The Lusty Men: Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Hall Pass

By Adam Nayman

On the long list of film-critical clichés, asserting  that a new release represents a “return to form” for its maker(s) rests somewhere near the middle, between describing a movie as a “meditation” on a given subject labelling it “good for what it is.” This essentialist dodge is most frequently applied to “low” genres like horror or comedy, as if there’s some sort of Platonic ideal for multiplex crap and any film that shapes itself to those contours deserves an affectionate tousle on the head.

Which is precisely what I’m prepared to offer Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Hall Pass, a meditation on aging and desire that, by virtue of being good for what it is, represents a return to form for a team whose last effort was a mess even by their own slovenly standards. That would be The Heartbreak Kid (2007), which attempted to invert Elaine May’s brilliant 1972 comedy by transforming the dream blonde into a locus of physical revulsion. As a result, they totally botched their source material’s dark and skillfully engineered punchline: the Jew entrapped in the WASP nest, an idea Neil Simon got across without resorting to having Cybill Shepherd fart through her vagina. (more…)

Speaking Parts: Clio Barnard’s The Arbor

Natalie Gavin as Andrea Dunbar

By Adam Nayman

“I’ve got loads of childhood memories, but none of them are really good.” These words are spoken early on in The Arbor by Lorraine Dunbar, daughter of the Yorkshire playwright Andrea Dunbar, who achieved national fame in 1980 at the age of 15 for writing a play about growing up on a council estate (also called The Arbor) and died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 29. The film juxtaposes the elder Dunbar’s downward spiral into addiction and alcoholism with the distressingly similar trajectory of her firstborn child, suggesting destinies tragically entwined. (more…)

Of Gods and Men: Jack Cardiff and Cameraman

By Andrew Tracy

It would be both needless and unfair to criticize Craig McCall’s new documentary Cameraman: The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff for its relative lack of cinematic imagination, no matter that it’s all the more ironic in light of its subject’s masterly command of the medium. Though the imperative of paying deserved tribute has been used to justify any number of aesthetically underwhelming, opportunistic or distorting films, that imperative is still valid—and perhaps dispiritingly, the familiar stock of documentary conventions often prove perfectly adequate to the task. So this chronicle of Cardiff’s eight-decade career as one of the world’s most renowned cinematographers duly deploys the usual stock of Hollywood-luminary testimonials (Martin Scorsese, Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Charlton Heston, Richard Fleischer), copious clips, late-in-long-life salutes at Cannes and the Oscars and an engaging wealth of personal reminiscences to complacently satisfactory effect.

Yet for all its understandable warmth towards one of the medium’s master craftsmen (aided considerably by the 91-year-old Cardiff’s little-old-man likeability), its general air of anodyne inoffensiveness and innate forgetability, Cameraman inadvertently raises some interesting issues around the question of cinematic authorship. (more…)

The Great American Crack-up: Conspiracies and Crazies at Sundance 2011

Take Shelter

By Robert Koehler

Well before Sundance 2011, it’s been a rough time for America. The Tea Party/Palin acolytes were increasingly scared of the black man in the White House, and with a compliant GOP gave him a “shellacking.” Gun nuts drifted away from the firing range and started shooting at elected officials in Tucson, eliciting not even a protesting whimper of reform from scared Democrats. Then Sundance happened, and the crazies really came out of the closet. (more…)