The Terrors of Roosevelt Island

Leaky architecture is the villain in “Dark Water,” but the thing that really freaked me out was a little monster named Cecilia (Ariel Gade). Barely old enough to read New York magazine, she’s already a full-fledged Manhattan real-estate snob. Are the parents to blame?After all, mom (Jennifer Connelly as Dahlia) is a pill-popping depressive, dad (Dougray Scott as Kyle) is a bitter jerk, and both are baring fangs in an acrimonious divorce. All of which is enough to give a girl an attitude, but the thing that really seems to piss off Cecilia is dad’s relocation to Jersey City and mom’s inability to afford a bright, spacious two-bedroom in Manhattan.“This isn’t really the city,” Cecilia snaps as mom checks out the listings on Roosevelt Island. “The lobby is yucky,” she moans to their broker (John C. Reilly). So it is, but try and get a grip. The idea here is to find a decent two-bedroom in New York for under a grand, right? I suggest you talk to your broker about that up-and-coming neighborhood south of TriBeCa known as “rural Pennsylvania.”While Dahlia listens to the broker extol the virtues of the so-called “two bedroom” (you’ve got to think in terms of square footage), Cecilia, totally over it, wanders off into the haunted elevator. Much panicked running amok ensues until the uppity munchkin is discovered blissing out on the roof, clutching a Hello Kitty backpack someone left behind. Someone like, say, the ghost of a murdered little girl! Creepy! Who’s exactly the same age as Cecilia! Spooky! And who roams the shabby construction on Roosevelt Island motivated by an implacably evil desire: She wants her mommy.“Dark Water” dribbles, gurgles, gushes stupidity. Where to begin? Let’s start at the source. This lousy excuse for a summer fright flick remakes a marginally better film by Hideo Nakata, director of “Ringu” and chief popularizer of the J-horror subgenre. Ever since the success of “The Ring,” Hollywood’s been hell-bent on repackaging these unnerving, highly profitable ghost stories. They add movie stars, but subtract what’s most compelling in the originals: meticulous mise-en-scene, diabolical sound design, and a creeping sense of dread.Director Walter Salles couldn’t fall on good filmmaking if you pushed him. Flush with the success of “The Motorcycle Diaries,” his definitively reductive, bubble-headed biopic of Che Guevara, he takes a mighty step hackward in his Hollywood debut. He’s incapable of creating tension within a shot or in sequence, and relies instead on sonic bombast to trick up the scares. He dares the audience not to roll their eyes as Dahlia lingers at the medicine-cabinet mirror. What’s going to pop into the background when Dahlia closes it? People walking out of the theater. If the movie had a piano, this guy would throw cats on it.“Dark Water” is “atmospheric,” meaning everything is done up in shades of mildew. Originally from Seattle, Dahlia seems to have brought the weather with her to New York; the movie is soggier than “Titanic.” Indeed, a spreading patch of wet rot is the central horror of the plot. This sinister stain, which seeps in from the vacant unit above, is a medium for ghostly whispers in the night and corny point-of-view shots. Together with overflowing toilets and the occasional exploding faucet, this moist malevolence constitutes the entire supernatural arsenal of our idiot entity – the least threatening cinematic spook since Whoopi Goldberg channeled Patrick Swayze. Forget the exorcist – call a plumber.Ms. Connelly’s depressed stupor suggests she spent the production of “Dark Water” rehearsing for an upcoming role as a heroin junkie. The only explanation for Ms. Gade’s participation is that Dakota Fanning was otherwise engaged. As for Tim Roth, co-starring as lawyer/love interest Jeff Platzer, he pretends he’s involved in a real movie. You’ll be under no such illusions.***Wetness in “Saraband” mists the eyes of Marianne (Liv Ullmann). A poised, handsome woman with an aspect of deep knowing and emotional bruises, she opens the film’s prologue seated before a table strewn with the photographs of her life. She touches the images and couples her gaze to ours, brushing aside the fourth wall and compelling us into her confidence. A strange feeling has lately come over her: the urge to call on Johan (Erland Josephson), her ex-husband. The weird impulse is easily explained. Marianne and Johan have been summoned for a sequel.“Saraband” reunites the lead characters from the 1973 film “Scenes From a Marriage.” Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman – but stop: how extraordinary to write those words! More than two decades have passed since a new Bergman film opened in a New York cinema. While the octogenarian master has continued to write movies and direct them for European television, he has been absent from the American art house for a generation.His return is to some extent inadvertent. “Saraband,” shot on high-definition video, was produced for the small screen. Over Mr. Bergman’s initial objections, it was digitally projected at last year’s New York Film Festival. Now it is being released by Sony Pictures Classics at Film Forum.Orchestrated in 10 movements with a prologue and epilogue, the film plays anew that old Bergman tune: Walpurgisnacht engulfs the haute bourgeoisie. Psyches shall pressurize and crack, emotions roil with cruelty and shame. All existence – or at least this remote nook of Swedish countryside – will writhe in hatred, sorrow, and terrible truth. Communication is recrimination, and tends to sound like this: “There’s a healthy dose of hatefulness in your general tone of mushiness.”Chapter one, in which Marianne pays a visit to Johan and they catch up on their lives, is filmed as a harmony in blood shades of red: the seeds of violence. In chapter two, Marianne witnesses the meltdown of Karin (Julia Dufvenius), Johan’s granddaughter. She is a cellist, taking lessons from her father, Henrik (Borje Ahlstedt). He is holding her back; she is unnaturally devoted. Both are haunted by the death of Anna, mother and wife, whose image returns again and again to reproach the players with silence and void.The movie is a series of escalating confrontations among these four, an eruption of scalding, scathing emotionalism. The acting is flabbergasting, unimpeachable, superhumanly intense. Mr. Bergman titles one chapter simply “Bach”; his control of the material, its rhythms and tones, rivals the supreme assurance of that master. So why, in proximity to such volcanic psychodrama, such magisterial moviemaking, did my temperature barely flutter?“With Bergman,” film critic Patricia Patterson once wrote, “there’s so much assertion: He’s giving you truth about how men and women relate. But he doesn’t deliver; he’s insincere and false in that he gives you a pat, stock situation that he’s already worked through, one that had worked for him. Coercive situations built up from banal melodrama … I think it’s crap.”Well, I don’t think “Saraband” is crap, but Ms. Patterson (writing in 1977) sniffed out my problem with the movie: its air of predetermination, the way it puts the material (and the audience) through their paces. The movie is powerful but also preposterous; fastidious but facile; excoriating and ridiculous. I exited the film slightly dazed, but in no way enlightened. Nevertheless, “Saraband” is a film to be reckoned with. “A new Bergman film” – is it churlish to complain? The phrase will never be heard again.WHAT TO SEE THIS WEEKTwo by Jean-Luc Godard (MoMA) A pair of cine-essay rarities from late-phase Godard. In “Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject),” the master muses with Anne-Marie Mieville, his domestic and artistic partner. “The Old Place” in question is MoMA itself. Commissioned by the museum, this mind-boggling montage ruminates on 20th-century art.“Last Days” (Museum of the Moving Image) Gus Van Sant’s meditation on the last days of Kurt Cobain (Michael Pitt as “Blake”) extends and deepens the experimental mode of “Gerry” and “Elephant.” The movie opens in August, but enterprising cinephiles might want to get a jump on a beautiful enigma that rewards multiple viewings.The first hour of “War of the Worlds” (general release) Everything else sucks.

The Terrors of Roosevelt Island

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