NYLON - April 2008 - (Page 145)

FILM STRIPS EDITED BY LUKE CRISELL In his eight-year hiatus, writer-director Harmony Korine pulled a couple of stints in rehab and spent time in the Panama jungle hunting for a mythical ﬁsh with golden scales. Trying to divine some deeper meaning in the surface world of Mister Lonely might be like that futile ﬁshing expedition, but Korine’s ﬁlm about identity and faith often captivates on a cosmetic level. Diego Luna stars as a Michael Jackson impersonator who befriends a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) in Paris. She invites him to a tranquil commune of impersonators where she lives with her husband, Charlie Chaplin, and their daughter, Shirley Temple, and others including James Dean, Madonna, and the Pope. None of them are spectacular at the art of verisimilitude— Marilyn points out that her husband looks more like Hitler than Chaplin—and Michael soon realizes he’s surrounded by mediocre phonies but has nowhere better to be. Werner Herzog cameos as a priest who tests nuns’ faith by having them leap from an airplane without a parachute, which is ultimately nothing more than a mesmerizing digression. Korine’s cult may ﬁnd little common ground between this sweet-natured slice-of-life and his darker, Dogme works (Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy). Even if Mister Lonely is mostly artiﬁce, we’re glad to have him back. REBECCA RODRIGUEZ mister lo n e ly lon “The heart is the strongest muscle,” Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) tells her best friend, Maureen (Eva Amurri), midway through The Life Before Her Eyes, an ambitious drama about two high school girls whose lives are shattered by a Columbine-style shooting. With a subject this overwhelming, the viewer’s heart had better be strong—and the ﬁlmmakers’ skill exceptional. To a point, Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog) is up to the job, ﬁnding an effective way into the tragedy through stylistic ingenuity. From close-ups of velvety blooms to a burst-pipe rain shower that mists around the girls in the ﬁlm’s central moment, the Ukrainianborn director uses sumptuous colors and slow motion to create an almost painfully lush world. The ﬁlm is at its best when it submerges its audience in meditative, hypnotic moments; but when the lyricism affects the story itself, it becomes maudlin. Perelman is a sucker for symbolism, which isn’t too distracting so long as it’s visual (ﬂowers, exploding THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES with all-too-short-lived beauty—that’s right, just like the girls—ﬁll almost every scene). But, too often, the dialogue turns charaters into metaphor machines and the plot, in its effort to surprise, loses its power. After the opening moments thrust on Diana toward terrible life-ordeath choice, the rest of the 90 minutes bounces back and forth between before and after, via a second storyline that follows her as an adult (played by Uma Thurman) wrestling with the consequences of that choice. The structure tugs the audience out of immersion in either story. Still, both Wood and Amurri turn in solid performances that, when free of heavy-handed dialogue, rise to moving ones, and Thurman fully embodies the conscience-wracked adult Diana. For its sheer visual splendor, this is a ﬁlm worth seeing, even if one can’t help feel that, as strong a muscle as the heart is, the ﬁlmmakers didn’t quite manage to ﬁnd it in their story. JOSH WEIL THE Jenkins, the pockmarked character VISITOR Richard actor who is a favorite of the brothers Farrelly and Coen, often plays to type as an older cop, an FBI agent, or a dad, and always in a supporting role (check out his memorable performance as Josh Brolin’s lover/partner in David O. Russell’s underrated Flirting With Disaster). In Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor, though, Jenkins is front-and-center as aging professor Walter Vale, a widower sleepwalking through the late autumn of his life, who discovers a pair of squatters in his seldom-used NYC apartment: Tarek, a Syrian musician, and his Senegalese girlfriend are innocent victims of a sublet scam, they are in the country without papers, running one step ahead of the authorities. Walter allows them to stay temporarily and soon forms a musical bond with Tarek that crosses cultural and communication barriers. But a misunderstanding in a subway ﬁnds Tarek arrested and held in a detention center and Walter becomes his only connection to the outside. A timely feature from actor/director McCarthy (The Station Agent), The Visitor asks all the rightfully painful questions in the post9/11 immigrant-bashing atmosphere. Jenkins owns every scene he’s in; McCarthy fought for him, and his gambit has paid off. RR STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE Few people do the documentary interview like the legendary Errol Morris, director of the Oscar-winning The Fog of War. He puts his skills to disarming, disturbing effect in his latest ﬁlm, Standard Operating Procedure, as his subjects attempt to explain, and reconcile, the breakdown of authority—political, military, and moral—that precipitated the crimes of Abu Ghraib. Five years later, Morris’s interviewees are clearly still coming to terms with their complicity in abusing the detainees of the Iraqi prison, but the photographic evidence Morris showcases here is damning: One of the ﬁlm’s most fascinating elements is the work of a military investigator, a sort of digital-camera CSI, who becomes the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes criminal action and what is only the titular S.O.P.—and it may surprise viewers that the latter category includes naked men handcuffed to metal bed frames, with women’s panties over their heads. It’s easy to imagine Morris being accused of being unpatriotic for broadcasting such thoroughly dirty laundry, but his subjects are treated with empathy, if not sympathy, and the overarching idea seems to be that a worthy nation should confront its appalling acts with clarity and fortitude—and that the most appalling acts here were not committed by 20-year-old members of a volunteer army, but by their ostensible leaders. DIANE VADINO ROMAN DE GARE If there’s one face that screams French cinema, it’s that of Dominique Pinon (Amélie, A Very Long Engagement, Delicatessen): Those ears, a bit lower than they should be; chin all crunched up under the prominent lips; eyes beady and mischievous. In recent years Pinon’s acting style has become as distinctive as his mug, and he comes to the rescue of Oscar-winning director Claude Lelouch in Roman de Gare (Crossed Tracks), as a quirky point of reference in a ﬁlm that has perhaps just a few too many twists to hold together the suspense it builds, so wonderfully, for the ﬁrst hour or so. It’s tricky to give many plot details away without revealing too much: Pinon’s intense relationship with the fantastic femme fatale Fanny Ardant, who plays a best-selling author, is at the heart of it somewhere, though Lelouch keeps you guessing as to precisely where. There’s also a serial killer, known as the Magician, on the loose, a university professor with commitment issues, and a hairdresser from a top Parisian beauty salon with some tough choices to make after being left at a rest stop by her boyfriend. No story is quite what it seems in Roman de Gare and, aptly, Lelouch actually wrote it under a pseudonym, only revealing himself as the author when it screened at Cannes. LUKE CRISELL

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of NYLON - April 2008

NYLON - April 2008 Contents Editor's Letter Par Avion Behind the Scenes Contributors Happily Ever After Mass Appeal: Punk Mass Appeal: Retro Mass Appeal: Glam Mass Appeal: Watches Haute Stuff Mass Appeal: Denim Private Icon: Shampoo Jeans of the Month Cult Of The Price is Right East Meets West Nesting: Flower Power The Observer Factory Girl: What a Girl Wants Hall of Fame Social Studies Poetry in Motion Beauty Street Style Fashion News Mania: Bottoms Up Directory: Somewhere Over the Rainbow Bella Donna Private Icon Counter Culture 'Tis the Season Beauty News Some Kind of Bliss Rocking Horses The Story So Far Personal Effects And This Bird Can Sing Young Offenders Geek Love Eyes Wide Open The Graduate Film Strips Culture Club En Route: In Vino Veritas Three of Hearts Head Trip The Shape of Things The Great Outdoors Star Maps Shopping List Bag Check

NYLON - April 2008

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