“Well, let’s just say it takes place in the imagination, and French people seem to like it.”—Christopher Doyle
… and so do I. At first, I was convinced that it was merely a retread of Wong’s earlier films (what Wong film isn’t a retread of earlier Wong films?), but in fact the issues of nostalgia, temporality, Orientalism, and good old-fashioned love are even more complex here than they are in In the Mood for Love. And of course it’s totally gorgeous, well-acted, and even rather funny.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Mei Ah DVD
30 Apr 2005 1:58 PM | Submit Comment
It has always been of some intrigue to me, the relationship between an actor’s celebrity and their ability to convincingly execute their craft. A recent example (on this side of the pond, at least) were the tabloid revelations concerning Nicole Kidman and Jude Law during the filming of Cold Mountain. Upon watching that film, I couldn’t help but wonder what real passions lay behind the physical contact of their characters on-screen because of the extensive tabloid coverage highlighting an alleged “affair”. Such wonder inevitably shifted my focus away from what was actually going on and thus rendered any artistic craft on behalf of Ms. Kidman or Mr Law redundant. I dare say the same will happen when I watch the remake of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, what with the furore surrounding Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and any relationship that existed betwixt the two.
Sean Penn doesn’t do tabloid — but he does do political, and was an outspoken (celebrity) critic of the recent Allied military excursions in Iraq. That criticism included a staunch defence of the United Nations, the organisation in which The Interpreter is based, and I couldn’t help but feel distracted by Penn’s political persuasions throughout the film.
Where the UN is concerned, the film’s message is somewhat undecided: it can’t seem to choose between the way of the gun or the wordplay of diplomacy — the art of translation, in this case, possibly mightier than the sword. Penn’s involvement simply adds to the flip-flopping politick from which The Interpreter suffers, and leads me to suggest it is not the business of film — this film, at least — to discuss the merits of the UN as an effective international peace-keeping organisation or otherwise. (Political thrillers, on the other hand, are precisely the business of film: see, for example, The Manchurian Candidate.)
Oh, and though the film’s advertising will tell you Kidman and Penn are the stars of this film, they are wrong: the real star is the UN building itself. I’ve never been to New York but when I do make it, Wallace K. Harrison’s exquisite building will be high up on my list of places to visit.
by Rich Watts | Source: 35mm print
28 Apr 2005 9:03 AM | Submit Comment
I have spent a considerable amount of time in and around university departments. In observing the individuals that frequent such environments, not once have I seen a professor or otherwise do anything that might require their pulse to rise above 60 beats per minute. Quite who thought that a devilishly handsome and clearly unstable archaeologist/academic would make for an all-out action hero, then, was obviously deluded. Still, their delusion was our gain, and I for one can’t wait to see a 60-odd year old Harrison Ford reprise his squash-buckling role for a fourth installment.
by Rich Watts | Source: UK terrestrial TV
28 Apr 2005 8:24 AM | Submit Comment
Keanu Reeves has always sucked — but it’s never really mattered because there have always been plenty of other things on-screen to make up for it. In this case, the job is done by the delightfully subversive and humourous sight of a bank robber wearing a Richard Nixon mask shouting “I’m not a crook” as he runs out of his latest heist. That, and one of the best foot chases this viewer can remember.
by Rich Watts | Source: UK terrestrial TV
28 Apr 2005 8:20 AM | Submit Comment
“… pour ma chèvre!”
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: 16mm Print
27 Apr 2005 11:25 PM | Submit Comment
Here is another Frampton film, consisting of sequences from early Irish wake films and of rigorously indexed, computer-typewritten impressions of his maternal grandmother. Like much of Frampton’s work, it combines a passion for organization with a deeply subjective undercurrent. Here, the effect is quite moving, especially with the inclusion of the old Irish folk song — possibly that which played at Frampton’s grandmother’s wedding — with the pipes that sound like a duck quacking.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: 16mm Print
26 Apr 2005 12:01 AM | Submit Comment
Hollis Frampton is, in my opinion, a terribly undervalued filmmaker. This is not to say that his films are unappreciated by film scholars, but rather that one is more likely to have read about his films than to have seen them. Zorn’s Lemma, in particular, is a film much written about but seldom seen. I won’t expend the effort to describe this film here because so many others have done so (notably P. Adams Sitney), but suffice it to say that the film, like so much of Frampton’s work, is about language. And while it is formally schematic in the extreme, it nonetheless offers a simple gesture toward the sublime, the quotidian, and the personal (and to New York City). So, on the one hand, his films are never quite as abusive as Sharits’, but nor are they so humorlessly mystical as Brakhage’s. Seek them out and watch them.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: 16mm Print
25 Apr 2005 11:52 PM | Submit Comment
Kenneth Anger’s film features a costumed midget, some ejaculatory waterworks, and a little Vivaldi. It’s as visually sumptuous, technically impressive, and utterly spellbinding an avant-garde film as one is likely to see, locating Anger in the genealogy of Michael Powell and Josef von Sternberg.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: 16mm Print
25 Apr 2005 11:35 PM | Submit Comment
The Days is Wang Xiaoshuai’s sedate, beautifully banal portrait of a painter and his girlfriend, their faltering relationship, meandering lives, and post-Tiananmen malaise. A member of the provisionally labeled “Sixth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers, Wang approaches his subjects with a kind of kitchen sink realism, favoring a placid, unhurried, and unadorned view of urban Beijing over the vast tapestries and allegorical gestures of the previous generation of filmmakers. Perhaps this more obliquely political depiction of life in modern China “as it really is” is the reason that the film has been (and perhaps still is) forbidden in the People’s Republic of China (though it has apparently been widely available through the bootleg DVD and VCD market).
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: VCD?
23 Apr 2005 2:19 PM | Submit Comment
Although I am a passionate defender of almost anything the Coen Brothers do, a long overdue revisit of the original Ealing production of The Ladykillers reveals the Coens’ remake to be all but totally irrelevant. Breathlessly economical in its pacing and character sketches, brilliantly acted, and charmingly, mordantly funny, MacKendrick’s film is so light on its feet that even the slapstick seems subtle and witty. In spite of the mutual affinity for zaniness, the film seems particularly unsuitable to the Coen Brothers’ verbose and overdetermined style. (The remake has at least one inspired quality, however: the analogy it establishes between post-WWII Britain and the post-Civil Rights Era American South, and between the resilient, underestimated matriarchs that have borne witness to these eras.) Finally, the original film remains untouchable. It is a genuine classic, though this is far too hackneyed a label to be truly adequate.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Anchor Bay Entertainment DVD
23 Apr 2005 2:11 PM | Submit Comment
Exactly how much better than this is it possible for a film to be?
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Columbia Pictures DVD
23 Apr 2005 1:48 PM | Comments (1)
Having become obsessed with Arrested Development during its second season (it is the only television program I make an effort to watch), watching the first was in order after the underwhelming but nonetheless better-than-anything-else-on-television season finale. Its innovation and supreme wit is evident in any given minute of footage, I’m convinced: the hand-held camerawork, the incessant comedy, the nonjudgmental narration—its merits are numerous. Ron Howard’s narration, specifically, encapsulates each episode, but I realize now there is also a discreet consistency that connects every episode: George Michael’s crush on his cousin Maeby, Tobias’ collection of cut-off shorts, or Kitty’s constant flashing of her asymmetrical breasts. The Bluth’s egotisim is the primary exploitation; most of them are spoiled by the family’s dwindling wealth, and others trapped by unattainable ideals (“I am the magician! He is the assistant!”). But there is also an air of sensitivity, concerning a family’s recuperation in the aftermath of their greatest hardship. This dynamic, along with the numerous connections the Bluths find they have with Saddam Hussein, certainly enables this to be the most compelling, subversively political show available on television. (At least, it’s the best show I watch.) Here’s to a third season.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Fox DVD
22 Apr 2005 1:30 PM | Submit Comment
Zombie horror translates so well into comedy. As exhibited in the sloth Shaun and his roommate Ed incur each morning, lazy, uninspired humans share few differences with the undead. This characteristic is intact in every zombie film I have seen, and is in this case the source for more humor than usual. Romero is the proprietor of morbid, subversive comedy; Shaun of the Dead isn’t a rival in this regard, but an endeared and comedic homage.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Rogue Pictures DVD
22 Apr 2005 12:56 PM | Comments (1)
If you can make it through the first hour of this picture (and it is quite an effort), there are a few minutes of decent sci-fi here, but only a few. The story is that of a six person team sent to investigate Mars. They crash land and spend the rest of the movie bickering about how to survive. The tale only picks up when three of the team is more or less told to leave the spacecraft and try their luck on the barren planet. What they discover in an ancient, and seemingly human-carved cave is mildly engaging, and ending the film with a trio of survivors attempting to eek out an existence on the red planet is sufficiently open-ended. But a few moments of mediocre entertainment does not make up for over an hour of drivel.
What is most astonishing about the film is that anyone, at any point during its production, thought they had a winner on their hands. The acting is horrendous, with only Joaquim de Almeida (Bucho in Desperado) and Maria de Medeiros (she was Bruce Willis’s woman in Pulp Fiction) offering anything resembling competent performances. The rest of the cast, even Vincent Gallo, who can be good at times, plods through horribly pretentious and repetitive dialogue, injecting every scene with emotionless recitations of why they are all going to die, and failing at every turn to instill in their respective characters anything resembling a personality.
Some might attempt to defend the film based on a bizarre sense that boring pictures filled with philosophically naive blather are worthwhile so long as they are pretty. And I must admit that some of the Mars surface sequences are nice to look at. But the moment anyone opens his or her mouth to utter a line from this trite screenplay, all aesthetic pleasure is lost.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Dej Productions DVD
21 Apr 2005 12:38 AM | Submit Comment
The context of current entertainment affairs made these a very uncomfortable two hours for these eyes to endure. A successful, male artist with porcelain features enjoys the company of a group of young boys, introducing them to his fantasy world — called “Neverland” — in which they can all escape the responsibilities and difficulties of the ‘real world’ and courts some controversy over the status of his ‘relationships’ as a result.
The similarity to Michael Jackson’s so-called “trial of the century” is perhaps a tenuous one, especially since the film was made in 2004, but so little did Finding Neverland move me otherwise that the comparison made in my mind at the start of the film only grew as each minute moved by.
by Rich Watts | Source: Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD
18 Apr 2005 5:48 PM | Submit Comment
Such utter guff as this, whose plot is so threadbare as to leave Johnny Depp standing naked, does nothing but line Steven King’s pockets with more money—the film being based on his short story of the same title. Truth is, I find the local train timetables less predictable than this rubbish—and when a film relies on one obvious plot-twist to justify its existence, you know everyone involved just shouldn’t have bothered.
by Rich Watts | Source: Columbia Tri-Star Home Video DVD
18 Apr 2005 5:44 PM | Comments (1)
Despite my high hopes, I’m afraid I’m going to have to march along with the consensus on this one: Eros is an uneven and — given the talent involved — disappointing picture. Wong Kar-Wai’s piece may not be a stretch for its director, but is nevertheless an absorbing tale of the unrequited love between a tailor and a courtesan. Things swiftly go downhill from there, with Steven Soderbergh delivering an amusing but unsubstantial bit starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Alan Arkin. Sadly, Michelangelo Antonioni, whose previous work I am a great admirer of, delivers the worst of the bunch; throughout it, I felt as though I was witnessing one of the old man’s wet dreams.
by Beth Gilligan | Source: 35mm print
17 Apr 2005 8:23 PM | Submit Comment
Clive Owen is, as always, fantastic, wiping the floor particularly clean with Jude Law and Julia Roberts, but yeesh, what a bunch of phony baloney.
by Matt Bailey | Source: Sony Pictures DVD
16 Apr 2005 8:16 PM | Submit Comment
This World War II zombie picture tells the story of three Americans who crash land on a desolate Caribbean island (basically Haiti), meet a mysterious Austrian doctor with an affinity for voodoo culture, and are systematically set upon by the doctor’s zombie hordes. With a running time of less than seventy minutes, there isn’t much in the way of character development, and aside from Mantan Moreland as Jeff the doting servant, the players are universally bland.
What makes the picture fun, though, is its unique presentation of the zombies themselves. Far from the brain-munching, lurching undead we all know and love, the creatures in this picture are nothing more than helpless victims of hypnotism. As a result, they display a number of zombie traits largely unseen in other flicks. To wit, the zombies here (a) Cast no reflection in mirrors (actually, I don’t know how this connects to hypnotism, but there it is), (b) Eat a sit-down dinner every day, (c) Are controlled by the clapping of hands, (d) Are little more than wartime puppets employed to gather sensitive Panama Canal Zone information from captured American pilots, and (e) Are not actually dead. Worth watching more for its pre-Pearl Harbor representation of American wartime concerns (the fear of the enemy destroying the Panama Canal was at the top of the American’s list of worries) than for its story, King of the Zombies is nevertheless an intriguing chapter in the history of zombie horror.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Platinum Disc Corporation DVD
16 Apr 2005 12:59 PM | Submit Comment
In the vein of Buñuel, Lucrecia Martel’s debut feature is a brilliant study of the Argentina’s decadent bourgeoisie. The movie grabbed me at its opening scene: as storm clouds gather above, wine glasses clink and the camera languishes on the rotting, obese flesh of the past-their-prime adults drunkenly stumbling around a swimming pool. All of a sudden, a woman falls on broken glass, but almost everyone around her is too sozzled to do anything about it. This may sound like a cliché, but the way Martel composes her frames and uses sound (noises such as gunshots and dogs barking are oftentimes heard but not seen) to scratch away at two families’ veneer makes it more than worth watching. Now I can’t wait for the upcoming release of The Holy Girl.
by Beth Gilligan | Source: Home Vision Entertainment DVD
15 Apr 2005 3:53 PM | Submit Comment
I’ve seen this film quite a few times over the years and have found in it plenty of support for the usual readings. Sometimes it’s a slightly campy sci-fi horror, sometimes a Freudian melodrama (“With all due respect to Oedipus …”), sometimes a sadistic fantasy about repressing female sexuality. But what struck me on this most recent viewing is how genuinely touching the film is. In particular, the film’s emphasis on Jessica Tandy’s brilliant performance (which I always liked but never quite understood) reveals the sensitivity and even humanism with which the film approaches its characters. Tandy’s Lydia is the exact opposite of Hitchcock’s usual bitchy, Oedipal mother-figures. Indeed, she is simply lonely, uncertain, and deeply frightened at losing her son’s affection. Melanie Daniels’ concurrent need for mothering seems to me a little overdetermined in this context, but it nonetheless balances the film’s emotional center, offering something that is at least as interesting as the perversity, reactionary sexual politics, or flat-out mysogyny more often perceived in the film. It is strange that our interest in cataloguing Hitchcock’s perversions so often blinds us to a more generous reading of his work.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: 16mm Print
15 Apr 2005 1:21 PM | Comments (1)
Martin Arnold’s 1993 film remixes a banal scene from To Kill a Mockingbird in which Gregory Peck dolefully sends his children off to school after a wholesome breakfast. Frame-by-frame, the scene is diced up and deconstructed so that the characters repeat syllables and slight gestures in stuttering, robotic rhythms. The result is a bizarre, hilarious, and rather toe-tapping meditation on the apparatus of the movies and the minutiae it makes available to us; its effect is that of watching our favorite scene from our favorite movie over and over again until the figures onscreen become automatons whose every gesture becomes circumscribed by our watching it.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Revoir VHS
13 Apr 2005 11:53 AM | Submit Comment
Michael Snow’s 45-minute zoom becomes more fascinating (and funnier) with each viewing. With puns, in-jokes, interjections of narrative, visual and aural glissandi, and guest appearances by Hollis Frampton and Amy Taubin, the film is neither as taxing nor as arty-farty as most written descriptions might lead you to believe. It is a rich and inviting formal cinematic experiment, fully deserving its place of importance in film history.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: 16mm Print
12 Apr 2005 11:28 AM | Submit Comment
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Universal DVD
12 Apr 2005 9:29 AM | Submit Comment
The evolutions of Gavin Banek, a partnered Wall Street lawyer, and Doyle Gipson, a father seeking to retain partial custody of his children, ripple greatly after they are components of a minor rush-hour traffic accident. I am selective with “evolutions”; both characters evolve after the accident, vying for conceit and manipulation before the experience molds both into tolerant and ethical men at the film’s end. Changing Lanes, an engaging film, apparently, because it made me ignore my responsibilities on a Sunday afternoon, is the stuff of so many other films that hing upon contrived ethical circumstances.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Cable Television
10 Apr 2005 11:14 PM | Submit Comment
Though it is liberally inspired by Hitchcock’s more prominent works and based upon a better film, 12 Monkeys is still among the densest, uncompromising science-fiction films to have emerged from Hollywood—a party in which Gilliam’s own Brazil is a benchmark.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Cable Television
10 Apr 2005 11:04 PM | Submit Comment
Seeing this so early in my life not only qualified it as a favorite, but contributed to my intense aversion to marshmallows.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Cable Television
10 Apr 2005 10:56 PM | Submit Comment
Yo, dog. Keepin’ it real, dog? Totally honest? It was just aiight for me.
by Matt Bailey | Source: New Line DVD
10 Apr 2005 10:04 PM | Submit Comment
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Fox Home Entertainment DVD
10 Apr 2005 7:32 PM | Submit Comment
Excellent Hitchcock murder mystery, one of my new favorites from the master, tells of a man (Richard Todd) unwittingly roped into a murder, and the young woman (Jane Wyman) inveigled into helping him escape capture. At the center of the affair is Marlene Dietrich, the cold, calculating star of stage and song who views people as nothing more than her playthings, and Michael Wilding as the astute detective ‘Ordinary’ Smith. The well-wrought plot, focused on the efforts of Wyman’s Eve Gill to penetrate the secret world of Dietrich’s Charlotte Inwood and procure evidence to exonerate Todd, is enhanced by Alastair Sim’s Commodore Gill, father to Eve, erstwhile smuggler of Brandy, current resident of a dockside shack, and a man who views life as little more than a whimsical farce. The humor inserted into the story by Sim, and to a lesser degree by his oblivious wife, turn this rather serious crime drama into an unpredictable black comedy.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Warner Bros. DVD
10 Apr 2005 7:25 PM | Submit Comment
There is a central conceit within Lars von Trier’s second film subscribing to the ‘Dogma 95’ manifesto, and it’s little to do with the production values of the movie. The group of individuals pretending to act like “spasses” (that is, retards) are only able to challenge and reject the bourgeois, middle-classes they despise because they themselves are bourgeois and middle-class. “The Idiots” are therefore just another clique in the MTV generation—albeit a middle-class, cultured one. For who does the majority of music on the station cater for other than teenagers simultaneously rejecting and taking advantage of their own social circumstances for no discernible reason?
by Rich Watts | Source: Tartan Video DVD
07 Apr 2005 5:19 AM | Submit Comment
Full review forthcoming.
by Rich Watts | Source: bfi Video Publishing DVD
06 Apr 2005 6:28 AM | Submit Comment
by Rich Watts | Source: 35mm print
06 Apr 2005 6:25 AM | Submit Comment
Insanely good pre-Code melodrama with a shocker of an ending. I was a little worried when the movie began that Ann Dvorak was playing the prudish, respectable friend to showgirl Joan Blondell and meek office girl Bette Davis, but she transformed from society matron to drug-addicted wanton harlot within about three minutes, making my worries for naught.
by Matt Bailey | Source: Turner Classic Movies broadcast
06 Apr 2005 12:00 AM | Submit Comment
I’m still not sure whether I liked this movie or not. On the one hand, the film vocalizes a lot of familiar contemporary frustrations for bourgeois couples; the setting is a horribly clichéed movie-Paris, a gauzy, sepia-tone lovers’ paradise; and Ethan Hawke is smug and flirty, while also looking as gaunt and sickly as Lou Reed. On the other hand, the bourgeois complaints still strike a chord; Paris is really like that sometimes; and Julie Delpy is hotter than she has ever been.
Still, though the film can be self-indulgent at times, it is nonetheless deceptively rich and quietly affecting. That said, I much prefer Scenes from a Marriage, even if it is four times longer.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Warner Bros. DVD
05 Apr 2005 10:38 PM | Comments (1)
Full review forthcoming.
by Beth Gilligan | Source: 35mm print
05 Apr 2005 5:28 PM | Submit Comment
A testament that in film Thomas Mauch can be more useful than a tripod.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Anchor Bay Entertainment DVD
05 Apr 2005 10:04 AM | Submit Comment
The sequel to the remake of the Japanese original, and the remake of the sequel to the Japanese original too, for that matter, The Ring Two sees director Hideo Nakata suffer in his Hollywood surroundings. Although responsible for both the Japanese originals, Nakata here loses the essence of Ringu’s horror in favour of hand-holding the audience through the relatively simple back-story.
The two “animal” set-pieces of the Hollywood remakes suffice to highlight the differences between the two films. In the first film, as journalist Rachel Keller and her weirdo son Aidan make their way over a ferry crossing, an on-board horse loses it, bolts around the small ferry and eventually falls over the side. The best sequence of the film, the photography employed to capture the horse’s panic was quite extraordinary, rendering the horse’s power in juxtaposition to its confined environment much like the circumstances of the young girl Samara, whose limbo provides the story’s horror. What was really remarkable, though, was the fact that this sequence was captured through photography alone – no CGI here, thank you very much.
The second film’s animal set-piece, however, is burdened by its reliance on CGI. As Rachel and Aidan drive through some woods, they are set upon by a leash of CGI-deer, bashing the car here and there until the couple manage to flee the scene in panic. Far from being an effective echo of the (in comparison simpler) horse scene, the onslaught of the deer looks ridiculous and releases much of the tension that had been built before. Within the context of a Hollywood horror, the set-piece would seem to work, especially judging by the reaction of the 15-year-old target audience sitting in the cinema. But within the context of a well-regarded horror series that Ringu and its derivatives has become, CGI is one step removed from the approach that has encouraged many viewers to look up the original Japanese films.
As a point of interest, Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly was originally offered the chance to direct The Ring Two but turned it down. Perhaps, like me, he was disappointed the killer video was still only on VHS and hadn’t been updated to DVD format for the sequel.
by Rich Watts | Source: 35mm print
05 Apr 2005 8:04 AM | Comments (1)
Upon doing some reading on this film, I noted an interesting and rather under-reported fact. The film’s title (Cheun gwong tsa sit in Cantonese, Chunguang zhaxie in Mandarin) loosely translates as The Light of Spring, which (according to Sheldon Lu) was the Chinese title for Antonioni’s Blow-Up when it was released in Hong Kong. Lu doesn’t offer much speculation on the provenance of this title, other than the fact that Antonioni’s film is based on a story by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. I would suggest that the word “light” is significant, as so much of Wong’s (and Doyle’s) work seems to be obsessed with the qualities of different light sources, especially natural light versus fluorescence. Beyond that, it strikes me as a rather empty reference, and I much prefer the ironic-unironic English title, even if I don’t like the song very much.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Kino Video DVD
03 Apr 2005 2:54 PM | Submit Comment
Rocky IV is a strange artifact of the Cold War, made more strange to me because I used to really like it. Shamelessly jingoistic, nationalistic, and improbable, the film quite inauspiciously ends Sylvester Stallone’s career as a film director (at least for now: Rocky VI is said to be in production). Beginning with a highly unsuspenseful exhibition bout between Apollo Creed and testy-tube commie Drago (featuring an appearance by James Brown and ending in disaster for the hubristic Apollo), Rocky IV strings together a series of disconnected speeches and vignettes about getting old, going out on top, good ol’ American perseverance versus Nazi-like Soviet techno-athletics, and a toy robot. The requisite montage of Rocky’s training (which here takes place in the Siberian hinterlands and involves a lot of farm equipment) seems to make up for roughly a third of the film’s running time. Another third is devoted to the interminable final match between Rocky and Drago (see if you can guess who wins), which looks like it was shot in a high school gymnasium decorated with enormous 1930s-era banners of Lenin and Marx. As round after round ends in a dizzyingly boring succession of dissolves, Stallone and Dolph Lundgren pretend to hit each other and look tired with little sign of bloodshed. And once Rocky rallies to defeat his Red nemesis, the people of the USSR (along with their Gorbachev look-alike premier) are miraculously won over, especially when they hear Rocky’s eloquent oration on political freedom, the (surely unilateral?) possibility for “change,” and potatoes for everyone. If that’s not enough to make one defect, I don’t know what is.
The film’s only major disappointment is a lack of screen-time for a pre-Foofy Foofy Brigitte Nielsen, who plays Drago’s icy KGB-indoctrinated wife.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Cable television broadcast
03 Apr 2005 2:27 PM | Comments (1)
Central to relaying the originality of this film is the image of Mike Waters, a street hustler and narcoleptic, either waking up or suddenly falling asleep in some anonymous highway on the Pacific coast. He has been abandoned by his family, and his search for his birth mother (only the most distinct of the film’s many interests) leads him around the world. But as the final shot implicates, Mike is perpetually left asleep on a highway, his mother always inaccessible in either of the two directions he may choose to traverse when he awakes.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: The Criterion Collection DVD
03 Apr 2005 1:17 PM | Submit Comment
It would be nice to think that I could get away with asking a female stranger to help pay my train fare, crash a posh party without an invite and repeatedly call a woman I desired “monkey face”. Furthermore, it would be very useful if I could seduce said woman by saying: “I think I’m falling in love with you and I don’t quite like it.” That said, I’m not Cary Grant under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock and, sad to say, I never will be.
Still, the woman—or Joan Fontaine to her friends—won the 1941 Best Actress Oscar, so she should have little reason to complain.
by Rich Watts | Source: Universal Pictures DVD
03 Apr 2005 7:50 AM | Submit Comment
by Matt Bailey | Source: The Criterion Collection DVD
02 Apr 2005 12:06 AM | Submit Comment
Man, Days of Thunder is fecking bad. I mean, Days of Thunder is fecking bad.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Cable television
01 Apr 2005 3:03 AM | Submit Comment