Hilariously bad flick starring James Mason as a father whose accidental contribution a bomb plot causes his kidnapping, along with his wife and young daughter by a sweaty Rod Steiger. Preposterous sequences include the wife, Inger Stevens, speeding to the Bronx after making a wrong turn through the Battery Tunnel – with only ten minutes to spare before Steiger takes a knife to the cherubic daughter. So! many! exclamations! abound in the dialogue throughout, and an additionally ridiculous voice-over (“the stop lights were all against me!”). Topping it all off is the hired thug hooked on “Bennies,” a.k.a. Benzedrine – this is classic camp all around.
by Jenny Jediny | Source: MGM 35mm print
01 Oct 2007 12:00 AM | Submit Comment
Using a dog as the initial carrier for the monster strikes me as especially brilliant – perhaps it was because I happened to catch a moment of Independence Day either immediately before or after viewing this film, and happened to remember the cheers when the dog survived the massive explosion/fireball/what have you – not so much enthusiasm for the humans. Watching the opening of The Thing, I had a similar reaction, instinctively hoping the dog would escape the gunfire. Dogs are an excellent symbol of trust, and the way Carpenter implements the animal into the company of the scientists is fascinating, setting off the chain of suspicion that effectively pervades the entire film. These are the sort of details that really have me admiring Carpenter lately.
Rumsey’s review
by Jenny Jediny | Source: Columbia TriStar DVD
30 Sep 2007 11:48 PM | Submit Comment
What a bitter pill. Julie Delpy does a great job exhibiting a couple dismantling while on holiday, capturing the paranoia and sheer anger when one learns their partner may not be exactly what they seem (at least not for the first six-twelve months of a relationship). Balancing sympathy with disdain for both her own character, Marion, and Adam Goldberg’s Jack, Delpy does pull a bit of a Woody Allen with her humor at times, more in line with Deconstructing Harry than Annie Hall. The most telling moment may be after an apparently consequential blow-up – Marion wanders Paris alone, and has a sudden, happier vision of herself and Jack as they might have been, if only one or both of them had bothered to let go of their insecurity and self-ego.
by Jenny Jediny | Source: Samuel Goldwyn Films 35mm Print
30 Sep 2007 11:34 PM | Submit Comment
Based on Jean Vigo’s short Zero for Conduct, Anderson’s film focuses on much older boys at a British boarding school, an institution which I truly believe must be hell on earth. Sadistic professors are in abundance, and there is little that our sarcastic teenage protagonists can do, save minor misbehaviors that eventually explode into full on, if fantastical moments of anarchy. Leading the pack is a young Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis, whose beguiling voice is matched by his steely blue eyes (easy to see why Kubrick cast him for A Clockwork Orange soon after, observing his charming antipathy for law here). The film is slightly uneven but inspired all the same – the most out of control behavior is nearly Godardian, filmed in garish primary colors, surrealistic style, and lustful, primal behavior that echoes both Pierrot le fou and Weekend.
by Jenny Jediny | Source: Criterion Collection DVD
30 Sep 2007 11:19 PM | Submit Comment
From the pulsing opening chords of David Shire’s musical score, this is quite the fun ride. Love the time capsule of 1970s New York City culture, from the lack of billboards that currently clog the cityscape to the gruff, offensive exchanges between the city MTA workers (still managing to barely avert large scale disaster these days). Love Matthau, Shaw & Co. – can Tony Scott really be remaking this ? You would think they would have learned from the TV movie, as nothing can capture the off-color charm of the original. Definitely one of the best films to see in a theater with an enthusiastic audience.
by Jenny Jediny | Source: United Artists 35mm print
30 Sep 2007 11:00 PM | Submit Comment
Full review at Reverse Shot.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Universal Pictures 35mm Print
28 Sep 2007 1:54 PM | Submit Comment
Fully braced by the current Wes Anderson backlash, and with very little expectation for The Darjeeling Limited, I was surprised to find that I kind of loved this. It’s thoroughly Andersonian, but the short format works well for Wes, forcing a certain concision in the dialogue, while packing the frame with the usual tchotchkes. But the use of detail here is almost self-critical, as Schwartzman’s monotone character seems to be cosseting himself in knick-knacks — little toys and statuettes, music boxes, a well-chosen song on his iPod, some furtive attempts at watercolor — as he holes up in an overpriced luxury suite in the titular Paris hotel. Everything about the film echoes Anderson’s previous work, but the excess of style here is a good deal more muted, even quite dark. Marc Jacobs’ elegant grey and black costumes contrast with the luminosity of the yellow hotel room just as the yellow lights of Paris contrast with the city’s grey buildings. And there is a somberness and sobriety in the terse dialogue that Schwartzman shares with the cropped, unusually moxieful Natalie Portman that is interesting, too: it retains Anderson’s usual cutesiness tinged with melancholy, but there is an unexpected shade of darkness here, and I’m surprised to say that their relationship rings quite true (and, unfortunately, familiar). Portman looks cute and pixie-ish and acts butch and forthright (the toothpick detail is wonderful), and Schwartzman is his usual frustrated manchild. But his juvenile and spiteful retorts to Portman’s direct address of emotional hurt don’t feel so witty as they might have in Rushmore. On the contrary, they sound pathetic, defensive, like everything else about his character. It amounts to a degree of self-awareness that I no longer expected from Anderson, and it makes this short work quite satisfying. Not that it has dramatically raised my expectations for Darjeeling.
And for the onanistic among us: Natalie Portman is naked and quite stunning.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Free iTunes Download
28 Sep 2007 12:52 PM | Comments (1)
Mind-numbingly stupid and not the least bit scary, with some totally fake-looking sets that, for a film with an estimated budget of $20 million, is totally inexcusable. Surely all that money didn’t go to Sarah Michelle Gellar, who is in the film for all of two minutes before falling predictably to her death (while keeping her hair lustrous and beautiful). And for a movie that is in all other ways designed to appeal to (particularly thick) 12-year-old boys, they couldn’t even manage to replace her with an attractive protagonist (though there is a stunningly juvenile, PG-13 girls’ locker room scene).
In a word: worthless.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Sony Pictures DVD
27 Sep 2007 4:22 PM | Submit Comment
Wooden Crosses never seems as dated as Bernard’s later, five-hour adaptation of Les Misérables. With that film, as a viewer you need to indulge it a little, excuse the weaknesses and heavy-handedness that mark it as a product of its time. Wooden Crosses is an entirely different case – this French version of All Quiet on the Western Front still stands up as a superb piece of filmmaking. The Criterion/Eclipse blurb talks of the story marking the transformation in these First World War soldiers from blind patriotism to disillusionment, but this isn’t quite the case. True, a brief documentary-style prologue does refer to the extraordinary enthusiasm and patriotism with which the French greeted the outbreak of war, but right from the first scene of the story — when the audience-surrogate, the middle-class Demarchy, arrives at the front — the mood in the film’s portrayal of the war and the opinions expressed by the soldiers is one of gritty sardonic cynicism. It’s a film of filth, mud, cacophonous noise, confusion, casual and meaningless death, which Bernard orchestrates into a series of set-pieces (for example, an extended battle in a graveyard) with the stress on ensemble performance — the soldiers as a group rather than highlighting the story of Demarchy. Two sequences stand out as indicative of what Bernard is attempting in Wooden Crosses. In one, the battle-weary soldiers are ordered by their general to turn out for a victory parade and we see in the one shot the march past of the soldiers and at the same time the even greater number of their dead comrades superimposed in a march above their heads. This is the more conventionally anti-war aspect of the film, mourning the enormous loss of life that was involved. But even more striking is a longer, earlier sequence when the soldiers are stationed at the front and realise the Germans are tunnelling underneath them to lay a bomb — and realise that if their luck holds, they’ll be relieved at their post before the enemy blows it up. So, they count off the hours and then the minutes to the thud of the tunnelling below — a scene that wonderfully portrays the dull tedium of the soldiers’ lives as they await their possible death, their lack of control over their own fates, their submission to a callous officer class, and the way their survival rests on luck and chance.
by Ian Johnston | Source: Eclipse Series 4 DVD
20 Sep 2007 12:04 PM | Submit Comment
Perhaps I was expecting a good deal more from this than the plot synopsis warranted, but as glad as I am to hear of Cronenberg’s win at the Toronto International Film Festival, I’m a mite disappointed by his film. Like quite a few others, I like A History of Violence a great deal, but mainly because of the characters and the craft of the filmmaking, not because of the suggestive portentousness of its title. As I’ve said before, I’m unconvinced that that film has any big message to deliver about the nature of violence, other than perhaps the fact that it is ugly and inevitable. In the new film, there is even less of a message to be learned, if you’re still looking for one. And yet the film’s one singularly effective scene — the visceral, nasty, and already much-touted nude fight scene — seems to exist not to advance plot or build character, but so that Cronenberg can claim, as he did in a recent New York Times article, that his treatment of violence is more real and more interested in consequence than Hollywood’s version.
If demonstrably true, this would surely not be a major achievement. But is it true? Does it even matter? Aren’t there a hundred other directors working today who are doing the same thing — shoving the nastiness of violence in our face, in closeup, so that we can’t fail to remember how unpleasant it is? Can we not all agree that it is virtually impossible for a film — much less a “thriller”, still less a Cronenberg film — to give us an unmediated, unvarnished experience of honest-to-goodness violence?
I laughed in horror at the ultimate pay-off of that scene, and while I more or less understand its overall function in the film (something about homoeroticism, betrayal, and tattoos), it lacks any of the emotional undertow in Cronenberg’s prior film’s two brilliantly staged sex scenes.
As for the rest of the film, I’m not really sure what it amounts to. The acting is excellent, even if the characters (especially Naomi Watts’) are quite inconsequential. The comic scenes, like those between Watts, her mother, and her daft Russian uncle, are executed painfully and, like Steven Knight’s earlier Dirty Pretty Things, which I sort of enjoyed, the script is less clever than it thinks it is. All in all, there is very little dread that any of the characters (especially the infant) are in any real danger. The only theme I can derive is an odd twinning of A History of Violence, insofar as the film argues that there are good sides to bad people (versus the other way around).
Still, it’s a brisk and exciting film for the most part, Viggo and Vincent Cassel are a lot of fun to watch together, and, once again, it’s only about 100 minutes long. Hardly a glowing recommendation, I know, but middling Cronenberg is still more appealing than Russell Crowe’s Glenn Ford impersonation or Jodie Foster’s Charlie Bronson.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Focus Features 35mm Print
17 Sep 2007 4:28 PM | Comments (1)
I can’t for the life of me think why, but for some reason I really enjoyed this movie. This doesn’t mean I thought it was excusable, or appropriate, or even particularly good. But I enjoyed every minute, and was sorry when it ended. I think the problem is that I honestly couldn’t say exactly what Craig Brewer was trying to do- is he really a fearful misogynist, as this film and it’s predecessor Hustle And Flow suggest, or is he just playing? And even if he is, does that excuse anything? Is his rampant overuse of cliché- cultural, racial, and cinematic- intentionally ludicrous, or just lame? I’ve seen very few films which left me as confused as this one, I literally didn’t know whether to laugh or be moved (particularly following the astounding final scene). But this very turmoil is one of the things I find so impressive about the film- it made me feel something new, even if it wasn’t entirely pleasant. And that’s got to be worth something.
by Tom Huddleston | Source: DVD
17 Sep 2007 1:06 PM | Submit Comment
Quentin Tarantino’s career trajectory has been smooth and interrupted, a flawless descent from the near-masterpiece of Reservoir Dogs to the near unwatchable Kill Bill Vol. 2, every film has been noticeably worse than the one before it. I was really hoping Death Proof might buck the trend- how could anything be more awful than David Carradine and Uma Thurman discussing Star Trek? But this film actually succeeds, and in spectacular style. It’s not a film, it’s an embarrassment.
I’m no expert on exploitation cinema, but I think even 1970’s drive-in audiences would have balked at film where nothing remotely interesting happens for the first 45 minutes: it’s just talking, and not even very interesting talking, just three thinly sketched and clearly doomed young women nattering. Other characters are mentioned but never appear, there are some decent tunes and some stylish photography, and the director himself in yet another regrettable cameo. And then we get to the interesting stuff- blood! Death! This takes about 5 minutes, and we’re back into another 45 of talking. I mean, I expected this film to be tacky. I expected it to be daft, and violent, and essentially meaningless. I just didn’t expect it to be so unbelievably boring. It’s like My Dinner With Andre in hotpants.
And what of Kurt Russell’s psychotic Stuntman Mike, a character Tarantino’s been arguing is the actor’s best since Snake Plissken? Well, he’s onscreen for about 20 minutes total, and for the last half of that he’s just whimpering a lot. For Quentin to even begin to suggest he’s capable of writing a Snake Plissken or a MacReady is sheer self-delusion: there’s nothing here for Russell to get his teeth into, it’s just a grin, a quiff and a car.
Okay, so the last 15 minutes are pretty neat, the very final scene particularly so. But what leads there is so banal, so messy, so uninspired, so goddamn tedious, it really isn’t worth it. Someone needs to give QT a damn good talking to, there’s got to be something in there worth saving.
by Tom Huddleston | Source: 35mm print
17 Sep 2007 12:56 PM | Submit Comment
Weirdly enough, when I was 14 this was one of my favourite movies- a slow, sentimental indie drama heavy on character and light on incident, Wenders by way of Jarmusch. Wandering German hausfrau Marianne Sagebrecht ditches her husband in the Nevada desert and walks to the nearest motel, the eponymous rundown gas station miles from anywhere. Here she interacts with the poor, mostly black inhabitants and owners, everyone learns something and there’s a fair amount of hugging.
But it’s better than such a brief synopsis sounds- Sagebrecht is extraordinary, quiet and watchful but strangely loveable, perfectly contrasted by CCH Pounder crawling the walls and chewing the scenery as the irascible Brenda. And there’s an unexpectedly twinkly performance from Jack Palance as the local artist-in-residence, a Hollywood cowboy in shimmering silk shirts. Best of all is Bernd Heinl’s flawless photography. Vivid and magical, the desert has rarely looked so tranquil and utopian: a strong case could be made for this as one of the most memorable looking films of the decade. The last act is trite and thinly plotted (and there’s a song-and-dance sequence to make the toes curl), but up to that point the film barely puts a foot wrong.
by Tom Huddleston | Source: DVD
17 Sep 2007 12:54 PM | Submit Comment
A bit of a rambling and directionless noir, with Humphrey Bogart trying to uncover the truth behind his army buddy’s disappearance and stumbling into the fatal arms of Bacall knockoff Lisabeth Scott. It’s entertaining enough, but not much happens and it’s largely predictable. The ludicrous melodramatic ending feels like it’s strayed in from another, probably more enjoyable movie.
by Tom Huddleston | Source: DVD
17 Sep 2007 12:53 PM | Submit Comment
It’s amazing that this is Greg Mottola’s first feature since the critically popular The Daytrippers over a decade ago- he’s been languishing in TV hell ever since, but has now been mercifully rescued by the non-stop Apatow comedy juggernaut. But to be honest this really isn’t a director’s film: it belongs to authors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and it’s they who deservedly have been reaping the bulk of the sizeable praise the film has garnered.
I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while, and was perhaps slightly disappointed that it’s more puerile and less heartwarming than I was expecting. The accusations of misogyny which were (in my opinion unfairly) aimed at Knocked Up probably do apply here: the film takes care to disparage it’s schlubby protagonists mercilessly, but they still get the (far more attractive) girls. But goddamn it, it’s funny, and kind of sweet, and effortlessly memorable. In 20 years time they’ll be teaching Apatow university courses, just like they do with John Hughes‚Ķ
by Tom Huddleston | Source: 35mm print
17 Sep 2007 12:52 PM | Submit Comment
I knew this one was going to be pretty lame- a sort of Brit-culture Mighty Ducks- but I was quite unprepared for just how awful. Largely at fault is the script, which piles cliché upon coincidence to produce a messy mélange of other, better films. The acting, too, is dire- Keira Knightly was young and inexperienced, but Jonathan Rhys-Meyers has no such excuse, he’s simply wooden. Parminder Nagra can certainly act- she’s proven that since- but here she’s hamstrung by the aforementioned godawful script. The direction is flat and featureless, the music utterly harrowing.
But the real question is why a director like Chadha (and a number of other British Indian filmmakers) feel so comfortable perpetuating their own tedious, overfamiliar cultural stereotypes, and with so little subtlety: a character actually says the line “What family would want a daughter-in-law who can run around kicking football all day but can’t make round chapattis?”. ‘By the numbers’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.
by Tom Huddleston | Source: BBC2
17 Sep 2007 12:51 PM | Submit Comment
Ian McEwan’s widely feted novel was always going to be a bitch to adapt, but director Joe Wright and writer Christopher Hampton have made a decent fist of it here. Unsurprisingly it’s the first act that suffers, lacking the sensual, lugubrious intensity of McEwan’s extraordinary prose. And it’s Wright’s mistake- if he’d been a little braver as a director, drenched the screen in colour and liquid sunlight as opposed to the rather cold look the film utilizes, it could have been something special, rather than merely entertaining. And the typewriter driven soundtrack, while innovative, is a little crisp and even for the subject matter.
But things improve when James McAvoy gets to France, and the much heralded Dunkirk tracking shot really is something to behold, perhaps unintentionally serving as a strange nostalgia trip through the history of British war cinema- there are moments that directly recall The Charge of the Light Brigade, Oh, What A Lovely War!, Colonel Blimp. The structure is all over the place, and one feels Hampton could have taken more liberties with the novel in order to knock it into filmable shape- the ending is seriously underwhelming after all that’s gone before. But overall, this is a perfectly serviceable slice of wistful Englishness, if not the masterpiece it so desperately wants to be.
Props, too, for featuring possibly the inaugural use of the word ‘cunt’ in a British historical costume drama: even if it’s never actually spoken, there were audible gasps around the Ambleside Zefferelli’s when it flashed up thirty feet high on the flickering screen.
by Tom Huddleston | Source: 35mm print
17 Sep 2007 12:49 PM | Submit Comment
Upper lips have rarely been stiffer than in this propagandist wartime drama from writer-director-star Noel Coward, but it’s a fascinating and rather moving exploration of a very real world, thankfully left behind. It’s social politics may be rather dated, but as a depiction of dedication and sacrifice the film still leaves a mark- American films of the day may have preferred a lot of shooting, shouting and rugged heroism, but for my money there’s more emotional power in Celia Johnson’s motionless little finger than in a whole slew of weeping Midwestern mothers.
by Tom Huddleston | Source: BBC2
17 Sep 2007 12:48 PM | Submit Comment
With clinical precision, director Charles Ferguson neatly dissects the disastrous U.S. policy decisions that prompted insurgency and chaos in Iraq. He relies on a series of talking heads interspersed with news footage to narrate what proves to be an epic tale of mismanagement and miscommunication, culminating in what may end up being one of the largest foreign policy disasters in U.S. history. While the film lacks the formal inventiveness of Errol Morris’ Fog of War, it is nonetheless riveting, essential viewing.
by Beth Gilligan | Source: Magnolia 35mm print
13 Sep 2007 11:00 AM | Submit Comment
Twenty minutes into Andrea Arnold’s feature film debut, Jackie, a CCTV operator in Glasgow, focuses one of her cameras on a man and woman having sex in a grassy, graffiti-laced lot. When they finish, he turns his face and she recognizes him. She tries to follow the man as he walks away, but her attention drifts to the woman, and soon he has disappeared. She moves the camera to the left, to an empty road. There is silence, stillness, before a fox emerges from the tall grass and scampers away.
Though undoubtedly better than most modern thrillers—because the director is a woman? because she’s a newcomer? because she wrote the film herself?—Red Road is nevertheless agonizingly slow; the build-up of suspense is offset by a tiring, empty, dialogue-scarce pacing that has Jackie moving outside her realm of comfort and safety. She wants to confront the man she sees, the person who years ago destroyed her family, and her mode of vengeance seems unthinkable.
Then again, in her mind, it also seems necessary. Her small corner of Glasgow, which she watches over tirelessly, has become a surrogate child of sorts. She has no social life, no close family to speak of; invited to the wedding of her sister-in-law, she stands rigid, a drink in her hand, and can only make occasional small-talk with others. Her job offers her the chance to save people, to do what she never did for her own husband and daughter. And this man has interrupted her world for the second time.
by Adam Balz | Source: Tartan DVD
12 Sep 2007 9:50 AM | Submit Comment
Dismissing this as a stoner movie is lazy. Not because the film isn’t geared towards a particular audience—say, someone my age who watches the show religiously every weekend—but because any attempt at injecting purpose or intent into this manic, blurred world goes against the entire idea. Our heroes are an anthropomorphic fast-food menu—a sleeve of French fries, a milkshake, a ball of hairy meat—and they’re barely heroes at all. They are vulgar, violent, insecure, hedonistic, controlling, and stupid. In fact, the world in which they live is populated by only vulgar, violent, insecure, hedonistic, controlling, stupid individuals. There is the diapered spider, condemned to rap in Hell, who must return to earth as a poo-sucking fly and is promptly swatted. There is the Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future, a dog-like robot predisposed to telling pointless stories and humping almost anything. There is Carl, the dispensable neighbor who wears tight pants and loves porn. The entire plot, beginning with an escape from the Sphinx and continuing through a chance meeting with a very crass Abraham Lincoln—who, it should be noted, can disappear at will and is gunned down by trigger-happy CIA agents—mocks everything about big-budget action films. The flashbacks, the surprise twist, the character’s search for identity, the repeated use of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight,” all surrounded by pixilated aliens, a rampant disco-powered exercise machine, and Neil Pert, should be a clear hint that, sometimes, a ten-foot talking bean burrito is just that.
by Adam Balz | Source: DTV
12 Sep 2007 9:46 AM | Submit Comment
If, halfway through Robert Stevenson’s 1964 film, Mary Poppins had pulled out a machete and dismembered Mr. Dawes, it would be something akin to Keeping Mum, sans the singing and dancing.
by Adam Balz | Source: ThinkFilm DVD
12 Sep 2007 9:44 AM | Submit Comment
The true story of two British activists—one a divorced father, the other a homespun gardener and bartender—who draw the ire of a global Goliath, become victims of their nation’s own laws, and are forced to represent themselves in court for seven years—and win. Helped along the way by scientific experts, representatives from the World Cancer Research Fund, and even a former Ronald McDonald, the case soon became a rallying cry for those opposed to billion-dollar corporations.
The transgressions of McDonald’s has been well-documented for some time—and, for support, director Franny Armstrong brings in Eric Schlosser of Fast Food Nation fame—and the film manages to condense much of that into an enjoyable, informative 85-minute documentary that balances the courtroom struggles against the “McLibel Two’s” lives at home, which slowly deteriorate. Included herein are recreations of those seven-year proceedings, taken directly from court documents, featuring the environmentalists themselves, and directed by none other than Ken Loach.
by Adam Balz | Source: DOC Channel
12 Sep 2007 9:42 AM | Submit Comment
Almodóvar’s characteristically knotty tale of passion and infidelity is actually based (loosely, I would guess) on a Ruth Rendell whydunit, transposing her novel about a supposed attempted rapist from the idiom of the English crime thriller to that of the Iberian melodrama. Somewhere along the way from London to Madrid — which is as lovingly rendered here as it is in any of his other films — Almodóvar molds the story into another of his intricate and surprisingly sympathetic portraits of the idiocies of love. Drugs, domestic abuse, public transportation, virginity (and its unceremonious loss), physical paralysis, the Barcelona Olympics, incarceration, obsession, revenge, and, best of all, the fuzzy lines that bind sex with love — all are sewn together in Almodóvar’s film with plenty of good humor, and a minimum of sarcasm or condescension. In this universe, if in no other, there is abundant pathos for a drunken wife-beater, disdain for a snitchy paraplegic, and respect for a sexually obsessive ex-con.
And if that’s not enough, the film is also one of the most deeply felt portraits of infidelity I can think of in cinema, one that manages to lay out the circuitous circumstances of the human need for affection — even to the point of betrayal — without providing any pandering justification or facilely demonizing the characters in any way. When a principal character (actually, more than one) cheats on her husband, it is a necessary act, neither spiteful nor reckless, motivated by a physical and emotional lack. It doesn’t serve to reduce or elevate the character (or other characters) as such, but it allows Almodóvar to demonstrate that the lives of his heroines — his restless, indomitable, manic heroines — are not totally circumscribed by their relationships with their husbands or lovers. Though, of course, Almodóvar is careful to delineate the ways in which these actions have reactions.
And although it’s probably boorish and politically moronic to speculate as such, it is a consistent wonder (and pleasure) to me that Almodóvar displays such a rich insight into heterosexual relationships — richer, I would venture, than almost any heterosexual director currently working. Naturally, his sexuality shouldn’t matter in the least, but I wonder if a heterosexual male director would have the guts to sensitively (and selflessly) portray a woman cheating on her husband without making her out to be a whore or him out to be a monster. Of course, that Almodóvar does neither of these is probably more attributable to his abilities as a creator of characters and especially as a director of actors. But I find it sort of amusing and slightly embarassing that most modern “films about men and women” directed by hetero men function as either self-deprecation or self-mythologization, laboring either to self-effacingly skewer the male character as a pig or pathetic slob or to try to rehabilitate the by now thoroughly trampled image of “guys” into a kind of reified masculine heroism. (See Knocked Up for perhaps a bit of both.)
Almodóvar manages to navigate these extremes, creating characters who are in many ways repellent and in many ways admirable, for reasons that probably have little or nothing to do with the director’s sexuality and more to do with how well they are realized. But whatever the cause, between this film and Talk to Her, I can think of few filmmakers that better capture the bathetic neediness and erotic possessiveness that men have for women in a light that is so relentless, so tender, and so clear. Not to mention funny as hell.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: MGM Home Entertainment DVD
11 Sep 2007 3:06 PM | Submit Comment
Chris Sarandon’s classic handsomeness – he is Michelangelo’s David personified – has little utility in The Princess Bride, in which he is the reprehensible Prince Humperdinck. His Grecian locks remain impenetrable by wind, and his gaze is one of enchanting determination, but he is immediately the lesser beau to Cary Elwes’ Westley.
So now, imagine this same character as a vampire in a horror film, and you have Fright Night.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: VHS
10 Sep 2007 9:50 AM | Submit Comment
Jeff Bridge’s Starman simplifies each conversation he has, reducing it to succinct declarative statements or simple questions. His desire for knowledge and capacity for trust engender his statements with a child’s earnest curiosity. It is for this reason that his sole companion – Jenny, whose deceased husband he has embodied – is initially terrified of him. He looks exactly like her dead husband, but the mannerisms and personality are disturbingly amiss.
Jenny will grow increasingly more affectionate toward Starman—this is by some measure a plot contrivance, because she falls in love with him in less than three days, but it is, I think, an action that establishes her urgent necessity for love and, more significantly, closure. Her husband’s death isn’t illuminated, but you get the impression that it happened suddenly, and has depressed her so much that her initial terror and subsequent attraction to Starman are wholly justifiable responses. Her husband’s death and miraculous reincarnation as an extra-terrestial being have blended her emotions with great velocity; they’ll manifest and subdue regularly until they subside accordingly within her emotional spectrum.
Another catalyst for Jenny’s affection is the temporal nature of her relationship with Starman. She knows he will be gone in three days, giving her last chance for closure a definite amount of time in which she must purge her insecurities. In the film’s momentous, enthralling final shot, she glances not with desperation but contentedness as her lover ascends toward the heavens.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Sony Pictures DVD
07 Sep 2007 5:09 PM | Submit Comment
As I watched Death Sentence, I thought to myself, “You know, in the right hands this movie could be halfway decent.” Then the opening credits ended, and I was plunged into the same old revenge-flick formula—in this case, a contented suburbanite named Nick Hume taking out retribution on the gang that killed his son, slowly becoming a stumbling, maniacal Rambo. And while a few moments are noteworthy, including a tracking shot through a downtown Columbia parking structure that is amazingly executed, director James Wan spends too much energy trying to balance the compassionate family man against his momentous inner demons, which slowly transform him into a slaughter machine; neither side seems to develop completely, and we’re left with a half-hearted Jekyl and his oblivious Hyde. (The final showdown between Bacon’s character and the gang leader, set in a makeshift ghetto church, is at best grossly predictable.)
My only true motivation in seeing this, besides my sound love of revenge films, was the promise of John Goodman as a foul, sweaty, malicious gun-dealer named Bones, whose advice to Nick “from one dad to another” is chilling, albeit inane considering the lackluster storyline twist that has just been revealed. Loud and forgettable, nothing more and nothing less. Bring on Jodie Foster.
by Adam Balz | Source: 35MM Theatrical Print
04 Sep 2007 5:13 PM | Submit Comment
There is one thing that needs to be stated about Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween right off the bat: It is essentially pointless. Zombie adds little or nothing of quality to Carpenter’s original film (though he adds much quantitatively), and it would be difficult to argue that Zombie does anything more for Carpenter’s seminal film than offer a very loud, aggressive, startling piece of film interpretation. Like Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Zombie’s film is like the product of a fanboy film appreciation society funded by millions and millions of dollars. It’s like a version of a film turned into a Universal Studios ride, amped up in every way, then refilmed for our consumption with all of the expected notes in place (or replaced).
But once we get that out of the way, and we heave a small sigh of relief with the realization that, for all its faults, it’s not utterly dreadful, Zombie’s film actually delivers in ways that one might not expect.
Sure, he gets significant things wrong: Michael’s white trash childhood is pure Rob Zombie and has little of the deep-seated terror of a simple middle-class suburban kid gone inexplicably awry. Getting this out of the way, and following it with some near-deathly scenes of one-on-one therapy with a distinctly post-Dr.-Phil Dr. Loomis (who here seems to exist as a poe-faced, semi-parodic cousin to the shrink at the end of Psycho), Zombie hits his stride with the boobs and blood, delivering to the audience every expected slash, gash, pummel, and crunch with disquieting and distinctly unexpected vividness and violence.
So, why is this the least bit compelling? Because unlike Eli Roth and the other Splat Packers, Zombie is a stylist. He realizes that all of this nastiness is only worth it when integrated into a discourse of images — of women’s bodies, of death, of abused children, of abused animals, and so forth. That, with each film, it becomes increasingly difficult to know what Zombie thinks of all this — whether he cynically thinks it is merely entertaining to fantasize about brutality (possible), whether he desires to imply some social message (unlikely), or whether he actually relishes cruelty, mental illness, death, and putrefaction (hmm …) — is what makes his films so consistently provocative (in, I would argue, a good way), their thoroughgoing transgression so deeply unpleasant. This is to say, by way of a privileged negative example, that if Eli Roth weren’t so cinematically illiterate or so shallow in his moralizing, his films might make us ponder the way the horror genre feeds us and feeds off us in the way that Zombie’s films do.
And it is this fact that, in spite of the film’s pointlessness in the face of the original, makes Zombie the perfect person to make this film. Carpenter’s Halloween is the archetypal slasher film; it is the very film that promulgated killer-cam aesthetics, that ought always to raise the hackles of feminist film theorists in suggesting the director’s (and then the audience’s) complicity in the punishment of female sexuality, in the sexualization of death and the mortification of women’s bodies. Zombie has nothing of substance to add to this debate; he has only style. But his particular stylistic obsession — his desire to vividly and relentlessly depict a bare-breasted woman being stabbed and bloodied, his utter lack of compunction about drawing our sympathies in one direction and then violently pulling them back — make him a worthy heir to Carpenter in the manipulation of viewer identification in the horror film. And he earns this place without a single killer-cam POV.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Dimension Films 35mm Print
03 Sep 2007 6:30 PM | Submit Comment
Casino Royale is my favourite James Bond film since 1965’s Thunderball, and it’s the best Bond film in a long time. The filmmakers push back against the familiar Bond tropes, and don’t care if they mess with fans’ familiarity with the series. This film is especially risky because here is a film franchise known for its painfully formulaic predictability, with Bond being as close as uber-male fantasies come to a warm, familiar, fuzzy blanket.
For the ladies, our revisionist Bond is blonde and studly, with Daniel Craig looking and acting like a throwback to Sean Connery, which is a very, very good thing. Craig thoroughly embodies the role, walking around through the entire movie as if he has a constant erection (that’s a friend’s line, and it’s totally accurate).
Bond was always meant as a dual male/female fantasy, and this is the first film in the franchise to get it right for both sexes in quite a while. Pierce Brosnan was attractive but really goofy, especially with his film tenures’ obsession with gadgets. Casino Royale reminds viewers that gadgets can be disposed of without sacrificing plot, so long as the most important gadget of all, the one in James Bond’s pants, tells the story.
I also have to say I like that Casino Royale’s narrative is a bit of a rough ride. The filmmakers obviously couldn’t decide how far to break away from the Bond formula, and the result is half a genre film and half an idiosyncratic take on the origins of a legendary character. Watching a mash-up of the familiar and the totally alien felt good, though, because it kept me on my toes, which was especially surprising while watching the twenty-first entry in a film series which, God knows, has been phoned in on more than one occasion.
The bad guy’s male, “tear-duct periods” were also very inventive. I don’t know what else to call them, but there was definitely some strangeness going on there in terms of body and gender politics. And having a key scene set at a human anatomy art exhibit only further explicitly acknowledged that the Bond franchise is all about anxieties involving the human body.
Case in point: we have a main character who’s an Adonis despite never seeming to have any time to work out, who drinks to the point of being an alcoholic without paying any physical price, who’s almost died repeatedly and yet gets back on the horse every time without any newly gained wisdom towards mortality, and who f**ks as he pleases – condom free – without contracting any major diseases. James Bond as a cultural figure is almost post-body, enjoying the pleasures of the flesh without aging or weakening due to his behaviour or the natural passage of time.
And speaking of, when is a Bond film truly going to break from its forty year-old roots and have an explicit sex scene? I ask, because I could have seen one (or a few) explicit scenes occurring in this film without it seeming out of place. I suppose the risk is ruining both a tried-and-true formula and the reputation of actors locked into a role which requires long-term committments, but at the same time, the excess of violence in these films has certainly evolved over the years.
Changing gears a bit, Martin Campbell can certainly direct an action movie. It annoys me when directors versed in action filmmaking get crapped on, with Michael Bay being the poster boy for these type of complaints. I agree that Bay is extremely hit and miss with his storytelling (though 2005’s The Island was unfairly dismissed as stupid, when it’s clearly not), but whereas guys like Bay and Campbell often mess up their films, they also rarely get credit for their strengths where it’s due.
The opening chase sequence of Casino Royale is an incredibly shot piece of filmmaking, with the footage atop a construction crane of an extended fight sequence being both extremely effective and well-staged. Campbell and the screenwriters also deliver on a card game which takes up nearly half of the film, and could have easily derailed Casino Royale’s plot flow. Instead, a traditional Bond setting is made unfamiliar due to the sheer on-screen length of its presentation.
Martin Campbell’s re-invented one of the longest-running franchises in the history of film by giving James Bond a weird combination of heart, remorse and consciousness, combined with more charisma and arrogant machismo than any Bond since Connery. The result is a conflicted character whose origins require a sometimes unsteady, practicted emotional repression and angry indifference to others, so that Bond can deny his humanity to the point of permanently becoming the cold, cool killer we’ve come to know for nearly half a century. This is the Darth Vader story told through Ian Fleming’s creation, but it is told much more convincingly and subtly than in Episodes 1 to 3 of the Star Wars series. Having already accomplished so much with just one film, I can’t wait for the next film of the Daniel Craig-James Bond era.
by Jason Woloski | Source: DVD
02 Sep 2007 6:48 PM | Submit Comment
I’ve been meaning to write a post about Spike Lee’s two-part HBO doc on post-Katrina New Orleans for a long time, and thanks to inspiration from Tom’s post a few days ago and the two year anniversary of the Katrina disaster, I’m finally getting around to it now.
The film blew me away both times I saw it. I love how Lee’s movie is a broken levee of a documentary in and of itself, with all the talking heads and disparate points-of-view being almost too much to take over the film’s massive four hour running time. I also love that Spike Lee essentially made an anti-Michael Moore activist documentary. Don’t get me wrong, I like Moore’s films for the most part, but Moore is such an obnoxious and ubiquitous provocateur, other filmmakers need to directly react to Moore’s style of filmmaking and point out to viewers that “gittin’ interview subjects good” isn’t the only way to raise awareness. Instead, Lee allows his subjects’ anger rather than his own anger drive the film, and as a result you have a box of puzzle pieces that don’t come together a lot of time, with the overall message being that this is still one big f***ing mess of misunderstanding and conflict.
I also really like how Lee divided the documentary over the two nights when it originally aired, with parts 1 and 2 on the first night providing a general feel of pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans one year later, as well as recollections of what the pre-Katrina warnings, the actual Hurricane, and the immediate aftermath were like for residents in the eye of the storm. Night two (part 4 and especially part 3) focused on the idiosyncratic stories which came out of Katrina, from the medical doctor who twice told Dick Cheney to “go f**k himself” to his face, to Barbara Bush’s idiotic comments while touring the Superdome.
As my wife pointed out, this is also a rare movie in which Black figures from different classes, backgrounds, upbringings, outlooks, and genders are equally represented, and so there’s no need for the “token Black stereotype” anywhere in the film. In the same way that the Katrina/New Orleans situation is complicated through all that emerges over four hours, Blackness itself is complicated as not meaning just one thing or another.
Levees… is also a perfect bookend to Do the Right Thing, the film that put Spike Lee on the map as a hell-raiser in 1989. I’m not exactly sure how, but the movies are like mirror reflections of one another, with Do the Right Thing featuring subtle racial tension that builds beyond subtly throughout the film, ending with a series of outright disasters. When the Levees Broke begins where Do the Right Thing left off, with a race-based, avoidable disaster turning an isolated, idiosyncratic region (albeit the entirety of New Orleans and several areas beyond, versus a single neighborhood in Bed Stuy Brooklyn) into a reflection of much larger, American societal race tensions.
Finally, the brief but chilling section of Lee’s film, in which several residents of New Orleans swear that they heard explosions during the hurricane, is incredible. Combined with archival footage of levees being intentionally exploded (not from Katrina), and the historical fact that levees have been intentionally blown up during past New Orleans’ floods, possibly to relieve flood pressures from affluent neighbours while wiping out poorer neighbourhoods, is one of the most memorable segments of the entire doc, despite occurring very early in part 1.
by Jason Woloski | Source: DVD
02 Sep 2007 6:17 PM | Submit Comment
Wes Anderson doesn’t get enough credit for experimenting with Bill Murray’s facial hair. Anderson captured an untapped resource with Murray’s moustache in Rushmore, pscyhiatry beard in The Royal Tenenbaums, and faux “Hemingway” in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Conversely, I remember thinking Murray seemed highly “shaved” throughout Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation the first time I saw it (at least to me, he seems to have just a bit of stubble going on in a lot of his movies). Coppola took Murray’s grooming to the next level in Lost…, bringing out Murray’s scarred skin, which becomes more expressive as he ages into his rugged mug.
Critic Antonia Quirke describes Murray in Coppola’s film as, “Sexy with his bad skin, pockmarks so deep his complexion seems dotted with bits of chewed gum.” I love that description.
by Jason Woloski | Source: DVD
02 Sep 2007 5:34 PM | Comments (1)
