Dir - Sion Sono
Overall: MEH
At nearly two and a half hours in length, the simmering nastiness of Sion Sono's Cold Fish, (Tsumetai Nettaigyo), is a lot to endure, though the movie has a demented absurdity to it that is difficult to forget. Loosely inspired by the serial killer duo of Gen Sekine and his common-law wife Hiroko Kazama, the ticking time bomb plot involves Mitsuru Fukikoshi's wimpish fish shop owner who gets manipulated into a life of crime and brutality by another, more successful fish shop owner who has a tendency to make less agreeable acquaintances "invisible". Things head in an inevitable direction where the solid batch of odious characters are doomed by some ultra-violent fate, yet the level that it all goes off of the rails still manages to pack a visceral gut-punch. Not for the squeamish, the gore is sickening and the depravity on display has a "dog eat dog" gravity to it where people have become so complacent in either their cartoonishly perverse or sheepish life choices that they enter an inevitable rabbit hole of self-destruction. It paints a broad, cynical brush for humankind, featuring a few references to the Earth's extinction from the cosmos, but the performances are disturbingly heightened and Sono's penchant for dark humor thankfully manages to permeate through the whole thing.
Dir - Darren Aronofsky
Overall: GOOD
While Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan indulges in a hefty amount of performance stress cliches and achieves more of an on-the-nose, gaudy camp than the type of arthouse brilliance that it may be going for, these things are not inherently detrimental. Ten years in the making, Aronofsky fused inspiration from Tchailkovsky's Swan Lake, the concept of doppelgängers, Roman Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy", and a pre-existing script called "The Understudy", all while styling this as a sister film to his flash-less and exclusively intimate The Wrestler. Certainly ambitious and occasionally a mess because of it, the film strictly plays the psychological horror game, with Natalie Portman's Nina Sayers succumbing to the typical, repressed, duality-stricken turmoil of her chosen profession. Thankfully, Portman's performance is top to bottom outstanding, not just in how her year long, physical training paid off, but more importantly in her gradual, schizo transition from timid, paranoid perfectionist to the "Black Swan" alter ego that her character struggles the entire movie to master. Sans the aforementioned The Wrestler, a big part of what makes Aronofsky's movies exciting is his willingness to satiate a barrage of stylistic flourishes which can have a bravado absurdity to them that bounces between unintentionally silly and cinematically fetching. This is a crystal clear case of this trait, yet the production has an unabashed chutzpah to it, with the type of top-notch talent behind and in front of the lens to entertainingly pull it off.
Dir - Quentin Dupieux
Overall: MEH
The indie-meta genre hybrid Rubber from French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux is a bizarre one that tries to find the humor in watching a movie that purposely makes fun of watching movies. Tongue-in-cheek pretentious in this respect, Dupieux seems to be having a tremendous amount of fun with a premise that can only be ridiculous, constructing a story around it where half of the characters are spectators and the other half performers, with most of them seemingly in on the gag. The tone is endlessly perplexing and more dry than one may think is even allowed, posing a series of "nothing makes sense" questions that defy the audience to ward off the one-note monotony of what transpires here, as well as coming up with their own reasons for justifying the film's existence. Perhaps Dupieux trusts his instincts here that an avant-garde, fourth-wall demolishing send-up about a killer tier is far more interesting, (if not altogether more entertaining), than a conventional B-movie spoof which this easily could have been. He is probably right since if anything else, this will easily spark anyone's curiosity who craves something that is off the beaten path.
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