In the age of Freddy vs. Jason, it’s hard to imagine that versus horror movies were ever anything more than contrived amalgams of popular franchises. But as The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman proves, an ostentatious title did not always mean a forgettably ludicrous monster mash. Yes there is a werewolf, and a vampire woman, and yes they eventually throw down, but this excellent Spanish production is an atmospheric and entertaining tale of gothic horror, and the battle throughout is more cerebral than physical, a centuries-old struggle between an immortality-seeking vampire queen, and an accursed werewolf trying to find a way to end his earthly days.
Like many Spanish horror films of the day, we never get a solid sense of when or where all this is happening (an unpopulated valley somewhere in France?), the few establishing shots in evidence (a ruined cemetery, a crumbling country estate) doing little to place this story within a larger world. And yet, by populating this amorphous, and isolated, location with but a handful of interesting characters (lecherous henchmen, drooling werewolves, slow-motion prone vampires), a wonderfully eerie intimacy is created that makes us feel we are participants, not spectators, in this involved tale of timeless monsters.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Mill Creek Entertainment DVD
30 Oct 2007 12:27 AM | Submit Comment
This is the least compelling film of Jean-Pierre Melville’s that I’ve seen, and certainly the least effective of his literary adaptations. The central problem is that Melville is overwhelmed by Cocteau, in the same way that the soundtrack is overburdened by Cocteau’s voiceover narration; Cocteau’s protégé Edouard Dhermite is woefully miscast (far too old for those schoolboy shorts); and Nicole Stéphane verges on the unbearably histrionic. For all the great visual ideas there are as many awful ones (some strange, ugly low-angle closeups), and the few outdoor exteriors only underline the word-heavy ponderousness of the studio-set scenes.
by Ian Johnston | Source: BFI DVD
28 Oct 2007 1:54 PM | Submit Comment
Delmer Daves’ original is an absolute gem of narrative, directorial and acting precision, and the overblown quality of James Mangold’s remake had me worried. So, we get a burning barn in the opening scene, as if otherwise we can’t comprehend the financial threat to the farm. There’s an overextended attack on a stagecoach where a Gatling gun is thrown into the mix so there’s more things getting blown up in the modern style. And Christian Bale’s farmer is now given a wooden foot, as if we otherwise couldn’t see how Ben Wade emasculates him in front of his wife and son — although Van Heflin and Glenn Ford were perfectly able to do it without the wooden foot fifty years ago. But in the end, it works pretty well, Russell Crowe does a good job with a convincing mix of ruthless criminality and better-natured charm, and the changes that are made to the film at the end are ones that no doubt make the story more credible to a modern audience while still preserving the moral force of Elmore Leonard’s original story. (Although I also can’t help wondering do we really need this remake?)
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
28 Oct 2007 1:50 PM | Submit Comment
Of course we’ve all seen this before — consummate professionals trying to do their jobs in spite of locals’ intransigence and craven politicans and diplomats — but ignore the Syriana touches and the wobbles in the plot towards the end, and enjoy it as the good action movie that it is. Still the sombre we’re-all-rushing-inexorably-to-our-doom coda was a bit of a surprise.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
28 Oct 2007 1:47 PM | Submit Comment
The limited scope of Orchestra Rehearsal – the single set, the low budget, the short running time – works to its benefit; a pity Fellini didn’t try repeating the exercise in the very uneven rest of his career. The whole film is focused on one single idea — the workings of the orchestra as the acting out of the forces at work in Italian society. It’s also a very conservative film where resistance to authority is expressed only as pure anarchy and the rebels quickly submit to their authoritarian leader (in the person of the conductor, whose voice, when the film fades to black at the end, changes to a German Hitler-like rant), but, reject the message as we may, the film is satisfying in its forcefulness and economy.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
28 Oct 2007 1:44 PM | Submit Comment
Fellini’s final film is a dull dud about which it is hard to find anything positive to say. Roberto Benigni plays a kind of idiot savant, an ex-mental patient who wanders around a small Po valley town, tying together a typical collection of late-Fellini scenes (including the requisite, weak gibes at television — even though the film itself was almost entirely TV-financed) to generally tedious effect.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
28 Oct 2007 1:41 PM | Submit Comment
In his early films Fellini showed a lot of affection for the tawdriness of second-rate theatre and circus acts, but he never transferred this affection to the equally second-rate television that he took on as a target in the eighties. Instead, television is made to be a rather obvious index of the crassness of modern life. In Ginger and Fred for the first time Fellini brings together in one film his wife Giulietta Masina and his alter ego Marcello Mastroianni. They play former Astaire and Rogers impersonators from the forties who are rescued from oblivion for one final dance performance in a horrendous Christmas variety show for TV. (The show’s host is played by Franco Fabrizi, the Lothario from I Vitelloni and Il Bidone.) Masina plays the role as a neat, genteel, little old lady, Mastroianni as a run-to-seed, semi-alcoholic has-been, and they’re both the still centre of a sometimes too busy film. This stillness is a literal one, for at the moment that they start their dance, the television studio suffers a power cut and they’re forced to sit on the stage in the darkness, quietly talking to one another. It’s a beautiful, even magical moment, and it’s one that makes for the success of an otherwise rather obvious film.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
28 Oct 2007 1:39 PM | Submit Comment
True story: Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem see this film together for the first time, and afterward Bardem leans toward Brolin’s ear (paraphrasing): “Man, we were in a good movie,” he says. “Did you think my haircut looked dumb?”
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Paramount Vantage / Miramax 35mm print
24 Oct 2007 10:46 PM | Submit Comment
Being something of a proponent for throwaway art, I’m somewhat ashamed to say how reprehensibly incompetent I found this film. Save for Nicolas Cage dressed as a bear and punching the occasional woman in the face, nothing in this film sustains any of the oddness of the original. Even the New and Improved wicker man looks like more of a rural attraction than it does a gigantic tomb. Given the concentrated sexism of Neil LaBute’s past films, there is fodder here for a film much less disappointing than this.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: HBO
24 Oct 2007 10:43 PM | Submit Comment
Reprisals of Brian Eno and Godspeed You Black Emperor in lieu of Queen, and microcosm in lieu of bloody mayhem, and I’m more asleep than I am awake. But this, I think, is appropriate behavior for a zombie marathon. There are few, if any, genres that subscribe to the marathon format as well as the zombie movie: you begin alert and human by some measure, and emerge from it, hours later, in a sort of daze, your meager consciousness instilled solely by determination, staggering up from your seat with just enough balance to through your momentum forward toward the exit.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: 35mm print
24 Oct 2007 10:41 PM | Submit Comment
Seeing this in a theater is thrilling and unwatchably disgusting in equal measure.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: 35mm print
24 Oct 2007 10:40 PM | Submit Comment
The opener of a recent zombie marathon at the beloved Somerville Theatre, Shaun of the Dead better equipped than any film I can immediately cite to screen in front of an audience craving brains, blood, and apocalyptic mayhem—foreplay for bloodening that will soon proceed…
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Rogue Pictures 35mm print
24 Oct 2007 10:37 PM | Submit Comment
Robyn Hitchcock is nothing short of a wizard, summoning whimsical flashes of inspiration in introspective, substantive songs about sex, food, death… and insects.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: The Sundance Channel
24 Oct 2007 10:34 PM | Submit Comment
Troy Hurtubise getting slammed in the chest by a formidably-sized tree trunk is hilarious, and this hilariousness is quickly staved the moment you realize the breath is still in his lungs, his body ready for a second.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: The Sundance Channel
24 Oct 2007 10:33 PM | Submit Comment
Growing up, my brother and I worshipped Tomoyuki Tanaka. While other kids watched Disney, we collected old, poorly-dubbed VHS tapes—Godzilla’s Revenge, Godzilla Versus Mothra, King Kong Versus Godzilla—and sat mindlessly in front of the television, delighted that some man in a rubber lizard suit was stomping cardboard Tokyos into submission. (Neither of us found the Americanized original, with frazzled currents of social intrigue and a forced-in Raymond Burr, all that interesting.) The tapes are still around, kept safe in a box in our parents’ basement.
So watching The Host was like revisiting those childhood movies, only with better special effects and zero dubbing. It was fun, yes, and imbued with a level of not-so-subtle social commentary—if you don’t realize this by the film’s climax, the “Agent Yellow” dispenser’s familiar shape should give it away—but it was also amazingly refreshing. Nobody does good monster movies anymore. Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla stunk, and I can’t stomach Peter Jackson’s King Kong long enough to sit through all three-plus hours. (Note how both of those are remakes, and both star ill-placed comedic actors.) Perhaps it’s the stigma surrounding monster flicks, that they’re only marketable to kids, that’s kept directors away; trying to make an appealingly violent film loaded with destruction while staying at PG-13 is an impossible task. Maybe it’s finally time I dig out that old dusty box of tapes.
by Adam Balz | Source: DVD
19 Oct 2007 12:19 PM | Submit Comment
The plot of My Super-Ex Girlfriend was ripe with comic possibility: the private life of a superhero. And, to be fair, Reitman’s film occasionally does more than simply graze the surface: Our superhero, on a failed double-date, throws a fit when certain annihilation threatens to undermine her social life. But instead of making her character acutely sympathetic—how often does a world-saving, power-endowed person get the chance to be like everybody else?—she is depicted as unstable, even mentally broken. A love-starved stalker.
Which is sad, considering this has never been done before. Sure, we’ve been offered scenes of Superman and Lois Lane in bed together—an image, I should mention, that undoubtedly scarred my younger self and will most likely propel me into therapy around middle-age—as well as Spiderman and Batman working out their relationship issues as Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne, respectively. But there was so much more lurking beneath the surface of My Super Ex-Girlfriend, and I could sense it trying to get out. Uma Thurman’s G-Girl doesn’t understand what it’s like to be breakable, just as Luke Wilson’s Matt Saunders doesn’t understand her craving to be “normal”—so much depends on her willingness to save a faceless world that can never get close to her.
Call me an idealist for trying to find meaning in this mess. It’s a truly awful movie, with poor writing and terrible acting. But compared with the homogenous Good Luck, Chuck rom-coms that now seem to congeal out of nowhere on a bi-weekly basis, this one actually had some promise. Too bad.
by Adam Balz | Source: Showtime
19 Oct 2007 12:18 PM | Submit Comment
Ah, love. Everlasting muse of the poets, scourge of singers, money-derrick of American industry. You drive us to alcohol and ice cream and crappy television; because of you we buy cheap chocolate, write bad poems, and annoy friends for hours on the telephone. Our daily lives are clogged by James Blunt and Harlequin novels and eHarmony ads, all offering sugared sermons about your glories. And sometimes, those rare sometimes, we pay someone to throw acid in the face of our beloved, all for the sake of attaining you.
Which is what Burt Pugach did. And when Burt Pugach, a lawyer, went to prison, he took up the cases of his fellow inmates and got convicted murderers released on technicalities. He sent his beloved Linda a check for four-thousand dollars, all earned by defending his new and incarcerated clientele, and simultaneously secured his own release. He then proposed marriage on the local news, all while Linda sat in her apartment listening, scarred and blind. And so they married.
The one resounding question, which creeps slowly into focus as Dan Klores’ documentary proceeds, is whether or not Burt and Linda Pugach truly love one another. After thirty-some years joined in matrimony—rocky and ribald, not exactly wedded bliss—Linda’s friends seem to challenge any notion that the two share a devoted affection, while Burt’s acquaintances seem removed from the entire affair. We see Burt and Linda arguing over dinner, arguing at home, and even arguing during the interviews. And while the film ends on a rare image of togetherness—of them dancing hand-in-hand—we’re left with questions about them. I’d like to think that Burt and Linda, after so many years, sincerely adore one another, and their marriage isn’t something fabricated. But love, as the singers say, is a fickle thing.
by Adam Balz | Source: DVD
19 Oct 2007 12:16 PM | Submit Comment
It is difficult to discuss Freaks without breaking numerous rules of political correctness, the very title of the film likely to elicit negative feelings in viewers and readers alike. To these dissenters I can only point out that Tod Browning does not use his powers as director to tell a tale that disparages and mocks these unfortunate souls. Rather, he keeps his focus on showing us all that is beautiful, special, and worthy about these fascinating people. Instead of the negative label applied to these folks by cruel manipulators, in Browning’s hands the title of the film becomes a point of pride, stripped of it’s negative connotations. It is as if Browning is saying, here are those which have been deemed Freaks; see what honor and beauty lies within them.
And indeed, although an overarching plot does manifest itself by the film’s astonishing and horrific conclusion, for the bulk of Freaks it seems as if Browning was working with no goal in mind but to champion the humanity of his stars. Thus amidst a cordon of rickety wagons scattered about the dusty lot of a traveling circus show, we see Siamese twins courting a pair of would-be husbands; a microcelephic girl showing off her new dress; a torso nimbly lighting himself a cigarette; and Hans and Frieda, the vertically challenged couple, struggling with pre-marital difficulties. Although this last tale eventually comes to dominate the story (with Hans’s love for another woman, a regular-sized beauty named Cleopatra, threatening to destroy not only his relationship with Frieda, but also his life), the moments leading up to it are actually more affecting, the threadbare narrative allowing for an undiluted intimacy with these singular people.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Warner Bros. DVD
17 Oct 2007 11:47 PM | Submit Comment
A guy has got to be pretty head-over-heels in love to marry a woman who won’t even let him kiss her. But if the woman was Simone Simon, and she looked up at you with those radiant teary eyes, you might marry her too. Simon plays Irina, a Serbian immigrant convinced that any passionate encounter will turn her into a panther, due to a curse placed on her village generations ago. Her new husband, Oliver, is convinced that she’s crazy and that psychotherapy will help her. Meanwhile, though, they’re sleeping in separate bedrooms (Irina believes that even a kiss will make her turn and maul her husband to death), and after a tense few months of marriage Oliver starts to notice that the cute no-nonsense woman he works with is probaby more his type anyway. But when Irina suspects that her husband might be less than faithful— well, you know what’s bound to happen.
Executed with lots of style, many gorgeous shots, and a keen eye for the innocuously scary detail, this movie does a nice job maintaining tension over time, though there are fewer big-money scares than one might expect or wish for. The look of the film is particularly masterful given its apparently tiny budget— though after its success, Tourneur was out of the low-budget ghetto for good. Moody and almost gothic, Cat People is the sort of stylized horror film that you don’t see done quite this well anymore. Be sure not to blink during Simon’s bewitching penultimate scenes. It’s all almost too gorgeous to be scary at all.
by Megan Weireter | Source: TCM
15 Oct 2007 1:38 PM | Comments (1)
I can’t but wonder — whether Fellini intended it or not (probably not) — how much Terence Stamp’s performance in Toby Dammit (Fellini’s segment of Histoires extraordinaires/Tre passi nel delirio/Spirits of the Dead) is a self-portrait. Stamp did after all famously go off the rails and vanish to an ashram at the end of the sixties. Here, he plays a wan, unshaven, drugged- and boozed-out English actor brought to Italy to star in a Catholic western that, we’re told, aims to combine Ford, Dreyer, and Pasolini, and haunted by his personal image of the devil, a supposedly innocent girl playing with a large white ball. Stamp is fortunately the centre of this short and, equally fortunately, the Stamp character speaks no Italian and Stamp speaks in his own voice, so for once we have an English-speaking actor in a Fellini film who is not dubbed by some Italian. Otherwise, this is standard late-sixties Fellini — a crazed TV interview, an equally crazed film awards ceremony, and a final drive into the night in a revved-up Ferrari.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
15 Oct 2007 1:25 PM | Submit Comment
Fellini’s first film in colour, it’s his segment to Boccaccio ‘70, shared with De Sica, Visconti, and Mario Monicelli. It starts off promising enough with its opening shot that plays off a line of white-shirt and yellow-skirted schoolgirls against another line of red-cassocked priests, but then unfortunately the story itself begins, a crass and ploddingly obvious critique of puritanism (Dr Antonio, a caricature of a moral-standards crusader, is enraged and then literally driven made by a billboard of Anita Ekberg that highlights her giant breasts) that is extended way beyond its natural life to 54 increasingly tedious minutes.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
15 Oct 2007 1:22 PM | Submit Comment
This 16-minute contribution to the Zavattini-orchestrated omnibus film Love in the City/L’amore in città is what I like from fifties Fellini, the productive play between the neorealist impulse, the on-location depiction of Italian life in the streets, and Fellini’s own structural reworkings of that reality for symbolic, sentimental, or aesthetic ends. (See La Strada.) Here, A Marriage Agency falls into two parts. First, a reporter is guided by a gaggle of little children along an unrealistically long warren of corridors to the marriage agency of the title. Then, after the reporter invents an incredible story of a rich werewolf friend looking for a wife, the agency, equally incredibly, finds a prospective bride whom the reporter takes for a drive into the country. It’s at this point that this apparently light piece takes on an emotional (and social-critical depth) with its insight into the impoverished background of the woman involved. This is very nicely done — a fine, delicate balancing act on Fellini’s part.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
15 Oct 2007 1:19 PM | Submit Comment
Normally, this is the kind of film I would leap to praise—for its near poetic treatment of imagery, its wavering use and disuse of dialogue, its unabashed fixation on everything unstructured and symbolic. And there’s a grating thought existing somewhere in my mind that says, yes, this is a great film, a work of borderline brilliance. But I want to know why everything looks the way it does, and if everything I think about this film is true. Ilya Khrjanovsky’s 126-minute film is a puzzle without any matching pieces; the “round piglets,” the story of Russian “doubles” numbering in the tens of thousands, the blond twins, the Cold War-era meat-freezer, the millennial setting, the drunken old women, the dogsÑI feel the need to assign meaning and purpose, simply because the director’s use of “4” drives me to. And yet Khrjanovsky dangles the entire plotline above my head like a teasing adult. A lot of critics have denounces his film as boring and indulgent and, in one oddly complementary instance, a “bad cheese dream”; I think it’s just right, and that thought drives me nuts.
by Adam Balz | Source: Red Envelope Entertainment DVD
15 Oct 2007 1:01 PM | Submit Comment
There’s a moment in Eric Steel’s film when all hope for a serious rumination on the nature of suicide—its causes, preventions, and effects—becomes immediately perverted. A subject paces back and forth along the Golden Gate Bridge as he prepares to leap over the side; his hair courses through the Bay wind, and he casually smokes a cigarette. And, over the sounds of silence, we’re offered “Sim City” music—bouncy, anxious, appallingly placed, as though the filmmakers were building some sick tension in preparation for his final moments. In fact, that’s what much of The Bridge is based around—a growing anxiety over “will he?” and “when will he?” It doesn’t help that, most of the time, the camera seems to be moving along with its subjects, following them as they pace and pray and fall—as though somewhere, someone with a camera were watching each suicide unfold without trying to stop it.
by Adam Balz | Source: Koch Lorber DVD
15 Oct 2007 1:00 PM | Submit Comment
As much as I love seeing half-naked escorts machine-gunning killers into the dirt, Severance is a standard parody of the slasher subgenre with larger aspirationsÑnamely, to be a decent horror film itself. There are some funny momentsÑa man colliding with a tree as he eludes capture, a woman’s unexpected love of creepy-crawliesÑas well as some good frights. But the whole thing feels so old and overusedÑWes Craven does “The Office.”
by Adam Balz | Source: Magnolia DVD
15 Oct 2007 12:58 PM | Submit Comment
How much you’re charmed by The Clowns will depend on your interest in what Fellini here mourns as the lost art of the clown. For myself, interest is pretty limited, but there’s no denying Fellini’s passion for and commitment to the subject—no surprise, given, for example, the circus motif in 8½ and the circus scenes in Juliet of the Spirits. So, the film contains early scenes recreating Fellini’s childhood memories of a circus visit (a precursor in tone to Amarcord)—there’s a lovely feeling to the slow track in the empty circus ring; Fellini himself and his crew in their documentary research, principally in Paris, interviewing former “white” clowns; and a recreation of a clown performance that acts as a funereal ceremony of this now lost art. I can’t share Fellini’s passion, but you have to acknowledge that in its own terms the film is remarkably successful.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
14 Oct 2007 12:12 PM | Submit Comment
The nice thing about Amarcord is its tone of quiet melancholy. This re-imagining of Fellini’s childhood in provincial Rimini in the thirties plays as a series of sketches, where sometimes little more than mood is invoked and the sequence fades out on a note of peaceful epiphany (the peacock in the snow). At other times any cracks in the structure are successfully papered over by extended Nino Rota tunes. There’s some ritualistic mocking of Mussolini’s fascism but it seems pretty half-hearted compared to what other Italian directors were doing at the same time (The Conformist or Marco Leto’s sadly little-known La Villeggiatura). Fellini’s at his best in the final wedding sequence, in the way it slowly winds down until only a few guests are left in the near empty landscape; then they too leave, and the film quietly, slowly fades out.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
14 Oct 2007 12:09 PM | Submit Comment
City of Women is in one respect quite a historical artifact—a reminder of how much males felt threatened by the feminism of the day. It’s rather like the harem sequence from 8 ½ expanded into a full-length feature, and in Marcello Mastroianni’s character you can feel free either to admire Fellini’s self-awareness of the ludicrousness of his alter ego’s sexualised view of women or to be annoyed by Fellini’s simultaneous indulgence in it. There are some nice set pieces but it does all go on a bit too long, and although the repeating dream structure is a nice idea (we plunge into a Freudian train tunnel at the start of the film, and then again at the end, literally stuck in the dark of the tunnel as the credits end), visually the film is disappointing, very drab and unimaginative compared to past glories.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
14 Oct 2007 12:02 PM | Submit Comment
Okay, so I have a not-so-secret crush on Freddie Prinze Jr. And trashy teen rom-coms are like crack to me. So in theory, Boys and Girls should have been a perfect bit of guilty pleasure on a rainy Wednesday evening. Instead, I can unhesitatingly say that it is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
The funny thing is, I actually saw it in theaters years ago – you might remember it being billed under the tagline “Warning: Sex Changes Everything” – but its awfulness seemed to have slipped my mind. The plot is your basic, run-of-the-mill, When Harry Met Sally rip-off: Nerdy Boy and Cool Girl bump into each other repeatedly through those painful teen years, and strike angry sparks each time. But in college, Nerdy Boy gets a haircut and contact lenses and the two become unlikely Best Friends Forever… UNTIL that one fateful night!
You know the rest. The thing is, Freddie – bless his heart – really can√¢’t pull off “nerd.” Stick to “jock with a heart of gold,” sweetie. As for Claire Forlani, well, there’s a reason she hasn’t been heard from since Antitrust. But the real problem isn’t the acting, it’s the script. I love a cheesy teen romance, but they are what they are, and this script tried far too hard to be something more: clever, moving, philosophical even, about the meaning of love and the things that make relationships work. It failed. Miserably. Somewhere, Nora Ephron is cringing at this messy re-hashing of her “can men and women really just be friends” masterpiece. I feel your pain, Nora.
And one last thing—I haven’t spent a ton of time in the Bay Area, but I’m pretty sure that the Marin Headlands aren’t within walking distance of the Berkeley campus.
Why, Freddie, why?
by Eva Holland | Source: Dimension Home Video (DVD)
11 Oct 2007 10:24 PM | Submit Comment
Breaking and Entering is easy enough to pick holes in. Underpinning its soft middlebrow humanism is an interesting attempt to depict the way parallel, separate societies co-exist in the same area of a city, rarely meeting one another; although it’s a pity this is then spun out into a less than credible romance between middle-class architect Jude Law and Bosnian immigrant seamstress Juliette Binoche(!). But I still prefer this to Minghella’s big budget literary adaptations (The English Patient or Cold Mountain) and the film is impressively spot-on in its depiction of the way a marriage can devolve over a number of years into tiredness and anomie (too spot-on, if you’ve been there yourself).
by Ian Johnston | Source: Weinstein DVD
09 Oct 2007 1:31 PM | Submit Comment
The brutal ugliness and violence of human behaviour finds an apt enough counterpart here in the cruel pitilessness of the Australian outback, but by the time The Proposition reaches its climax, you wonder what the point is in this display of unredeeming violence. There’s no sign that the filmmakers know themselves. What we’re left with is just the kind of indulgence in Gothic luridness that you get in scriptwriter Nick Cave’s own worst songs. This is all something of a pity as, early on, the film goes off in a fascinating and surprising direction with the Ray Winstone character, the captain with the civilising mission who sets wife Emily Watson up in a Fordian garden in the desert — this ends up the strongest and most rewarding aspect to a very muddled film.
by Ian Johnston | Source: First Look DVD
09 Oct 2007 1:26 PM | Comments (1)
I’ve no idea how close to or far from historical truth Fuller sticks in this tale of James Addison Reavis’ scheme to con the entire Arizona territory out of the U.S. government, but in Fuller’s hands Reavis not only almost gets away with it but it’s played out as a great yarn, stretching over years — even a couple spent in a Spanish monastery, followed by encounters with gypsy queens and bored countesses — and immeasurably helped by a rich, suitably theatrical performance from Vincent Price. The low (but, I guess, not too low) budget doesn’t seem to limit Fuller’s expressiveness in the way you get in I Shot Jesse James – there’s a suitably shadowy, expressionist attempted lynching scene; and another scene where Reavis deals with two locals come to threaten him in his office is a forceful portrayal – in one single medium shot – of coiled violence suddenly unleashed, brilliant in its economy.
by Ian Johnston | Source: Eclipse Series 5 DVD
09 Oct 2007 1:23 PM | Submit Comment
Maybe I was expecting too much (the heights of Fixed Bayonets! or Pickup on South Street), but I was left disappointed with my first viewing of this. Fuller’s sympathetic and heavily psychological take on Bob Ford is an interesting one, but it’s let down by an overly wordy script and a poor female lead — and the famous fist-to-the-camera shot turns out to be an anomaly, standing out from the stolid style of the rest of the film.
by Ian Johnston | Source: Eclipse Series 5 DVD
09 Oct 2007 1:17 PM | Submit Comment
There’s nothing particularly objectionable about this road movie/family comedy drama — just surprise that it should have garnered so much critical and audience acclaim. It’s pretty much what “independent cinema” seems to represent in America nowadays — put it beside true indie spirits like Mysterious Skin and Keane and this pleasant enough film turns inconsequential and forgettable. (And, needless to say, as someone finally getting towards the end of Time Regained – seventh volume of the greatest novel ever – not believing in Steve Carell’s America’s No. 1 Proust Scholar doesn’t help me like the film any more.)
by Ian Johnston | Source: Fox DVD
09 Oct 2007 1:13 PM | Submit Comment
I was practically vibrating in my seat when the credits started to roll. The only comparable feeling I can recall having at the movies was at the same point in Unforgiven, to which my father and brother escaped on a rainy day in Cape Cod back in 1992. The screen went dark and I simultaneously experienced a draining of emotion and a jolt of physical energy, like a cross between a funeral and a football match, a testament to vigorous (if futile) masculinity yoked with an invocation of total, incomprehensible blackness.
No Country for Old Men is an utterly pitch-perfect film, beautifully and expertly made in every way, and a thrilling reminder of the Coens’ consummate craftsmanship. Surely, as Jit has noted elsewhere, there will be naysayers. It is arguable that the film’s tenor and ethos are wholly indebted to McCarthy’s novel and that the Coens are merely channeling him. But even if this is the case, one can hardly have predicted how perfectly McCarthy’s language sits in the mouths of the Coens’ actors and how beautifully aligned the brothers’ sense of mood and pacing is with their source material’s. There is not a line out of place, not a bum note in any performance, not a cut wasted, and not a single composition that doesn’t marry with the West Texas landscape or turn a paneled and padded motel room into the surface of a chessboard.
But whether this film is lauded for the Coen Brothers’ contributions to it or in spite of them, many of us will be hard pressed to find a better American film made this year.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Paramount Vantage 35mm Print
09 Oct 2007 12:05 PM | Comments (1)
Avida, the second film from directors Benoit Delepine and Gustave de Kervern, opens with a close-up of thick gray lips moving like two slugs, then cuts to Fernando Arrabal dressed as a picador. He is seated in a dark hallway, agonizing over his fate, then enters a dusty makeshift ring and battles a rhinoceros. This is his suicide.
In the scenes that follow, the storyline of Avida descends into the wonderfully bizarre. Bathed in the fresh, undisguised style of the filmmaker’s absurdist and surrealist predecessors, Delepine and De Kervern’s film—the story of three men who kidnap a rich woman’s dog, then must help her fulfill a death wish—is kept consistently droll by their disuse of color; with the notable exception of one scene, the entire film is shot in black and white. It creates a stark, blatant world where lives operated by remote control seem lethal, and a break from it all seems necessary.
by Adam Balz | Source: 35MM Theatrical Print
07 Oct 2007 12:15 AM | Comments (7)
I went in expecting a purely entertaining mess (a friend called this “junk food”) and I couldn’t even enjoy myself. This is awful on a level incomprehensible to most human beings. Writer-director Hyung-rae Shim has no command of his actors and spends 90 minutes stealing from Lord of the Rings, William Shakespeare, and Kung-Fu movies. (If your brain can conceive of such a combination without trying to claw its way out of your skull, you’ll have a good idea of what this film looks like.) The plot is inconsequential—this is a story built solely around special effects, some of which are surprisingly fun—and the dialogue is a mesh of grating one-liners. And Robert Forrester seems to have reached the end of a respectable career as the reincarnation of a 500-year-old master swordsman who manages an antiques shop in downtown Los Angeles. (Because, if you’re a 500-year-old spirit from feudal China trying to keep a low profile, antiques are the way to go.) It’s the kind of film that makes you wish Mystery Science Theatre 3000 was still around.
Sure, I suppose I don’t “get it”—I’m a stuffy adult at a party thrown solely for ten-year-olds. A square. But it says something when a film like Dragon Wars earns $40 million in its home country while native filmmakers like Ki-Duk Kim, one of the best directors working today, languish in obscurity. So you can have your sour, underdeveloped dragon films, as long as I can have my beautiful Kim operas.
by Adam Balz | Source: 35MM Theatrical Print
07 Oct 2007 12:12 AM | Comments (1)
A lot has been made of Von Trier’s recent confession that he derives “no pleasure from filmmaking.” Considering his usual style and subject, one is forced to wonder: If his pleasureless-but-content self is represented by the warped and instinctively bleak works of the last ten years—Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Manderlay—what does the mind of a depressed Von Trier look like? Moreover, how does one balance that image of the complex, phobic Dane with The Boss of It All, a lighthearted office comedy?
Von Trier, embracing an amusingly deconstructive form, narrates his film as it progresses; beginning as a reflection in office windows, his eye pressed to the camera, he becomes a cinematic John Barth. When a scene requires something cliched, such as the introduction of a new character to advance the story’s progression, he lets us know. It’s refreshing and, at the same time, essential to a film about how years of compound storytelling leads to disaster and, eventually, redemption.
by Adam Balz | Source: 35MM Theatrical Print
07 Oct 2007 12:10 AM | Submit Comment
At times looking like a James Whistler painting left out in the rain, L’Iceberg’s charm is its absences. Devoted to the art of pantomime, we are offered long, beautiful scenes peppered with rare instances of dialogue. The sound of clocks and doors and, eventually, crashing waves occupy much of the soundtrack, and our heroine’s ever-changing world—from a cookie-cutter European suburb to the floating iceberg of her dreams—is presented with an unflinching artistic eye. (Many of the scenes are evocative of a happier Roy Andersson.)
Fiona is a diligent fast-food manager; as her husband turns off the lights to sleep across town, she is turning off the lights to her restaurant, her implied home. Only now, returning briskly to finish an overlooked task, she becomes locked in a walk-in freezer. Freed the next morning by industrious employees, who march around the restaurant in the odd choreographies of routine, Fiona finds that nobody noticed her absence. Not her staff, her husband, or her two children. At the same time, she has a strange new fixation—she is drawn to anything remotely cold. It represents an inner freedom, the chance to do something for herself, and so she leaves her family for an iceberg in the Arctic.
The best moment comes as Fiona backs away from a lone commuter bus in an empty parking lot. Her backward steps slow and cautious and eyes ever fixed on the open door, she seems to regret any notion of fleeing. Just then, a group of elderly men and women shuffles into view. They walk like packed sardines, stomachs pressed to backs and feet barely leaving the pavement, and as they move towards the bus they absorb Fiona. It’s a recurring theme for the filmmakers, and for Fiona—separating one’s self from shifting sameness of everyday life. This same group of men and women appears later, still packed tightly together, as a mute fisherman prepares to kill himself; they are centered, with Fiona and the fisherman existing on the brink of the screen, and turn as a one between the two opposing figures. Pure beauty.
by Adam Balz | Source: DVD
07 Oct 2007 12:08 AM | Submit Comment
Lust, Caution certainly didn’t deserve to win the Golden Lion at Venice (Jia Zhang-ke must be thankful Zhang Yimou wasn’t president of the jury last year), but nor does it deserve the lukewarm-to-cold critical reception it seems to be getting. This handsomely-mounted period espionage drama (set in wartime Shanghai, with the emphasis on the “drama” rather than the “espionage”) has all the virtues — and, of course, the limitations — of Ang Lee’s cinema: solid and slightly old-fashioned virtues of an attention to story and character and a clean and functional narrative style. Tang Wei does a fine job in the lead performance as the drama student at the centre of an assassination plot aimed at Tony Leung’s nasty collaborationist Mr Yee, but Leung’s acting is characteristically a little too one-note — we miss the emotion that Heath Ledger brought to Brokeback Mountain. Still, in the context of Chinese culture where vilification of the Japanese is par for the course (somewhat justified, I should add, given what they did in China and their reluctance to offer any adequate apology), there’s something courageous even today (as there was even more when Eileen Chang published her original novella) about the sympathetic shadings that are brought to Yee’s character and about the privileging of personal emotions over patriotic duty.
One of the strongest scenes in the film is when Wong Chia Chi (the Tang Wei) embarrasses and drives away her spymaster with the intimate details of how sex with Yee constitutes an assault on her body and her soul. It’s interesting that (once you’re past the first sex scene between Yee and Chia Chi — all spanking and bondage) we never get as deep a feeling of the psychological effects on Chia Chi from the sex scenes themselves. And to be honest I don’t think in the end the film really needs Lee’s tastefully-arranged displays of Tang and Leung’s body-part contortions.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
06 Oct 2007 1:51 PM | Submit Comment
Pauline Kael famously praised this movie out of failure and into the cultural relevance that has stuck to it. Arthur Penn is like Godard for the Depression-era American South, and with Bonnie and Clyde he apparently ushered in all the hip movie violence of the 70s. I don’t know. Movies have been far more brutal since way before I started watching them, so it’s hard to put myself in a mindset to comprehend the impact that getting a kick out of killing must have had at the time. In a post-Virginia Tech massacre essay in the New York Times, A.O. Scott basically said that maybe we were better off before Bonnie, or maybe the cinematic violence its success led to (especially the new psuedo-snuff shit like Saw, and Hostel) isn’t such a good thing, or at least that the issue is worth examining.
I’m not sure how Pauline Kael would have reacted to Viggo Mortensen fighting two mobsters naked in a steam room, eventually stabbing one of them in the eye in Eastern Promises, but it takes that kind of extremity to make me tense up at this point. Am I all fucked up inside because of it? No way to tell, really.
What stays with me is not necessarily the casual gunshots of Penn’s film, although the end is still pretty chilling, but how much fun the actors are having at playing dirt-poor rednecks. Warren Beatty’s sleazy psychosis and insuppressible tooth-grin tell you right off the bat what kind of woman would want to go on a road trip with him. And so we have Faye Dunaway, unbelievably gorgeous, slinking around in an endless supply of loose-fitting V-neck blouses and having a hell of a time with her fake Hollywood twang. (As illegitimate as their accents are, neither do the Foghorn Leghorn, thank god.) She can’t get him to go to bed with her, but it’s okay, ‘cuz his gun turns her on more.
When I see a movie that has a famous quote, scene or shot that’s been burned into collective consciousness long before I pop it in the DVD player, I have a tendency to sit in anticipation of what I know is coming up. I did it with the shot through the leg in The Graduate and the “You talkin’ to me?” scene in Taxi Driver. It’s almost as if the movie hasn’t fulfilled it’s promise until that certain part happens, and then it’s usually disappointing, like how Al Pacino actually says “Say hello to my little friend” really quickly in Scarface, and without much fanfare. The still image I always see from Bonnie and Clyde is Beatty and Dunaway in the doorway of a bank, stone-faced, pointing guns at the camera. Forever printed in magazines and on video cases, the image takes less than a second to happen, but it’s thrilling, emblematic. Whoever chose that still for immortality chose well; it depicts our anti-heroes in a rare moment of seriousness, looking for once like real criminals.
by Teddy Blanks | Source: DVD
04 Oct 2007 12:18 AM | Submit Comment
The latest IMAX offering from the producers of Everest has all the jaw-dropping, stomach-lurching scenery I’ve come to expect when I go to see a movie on the big round screen. The camera follows high-speed trains past Swiss villages carved into the hillsides and over viaducts spanning plunging gorges, and the shots of the peaks themselves, up close and personal, had me gripping my chair arms with delicious vertigo.
But when I wasn’t thoroughly distracted by the views, the movie also had me asking some troubling questions. Unlike some IMAX productions, The Alps has a clear storyline: climber John Harlin III, whose namesake fell from the north face of the Eiger when the younger Harlin was only 8 or 9 years old, has returned to Switzerland to conquer the route that killed his father. He brings with him his wife and young daughter, and while they seem understanding and supportive of his quest, I can’t help but question how a man who was left fatherless could risk doing the same to his own child. To make things even worse, the two local climbers assisting Harlin on his quest are a married couple, who leave two potential orphans below them when they begin the ascent.
I have never climbed a mountain and likely never will, so I’m sure most climbers would say I just can’t possibly understand. And of course, a parent could be killed crossing the street to buy the paper on any given morning — I don’t expect people to give up every sport and hobby when they have kids. But mountain climbing isn’t just any hobby, and the movie makes clear that the north face of the Eiger isn’t just any climb either: John Harlin II is certainly not its only victim. It seems to me that no matter how fulfilling or mind-expanding it must be to reach the summit of a mountain, it remains an inherently selfish act, in that it is an accomplishment that will only benefit the climber. As such, doesn’t it have its proper time and place?
I know, I know. Let the you-just-don’t-get-its begin.
by Eva Holland | Source: MacGillivray Freeman Films (IMAX)
02 Oct 2007 9:49 PM | Comments (1)
Underwhelming, considering the talent involved. I went in expecting this film to be methodically paced rather than peppered with moments of surreal body distortions, as is Cronenberg’s custom; I knew there’d be no exploding heads or vaginal stomach gash, no leg-length stitching or oozing bubbling man-bug, and I was fine with that, because Cronenberg is such an expert cerebral filmmaker. Only half the movie is what we see; the rest is what we think we see, and why, as exemplified by Videodrome.
None of his perceptual playground, though, is utilized in Eastern Promises. Yes, there are still distortions of the flesh, represented by Nikolai’s inked skin, but we’re never led into Cronenberg’s usual dance. The film, while exceptional, feels wholly incomplete; Nikolai’s sudden moral turnaround seems forced and synthetic, and the “twist” feels almost blasphemous. (Plus, you would think with such a highly mobile network, Semyon or Kirill would have been tipped off at some point to this revelation, considering it happens on a balcony in full view of passers-by.) Still, Cronenberg’s eye for visuals is as strong as ever—Eastern Promises marks only the second time a director has used two little girls to thoroughly creep me out—and Armin Mueller-Stahl’s turn as the bloodthirsty patriarch is decidedly astounding.
by Adam Balz | Source: Focus Features 35MM Theatrical Print
02 Oct 2007 12:25 PM | Submit Comment
Considering the subject matter and the explicit way in which it’s presentedÑuncensored firsthand accounts played over stunning visual reenactmentsÑI was surprised by how utterly dull Zoo is. Due, in part, to the filmmaker’s insistence that we focus on the complexity of the issue involved—people whose love of animals leads unthinkably to sex—rather than the acts committed, we are promised something more than the torrid, sensationalistic angle that usually surrounds stories like this; usually we would expect to be repulsed, and to have figures ready to absorb our disdain. But by constructing his film around actors rather than interviewees, director Robinson Devor takes away the directness; the prospect of an immediate emotional reaction is gone. But the voiceovers provide almost no background; if these men were suburban husbands, with loving kids and secure professions, my reaction would be different. But the only real information we get on them, outside of Mr. Hands, is that one drives truck and another looks like a child molester. This is the story of a moment in time, when these men were finally caught, of the ensuing pandemonium, and not of the men themselves.
by Adam Balz | Source: Velocity/ThinkFilm DVD
02 Oct 2007 12:22 PM | Submit Comment
The scene that really gets me is when Dustin Hoffman, as Lenny Bruce, goes on after shooting up with his wife backstage. For the most part, the movie is a collage that cuts abruptly from one time period to another. But here, the camera, seated somewhere to the right, in the back of the club, stays with him. It’s a long shot. Painful to watch. He riffs incoherently, unable to settle on any one subject matter, and the audience laughs only when it doesn’t know what else to do. And because we are kept far away from him as he self-destructs, we feel less like we are watching a movie and more like we are part of that uncomfortable audience, witnessing greatness hit bottom.
I don’t know how close Hoffman actually gets to Lenny Bruce, but his performance in this scene is a perfect example of how extraordinary he was as a young actor.
by Teddy Blanks | Source: DVD
02 Oct 2007 12:11 AM | Submit Comment
Klute is most eerie when capturing Fonda’s vulnerability, not so much in her therapy sessions, but when she is alone in her ugly New York apartment, and the phone won’t stop ringing. It’s a universally frightening moment for anyone who’s ever been alone and suddenly frighted by the dark in their own house. Unfortunately Sutherland can’t do much with his corn-fed, concerned detective role, and the final confrontation between Klute and her stalker had me slightly nauseous (he forces her to listen to a disturbing audiotape) but more irritated that this resolute, street smart hooker wasn’t trying to claw his eyes out.
by Jenny Jediny | Source: Warner Bros. 35mm print
01 Oct 2007 10:58 AM | Submit Comment