Dazed and Confused

New piece in the film section of this month's Dazed and Confused

White Lightnin'

White Lightnin' in the October 2009 issue of Dazed.

Dazed and Confused, October

My review of White Lightnin' was published in the October issue of Dazed and Confused. Check it out at a newsstand near you!

Review//Katalin Varga//Dazed and Confused

originally published in the May issue of Dazed and Confused
Katalin Varga
By Jesi Khadivi

The moral landscape mirrors the physical in Katalin Varga, a minimal and elegant revenge film shot in Transylvania’s Carpathian mountains. The plot is straight forward: Katalin was raped before the film’s action begins, resulting in the conception of her son Orbán. 11 years hence, her husband learns her secret and Katalin sets off on horseback, seeking vengeance. It’s a timeless tale, set in primordial landscape of rolling hills and dank mist. Inspired by Werner Herzog’s unsentimental view of nature, Greek born UK director, Peter Strickland, has crafted a gripping feature-length debut brimming with complexity, intelligence and ambiguity.

Although the project was five years in the making, actual shooting time was only seventeen days and Strickland’s budget was less than 30,000. The film was made with his own money and without any professional backing “The fear of failure was huge,” Strickland admits. Katalin Varga premiered to critical acclaim at the Berlinale Film Festival in February. However, critics looking for pat commentary on rape or Hungarian-Romanian tensions were frustrated to find few answers from a director more interested in exploring the twin themes of revenge and redemption.

“The idea of revenge is quite compelling,” first time director Peter Strickland told me in a Potsdamer Platz cafe , “There are no resolutions. Revenge is the one crime we can all relate to.” The recent popular resurgence of genre filmmaking confirms Strickland’s point; its explosive popularity is largely due to directors like Quentin Tarantino, whose Kill Bill films mash-up elements of martial arts, western and revenge films. “I wanted to take a pulp genre and transport it into another context,” Strickland says, “You don’t need to be Tarantino to do that.” As a pulp inspired film, Varga has little in common with Kill Bill. Revenge is rendered in broad strokes and explored through ideas of causality, redemption and forgiveness. Varga’s characters are more morally indeterminate than their pop-revenge films counterparts. Throughout the film, the boundaries between right and wrong and justice and injustice are continuously blurred. Like the best noir anti-heroes, Katalin and Antal, the man who raped her, have complicated, fractured psyches. Katalin has suffered a grave injustice, but is also a murder. Antal brutally raped Katalin, violating the sanctity of another human being, yet over the course of a decade he evolved into a sensitive man and a loving husband.

Though Strickland says the story could be told anywhere, its Transylvanian setting is inextricably linked to the film’s artistry. Strickland wisely chose a location capable of evoking the beauty and terror of personal and spiritual transformation. However, he’s careful to point out that the film’s themes are universal. “This could never be an authentic Transylvanian film,” he told reporters after the film’s premiere, “I’m English. I didn’t want to go the Kusturica route, which is a bit bombastic. I wanted to make something more like a ballad.”

Notorious

My review of George Tillman's biopic of Biggie Smalls was published in issue 171 of Dazed and Confused, available on most newstands.

Christopher Wallace balled hard. Better known as Biggie Smalls or Notorious B.I.G., Wallace’s pop-gangster storytelling and exceptional lyrical prowess almost single handedly galvanized the East Coast hip-hop scene during a time that the genre was largely dominated by West Coast artists. By the time he died at the age of twenty-four, the father of two and award winning rapper had two platinum albums (His second album, Life After Death, debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts fifteen days after his murder).

Notorious follows Wallace from his humble beginnings as a teenage drug dealer through his meteoric rise to fame and untimely death. George Tillman’s (Soul Food/Barbershop) biopic attempts to expose the man behind the legend, subjecting the rapper’s woefully brief life to a literary treatment that largely fails; A deeper understanding of the artist’s life and times can be gleaned from his Wikipedia page. Still, we go to most big budget films to be entertained and Tillman and his cast don’t let us down. Melodrama and humor coalesce to paint Biggie’s story in broad strokes, dutifully chronicling the rise of Bad Boy Records, his troubled relationships with Faith Evans and Lil’ Kim, and of course, his falling out with Tupac Shakur and the ensuing East Coast-West Coast feud that ultimately cost him his life.

Tillman fleshes out his cast of seasoned professionals with a few young upstarts and the . rookies steal the show. Although the excessive joviality he brings to the role borders on Big-lite, first time actor and rapper Jamal Woolard (known on the mix tape circuit as Gravy), captures Biggie’s swagger and charm. Naturi Naughton imbues Lil’ Kim with a tantalizing mix of fire and vulnerability, outshining Puffy (Derek Luke) and every dude in the entourage.

Notorious isn’t ground breaking, but it’s fun—a bubble-gum guilty pleasure full of wise-cracks, spot-on period mise-en-scene and (best of all), lots and lots of music.

Lat den ratte komma in

Orginally published in Dazed and Confused, issue #130

Text Jesi Khadivi

“Are you old?” a young, cherubic-faced Swede asks his new dark, androgynous friend. “I’m twelve,” the child responds, “but I’ve been twelve for a long time.” Meet Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) and Eli (Lina Leandersson), two pre-teens living in the anonymous block suburbs of Stockholm in the early 1980s, a far cry from the drafty Transylvanian castles of vampire lore. Despite this, Let The Right One In, a minimal Swedish film about a twelve year old vampire and her budding relationship with her neighbor, Oskar, is one of the most outstanding experimentations with the genre in years. Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of the best selling novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist is light on the gore and heavy on the pathos. Oskar, a pale and friendless young boy, is repeatedly tortured at school. When a gaunt child and her much older caretaker move in next door around the same time that grizzly murders start happening in the neighborhood, Oskar forges a friendship with her over a shared Rubik’s cube. Already a bit of a gore fiend, Oskar soon discovers that his girl-next-door is actually a vampire and not even a girl, forcing him to choose between his nascent sense of morality and love for his only friend.

Working with a cast of stellar, largely unknown actors, Alfredson drains the bravado out of an essentially hyperbolic genre to create a film of unparalleled restraint and tenderness. Vital back stories in the novel, Oskar’s father’s alcoholism and the troubled relationship between Eli and her caretaker Hakan, are only wordlessly alluded to in the film, but the adaptation isn’t slighted at all by their absence. Far from it. The reliance of Let the Right One In on the suggestiveness of rich, visual storytelling lends the film an ambiguity that accounts for much of its charm. Alfredson depicts a world of losers: a lonely boy, a shrill single mother ashamed of her broken home, a gaggle of drunks, a grubby vampirette and the broken old man who takes care of her until his untimely death. Let the Right One In is a horror flick without a clearly delineated evil, other than repression and provincialism--byproducts of Blackeberg’s brutal landscape. Aggressors and victims alike are depicted as every day folk just trying to get by. Those looking for blood in the film will find it, but the gore factor is so subdued that it appears fantastical rather than gruesome. The trauma and violence of adolescence—the sensuality of bullying, the shame of being monstrous, and first pangs of sexual desire—are treated more in depth than any nocturnal blood letting. With a keen eye for nuance and elegiac pacing, Alfredson deftly probes his characters’ capacity to love and feel pain through intimate, revealing moments. The solemn hug a bloody-mouthed Eli gives Oskar after he watches her kill a man beautifully encapsulates the limitations of Eli and Oskar’s fragile relationship. Adolescence is depicted as a long Scandinavian winter, steeped in darkness and ice. While Oskar will eventually make it to Spring if he chooses to, Eli will continue to inhabit the dark, cold night.