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d his connections with classically american cinematic tropes his films have become progressively more abstract and formally adventurous his later films are ponderously paced and heavily aestheticized visual poems seemingly influenced by andrei tarkovsky meditations on time memory and spirituality they are also investigations of the relationship between form and content days of heaven sits at the intersection of early and late malick retaining some of the cohesion of badlands while pointing the way to the more ruminative style of the thin red line the new world and the tree of life read the full piece here 2012 12 26 category film terrence malick tags badlands days of heaven film reviews terrence malick 1 comment the master by p t anderson billed as pt anderson s scientology film the master is really an enigmatic melodrama about everything and nothing this is its strength in a way but also ultimately its weakness continuing in there will be blood s vein of hammed up thespian intensity like that film the master focuses on two larger than life characters freddie quell is an emotionally damaged ww2 veteran and wildly self destructive drinker whose benders involve alchemising lethal moonshine from ingredients like cough syrup and literal rocket fuel however most of the pre launch hype has surrounded his counterpart the bombastic pseudo messianic shyster lancaster dodd inspired by south park s l ron hubbard quell falls under the influence of dodd by chance having wandered onto a cruise ship rented by dodd s cult during the course of one of his binges the two strike up a strange mutual dependency with quell falling under the spell of dodd s charismatic oratory and cod spiritual guidance quell s priest psychoanalyst and surrogate patriarch in equal parts dodd is also in some ways a kindred spirit and mirror image in a strangely triangulated pact he feeds off quell s childlike reverence growing ever more dependent on quell s dependency dodd also it is hinted develops something approximating quell s physical dependency for the potent cocktails he concocts just as there will be blood concerns the intoxicating effects of the will to power religious fervor and primal animosity the master concerns the parallels between those of belief personality and alcohol both films make more sense if you bear in mind that in one way or another the characters spend most of their time completely wasted as is immediately discernible then this is not anderson s personal critique of the tenets of scientology an exercise that would be unlikely to merit two and a half hours of any thinking person s attention the cod philosophy that dodd spouts is clearly spurious but its details are arbitrary and only briefly gestured at anderson is clearly interested in belief and where it comes from but he is primarily concerned with the human compulsion need manipulation desire and force of personality that creates it not the details of that which is believed even when a rare educated listener challenges dodd as he spouts his ludicrous metaphysics the focus is on the human content of his violent and paranoid reaction rather than the truth content of the objection if this is a character film rather than an issues film per se that is not to say that anderson does not attempt to locate his characters within the specifics of their time and place indeed the film is full of gestures towards wider themes quell is a lost boy who has no idea how to take control over his life having been cast back into civilian society after the war though the latter is never shown his search for a surrogate family is underwritten by his own rootlessness his father having drunk himself to death and his mother having died in an insane asylum he makes a living for a time by taking family photographs in a shopping centre the ultimate symbol of america s mid century crisis of spirituality creating endless reconstructions of the idealized nuclear unit from whose authentic reality he is alienated yet if anderson intends quell to embody some sort of wider truth about the postwar condition this intention is at odds with joachim phoenix s caricature posturing which is not to say that it isn t an extraordinary performance in many ways it is a remarkable display of method acting rigour indeed pheonix s sneering maniacal intensity recalls that of klaus kinski in werner herzog films like aguirre the wrath of god fitzcarraldo and woyzeck yet the uses to which herzog and anderson put this sort of performance are very different herzog s kinski films are defined by wagnerian excess explicitly in the case of fitzcarraldo the histrionics of kinski s performances are matched by herzog s overreaching metaphysical bombast their elemental intensity recalls classical tragedy serving to dissolve the individuality of kinski s personas and elevate them to the realm of archetype herzog s purpose is not to create a sense of empathy or three dimensional believability in the case of aguirre any more than homer s is in the case of achilles anderson is interested in filming similarly spectacular and histrionic performances from both his leading men but he also seems to want to domesticate them in a way in which herzog has no interest this creates a conflict anderson seeks to examine quell and dodd and tap into their interiority understanding the human motivations that underpin their relationship but their performances are so external and aestheticized in their studied thespianism that they remain remote quell and dodd are neither believable enough to be fully human nor representative enough to be compellingly symbolic they neither fully achieve nor transcend the particular the result is caricature there is much to admire in the master but it is not a film that ever achieves more than the sum of its parts indeed the main impression i left with is that anderson is an interesting and talented director who has fallen into the trap of believing his own hype profundity much like humour is something that can t really be forced the earlier films that launched anderson s reputation boogie nights and magnolia are triumphs of style offbeat humour and imagination but they are not works of any particular artistic or philosophical depth they are films that are not about anything per se they merely are in a way that is unforced singular and vital the master in contrast is a work that in its desperate striving to say something meaningful about life ultimately fails to attain a life of its own 2012 11 07 category film p t anderson reviews uncategorized tags film joachim phoenix klaus kinski p t anderson philip seymour hoffman the master werner herzog 1 comment tabu by miguel gomes the latest offering from portuguese auteur miguel gomes tabu revolves around a series of unresolved oppositions realism and romance fact and fiction the metropolis and the colony the internal and the external the narrator and the narrated not only is the film structured around thematic contrasts formally it is split into two bipolar halves present and past or in its own literary terminology paradise lost and paradise the former is a prosaic study of urban alienation while the latter is a self consciously poetic melodrama set in colonial africa the thread that links the two sections is aurora a senile old lady who gambles away vast chunks of her fortune and rambles semi coherently about filial plots the machinations of her taciturn maid santa and escaped crocodiles we encounter her through the eyes of her neighbor pilar a lonely middle aged spinster and catholic do gooder along with santa they form the central triangle in a low key urban character study that resembles a less dramatic haneke or a less wry kaurismaki the themes are all there the impossibility of communication the atomization of modern life the arbitrariness of a faithless world the failure of multiculturalism the characters are ideas with names santa saint an impoverished african immigrant remains as utterly inscrutable as her postcolonial generic precedents would lead us to expect she even secretly reads robinson crusoe pilar s pillar catholicism insulates her against the meaninglessness of her lonely existence the surreal poetry of aurora s demented monologues provides a contrast to the unrelenting prose of daily life all of which while not without its merits on first viewing errs on the side of obviousness and didacticism however the film is flipped upside down by a second section that could scarcely be more stylistically incongruous an elderly stranger gian luca ventura emerges like a ghost from aurora s past and recounts to pilar the tale of their histrionic romance set at the foot of the remote african mount tabu replete with elemental passion shattered taboos elopement murder betrayal and tragic separation the tale breathes life back into the dead themes whose very absence haunts the opening section the world is re enchanted before our eyes in a manner whose potential spuriousness we are more than willing to temporarily forget the contrast is as much stylistic as thematic the neo bressonian minimalism of the opening section gives way to an unashamedly lyrical homage to the silent era all aestheticized black and white shots of verdant mountainsides in the setting sun and smoldering close ups of the youthful star crossed lovers the section is soundless other than the atmospheric hum of crickets and the disconnected voiceover of the now elderly protagonist telling the story at aurora s wake in lisbon reviewers have invoked terrence malick as a reference point and the magic hour lighting leisurely panoramas and enigmatic voiceover would all seem to suggest his influence the unconfirmed relationship between word and image serves as the formal crux in malick films such as badlands and days of heaven and tabu utilizes a similar structural instability we do not know whether what we watch in the second half is a visualization of the events from an omniscient perspective a projection of gian luca s memories as he sees them in his mind s eye as they are transfigured in the romance starved imagination of the listening pilar or even a commentary on the way we the audience might perceive his memories to look because of our own preconditioning by the very cinematic norms and clichés it employs in a sense it doesn t matter the effect lies in the uncertainty if the section s aesthetic were merely intended as homage to a bygone cinematic era we might dismiss it as mere trainspotting or self indulgence but the romanticizing cinematic language is problematic on the one hand it serves to poetically exaggerate and universalize its themes in the manner of classic middlebrow melodrama but on a more subtle level it emphasizes the potentially violent subjectivity of nostalgia stripped of their sentimental baggage the events it depicts are largely destructive culminating in the hastily covered up murder of an entirely undeserving victim like the ironically fairytale aesthetic that disguises the violence of badlands and days of heaven this treatment conceals the nature of the events it describes the second section then provides a mythic counterweight to the drab social realism of the first which purports to merely show things to us as they are but this is rather more than dramatic relief or escapism for one thing it calls into question the limits of cinematic realism underscoring the gap between appearance and quiddity just as the characters in the first half are unable to really communicate or empathize with one another our window into aurora s tumultuous past outrageously distorted or downright untrue though it might be serves to emphasize the inauthenticity of appearance though the realism of the first section pretends to document concrete reality the second half shows that it has communicated nothing of its characters inner lives the actual nature of the present is as fugitive and hypothetical as that of the past if the purpose of the second section were merely to correct our initial reading of the first with a revelation of the past while juxtaposing the prose of the present with the poetry of nostalgia it would have run the risk of triteness yet its complexity stems from its ambiguous relation to any notion of objective truth by retaining an uncertain relationship between the words that form the historical data of the narrative themselves potentially unreliable and the aestheticized images that relay it to us visually tabu refuses to give us an authentic version of events to fall back on indeed the truth of the film lies somewhere within the very contradictions inherent in its opposing forces the poetic truth of the second section is as selective questionable and incomplete as the prosaic truth of the first the whole remains inaccessible ultimately tabu serves as a monument to the glorious futility of any attempt to impose a narrative upon the world 2012 09 25 category film uncategorized tags film miguel gomes narrative tabu terrence malick 1 comment the walk by robert walser this review was originally published in 3 am magazine every american hungers to move writes john steinbeck in travels with charley he may be right but by and large they hate to walk the quintessential mode of conveyance in the us novel is the vehicle by wagon for faulkner s mourners or steinbeck s wage slaves by boat for melville or twain by car for kerouac hunter s thomson or tom wolfe by motorbike for robert m pirsig or on horseback for larry mcmurthy or cormac mccarthy when mccarthy strips his characters of a ride in the road it feels like a symbolically loaded statement back in the old world we are rather more tied to our bipedal roots indeed if many of the great american novels are in one way or another about road trips the modern european novel is similarly obsessed with walking from proust s miasmic peregrinations around combray to doblin bely and joyce s more metropolitan flaneur isms or more recently sebald s psycho geographic ramble around east anglia in the rings of saturn which has contributed to a new uk based walking craze through the likes of iain sinclair will self and robert macfarlane beckett as usual defines this trend by negation constraining his characters to more stationary forms of existential bewailment if movement is allowed it tends to involve either an ignominious end in some distant roadside ditch or at a push dragging oneself along face first in the mud this transportational preference has its formal and thematic correspondences the macho open road tradition of the great american novel privileges romantic excess the formless howl rather than the european well wrought urn if the american novel has retained something of the frontier mentality we crowded old world ers are more interested in constraints both actual and formal the us has catch 22 gravity s rainbow underworld and infinite jest europe has the nouveau roman and oulipo if american literature is about discovery and new beginnings europeans are crushed...