Screaming Masterpiece (2005)--3/5

"Screaming Masterpiece" showcases bands and singers from Iceland. Many of them include Björk or are Björk herself. With shots of endless crags and frozen rivers, the film makes the not-so-new point that Icelandic music is cold, glacial, and eerie.

Sigur Rós is the most famous--and best--synthesizer of traditional and modern Icelandic music. The mournful chanting of the country's Head Pagan(!), Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, segues easily into their epic sound.

At a performance duplicated in the Sigur Rós concert film "Heima," the band plays with Hilmarsson. Artist Andy Goldsworthy would be proud of the stone marimbas created for the performance. Flat stones are collected and hit with a mallet to determine their sound. After a few octaves worth of stones are found, they're lashed to a resonating frame. This instrument, derived almost completely from nature, is wonderfully complex. ("Heima" has more on its creation than "Screaming Masterpiece;" I never wrote about that film.)

Ventures past the core "Icelandic" sound elude "Screaming Masterpiece." Attempts at punk, metal, and rap sound like third-generation xeroxes of better bands. There's a reason Sigur Rós, Björk, and múm are the most famous bands from Iceland--they sound like nothing else.


A stone marimba, from the Sigur Rós site.

Notorious (2009)--4/5

This is the second-best movie with the title "Notorious."

Chris Wallace's eyeblink rise and fall tragically serve the biopic format well. Wallace aka Biggie Smalls aka The Notorious B.I.G. broke in 1994 with "Ready to Die" and was murdered in 1997, sixteen days before the release of "Life After Death." He can credibly be played by the same actor (Jamal Woolard) without a suspension of disbelief. Events from his life during these years are uniformly interesting and they easily stack into a complex arc.

Biggie always had the talent, rhyming to himself and to his friends. It took Puff Daddy's (Derek Luke) compromising genius to make him a sensation beyond Bed-Stuy. Puffy strongly encouraged Biggie to soften his image and rap against the early eighties song "Juicy Fruit." The resulting single, "Juicy," became his first hit. (It was also one of the first of many "Remember how great the past was?" hip-hop tracks.)

Despite his prophetic album titles, Biggie tried to stay above the deadly West Coast/East Coast rivalry. Having said that, he and Puffy are portrayed as a bit too angelic in "Notorious;" the excitement ultimately helped sell albums for both camps.

According to the film, the blame for the rivalry lies with Tupac, Suge Knight, and the media. Tupac, the scared aggressor, believed the hype about former friend Biggie, especially after a violent mugging with suspicious connections. Suge, ruthless and quick to violence, pulled the strings. The news, quick to the sexy rap-shooting angle, only brought more attention.

The shootings--the mugging and the murders of Pac and Biggie--are still a complete mystery. "Notorious" wisely skips any speculation, reenforcing the senselessness.

The Uninvited (2009)--2/5

Apologies for the spoilers and the exclamation points:

1) It was all a dream!

2) Every strange thing that's happening to me can be conveniently explained by the fact that I'm totally crazy!

3) Someone I thought was alive has been dead the whole time!

One of these cliches is usually enough to derail a horror flick. "The Uninvited" uses all three, sometimes in concert. The acrobatics fail to make the film scary or even noisy.

Anna's (Emily Browning--Violet from the "Lemony Snicket" film) insanity can't retroactively correct the pace of "The Uninvited." Convinced that her new aunt (Elizabeth Banks, for real) is homicidal, Anna discusses what to do with her sister and a local boy. For the first hour of the already short film, these conversations abruptly end with promises to meet or investigate later. Why not just continue the conversation now? Crazy!

What Would Jesus Buy? (2007)--2/5

With his name in the credits as a "presenter" of "What Would Jesus Buy?," Morgan Spurlock is to gimmicky documentaries with a conscience as Quentin Tarantino is to neo-grindhouse movies. The film is a scattershot screed against--what, exactly? It's hard to tell. Tucked between scenes of Reverend Billy's revivalist-inspired anti-shopping sermons are chestnuts from other recent documentaries.

1) Wal-Mart is evil and it's destroying small-town America. That's from "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price."

2) Credit cards lead to endless individual debt. "Maxed Out" already took on credit card companies.

3) Products are made in sweatshops. Michael Moore confronted Nike and other corporations, in "The Big One."

Reverend Billy is onto something by focusing on ugly Christmas shopping hysteria. Sickening shots of near-riotous after-Thanksgiving sales illustrate his point. "What Would Jesus Buy?" should have stuck with this theme.

The Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir confuses more than it raises legitimate questions. Most people think the choir is from a real church. Those that investigate are puzzled by the message--shouldn't it be the "Shop Less Gospel Choir"?--and frightened by the messenger.

The Passion of Anna (1969)--4/5

Ingmar Bergman interrupts "The Passion of Anna" four times with "interviews" of his actors. In the first and most shocking instance, Max von Sydow remarks on the difficulty of playing Andreas, a man with very little outward emotion. This technique--downright Godardian in its destruction of conventional filmic escapism--is way out of the ordinary for Bergman.

Andreas is a divorcee living in solitude on a small Swedish island. He meets Anna (Liv Ullmann) via two married friends. In typical Bergman fashion, they all have tragic inner and outer lives. "The Passion of Anna" is punctuated by trysting, violent emotional explosions, and existential musing.

Von Sydow's interview, and one each with Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, and Erland Josephson, segment "The Passion of Anna." Each interview is increasingly "scripted." That is, each one may be the thoughts of the actor on their character. But these thoughts are dense, metaphorical, and delivered free of extemporaneous pauses and hiccups. In these moments, the audience is aware of the artificiality of the film's content. It's also aware of Bergman's control over an entire world--the narrative, the characters, even the actor's interpretations of the characters.

Chess probably isn't the best idea, guys.

The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)--4/5

I had the Keanu Reeves remake sitting on my shelf well past the due date, taunting me. At about the third or fourth dismissal, I actually opened the case to find the original film inside, on a second disc. "The Day The Earth Stood Still" is one of the few sci-fi films from the fifties that is worth watching today in a non-campy mood. ("The Forbidden Planet" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" are also on this list.)

Klaatu, the alien Jesus, is just as much a reaction to nuclear war as "Godzilla." That film's pained destruction is replaced by the competing hubris and humility of post-war America.

Klaatu's flying saucer settles in a public park in the center of Washington D.C. As an interstellar diplomat in a Hollywood film, where else would he land? Testaments to U.S. importance, like the Washington Monument and the Capitol, are visible in the foreground of Klaatu's touchdown. They're meaningless in the face of Gort, an unstoppable robocop capable of destroying planets. It's implied more than a few times that humans have been of no galactic consequence until now.

Trailers for the remake show mass destruction of a stadium, a semi truck, and other man-made things. Not knowing the context, I can only speculate, but it seems as if this misses the point by a few parsecs. "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is a powerful anti-war film, memorable for its lack of unnecessary violence. Gort is terrifying despite only using a small percentage of his full power. He vaporizes weapons and later--after Earthlings have shot Klaatu for the second time!--two soldiers. Thrilling as the 1951 special effects are, "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is still watched for its pacifism and indictment of humanity.

RocknRolla (2008)--3/5

Guy Ritchie exhibits an incremental maturation in his latest, “RocknRolla.” Ritchie made a stylistic first impression with “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,”* successfully returned to the well with “Snatch,” and seemed to fade away after the “Swept Away” fiasco.

Like those first two films, “RocknRolla” follows a few too many MacGuffins through serpentine criminal activities. Also, many of the characters have “whimsical” nicknames. One-Two (Gerard Butler) and Mumbles (Idris Elba) stick up Uri’s accountants. Uri (Karel Roden) owes Lenny (Tom Wilkinson), who’s also owed by One-Two and Mumbles. A valuable and never-seen-from-the-front painting, originally borrowed by Lenny, travels a similarly convoluted path.

The second of two ostentatious stickups has a blithe framing device. A severely beaten One-Two limps into a restaurant to pay off his “finder’s fee.” He has to ask, “Don’t you want to know what happened?” Before we even see one second of it, the chase is entertaining. It involves superhuman Russian warriors, multiple car crashes, a sporting goods store, and an increasingly pathetic chase on train tracks. And it manages to somehow be longer and goofier than expected.

For all the macho posturing and plot calisthenics, “Rocknrolla” manages to sneak in some grounded characterization. This time around, the individual crooks are more than just funny nicknames. At the center of everything is Archie (Mark Strong), narrator of the film and right-hand man to Lenny. Andy Garcia-lookalike Strong doesn’t play Archie to the cheap seats. Instead, he slowly burns brighter, a secret voice of relative sanity and wisdom. Lenny’s comeuppance at the hands of Archie is surprisingly cathartic.


*I prefer the Italian title to the film, “Lock and Stock.”