“Whose business is it what I do?”
One begins to get the distinct impression that the decadent, melancholy, hedonistic Franz is a portrait of the artist as undesirable in this fourth section. Like his director, at least in his own eyes, Franz is a barely tolerated outsider, lashing out against German society while making occasional clumsy attempts to appeal to its prejudices (viz. the scene where he drunkenly insists on his patriotism to a shirtless worker). As in his later adaptation of Jean Genet’s Querelle, I think it’s the link between criminality and bohemianism which interests Fassbinder here, alternatives to honest work which he half-glorifies, half-shares the bourgeois contempt for. (The third side of this cultural triad, homosexuality, is left out, though perhaps hinted at by Franz’s failure to consummate his flirtation with a passing woman -¬†she calls him “limp-dick” and goes away disgusted – and by his curiously tender relationship with his flophouse neighbor Baumann.) Meanwhile, just to underscore how unpleasant real marginality can be, RWF adds a few extra layers of nightmarish sonic and visual density to what was already a pretty claustrophobic frame, and many, many bottles of alcohol to the mise-en-scène.
by Evan Kindley | Source: Criterion Collection DVD
30 Jun 2008 11:32 PM | Submit Comment
I’m sure this admission will be viewed as total blasphemy, but I must confess that I actually prefer Cate Blanchett’s impersonation of Katharine Hepburn (“… I’m so vulgarly referred to as “outdoorsy.” Well, I’m not “outdoorsy,” I’m athletic.”) to any performance by Katharine Hepburn. Truthfully I generally find Hepburn’s pompous personality to be unbearably irksome (dare I say, both “snooty” and “snotty”). I assume this entirely bias perception of Hepburn probably explains why I find some small amount of satisfaction while watching Huston’s movie, since most of the filmmaker’s effort appears to be devoted towards dishevelling Hepburn’s hair … and yet her locks are still annoyingly steadfast.
by Chiranjit Goswami | Source: PVR/Turner Classic Movies
30 Jun 2008 5:38 PM | Comments (5)
I’m definitely not qualified to state conclusively how offensive or authentic Capra’s film may be at depicting Chinese culture during the early 20th Century, though I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a few voices stridently declaring it to be mostly the former description. It’s actually quite understandable that contemporary corporate studio management has conveniently avoided releasing the film on DVD in North America, though I really wish they would reconsider their decision.
While the film includes a few moments which I thought could be viewed as mildly offensive and requires Nils Asther to appear in “yellow-face,” the film is far more fascinating for the cultural and religious tug-of-war that’s going on within the narrative. Plus, while he takes a fairly impartial position throughout, Capra is unexpectedly bleak and severe when it comes to examining the struggle over which character gets to claim the moral high-ground.
The film seems to have achieved some small degree of notoriety within film history for a dream sequence in which Barbara Stanwyck’s character – an American missionary named Megan Davis – has a rather subdued, though still overtly sexual fantasy about her captor – the mysteriously beguiling Chinese warlord named General Yen. The sequence is kind of hilarious on one level, due mostly to its outdated imagery, but also kind of audacious upon further scrutiny, considering the same subject matter would likely be carefully circumvented in any current mainstream movie.
Unfortunately the striking sexual circumstances within the dream sequence serve as sort of a distraction from some of the more revealing details of Capra’s filmmaking. While the initially pleasant dream sequence becomes abruptly interrupted by a barbaric Asian man, cloaked in ancient Chinese clothing, breaking through Megan’s bedroom door in order to lecherously overwhelm her, the innocent American women is suddenly saved by a masked man, who is noticeably dressed in western apparel. Even before Megan’s saviour rips off his mask to reveal himself and passionately embrace her, it’s obvious from the outset of the sequence that both of the Chinese men involved within Megan’s fantasy are in fact polar opposite perceptions of General Yen that are battling for prominence within Megan’s mind. At this point, the filmmakers are clearly confronting the fact that Megan, the film’s surrogate for American society, can only comprehend her subjugator through Western conventions and imagery, unable to overcome the general impression of foreign societies as comparatively inhumane and crude, and thus remaining imprisoned within the traditional Western concept of Eastern cultures.
While the costume choices may appear to be a small detail within the fantasy sequence, Capra continues to use his character’s wardrobe choices to reveal alterations within their mentality, adaptation to their surroundings, and acceptance of a foreign culture previously perceived to be frightening. In fact, during the film’s final moments, as Megan and General Yen finally share a truly tragic and considered embrace, Capra offers his audience a direct contrast to the carnal implications of prior dream sequence, with both his central characters now enveloped in traditional Chinese attire and sadly resigned to the realities of the world that surrounds them.
As an aside, I continue to be astounded by how many great movies Barbara Stanwyck was involved in during her career. Stanwyck has always been a captivating screen presence, but in contrast to the worldly women she’s become famous for portraying, with The Bitter Tea of General Yen her beauty feels startlingly chaste, while her personality seems astonishingly naive. Yet, Stanwyck makes certain the character is entirely understandable, while a lesser actress would undoubtedly made Megan Davis utterly frustrating.
by Chiranjit Goswami | Source: PVR/Turner Classic Movies
30 Jun 2008 5:08 PM | Submit Comment
Miffed at having their ancestral burial ground desecrated, and at being murdered in the first place, the ghosts of a clan of Aborigines decides to dispatch some local teens via Kadaicha stone power. What are Kadaicha stones, you ask? Oh, the things we can learn from late-’80s vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave Aussie horror. A sort of magical crystal used by the spirits of Aborigines to curse the living, Kadaicha stones are somehow transmitted to the intended victim through his or her dreams, and anyone receiving such a stone is doomed to die. More specifically, at least as Stones of Death is concerned, if you have a nightmare about half-naked Aborigines dancing in a cave, and wake up holding a Kadaicha stone, you’ll soon be killed by an angry super-animal. Not a bad premise for horror film, melding the vengeful spirit idea of The Amityville Horror with the evil dream interloping of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Sadly, the execution is a clumsy and uninspired mess.
The main problem is that the evil force has no consistent personality. Yes, we see the dancing ghosts from time to time, but the ghosts themselves don’t actually do anything, other than place Kadaicha stones in the hands of dreaming kids. And the stones themselves don’t do anything either, other than eliciting fear in those who receive them. The actual, physical vehicles of death are a dog, a spider, an eel, creatures variously possessed by and made to do the bidding of the spirits of the dead. And though the attacks of these beasts are gruesomely entertaining, it’s never clear who or what is possessed, or where we should direct our fears. Not until one of the young people is possessed by the ephemeral evil does the story take on any real semblance of tension, but by then the tale has largely been told, and it’s not enough to counteract the aimlessness of what came before.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: SONY VHS
28 Jun 2008 1:03 PM | Submit Comment
The great Lon Chaney plays an on-the-lam criminal hiding out in a Spanish circus pretending he has no arms. Alonzo the Armless, as he is known, manages to smoke cigarettes, drink wine, use a handkerchief, throw knives, and fire a gun using only his feet. It is a testament to Chaney’s legendary talents that it takes only a moment or two of watching him perform before we fall into an unshakable belief that he truly does lack his upper limbs. (Rumor has it, however, that Chaney was doubled by an actual armless man for some of the more complicated foot manipulation scenes.) But of course, Alonzo is not actually armless, a fact which hinders his attempts to woo the lovely Nanon (a young Joan Crawford), a woman who has vowed never to abide a man’s hands on her body.
Years before Freaks, Tod Browning crafted this equally bizarre, and equally gripping, tale of the circus, a riveting saga of the lengths to which a man will go for love. Though not quite as unnerving or ambitious as Freaks, The Unknown, thanks in large part to the presence of the astonishing Chaney, does share that film’s respectful intimacy with the world of traveling performers, and once again showcases Browning’s ability to craft an affecting and relatable human drama out of the most unusual of circumstances, in this instance without a word of spoken dialogue.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: TCM Broadcast
27 Jun 2008 7:15 PM | Submit Comment
For a misanthrope who claims to be horrified by the indifference of nature, Werner Herzog is incredibly captivated by both the human soul and the wilderness. Encounters at the End of the World bears many of the hallmarks of Herzog’s work (bears—Ha!); the brutal landscape; the driven, eccentric people who are drawn there; the narrator’s perpetual gloominess. But I often think Herzog protests too much. If he did not feel awe at the immensity and beauty of the Antarctic landscape, or empathy with its curious (in both senses) inhabitants, he could never make a film with as much power, and—dare I say it—love as Encounters. On this continent where humans have a tenuous and necessarily temporary toehold, Herzog freely indulges in doomsday scenarios, describing half with dread and half with glee a World Without Us post-human Earth and all the various ways in which we’re blundering toward an apocalypse. But he includes, at the end of the film as if in summation, a driver and philosopher who quotes the sentiment, “Through our eyes, the universe perceives its own glory.” What comes through Herzog’s images, if not his narration, is pure awe, both his own and of the people he films.
There is a delightful shot of red-parka-clad scientists slowly lowering their faces to the expanse of sea ice to listen to the trilling and buzzing of seals calling to each other in the sea below. We follow a vulcanologist (who looks adorably like ’70s Dr. Who, scarf and all) into an ice fumarole, and at the end of the navigable part of the tunnel, Herzog films him there, encased in Caribbean-blue ice, utterly isolated from the rest of humanity, sitting in meditative stillness. A glaciologist describes his dreams, in which he can physically sense, through the bottom of his feet, the movement of the nation-sized icebergs he studies as they chug their way north. Herzog’s favorite shots seem to be those taken by expert divers who explore the waters under the sea ice—perhaps the only people in the world who can capture these images. They film the ethereal grace of jellyfish, the mercury-like running of exhaled bubbles on the underside of the ice, the otherworldly cliffs of a glacier where it meets the ocean under water. Herzog, on the surface, films the divers as they silently don their formidable protective gear, speaking not a word. He likens it to Mass. Though Herzog often takes the point of view that both people and nature are antagonists, the most resonant moments of his films are those when people and nature commune, when there is an almost religious respect and love for the natural world and its ability to move us. It just so happens that these moments are most likely to occur when one person is isolated from all others, when he (it’s almost always he) has to struggle against the natural world and accept his submission to it. Herzog spends much of Encounters at the End of the World, and indeed much of his career, chasing this elusive wonder. On his trip to Antarctica, he beautifully captures it.
by Katherine Follett | Source: 35 mm print
27 Jun 2008 1:38 PM | Submit Comment
Although the colorful title suggests a giallo, this enjoyable Mario Bava offering doesn’t fit the genre mold. For starters, the devious soul behind the deaths isn’t some black glove wearing psychopath with deep-seated emotional issues. He or she (we’re offered a trio of possible suspects) is merely interested in obtaining sole ownership of an ill-defined, but lucrative, scientific process. The killings are brutal, and Bava appreciatively lingers over the lurid details, but the reasons why they are committed are practical, not sadistic.
That said, the film does employ the necessary ingredients for a satisfying murder-mystery, isolating a bevy of attractive people (sporting outlandish ’70s attire) on an island, introducing an object of desire among them, and allowing the darker human impulses to take control. Bava’s strong sense of color and composition are in evidence, as usual, but this unexpected narrative directness (when compared to some of his more meandering creations, such as Kill, Baby…Kill! or Lisa and the Devil) makes for a film that is both visually and structurally entertaining, proving that the maestro of the macabre is capable of more than just atmosphere and gore.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Anchor Bay DVD
27 Jun 2008 11:29 AM | Submit Comment
Minute fifty-seven: where are all the piranhas? Should have called it Motorcycle Race, Motorcycle Race.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Mill Creek Entertainment DVD
27 Jun 2008 10:21 AM | Submit Comment
U.S. Marshals has the faltering responsibility of functioning as both an action vehicle for an unlikely action star – Tommy Lee Jones – and a sequel that has few of its precursor’s marquee strengths, namely Harrison Ford. But all said, it’s a decent exercise, if only to allow its aging sta—oh my God is that friggin’ Irene Jacob? Holy shit!
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: cable TV
26 Jun 2008 10:23 PM | Submit Comment
Everyone knows that using dynamite to catch fish isn’t very sporting, and likely to cause irreparable harm to a fragile ecosystem. But as the makers of Bog remind us, there is another, less well-know reason to abhor the practice: Any deep lake, particularly one carved by a retreating glacier, may well serve as the hibernation home of an ancient fish-insect monster. And the odds are good that any concussive blast in the area will awaken the beast and rekindle its dormant desire to seek out a suitable human mate, alter the chemical composition of her blood, and a sire untold numbers of baby Bog Monsters. Consider yourselves warned.
Also consider yourselves warned that this film is terrible. The dialogue is bad, the editing is bad, the bulk of the acting is bad, and aside from a few desanguinated bodies, there’s little genuine horror. But in movies like Bog, movies that beg to be watched by groups of open-minded aficionados, cinematic competence and genuine horror are irrelevant. For who needs well-crafted monologues when we can ponder the mysteries of the scent generator, a device capable of reproducing and dispersing the smell of human blood? And why worry about continuity when it’s so much more fun to marvel at the decision to dub a man’s voice over a woman’s lines? And what, in the end, is more likely to elicit fear in the human soul: a man in a rubber monster suit, or a lengthy make-out session between a pair of frisky sexagenarians?
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Prism Home Video VHS
26 Jun 2008 1:29 AM | Submit Comment
Way back in the 9th grade, I made my one and only appearance on film: I was an extra in an amateur movie being made by a recent alum of my high school. He was the darling of the entire drama department, and his name was Martin Gero.
Fast forward ten years, to summer 2007, and the alumni gossip mill was churning at triple speed. Did I remember Martin Gero? Had I heard that he had a movie premiering at TIFF? And that (gasp) it had the F-word in the title? Emails were flying. Beyond the scandal of the title, though, none of us took the news very seriously. After all, how often does your high school’s token wannabe filmmaker – your local Dawson Leery, if you will – actually make a quality film?
Martin Gero has done just that. Young People Fucking isn’t revolutionary by any means (though of course a few censorious types think so), but it is a smart, tightly-paced, well-made sex comedy. The movie follows five separate couples as their stories unfold over the course of a single evening, and this approach lets Gero hit all the classic entanglements and conundrums of modern romance: the perils of co-ed friendship, ex sex, or the post-marriage rut. It’s American Pie meets Sex and the City, with a dash of When Harry Met Sally for good measure. It veers from the absurd to the sentimental, from crude to genuinely touching. Highbrow cinema it ain’t – but whether I was laughing or cringing, I don’t think I ever looked away.
The risk with a gimmicky, attention-grabbing title is that the movie won’t live up to its own self-created hype. In this case, the movie is exactly what it claims to be: young people fucking.
by Eva Holland | Source: 35mm Theatrical Print
24 Jun 2008 7:58 PM | Submit Comment
Expecting a samurai swordplay genre exercise but instead getting a layered, elegantly conceived drama of devastating emotional impact, my first Kobayashi left me shellshocked. The narrative is superbly structured, forcing the viewer to continuously reevaluate what he has seen and even what he is currently seeing, not through any rashomon effect or convoluted chronology (though flashbacks are key to the storytelling), but rather through an ever-deepening understanding of character. When the destitute ronin Hanshiro first enters, looking to use a wealthy lord’s court to commit ritual suicide, he’s a standard bad-ass type—deep of voice, stoic in expression, honorable in person. Yet as the story unfolds (and this is one of the few films whose story can be said to truly unfold rather than simply unspool in front of you) Hanshiro becomes far more than the genre would normally permit. Played brilliantly by Tatsuya Nakadai, Hanshiro is a hero who earns the audience’s sympathy and respect by virtue of his character, not because the film mandates it.
Kobayashi’s formal strategy here is rigorous, precise, elegant. Every shot is beautifully composed, the frame never out of balance. The slow tracking shots Kobayashi employs, particularly those that track up and close behind the actors as they remain stationary, are aesthetically pleasing in and of themselves, but also brings us into the psyches of the characters, heightening their feelings and giving a sense of mental processes as work. The editing is crisp and fluid, to the point where the multitudes of flashbacks flow directly into the main narrative and vice versa. Canted cameras, mini-zooms and excellent use of off-screen sound round out Kobayashi’s arsenal of cinematic tricks, each used exactly where they need to be and no more. This is an exceedingly well-made, aesthetically confident picture.
I was truly blindsided by the emotional impact of this film; the emotions keep building on top of each other as the story progresses, until finally, at the breaking point, action erupts. For me, never has the kinetics of action cinema been delivered as such a catharsis, a release of all of the feelings and ideas that the movie has thus far presented. Visceral and wild, yet never flagging in its formal elegance (have I used that word enough?) the climactic action sequence blows everything I’ve seen by Kurosawa out of the water (there, I said it). And when the dust settled, almost without my realizing it, the film’s great theme of individualism and compassion in the face of social indifference and hypocrisy emerged loud and clear, still ringing in my head now.
by Timothy Sun | Source: 35mm
22 Jun 2008 10:09 PM | Submit Comment
Errol Morris is a great filmmaker, but when you look past the hundreds of shocking and uncensored photos from Abu Ghraib there’s really very little here. As viewers we’re often given what we expectÑinterviewees that are far from repentant, angry that they were present for those terrible actions rather than apologetic for actually committing them. They spend far more time being nostalgic, as though participating in a warped and disturbing “Memories” video for some sort of reunion: Lynddie England recalls with seeming awe how a prisoner, when forced to pleasure himself, did so for 45 minutes, while another remembers how country music was used to deprive prisoners of sleep, succeeding where hip-hop and heavy metal failed.
Perhaps it’s too soon. When Morris sat down with Robert McNamara, 30 years had passed since the end of the Vietnam War; history, wisdom, and retrospection all had decades to set in. The same with Fred Leuchter and, to a lesser extent, the subjects of The Thin Blue Line. Perhaps if Morris had waited another ten or fifteen years, after the maelstrom of partisanship had dissipated, the participantsÑon both sides of the cameraÑcould have offered more.
by Adam Balz | Source: 35MM Theatrical Print
22 Jun 2008 9:11 PM | Submit Comment
My major qualm with this film has nothing to do with battery life, the dialogue’s supposed realism, or the main character’s seeming inability to put down the camera and help his friendsÑor, for that matter, the friends’ indifference to the camera rolling as loved ones and fellow citizens die in droves. It has to do with the man behind the camera, who might be one of the most annoying characters in any film I’ve ever seen. He’s a pestering gossip, an empty-headed loser who insists on making jokes while his friends flee from scuttling little monsters. Maybe it would have been different if the character had been in front of the camera, because the minute you give point-of-view to a specific person, you’re bestowing their voice and personality on the audience. In essence we are Hud, and nobody wants to be depicted as sluggish, unhelpful, and irritating.
Tom’s Thoughts
David’s Thoughts
by Adam Balz | Source: DVD
22 Jun 2008 9:07 PM | Submit Comment
This is my favorite movie of the year so far, and here’s why: At a certain point in the filmÑabout ten minutes in, if my estimates are right, about the same time we’re offered the first of many diverse TV news reportÑwe’re also offered a choice in how we can approach Shyamalan’s intentions. We can treat The Happening as another sharp bend in the downward arc that has been the director’s career since The Sixth SenseÑand this seems to be the overriding preference thus farÑor what it really is: A fun and surprisingly original B-movie.1
The title that my friends and I have ridiculed over the last few weeksÑa bland, uncommitted, ambiguous singular nounÑis cast from the same mold as other “the” titles from the pastÑThe Blob, The Terror, The Tingler, and The Fly, to name a few. There is the stilted acting that, considering the talent involved, can’t be anything more or less than purposeful, as well as some undeniably satirical dialogueÑabout only being fed one sentence of information at a time, about trying to use science and logic to explain something illogicalÑas well as a PC soldier who exclaims, upon learning of bodies along a Pennsylvania road, “Cheese and crackers!” There’s the necessary crazy old personÑin this case, a Luddite survivalist played by Betty BuckleyÑa soundtrack that cracks and thunders as the plot advances, and dismally amusing depictions of death. And, above all else, the villain is natural, omnipresent, and unstoppable: An entire coast of pissed-off plants.
1Claiming this is the “best B-movie ever,” though, is a bit of an overstatement.
by Adam Balz | Source: 35MM Theatrical Print
22 Jun 2008 9:02 PM | Comments (5)
This is the second of three documentaries Jia has planned on artist figures. I wasn’t too taken with the first one, Dong, which fell down for me on two counts: the utter banality of painter Liu Xiaodong’s style of realism, and the inauthenticity (Jia’s eye reduced to a touristic one) of the second half shot in Thailand. Useless is another case entirely. It centres on fashion designer Ma Ke, who’s attempting to design a brand — “Useless” — of handcrafted clothing in deliberate opposition to the mass-produced industrial model now predominant in China. Jia has a clear admiration for Ma — just as he did for Liu in Dong – but it’s more subtly tempered through the film’s structure, which first offers some scenes of workers in the big clothing factories in Guangdong, before moving to a brief scene of the banality and empty materialism of upmarket brand names, and then to Ma, first in her studio in Shanghai, and after at her fashion show in Paris. The final section of the film then follows Ma on a visit to Jia’s hometown of Fenyang where she extols the virtues of a return to the country/simpler values, and Jia simply, thrillingly abandons her in favour of what strikes me as an acted scene of a man taking some clothing to a seamstress for repair. (If I’m right about this being acted, then it makes Useless a companion piece to Jia’s latest feature film, 24 City, which is comprised of a series of interviews, some real, others acted.) In this final section, which stylistically is the closest to his feature film work, Jia contextualises his admiration for Ma’s artistic statement and underlines the limitations of her gesture with his portraits of individuals made “useless” by the economic forces of globalisation and China’s rampant brute capitalism — the seamstress barely making ends meet; the tailor forced to give up his trade to work in the mines; and the other tailor still plying his trade, but in a building marked for demolition, as a whole artisan-profession seems to be.
by Ian Johnston | Source: DigiBeta projection
22 Jun 2008 1:48 PM | Submit Comment
Sam Fuller’s bruising noir is packed with goodies, from the hardboiled dialogue throughout to the bracing subway station punch-up at its conclusion.
What has stayed with me most, though, is Thelma Ritter’s Oscar-nominated turn as an aging “stoolie” named Moe. She begins the film as an amusing and seemingly incidental character: selling information and men’s ties with the same casual bartering and prattling on about the increase in the cost of living. Yet by her final scene Moe has become a surprisingly moving figure. Check out that last monologue for a lesson in what it means to be worn down by life. Moe’s lined, weary face contrasts powerfully with the fake-lashed glamour of Jean Peters’ good-hearted moll Candy, and her quiet tragedy rings with grim authenticity.
by Victoria Large | Source: 35MM Print
19 Jun 2008 6:30 PM | Submit Comment
“Back to literature.”
Jacques Rivette’s hippie-chick epic is best understood as a delayed reaction to the utopian expectations of May ‘68; or better, a reaction to the sixties in general, what it did and didn’t make possible. It’s a drug movie that could only have been made when the novelty of taking drugs had worn off; and a feminist movie that could only have been made once women began to sense the limits of their liberation. It’s also pretty much a masterpiece. The story of a developing friendship between a bohemian magician and a bourgeois librarian who quit their jobs, trade lives and clothes, perform magical rites and become embroiled in “all-day screenings, every day” is too much fun to be just an allegory, though it’s an uncommonly subtle and comprehensive one. After a while it seems that the real joy of Céline et Julie will be watching French women – internationally known for their demure demeanor, especially on film – pull faces and turn on their “cosmic twilight pimps,” and this would be enough jouissance for most movies. But as the film enters its third hour and the protagonists a laughably banal melodrama, you realize you’re kind of interested in the melodrama too, and you’re definitely interested in Céline and Julie’s interest in it. Maybe everything is interesting! Let’s go boating!
by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
19 Jun 2008 10:46 AM | Submit Comment
The Incredible Hulk begins with one of the most well crafted credit sequences in recent memory. Its not the credits themselves that are memorable, it’s the fact that the brief sequence distills everything one would need to know about the Hulk into a neat little montage. This allows the film proper to skip the overused “origin story” section of the superhero genre and jump right into what everyone paid to see: the action.
It is the aforementioned action that was frustratingly absent from Ang Lee’s Hulk and the opening montage also serves the secondary function of announcing to the audience that the film that follows is going to act as if Lee’s film was never made. In this regard this is the Hulk’s equivalent of Batman Begins rather than Superman Returns, both in the sense it is a complete restart and in terms of overall quality. The rest of the film lives up to the pace and style established by the opening sequence, with a handful of moments that will likely elicit gasps from even the most ardent CGI-haters. Norton’s Banner/Hulk is perhaps the screen’s most accessible superhero to date. He’s able to convey the loneliness and sadness of the character without the “woe is me” histrionics of the Spiderman series. Norton also deserves credit for making the non-action scenes believable and entertainingÑthe small children in the theater with me seemed as mesmerized during dialogue as they did during the destruction.
2008 seems to be the year of the good superhero film with Iron Man already setting the bar and the much-anticipated The Dark Knight yet to come. I put The Incredible Hulk just a notch ahead of Iron Man. It may be merely personal preference, but I enjoyed Norton’s sympathetic but admirable Banner over Downey Jr.’s loveable rogue in StarkÑgeek heresy, I know. The Incredible Hulk, for all the noise and destruction, ultimately feels the more mature film of the two when compared to Iron Man’s adolescent fantasy indulgences.
Don’t bother staying past the credits. Marvel’s smart enough not to pull the same trick twice.
by David Carter | Source: Theatrical Print
14 Jun 2008 8:07 PM | Submit Comment
“The illusion of health is not health.”
Bresson’s film is beautiful and haunting, all the more so to a secular skeptic to whom it can’t help but suggest a murder mystery without the crime. But that’s just what’s interesting about it: in its own austere way, Diary of a Country Priest echoes The Big Sleep in its story of a tortured outsider who becomes entangled in power struggles within a decadent aristocratic family, gets nothing but guff and repulsion from everyone else, and ends by washing his hands of the situation entirely (although here with more permanent results). Both films express a certain futility to our desire to find out what’s really going on, though in this case it’s the mind – or soul, if you like – of the protagonist itself which is a mystery. (The other characters continually suggest their own red herring explanations: too much wine, not enough beef, the “rotten blood of intellectuals, undernourished since childhood.”) Whatever his intentions, Bresson’s style is the perfect vehicle to embody this enigma of epistemological distance – the way he dollies in on faces at the slightest provocation, as if we could actually get all the way there.
by Evan Kindley | Source: Criterion Collection DVD
14 Jun 2008 3:37 PM | Submit Comment
It’s the plants!
This movie is awesome, for reasons I’ll get to in a second, but it does have a major problem in its lack of a villain—or rather, in its ham-handed attempt to evoke one in shots of ominous-looking gales blowing over trees and brush, and people looking ominously at these ominous-looking gales. Wind, you see, doesn’t look ominous, especially not in quaint, rural Pennsylvanian landscapes. Our response is to mirror these peoples’, but it doesn’t really. And gauging from the audience I saw this with, there’s a lot more humor in the film than intended.
What should be scary here is the sudden compulsion towards suicide that grips so many people so suddenly. But the suicides are – by and far – the best parts of this movie. The more people killing themselves, and the more creative their deaths, the better it gets. It’s jack-in-the-box filmmaking, and the only suspense this film contrives from its fatally ephemeral concept is in how this unavoidable plague inspires people to dignify their deaths with elaboration—and they keep getting better and better and better. My favorite is the guy who offhandedly attempts to pet the lions at the zoo, followed closely by the group of people who systematically erect ladders and hang themselves from oak trees overhanging a rural road. Oh, and there’s a guy with a lawnmower…
This is deathsploitation with pretensions toward environmental parable, but deathsploitation it remains. I’m actually disappointed that there’s not more death in the movie; had Shyamalan the lack of tact to include more killing, this would have been a solid contemporary exploitation film.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: 20th Century Fox 35mm print
14 Jun 2008 11:08 AM | Comments (4)
This self-aware latest entry into Romero’s unequaled undead oeuvre has high energy and typically disgusting gory gags from special effects makeup wizard Gregory Nicotero, plus a healthy sense of humor and an appealing low budget vibe. Fans of the director’s shambling masses of flesh-eaters should be greatly amused – I certainly was.
But just as Romero’s student-filmmaker protagonists are toiling away on a mummy film with an underlying social conscience, so Romero has infused Diary of the Dead with a lot of criticism for our media-saturated society. These concerns sometimes threaten to overwhelm the picture, particularly in the case of some obvious and unnecessary voice-over narration. Nevertheless, Romero does a memorable job of demonstrating how the influx of instant communication in recent decades is seemingly more liable to create panic than curb it.
by Victoria Large | Source: Weinstein Company DVD
08 Jun 2008 2:07 PM | Submit Comment
In a world… ruled by network executives…
where wealth is measured in Nielsen ratings…
where a blipvert can tell you everything— except the truth…
where hackers have dominion over the souls of men and parrots…
and where watching television could blow you away…
the only one who can save us…
is an electronic hairdo who cracks jokes about enemas.
by Megan Weireter | Source: Chrysalis VHS
05 Jun 2008 10:49 AM | Submit Comment
The genius of Sex and the City, the television show – in addition, of course, to the tightly-paced, funny writing, the occasionally revolutionary messages behind the gals’ sexual behaviour, and the fabulous Manhattan backdrop – was the way each episode hung together while following four distinct story arcs. Every week, Carrie’s over-arching question linked the action in each woman’s life; that question, as much as the brunches and Cosmos, was what kept the ensemble together.
It’s that tight, linked plotting that the movie lacks more than anything else. Instead, Carrie’s story dominates all the rest. (I know, I know. She’s technically the “main” character – but she’s also most fans’ least favourite. Didn’t the producers get the memo?) Samantha’s and Charlotte’s lives are practically reduced to footnotes; Smith, Harry, and Stanford Blatch to virtual cameos. Miranda, meanwhile, has big things happening in her life – but her friends, inexplicably, ignore her storyline to obsess about Carrie’s. Jennifer Hudson’s “Saint Louise” is an odd, somewhat forced, deus ex machina – and also one of the more shameless bits of tokenism I’ve seen in awhile. And did anyone else think the extended intro/re-cap was reminiscent of the first chapter of a Baby-Sitters Club book?
The dialogue is uneven, with some moments finding the old spark and others that are cringe-worthy. There are at least two instances of totally gratuitous slow-motion. And Smith Jerrod, in the few times we see him, just isn’t as smokin’ hot as he used to be.
But with all that said, we all know reunions can be hard. I laughed. I cried a little. And even with the awkward moments, it was still fun to spend a couple of hours catching up with four old friends.
by Eva Holland | Source: 35mm Theatrical Print
04 Jun 2008 4:25 PM | Comments (1)
Silent films often have a rough time of it on video. They fall into public domain and are plagued by poor picture quality or atrocious musical scores, and it becomes difficult to see even the best silent films for the treasures that they are. The situation has improved with the rise of DVD, but even the slickest DVD productions would be hard-pressed to match the experience of seeing a classic silent on an enormous screen with live musical accompaniment.
In this case, the enormous screen was provided by Brookline’s luscious Art Deco theater, the Coolidge, and the music was provided by pianist Marty Marks. The classic silent was the wonderfully-titled Flesh and the Devil, in which none less than Greta Garbo and John Gilbert share a forbidden tryst and pay dearly for it.
It was easy for me to reflect on the differences between the experience of seeing the hushed, intoxicating Flesh and the Devil and the screeching blockbuster fare common at today’s cineplex, but it was also striking that some things haven’t changed. Gorgeous lovers and juicy affairs? That works as well now as it did over eighty years ago, thank you very much.
There’s a lot to take in here: William H. Daniels’ haunting black and white cinematography, odd bits of humor stuck in throughout, and the curious, subtext-laden friendship between the two male leads. But until she arrives, you find yourself waiting for Garbo. Her ironically-named temptress Felicitas is so dominant and delicious a figure – just watch her knowingly arching one eyebrow or primping beneath a black widow’s veil – that her inevitable punishment is nearly beside the point.
by Victoria Large | Source: Projected DVD
02 Jun 2008 11:58 PM | Submit Comment
I suppose it’s merely a byproduct of world film history that 2008 brings us two films by European directors about amateur remakes of 1980s American blockbusters: first Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, and now Hammer & Tongs’s Son of Rambow. As children, this filmmaking generation witnessed the American cinema reascendant after a brief interregnum during which it looked like it might just be one among many. In this respect, if not in others, this generation is the French New Wave all over again; and these movies seem like a way of coming to grips with American cultural domination while still recognizing that culture’s formative influence on their own aesthetic, and not without a certain fondness. (Seems like we might need a word for this soon: hegemonostalgia, maybe?)
In Son of Rambow, two maladjusted British schoolboys collaborate on a submission to a BBC Screen Test competition inspired by Rambo: First Blood. Like the boys’ efforts, Son of Rambow itself has noticeable American antecedents, primarily Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, which exploits its school milieu to similar deadpan effect. But Son of Rambow is both dingier and nastier: like a cross between a Mike Leigh film and a Tom & Jerry short, it links social realism with a brutal, cartoonish sense of humor that works much better in the ambitious visual gags than in the uncertain dialogue. Luckily, the film’s flaws are offset by the two young lead actors (Will Poulter and Bill Milner), who seem miserable enough to make the underdeveloped flights of fancy around them work as pathos if not as spectacle. (Jules Sitruk, as an idolized French foreign exchange student, is also a lot of fun.) But in the end, as in Gondry’s film, sentiment beats critique: the tempered Hollywood ending suggests that Hammer & Tongs want to keep their distance from American narrative formulas, but can’t think of anything more satisfying to replace them. There’s a great film to be made with the hegemonostalgic premise, perhaps, but it has yet to appear.
by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
02 Jun 2008 9:49 PM | Submit Comment
I would feel a lot more comfortable with this film if Spielberg and company would just admit what it really is: an homage and not a fourth installment. Too much has changed for this to have been anything but completely incongruous with its predecessors. David Koepp is no Jeffrey Boam or Lawrence Kasdan, Jim Broadbent is no Denholm Elliott, and Cate Blanchett’s sword-wielding Russian villainess is nowhere near as wickedly entertaining as Julian Glover’s Walter Donovan or Amrish Puri’s Mola Ram; she’s too underdeveloped, doesn’t exude the dangerous sexuality of Spielberg’s previous vixens, and belongs to an organizationÑthe KGBÑthat just isn’t fun enough to hate. Sorry, but there’s something about Indiana Jones fighting Nazis that is just a lot more entertaining.
And as an homage, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is extraordinarily lackluster. The camera-based special effects I grew up reveringÑmelting faces, falling tanks, rapid agingÑhave been almost entirely replaced by computer-rendered graphics that reduce prairie dogs and an atomic blast to the same piss-poor look as a bad summer blockbuster, which is something an Indiana Jones film should never be. Snakes, hordes of creepy-crawlies, the Ark of the Covenant, waterfalls, secret underground tunnels, skeletonsÑthe filmmakers take immense delight in recalling the previous films, so much so they seem irrevocably lodged in their own feelings of nostalgia. Until the final climax, which is itself mind-numbingly outrageous, nothing in this film felt truly inspired. It felt like forced creativityÑa writer new to the franchise trying desperately to prove that he understands the franchise, that he “gets it.” (Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly summed this up better than I possibly could when she said, in part, “Everything is new and nothing is new.”)
I suppose my dislike of this film can be attributed in part to my age. I was three years old when The Last Crusade was released, so the original Indiana Jones films are iconic and untouchable in my eyesÑan invulnerable, unofficial trilogy of sorts. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull feels almost like Lucas and Spielberg trying to amend my childhood, and it doesn’t help that Koepp kills off Jones’s father within the first half-hour, drawing our attention to a photograph of the bearded old man as his son offers us a dizzyingly saccharine eulogyÑa cinematic decision that seems almost vindictive in nature, considering Sean Connery’s refusal to reprise his role in favor of staying retired. It violates rule numero uno in how to write a decent sequel: Never kill off a character the audience loves like their own grandfather.
But I have to admit that not all is bad. The one redeeming aspect of this film, at least from my perspective, is the return of Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood. As hardy as Indiana Jones, if not tougher, she is now a mother dressed in clothes that never seem to dirtyÑperhaps an oversight, perhaps a way to signify her clean, unshakable character. And while her son is a plotline I would love to wish away, her appearance alone is the one from-the-past aspect the filmmakers pulled off without mistake. If only they had given her scenes a little more meat rather than spending the film’s bulk handing the fedora and bullwhip over to young Shia LaBeouf.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ended with four men riding off into the sunsetÑa perfect metaphor for the fading horse-and-pistol masculinity represented by the title character. In the years that followed, one of those men passed away, another retired, and the final twoÑHarrison Ford and John Rhys-DaviesÑmoved on to other projects. It was an ending that Spielberg himself has often heralded as perfect, probably why the franchise had remained untouchedÑor mostlyÑfor nineteen years. So the question arises: Does Kingdom of the Crystal Skull add or subtract from the Jones oeuvre. I know a lot of people will find this new installment entertaining, my parents included, but I for one would have liked the trilogy to remain just that.
by Adam Balz | Source: 35MM Theatrical Print
02 Jun 2008 8:14 PM | Submit Comment