Ryan Gosling has not so much reimagined the strong, silent type as he has made it his own. Drive, Blue Valentine, Half Nelson, Lars and The Real Girl – These are all unique, well-constructed character studies in a signature mold. The good news is, The Place Beyond The Pines continues in that vein, providing one of the most visceral performances Ryan Gosling has elicited to date.

Pines is a brilliantly-adapted cautionary tale about fathers and sons, good guys and bad, and the very thin – sometimes even nonexistent – line that separates one from the other. Ben Mendelsohn is noteworthy, Bradley Cooper is superb, and Eva Mendes, well, Eva Mendes is just fucking fantastic, boy. That’s what Eva Mendes is.

Mendes is so spot-on, in fact, that you may even find yourself resenting her good looks. I mean, sure, the same can be said for most of the leading cast here. But it’s Mendes, more than anyone else, who always seems to be afforded such short shrift. Perhaps that’s because Mendes is a spokesmodel, and, as such, it makes it chauvinistically acceptable for the media to simply accept her on those terms. But Mendes is so much more than that, really. And, to that end, she is absolutely fantastic in this film – a welcome female presence in a veritable sea of virile men.

Above and beyond that, The Place Beyond The Pines is a pretty remarkable motion picture. It’s the kind of vehicle that a lot of mainstream critics might dismiss as being unnecessarily dark or uninspiring. But those are probably the same critics who’d be quick to point out just how fucking hot Eva Mendes looks throughout. So my advice would be to ignore them, ignore that, and treat yourself to one sprawling king-hell-bastard of a film – a penetrating reminder that we’re all paying for the sins of our fathers, and we’ve been doing it so long we almost languish in the foil.

(The Place Beyond The Pines arrives in limited release in New York City and Los Angeles today, with a national rollout to follow.)

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It was just past 1 am when the ocean breeze came pressing down, forcing rusty hinges on the porch to bend and squeal like aching joints. I was alone in my apartment, drinking Mad Dog from the bottle; listening to the cut and buzz of cables in the storm.

When out of nowhere came a clap so loud it set me rolling on my heels. I recognized that clap on spec, having heard it several times before.

I pulled the plug out on my Tiffany, assumed a foothold near the door. I pressed one ear up to the woodwork, genuflected on the floor. I swept both knees across the threshold, turned the doorknob like a dial. Then I eased the chain-lock open, slithered low into the hall.

It was out there – in the darkness – that my world, it set to shifting. And my head, it set to spinning, like a tape set on rewind. I was floating through the cosmos, flitting high above the jetties; past the coastline and the inlet, past December and the new year; past re-enrollment for the Spring term, past four buses every weekday; past student loan funds meant to finance, past mid-term essays meant to bolster; past the fall of Tonya Harding, past the death of Kurt Cobain; past preseason on the boardwalk, past one year spent dating Meghan; past it all until I drifted down into that pitch-black cauldron – a musty hallway where my feet went numb and my legs could hardly feel for burning.

I could smell the ripe asbestos now; could hear the dying smoke alarms.
I could feel the mounting pressure; could sense the stiff hairs on both arms.
The corridor ran 100 feet, with splintered doors down either side.
I swept the starboard with my fingers, caught the flood box with my arm.
I ran my palm along the base; found a button, pushed it hard.
What followed was a blunt-force clap, much like the punching of a card.

Then a blinding flash of light so bright, it took 15 seconds to adjust.
I turned one eye toward the entrance, saw a black man bathed in dust.
This man was wearing crushed velour, over cutoffs and brown Uggs.
He held one hand toward me; squared both feet upon the rug.
“Can I help you?” I then shouted, my body planted to the floor.
“Can I help you?” I then shouted, a second time, and then once more.

The vagrant propped himself up, let out the snarl of a boar.
Then he let his weak hand falter, exposed a rash of open sores.
He was sweating like a hound now, charcoal embers through his pores.
And so I made a break for it; held that button, nevermore.
I was scrambling in cold darkness, tracing a hard line to my door.
Strobing freeze-frames marked each footstep, pounding boot-prints shook the floor.

He was ambling toward me, bone-snarl slow-building to a roar.
I caught the doorknob with my shirt sleeve, forced the issue with my core.
I dove head-first into my bedroom, pulled the chain-lock, tight and sure.
Then I fell hard to the carpet, crabwalking backward on the floor.
I could hear each boot-step fall now, could sense him circling the fore.
He was there now, waiting for me. He was the Beast of 1994.

***

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

There’s something so stunningly sedate about the pieces on display at Gallery Henoch through this Saturday, it’s almost worth the visit just to let the whole damn thing wash over you. The artists are eclectic, and the pieces are, as well. But there’s a common thread throughout here – one that captures subtle nuances set throughout the urban sprawl. Five-floor walk-ups, first-floor lobbies, Midtown diners and Mexican delis – all present and account for, in an altogether tranquil exhibition.

(Gallery Henoch’s Winter Group Show runs through this Saturday at 6 pm, free, 555 W. 25th Street)  

Five More For the Offing:

• Gotham and Beyond by Luca Campigotto @ Laurence Miller Gallery (Free, through 4/21, 20 West 57th Street)
• Film Noir by Bill Armstrong @ ClampArt (Free, through 4/6, 521-531 West 25th Street)
• Artists of Atlantic featuring work by 15 deifferent artists @ Atlantic Gallery (Free, through 4/20, 210 11th Avenue at 25th Street, Suite 801)
• Now and Now by Daido Moriyama @ Steven Kasher Gallery (Free, through 5/4, 521 West 23rd Street)
• Passion and Resurrection Motets at the Renaissance by Pomerium @ The Cloisters ($45, 3/30, 1 & 3 pm, 99 Margaret Corbin Drive, Fort Tryon Park, NY)

Poor poor Jimmy McAvoy – forever playing second fiddle to a star. First came Keira Knightley in Atonement. Then a surging Michael Fassbender in X-Men:First Class. And now, in a more recent twist, McAvoy’s been taken to the woodshed once again.

Yet the problem – in almost every case – is that McAvoy absolutely insists upon doing his Little-Big-Man routine. He’s constantly yelling, or stewing, or harumphing to no end. Consider, for example, McAvoy’s role in Welcome to The Punch – a mid-range thriller, featuring a pair of taut performances by Johnny Harris and Mark Strong. What brings The Punch down to its knees – time and time and time again – is Mr. McAvoy’s whole stammer-stammer-kick routine. I mean, on the one hand, it seems like McAvoy was specifically cast to elevate Strong. On the other, it’s McAvoy’s consistent lack of anything that ultimately diminishes his role. It’s like watching a poor man’s Jeremy Renner, despite the fact no one wants to watch the real Renner at all.

And the utter shame of it – at least in so far as Welcome to The Punch might be concerned – is that poor poor Jimmy McAvoy just tends to feel more like a liability. For it’s not only Strong that outshines him in this film. The entire supporting cast does as well. And that, well, that certainly does not bode well for the Napoleonic Mr. McAvoy, regardless of where B-List celebrity should take him from here.

(Welcome to The Punch arrives in limited release today, and will be available via most OnDemand platforms as of March 30th.)

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There are layers to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and then there are LAYERS to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. So many of them, in fact, that it’s often difficult to separate true fact from fiction.

Therein lies the sweet spot known as Room 237.

Equal parts gambit and goosechase, Room 237 succeeds because it is both in on the joke and wholly fixated on the punchline. Was The Shining a stark treatise on the Holocaust? An homage to the American Indian? Was it some multi-layered work of genius? Or just a weak-ass romp about some asshole in the woods?

The truth – according to most die-hard conspiracy theorists – is that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is more than likely all of the above. Keep in mind, we are dealing in deep shades of psycho-babble here, some of it so absurd as to reduce the magic bullet to a jumping bean. And yet there still appears to be a subtle grain of truth to the affair; some subtle nuance, perhaps, that suggests an air of possibility.

The lasting value of Room 237 is largely based upon its depth. An average poster represents the fate of Theseus? an Adler type-set, Nazi Poland? 237 hits its mark because it allows stark-raving inmates ample run of the asylum. The end result feels like some meta-satire, if not a brilliant commentary on the allure of motion pictures themselves.

(Room 237 arrives at The IFC Center in New York City this coming Friday, 3/29, with a rollout in most major markets set to begin on April 5th.)

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“Look, it’s all good. I’m not telling anyone what to think. I’m not trying to even defend it in that way, or say that this was my intent or that was my intent, or that this is what I was trying to say. That’s not for me to argue. I’m trying to make something that’s amazing, something that’s beautiful, something that lasts. Since I was a kid, I stayed to myself, and I was always just paying attention to the light at the end of the tunnel. There can be all those types of interpretations, it’s all part of it. I enjoy it. There is purposefully a large margin that’s left undefined. If it was something I could just articulate or explain or say this or that, I probably wouldn’t do it anyway. But I also wouldn’t make the film like the film is.”

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“I remember a musician once saying to me that he wanted to create the perfect sine wave. And the interesting thing is that the most boring sound in the universe is probably the perfect sine wave. It’s the sound of nothing happening. It’s the sound of perfection, and it is boring. As David Byrne said in his song, ‘Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.’ For me, perfection represents the absence of character. If I get anything even close to a perfect sine wave from my synthesizer, I send it to an amplifier so that it starts to get imperfect and becomes distorted. Distortion is character, basically. In fact, everything we call ‘character’ is the deviation from perfection. So perfection to me is characterlessness.”

There are certain American pastimes that inevitably lend themselves to smoking – All-night Poker, arena Boxing, and horsetrack-betting chief among them. You can add the Delta Blues to that short list, as well. Because it is the Blues – from Robert Johnson all the way through dame Adele – that’s always been wrought with a down-and-dirty feeling of modernity. And while The Museum of Contemporary Art’s Blues for Smoke takes it name from a little-known improvisational technique, it is also highly indicative of the tooth-and-nail struggle for equality, if not the unmitigated role of race in this country.

Billed as a interactive installation, Blues for Smoke combines audio and video with the occasional toy train, in an attempt to chart the evolutionary course of mainstream Blues, including all of the unfortunate bumps and bruises that have occurred along the way. There are paintings. There is commentary. There is even an infinite loop featuring Coltrane and Monk, with a brief sampling of James Brown in between.

What’s most intriguing about this exhibition is the way it seamlessly incorporates civil rights into its architecture, most effectively via works like Martin Wong’s painting, La Vida, and Glenn Rigon’s oil, No Room. All in all, it’s a fascinating study in both an era and a feeling, if not the overwhelming genre that brought the two of them together.

(Blues for Smoke runs through 4/28 at the Whitney Museum, $18 general admission, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street.)

Five More For the Offing:

• Myth & Memory: Personal Iconographies by Leigh Behnke @ Fischbach Gallery (Free, 3/21-4/20, 210 11th Avenue at 25th Street, Suite 801)
• We Ate The House by Michael Reafsnyder @ Ameringer, McEnery, Yohe (Free, 3/21-4/20, 525 West 22nd Street)
• The Painted Photograph by Duane Michaels @ DC Moore Gallery (Free, 3/21-4/27, 535 West 22nd Street)
• Paintings, Etc. by William Klein @ Howard Greenberg Gallery (Free, 3/1-4/27, 41 E. 57th Street, Suite 1406)
• Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Free with suggested donation/admission, 2/26-5/27, 5th Avenue at 83rd Street)

If there is one thing worth despising about the average mainstream movie critic, it’s that he or she makes no worthwhile distinction between the terms review and recap. I mean, forget about the fact that spitting back an entire film in one tidy 3-inch chunk is just as rude as it is lazy. Consider – instead – what an absolute disservice it represents to one’s readers. The only way any critic could possibly justify such behavior might be in the event he or she was warding audiences away from a bad movie. Above and beyond that, you’ve really got to wonder how or why some of these people got their pedigree.

Never has said dynamic been on more embarrassing display than when considering a full-length feature like My Brother the Devil. Reason being, this is a film in which everything from the actual name to the actual game is completely incumbent upon key plot twists. Present a full-time recapper with a conundrum like that, and he or she will more than likely end up qualifying the entire review with some weak-ass media tagline like “SPOILER ALERT” or “Do not read beyond this point if … “. And the crime of it is, most editors won’t only endorse this type of behavior, they’ll simultaneously consider it a worthwhile means of traffic.

Fuck you, Mr. Mainstream Movie Recapper. Fuck you, and the advanced fucking journalism degree you wandered in on.

But I digress.

The point being, the best way to do justice to a movie like My Brother The Devil (at least in any film critic’s capacity) is to simply recommend that your audience go see it. My Brother offers up some pretty stunning bait-and-switch, combining elements of Shakespeare, The Bible, The Quran, and even West Side Story along the way. The screenplay is taut, the cinematography is crisp, and the acting is believable. I mean, sure, My Brother puts the audience through stiff rigors in order to get where it is going, but the film ultimately succeeds because it manages to transcend veiled lines of race, creed, strata, and gender. It’s Romeo and Juliet made for the modern era, quite frankly. And – assuming you have any interest in such things – My Brother the Devil is most certainly worth the time, if not the admission, to go see.

(My Brother the Devil opens this Friday, March 22nd, at the Landmark Sunshine in New York City, with a national rollout to follow.)

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