The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (Justin Lin, 2006)

I had such an unexpectedly good time at the most recent Fast and Furious movie, despite some reservations about its overbearing plotting, that I took advantage of some sales to acquire the previous films, three of which I had not seen, and marathoned through them over the last couple of days. Of the ones I'd not previously watched, the best was this third film, an aberration in the franchise that suddenly introduced a whole new cast to go with a whole new location and, most importantly, a whole new style of racing. Justin Lin's first foray into the series falls into the same pitfalls of the earlier movies (the self-parody of its neon underworlds, a diverse set of faces placed under the whitest man the casting people could find), but he charges the series with new energy, meshing his style with the racing like not even Singleton did and making a case for this franchise as one of the most shamelessly giddy in a Hollywood increasingly defined by dour, self-serious blockbusters. It's not great cinema, but it's often damned delightful, and I'll revisit it as much as the last two installments.

My full piece is up at Movie Mezzanine.

Revisited: The Black Dahlia (Brian De Palma, 2006)

I've loved Brian De Palma's maudit The Black Dahlia since I first watched it over a year ago, and each viewing proves more rewarding. It's the ideal blend of the director's uncompromising independent streak and the visual sumptuousness of his glossiest studio work, a fake-out work of genre prestige that is slowly consumed by the inconsistencies and hypocrisies it allows to creep out from around the edges.  With racial tensions filtered through that sun-bleached bone of an actor Josh Hartnett and its critique of misogyny played out in gazes, The Black Dahlia is often guilty of what it attacks, but that also permits De Palma to trace his themes to their fullest extent. Roundly dismissed as a sloppy mess, The Black Dahlia may be one of the great American films of the previous decade, and certainly one of its maker's finest moments.

My full article is up at Spectrum Culture.

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Spike Lee, 2006)

I have not seen Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke in five years, and in that time I had not only forgotten what a superb documentary it is, but also how profoundly I was affected by Hurricane Katrina. Rage and sorrow run through Lee's film, their purest outlet in his filmography since Do the Right Thing. But Lee also focuses his emotional response to the gargantuan blunder by interviewing such a wide variety of people that blame is cross-examined, shifted around, and finally rendered both unclear and sharply honed. One of Lee's finest works, if not his best.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Brian De Palma: The Black Dahlia

Building off the moral investigation of film noir that characterized his Femme Fatale, Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia is a grim, stylish examination of the whole genre, not merely one of its most vital foundations. An adaptation of a fictionalization of a real murder committed in Hollywood, The Black Dahlia is ripe for De Palma's approach, but his film is less a deconstruction than a demolition, its elegant, formalist structure nonetheless betraying jagged edges that rip apart film noir. At its face value, the film is perhaps the director's most aesthetically pleasing, with its golden hues and plunging shadows casting Hollywood as its own cinematized fantasy and nightmare. More importantly, however, it is easily De Palma's most profoundly disturbing film, as transgressive in its own way as Body Double, only more formal and emotional. Body Double assaults the senses, but The Black Dahlia hits where it hurts.

Narrated in terse, strained voiceover by Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett), The Black Dahlia feels like a noir from the start, even as it introduces its detectives via their alternate gig, boxers for the force. If Femme Fatale delved into the characteristic female type of noir, The Black Dahlia breaks down the male cop archetypes. We meet Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) as Mr. Ice and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) as "Mr. Fire," their accomplishments as police officers nothing more than mere fodder for hyping this exhibition match for the precinct. It casts the two as leading men not merely of the film but of its diegetic world, headliners revered for their crowd-pleasing qualities. This presentation fundamentally weakens the two men as serious police officers, but De Palma will spend the rest of the movie undermining them even more, digging into the grim, unheroic truths beneath their aesthetically captivating shells.