ShortTakes
THE FINAL DESTINATION
Duck, folks—here comes the Ben Hur of 3-D fatality porn, riding a blazing chariot ready at any instant to hurl a flaming wheel or a stray spear into the viewer's lap. As bucket-of-blood franchises go, the Final Destination movies strike me as a big improvement over their scowling rival, the ongoing Saw saga: their cartoon what-me-worry nihilism is infinitely preferable to Saw's humorless pose of moral superiority. (Put it another way: Saw is a bullying snob, but Final Destination is a leveler.) If you're in the proper sick-joke frame of mind, and you're willing to go along with the ludicrous premise—that Death engineers elaborate Rube Goldberg fates for those who temporarily elude his icy grasp—this is literally gut-busting splatstick, from its opening NASCAR wipeout to its ingenious finale inside (ta-DAH!) a theater showing a 3-D movie to an audience of impending pincushions.
Final Destination 2 director David R. Ellis, returning to the scene of the crime, makes a blithe joke out of the script's bloodthirstiness and its reckless disregard for plausibility. The movie skates past its dull characters and plot holes from one gory set-up/punchline to the next, lingering with sadistic glee over every pointed object, perilously tilted oilcan or inopportune nail gun aimed at the lens. As excellent as the 3-D atrocity exhibition is—the astounding effects will make you feel like you're front row center at a Gallagher show, with human skulls getting sledgehammered instead of melons—the whole enterprise points out how quickly the 3-D craze exhausts its novelty. Every generation seems to get the 3-D revival it deserves (remember Demi Moore in 1982's Parasite?): ours just reached its apex with a fourth movie featuring Death as a lethally efficient Coyote, and us as his luckless Roadrunners. But there's no escape from the spiraling drain of fate—not when this star-free opus opened to $27 million. Coming spring 2010: Piranha 3-D! (Now playing) JIM RIDLEY
SERAPHINE
Movies about artists face an innate limitation: With few exceptions, the art itself lies inert onscreen, with the camera serving almost as a buffer between the viewer and the force of the work. Martin Provost's earthy biopic of the early 20th century naïve artist Séraphine de Senlis gets around this problem by focusing raptly on the process—not so much the filling of canvases but the mixing of paints, the gathering of gurgling bottles on the sly from a bloody kitchen bowl while Séraphine labors at her housekeeping work. Yolande Moreau, who won France's Cesar award for best actress, gives Séraphine a lumbering downhill gait and a hint of ecstatic mischief, reflected in the darting smile she flashes while pilfering pooled wax from a church's votive candles. Much of her performance lies in her hands, thick-fingered and ruddy from scrubbing floors: the act of creation here registers as a kind of transcendence through hard contact with the physical world. The movie follows Séraphine's discovery by her coolly admiring patron, Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), their subsequent separation by anti-German sentiment in the years surrounding World War I, and her late-life blossoming at his hands as a wealthy art-world sensation in Paris—a blessing that proved to be a curse. Mercifully, Provost doesn't overhype her story for pity or melodrama. The movie's emotional restraint and its scrupulous emphasis on texture produces an effect not unlike staring at a work of art. In French with subtitles. (Opens Friday at The Belcourt) JIM RIDLEY
SOUL POWER
As concert-of-the-century nostalgia goes, the 1974 soul summit organized to compliment the Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" in Zaire has inspired far less bloated rhetoric than Woodstock—no small feat when Don King is involved. But in any kind of musical competition, it comes out the no-contest champion. Using period footage that didn't fit into the excellent 1996 doc When We Were Kings, director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte (who edited Kings) dawdles for nearly a half-hour over dull event-coordination details and press conferences. But when he finally takes it to the stage, the performances capture a rainbow of '70s soul at its highest arc, including Cuban salsa sorceress Celia Cruz, South African singer Miriam Makeba (providing her own percussion with the glottal clicks of her native dialect), an ebullient Sister Sledge, The Spinners, and the great Bill Withers daring to hush the arena with an anguished acoustic version of "Hope She'll Be Happier." The climax is a typically galvanizing set by James Brown, bare-chested and limber as a whip, but he's matched for every ounce of charisma by Ali in fighting trim, speaking truth to power with neck-rocking verbal jabs about racism back home. Make sure you stay through the closing credits. (Closes Thursday at Green Hills) JIM RIDLEY
Comments (0)