Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)

[The following post is my belated April selection of my Blind Spots choices.]

Jonathan Glazer's Birth cribs so much from Stanley Kubrick that I don't think that even Steven Spielberg's A.I., Kubrick's own former project, owes as much to the master. A stately, graceful tracking shot follows a lecturer, Sean, as he goes on a run in Central Park after decrying the concept of reincarnation. The shot is as frigid as the snow-covered area it covers, following behind the jogging man like a stalker until, finally, the angle changes and darts in front of the man. As it does so, the camera moves back into a tunnel under a bridge as Sean slows his pace and starts to stumble. In the middle of this darkened hole, he collapses and dies of a heart attack. Somewhere else, a baby is born in a bath.

The connection is obvious. A man enters a giant womb and dies as a child emerges from one to live. The man who dismissed reincarnation is visually linked to rebirth, and soon the narrative makes this the driving focus of the film when Sean's widow, Anna (Nicole Kidman), has her slowly rebuilt life re-shattered 10 years after her husband's death when a young boy (Cameron Bright) shows up at her door claiming to be Sean. This Sean's emergence raises metaphysical questions that gradually come to nothing as Glazer icy framings serve only to keep a ludicrous, overheated melodrama on ice.

Capsule Reviews: Trespass, My Week With Marilyn, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Trespass (Joel Schumacher, 2011)

Having premiered at TIFF in September and come to DVD not two months later, Trespass couldn't possibly have been any good, but its badness is still striking. Shot with colors so artlessly exaggerated it looks merely as if someone adjusted the color balance rather than composed anything, Trespass wouldn't be interesting if it were lensed by Emmanuel Lubezki. A bog-standard house thriller with a simperingly moralistic message about family, the film proceeds with hilariously random flashbacks, endless narrative diversions, and hopelessly absurd dialogue. Nicole Kidman still can't get her emotions to match her starched facial expressions, while Nic Cage plays the fast-talking diamond dealer with his usual incoherent yelling. (I confess that his agonized cry of "You shit fucking animals!" is something of a highlight.) The film does improve (by which I mean becomes even worse) when someone socks Cage in the mouth and he speaks with a thick voice the rest of the film. But not even the delight of Cage at his worst can make up from Schumacher's clumsily overactive direction or the constant addition of conflicts thanks to useless reveals.

Capsule Reviews: Moulin Rouge!, A Corner in Wheat, 31/75 Aysl

Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)

A pop culture kaleidosope-cum-travesty, Moulin Rouge! is as unbearable as it is enthralling, always at once, all throughout the film. The exclamation point in the title is actually the most subtle element of the whole shebang. It's like a Girl Talk musical, running through fragments of a vast range of music in blitzkrieg assaults of color and choreography. Though I don't know where on Earth the people who get emotionally invested in its paper-thin romance narrative are coming from, the film's aesthetic smorgasbord makes for an unforgettable, transfixing experience. Tim Brayton said it best, even if I can't match his level of enthusiasm: "Five minutes of the film can be exhausting; two hours is the most invigorating, blissful experience that cinema can offer."

The performances are fantastic: Ewan McGregor has rarely been more attractive, Nicole Kidman definitely hasn't, and Jim Broadbent has never been more boisterously endearing. Jill Bilcock's editing feeds every shot through a meat grinder, but Donald McAlpine's lurid throwback to Technicolor and Catherine Martin's vibrant art and costume design are still striking. Luhrmann's bombastic setpieces take choreography and romantic melodrama to gaudy extremes, and it's funny how this, his most bewildering picture, is also his most coherent and successful. I have no grade for this film; it's an A+ and an F at the same time and averaging out to a C doesn't remotely give the right impression of my feelings for it.

A Corner in Wheat (D.W. Griffith. 1909)

With its rapid editing between financially shaken-down commonfolk and monopolizing wheat tycoons, D.W. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat presages Soviet montage not merely in aesthetic but political thrust. His intercutting is darkly humorous: boisterous, lavish parties of the rich mix with static tableaux of miserable, exorbitant breadlines that feel like Griffith somehow went through time and brought back photographs of the Depression to splice into his moving picture. Even when they move, the poor trudge like zombies, and when the bread runs out all too quickly, the sense of despair only compounds. Griffith's grim comeuppance for the tycoon who starves the people to add $4 million a day to his coffers is a literal burial in riches, a macabre joke I didn't know Griffith had in him, but then I've only seen Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. The depiction of the middle class being driven into poverty to compound the wealth of the rich is, of course, more relevant than ever 112 years later.

31/75 Aysl (Kurt Kren, 1975)

Shooting over 21 non-consecutive days with the same strips of film and an alternating masking board with altering alignments of holes, Kren's 31/75 Asyl turns a static shot into an ever-changing tableaux of colliding light exposures and alternating time periods. The shifting areas of black space and splotches of countryside comprising differing days and lighting/weather conditions make a pointillist landscape, like satellite TV in a storm. When Kren drops the black space altogether for a moment, he's left with a pan-seasonal collage where winter snow rubs against spring bloom, the multiple timeframes glimpsed in the alternating patches of light and exposure now fully visible. I confess I don't know what it "means," but Kren's structuralist experiment is fascinating, beautiful and suggestive, calling attention to the way time affects all images even as they are constructed.

Australia

There’s a definite classic feel to “Australia,” as if all the grandiose epics of Old Hollywood mated and gave birth to an anachronistic child. At last, Baz Luhrmann has made a film with the scope to contain his oversaturated flash, a fairy tale about a wide open land and star-crossed lovers. Unfortunately, the film’s size simply bloats Luhrmann’s already glaring flaws and makes for a tedious experience.

“Australia” starts simply enough: an English aristocrat, Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) travels to Australia to visit her husband’s flagging cattle ranch, only to find him recently murdered. A rival cattle baron seeks a monopoly, and tries to force Ashley out o business. Sarah fights back with the help of a mixed race child named Nullah and “The Drover” (Hugh Jackman), a cattle-herder who is rugged, handsome and, when the situation calls, shirtless. They must get their cattle to the port town of Dover to ensure the ranch’s survival, all the while being sabotaged by Neil Fletcher (David Wenham), a higher-up in the rival rancher’s pay.

The film starts out decently enough, but it wastes no time beating you about the head with Luhrmann’s usual cartoon-ish nonsense. Nicole Kidman spends the first hour making goofy faces that equally reflect shock, outrage, and mild intrigue, and her facial contortions are so over the top I began to wonder if I was watching an old sitcom with the laugh track turned down. The Australians are dusty and say “Crikey” a lot, and the ragtag team gets the cattle across the harsh Outback.

It is around the two hour mark (where the film should have ended, by the way), that we are suddenly plunged into the dreaded territory of Serious Business. The bouncy slice of optimism abruptly turns into a somber look at the frightfully-racist-yet-not-as-frightfully-racist-as-it-actually-was Australia. Nullah, a complete outcast because of his mixed race, is taken to a island mission, which presents the first tactical target to the approaching Japanese.

We learn of Australia’s horrible policy of removing aborigine children from their families and adopting them to white homes, which might have made more emotional impact if the whole thing wasn’t so campy. Sorry, but you can’t go about making cartoon faces and suddenly talk about racism. Well, maybe Charlie Chaplin could, but then we wasn’t a flashy hack.

And why is it that films that criticize racism always seem to employ stereotypes? An Asian fellow works at Sarah’s ranch and speaks in a heavy accent guaranteed to score cheap laughs. And Nullah…oh, where do you start? He speaks an annoying type of pidgin English that is often incomprehensible. Worse, he provides the voice-over narration. Voice-overs are bad enough, but a voice-over in near gibberish? Why bother? Imagine how much worse “Episode I” would have been if Jar-Jar narrated it.

The only bright spot in any of this is David Wenham. Wenham, who starred as Faramir in the “Lord of the Rings” films, puts in a performance far better than the film deserves. His Fletcher is a cold, soulless demon who stalks the rival ranchers with increasing vigor, not because he is getting paid but because he simply enjoys it. He has no real loyalties and only loses his temper when his status is threatened. The only redeeming part of the tacked on 45 minute final act is that we see more of him.

So what are we left with? The film sure is pretty to look at, but so is a poison dart frog, and you shouldn’t go pawing one of those. Luhrmann set out to make “Australia” his “Gone With The Wind,” and instead he made a spiritual sequel to “Pearl Harbor.” Speaking of, I’m beginning to suspect that Hollywood is pushing forward some sort of revisionist history in which the Japanese got involved in the war in an effort to firebomb dull romances off the face of the Earth. If so, then the United States owes them an apology.