Not Coming to a Theater Near You

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Snow Angels / USA / 2007

Snow Angels finds David Gordon Green grasping at straws, clearly eager for a chance at meaty melodrama, but simply incapable of restraining his whimsy-tooth or even of constructing full and meaningful characters whose actions one can comprehend, much less believe. Again, Green proves himself an excellent director of actors: both Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell offer great turns in their otherwise unremarkable roles, and there are at least a half-dozen smaller roles that could easily warrant more screentime. But the film’s story seems to overwhelm Green’s sense of narrative and tone, and what begins as a characteristically idiosyncratic look at small town life, adults in relationship hell, and the various kids who get snagged in the middle soon devolves into pointless misery and violence with little warning or import.

And this is a shame, because Green’s quirkiness — for lack of a less condescending designation — always seems to have worked on me: in the beguiling, if derivative George Washington, in the gentle, sensitive-boy-baiting All the Real Girls, and even the maligned, oddball odyssey of Undertow. That film represented a decisive new beginning for Green, with its more adventurous sense of narrative and copped ’70s cinematics, and Snow Angels is a clear attempt to forge ahead with these new themes and styles (as seems his next film, The Pineapple Express, albeit in a rather different way). But Snow Angels, based on Stewart O’Nan’s novel, never manages to decide what type of film it wants to be. Its first half is devoted to Green’s usual quick-study of offhand character mannerisms, but these are soon found to be too glib and indistinct to sustain the cataclysms of the film’s final hour.

Most negative reviews I’ve read of this film — of which I guess this is one — point to the film’s miserablism as its downfall. Some, by extension, further note the downbeat nature of all American films these days, just as they did when — boo-hoo — the last crop of non-cheerful Oscar nominees was trotted out. Frankly, Snow Angels aside, I’m okay with this state of affairs. There’s nothing — nothing — I like less than a film that blithely serves up a happy ending it has failed to earn. Also, I actually like movies that successfully make me miserable. It’s always satisfying to be told that this is the worst of all possible worlds — indeed, Schopenhauer would agree, and he’d tell you that this is what art is for and why it’s so important. But Snow Angels doesn’t even manage to earn its miserable ending. It fails to construct characters and situations plausible enough to be pitiable, and so one wonders why such an absurd comedy ends with such po-faced histrionics.

Bring on the stoner comedy, DGG.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Warner Independent Pictures 35mm Print
01 Apr 2008 12:05 AM | Submit Comment

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The Wrong Man / USA / 1956

Many of my favourite Hitchcock movies have a markedly alluring artifice to them that appears to be a consequence of the director’s determination to shape his visual compositions in an exceptionally meticulous manner. Hitch always seems to know what he wants to focus upon and how he intends to attract his audience’s attention towards specific aspects of his frame, frequently ignoring continuity or the need to make actions reflect reality in order to craft striking visuals that serves to enhance the subtext of his story.

Hence, while there isn’t really anything particularly wrong with The Wrong Man, it still feels like an interloper within Hitchcock’s body of work, at least from my perspective. While Hitchcock’s willingness to use a few locations that served as the setting for the real-life events that the film chronicles infuses his film with a certain level of authenticity, the atmosphere also seems slightly peculiar in comparison to many of Hitchcock’s more famous films, which all have a strange synthetic beauty within their design. During much of the film, I never attained the distinctive sensation that Hitchcock’s hand was guiding my vision, as I often found my attention drawn towards the setting itself, rather than anything specific. As well, I have a tough time deciding whether the casting of Henry Fonda is successful. Again, Fonda isn’t doing anything harmful to the film and his personality allows the audience to feel great sympathy towards this man’s plight, but his persona doesn’t really lend itself to any of the typical anxiety (which is usually only fairly mild anyway) that the viewer often feels towards Hitchcock’s leading men, which usually only enhances the unease that Hitchcock is creating within his film.

However, the pleasant surprise within the film was the unexpected performance of Vera Miles as Manny’s suffering spouse, Rose, who becomes racked with unnecessary guilt over her husband’s incarceration. Miles effectively conveys Rose’s inability to contend with the apparent futility of the individual’s attempt to struggle against the system without shifting into strident hysterics and thus assumes much of the mental anguish and conflict that Fonda’s Manny appears largely immune towards. In my mind, it’s probably Miles’ performance that saves the film from becoming just a mediocre movie.

by Chiranjit Goswami | Source: Warner Brothers DVD
31 Mar 2008 6:43 PM | Submit Comment

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Notorious / USA / 1946

Don’t you love that feeling of getting home on an unseasonably cold windy day, exhausted and hungry and dying to kick off your uncomfortable shoes, and turning on the TV to find that TCM is beginning one of your all-time favorite movies? I love that feeling too. On this viewing I re-noticed all those genius details, especially the shots of the MENACING CUPS OF COFFEE. The only film I know of that could make coffee nightmare-inducing.

by Megan Weireter | Source: TCM
31 Mar 2008 10:24 AM | Submit Comment

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Shriek of the Mutilated / USA / 1974

A quartet of anthropology students follow their enthusiastic professor, Dr. Prell, into the wilderness in search of bigfoot. What they find is certainly an abomination of nature, but of the cannibalistic cult, not anthropoid ape, variety.

After a solid start—highlighted by an extensive, rage-filled monologue by an alcoholic former student of Dr. Prell’s, and his subsequent grisly death by toaster—the film (mistakenly touted as an inept-cinema classic) slips into a dull routine of overwrought dialogue and stilted deliveries. Although there are a few fatal forays into the woods, the inexplicable shifts in tone, colorful characters, and illogical narrative progressions that make low-budget horror so fun are largely absent. If the filmmakers believed that their cannibal cult plot twist was unique enough, and shocking enough, to overshadow the tedium of what comes before it, they were wrong.

by Thomas Scalzo | Source: RetroMedia Entertainment DVD
30 Mar 2008 7:46 PM | Submit Comment

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The Most Dangerous Game / USA / 1932

My Most Dangerous Game evening concluded, appropriately, with the exceptional film that started it all. Big game hunter Robert Rainsford is shipwrecked on an island, takes refuge in the home of Count Zaroff, meets the alluring Eve Trowbridge, and discovers she is to be the prize in an ensuing hunt—with him as the game. Perhaps I should have screened the original first, instead of Escape 2000, but after immersing myself in the latter’s outlandish sci-fi set up, copious amounts of gore, and gratuitous violence (and loving every minute), it was refreshing to fall back fifty years to a cinematic era capable of telling a gripping story with such little fanfare.

Beth’s review

by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Turner Classic Movies Broadcast
28 Mar 2008 12:29 PM | Submit Comment

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Escape 2000 / Turkey Shoot / Australia / 1982

From the director of BMX Bandits comes an Australian take on The Most Dangerous Game: It is the future, and an increasingly repressive society is plagued by non-conformist deviates. The only solution to the growing dissent is internment in one of many re-education camps. And woe to those who wind up in the clutches of camp director Thatcher, a man with a penchant for hunting the most elusive game of all: man.

With multiple head explosions, a man cut in half by a mini backhoe, a bazooka-toting Steve Railsback, and Olivia Hussey chopping a man’s hands off with a machete, director Brian Trenchard-Smith pulls out all the stops, crafting a film that is pure entertainment from start to finish. (And for all you BMX Bandits fans out there, keep an eye out for John Ley as a myopic prisoner named Dodge. (And for all you BMX Bandits fans out there who don’t know who John Ley is, here’s a hint: “I’m achin’ to blast someone.”))

by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Embassy Home Entertainment VHS
27 Mar 2008 7:57 PM | Comments (2)

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Superchick / USA / 1973

SUPERCHICK: You know, the only place where a man and woman don’t lie to each other is in bed.

MAN: Well then get ready for some truth.

by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Rhino DVD
25 Mar 2008 10:22 PM | Submit Comment

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Absolute Wilson / USA / 2006

I gotta say that Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s hagiocumentary of avant-garde opera director Robert Wilson is very PBS: i.e., linear, flatfooted, sentimental, with terrible music. But it doesn’t really matter when you’ve got a subject as fascinating, and self-conscious, as this one. A man of infinite attention to detail, known for crafting slow-moving, monumental stage tableaux, Wilson himself has elegance enough to spare, and frankly it’s kind of a relief to offset his tyrannical pursuit of aesthetic perfection with a cinematic effort on a more modest scale. Otto-Bernstein does a thorough job, too: there’s abundant archival footage from Wilson productions going back to the late 1960s, and revealing interviews with Wilson, Philip Glass, David Byrne and other downtown New York luminaries.

The most interesting aspect of Absolute Wilson, though, is the way it tracks the American avant-garde’s evolution from countercultural hijinks (a bunch of sleep-deprived bohemians performing on an Iranian mountain for seven days straight in 1972’s KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace) to ultraprofessionalized, corporately funded international business concern (Wilson in a power suit, screaming into a cell phone about securing “French moneys” for the CIVIL warS, his projected six-continent contribution to the 1984 Olympics). There’s a lesson in here somewhere, and it may not be the one about the redemptive power of individual genius that Otto-Bernstein seems to want to put forward.

by Evan Kindley | Source: New Yorker DVD
25 Mar 2008 2:08 PM | Submit Comment

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Troll / USA / 1986

I never sleep very well in hotels, so I frequently turn on the TV at 4:00 on the morning just to get a little white noise going. This sometimes works, but as often as not I get sucked into whatever strange programming the TV execs throw on the air for us insomniacs—and so it was with Troll. I suspect this is the kind of movie you can only appreciate if you saw it as a child (I didn’t). I also suspect that it’s pretty much an exercise in ripping off Gremlins—a horror-comedy for the kiddies featuring a cuddly monster, clueless adults, whiny children, and sub-par puppetry.

The title troll possesses a little girl considerably less cute than himself and starts terrorizing the apartment building she’s just moved into, mainly by turning people into seedpods and/or giggling, scantily clad idiots. Her older brother’s name is Harry Potter—and let me assure you that repetition of his name is about the funniest thing that happens in this ostensible comedy. Anyway, Harry quickly figures out that his sister is possessed, but no one will believe him except the old lady upstairs, played joylessly by a slumming June Lockhart, who’s actually a witch who knows something about all of this madness. Adventure ensues! The dialogue is predictably awful and the acting has all the subtlety of a TeeNick show, but there a few scenes that are truly unforgettable—like when the trolls all sing a big musical number (it sounds kind of like a chorus of kids burping the alphabet). And the bizarre casting makes for lots of fun moments of recognition. “Hey!” you’ll think. “Is that Sonny Bono?” (It is.) I came away with the important lesson to never let a strange little girl into my apartment—she might actually be a troll. Or at least a brat.

As I finally drifted off to sleep with visions of midgets being eaten by plants dancing through my head, I thought, “At least no one would ever remake a movie that terrible!” Of course I was wrong. Look for CGI trolls to appear in commercials advertising Buechler’s remake in 2009. May God have mercy on us all.

by Megan Weireter | Source: Showtime
24 Mar 2008 2:38 PM | Submit Comment

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Berlin Alexanderplatz / Chapter 2: How Is One To Live If One Doesn’t Want To Die? / Germany / 1980

“…looking at pictures is no good. It ruins a man. It screws him up. It starts with looking at pictures, and later, when you want to, it doesn’t come natural any more.”

So opines Franz Biberkopf at the start of Chapter 2 of Berlin Alexanderplatz, while weighing the pros and cons of entering into the pornography (or “sexual education”) business. He sensibly decides against it and joins up with the National Socialists instead, peddling anti-Semitic newspapers to the disgust of his old Communist friends. Party politics rush into Fassbinder’s film with a vengeance after their total exclusion from the first chapter; Franz is swept up by the rhetoric and promises of the Nazis with a speed that presumably reflects some of the actual disorientation of the late 1920s in Germany. The pyrotechnic style of the introduction is traded here for a cooler Brechtian dramaturgy, suited to an essay in economic determinism (“I’m not going to sing,” Franz says when his friends ask him to join them in “The Internationale,” “I’d rather eat”). Though there are some choice aesthetic moments, including a spectacular 360-degree pan around a still tableau in the middle of a subway station, anticipating The Matrix by almost twenty years.

by Evan Kindley | Source: Criterion Collection DVD
11 Mar 2008 10:28 PM | Comments (2)

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The Invasion / USA / 2007

Further proof that studio-heads know absolutely nothing about good filmmaking. When Oliver Hirschbiegel, the director responsible for The Downfall, completed The Invasion, it was unceremoniously handed off to James McTeigue and the Wachowski Brothers, three people of dubious artistic skill and creativity. Add some frantic editing, a pointless car-case sequence, and an unbelievably anti-climactic dénouement, and you have a final product that deserved its cold reception.

Which is a shame, considering the original is actually very good. In the many instances in which Hirschbiegel’s intentions push through, such as the Cold War mentality—the clothes and hair, the dichotomy between American and European characters, the representation of China and Communism—transplanted to contemporary politics or the brilliant contrast between blue (good) and yellow (bad), we’re witness to a work made with full competence—Herschbiegel knew what he was doing. McTeigue and the Wachowski Brothers did not.

I’m not someone who fully believes in director’s cuts. They tend to add very little and clarify even less, and most of the time they’re released for either added revenue or the appeasement of ego; the version that comes to theatres should be the version, as idealistic and implausible as that sounds. But in the case of The Invasion, should Herschbiegel ever wrestle a copy of his original from the grips of Warner Brothers, I wouldn’t hesitate to buy a copy.

by Adam Balz | Source: DVD
11 Mar 2008 11:37 AM | Submit Comment

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Evening / USA / Germany / 2007

A film just as arrogant and pathetic as its characters, Evening, co-written by Michael Cunningham and Susan Minot, decides halfway through that it wants to be The Great Gatsby. The character of Buddy, having failed to inspire love with the plot of his own Fitzgerald-esque novel, retreats to his family mansion, its lights ablaze. Later, as he drunkenly follows Claire Danes’ Ann and Patrick Wilson’s Harris through the forest, he is struck by a car. Falling to the roadside, the car speeds away and we hear the hoot of an owl.

Overbearing, to say the least, but credit must be paid to Glenn Close for understanding exactly what kind of movie she agreed to star in. Her stately matriarch is a rich B-movie brew of arrogance, self-loathing, latent homophobia, and shallow emotional emptiness. The very few scenes in which she appears—planning a wedding reception, discovering her daughter innocently in bed with another woman, falling apart after Buddy’s death—are riveting in their shear awfulness. Close knows her character, a woman with no reservations about her upper-class status and no misgivings about her absolute lack of self-worth, and basks brilliantly in every minute.

by Adam Balz | Source: DVD
11 Mar 2008 11:35 AM | Comments (1)

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Berlin Alexanderplatz / Chapter 1: The Punishment Begins / Germany / 1980

The first part (cheerfully titled “The Punishment Begins”) of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15-hour made-for-TV magnum opus covers more emotional ground than most feature films do in their entire running time: it takes its protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, from a state of crippling depression following his release from a four-year prison sentence to a state of manic glee, back on top of the tiny section of the Berlin underworld he calls home. Gunter Lamprecht’s lead performance as Franz is impressively repulsive and yet heartbreakingly vulnerable at the same time, which is exactly what’s needed to carry off the despicable things Fassbinder makes him do. The fact that, having watched him rape one woman and beat another to death, I still care about what might happen to Franz in future installments is a testament to the insinuating emotional power of Lamprecht’s presence.

The other standout performance here, of course, is Fassbinder himself, not as actor but as director; though the film was made for the small screen, it’s among the most cinematically persuasive things he ever did. In it he exhibits all the hallmarks of his late style, making judicious use of ironic intertitles, gauzy light effects, multilayered music, campy melodrama, vicious cruelty, and fluid telephoto lens-aided camerawork. I haven’t quite sorted out all the elements in play yet, and I sort of doubt the film can keep up the same level of invention and provocation throughout without becoming completely exhausting. But I am certainly moved to, as they say, tune in next week.

by Evan Kindley | Source: Criterion Collection DVD
04 Mar 2008 10:43 PM | Submit Comment

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Atlantis Interceptors / Raiders of Atlantis / Italy/USA / 1983

This is how Deodato followed up Cannibal Holocaust and House on the Edge of the Park. In the future (1994!), the government accidentally causes Atlantis to resurface while trying to raise a sunken nuclear sub. A punk biker gang of former Atlanteans called the Interceptors takes the opportunity to begin destroying society. Trapped in the middle of all of this are a pair of grizzled mercenaries, a militant black Muslim, a nerdy scientist, and a sexy professor of ancient languages who holds the key to unlocking the secrets of Atlantis.

Atlantis Interceptors doesn’t live up to Deodato’s previous films but it is a ridiculously entertaining Eurotrash action film. It contains a key ingredient that is lacking from most modern cinema: insanity. Practically every aspect of the film is devoid of even a hint of reality and at times it seems to be trying to reference more than three other films at once. Deodato is doing everything in his power to keep the audience entertained and the result is an intentionally delirious and enjoyable mess.

by David Carter | Source: Fortune 5 DVD
02 Mar 2008 4:36 PM | Submit Comment

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Stryker / USA/The Philippines / 1982

Filipino Mad Max rip-off starring Tony Curtis’ fourth wife. It’s typical post-apocalyptic schlock but worth sticking with until the out-there ending. Our permed hero saves the day with an army of midgets, unloads an entire machinegun clip in his nemesis from about four feet away, and then comforts a crying baby. All this happens within the span of five minutes and more than makes up for the preceding eighty.

by David Carter | Source: Fortune 5 DVD
02 Mar 2008 4:34 PM | Submit Comment

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Women’s Camp 119 / SS Extermination Love Camp / Italy / 1977

Bruno Mattei is considered the least able of the “big name” Italian exploitation directors. Rightfully so too, since most of his oeuvre is comprised of less competent versions of other popular exploitation formulas and none of his projects could be considered essential viewing. Women’s Camp 119 is typical Mattei but surprisingly he finds his stride mid-way through the film and manages to create something both entertaining and artistically meaningful by the end. The first fifty minutes are a joyless trip through every naziploitation cliché: lesbian guards, medical experiments, and sadistic commanders. Mattei abruptly abandons all of this in the second fifty minutes, focusing instead on the internal conflicts of the Jewish doctors forced to assist in the horrors. He trades the static camera of the first act for a frenetic approach later. His camera is in constant motion, swirling around the characters before flying above them, and drifting in and out of point of view shots.

Particularly powerful is the ending, which through its use of Holocaust footage and authentic Nazi war crime factoids paints the earlier missteps in a better light. The real footage contextualizes the clichés—reminding us that the sleaze of the naziploitation genre is partially based in fact. The brief introduction of reality gives the viewer a sobering pause and makes Women’s Camp 119 a stronger film than other forays into the same material.

by David Carter | Source: Fortune 5 DVD
02 Mar 2008 4:32 PM | Submit Comment

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Blood & Chocolate / UK/Germany/Romania/USA / 2007

It’s hard to explain it, but sometimes a star-crossed werewolf romance – the kind where people say things like “Silly girl! You are loup-garou!” – is just the thing. Yes, this is yet another monster-populated retread of Romeo and Juliet. But this slick PG-13 affair has touches of humor and humanity and some fetching shots of Bucharest, and as such goes down more agreeably than its sober, higher-artillery counterpart, the inexplicably popular Underworld.

by Victoria Large | Source: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment DVD
01 Mar 2008 3:28 PM | Submit Comment

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