike's film has a witty, dark fatalism, and a superlative craftsmanship, that takes it far above nasty thrills. It's either a story of romantic love gone horribly off the rails, an object lesson in why middle-aged men shouldn't act like twits or a fable about things that look too good to be true. In either or all of those stories, Aoyama has every chance to walk away. What happens at the end of the film, when we discover who's been auditioning for whom, is only what he has willed upon himself.
"Private Century" Perhaps the most remarkable episodic film out of Eastern Europe since Kieslowski's "Decalogue," Czech documentarian Jan Sikl's eight-part "Private Century" was constructed entirely out of donated home movies, photographs and other documents, made by several different families between the 1920s and the '80s. What sounds at first like a dry, academic exercise -- a social history of 20th-century Czechoslovakia -- quickly becomes a riveting, multifaceted account of public and private worlds in collision. A Czech-German family troubled by lies and sexual infidelity visits Berlin in 1934, and in between snatches of surprisingly racy intimate footage we see swastika-festooned slogans through a streetcar window. As it happens, the Czech nation was at the center of Europe's 20th-century dramas, from '30s bohemianism to the Holocaust to the Iron Curtain, the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, and all of that can be found in Sikl's film -- but mostly as backdrop. What's amazing about "Private Century" is how much he makes the domestic dramas of ordinary people, most of them long dead, come alive, so we are reminded of a fact history often elides: Life consists a lot less of great men making speeches and armies marching to and fro than it does of people taking naps, playing silly games with their kids and coveting their neighbors' wives.
"Rumba" Chaplin and Jacques Tati aren't dead after all -- they've been reincarnated in the unlikely but lithe bodies of Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, the Anglo-French dancing-directing duo behind this ridiculously entertaining little movie, which has almost no dialogue but is jammed to the gills with absurd delight. I could tell you that "Rumba" is officially about a Latin-dance champion couple severed by a terrible car accident, but that's doing the movie a disservice on numerous levels. "Rumba" isn't about its purported plot at all; it's about the combination of bravura dance numbers and slapstick set pieces that Abel (a grave, long-faced Frenchman) and Gordon (a gawky, horsey and mysteriously sexy Scottish woman) can pull off, the ludicrous outfits they wear, and the comic-pathetic-tragic ways they try to navigate the everyday world and its objects. Wait till you see Gordon dealing with an English class, a stack of unruly papers and a pair of brand-new crutches. First she made me laugh until tears came to my eyes, and then she simply made me cry as I recognized her pride and clumsiness and utter ineptitude as my own, as in fact the human condition.
"The GoodTimesKid" Finally the DVD universe encompasses the funky-fresh, Jarmusch-meets-Godard-in-downscale-L.A. debut feature from ultra-indie hero Azazel Jacobs. Here's what I wrote on first viewing in 2007:
Jacobs himself plays a slacker idiot named Rodolfo, who abandons his wry, cute, long-legged girlfriend (Sara Diaz) to a near-silent sailor who has exactly the same name as him, and who has crossed his path at an Army induction ceremony. (Don't ask, because I can't really explain it.) Rodolfo No. 2 (Gerardo Naranjo) moves through the film in a nearly silent state of rumpled, Chaplinesque dignity, even as Diaz's character dubs him "Depresso," performs a beautiful Converse-sneaker soft-shoe routine for him, and then beats him up for following her.
Those two take a bus ride and spend the night on a boat, where Rodolfo No. 2's psycho girlfriend shows up, the one who has spray-painted "FUCK YOU I HATE YOU CALL ME" across his door. Then they go back home, where Diaz (character and actress have the same name) smashes Rodolfo No. 1's favorite punk albums and draws a mustache on the sleeping girl he's brought home. That's really about it; it's plenty. "The GoodTimesKid" has a whimsy, a passion, a sophistication and, above all, a vigor that's mostly drained out of Amerindie cinema over the last decade or so.
Video Games That Make You Cry 