Shutter Island

An all around disastrous failure. Oh god. Someone should put all the outstanding prints of this film on an island near Boston and then invite Leo's imaginary arsonist enemy to set them all on fire.

Neither a compelling drama nor a successful psychological thriller, this film tries and fails to develop any legitimate suspense. Lightening? Scary music? Low angle pans in the woods? It verges on farce. Minutes in I found myself wishing the film could have been re-written as a send off or dark comedy. It probably would still have been a failure, but at least I wouldn't have been the only one laughing at the tear-stained face of a man momentarily tricked by his psychiatrist into believe that his delusions were real.

Tetro

There's a lot to like in this film, but there's even more to dislike. The plot seems painfully formulaic: loveless childhood produces adult mood disorders, and the main character must renew his faith in love through a defiant act of will. Unfortunately, Tetro deviates from the formula with some unlikely (and occasionally impossible) plot lines and revelations. In this case the pure formula would have sufficed.

Praiseworthy here (prior to the unconvincing Sophoclean surprise) is a genuine depiction of the complexities of brotherhood. I like the burden the younger brother suffers under; he relies on others to make sense of his own life and history before feeling ready to live independently. This is easy to identify with.

The Antichrist

It's been several years since I've left a cinema and felt like stopping people on the street to apologize for something.

The last time this happened to me was after watching Pasolini's Salo, a film which convinced me that any kind of hunger or desire has a logical conclusion in extreme cruelty and even fascism. Lars von Trier is also really good at playing with logical extremes. The Antichrist explores two kinds of responses to the challenge of living in the aftermath of an inexpiable crime. The masculine response is rational, ordered, structured, and even cold. The feminine response is disordered, emotional, unstructured, and unpredictable. Both come up short.

The ensuing drama is terrifying, and the acting is convincing--so convincing in fact that it's easy to overlook the thin and annoying plot mechanism of the woman's failed PhD dissertation on medieval misogyny. It's the closest von Trier has ever come to extremely lazy screenwriting, but he can easily be forgiven on account of how much success he attains with his characters.

And I'm uncertain whether the ghoulish talking animals and other unsightly preternatural junk remain below von Trier or if he exalts these elements of schlock horror. Either way it is the disturbing treatment of human problems and our hastily drawn, totally inadequate solutions that makes this a great film.

The Best of Youth

This massive Italian epic was originally produced for television and it shows. This isn't art, it's camp. Melodrama leaps off the screen at every predictable turn. As unlikely as Forrest Gump and just about as contrived, it's a grand mess of 1 (and occasionally 2) dimensional characters who seem incapable of taking a step back and evaluating their lives.

I found myself thinking a lot about Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage during the 6 torturous hours of La Meglio Gioventù. Some people love these completely clichéd and horrendously oversold formulaic dramas, but I think they're as poor a representation of life as soap opera. In alleging to portray everything, almost nothing genuine is accomplished.

A.O. Scott points eloquently to two characters' "moral allergy to their own feelings and to the messy bonds that connect them to their lovers and families" in his review of several years ago. Excuse me? Some motive would have been nice here. A tendency to treat loved ones with unexplained cruelty isn't dramatic, it's inane.

Scott suggests that this film's argument is that "a commitment to human dignity is ideology enough". What calamitous quietism.

La Meglio gioventù

Choke

This film is entertaining and often clever but it doesn't amount to much. The whole sex addict shtick gets a little old (and so does the self choking scam). They're both basically great ingredients for a trailer but they don't cohere well enough to breath life into a full character. But splicing in those flashbacks at the nursing home was a nice touch.

What really sucks about this film is that the person's contemporary life is supposedly explained away as a pathetic recapitulation of the indirect child abuse he endured being raised by a mentally ill mother.

I feel strongly about the misuse of psychology as a plot device.

The film's mockery of tourism put me in mind of a great quotation from the late David Foster Wallace's essay Consider The Lobster: "To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."