A few months back I saw Enter the Void, a demanding movie that only rang a bell because I’d seen the director Gaspar Noé’s previous effort, Irreversible. And I’d only heard of Irreversible because of its notoriety, its DVD release briefly addressed in Entertainment Weekly a few years ago.

It’s notorious for one scene in particular, one long, agonizing scene: A rape, captured by one camera setup, that for a scene lasts an almost unbearably long time, nearly ten minutes. It’s graphic, certainly because of the violence demonstrated. But – and none of what follows here is to take the situation lightly – it’s very interesting to me how the act is portrayed. That clothes are mostly on makes the act no less a violation, but it’s less sexualized, I’d say, and in that way even more personalized, or humanized. It’s not pornographic in that particular sense, though it’s still a physical confrontation. One camera angle, from on the ground, if not inches off, displays the scene with the indifference of the one scared passerby in the background. Yet still, this indifference is paired with the curiosity evident in that we are told, or at least suggested, not to look away. The act is portrayed, not merely hinted at. I think this combination of apathy and voyeurism creates a fascinating tension.

But there’s more to the movie, too. First of all, the scenes (and the credits) are arranged in reverse-chronological order. We see the aftermath of the attack before the attack. This reorganization leads to some shocking scenes, including a beating towards the beginning that remains the most explicitly gruesome thing I’ve ever seen on film. But the movie also raises interesting questions of crime and punishment and to what extent retribution is justified.

Possibly complicating matters is the actress herself. Monica Bellucci plays Alex, the victim of the rape and subsequent beating. We see her injured, then we see her being injured. But only after that, really, do we see how exquisitely beautiful she actually is, how charming she seems, how loving a relationship she has with Marcus (Vincent Cassel, her real-life husband). This information makes the movie increasingly more heartbreaking, but looking back, also makes me wonder how her beauty affects our thoughts of her rape. Is the attack more disgusting because she is more beautiful to begin with? If so, that seems like an unfair reaction. But is it a natural one? If a conclusion can be drawn, in that all such injustices are unfair and that kindness and a measure of respect should be exuded towards everyone, then this depiction of rape is not just exploitative. I’d say the visualization succeeds in making the violence real enough to make people think, or become more sensitive to actual acts like this, in which case the movie, as disturbing as parts of it are, has very much in the way of artistic merit.

Vis-à-Vis: I’d definitely recommend seeing Enter the Void in conjunction with this one, specifically for both having impressive camerawork. Between the two, though, there’s a definite divide in that Enter the Void is mostly surreal, with a beautiful representation of a drug trip, for example, while this film begins with a level of subjectively – the characters’ world turned upside down as it were – and becomes more realistic throughout. I also of course have to suggest Memento, with its similar “backwards” organization, others parallels in narrative, and the clever revelation of backstory.

In brief: Disturbing, visceral, gut-wrenching but also thoughtful and occasionally sublime.

3.5 stars/4 (A-)

Available on Netflix Instant

Before last week’s grand return to the IFC Center for Fight Club, the last time I’d seen one of my favorite movies on the big screen was a few months ago in October, for the 25th anniversary of Back to the Future. It went poorly. In short, a hipster dufus two seats down talked throughout and ruined the experience almost wholly; I hope his girlfriend broke up with him. On the heels of this, I was ready to throw down as only I know how – with words – if anyone ruined yet another of these rare opportunities.

For everyone’s good, the night went smoothly. Except for that sniffly dude towards the back ahemming his way through the film. Chinese coughing torture. I waited as often for favorite lines as for his involuntary spasms. I’d have whipped a lozenge at him, had one been on me, but I settled down when I realized it was tenfold worse for the poor bastards sitting right in front of him. It’s probably my least favorite way of cheering myself up – realizing other people have it worse – but it was in this case nonetheless effective.

This was my first time seeing Fight Club in a theatre. It was released in October of 1999, when I was a freshman in college. I spent too much time in my dorm room, a bus ride away from civilization, to consider seeing any movie. Unlimited internet access saw to keeping me there. I do wonder what I would have thought then – this hypothetical now and forever useless – but it probably wouldn’t have had the right impact. I felt like an outsider enough as it was, then: There was no pressing need for iconoclasm.

Nearly twelve years later, the film found its true mark. I watched it several times over one week last July, on account of all the commentaries, bookending what has been for me a period of, if not self-destruction, stripping away. Of employment, of friends, of familiar comforts. I was hoping to find inspiration several times over. Instead, I found that with the freedom to do anything is the freedom to do nothing at all. I ignored the metaphorical sense of self-destruction for the literal one. Moving on, progressing, evolving, any of these acts of creation and of self-creation are also in essense acts of self-destruction. Healthy ones. I was surrounded by vivid thoughts of what was, my memory occasionally being unforgiving, and entered a prolonged and early hibernation. Rather than keeping in touch with the physical, I eschewed it. I repeatedly and mindlessly hitched my wagon to a perverted mantra of the film – I’m not gonna play by their rules – rather than focus on a crux of it: Don’t forget to feel something along the way.

So, there I was, a week ago. Eight months after this slow descent began. This viewing wasn’t the transcendent experience I might have been hoping for – but it was helpful. More than anything, it was fun. Funny. That the movie is hilarious is integral to its message, I’ve found, at least integral to the transmission of that message, being the sugar that helps the medicine. The powerful moments were still powerful, in some cases more so: The car scene preceding the accident was more nerve-wracking, the accident itself possibly more cathartic. But it was the jokes that really popped. Tyler Durden, besides looking and fucking better than the Narrator, also gets to be funnier. And not just in the clever way that humorists are often clever. Funny in the popular-kid kind of way, the way that earns admiration and laughs a group of people at a time, not just one-by-one, and belly laughs at that. It’s not lost on me now that plenty of Tyler’s laughs are the result of slapstick: the nunchuks, the bicycle fall. Physical comedy in these cases outweighs the cerebral, and that’s freeing in itself.

The fight scenes, reasonably, came across more strongly. Their sounds and imagery, being more potent, constrasted that much more strongly with the cold brightness of the corporate scenes. Brad Pitt’s “rules” speech seemed even more stately, historic, even. The lye kiss scene was as essential as ever. And I must highlight the scene in the back of the bodega with Raymond K. Hessel. It usually gets me, but this time around, probably got me more than it ever had. Because in a movie full of large ideas and huge targets, that’s a small bit of practicality. The sense of community is one thing, the need to be a part of something larger than oneself certainly valid. But day-to-day, in and of oneself, existentially, it gets no more personal or important than wasting no time and doing exactly what it is that will make you the person you want to be. A lesson well taught.

Now at the AMC Empire 25
Directed by David Fincher
Written by Aaron Sorkin

It only takes about a minute for some integral pieces to fall into place for this movie. Jesse Eisenberg, as facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, shows us how well and quickly he will be able to spout the sharp dialogue of Aaron Sorkin. David Fincher, meanwhile, keeps his direction simplistic so as not to compete with its density. In the scene, Eisenberg demonstrates his character’s superior intellect and also arrogance, those things which set him apart from his peers, but also the emotional vulnerability that connects him to every teenager. His girlfriend, Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), is out with Mark and breaks things off. Mark has belittled her school and insulted her, all while finding himself on the outside of the most exclusive of clubs at Harvard. He seems between worlds, and would seem happier to fit snugly into at least one of them. But he’s really mostly hurt by Erica’s rejection, and he uses that energy first for revenge, and then also for something more.

Without going too much further into it: Mark blogs about Erica, insulting her right back, and meanwhile, with some friends, creates a website that compares the attractiveness of Harvard undergrads versus each other. It’s popularity and ingeniousness draws the attention not only of the adminstration of Harvard but of other students. The Winklevoss twins (apparently both played by Armie Hammer) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) have an idea for a program to connect Harvard students, exclusively, and want Mark to program it. Zuckerberg uses their idea as inspiration – some, including those students, would say he stole it – and thefacebook is born. With later help from Sean Parker (a suitable Justin Timberlake), facebook’s influence spreads even more.

Much of the movie is told cleverly via flashback from a pair of depositions. We see that the relationships have broken down, and then we see how. It has the logic and exposition of a play, but wouldn’t have been as effective as one. Eisenberg’s take on Zuckerberg is not robotic as much as it is cerebral, and works best in smaller doses, and when it has other people to play off – whether he’s not being up front with CFO and co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) or cutting down lawyers or school administrators.

Turning back to Aaron Sorkin, he’s just about the perfect choice to have written the screenplay. There’s plenty of legalese in this movie, because it is so much of the story, and his experience with A Few Good Men and The West Wing speak to his success with it. But we can’t forget that, maybe above all, Sorkin terrifically captures self-importance. There’s not much walking and talking, but Zuckerberg’s confidence and even defiance places the character – if not also the person – firmly in Sorkin’s gallery of people with enormous balls.

Speaking of pitch-perfection, the music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is another fantastic complement. It’s largely subtle, but certainly familiar, insistent, mechanical, and ideally suited for a film about technology and an individual that, while also emotional, is highly logical, sometimes coldly so.

Especially as the modern world accelerates, it seems too infrequent that films are perfectly suited to their times. The Social Network is a story that could have been told a few years from now, but is so well-suited for today. It hits home for me, certainly for being on facebook, but also for having grown up in a time without computers connecting us. Going to college a few years before this story took place, I knew even then how alluring it was to get caught up in this technology, to see and especially hear things I would not otherwise have had access to. Who knows how quickly the film might seem antiquated – The Net doesn’t quite hold up on most levels – but that’s not for us to know now, or to care, really: This is a great movie, full of powerful moments, that addresses not only the nuts and bolts of the technology, but gets at the delicate humanity beneath it all.

In brief: The story of facebook, more or less. Superbly told.
4 stars/4 (A)

Seen at the IFC Center in New York.
Written and Directed by Gaspar Noé

First of all, the opening credits: Phenomenal in and of themselves. Worth sitting through all the pre-show commercials to get a good seat for them, and in time. Second-for-second, more intense than the movie itself, which is not without its intensity.

It took watching only a few minutes of this movie for me to set aside most of my conventional measures of how a movie should be shaped and what one should look like. In the first section of the movie we have “enter”ed the head of Oscar, an American living in Tokyo. We hear his voice muddled as if it’s our own – frustrating at first but quickly no issue, helped along by the slowness and scarcity of his speech (he actually sounds much like the goateed Nick Groff of Ghost Adventures). Oscar’s sharing an apartment with his sister, Linda, who soon heads off to work. Oscar is reluctant to call himself a drug dealer, but he’s certainly also a drug user. When his sister leaves, we join him on a trip, beautifully incorporated and rendered. It’s interrupted by a phone call from a friend of his, Victor, who asks that Oscar bring some stuff to a place called “The Void.” Oscar is met at his apartment by his friend, Alex, and they walk over to the bar together.

The action picks up, but so does the artistry. The perspective remains first person, but shifts among point-of-view, over-the-shoulder and overhead shots. We’re in Oscar’s body, and we’re not; we’re in the present and the past. The relentless linearity of time in the first “act,” communicated by its really being one long take, becomes occasionally more disjointed. It becomes a stream of consciousness and the memories we see are joined together because of the similarities of the situations. Other scenes play out more straightforwardly. In any event, the scenes are all strung together, either geographically by scanning over Tokyo to find the next one, or by zooming into some kind of light, in both cases the interconnectedness of all things in time and space being firmly put forth.

The movie is almost two and a half hours long, and judging by how many of my neighbors checked their watches, felt even longer. But I didn’t take that as a bad thing; I let this movie take me where it wanted to take me without being impatient about it and felt rewarded for it. Enter the Void is effective for reasons generally opposed to those benefitting American movies, in which economy is normally key – showing instead of telling, letting the viewer’s mind do the work, knowing that less is usually more. This movie, at the theatre, was an immersive experience possibly not unlike that of Room 23 – the visuals were wonderful, the stylized colors of Tokyo were amazing, the camerawork almost magical. Some of it might have been needlessly complicated or overlong, but I went with it because it seemed the choice not only of an indulgent director, but of the character himself. We’re on a voyage with him and I was curious to see where it would end up (which, maybe because of the simplicity of the narrative, was somewhat predictable). The getting there, and the way there, are what’s important.

The movie isn’t all beautiful – parts are also violent, shocking, brutal, gruesome, scary. In another inversion of a longstanding trend in American movies, violence was only saddening, not also enjoyable as it can be in its stylized way. Sex, hardly ever shown without its emotional component, is seen as the more natural and redeeming of the pair. Violence, as it’s realistically shown, seems to exist only to ruin a good thing.

Objectively, the movie is a little short on story, the dialogue is a little stilted, and the acting too often takes a back seat to the effects. But movies don’t always have to be all about those things. I don’t think it’s too far to compare this one with 2001: A Space Odyssey. This movie affected me differently, perhaps more profoundly, than most movies do. I mean it as a compliment when I say not since Avatar did I see a movie and have no clue how anyone could make it, logistically. Now, my lack of understanding doesn’t by default make Enter the Void a great movie, but my awe goes a long way. The novelty involved was all directed towards one hell of a trip that, details aside, tackles some pretty fundamental questions and stunningly so.

In brief: A mindbender without a lot of the usual mystery. Better to just go with it. Recommended for viewing in a theatre or on the biggest, loudest damn TV you can find.
3.5 stars/4 (A-)

What’s black and white and red all over?

This is a very interesting movie for Darren Aronofsky to have made right after The Wrestler. Similar in their focus on the mental side of a physical being, a professionally physical being, The Wrestler is realistic, relentlessly so, while this film seems to dip its toe in surrealism. I think this one is better off for Aronofsky’s having made the previous one, though I think for many reasons it matches and surpasses a superb artistic achievement.

Natalie Portman, who gives a remarkable performance after damn near turning into Audrey Hepburn overnight, plays Nina Sayers, a technically proficient young ballet dancer living at home and striving for her big break. She is shortlisted for the starring role in a revamped Swan Lake, directed by a prickly Frenchman named Tomas (the perfectly cast Vincent Cassel). She is distracted during her audition by the conspicuous entrance of Lily (Mila Kunis) and is passed over for the part. When Nina goes to see Tomas the next day, he criticizes her style of perfectionism, saying that it’s essential for her to let her humanity shine through, taking her and her mechanical prowess to a new place. From then on, more or less, for the good of the role, Nina undertakes the difficult challenge of unleashing her passionate side, however one does that.

That’s hardly to say that little else happens in the movie which, by the way, is absolutely terrifying. The great juxtaposition of this movie is the refined elegance of the ballet and, really, some of the conventions of horror movies. What I enjoy most is that these conventions, and whatever weirdness there is, is not for its own sake. Nothing wrong at all with straight-up horror movies, but here there’s more to it. The dread comes on subtly but builds itself up until there seems to be no safe haven for Nina or for us. More than trying to figure out just what the hell was going on, I just wanted to protect this girl from all that was threatening her. I found stirring that particular emotion to have been masterfully accomplished.

Complementing this more visceral reaction are all the heady, metaphorical goings-on. The duality of the physical and the psychological is just one of many relationships to be found in this lit major’s dream. There’s the White Swan and the Black Swan, to start with. Then you have to wonder what’s going on with Nina and Lily, Lily who occasionally bears a striking resemblance to Nina herself. And what about Nina and her mother, a former dancer in her own right? Speaking of, Nina’s an adult, but lives with her mother in what looks like her childhood bedroom, complete with stuffed animals. Is she a girl, or a woman? Then there’s Nina and the long-in-the-tooth dancer Beth (Winona Ryder, another perfect fit). They begin to share a dressing room – is that all they share? Everywhere we turn there’s another unanswered question, and we’re hyperaware of them all because our adrenaline’s going and we’re doing nothing if not paying attention.

Black Swan made me feel and made me think, both to an exceptional degree. Beyond being a pretentious mind-bender, or a simple horror movie, we’ve got the best of both cases. A movie hasn’t demanded so much of me in a long time, and I say that with my highest praise.

In brief: Heavy lies the crown. Awesome, in every sense of the word.
4 stars/4 (A)