Quick Takes, October 2022

Lux AEterna

Gaspar Noe's Lux AEterna is a fifty minute film about filmmaking that was dashed off in five days. All the actors involved play versions of themselves. Beatrice Dalle is the director of a medieval epic concerning witchcraft. She has fun playing a bitch on wheels. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays the beset upon star of the chaotic production. The film's climax is a technical malfunction on the set which bathes the players in strobe effects. Epileptics be warned. I enjoyed the improvised playfulness of the film and its visual invention, but doubt I would ever revisit it. Lux AEterna seems to be more of a throat clearing exercise for Noe than a major work. He would revisit the split screen technique employed here to greater effect in the subsequent Vortex. 

Lynn Shelton's Touchy Feely is a slight, but winning feature from 2013. The film combines a look at family dynamics with some gentle New Age satire. Nothing earthshaking, but Shelton always managed to inspire winning turns from her cast; in this case Rosemarie DeWitt, Ron Livingston, Elliot Page, and Allison Janney. Josh Pais is especially effective as an inhibited dentist.

Rob Zombie's The Munsters, currently streaming on Netflix, seeks to emulate the goofy humor of the television series rather than the hardcore horror found in Zombie's cinematic oeuvre. The results are predictably hit and miss. I enjoyed Juci Szurdi's DayGlo production design and the overall amiability of the movie, but it is at least thirty minutes too long and Zombie's script is haphazard and badly structured. Jeff Daniel Phillips is dizzily amusing as Herman Munster, but Shari Moon Zombie, as Lily Munster, is a director's wife. Mr. Zombie's personality seems more attuned to the frenetic splatter of The Devil's Rejects and 31 than such child friendly fare as The Munsters. 

Istvan Szabo's Sunshine, from 2000, is a three hour historical epic chronicling a Jewish family in Hungary. Ralph Fiennes does triple duty as successive patriarchs of the clan in a film that spans the 20th century. Szabo, as in Mephisto and Colonel Redl, focuses on the corruption and intolerance that has bedeviled Hungary since the beginning of the reign of Franz Joseph. The screenplay, by Szabo and Israel Horovitz, threatens to descend into a soap opera occasionally, but an impressive cast that includes Jennifer Ehle, Rosemary Harris, Rachel Weisz, John Neville, and William Hurt elevates the material. Two hunting parties fifty years apart demonstrates the common thread underlying Hungarian history no matter who the ruling party was, namely brutality. Recommended. 

John Andreas Andersen's The Burning Sea is Norwegian disaster film in which an oil rig explosion leads to an even greater environmental disaster. This film, like The Wave and Andersen's The Quake, reflects Norway's current environmental anxiety. The merchants of fossil fuel are, naturally, the villains. The film is not incompetent, merely silly and dull. I did like Kristine Kujath Thorp as the protagonist. Better than Earthquake, but not as good as The Poseidon Adventure. 

A flight of fancy that never takes flight, Tom Gormican's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent features Nicholas Cage playing himself. Unfortunately, this prime comic opportunity for a meta comment on movie stardom devolves into a routine thriller featuring the CIA and arms dealers. A footnote rather than a capstone to a great career.