Reviews

I saw Garden State at the Bridge last night. Though it steals an entire playbook from Wes Anderson, the first hour is quite watchable and has some genuinely funny scenes. As Zach Braff emerges from a lifelong Prozac- and Zoloft-induced haze, he is surrounded by the same quirky characters and nodding displays of Americana that have delighted knowing hipster kids for more than a decade now.

But Braff's shaking off the drugs turns out to be a metaphor for him shaking off all that hipster irony, for trying to figure out what is really important in life. Unfortunately, this is also where I shook off any interest in the film. As it entered its second, 'earnest' half, I experienced so many "People don't talk that way"-moments that I wished Braff would get back on the drugs.

You can only pity poor Natalie "I like sand" Portman, who gets to add some real gems to her portfolio:

"I know it hurts. But it's life, and it's real. And sometimes it f***ing hurts, but it's life, and it's pretty much all we've got."

However, my favorite had to be Braff's:

Braff: Have fun searching the infinite abyss. Boat guy: You too.

The accompanying symbolism is just as heavy-handed as the dialog. For example, the film goes way out of it's way to let you know that this infinite abyss is scheduled to be paved over for a shopping mall. See, it's like, he's digging down through the facade of modern suburban life to get at what's really real, you know? That's deep, man.

I know 4 out of 5 twenty-something disaffectoids recommend Garden State to moviegoers tying to wean themselves off irony. But please, this is not The Graduate for a new generation. It's not even as good as Lost in Translation (to which it is inexplicably compared). I'll give it an 'E' for effort, but Garden State simply underscores the fact that the post-irony school is still trying to figure out how to infuse the new earnestness with intelligence and subtlety.

Quentin Tarrantino once spoke about the infamous scene from Reservoir Dogs in which Michael Madsen takes his knife to a cop's ear. In the final edit of that scene, the camera pans away, leaving us to listen to agonized screams. Mr. Tarrantino notes that test audiences were far less horrified by an early cut of the scene in which all of the gory details were shown.

Of course, a good film maker wouldn't have needed a test audience to tell him this. At least as far back as Hitchcock, they have understood that creating suspense is at least as much a matter of what you don't show as it of what you do. In Kill Bill, Mr. Tarrantino has manifestly failed to recall this lesson. Here we see not only the ear, but nearly every other human body part removed in full, blood-spraying glory.

While I wasn't particularly disturbed or offended by any of this, I did come away wondering what the point of it was. The violence here is so supersized that at times it threatens to consume the entire film. This is particularly felt in the film's patient, stylish and well-filmed climax, who's cutting edge is left dull by the numbing splatterfest that precedes it.

Apparently, one popular explanation/justification for all this violence is that it is so intense that it eventually becomes comical. Well, maybe, but I think it really depends on your idea of what is funny. The Road Runner was violent, ha-ha funny. Monty Python's Black Knight was violent, ha-ha funny. Kill Bill is violent, I-can't-believe-someone-actually-put-that-on-film funny.

Then of course, there is the legions of QT fanboys who toss around words like 'homage' and 'pastiche' like so many throwing stars. "Don't you get it? Three decapitations-per-minute is, like, a reference to old kungfu movies, see?" Well, these people clearly have never actually watched any of the old Shaw Brothers films to which Kill Bill declares itself a paean. While certainly violent, those films were rarely more than slightly gory, if only because they lacked a $10 million budget for latex and fake blood.

Nonetheless, QT's mastery of exploiting the exploitation film is clearly evidenced in Kill Bill's plot, dialog, editing, and soundtrack. But for my money, films like Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are still much better genre reinventions because their directors don't feel compelled to hide behind winking pop-postmodernism. I dunno, maybe I'm getting old, but Mr. Tarrantino's brand of irony just isn't doing it for me anymore.

I finally saw Better Luck Tomorrow this weekend. I simply cannot the critical praise that has been lavished on this film. I don't care what it's trying to do to challenge Asian American stereotypes - this move sucks ass.

The premise (straight-laced overachievers by day, gangsters by night) is interesting enough and could have made for a good film, but this isn't it. It utterly fails to explore (or even plausibly explain) why and how these kids fall into a life of suburban thuggery. The violence feels weirdly forced and is devoid of emotional impact (on either the audience or the characters). And the lead character (Ben) is absolutely unwatchable - I'm supposed to believe this vacant mama's boy is some kind of badass? There is just so much wrong with this film I don't even know what else to say about it.

This is the last film I saw at the SFFIF and may be the one I liked best. It's a pretty straightforward comedy about a Parisian college student who takes years off from school to study abroad in Barcelona. There, he finds lodging in a cramped apartment shared by a motley assortment of students from all over Europe. He quickly settles in and all manner of hijinks and affairs (and very little studying) ensue. It's kind of like a two-hour episode of Friends; except that it's actually well-written and funny.

A persistent theme throughout is that of identifying the culture of a federated Europe; at a few points, I actually felt like it hit me over the head with this ("gee, look at the kooky people from different countries who don't always get along but still share a common bond...blah blah blah"). In that context, I couldn't help but wonder why Eastern Europe wasn't invited to the party. Maybe there really aren't any Romanians studying in Spain, I dunno.

Americans, on the other hand, are not so fortunate as to be completely overlooked. The token Yankee is a guitar-slinging cowboy boytoy from Santa Fe, who is (justifiably) referred to as 'stupid American' at least once and whose few lines consist primarily of howling like a dog. His appearance is brief, though, not long enough to really bother me very much.

However, it wouldn't have bothered me at all had the film not gone out of its way to dismantle this sorts of stereotype as it is applied to Europeans. This occurs when a younger brother visits the crew and quickly alienates himself from everyone with his insensitive cariacatures of various European nationalities (the anal German, the messy Italian, the mumbling Frenchman). The filmmakers clearly want the audience to be irritated because in the backlash against these ridiculous stereotypes, they will be better able to recognize their own European-ness.

American stereotypes, however, are apparently still fair game, and it just feels like a cheap shot. Because of this, and contrary to some claims, I would argue that this film is not about promoting cross-border understanding generally; rather, it's exclusively about forging a European identity (and a Western European one, at that).

This is just (lengthy) quibbling, though; I really did find this film funny and enjoyable. And being an American in the age of Freedom Fries, I suppose I don't have much license to pout, anyway.

My girlfriend and I had to turn it off halfway through (not something we do frequently). I fully agree with the other (rare) negative reviews. It's one of those films that seems to think that it's characters will be compelling if they simply tell me over and over again how compelling they are. Cinema Paradiso was great, but I'm frankly astounded by the gushing of praise for this unbearable film.