NYLON - January 2008 - (Page 133) FILM STRIPS EDITED BY LUKE CRISELL BE KIND REWIND A valentine to DIY and community-based filmmaking, fantasist Michel Gondry’s latest sprinkles the ebullient whimsy of previous efforts Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep over the decidedly not-beautiful town of Passaic, New Jersey, where Mos Def helps run a battered video store owned by father-figure Danny Glover. When junkman pal Jack Black (in a typically overcaffeinated turn) becomes magnetized while trying to sabotage the local power plant, he accidentally erases all of the VHS tapes in the store. In an effort to recoup their lost business and save Glover’s building from money-hungry developers, Mos Def and Black set out to recreate the destroyed videos by crafting 20-minute homemade versions of Ghostbusters, Rush Hour, Robocop, 2001, and Driving Miss Daisy. While their shoddy but earnest recreations capture the hearts and dollars of local residents, what should be a romp for the audience feels more like a slog. What’s more, the film’s nostalgia for outmoded technology seems strange in a world where YouTube has radically democratized filmmaking and distribution. The montages of our heroes carving out trash-heap f/x from fans, tinfoil, and cardboard cutouts of automobiles may elicit chuckles, but the film’s repeated “magic of the movies” trope feels forced, and lacks the bittersweet qualities that kept Gondry’s previous work from being sugary, weightless meringues. GREG ZINMAN THERE WILL BE BLOOD Paul Thomas Anderson’s fifth feature film is a spare, sprawling, Steinbeckian affair that follows the dealings of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) during the turn-of-the-century petroleum boom in California. Starting off as a regular miner with one pick-axe, one gun, and one big hole, Painview quickly transforms himself into a tycoon as oil starts bursting from the rocks more quickly than he can find barrels to put it in. One day he is visited by the enigmatic Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), who tips him off to the oil seeping through the ground at his family’s tumbledown ranch further west. Plainview promptly buys up all the land he can get his callused hands on, and relocates with his son H.W. to find himself in the midst of a small, impressionable community that rallies around Eli Sunday, the local preacher (also played by Paul Dano), who is somewhat prone to theatrics. Based (loosely) on approximately the first third of Oil!, the novel by that notorious muckraker Upton Sinclair which was first published 80 years ago, Anderson’s long film simmers, albeit very slowly, with malice, ambition, and greed—traits that seem to spill across the rocky landscape like the oil that spews from it. The barbed themes are, of course, particularly vital today but as far-reaching as the sentiments here are, There Will Be Blood is most notable for the two performances that drive it; those of Dano, and, in what could well be the turn of a lifetime, Day-Lewis. It’s almost impossible to overstate the gravity of Day-Lewis’s performance in this film—the camera follows his every mustachioed move as he tries (and often fails) to reconcile his ambition with his love for his son. It is, in a way acting so rarely is these days, astonishing. LC youth without youth When most people hear “a new Coppola film,” they probably think Sofia, which puts in perspective just how long Francis has been away from a camera. The senior Coppola returns from a decadelong absence with a film that is, to put it delicately, a tough sell. Based on the works of Romanian philosopher, author, professor, and historian Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth is, ostensibly, about Dominic (Tim Roth), an elderly professor who appears to be living out his final years in sad isolation. After being struck by lightning, Dominic is taken to a hospital where he begins to “deage,” much to the consternation of his doctors. This regression is just the beginning, however, and what follows is a dense journey weaving through the history of language, notions of identity and duality, reincarnation, and, underneath it all, tragic love (Coppola seems out to defy expectations—he shot the film digitally, yet it looks and feels like an old-time movie). It’s probably disingenuous to fault a film for having too many ideas when most have so few, but Youth ends up feeling like a philosophical patchwork rather than a cohesive film, despite a gripping performance by Roth. But thought-provoking? Absolutely. ERIC ALT I’M NOT Dylan in Todd Haynes’s fractured, THERE You won’t find Bob impressionistic portrait of the musician.—and that’s precisely the point. Haynes recruits a passel of top-notch actors to portray Dylan in various phases of his career: Christian Bale is the freewheeling protest singer, 11-year old Marcus Carl Franklin is the Gutherie-obsessed folkie, Heath Ledger is a movie star, Richard Gere is Billy the Kid, Ben Wishaw is the poet, and Cate Blanchett is the amphetamine-fueled ’60s rocker. What develops is an at times captivating, at times airless meditation on identity—backed by a killer soundtrack of Dylan originals and covers—where the recurring question of whether or not an individual can change the world is met by a chameleonic figure whose repeated gestures of refusal provides a political model of existence. And while Dylanologists will surely have a field day spotting references to real-life events, Haynes’s jigsaw of visual sensibility—which shifts from grainy black-and-white to sensuous color, from faux-verité to high-modernist hallucination—offers up a welter of filmic allusions to Godard, Peckinpah, Pennebaker, Resnais, Fellini, and Richard Lester. It’s a rhetorical strategy that mirrors its subject’s restless, shifting perspective: in flux, maddening, and heroically impossible to pin down. GZ THE YEAR MY PARENTS WENT ON VACATION By turns humorous and haunting, Cao Hamburger’s The Year My Parents Went on Vacation balances the awakening of a soccer-obsessed 12-year-old with Brazil’s quest for the 1970 soccer World Cup and a portrait of a country under a brutal military dictatorship. Mauro (Michel Joelsas) is unceremoniously dumped in front of his grandfather’s house in Bom Retiro, a largely Jewish neighborhood in São Paolo, as his militant left-wing parents leave for “vacation,” essentially going underground to escape retribution from the state. Problem is, Grandpa’s dead and so the abandoned boy is taken in by Shlomo, a solitary neighbor who believes that Mauro may be a sign from God. Hamburger’s approach to Mauro’s realizations tempers the gravity of the situation with moments of lightness—you can see the childhood innocence wearing away as Mauro is transformed by his experience. Solid performances abound, notably Daniela Piepszyk as streetwise Hanna, in whom Mauro finds a welcome friend. The film won the respect of audiences at film festivals in Brazil, but this charming coming-of-age tale will resonate far beyond the country’s borders. REBECCA RODRIGUEZ
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