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All this Unearned Unhappiness
The director of “House of Sand and Fog,” Vadim Perelman, is an expatriate himself. He was born in Kiev, grew up in Canada, and moved to Los Angeles, where he made music videos and TV commercials. This is his first feature film. His work is quiet and steady, but, like Jane Campion’s recent “In the Cut” and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “21 Grams,” Perelman’s movie offers a malign and depressive view of life in America—a place where people can discover their souls only though misery and mess. Working with generally good actors, these three foreign directors created small, dense networks of relationships, and their sense of concern comes as a relief in our increasingly anti-humanist commercial cinema, where spangled fantasy is the norm. The trouble is, as talented as these directors are, they don’t really get America right. They don’t provide a flow of activity around the core relationships; they miss the colloquial ease and humor, the ruffled surfaces of American life. “In the Cut” is set in a paranoid, mouth-of-Hell version of New York, “21 Grams” in a nameless urban and rural wasteland (it’s as if the landscape were so fouled it repelled an identity), and this movie, too, rattles angrily in a vacuum. Campion, Iñárritu, and Perelman may be complacent in their own ways. Perhaps they accept tragedy too easily; perhaps they need to work harder to make it seem unavoidable. Dolorousness is becoming a curse in the more ambitious movies made in America by foreign-born directors. We need criticism and satire. We don’t need other people’s despair.
- From David Denby's New Yorker review of "House of Sand and Fog"
I haven't seen - and probably won't attend - "House of Sand and Fog" for this reason: I'm tired of these overly-gritty movies masquerading as "realist" cinema. I even walked out on "21 Grams" after the first 30 minutes or so.
When are folks going to learn that heavy does not equal profound and that the best way to plant an idea in the moviegoer's mind is via the medium of laughter? Just talk to any memory expert: we remember what we enjoy and block out the rest. I honestly can't recall much of anything I saw in "21 Grams," mostly because I wouldn't want to.
The same goes for "Lilya Forever," John Frankenheimer's incredibly pretentious "Seconds," and "Requiem for a Dream." Those movies are especially bad because they violate you to the core with all their unearned over-the-top shock-value. The only things that I want to jolt me around like that are the real thing, not some staged 12th take of a heroin addict spotlit with a 650-watt Inky-Dinky and filmed with a Panavision Platinum on a crane dollying back smoothly across 30-feet of stainless steel track. Whenever I see such "real" scenes, I can just hear craft services pouring more M&M's into the cut-glass serving bowl...
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