Trade

Two Wrongs Make a Movie

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

Ken Loach’s Guernica, a vivid recollection of death, brutality, suffering, and helplessness, unalleviated by a happy ending. Its subject is the birth of the IRA, the unbearable emotional toll on the lives of those involved, and the price paid in blood. Incredibly manipulative, biased, and deterministic, it is also an accomplished piece of filmmaking. As is usually the case with Loach, the film somehow manages to take the broad view while keeping his human characters sharply in focus. Gradually, a theme of ruptured familial relationships emerges from the rubble. The roving, restless camera unites all the performers within the frame without emphasizing one over the other, so that the entire film resembles a tapestry or portraiture. And the seemingly improvisatory acting is invigorating for its ease and naturalness. (The difficult Irish accents are not attended by subtitles.) Excellent performances by Cillian Murphy, Padraic Delaney, and Orla Fitzgerald accompany this unashamedly tenacious polemic, though it is that very tenaciousness that tends to work against its success.

The Last Winter

Set in the white wilderness of Northern Alaska, this hypnotically eerie independent feature from Larry Fessenden secures his position as one of the most creative and intelligent horror directors on the American scene. More concerned with creating tension within a group of tightly knit characters than proffering cheap shocks, Fessenden exhibits a Howard Hawksian appreciation for male camaraderie and Val Lewtonian love of the patient scare. Ron Perlman gives credence to the role of a grizzled captain of an Arctic drilling team who accidentally unleashes Mother Nature’s ghosts from the rapidly liquefying permafrost. If the plot sounds a little like An Inconvenient Truth by way of John Carpenter’s The Thing, think again. Fessenden’s main interest lies in the exploration of subjective reality, although the eco-conscious subtext allows him to simultaneously develop themes established in his previous Wendigo. The start realism is so patiently established that it almost feels like a cheat when the special effects finally arrive (unlike Lewton, Fessenden always shows his monsters), but this remains a compelling thriller with a strange aftertaste. Anton Sanko is responsible for the creepy ambient score.

(Twilight Zone) Screengrab of the Day

"A Stop at Willoughby"

Amazing Grace

Refreshingly old-fashioned biography of William Wilberforce, the English politician whose parliamentary campaign against the slave trade quietly rocked the free world. Beguiling in its celebration of victories both small (Wilberforce’s charming courtship of wife-to-be Barbara Spooner; his movingly articulate friendship with fellow abolitionist William Pitt the Younger) and large (the eventual assent of the Slave Trade Act in 1807, after nearly two decades of demonstration), the film remains sensually grounded in the struggles of its “ordinary” protagonists. Under Michael Apted’s calm, assertive direction, the largely British cast delivers more than its share of vibrant portrayals (Ion Gruffudd’s munificent Wilberforce, Benedict Cumberbatch’s subtly expressive Pitt, and Albert Finney’s stormy John Newton come to mind), and Steven Knight’s cogent screenplay renews faith in the possibility of social reform. Knight is less successful in laying out the chronology of events, but this only makes one eager to crack open the history books and see for oneself. A redoubtably handsome film, photographed in soft, milky tones by Remi Adafarasin.

Screengrab #10

Mr. Bean's Holiday

While American movie culture continues to trade on store-bought cynicism and trendy politics, Rowan Atkinson’s bourgeois comedies seem heroically square. Working with gags that are primarily visual, Atkinson avoids postdating himself. Many years from now Mr. Bean’s Holiday will be just as droll as it is today.

A full decade has elapsed since audiences first encountered the bug-eyed, elastic-faced English oaf in theaters, and time has done nothing to ossify his image. He still resembles a Martian trying vainly to adjust to the rhythms of human life. Mischievous yet essentially innocent (like his closest cinematic cousin, Stan Laurel) he is never far from trouble’s front door.

In a local lottery, Bean wins a modest vacation to the South of France. Camcorder in tow, his destiny collides with that of a ten-year-old boy (Max Baldry) whom Bean inadvertently separates from his father. Grimly determined to reunite the tyke with his distraught dad (Karel Roden), Bean accidentally sabotages the set of an egotistical film director (Willem Dafoe). This in turn leads to a serendipitous encounter with a beaming French actress (Emma de Caunes). All five characters converge at the Cannes Film Festival in a scene that resembles the climax of Buster Keaton’s classic silent comedy Sherlock, Jr.

This is featherweight stuff, yet many of the scenes are vividly conceived and executed with at least a modicum of good timing. Whether impishly dumping a plate of oysters into a woman’s purse or bicycling after a truck full of chickens, Atkinson is compulsively watchable. And though one can sense a dire kind of gallows humor encroaching on the material, the movie is generally bighearted and sweet in disposition—a sexless, G-rated alternative to the raunchy status quo.

Like the underrated Johnny English, Mr. Bean’s Holiday serves mostly as an opportunity to exploit Atkinson’s loose-limbed mugging (at one point he makes a pallid attempt to dance to Shaggy’s “Boombastic”), yet it narrowly avoids narcissism. The title recalls the French film genius Jacques Tati (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday) to whom Mr. Bean bears a superficial resemblance. And like Tati, Atkinson realizes that one of comedy’s grandest qualities is the power to heal. (It ends with a romantic, if unlikely, image of the entire multicultural cast united in song.)

In one of the final scenes, Bean, entranced by the sight of a scenic beachfront, walks across a series of perfectly placed automobiles. For a moment, we are reminded of how certain great comedians have a way of bending the physical world to their will. If this is truly Mr. Bean’s final public appearance, it’s a good one to go out on.