While Inception purports to deal explicitly with dream worlds and the subconscious, there is just cause to assume these dream worlds can stand in for any manifestation of alternate reality. As Nietzsche pointed out, dreams are the blue print for our concept of alternate reality: “In the ages of the rude beginning of culture, man believed that he was discovering a second real world in dream, and here is the origin of all metaphysics. Without dreams, mankind would never have had occasion to invent such a division of the world.”

Directors have taken this division and run with it since the earliest days of cinema, but always with the lesson that realities apart from our own are dangerous. Inception does nothing to refute this notion, as evidenced by the damaging effects dreamcrashing has on Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his family. Dorothy Gale, who dreamed up her journey through Oz, exclaims a resounding, “There’s no place like home!” upon waking and the natural order is restored. (Cobb, of Inception, similarly, pines for home.) But it is easy to forget that by the beginning of Return to Oz (1985), Walter Murch’s sole directorial endeavor, Dorothy is so obsessed with her invented dream world that Aunt Em has to send her to a doctor for electroshock therapy. A dream world turns into a nightmare in Abre Los Ojos, and then, perfunctorily, in Vanilla Sky, and the protagonist of The Science of Sleep is crippled in the waking world by an overactive dream life.

Since the movie screen is just another layer of dreaming between the story and the audience, Nolan’s uncertain ending is asking us to question whether we live in the real world or if we are likewise doomed to wander the corridors of the nether world for an eternity. This unsettling concept recurs often enough in the canon of human history to indicate that this fear is interconnected with consciousness itself, exposing our innate terror of God and our feeling of vulnerability to the parts of the cosmos we don’t understand.

Ingmar Bergman touched on this idea in his 1968 film, Shame, about husband and wife musicians living in Scandinavia at the time of the German invasion. After being subjected to a series of humiliations and abuses, Eva utters to her husband, “Sometimes everything seems just like a dream. It’s not my dream, but someone else’s, that I have to participate in. What happens when the one who dreamt us wakes up and feels ashamed?”

In 1940, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote “The Circular Ruins,” a fable about a man who devotes his life to dreaming in order to build a dream-man who can live even when its creator is awake. When the old man finally succumbs to death he makes this discovery: “With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.”

Both of these twentieth century examples are incarnations of the Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic (c. 380 B.C.E.) wherein Socrates compares the unenlightened human to a prisoner chained inside a cave, watching shadows on a wall and believing those shadows are the whole of reality. But the twenty-first century has hailed The Simulation Argument, a theory that is gaining popularity through the support of a school of Oxford-based thinkers who calculate the likelihood that we all live in a computer simulation. The concept postulates that technology is advancing at such a rate that computer programmers will soon be able to simulate consciousness. Once this happens, it will be possible to run ancestral simulation programs, similar to that of The Matrix, at which point there will be no reason to assume we aren’t simulations ourselves operating inside a computer interface. It may sound silly, but in reality (whatever that may be) the Simulation Argument is one of the more logic-based philosophies of existence we’ve come up with, and, like all metaphysical theories, it is impossible to either prove or refute. After all, who can demonstrate conclusively that we actually exist in the real world? Why are we so suspicious that we are not in the REAL reality, and why is that even important to us since it is, after all, so irrelevant?

Alas, the only way we humans have found to work through these ontological questions is through story. Dreams and psychedelic drugs do their part, but when all is said and done, these experiences boil down into stories as well. By that token, going inside a dream within a dream is akin to telling stories within stories, and, as BananaWho discussed in A Serious Man: A Never-Ending Story this kind of story-in-a-story structure has its roots in the centuries-old One Thousand and One Nights, in which each level of story removed is meant to bring the reader closer to Allah.

Most notably, this dream- or story-layering creates a narrative labyrinth. Mark. Z. Danielewski’s experimental novel, The House of Leaves, is a perfect example of this kind of narrative structure. In his book we follow Johnny Truant, the narrator, who discovers an academic paper written by a blind man about a fictional documentary about a family that finds a labyrinth in their house that they believe to be God’s house. And God’s house is a terrifying place, indeed. The story inside a documentary inside a paper inside a book frames a literal labyrinth that becomes the centerpiece of the book. Sound familiar?

The labyrinth is an archetype rife with meaning from a splay of ancient cultures. Generally, labyrinths were thought to symbolize the pathway to God or traps for evil spirits, so it is no coincidence Nolan employed this archetype in Inception, on his quest to unveil the mysteries of the universe. Within the film, Cobb hires a new “architect” to design the world of the dream. In order for the group to corner their subject and perform the inception they must operate inside a finite universe—a maze. Is it any wonder they find an architecture student named Ariadne (Ellen Page) to design the dreams for their final venture? In Greek myth, Ariadne was known as “the Mistress of the Labyrinth.” She aided Theseus on his quest to slay the Minotaur who was imprisoned in the Cretan labyrinth of Knossos. Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of red string he could lay out in the chutes of the maze to help him find his way out. Incidentally, the Ariadne of Inception is the only one to guide Cobb all the way through the furthest reaches of dreamspace, and she is likewise the only one who knows the truth behind his wife’s death. But how can the Greek myth play out without the Minotaur? There is no bull-headed man-beast roving the labyrinth, but there is Mal, imprisoned in Cobb’s subconscious as a murderous specter who haunts his every dream.

As the myth goes, Theseus and Ariadne were born of the gods. Theseus is credited with building the Athenian empire. Similarly, Cobb and Mal built an entire metropolis in the decades they spent in their own private dreamsphere, which lends insight into Inception’s stringent interest in architecture and building. Just as dreaming is a form of creation, the creative act is actualized through architecture in the film. Thus, dreaming, building, and “inception,” which Merrium-Webster defines as “an act, process, or instance of beginning,” are all forms of playing God.

Nietzsche also accredited dreams as the cause of the human belief in divinity: “The parting of soul and body goes also with this way of interpreting dreams; likewise, the idea of a soul’s apparitional body: whence all belief in ghosts, and apparently, too, in gods.” Cobb, Arthur, Ariadne, Mal and the whole gang have made careers of toying with humans in the tradition of the Greek deities. They are gods having their way in God’s House. But the Greeks were also proponents of punishment, and given Nolan’s treatment of his previous heroes, there’s little hope that Cobb gets off the hook for meddling so long in a world where he doesn’t belong. After all, the damned character is Nolan’s favorite kind.

Memento, The Prestige, and Inception all have in common that their heroes are two-sided journeymen caught up in endless Sisyphus cycles, and all of them basically deserve their punishment. Memento’s Leonard is either unwilling or unable to escape the psychological affliction that compels him to murder. In The Prestige, Robert Angier, crazed with vengeance and touched by dark magic, kills himself every night to maintain his reputation as a magician. Even Batman’s crime fighting only seems to encourage terrorist supervillains and alienates the civilians he is fighting to protect. Though Cobb obviously never meant to play a part in his wife’s suicide, his ability to win the trust of the Mark (Cillian Murphy) and proceed to manipulate him at his most sacrosanct level belies Cobb’s utter lack of morality. Not to mention ALL of these figures, including Cobb, have dead wives. (For Batman, dead parents and a dead girlfriend.) They are all haunted, doomed, and lonely, but locked into the cycles they set forth for themselves.

Though Nolan tends to pass on the happy endings, his stock is way up as the rare director making big budget studio films that actually resonate with people. Nolan makes use of his understanding that at some level, we all feel we are alone on a circuitous journey, and he appreciates that there are no real explanations for the big mysteries of life, only questions. Just as the Coen brothers shake God’s tree in A Serious Man, Inception is Nolan’s chance to ask questions and rigorously explore his own agnosticism. He expertly draws out the tension between religion (“a leap of faith”) and nihilism, but ultimately, and perhaps cruelly, reminds us that our world may be little more than shadows on a cave wall.

Find a labyrinth near you! Just type your ZIP code into this Labyrinth Locator, a rad new feature from the Labyrinth Society.

-Christianne Hedtke

Enright is a visual artist whose work spans many mediums, incorporating performance and video art with sculpture and installation. After securing patronage from the Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York to create a body of new work for an upcoming solo show, the film begins by following Enright and his girlfriend, Kirsten, on a road trip to her family cabin in Mendocino, California. The two pull over periodically to shoot weird videos against breathtaking backdrops, and as they explore the American landscape they experiment with images, sounds, and personas. Their willingness to immerse themselves in all that is strange and psychedelic is reminiscent of Kit and Holly from Terence Malick’s Badlands or Mickey and Mallory from Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. While Brock and Kirsten are not on a cross-country murder spree, the intimation of violence is never far behind them. When they arrive at the secluded cabin in the woods in Mendocino, this underlying sense of imminent danger is still present, and when Enright and company start playing with chainsaws and donning masks, it feels as though the movie could devolve at any moment into a slasher horror.

It is here that Enright gets serious about his upcoming show. No one ever said artists are easy to live with, and Enright does nothing to refute the stereotype of the New York artist as a pretentious narcissist. While Kirsten seems terrified about money, Brock complains that he doesn’t feel supported, and he needs to be “in it,” not worrying about earthly matters like paying the phone bill. After a half an hour of grandiloquent speeches about his process, the film builds a serious case of doubt about Enright’s ability to deliver. Quit bitching and get to the good stuff, Brock!

But, very quickly, the film reveals itself to be a movie about process, and Lipes shows an admirable degree of restraint, especially as this is his first feature. As the storyteller, Lipes is not particularly generous with background or didactic information, so watching this movie requires more of an effort on the part of the audience. Lipes doesn’t seem interested in contextualizing Enright’s art, and he deftly avoids projecting his own feelings about the work onto the audience—a tricky conceit to pull off, but it is what ultimately makes watching this film so rewarding. An example to the contrary would be The Woodmans, C. Scott Willis’s documentary about the late photographer, Francesca Woodman. Willis places a world of “atmosphere” and contextualization onto a retrospective slideshow of her work that completely robs the audience of any chance they had of connecting to Woodman’s work on a personal level. Alternately, Lipes opts for honesty, and respects the intelligence of his viewers.

When Enright gets working, we only get glimpses of what it is he is creating: an open air theater where warped fairy tales and pantomimes worthy of Grand-Guignol unfold, half-baked sculptures and melted hardware on their paths to becoming fine art. At times, his work makes allusions to Paul McCarthy in bringing juvenile ideas and scatology into an intellectual sphere, especially when a sinister Mousie cuts Enright’s feces with a knife. (Cut the crap, Kirsten!)

When Nicette, a representative from the Perry Rubenstein Gallery, pays a visit to his workshop in Mendocino, Enright throws her into his process and keeps her there against her will. (This might be a good time to mention Enright operates a voluntary kidnapping service where he tortures his clients emotionally per their own design.) As Enright steers Nicette toward the brink of hysteria, his sylvan theater finally explodes into an orgiastic carnival of screaming and smashing. Enright delivers! All his squawking about process becomes justified as enigmatic concepts and animalistic emotions are released at last like from some nuclear bang. It is here we realize that Enright’s system truly functions at its maximum when he leads his band of merry pranksters on a path to disintegration, chaos reigns, and everyone hovers on the brink of their own personal absolute zero. And it’s extremely fun to watch! When Nicette is finally driven to tears, she asks Brock, “You want me here?” and he says yes. He wants her in a position of frailty and volatility. And frankly these scenes are the most powerful in the movie.

Of all the colorful characters in Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same, Lipes is the only one we never meet. The film is so focused on Enright’s process that we must inevitably think of Lipes’ which lies in perfect juxtaposition to Enright’s—a measured and thoughtful construction, with clean, radiant, and sometimes unusual images. A shooter by trade (Wild Combination, Opus Jazz, Tiny Furniture, Afterschool, Two Gates of Sleep), each frame looks like it could be hanging in a contemporary art gallery, and even the music was entirely performed on camera by Mr. Enright himself. Given this film and Lipes’ directorial follow-up NY Export: Opus Jazz, look forward to a long and illustrious career from this emerging voice in independent film. -Christianne Hedtke

Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same was released TODAY on DVD from Factory 25. Buy it AND put it on your Netflix queue. Brock Enright will also be screening at BAM in July. Check your local listings!

Perhaps you’ve heard the chatter, the tweets, the blogs, the blurbs. Ayn Rand is back, in a big way. Sales of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead soared after the election of Barack Obama, and 2009 saw the highest sales of Atlas Shrugged ever—sales reached the peaks of the Amazon bestseller list for Fiction and Literature at position 6. This resurgence of interest in Rand is a measure of the backlash from the government bailouts, the stimulus plan, and the move toward increased regulation on Wall Street in the wake of the economic collapse. But while Rand sales spike predictably whenever the government intervenes with the market, this time around the effect has been record-breaking. Two full-length biographies of Rand were released last year within a week of each other when only one had existed previously, and on Saturday, June 12 cameras began rolling on the first installment of the feature film version of the novel. So what’s all the fuss about? C’mon, hop on the bandwagon, and BananaWho will lead you on a magical history tour of the book, the woman, and the strange irony of the Ayn Rand phenomenon.

A Ridiculously Condensed Summary of Atlas Shrugged and Objectivism
In case you haven’t read it, Atlas Shrugged is the main vehicle for Rand’s signature philosophy, Objectivism, or as she called it, “the Virtue of Selfishness.” Set in an unspecified time in a dystopian America, wealthy railroad heiress Dagny Taggart has worked all her life to take over her father’s company. In a time when much of the United States was still undeveloped, this little lass’s dream is to globalize the railroad, and expand its service continentally. Standing in her way is a criminally incompetent government and the entropic heavy-hitters of industry who have made it their business to obstruct industrial development and expansion. These privileged cretins aren’t as industrious or intelligent as their counterparts who threaten their hold on industry, so they aim to dumb down the rest of the world so they won’t have to wise up.

In reaction to the suffocating political climate, a strange epidemic sweeps the nation where hoards of “deserters” leave their jobs and disappear (hence the novel’s original title, The Strike.) Fearful of becoming obsolete, the government issues a series of “directives” that are increasingly Communistic, seizing property and assets, and further limiting companies’ ability to expand. Their tacit goal is to stamp out the true innovators, or Prime Movers, but they only succeed in bringing about a devastating economic and intellectual collapse.

In the midst of all the chaos, Dagny and steel magnate, Hank Reardon, discover the remains of a revolutionary motor that could change the face of industry forever, but the government promptly rains on their parade and shuts down development of the motor. Finally, after much exhaustive searching, she crashes her plane (she’s an aviator, too) into a mountain Utopia where she finds her ideal man, John Galt—the fabled instigator of the strike—who will lead the Prime Movers to revolution! It was HE who invented the magic motor only to destroy it because he refused to share his genius with a system that was so broken. So with lovers aplenty and America sunk into an economic and intellectual mire so deep only the Prime Movers could pull them out, Taggart and Galt must find a way to bring about a revolution, and oust those who would seek to limit their brazen genius!!!

Rand stresses the need for reason above all else, the sanctity of the self, capitalism, and the pursuit of dollar bills as a measure of personal success, generally shirking loyalty, altruism, and religion. And this gets them all really horny.

Now, I’m not an Ayn Rand scholar and I haven’t read her books in a few years, but I have read them all. I, like most young girls, embraced her philosophy in my early 20s, seduced by the promise of individualism and a boundless future. I hoped she was right as I envisioned her utopian, sexy world, where only the most hardworking, virtuous, and innovative people achieve success, regardless of their beginnings. But as it turns out, I, like most people who grow to reject Rand’s philosophy, realized that Objectivism simply doesn’t hold water in the world stage. Her philosophy places too much trust in the virtue of individuals, and vastly underestimates the power of greed, earning her the moniker, “the Evel Knievel of jumping to conclusions.” So I’m here to punch some holes in her reasoning, and by proxy, expose the Tea Party and the new Objectivists who have so righteously, albeit erroneously, claimed Rand for their own.

Non-Contradiction
“I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.” – Ayn Rand

Although Ayn Rand’s reasoning is celebrated for being “airtight,” contradictions flow freely through her work like crude oil in the Gulf. The most immediately problematic part of her philosophy is that her ideas are perfectly hewn for the world they exist in—a fictional world. Her philosophy operates on the assumption that all people are treated equally in society: that everyone has equal access to education and the same chance at upward mobility—all one has to do to succeed is work hard. This is a titanic assumption to make even by today’s standards, but it seems frankly naïve and dare I say unreasonable to assume such equality existed in 1957 where “supremacy of reason” met white supremacy. The America she describes in Atlas Shrugged is a world with infinite natural resources, a world without hot wars or environmental disasters or human-caused health risks, and as a staunch anti-environmentalist, Ayn Rand has got some explaining to do. In essence, Objectivism only functions in a Utopia. The same could be said for Communism, right? Yes, Communism, the reviled political structure that seized her family’s pharmacy when she was growing up in Russia and sent her galloping for the capitalistic U.S. of A. to seek her fortune.

Find her fortune she did, and not from a lack of trying. Young Rand immigrated to Hollywood where she churned out screenplays and stage plays, and eventually wrote four novels and several books on Objectivism, all by the virtue of her work ethic. Condemning handouts and shortcuts, Rand sang the praises good old fashioned blood, sweat, and tears, but a daily dose of amphetamines sure gave her that kick in the pants she needed! When it was discovered that Rand had been addicted to amphetamines for most of her life she reasoned that the drugs were to control her weight. Even if that were true, shouldn’t she have toiled the old fashioned way to lose her chub rather than take a prescription short cut? (She also reasoned her way through a lifetime of cigarette smoking, celebrating the cigarette as a device by which man could control fire at his fingertips. Rand contracted lung cancer in 1974.)

Either-Or
While Objectivism is an invented model, examples of the philosophy in action exist in the real world. Let’s take for example, a remedial study of the development of the computer as a household item. Though IBM made early advances in creating the computer as we know it, Apple Macintosh was the computer forerunner in the early days with the monochromatic screen and manual code entry, until PC introduced the mouse. The mouse was a revolutionary invention that made computer use vastly more accessible and convenient. Then along came Bill Gates and the Windows operating system whose overwhelming success so crushed Apple the company was teetering on the brink of obsolescence. So to compete with the PC, did Apple buy up patents to assets the PC needed to limit its development? Did Apple use intimidation, blackmail, or bribery to squash the competition? It’s unlikely. Instead, Apple developed superior, accessible, and intuitive operating systems and devices that eliminated all the problems posed by PC usage: viruses, incompatible software, and circuitous navigation. Apple emerged as the leading computer company once again, and you’d better believe the Windows people are in their labs right now trying to come up with the next computer revolution. Not to go all Malcolm Gladwell on my readers, but these programmers, people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, et al, are perfect examples of the Prime Movers of Ayn Rand’s books. Their inventions have touched all of our lives, and their competition in the market has ultimately benefited all of us because we have amazing, delightful, and useful computer machines. Well done.

So it’s true, there are real-life examples of Objectivism functioning in our world and benefitting the whole. But if we look at the energy industry, our findings will demonstrate Objectivism failing catastrophically.

Rand enthusiasts are outraged anew that Obama made BP put $20 billion in escrow for oil spill-related claims, and they strongly oppose his moratorium on deep-sea drilling. A neo-Objectivist would say the moratorium is limiting the development of an industry, but isn’t Obama the one relentlessly urging us to move forward in developing clean renewable energy sources? As Rand championed change and modernity, is Obama the Objectivist in this situation? He is the one spurring oil companies to create safer drilling technologies and better clean-up techniques. But still, the Objectivists run to the oil companies’ defenses. After all, big oil has gotten to be so profitable simply because they are the most innovate companies we’ve got, and oil is a cutting-edge modern form of fuel. Right?

An expert would say it is thoroughly un-Objectivist to stamp out a nascent industry by any means other than creating a superior product. So it would be wrong to occlude an invention like the electric car by snapping up patents to batteries and other parts an electric car would need to function solely to hinder its development, promoting, instead, gas guzzling SUVs and Hummers the size of living rooms. But this is exactly what big oil has done. It is also un-Objectivist to accept hand-outs, but the oil industry is subsidized by the American government to the tune of $10s of billions annually. These are just a few measurable violations of Objectivism big oil employs that doesn’t include the unadulterated bribery, intimidation, gifting, profiteering, and swindling that has made big oil so big. Innovation? Sure. They can drill 10,000 ft. beneath the ocean’s surface now, but the product is the same old oil. If you’d actually read and understood Atlas Shrugged, you wouldn’t defend companies like this.

Ironically, the hero of Atlas Shrugged who swore he would stop the motor of the world, that lil rabble rouser John Galt, also turned to energy to make his fortune. His greatest contribution to mankind was the invention of a motor that had the capacity to extract static electricity from the air and convert it into usable energy. This sounds to me like he invented a form of CLEAN RENEWABLE ENERGY!!! In Rand’s world, the oil industry would rise to the challenge and try to develop something even faster, cheaper, and cleaner than the electric motor, taking it in stride that Galt’s invention could destroy their empire. In our world, Galt would have to go into hiding.

Rush Limbaugh wrote a “Limbaugh Letter” highlighting the “eerie” parallels between the fictitious economic collapse in the novel and our own economic shit sandwich. (The letter is entitled “Atlas is Shrugging.” Great title, Rush!) It seems like an awfully inopportune moment to embrace Objectivism as the antidote to economic collapse, especially since our current recession was caused by capitalism run amok, the exact opposite scenario that plays out in Atlas Shrugged. The only eerie parallels evident here are the ones between Rush Limbaugh and one Ellsworth Toohey, the villain from Rand’s The Fountainhead, a columnist and a cultural enthusiast of sorts who had his fingers in so many political honey pots that by the end of the novel he emerges as the puppeteer of a party that exists to promote bad art and obscure reason in order to empower an oppressive political regime. I haven’t read the book in a while but I could have sworn he had a radio show, too…

Ultimately, Rand may call herself an Objectivist, but at her roots she is an idealist whose beliefs defy party lines. And you simply can’t invoke John Galt on a protest sign without inferring the whole of her politics and personal ideals, and sadly, Rand probably wouldn’t have appreciated it. Members of the Libertarian Party who most often align themselves with Rand weren’t even in her good graces. In 1976 Rand said of Libertarians, “They are not defenders of capitalism. They’re a group of publicity seekers… most of them are my enemies.” And, ” […] this party plagiarizes some of my ideas, mixes them with the exact opposite–with religionists, anarchists and every intellectual misfit and scum they can find–and call themselves libertarians and run for office.”

Rand would have similarly rejected the Tea Party who’ve so named themselves in homage to pre-revolutionary colonial America. This reactionary stance is in direct opposition to Rand’s belief that we aren’t here to rehash the movements of our predecessors, we are here to innovate and contribute to the legacy of humanity. It’s counterproductive to pine for the past.

So why hasn’t the left turned to dark premonitions of the future in fiction? There are plenty of brilliant dystopian authors who portended as much or more about the future of the Western world than Rand did (Huxley, Orwell, Atwood, Wallace to name a few.) The answer to this question seems obvious: when a fiction writer is your main touchstone for a political model there is bound to be trouble. Have you, Dear Reader, heard of L. Ron Hubbard?

Atlas Shrugged: The Movie
In 2006, Lionsgate Entertainment conceived of bringing Atlas Shrugged to the big screen for the first time. Randall Wallace, screenwriter of Braveheart, came on to pen the script, and in 2007 he graced the cover of Script Magazine in an interview highlighting his struggle to wrestle the beastly 1100-page novel into a single-sitting feature. Vadin Perelman (House of Sand and Fog) signed on as director, as did Angelina Jolie in the part of Dagny Taggart, with Brad Pitt expressing interest in the part of John Galt. It was the stuff of Rand’s dreams—true talent in each facet of the developing picture. But! Oh happenstance. 2008 rolled around with Barack Obama ascending to the presidency, his opponents reached for Rand, the economy crashed and BOOM! Almost overnight, the project became a political hot potato that went sailing out of the ranks of a high budget blockbuster and rolled to a stop somewhere on One Tree Hill, where star and sometimes-director Paul Johansson scooped it up and threw it back into hasty development with only $5 million to its name. With a cast of mostly television actors and a little-known screenwriter, Atlas Shrugged splintered into a trilogy, and rushed into production lest the producers lose the creative rights to the project. Nothing spells awesome movie like a 50-year old project hastily adapted to the screen in 5 weeks by career television actors. Per Rand, if success can be measured in dollars, the market will judge thee.

A Isn’t Always A
All criticisms aside, I wouldn’t have read Rand’s entire oeuvre if I didn’t enjoy her books. They are compelling and highly readable even if they are a bit effusive and never quite enter the realm of real literary merit. Her breadth of vision is truly incredible, her unshakable faith in mankind is a refreshing stance, and she had some inspired insights about power structures. Rand herself is a fascinating figure—she invented herself as a Jewish-Russian immigrant in a decidedly anti-Semitic man’s world. She was a confusing feminist who took for granted women’s place alongside men in the world of business and industry, and yet condoned rape as a feasible means to get a girl to like you. (Don’t worry—it’s all a part of taking what you are entitled to. SeeThe Fountainhead).

Perhaps the reason she speaks so loudly to young readers is because she is so focused on the self. With all her attention to individualism, she reaches those scouring out identities for themselves, trying to find their place in an overcrowded, threatening world. It is something college-age people need to hear, which is why I recommend Objectivism to fans of a la carte faith—you can take what you want from her books and leave the rest.

What you can’t do is scrawl “Who is John Galt?” on a sign and believe you walk a straight and narrow path.

-Christianne Hedtke

It sounds uncannily like an episode of Les Assassins Des Fauteuils Roulants, the fictive taskforce of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: wheelchair-bound Québécois separatists who murder their enemies in manners most foul. Wallace’s invention of the AFR is just another darkly hilarious fixture of his fiction, but no, It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine! has a separate handi-capable serial killer, although many young lovelies do nevertheless “hear the squeak.”

Written for the screen by Steven C. Stewart who was himself afflicted with cerebral palsy, Stewart starred in the film as the disabled Don Juan, luring woman after unsuspecting woman into his blanketed lap, and having sex with them before and/or during and/or after murdering them by strangulation and/or rolling back and forth over their necks with his wheelchair. Todd Solondz, who built his career on taking controversial subjects too far, lightly broaches the subject of cerebral palsy and sexuality in Storytelling, but I think we can all agree that Glover trumps Solondz in the area of taking things too far, especially given a climactic scene that features Stewart fully naked save for a pair of white Hanes tube socks, and fully …AHEM!… aroused, whilst a “co-star” performs oral sex on him. And they show it. Have I mentioned that Stewart penned this scene knowing he would perform in it? I did. (Also worth noting here that Stewart died shortly after Everything Is Fine wrapped shooting.)

Stewart cites a desire to portray the disabled as three-dimensional humans, complete with sexual desires and violent thoughts, and Stewart does fairly shatter Hollywood’s Pollyanna-paradigm onscreen. But the power dynamics of this experiment have increasingly interesting implications when given Glover’s excessive interest. His film What Is It? features a cast largely composed of persons with Down Syndrome who co-starred with talking snails. Though directors like Harmony Korine and Todd Solondz have cornered the market for “shocking” and “disturbing” films with similar elements, how are we to judge who is being innovative and who is being exploitative? Is Glover the Diane Arbus of our time, dedicated to telling the stories of the people who lurk in the underculture of America? Or is he gawker, orchestrating a glorified freakshow?

You tell me.

Just Like Us
I have been waiting for a movie exactly like this to come along. Not since Persepolis has a movie made such a bold attempt to humanize the people of the Middle East to the Western world. Directed by the stand-up comedian Ahmed Ahmed, Just Like Us documents a troupe of stand-up comedians of diverse ethnic backgrounds through a whirlwind comedy tour of the Middle East. The tour had two aims: to reach out to the people of these war torn nations through the healing power of laughter, and, by way of film, to emulate the way the African-American stand-up comedy scene helped bridge the gap between black and white cultures in the U.S. Just Like Us briefly examines the way Middle Eastern culture has been skewed in the American media, from a long history of representing villains in cartoons and kids movies as turban-wearing Jafar-types, to showing how naïve the general public is about the range of Middle Eastern and Central Asian cultures. But the movie only waxes social-activism for long enough to set a backdrop for the comedy tour, and focuses less on the “look how unfair this is” aspect and more on the “look what we can do to change it.” Through Dubai, where there is a long list of what the comedians cannot say on stage, to Beirut where anything goes, to Saudi where entertainment is illegal, to Egypt, Ahmed Ahmed’s motherland, Just Like Us is educational and perennially funny. I highly recommend this doc!

Director: Ahmed Ahmed

Dream Home
This one really got my attention. Although I can’t say I particularly liked it, Dream Home definitely has something to offer the horror crowd. (Not to be confused with Open House which has nothing to offer anyone. Whoopsie! Broke my own rule.) I would equate this to the Chinese version of American Psycho, if Patrick Bateman was a woman and fetishized real estate instead of business cards.

From the opening credits to its last dying breath, Dream Home has a sharp stylistic presence and a humorous yet caustic stance on the fierce struggle for success among upper-middle class professionals in Hong Kong. Set in a Ballardian concrete jungle, Cheng Li-sheung has been saving her whole life for the dream apartment she can’t quite afford. But she is an industrious young lass, and she soon realizes she can drive down the property value and lower the building’s occupancy rate if she can just kill off enough of its residents.

This gore is sincere, creative, and borderline-offensive. (Actually, let’s just call it offensive.) It is so realistic I covered my eyes for more than half the film, but it somehow avoids Hostel-style torture porn. After all, Cheng is a busy woman with a job to do.

Writer/Director: Ho-Cheung Pang

My Brothers
Three Irish brothers take to the road to replace their dying father’s wristwatch. Don’t you love such an unassuming premise? A story like this relies on great writing and soulful performances, and My Brothers succeeds on both fronts. It is a rare road movie that can pull it off, but My Brothers avoids the guitar-scored montages that bash you over the head with the bittersweet freedom of the road, but still guides three brothers at different stages of life through their own metamorphoses. My favorite narrative film so far.

Director: Paul Fraser
Writer: Williams Collins

Micmacs

Micmacs (Micmacs a Tire-Larigot) is the latest from Amélie director, Jean-Pierre Juenet. Still peppered with whimsy and delight, make no mistake that this is a children’s film that was never intended to broach the playful maturity of Juenet’s previous works, even if there are a few strippers with pastied nipples. Given that most American children aren’t likely to sit through a full-length movie with subtitles, and if they do then they deserve to see a boob or two, perhaps French children are more prepared for a little weapons-room nookie and or a lunchtime lap dance. Likewise, Juenet seems to be preparing French youth for a socially-minded future.

Bazil, is the unlucky protagonist whose father is killed by a landmine in North Africa when he is only a boy. As an adult, he is caught in a freak shootout and winds up with a bullet lodged in his cranium that cannot be removed lest it do more damage than good. Handicapable, he teams up with a veritable trash pile of unlucky characters with amazing talents, from contortionists to engineers. Together, they form a motley superhero force, and Bazil leads them on a mission to seek revenge not on the mercenary who shot him, not on the rebels whose landmine killed his father, but on the company who dealt arms to both offenders. Using salvaged, repurposed goods from the junkyard, they wreak hilarious havoc on the corrupt arms dealers.

Positively cartoonesque, MicMacs is cute and energetic, but it perhaps doesn’t strum the heartstrings quite like a Pixar flick. Nevertheless, if you are up for a light comedy that promotes disarmament and recycling, Micmacs is it!

Writer/Director: Jean-Pierre Juenet

Feathered Cocaine

This riveting documentary follows the life of falconer, Alan Parrot, whose life work has been to raise and breed falcons in the Middle East. Little did he know that his lifelong passion for the birds would lead him to become one of the founders of an ever-expanding falcon-smuggling trade in the Middle East. Parrot is easily drawn to tears when he reckons with the knowledge that his actions may have contributed to the abuse, genetic pollution, and severe decimation of falcon populations across the Middle East. But he never dreamed that falconry would lead him into the world of terrorism and the search for Osama bin Laden. Through his dealings with falcon trappers and the Arab princes who are major purchasers of the birds, Parrot knows many who meet with bin Laden regularly, and has reported this rather lucrative bit of information to the U.S. government on several occasions with no response. This is an extremely interesting documentary, but perhaps the best part is that an actual falcon wearing an actual hat has attended both screenings thus far, perched on the gloved hand on Alan Parrot himself. See it!

Writer/ Director: Thorkell Hardarson, Orn Marino Arnarson

Buried Land

Buried Land masquerades as a documentary about the war-torn Bosnian village, Visoko, that has engendered a thriving tourism economy and united its people based on the belief that there is a pyramid buried under their hills. Now, anyone who sees this hill will look at it for a while and agree that yes, it is triangular, but eventually you will not be able to deny that this is just a small mountain, like many others around the world. The movie understands this as well, at which point it morphs into a narrative about the town’s people, and how a common belief in something as mystical and hope-inspiring as an ancient pyramid can unite the community and help heal its war wounds.

It reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s greatest short story, The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, about a poor fishing village that finds a dead body washed up on its shores and gives the dead man a story worthy of Victor Hugo, and a funeral fit for a king. (If you haven’t read it you really should. Here, go on.) In both cases, the communities play out perhaps the oldest human ritual: creating meaning in their lives by giving themselves a story.

This is a beautiful idea, which is why Buried Land was smart to blend fantasy with fact, documentary with narrative. The film does build an interesting sort of synergy, but despite its best attempts it still winds up being quite tedious. Really, I just wanted to get you to read that Marquez story. Ha!

Writer/Director: Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, Steven Eastwood

The Sentimental Engine Slayer

I don’t even know where to begin with this one. I was initially pumped for this movie because it is written, directed, produced, and starring Omar Rodriguez Lopez, the front man from The Mars Volta—a recipe for noise. Noise is a good way to describe the film—deliberately dissonant and loud with a score composed of soundscapes that are the musical equivalent of a terrorist attack. If you love The Mars Volta and early Greg Araki films, David Lynch wannabes, and Holy Mountain then this just may be the movie for you, but on a very personal basis I can no longer get my kicks on movies where “fuck” is used in literally every sentence (it’s just bad screenwriting), virginity loss is the main focus, and gay prostitutes inevitably get murdered. (Or do they?….) That’s not to say some festival-goers didn’t like the movie, because some did! Just not BananaWho. Sorry.

Writer/Director: Omar Rodriguez Lopez

Shorts: Experimental Collisions

This shorts program is straight up experimental film in the most Brakhage-Anger way possible. If you like sitting in the dark, trying to get hypnotized by shapes on the screen, these little beauties might suck you right in. There were a few, especially the first two, Grandmother’s Eye by Jonathan Lewald up there in Sweden, and Release by Bill Morrison in our own US of A. Grandmother’s Eye is a single shot that contemplates infinity, and Release uses one piece of vintage footage in every possible way, teaching us volumes about the universe contained in one little shot, and building a rhythm that peaks when it finally reveals what it’s leading up to. (Hint: It’s Al Capone!) I rather enjoyed this program, but I wouldn’t have felt too guilty if I left the screening a little early.

Heartbreaker (L’arnacoeur)

Heartbreaker is a Hollywood rom-com of the most traditional variety, except it’s better because it’s French. The basic plot: the French Mark Wahlberg (Romain Duris) plays a man who breaks up couples for a living. He is a chameleon who can be anyone he wants, as long as he is his mark’s dream hunk. And it’s sexy because he is a seducer with morals—he gives the woman enough hope and self-confidence to finally leave her unhappy relationship, without leading her to believe she’ll wind up with him, the Heartbreaker. And he has principals. If he truly believes the couple is happy, he lets them enjoy their love. Enter Johnny Depp’s real-life baby mama Vanessa Paradis, who is slated to be married within the week. She plays the Heartbreaker’s mark, but Duris’s character can’t quite discern which category she falls into. One thing leads to another, the Heartbreaker becomes the Heartbroken, and it’s basically Wedding Crashers en français.

Writer: Laurent Zeitoun/Jeremy Doner
Director: Pascal Chaumiel

NY Export: Opus Jazz premieres on PBS March 24th, 2010. That’s tonight!

The Congolese Okapi and the ballerina are two of the rarest, most elegant living creatures to remain among earth’s biodiversity, and yet only the ballerina has successfully captured its own majesty and relevance on film. “The first film conceived, created, produced, and danced by dancers from the New York City Ballet” touts the film’s website, NY Export: Opus Jazz, was among the best of the films to screen at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival. The project is a highly cinematic rendering of Jerome Robbins’ 1958 ballet that casts away pointe shoes and tutus for a piece performed in sneakers and jeans.

Two soloists from the New York City Ballet, Ellen Bar and Sean Suozzi, were the creative forces behind the project. Even with minimal filmmaking experience, they were inspired to push past the in-the-moment self-expression as directed dancers and translate their expert knowledge of movement onto film. “Dancing, you wait for casting to go up and everything is very passive until you get up on stage,” Ms. Bar explains. “Even though Sean and I are successful you still feel like you are at someone’s mercy—you’re at the director’s mercy and you’re at the choreographer’s mercy—and the window for creativity shrinks.” Mr. Suozzi corroborates the need for conceptual creative expression: “There are so many times, being a dancer, that I have my own ideas. This was a way I could be in control. I got to do something that’s mine.”

Suozzi and Bar first conceived of a film adaptation of Opus Jazz while performing its revival for the City Ballet. “When we were learning the ballet and first performing it,” says Suozzi, “it was just such a fun experience and everyone liked it so much it was on our minds a lot… All of us felt really lucky and connected to be a part of it.” But even though the ballet was progressive for 1958, the duo still felt a facelift would do the ballet service. “When we got on stage and the costumes were these dated things we felt goofy for the first time, whereas the whole rehearsal process when we were in our own clothes in the studio we felt really cool and contemporary. We never thought about the ballet being dated.” (Suozzi is referring to the thick knit Technicolor sweaters and tube socks the City Ballet pulls out of a Cold War era vault for the stage performance of Opus Jazz.) “How do we get back to feeling the way we felt in the studio?”

By updating the costumes and grounding the choreography in real life locations, Bar and Suozzi took a note from West Side Story, another Jerome Robbins masterpiece whose cinematic visual sense gave the choreography new life. They teamed up with Jody Lee Lipes, a director and cinematographer who has already made the film fest rounds with Afterschool and Tiny Furniture (as cinematographer), and his own directorial debut, Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same at SXSW ’09. Lipes shot and co-directed along with Henry Joost whose documentary, Catfish, met success at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

As the screenwriter, Lipes was faced with a challenge. “It needed to be scripted … and in my own mind there is an internal logic to what is happening in it, but because it is a ballet I didn’t want to put too clear of an A to B arc to it.” While the film is decidedly non-narrative, Lipes and Joost achieve real tension and release, leaving the audience with the sense they have gone along on a journey. Lipes captures New York in the rich hues West Side Story could only fabricate on a studio lot, and shooting the city on anamorphic 35mm from a helicopter, this DP was like a fat kid in Candyland, yet he never loses control. His lens respects all the formal qualities of dance, but frees the viewer from the fixed point of view of a seat in Lincoln Center, without fracturing into the schizophrenia of a music video.

Three of the five movements of the ballet were shot in abandoned New York locations that were set to be revamped. The High Line before it’s makeover as a public park, McCarren Pool, overgrown and awaiting restoration, and an abandoned building in Red Hook describe a city left to grow wild. These locations are perfectly paired with these young and sometimes mischievous dancers who give such seductive, engrossing performances that the film is deeply moving, especially to those who don’t think they like dance.

Masterful in every approach, NY Export: Opus Jazz is frankly exultant. To borrow a saying from Ken Burns, “It is the product of hard work and love, but only the love shows.”

“We didn’t know how hard it would be even though people told us,” Ms. Bar says with nonchalance. “I think it worked to our advantage to be naïve in that respect. There was a lot of learning and growing that happened because of it.”

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, unlike the Gap who reproduced Robbins’ West Side Story choreography for the 2000 Gap Khaki campaign, Opus Jazz isn’t selling anything. In fact, it is this exact depiction of New York as a non-commercial entity that makes the film so special. Showing New York as a synergism of people, a flurry of movement rather than the materialistic Mecca of Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada, it provides a much-needed antidote to consumer culture and a timely reminder that there is still a side to the city that is pure and bohemian at heart.
-Christianne Hedtke

Similarly, we aren’t so much upset when, in Ordinary People, we learn that Timothy Hutton’s brother died tragically and no one’s allowed to talk about it, as we are thrilled, intrigued. What we’d really like is to give that tough little guy a trophy, we like him so much.

The advantages of a murdered spouse are limitless (see Mel Gibson’s great bit of Yiddish-style acting in Lethal Weapon).

Similar to the sensation of watching an orphaned child keep his chin up, we are afraid that we could also lose our loved ones while, simultaneously, we long for the kind of authenticity that such a drama would bring to our lives. We could add to this list avenging the death of/harm to a child. Liam Neeson’s performance in last year’s Taken was an almost comic exploration of how much merciless violence an audience will consume in the name of not without my daughter (see also Mel Gibson, this month, in Edge of Darkness, and, while we’re on the subject of Mel Gibson, we might mention his Oscar-winning film Braveheart in which William Wallace’s father and his wife are killed, making Braveheart, an exceedingly successful film by any measure, a kind of Rosetta Stone for what I’m talking about here.)

Alcoholism, though very-often gossiped about in real life, does not slice quite so cleanly. At first glance, it seems to offer as much ready-made conflict as the gallery of dead family members above: an alcoholic is irrationally bent on destroying himself. All appeals from the people who love him are useless. There is no cure. The only way out is a true reckoning with the self, a cathartic rebirth to a humble yet joyful, day-by-day existence. But the truth is, alcoholism just doesn’t get people off like murder does.

This fact was recently on display in the film Crazy Heart, in which Jeff Bridges plays Bad Blake, a drop-his-sunglasses-in-his-own-puke-then-pick-them-up-and-shake-them-off drunk. Bad is a country singer far, far past his prime who eats his steak dinners out of Styrofoam, with plastic silverware, in a towel. The movie is so goofy and homely to begin with that I was unprepared when it revealed its deep, ugly knowledge of the life of an addict. While the film is certainly receiving praise, there is an odd tone to it. The focus is always on the performances. Bridges and his unlikely love interest, Maggie Gyllenhaal, are both nominated for Oscars but the film itself did not make the engorged list of ten nominations for best picture.

The same is true of an earlier film on the same subject, Leaving Las Vegas, for which Nicholas Cage received an Oscar while the film itself failed to receive even a nomination for best picture. Everyone knows the Oscars are just a bad pageant but they are instructive about where the middle of the road is and, in the same way that Crazy Heart is being dismissed as mere background for its incredible performances, Leaving Las Vegas was dismissed, in some cases, as pretentious trash lifted up by wonderful acting. Glenn Kenney’s 1996 video review of Leaving Las Vegas found “the film’s studied depiction of emotional and material squalor tedious,” but he agrees that “the movie is worth watching for the actors.” A.O. Scott’s NYT review of Crazy Heart feels the same. It’s “a small movie” he says “perfectly scaled to the big performance at its center.” Later, patting the film on the head while rushing to shake Jeff Bridge’s hand, Scott says “there is always room for another version of that old song about the guy who messed it all up and kept on going. Especially when that guy can play the tune as truly and as well as Mr. Bridges.”

While its fun to pretend that we’d all line up to watch Jeff Bridges or Nicholas Cage “read from the phonebook” we wouldn’t, actually. Crazy Heart and Leaving Las Vegas are well acted but so were The Door in the Floor and Knowing and nobody showed up. Something beyond the acting resonates. While movies about alcoholism can be hollow, overly-tidy, redemptive tales (28 Days, When a Man Loves a Woman) Crazy Heart, Leaving Las Vegas, The Verdict and the great 1995 movie, Georgia, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh (as close a relative to Crazy Heart as Tender Mercies is) prove that the subject is fertile ground.

A lot of ink is spilled over mafia and crime stories and their ability to expose the dark heart of “the American dream.” But nothing indicts like alcohol. Crazy Heart eases slyly into its central conflict: Bad Blake is a lovable, goodhearted man, but he is poisonous. Having taken to drinking to keep up with Bad, knowing that she is putting her young son in danger by letting him hang around, Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) describes her attempt to live with him: “it’s like living with a rattlesnake.” That’s a great line for her but it’s also a neat description of the way that alcohol can become familiar to a person but never give up any of its savage power. This is echoed in one of Bad’s songs: “whiskey has been a thorn in your side and it doesn’t forgive.” Both phrases have a twangy feel but there’s nothing pat about them. There’s nothing maudlin, or easy, about watching Bad suffer the way he does. And I don’t think people like it. So we say “What a great performance!” and dismiss the film itself as simple or maudlin. But I think this reaction betrays discomfort at what we’re looking at.

Not everyone is an alcoholic, but the feelings that can surround alcoholism are common: self-pity, denial, depression. No one likes to think of themselves in these ways, these are unattractive qualities and have, basically, no place in a multiplex, except in the direct service of a redemption tale. And if that is the case, we’d prefer that the film merely “suggest” the most gruesome details as we can “probably imagine how bad it got.” Crazy Heart skips not one gruesome detail, is fascinated by the irrational, repetitive cycle of addiction.

This goes against the fundamental principle of “relatability” that governs mainstream movies. An orphan’s situation is sad but it’s not repellent. We are very willing to imagine ourselves in that same situation and like to hope we’d be as plucky and soulful. And if our lovely wife or husband were murdered, wouldn’t our anguish be just as heartfelt and gutsy? But the anguish of an addict is shameful and unappealing. What’s worse is that there’s no concrete, outside force (no cancer, no killer) to justify the character’s anguish. Addicts don’t deserve pity because they are the cause of their own downfall. The irony of this tends not to be dramatic but disgusting. Films that are structured this way will have cyclical, punishing structures that are liable to hinge on the performer’s ability to make them compelling, because the subject matter is unpleasant. But these movies are not “simple,” or “backdrops for great performances,” they’re challenges that put good actors in tough situations which is a better “formula” for success than holy, heroic relatability.

Who’s not sworn, over the bowl of a toilet, they’d never take another drink? Who’s kept that promise? Georgia stars Jennifer Jason Leigh as the neglected little sister of a successful country-western singer (there’s a real trove of these movies, subtler, richer, crueler than the loud-mouthed Mafioso movies) whose own career is always derailed by her abuse. The film has the same casual, almost oblivious, manner that Crazy Heart has but it also has the hidden, poisonous teeth. The last scene cross-cuts between a worn-out, dead-eyed Leigh, singing at a bar and her painfully talented sister singing the same song, “No More Hard Times”, in front of a huge crowd. When a stranger at the bar sends Leigh a drink she thanks him with such easy gratitude, such indifference to the suffering that we’ve seen drinking cause her. It describes perfectly the quiet but incredible force of alcohol.

Crazy Heart’s conclusion is much sweeter. You could say that Bad is redeemed. But there’s a relationship between the endings of Crazy Heart and Werner Herzog’s goof-ball addition to the alcoholic-redeemed genre, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans, starring the above-mentioned Nicholas Cage. At the end of that movie, everything has gone mysteriously right for the Bad Lieutenant, but not from any action he’s taken. It seems a fickle god has decided to spare the rudderless Cage his life and satisfy his every desire. But we begin to wonder if this is really god’s mercy or some cruel punishment. If to live Cage’s cyclical, irrational and hopeless life is a worse punishment.

Otis “Bad” Blake is as surprised as anyone to find, at the end of the film, that he is a success, that the manager and the protégé he thought were his enemies are his friends and that his life in not finished but has, in a way, just begun. He even utters that pious mantra “one day at time.” Bad knows the pain of a hopeless life and his amazement and reverence for that phrase, the self-confidence and humility that it symbolizes, are instructive and uncommon to find in a movie. –Micah Bloomberg

Sadly, the critically-condemned Fun with Dick and Jane was released the same year as Rabbit and perhaps usurped the more appropriate title, but here it is in full, Rabbit:

Rabbit is a 21st century play on Dick and Jane, the trusty baby boomer era characters from post-war reading primers. Wrake subverts the innocent-enough act of learning to read into a fable about the repercussions of our society’s humanistic approach to consumption and greed, and our proclivity for capitalizing on death. Using Dick and Jane cut-outs makes for fun and interesting visuals that pay homage to Lichtenstein, Richard Prince, Warhol, pulp fiction, and pop art of the classic and the digital varieties, but they also provide a glaring generational context. Since Dick and Jane are baby boomers, Wrake may be condemning our parent generation for the exploitation of our animals and natural resources, a generation that accelerated the tradition of turning indiscriminate killing into wealth. Dick and Jane see the world in labeled objects for their use and kill accordingly, but Wrake draws the scenario back to the present day by tying in videogame-like sensibilities using archetypes, jewels, ink, feathers.

If this political exegesis of a harmless animation is a bit too caustic for your tastes, the violence from these cherubic tykes is pretty funny in its brutality, and Wrake takes full advantage of the animated format, achieving omniscient “camerawork” and apocalyptic skies that would have required animation anyhow if this was a live action film. Well done, Run Wrake. —Christianne Hedtke