$upercapitalist (Simon Yin, 2012)

An anti-hedge fund screed set to a screen saver slideshow of Hong Kong, $upercapitalist clumsily delivers its ideas in stilted chunks that lack the punchy force of even an Oliver Stone, let alone a Sam Fuller. Though we are still dealing with the effects of the financial failure, this movie feels almost like a period piece, a "would-a, could-a, should-a" account of how everyone should not have been so greedy and the financial collapse might not have happened. Oh, to have had such great minds at the time. When the film tries to become a thriller, it is far too late. A shame, too; had it pursued its literal take on corporate crime from the start, it might have worked as a belabored metaphor but an entertaining romp. Instead, we get a sermon, though once again it is the working public who has to bear the brunt of the lesson while those in need of lecturing can go about their business.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Free Radicals: A Story of Experimental Film (Pip Chodorov, 2012)

The article of Free Radicals' title gives away its main strength and weakness: this is a story of experimental film, not the story. Filtered through the personal remembrances of a man who grew up around some of the greatest innovators of the cinematic avant-garde, Free Radicals often feels like the home movie that opens the documentary. Yet it also tries to be the story of experimental cinema, offering introductions of most major icons of the underground but leaving out numerous linchpins of the movement such as Hollis Frampton and Kenneth Anger. In fact, the whole sexual side of avant-garde film is elided entirely, omitting a significant motivation for the early underground and some of its most scandalous taboo-breaking. Still, I have a soft spot for the enthusiasm Chodorov has for the filmmakers he knows and loves, and helps demystify experimental film a bit by highlighting the curiosity rather than the heady intellectualism behind the underground. It's not a great introduction to its subject matter, but it'll do until a great one gets here, I suppose.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Sign 'O' the Times (Prince, 1987)

Like Purple Rain, the film of Sign 'O' the Times matches the album it supports. The former visualizes the artist in ascendancy, matching the jubilant, youthful bravado of songs like "Let's Go Crazy" and, of course, "Baby I'm a Star." Its narrative progression is basic but executed with sufficient weirdness to allow for idiosyncrasy and the odd bit of emotional resonance (the belabored journey of the title song within the film, to say nothing of the track itself). And like the album to which it is linked, Purple Rain is at once dated and outside time, a relic of outlandish '80s pop culture and a refinement of that culture into an enduring piece of art.

Sign 'O' the Times has almost nothing in common with Albert Magnoli's film, but then Sign 'O' the Times the album so scarcely resembles the music of Purple Rain. Like the double LP, Sign 'O' the Times begins with what appears to be a story, the theatrical staging of the movie analogous to the lyrical collection of headlines that is the album's opening title track. But then, as quickly as a story emerges, it dissipates, giving way to a pure rush of eclectic songwriting and performance that shows off the best pop star of his time at the top of his talent. From the overbearing stage design to the colliding moods of the 13 songs chosen for the final cut, Sign 'O' the Times matches the unwieldiness of Prince's cobbled-together album (these two haphazard vinyl discs themselves the result of whittling down three separate abortive projects, two of them multi-LP themselves, into one release). Yet it also matches the music's sense of unexpected cohesion and its uncontainable skill and force. There are better directed concert films, and ones that feel more definitive, but no other live document so immaculately captures the filth and fantasy of rock's id.

Matinee (Joe Dante, 1993)

Matinee feels like a skeleton key for Joe Dante's entire career. It combines satirical targets and stylistic influences typically given their own feature. Sociopolitically, the film spoofs the influence of militarism on American society and how that militarism informs our consumerism and entertainment. Aesthetically, it blends the Corman-esque, effects-driven monster movie with a metacinematic, giddy humor that invokes early Warner's cartoons. At times it can be unwieldy, but Matinee bursts with such jubilant energy that its escalation of self-destructive mania is almost necessary just to keep the whole frame from catching fire. But then, it sort of does that in the end anyway.

Set in Key West during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Matinee plays on fears of nuclear annihilation, with an emphasis on "play." Instead of focusing on the threat of destruction, Dante tracks the release of a B-movie perfectly timed to capitalize on national anxiety. When Lawrence Woosley (John Goodman) learns of the build-up of ships and tension in international waters just south of Key West, he does not cancel a planned screening of his radiation-themed horror movie. Rather, he can barely contain his glee,  fully aware that terror over a launch will only make people want to see his picture more. In his shrewd calculation is an unexpectedly poignant point about the cultural necessity for the horror genre.

Life, and Nothing More... (Abbas Kiarostami, 1992)

Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's Home? was a watershed release, exposing the director to the world and establishing him as a critical and festival favorite to this day. That film's simplicity and profundity, rooted in objective realism but also deepened by subjective camerawork, exists as if outside time. Not until I watched Life, and Nothing More... did I even realize that there are no cars in the 1987 film, no indication that the world in which the film unfolds has any trapping of modernity. This 1992 "sequel," on the other hand, opens with the grind of urban bustle. Kiarostami places his camera inside a toll booth in front of the operator so that the audience only sees the man's hand taking money and handing back tickets. The drivers all ask if the highway is open, and the loud din of emergency vehicles belies his calming assurances that it is. Compared to the muted bustle of children's voices that ushered in the tranquil fable of Where Is the Friend's Home?, Life, and Nothing More... feels harsh and grating.

When Kiarostami's camera jumps from the toll booth into the car of one of the drivers who passes through, the director soon clarifies this new sense of tension. The man driving the car (Farhad Kheradmand) is, effectively, Kiarostami himself, and he is returning to Koker in the wake of a devastating earthquake to try to find the local children who appeared in Where Is the Friend's Home? Accompanied by his young son, the director travels heavily damaged roads to reach the location of his breakthrough film, the beautiful, rustic buildings that made that movie such a gently labyrinthine journey now reduced to rubble. If Where is the Friend's Home? subsumed its conflicts of generations and duty into a benign, lilting trek, the cacophony of sirens, heavy-lifting equipment, and crying babies that drowns Life, and Nothing More...'s soundtrack reminds the viewer how real and mortal the setting for that film was.

All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

Pedro Almodóvar's films are so stuffed with irony that even the sympathetic streak underneath his wild transgression can sometimes seem a front for even darker impulses underneath. In All About My Mother, the director so thoroughly blurs camp, tastelessness and wrenching drama that it should be the most insoluble of all his movies. On the contrary, however, this is by some measure his most openly loving film, a tribute to the roles women play in art and life that deepens and softens the black comic exaggeration of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The women here are no less melodramatic or filled with presence, but Almodóvar's affection is plain even without the lovely dedication he makes at the end.

The opening shots, of tilts and tracks over medical equipment giving a few final, artificial breaths to the doomed, do not so much set a tone for the film as get Almodóvar's usual darkness out of his system. Whatever one might want to read into the machinery falsely keeping flesh alive or a broader cold machination underneath the red-blooded melodrama to come soon dissolves as nothing more than a setup for a swift emotional payoff: these shots merely establish the initial setting of Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a nurse in Madrid in charge of overseeing organ transplants. Almodóvar establishes her here so that when her teenage writer son, Esteban, dies on his birthday chasing an actress' autograph, he can immediately place her in the position she had to place so many others, of being sorry for he rloss but needing to act fast. I did say this wasn't the usual Almodóvar black comedy, right?

Where is the Friend's Home? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)

Where Is the Friend's Home? announces the intimacy of its focus from its opening shot, held on a door in close-up as the credits roll. The sound of children chattering and the unlatched door being blown ajar and closed again by the wind comprises all the action of the shot, until a shadow appears upon the door and footsteps near. The approaching person is the schoolteacher, reentering the classroom to scold his unruly wards. By focusing so intently on, effectively, nothing, Abbas Kiarostami makes the teacher's emergence that much more frightening, subtly aligning the audience's feelings toward the man with those of the children he harangues. One poor boy in particular, Mohammed Reza Nematzadeh, receives such a tongue-lashing for doing his homework on loose-leaf rather than in his assigned notebook that his thunderstruck terror filters through the camera and nearly turns the calmly filmed scene into a horror film.

Kiarostami stays in a childlike perspective for the remainder of the movie. Adults never appear in full close-up, the way a kid processes a grown-up, and the even larger world around them can be as scary as it is wondrous and inviting. The world takes on these contradictory properties to an even greater extent for Ahmad, a classmate of Nematzadeh's who discovers he accidentally took his friend's notebook home with him. Aware that his hapless buddy faces expulsion if he enters class the next day without that book, Ahmad decides to return it. But with Nematzadeh in the town of Poshteh and Ahmad stuck in Koker, he needs some help getting there, help almost always denied him.