A Moment of Innocence (1996)

Director: Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Screenplay: Mohsen Makhmalbaf

It’s almost impossible to tell fact from fiction, documentary from narrative, in this Iranian New Wave entry, though it is much easier to ascertain that the film is something of a masterpiece. The story of this project’s genesis is extraordinary in itself: director Makhmalbaf, who spent five years in prison as a teenager for stabbing a police officer during a political rally in the late seventies, encountered the very same police officer (Mirhadi Tayebi), now unemployed and looking for work as an actor, some twenty years later at a casting call. The two subsequently decided to collaborate on a film that would revisit the scene of the stabbing, exploring its personal, political, and moral implications for both parties concerned, then and now; A Moment of Innocence is the fruit of that collaboration.

Makhmalbaf’s execution here owes something to the French nouvelle vague, with its abrupt, playfully self-reflexive intertitles and extended interview/audition scenes particularly revealing Godard’s influence. But what makes the film especially engaging on its own terms, and lends it a tremendous amount of heart, is its mingling of the real Makhmalbaf and Tayebi with the young actors they cast as themselves to appear in the film-within-a-film reenactment (Ali Bakhsi as Mohsen and Ammar Tafti as Mirhadi; Maryam Mohamadamini as the young cousin of Mohsen present at the time of the stabbing). Rather than simply dramatizing the events of the past with these young actors, Makhmalbaf allows Bakhsi, Tafti, and Mohamadamini’s own personalities and ideals to inflect the way the story is retold, producing variously confusing, whimsical, and heartbreaking results.

By this method of allowing reality to affect fiction (and vice versa), Makhmalbaf and Tayebi’s original encounter is (or seems to be) thoroughly reinterpreted in A Moment of Innocence, confirming that no one interpretation can disclose the meaning of this encounter, and, more generally, that the passage of time both yields fresh insights into the events of the past, and serves to complicate them. The entire film pays off big time in a single, startling image that should knock the wind out of you and make your mind race.

-Cam

Farewell, Miramax.

After much discourse on the subject and many rumors, Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s iconic studio Miramax is no more.  As of 1993, Disney had bought the studio for $70 million, but brothers Harvey and Bob maintained creative control, keeping the studio teetering on the brink of collapse for some time.

I don’t know about you, but to me Miramax represented one of the closest things to an arthouse studio that existed within Hollywood.  Without Miramax, who would have taken on films such as Pulp Fiction, The Talented Mr Ripley, No Country For Old Men or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?  Miramax’s death is yet another setback for those of us who crave something more at the cinema than comic book heroes blowing things up.  What does it say about the state of narrative driven, original films if a studio run by two of the most powerful men in Hollywood can’t even survive?  Sure, they gave Kevin Smith his start, but everyone makes mistakes, right?

Grim indeed.

-mike

TIME CAPSULE REVIEW

[In the interest of upping the frequency of posts here at Wipe, we’ve decided to try our hand at writing shorter, “capsule” reviews for your daily (or semi-daily) reading pleasure. Below you’ll find the first of these “Time Capsule Reviews” (note: punny name subject to change; it just seemed appropriate for this particular posting). In the meantime, we’ll continue to work on our longer reviews and other exciting features, to be posted throughout the week. We ask for your patience and undying loyalty as the Wipe team tinkers with the format of the site. Thanks!]

Blind Husbands (1919)

Director: Erich von Stroheim

Screenplay: Erich von Stroheim

The brilliant and notoriously difficult Erich von Stroheim debuted as a director/screenwriter with this potently erotic yet severely moral silent feature. Always a superb actor (probably best known for his supporting roles in La grande illusion [1939] and Sunset Boulevard [1950]), Stroheim himself co-stars in Blind Husbands as a libidinous Austrian cavalry officer with designs on seducing the wife (Francelia Billington) of a neglectful doctor (Sam De Grasse) during a vacation in the Dolemite mountains. The film ostensibly concerns the doctor’s moral (and indeed sexual) duty to overcome his “blindness” to his wife’s desire to be loved. But as in his later masterpiece Greed (1924), Stroheim strikes deepest in Blind Husbands by exploring the moral and existential consequences of compulsive overreaching: hence, the film’s primary fascination lies in how the cavalry officer’s lustful, reckless appetite for women (unmistakably alluded to in his boast: “To me mountains are lifeless rocks. My pleasure has always been to master them”) binds him to a cruel, bitterly ironic fate. If that makes Blind Husbands sound self-righteous in tone, let me just say there’s something undeniably hilarious about the moral reckoning of Stroheim’s character, alone atop a mountain, driven into childish hysterics by what is apparently the judging eye of a vulture circling overhead.

-Cam

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

Director: Danny Leiner

Screenplay: Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg

I make it a firm habit never to muck about with the sort of filmmaking that produces work such as Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. However, since the film’s release in 2004, that title, that ridiculously languid title has echoed from the depths of my cerebellum.  Now, some six years later, I’ve given in.  Well, to be honest, in the end it wasn’t the title that got me to see the film.  It was the realization that the film concerned two grown men living together.

It’s not that Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is a good film or a bad film.  Such a classification is irrelevant.  Rather, the film is utter perfection as a case study of homoeroticism in the contemporary “buddy” comedy.

The “story” of Harold and Kumar involves marijuana and cheeseburgers, with the former barely being edged out by the latter as king.   A tremendous quest for cheeseburgers then ensues.  From a superficial view point, this is simply two good friends desperate to obtain their favourite meal.  But scratch the surface almost effortlessly and what’s buried beneath is crystal clear.

Seen from this perspective, meat and its bewitching allure drives the film as surely as does a libido.  In layman’s terms, Harold and Kumar’s quest is a quest for meat, and plenty of it.

So reverential is this meat in fact, that once Harold and Kumar get it, it proves to be the cure for all the problems the boys face with regards to women, bullies or any other conflict that life can throw at them.  They’ve stuffed themselves with meat and their hunger has been sated.  By the film’s end, both a symbolic as well as a physical penetration has occured in the lads, changing their views on everything and making them realize that their true strength was in them all along and that surprise, surprise,  it was hiding.

Still, although the film unearths the great depth of sexual attractions and feelings that Harold and Kumar share toward one another, it tries (in vain) to poke fun at the honest emotions behind what bonds Harold and Kumar.  Harold, for example, coming home after a difficult day at work to find Kumar trimming his pubic hair with a set of Harold’s scissors.  Kumar licking Harold’s face in order to “revive” him.  These sorts of dalliances into the arena of male courting patterns are to be perceived as little more than silly notions of homosexuality between two ostensibly very heterosexual men. In reality, this practice determines that not only are there feelings between these two friends, but also just how tender of a bond those feelings are.  For its part, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle soundly fails at dispelling any sort of male intimacy by mocking it.  For goodness sake, there’s even a giant penis cut into a wheat field, seen by the pair as they sail by, snuggled up together in a hang glider.

Yet, what quite possibly persists in most endearing me to this film is that below its crack-up of homosexuality, there truly exists a soul.  Down beneath the frivolous surface it shines: a world where men form alliances that aren’t broken by women and where alliances with their brethren elevate them to phenomenal plains of ecstasy.  Plains of ecstasy, I might add, that came solely from a slab of beef inserted betwixt two pillowy soft buns.

-Brice Hornell

Stand-out performances from 2009

With the announcement of the Oscar nominations just around the corner (February 2), I thought it an opportune time to bring attention to a few fine performances from last year that are likely to be shut out of the running. Some of these performances stand an outside chance of grabbing a nomination (a hunch tells me Anthony Mackie might steal a spot in the Supporting Actor category); others are clearly nowhere near being in the race, by virtue of appearing in “lowbrow” or strictly commercial fare. All together, the following comprise ten of my favourite male and female performances of 2009.

Alison Lohman in

Drag Me to Hell

Provided a blessedly soothing, sweet-tempered presence amidst a maelstrom of blood, flames, and witch vomit. ______________________________________________

Zac Efron in

Me and Orson Welles

Proved his ingenuousness (already traceable on his always-flush, emotion-stained face) by way of a beautifully poignant vocal and ukulele number. ______________________________________________

Beyoncé in

Obsessed

Made fiery, fierce red hair iconic; upgraded her fierceness with a rousing (if ideologically loaded) defense of domesticity by fisticuffs.

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Tobey Maguire in

Brothers

Manifested post-traumatic stress with paranoid, spectral eyes; scared the hell out of me and broke my heart, often in the same scene.

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Charlotte Gainsbourg in

Antichrist

Went to the limits for a no-class director; transcended his bullshit by channeling rage and madness on an almost super-human level.

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Omari Hardwick in

Next Day Air

Rendered a potentially trite drug kingpin character fully dimensional, with humour, style, and moral complexity to spare.

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Abbie Cornish in

Bright Star

Did justice to Keats’s effusions in her beauty and charm; clarified Fanny Brawne’s own passion in moments ranging from tranquil to devastating.

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Anthony Mackie in

The Hurt Locker

Unforgettably expressed a soldier’s anxieties in his final, heart-wrenching breakdown in front of Jeremy Renner’s (seemingly) unflappable bomb defuser.

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Rachel Weisz in

The Brothers Bloom

Rather amazingly shaped a ludicrous mess of quirks into a tolerable, even beguiling character.

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Johnny Depp in

Public Enemies

Eschewed his recent streak of commercial showboating in favour of a more refined, fascinating intensity; redeemed a misguided gangster narrative with movie star charisma.

Honourable mentions: Nicolas Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans; Zoe Kazan in Me and Orson Welles; Sam Rockwell in Gentlemen Broncos; Shoshana Bush in Dance Flick; Richard Kind in A Serious Man; Edith Scob in Summer Hours

–Cam