At the movies: The Lone Ranger.

Well, it's not often that one day after a review I write is published that a consensus between the exhibition industry, 'conventional wisdom,' and angry kids at the mall develops that casts aside not only a film I dig, but several points that I specifically tried to emphasize. It's sad, because it's now apparent that this is going to be 2013's John Carter of Mars- that is, an interesting, overlong phantasmagoria that will get used as a bludgeon (see also the piece I wrote about Heaven's Gate last month). Anyway, give me a read if you like, and see the film- it's so much better than any of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

At the movies: Meek's Cutoff.

Adrift. Three families and the yammering jackanape Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood, channeling Tom Waits as nineteenth century snakeoil salesman) traversing the Oregon Trail. Lost, with water and decency in short supply and the creeping sensation that hope has forsaken their small expedition. Meek’s Cutoff is the most politically lacerating film of the year; an anguished but restrained call to ask questions and openly communicate with your fellow human beings.

Wide Oregon frontiers yielding to intimate character moments, held prisoner in precise portraiture. Director Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy, Old Joy) uses the 1.33:1 Academy aspect ratio as a physical (and philosophical) representation of the limits of vision. When we think of the frontier, we think of wide open spaces; but we are lucky if we can really take in everything in front of us. The women’s bonnets are a form of bondage, but one that represents all too well the inescapable uncertainties of ‘that life.’ When you look at the process involved in fording a river, or moving covered wagons down steep inclines, you have to acknowledge some truths. I couldn’t do it. Few of us today could. But for its measured runtime, we enter into the frontier experience, and it is absolutely terrifying.

At its heart, Meek’s Cutoff is one of those very special films, like Gerry or The Blair Witch Project or Eyes of Fire, that taps into the primal American experience, the vast expanses of land and mystery that build upon secrets and legends and fears. Unlike those films, it hews to the path of realism, though that is in no way reassuring; the infinite horrors of the land come through in an even more upsetting form. Saltwater. Mocking, neverending horizons. And the ceaseless prattle of some good ol’ boy who talks a good game but has led you astray.

I’ve called it a political film, and it is. But not in the almost reductive fashion by which the mysterious Indian prisoner has come to be an Obama signifier (though there is certainly enough ammunition for such an interpretation). The Indian is simply The Other that is always part of the American experience.

Perhaps it is that way for all cultures, but the quintessential American experience involves the individual, The Other, and then other American individuals. Bound to one another by geography and (to some extent) ideology, Americans are tied to the thoughts and emotions of other Americans (those who’ve traveled internationally in the past decade can address this specifically), and whether through debate, intimidation, or reasoned discourse, we constantly strive for consensus. We cling to tradition, and custom, and, when necessary, hope. Meek’s Cutoff is an ongoing story, and one that should reverberate in the heart of anyone who has ever stopped and thought about history.

Originally reviewed at the 2010 New York Film Festival
--Jason Shawhan

At the movies: Poultrygeist.

When it says Troma, you know what you’re getting: gore, breasts, monsters, mutants, a representation of national diversity that makes Hollywood product look insular and unadventurous, and at least one (but often more) moment where the only response you can have is to say “well, I’ve never seen that before.” The typical Troma film, if you can even define such a thing, is like a madcap collusion between Frank Tashlin and the Marquis de Sade that works on whichever level you want it to. No setpiece too gross, not pun too outrageous, and no patience for subtlety; but still the Troma brand remains absolutely true to itself, and its take-no-prisoners style of social splat-ire doubtless will offend a significant portion of the population.

What else could we expect from a film positively enraged by the course of human life at this point in the aughts, explicitly attacking the legacy of Native American disenfranchisement, the way that food has become a corporatized industry, the Abu Gharaib photographs, and the way that entropy brings down countless social movements from the inside. Which is a remarkable agenda for a film about chicken monsters and dismemberment. There is no bodily mutilation, desecration, or violation that one could conceive of that remains unexplored during the course of Poultrygeist, and its gleeful willingness to gore up the place a little bit is a welcome breath of fresh air when you look at the disturbing ideologies splatter fans are made to implicitly support, through efforts like the Saw series or something like Quarantine, just to get a little grue.

The former frustrates because of its cruel and faux-moralistic undertones (perfectly served up for the Dr. Phil/Sarah Palin side of America), the later disgusts because of its dumbing-down and eviscerating of a quality foreign film/classic that didn’t need to be remade in the first place. And that’s where most modern horror is stuck. So even if Poultrygeist’s tone never strays far from slapstick farce rather than exploring more serious responses to horror, it still slings righteous social anger like the finest of documentary offerings and splatters the walls in ways that make this year’s Inside and Mother of Tears look restrained and dainty. Director/cowriter Lloyd Kaufman once again manages to find the gorgeous within the gruesome, and there’s no other splatter musical willing to talk about issues and sever limbs with such wit. ***

At the movies: Frozen River.

I don't envy how this pitch meeting must have gone. 'It's a movie about two poor and disenfranchised women who find themselves smuggling illegal immigrants across the Canadian border and a dangerous river into lives of indentured servitude. Nobody has any moral awakenings. Nobody gets an unrealistic happy ending. And it's also at Christmastime." But thankfully, someone listened, and the end result is one of the more quietly devastating films of the year.

Ray (Melissa Leo) and Lila (Misty Upham) are great and uncompromising characters. They're both mothers, and they're both fighting their way through life, put upon by how things are in a way that is relatable but not too easy to identify with; these are women who make difficult choices that cannot be justified by any rational person, and yet there's a very seductive pragmatism at work in the script that lets us follow them into their course of action even while all that is decent screams out "No."

The mood is bleak and wintry, and the ragged DV photography adds to that effect. High quality images of any kind would seem out of place in this poverty-stricken upstate New York milieu, and Leo and Upham both approach their parts without a shred of vanity or any specific agenda. Both women can be rather unlikable, but never really unsympathetic, even as their choices grow harder and harder to accept.

I find Tattoos on characters in film are often distracting (though sometimes necessary to the plot), meant as empty signifiers or used as instant street cred (or as a point of mockery). Here, we are allowed a couple of glimpses of Ray's morning rituals, and her tattoos, couple with her mottled skin, reads like a silent journal of betrayal and the passage of time.

We're given the same as we watch Lila perched in a tree, tossing food to a large dog to keep it from hassling her, watching the home of a family. Eventually, we learn its significance, and eventually we are able to find context for who Lila is and what she does. But for that moment, early on in the film, we watch her sit in a tree and watch over some family's evening through the front plate glass window, and there's nothing else in the world that hits so hard.

At the movies: The Exiles.

Kent Johnson’s 1961 film The Exiles is finally receiving a proper theatrical release, and it’s thanks to filmmakers Sherman Alexie (Smoke Signals) and Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep) that it’s happening. A jazzy (music by The Revels) and mournful trek through twelve hours in the lives a dozen Natives-turned-Angelenos, the film is steeped in vital, kinetic slices of life and pieces of interior monologue, and the disconnect between ideal and actuality is a sharp and serrated gulf. The visual sensibility on display here is astonishing, using high-contrast black-and-white photography to make the streets and sidewalks of Los Angeles into Caravaggio paintings, chiaroscuro portals into absolute darkness next to glittering prizes and ‘open all night’ signs.

The film is a time capsule twice over, documenting both the stories of countless Natives (though that aimless alienation that comes from living in the big city can be quite universal) and providing a visual history of a part of Los Angeles that simply doesn’t exist anymore. As the first, the film can’t help but suffer for its attention to the anomie and alcoholic cycle which most of its characters are stuck in; happy stories don’t normally drive insightful film. But as the latter, The Exiles is a marvel. There is a rawness, a swinging and suppurating energy to its scenes that threaten to break out of the screen, and in its way, Los Angeles itself is as much a character as any of the Native principals.

The Exiles doesn’t claim to offer any solutions to the travails that Native Americans face, nor should it be required to. But there’s a question floating in the ether, one that has been there since the film was made and which has not become any less relevant in the near fifty years since; what can be done? There’s a film coming out next week called Frozen River that also tells some Native American stories, stories of human trafficking, casinos, and crippling poverty. Both films are going to be difficult sells, because most people don’t like to think about Native American issues.

Maybe it’s unresolved guilt, or, as most usually say, the desire for escapism and entertainment at the movies that feed this impulse. But The Exiles is not a lecture. It is an experience, one that resonates long after the film has unrolled and the lights come up. And its ultimate sequence, as sunrise finds a group of young Natives leaving the hillside site of a drunken gathering/dance/council/brawl, echoes that perspective. The cars drive away, the participants creep home, and other than some debris, a little blood, a lot of cigarette butts, and a few tears, there’s nothing left to mark the land. But they were there, and for a little while, at least, it was theirs.