Culture Snob

Atom Egoyan has been on some kind of losing streak. Since his breakthrough masterpiece The Sweet Hereafter in 1997, his fiction features have gone from dense and compelling if awkward psychological dramas (1999’s Felicia’s Journey and 2002’s Ararat) to blunt, tone-deaf instruments to explore obsessions (2005’s Where the Truth Lies and 2008’s Adoration).

The shift is a subtle one, and the gap between artful and artless is in this case small. It looks to me that like the novelist Paul Auster, Egoyan ran out of new ways to narratively play out his interests; seemingly lacking the affinity and capacity for humor, thrills, and fully human characters — which can disguise a dearth of new ideas — both auteurs have in recent years tread water in an obvious and ugly fashion.

With the caveats that it’s a remake and not written by Egoyan, Chloe seems to chart a new path for the filmmaker, even though it collapses in a fit of silliness just as it threatens to become probingly nasty.

In the 10 years since I saw it in the movie theater, I’ve regularly planned to return to M. Night Shyamalan’s follow-up to The Sixth Sense. I wanted to see if it’s as strong as I remembered, and — as the writer/director’s star has fallen (and fallen, and fallen) — I was curious how this movie might look in the context of his career.

Sadly, Unbreakable hasn’t held up well. While I think it’s better than The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, and Lady in the Water, it suffers from an inability to transcend the conceit. Shyamalan’s movies are never as compelling as their one-sentence pitches.

Dizzyingly fragmented, Welles’ ‘F for Fake’ builds layers of credible story exploring authenticity. ‘This is true, you know.’ No, you don’t.

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In my hastily keyboarded notes after seeing Inception last weekend, I spent much time faulting Jim Emerson for his dismissal of Christopher Nolan and of the movie. Emerson made sweeping, unsupported generalizations in the service of his obvious dislike of Nolan’s movies. His pieces (and his responses in the comments sections) represented an attack rather than an argument.

It’s only fair, then, to praise Emerson for his essay yesterday, which restates his problems with the film but does so much more cogently and generously.

In at least four of Christopher Nolan’s seven feature films, the plots and/or fixations are initiated or propelled by the death of a man’s spouse or girlfriend. Considering that Nolan’s primary thematic interest is obsession, isn’t this a little strange?

The realization struck me the day I saw Inception, in which everything Cobb does involves “being with” his dead wife Mal or being reunited with his kids, from whom he’s separated because of how Mal died. She leaped from a window, but Cobb feels (and is) responsible. Cobb also convinced her to lay down in front of a train in their “limbo” world.

In taking down Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Jim Emerson writes:

“[W]hat this movie’s facilely conceived CGI environments have to do with dreaming, as human beings experience dreams, I don’t know. ... [T]he movie’s concept of dreams as architectural labyrinths — stable and persistent science-fiction action-movie sets that can be blown up with explosives or shaken with earthquake-like tremors, but that are firmly resistant to shifting or morphing into anything else — is mystifying to me.”

The complaint is fair enough, given that Inception regularly refers to “dreams.” But what’s going on is only marginally related to how “human beings experience dreams.” The movie’s plot concerns espionage that uses as its tool a shared, drug-induced dream-like state with environments created by external “architects.” And if one does a little thinking, one realizes that the technique of the premise is effective only if scientists and practitioners can exercise control over the dreaming — that is, if they eliminate the inherent fluidity, randomness, and chaos.

I understand that if you want to make a good movie about baseball, you need to be true to baseball. But this is a case of sloppy word choice rather than botched fidelity. I suppose the movie could have made up some stupid term for its alternate realities — say, “The Matrix” — but I prefer the simplicity of the inaccurate “dreams.” Bitch about Inception’s presentation of “dreams” all you want, but I think a filmmaker should get a pass on the core narrative given.

I was surprised after watching (and then reading reviews of) the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man that there was such a fervent (if small) backlash against it. The movie — about a Job-like Jewish professor in a Minnesota suburb in the late 1960s — struck me as so right that I didn’t allow for opposite reactions.

Yet there they are. Some critics have placed the movie comfortably, derisively in the Coen canon, which is to say that they find it empty and mean — gorgeously made cinema that has no interest in or respect for humanity.

The movie generously allows for (and perhaps embraces) accusations of misanthropy. Whether you love it or hate it, find it cruelly godless or searchingly spiritual, see affection or scorn for the characters, the film will not peep a word of protest. By design, it is what you think it is. And what you think it is depends in large part on how you look at it. Is it a synagogue parking lot, or evidence of Hashem?

But even though art can be interpreted many ways, the text has a voice, too. And the essence of A Serious Man is faith in Hashem, which is illuminated rather than confused by the film’s cryptic core.

‘Dragon Tattoo’ has a damaged, sharp heroine; compelling depravity; a fair mystery; and no fat. But it’s oddly amorphous and fixated on rape

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‘It Might Get Loud’ never does, and the guitar-star summit lacks chemistry. Still, it’s always engaging, and The Edge deserves his own movie

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When I say that the filmed version of Watchmen and the horror remake Quarantine are faithful to the point of tedium, I intend that largely as a compliment. Great talent, care, time, and money have been spent not fixing what ain’t broke. Considered separate from their sources, both movies work.

But they’re damned depressing.

I found Snyder’s ‘Watchmen’ merely highly competent (and far too fetishistic), but given that the comic was ‘unfilmable,’ he did damned good

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Describing the Shondes’ new album My Dear One, violinist Elijah Oberman noted in a recent interview that “it’s basically a break-up record. ... We’re both happy and terrified to be participating in that tradition. On the one hand, it’s a very universal topic, and something that most people can relate to. And on the other hand, you really have to work to make it your own.”

Mission accomplished. Because the New York-based band so masterfully blends its atypical identities into rock music, this break-up record sounds like no other.

Unlike most monster movies, ‘[Rec]’ builds horror along with chaos. Near the end, it tells when it should hint, but it’s invisibly skillful.

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‘Treme’ S1 starts slowly, has some tedious characters, and is too proudly authentic, but Simon’s team remains expert at resonant microcosms.

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‘Adoration’ is a dispiriting Egoyan misfire, a too-blunt but intriguingly indirect meditation on terrorism that then excavates dull motives.

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One thing you might notice picking up Daniel Woodrell’s novel Winter’s Bone is how thin it is — less than 200 pages.

And when you start reading, you might be struck that it’s been carved incredibly lean. While relatively plainspoken, the sentences are dense, with a mix of dialect from the Ozarks and artfully turned idioms that feel instantly right. One has to sip Woodrell’s language.

“I do like to make it apparent to the reader that you need to probably read everything,” Woodrell said in a phone interview in April. “‘I won’t put in any flab, but you have to read what’s here’ is kind of my deal with the reader. ... Pay attention to the sentences.”

Aside from canonizing its subject -- especially in the excruciating bookends -- ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ is crackling, sharp, and outraged fun

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‘Justified’ S1: Sly performances, character ambiguity, sharply natural dialogue, and propulsive violence elevate this backwoods pulp fiction

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‘The Messenger’ is unerring on its own dramatic terms but misses an opportunity by offering character over punishing war-death notifications

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Against Me! has been selling out for the better part of a decade, so complaints about the polish of the band’s forthcoming record are already tired to songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Tom Gabel.

Because Gabel is a punk icon and an anarchist, it was little surprise that there were negative reactions when the band jumped to a major label. But as it prepares to release White Crosses next week, Gabel talked about the challenge of being an ever-changing person in a world of rigid expectations.

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist in 560 characters over four Tweets: descriptive, positive, a turning point, and ultimately (in both the “finally” and “fundamentally” senses of the word) negative:

• ‘Antichrist’: Sexually, anatomically, violently graphic; baroque, gothic; the domestic horror of grief succumbs to mayhem; nature is a bitch
• ‘Antichrist’: Brave, naked filmmaking, rich in theme, metaphor; painfully intimate with an eye to the universal; authentic, raw performances
• ‘Antichrist’: The mundane mistake of shoes on the wrong feet is its most affecting detail, but the indicated mental illness undoes the movie
• ‘Antichrist’: Only marginally deniable in its hatred of women, the flesh, therapy; clear insanity undermines attempted resonance; kinda dumb

Unlike some people, I liked — perhaps even loved — the finale of Lost. It would have been churlish to deny fans who had invested six years in the show a happy ending, and while the sideways/afterlife reunion was cheap and sentimental, it worked. And it worked in part because it defied the expected coming together of the sixth season’s two universes. And it worked because it offered a payoff to those hooked by the characters and not just the mythology.

The writers took an optimistic and spiritual path rather than my proposed (and truly, madly, deeply wrong) cynical and philosophical one, and bully for them. My mistake was in believing that the Lost team would undercut the characters’ faith in (and the audience’s suspension of disbelief about) vague, unproven hokum. Instead, they rewarded both.

But I was seriously disappointed when the ending that was so clearly and carefully set up never materialized. (Bride of Culture Snob and I devised this about two hours into the finale.) Nothing in the finale changes, but after Jack’s island death, there’s this brief scene:

Hurley’s on the beach, the new Jacob. He’s looking out at the ocean, for perhaps 30 seconds, pensive. Jack walks up to him, and they have enough of a conversation that the audience realizes that Jack is the new Man in Black. The end.

Consider that Jack was in the center of the island when it was restored, and that Jack is not resistant to its force the way Desmond is. As with Jacob’s twin brother, the exposure changes him, delivering mortal wounds but also turning him into Smokey. Unlike with Jacob’s brother, Jack doesn’t die in the heart in the island, expiring instead with Vincent lying beside him, so we wouldn’t see the whoosh of black smoke.

Consider, too, Jack’s conversation with his father in the sideways world. Smokey has taken the form of Christian Shephard, no? So, with this ending, the sideways world could have had a greater resonance with the “real” island world.

Lastly, consider that this would reinforce the motif that the island has a habit of turning its most ardent protectors (e.g., John Locke) into its most bitter enemies.

Alas ... .

I was also miffed that this ending wasn’t even among the chucked alternatives.

‘Timecrimes’ is compact and skillful, but it’s all plot and no character. ‘Primer’ (culturesnob.net/l/12) is similar but far superior

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With its last episode airing Sunday, I revisited my 2005 piece about Lost and was pleased that nothing in it embarrassed me — even though what the show has become would be incomprehensible to somebody who stopped watching way back then. Written a quarter the way through the second season, the essay is — in retrospect — too enthusiastic, but it’s also correctly cautious and (to be boastful) pretty perceptive.

I won’t be coy: I’m writing this almost exclusively to get more people to read my old essay. But in return, I’ll let you mock me. Toward that end, I offer some predictions on the Lost finale.

The awaited Jacob/MIB episode of ‘Lost’ was penned by series bigwigs but merely underlined already-obvious moral relativism. Gallingly dull.

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‘(500) Days of Summer’ has a good hook and nails relationship details, but it’s too cute and frustratingly undisciplined and self-satisfied.

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Based on a memoir, the facile, impatient ‘An Education’ is incredible, and glosses over its most compelling element: the facilitating family

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‘Fantastic Mr Fox’ balances Dahl’s aggressive oddity with Anderson’s preciousness; given Wes’ recent missteps, animation is a promising path

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Movie-loving ‘Dead Snow’ deals engagingly with undying evil and pointless greed, but the Nazi-zombie trifle is mostly large with intestines.

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‘Sugar’ too broadly sketches Iowa and cuts corners with baseball, but its subversion of sports-movie expectations is refreshingly authentic.

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