Double Vision: Tony Scott's Spirit Possesses Ridley Scott's The Counselor (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

The rumblings of a critical debate (or is it grumblings?) have already surrounded Ridley Scott's The Counselor. A script by Cormac McCarthy (The Road) helmed by the director of Thelma and Louise should have been a sufficient enough marketing opportunity for 20th Century Fox to capitalize on as they rolled it out during awards season. And yet the studio held a press-only screening Tuesday night before its opening, a move which signals they're likely as mystified about how to handle the film as critics are in trying to build a consensus around it. Given how peculiar it is, this is not surprising. The Counselor is in many ways an anomaly for Ridley Scott.

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NYFF51 Review: 12 Years a Slave (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

What makes 12 Years a Slave so incisive isn't that it is a particularly apt depiction of slavery. It's that director Steve McQueen makes the viewer feel like it is. In his previous film Shame, McQueen got us to identify with a lascivious sex addict. In 12 Years, his third film (and his third entry in the New York Film Festival), McQueen does something quite ingenious by choosing to follow the true story of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor). In electing to tell of the ordeal of an educated, free African American from the North, kidnapped and sold into slavery, he makes Northup's fear and outrage our own.

Prometheus (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

Who would have thought that Prometheus, Ridley Scott's triumphant return to science fiction, is not necessarily designed to evoke the picture it shares the most connective tissue with? 1979's Alien, only Scott's second film, was a horrific variation on the traditional haunted house movie trope in which a small crew of seven miners slowly gets picked off by an indestructible monster in the outer reaches of space. Alien's grungy, shopworn technology, its motley crew of unlikeable and all too human antiheroes, and the emergence of the spaceship Nostromo's whiny, female second officer as the film's lead were among the movie's innovative twists, spicing up a once moribund genre. Eventually, Alien inspired so many copycats it all seemed kind of old hat again. While ostensibly a tangential prequel—explaining a few of the more mysterious elements of Alien—Prometheus takes off on a different course, one especially familiar to those of us around in the '70s.

NYFF11 Movie Review: Shame

by Tony Dayoub

Shame is not simply the sex addiction drama it is being marketed as. More precisely it is a character study focusing on Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a lonely disconnected New Yorker moderately succeeding at imposing a controlled routine over his life despite an unusual neurosis. If Freud and Fassbender's other NYFF character, Jung, were to psychoanalyze Brandon and his equally detached sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), they'd find that, though each acts out in different ways, both are obviously reacting to a childhood in which they were exposed to sexual dysfunction. But director Steve McQueen (Hunger) wisely avoids diving into the murky waters of cinematic pathology, preferring instead for his audience to connect the various clues to Brandon and Sissy's background themselves. McQueen is more concerned with how that pathology plays out in the lives of his characters, relying heavily on Fassbender's talent for conveying the defeated torment of the introverted Brandon through what is largely a performance based on subtle gestures and inflection that the director catches by simply allowing his camera to get uncomfortably close and stay there as long as needed.

NYFF11 Movie Review: A Dangerous Method

by Tony Dayoub

On the face of it, David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, based on the play "The Talking Cure" by Christopher Hampton, seems like the perfect vehicle for the director's cerebral approach. In his films, Cronenberg is often accused of a detached, almost clinical, method of eliciting drama from circumstances in which the body turns on itself, i.e., The Brood, The Fly, and even less fantastic stories like that of Dead Ringers. So, at first glance, this story depicting the nearly filial relationship between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and his protege, Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), and its eventual rupture over their contrasting approaches to mental illness, seems like the perfect marriage of artist and material.

The X-Factor

How X-Men: First Class Made Michael Fassbender a Star

by Tony Dayoub

Just out on Blu-ray and DVD, X-Men: First Class is Matthew Vaughn’s clever 1960s-era spinoff from Fox’s popular mutant superhero franchise. Based on the Marvel comics created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, X-Men posits a world where the infinite variety of super-powered homo superiors, the next step in human evolution, are being persecuted by the increasingly suspicious homo sapiens — us. Though the initial two films helmed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) tied the mutants’ quest for acceptance to the same battle being fought by today’s LGBT community, X-Men: First Class backtracks to its most primal disagreement, the one between its two lead characters. Appropriately enough, the movie this time finds its thematic touchstone in the civil rights struggle: telepath Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), like Martin Luther King Jr., believes humanity will only accept mutants through peaceful coexistence, at least as peaceful as it can be when fighting dastardly super-villains like Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon); Xavier’s friendly rival and master of magnetism, Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), is closer in spirit to the more militant Malcolm X, who believed coexistence must be fought for “by any means necessary.” Lehnsherr, the man who would be Magneto, is automatically then a far juicier role, and for Fassbender, a star-making turn.

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Movie Review: X-Men: First Class (2011)

by Tony Dayoub

Given the decline of the X-Men movie franchise—which peaked fairly early with Bryan Singer's X2: X-Men United (not just one of the best in this series, but one of the best superhero films, period) before ending up in the execrable X-Men: The Last Stand and the disappointing X-Men Origins: Wolverine—one would be justified in choosing to avoid the latest entry sight unseen. But the anomalous X-Men: First Class turns out to be one of the most surprising summer blockbuster hopefuls in quite a long time. The cheesy comic-book costumes glimpsed in the preview hinted that this may have initially been planned as a slapdash film hastened to the box office for fear that studio distributor 20th Century Fox's rights to the series would revert back to Marvel. However, director Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass) turns the inherent camp quotient into a virtue, giving us a stylized, period look at the secret history of the mutant group and its origins, at times channeling the espionage-laden eccentricities of the early 007 films.

Movie Review: Jane Eyre (2011)

by Tony Dayoub

Compared to the couple of adaptations I've seen in the past (neither of which I remember well enough to dwell on) the most recent Jane Eyre best captures the spooky dread of Charlotte Brontë's Gothic novel. Between the previous adaptations' focus on the title character's early feminism and the romance which attracts many of the book's most ardent fans, the first thing to usually go is the story's eerie atmosphere. Not in this film version, though.

Blu-ray Review: Three Women on the Verge...

by Tony Dayoub

Three recent Criterion Blu-ray releases—two new to the label, one reissue—focus on female protagonists on the cusp of change. For one, a mature woman of some importance, this change shakes her most fundamental beliefs, allowing her a brief moment of happiness before ending with a gradual descent into madness. For another, it is the beginning of an attunement to her spiritual life, and her connection to another woman hundreds of miles away. And for the youngest woman, trying to make the best out of her dismal surroundings, any change can only be a positive one.

On Demand: Centurion (2010) and Don't Look Back (Ne te retourne pas) (2009)

by Tony Dayoub

More and more, films which don't necessarily get a fair shake at the box office are being released through the On Demand platform. Movies with well known names attached both in front and behind the camera can now be watched comfortably from home. Last year's Two Lovers, directed by James Gray and starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix, even made it onto my top ten list. The two films reviewed in this post don't come anywhere near being top ten material. However, each is of varying levels of interest and, though it doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement, both are at least as good as most of this year's theatrical offerings.