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Mission: Impossible

Stephen Snart — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:02:11 GMT

The Action Movie – As Mission: Impossible marked Tom Cruise’s first movie as producer and was created at the height of his popularity, having just come off three $100 million movies in a row, one would expect his personality to have commandeered the production. If you look at the surface of Mission: Impossible it may be tempting to write it off as a star vanity project, but if you look deeper you can see just how much of the film is resolutely a Brian De Palma production.

Thief

Jenny Jediny — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:27:48 GMT

The Action Movie – Bookended by bursts of adrenaline – the first, a nearly silent Melville-inspired jewel heist, and the second a vengeful massacre – the greater part of Thief is conversation. Fraught with hope for a better future, these words are later replaced with furious acceptance for what cannot be.

The Lost Son of Havana

Victoria Large — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:39:50 GMT

IFFB coverage – The Lost Son of Havana, which chronicles retired Red Sox pitching star and Cuban exile Luis Tiant’s emotional return to his native country after a forty-six year absence, was easily one of IFFB’s big ticket films, with queues forming early and snaking around the block prior to every screening. It was also the only time at this year’s festival that the experience of attending a screening has threatened to overwhelm my recollections of the film itself.

Do or Die

David Carter — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:43:02 GMT

The Action Movie – This equation between female nudity and strength – not sex – is a key theme of the Sidaris/Speir series of films. Do or Die shows Sidaris making the first moves towards a more pure sexploitation style with the inclusion of Pandora Peaks, however, and later entries into his canon will see a lessened focus on female empowerment in favor of comedy and titillation.

The Room

Rumsey Taylor — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:37:13 GMT

The aftermath of seeing Tommy Wiseau’s curious masterpiece with a near-capacity audience is one strewn in a mess of plastic spoons, trampled rose petals, and hangovers.

Previously / Tom’s thoughts

Wizard People, Dear Reader

Rumsey Taylor — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:24:24 GMT

That Brad Neely’s uncannily witty, hilarious bastardization of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is in every qualitative measure superior to the film proper is a testament to the potential of viral art. Read more here, watching the opening scene here, and download the audio here.

Scaramouche

Matt Bailey — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:00:57 GMT

The Action Movie – As in the best of all swashbuckling action films from the era of Douglas Fairbanks to the era of Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp, Scaramouche hops along from scene to scene, providing just enough characterization for us to root for the hero and to hiss the villain, intermingling daring physical feats with a touch of romance and humor, and rooting the plot in history without turning the film into a tedious history lesson.

Prom Night in Mississippi

Victoria Large — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:29:35 GMT

IFFB coverage – The immediately stunning thing about director Paul Saltzman’s documentary Prom Night in Mississippi, a chronicle of Charleston High School’s first interracial prom, is that the events in the film take place last year. While Charleston High School itself was integrated in 1970 (lagging behind Brown v. Board of Education by more than a decade and a half), separate “black” and “white” proms persisted at the school into the twenty-first century. Saltzman’s story picks up with the Charleston High School students accepting an offer from Morgan Freeman, a Charleston resident, to fund the 2008 prom if, and only if, it is integrated.

Death Race 2000

Katherine Follett — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:41:04 GMT

The Action Movie – Though it does manage to comment on American culture, Death Race 2000 is a parade of awesome from beginning to end. Cars with knives on the grille! Nazi chicks in naked catfights! Splosions! Sly Stallone and David Carradine in a punch-up! Gratuitous boobs! It’s a perfectly shameless feast for the id, without sacrificing its sly sense of humor.

Highlander

Victoria Large — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 21:07:30 GMT

The Action Movie – When Clancy Brown, as our towering, throaty, vile-even-by-villain-standards antagonist, Kurgan, careens around the Big Apple, howling and shouting and generally reveling in his own evilness while Queen raucously covers “New York, New York,” it is, most assuredly, awesome.

Guns

David Carter — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:36:28 GMT

The Action Movie – Sidaris’ women are neither damsels-in-distress dependent on men to rescue them nor femme fatales preying on men through their sexual charms. Their portrayal as sex objects is only a ruse used to hide their true strength, a quality depicted as neither feminine nor masculine.

Voices from El-Sayed

Leo Goldsmith — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:27:16 GMT

Shots of a wide plain of dust and small clusters of single-level homes along unpaved roads accompany the sounds of distant children and animals, a light wind resonating in the microphone. The first images of El-Sayed suggest not a place of controversy in a divided nation, but one of stillness and quiet. Voices from El-Sayed begins with these sights and sounds of the village, while onscreen text reveals that this town is home to what is purportedly the largest community of deaf people in the world. One of many “Unrecognized Villages” in the Negev Desert – home to roughly half of the 150,000 Bedouins in Israel – El-Sayed is deemed illegal by the Israeli government, and is therefore cut off from the country’s electrical grid, water main, and refuse collection.

The Running Man

Adam Balz — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:13:59 GMT

The Action Movie – In fact, for all its belabored, Reagan-era abstractions, there is one aspect of The Running Man that has become oddly yet increasingly relevant, and what, in my mind, makes Glaser’s film especially noteworthy: its commentary on the inherent dominance of television.

Tracy the Outlaw

Cullen Gallagher — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:30:13 GMT

Tracy the Outlaw is a silent Western from 1928. Based on a true story, the film follows Harry Tracy as bad luck and circumstance change him from a run-of-the-mill cowpoke to a feared outlaw. An independent production by Foto Art Productions, Tracy the Outlaw doesn’t look like most movies we remember from that same year — it neither has the artistic touches of Victor Sjostrom’s The Wind, the style of The Docks of New York, or any of the technical or narrative polish that was the Hollywood standard by that time. 10 years behind the times, it feels like sometime made in the mid-teens, when features were just getting established and filmmakers were still feeling their way around the format. And that’s exactly why Tracy the Outlaw is important: Hollywood isn’t everything, and outside of it were independent producers and distributors, making raw, unkempt, flawed, and wonderful movies. Its obtuseness is its charm — it doesn’t abide by the rules that were standard. The action sequences follow their own rhythm, their own editing patterns. And its characters don’t always act like they would in a Hollywood production. The ending of Tracy the Outlaw is unexpectedly bleak, making no compromises with its characters or their actions.

The General

Timothy Sun — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:56:33 GMT

The Action Movie – The idea of a chase film involving trains may seem counterintuitive—trains travel on a predetermined path, after all. It’s a measure of Keaton’s genius that he turns this setup into a hilarious nail-biter. Tracks are switched, boxcars are set on fire, all manner of obstructions are thrown in the trains’ path, cannons are fired, even firewood for the engine is used for laughs. In a stunt that never fails to simultaneously generate laughter, gasps and applause, Keaton climbs onto the front of his train with a giant wooden rail tie and, at just the right moment, throws it down onto another rail tie left as an obstruction on the track, knocking both out of the way of his train. Mistimed, the stunt couldíve been disastrous. As it is, it’s all in another day’s work for Keaton’s matter-of-fact virtuosity.

First Blood

Cullen Gallagher — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:10:35 GMT

The Action Movie – Thoreau wrote that his mission was to “reduce [life] to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world.” Rambo discovered not only the meanness of life, but particularly of people. And like Thoreau before him, he wanted to “publish” his findings—but with a very un-Thoreauvian vengeance. Instead of a pen, Rambo uses a very large machine gun.

Favorites: The Action Movie

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 04:24:57 GMT

Depending on your point of view, the action movie is either (or both) the zenith or the nadir of cinema. To many, it exemplifies the spectacular excesses of the movies in general, presenting the most bloated, corruptive, and superficial of films, cynically designed for the delectation of that preeminent demographic: the teenage boy. But at the same time, it is a genre that pushes the margins of what is possible with the cinematic apparatus, even as it reaches back to the very basis of the movies: movement.

This feature christens a series of semi-annual canonizations of particular cinematic genres, movements, themes, filmmakers, and geographies. These are entitled _Favorites, and are intended – much like our annual celebration of the horror genre, 31 Days of Horror – to be construed as broad yet selective overviews, and will be comprised of reviews published in a random order over the course of a month_.

Helen

Victoria Large — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:22:15 GMT

IFFB coverage – It’s a shame to see such great-looking film descend into such torpor, and one hopes that Lawlor and Molloy will ease up on the controls in their next outing and let their story breath. I wouldn’t be surprised in a few years if filmmakers have found their groove, and Helen comes to be viewed simply as an early experiment that didn’t quite click.

Escape from New York

Katherine Follett — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:58:22 GMT

The word I thought of when finishing this film was “streamlined.” In comparison to today’s action films, the premise is simple (“Save the president.”); the plot moves relentlessly with no distractions, flashbacks, exposition, or unnecessary complications; and the ending is a blissfully concise climax. When Snake, our taciturn hero (Kurt Russel) makes it to his finish line as the time runs out, there’s none of the usual tiresome flickering-numbers, shaking-camera, down-to-the-microsecond nonsense. Instead, he’s relieved of his suicide device, takes a breath, and then checks the timer. Two seconds to spare. TWO SECONDS! He should have picked up a sandwich or something.

Not that it spares the badassery. We get only tantalizing hints of Snake’s criminal history through an eyepatch, a cobra tattoo emerging from his waistband, and a few muttered words about “Leningrad” (remember when the cold war seemed like an inevitable part of the future?). Isaac Hayes is perfect as the “Duke of New York,” driving around in a sweet Caddy outfitted with multiple chandeliers. Harry Dean Stanton is irreplaceable as Brain, the two-timing con man. And though the film was done on a relative shoestring, the choice to film in an actual bombed-out city (East St. Louis) makes for a chillingly convincing post-apocalyptic hellscape. The set pieces, too, are nearly eerie in their resourcefulness. The first thing Snake stumbles on is a group of convicts, many in drag, others playing junk instruments, putting on a musical. He’s put in the ring for a boxing match in Grand Central Station with what looks like an old-school circus strongman. The Duke’s first mate, a fey, David-Bowie type, confronts the police with stubs of the president’s severed fingers. With no explanation of who he is and whose fingers he has, he simply drawls, “You touch me, he dies. You’re not in the air in thirty seconds, he dies. You come back in, he dies. Twenty seconds. Nineteen.” The entire film is as sleek and weird and accomplished.

At the end of the movie, Snake returns to the police commissioner, who he’d promised to kill at the beginning of the film. “You going to kill me?” the commissioner asks. “Nah. I’m too tired,” Russel says. That’s right, Snake. You take a motherfucking NAP. Well deserved.

I Knew It Was You

Victoria Large — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:10:41 GMT

IFFB coverage – The need for a documentary like this one, which was directed by Richard Shepard and features interviews with John Cazale’s family as well as those who worked with him and those he inspired, is quickly apparent. Cazale did much of his work on the stage and only appeared in five features before his untimely death in 1978, but as cinematic CVs go, his is impeccable. But the point of the film is not simply that Cazale was a part of a slew great films: it is emphasizes that Cazale’s presence was an integral component of what made those films great.