What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
I read somewhere that the power of The Wrestler lies in Mickey Rourke’s wear-ravaged face, but when I left the theater, I found it was the image of his hands that stayed with me most strongly. At times during the movie I found the oft-zoomed-in camera work a bit much, but when the lens closed in on those hands – big, hard-working mitts, often cut up, with dark bruises under the broken nails – they seemed to tell Randy the Ram’s story all on their own. I don’t know how it will stack up against some of the year’s more sweeping, ambitious dramas, but as a straightforward character portrait? I haven’t seen a finer one on the big screen in quite some time.
by Eva Holland | Source: 35mm Print
31 Jan 2009 10:27 PM | Comments (1)
I’ve looked on in puzzlement as the reviews rolled in on this one. They’re near-uniformly bad, but often a little lean on rationale. (Unless “Dustin Hoffman is too old for Emma Thompson” or “Emma Thompson is too tall for Dustin Hoffman” counts as legitimate film criticism?) Sure, Last Chance Harvey is a flyweight, syrupy-sweet little film, but – to stretch the boxing metaphor a little – it performs well enough in its weight class.
If there’s a pair of actors that can make an audience feel every humiliation more keenly than these two stars, I haven’t met ‘em. I writhed with vicarious shame when they asked me to; I smiled when they smiled. In short, I was putty in their competent hands, and nothing much else about the movie seemed to matter. Watching Hoffman and Thompson spar their way around London was a pure pleasure.
by Eva Holland | Source: DVD
31 Jan 2009 9:09 PM | Submit Comment
From what I can tell, the concept behind Fishing with John is as follows: musician John Lurie goes fishing in some unassailably exotic location with one of his celebrity friends. A cameraman films the excursion. The resultant footage is edited down to a thirty-minute episode, which is subsequently embellished by narration that totally recontextualizes everything that happens. In one episode, John and Willem Dafoe perish in a snowstorm in Maine. In another, John and Dennis Hopper go hunting for the giant squid in Thailand’s noticeably shallow riverbeds.
What makes this so eminently watchable is its total absurdity. Fishing with John was unfortunately short-lived (six half-hour episodes), but never routine or predictable. And despite the stature of the cast – all belong to the early-Nineties’ indie film or music scene – John Lurie remains the main attraction here. I remain unconvinced that he knows anything about fishing.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: The Criterion Collection DVD
27 Jan 2009 7:22 PM | Comments (1)
This particular viewing of The Shining served as a sort of fulcrum for a notably frigid Boston winter. Unlike virtually every other cinematic entertainment my city of residence had to offer on this evening, The Shining was no reprieve from the outside temperature—I exited shortly after Jack Nicholson’s murderous smile is frozen in that hedge maze into a night that threatened me with precisely the same fate.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: 35mm print
27 Jan 2009 7:18 PM | Submit Comment
Midway through the Brattle’s recent screening of Alex Cox’s Repo Man, a fight broke out two seats down from me in the middle of a modest weeknight crowd. This alarmed pretty much no one. And in retrospect it seems uncannily appropriate for a film of such casual aggression.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: 35mm print
27 Jan 2009 7:17 PM | Comments (1)
Director Patrick Lussier serves up the gory gags early and often in this remake, which is bigger and glossier than the modestly budgeted Canadian original of the same title, but which has its (disembodied) heart is in the same place. This new Valentine fully, unapologetically embraces its slasher status, which means the characters do groan-worthy things like checking out a strange noise or tripping over invisible obstacles when trying to run from the approaching killer. It means that the audience is showered with 3D entrails and subjected to straight-faced deliveries of silly dialogue. Jensen Ackles and Kerr Smith star as romantic rivals who also happen to be leading murder suspects, but genre veteran Tom Atkins, a familiar face to fans of Night of the Creeps and Maniac Cop, has the more emblematic presence. The technology here is new – fancy digital processes are at work – but the charm is strictly from the old school of 3D gimmickry and goopy gore. The film revels in its own disreputability – from wholly gratuitous full-frontal nudity to a giggle-inducing dislodged eyeball – but it doesn’t wink. (Everyone may behave as if they’re in a slasher flick, but no one behaves as if they’ve ever seen one.) It’s sick, sticky, unreconstructed, and ludicrous from its first frame to its larky cheat of a twist ending. It delivers, dear readers, exactly what it promises: a film for anyone who’s ever wanted to duck a pickaxe between bites of popcorn. You know who you are.
by Victoria Large | Source: Digital 3-D screening
18 Jan 2009 11:50 AM | Comments (2)
The years of waiting are over. The terror has begun.
Working my way backwards through the illustrious career of director Norman J. Warren, I settled in for a second evening of low-budget thrills from across the pond. Instead of Bloody New Year’s muddled tale of demonic possession, however, I found a well-paced and well-constructed sci-fi shocker.
During a spirited bout of extraterrestrial archaeology, a group of astronaut-scientists discovers an ancient tomb, along with puzzling carvings and some unusual crystals. Before they can unravel much of the mystery, however, a timeless and indescribable evil awakens, an evil with the ability to control the minds of the feeble humans. One by one the crew is consumed until only a handful of unaffected souls remain. Then, in a surprisingly artistic scene given the low budget and subject matter, the monster artificially impregnates a female member of the crew, destroying her sanity in the process.
Suddenly, what was conventional sci-fi horror takes on aspects of a bizarre slasher, with the maddened mom-to-be roaming the dank caverns surrounding the scientific outpost, calling out to her prospective victims in a voice laced with madness, and employing picks, knives, and teeth to terrible effect. In a film that clearly didn’t have much in the way of surplus funds, such a narrative allows for an impressively harrowing scenario without the need to rely on costly special effects. That Judy Geeson’s performance as the enraged alien incubator is quite unnerving only adds to the fun, and keeps us wondering how the crew can possibly survive…and what’s going to happen when that unborn alien spawn makes its way into the world.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Embassy Home Entertainment VHS
13 Jan 2009 9:23 PM | Submit Comment
Should old acquaintance be forgot? Or just brutally murdered.
Evil elevators absorb foolish girls, killer fishing nets tackle the unsuspecting, disgruntled newel posts bite the arms of the careless, and through it all a ghostly, Tom-Petty-inspired rock band belts out the “Recipe for Romance.” Though the song is catchy and the effects are solid, when I sat down to watch Norman J. Warren’s final horror feature to date I was hoping for a love-starved maniac hacking up happy couples as the ball drops. Instead, I got a convoluted science fiction story about a radar-thwarting experiment gone wrong and an island forever trapped on January 1st, 1960. When a shipwrecked sextet of horny youngsters stumbles across said island, they too are trapped in time, and though they fight back with shotguns, knives, and sound logic, there is no escape.
Though Bloody New Year opens with a terrifically entertaining scene—centered on a terrifying tilt-a-whirl ride, a lively game of keep away, and a spirited chase through a haunted house—once the main players find themselves stranded on the island, the fun-loving storyline grinds to a halt. In its place is that most objectionable of late ’80s horror narrative features—demonic possession. Whether it’s the island’s occupants from long ago or the kitchen table, someone or something in this film is always possessed by evil, and angry at anyone that isn’t. And while some of the subsequent killings by these demonic denizens incorporate enjoyable special effects, the very concept of a haunted island hotel is boring, and it’s hard to get excited about much that happens there. We can only hope this film doesn’t stand as Norman J. Warren’s horror swan song.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Academy Entertainment VHS
12 Jan 2009 10:29 PM | Comments (1)
Just a week after being moved by Eva’s story about not getting a chance to see Metropolis on the big screen, I found myself attending the Brattle Theatre’s free screening of the silent classic. The coincidence made me particularly mindful of my good fortune; a great rep cinema is hard to find. As for the film itself: books can, and certainly have, been written on the subject – from its tortured history of reediting and truncation to its visual potency and tangled web of thematic concerns, Metropolis is a film to be grappled with. What stood out, for me, on this viewing, was how powerfully the film’s stark futuristic vision of urban anxiety and industrial malaise lingers; Metropolis’ frightening depiction of a mechanized society (epitomized by a nightmare vision of human workers being literally sacrificed to a machine) really isn’t softened by the story’s pat and rather forgettable ending. I keep coming back Brigitte Helm’s vividly fiendish turn as the robotic doppelganger of the film’s heroine, Maria. “Let’s watch the world go to the devil!” she suggests gleefully, and later laughs at the hordes who’ve gathered to burn her at the stake. She’s the kind of vice character who fascinates and terrifies us (the kind more recently incarnated by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, happily watching the world burn) because regardless of who’s pulling the false Maria’s strings, her pleasure in bringing the world to its knees is a horror rivaled only by the ease with which she does it. The reasons for Metropolis’ continued resonance are myriad, and its still-stunning visuals and far-ranging stylistic influence certainly top the list, but there’s also something quite compelling about how it dramatizes our worst fears about ourselves.
Rumsey’s full review/Matt’s full review
by Victoria Large | Source: 35MM Print
10 Jan 2009 7:00 PM | Comments (1)
Not since Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet has water been this big of a deal—everywhere the camera turns we find precious water. Benjamin’s father, seeing his son’s ghastly appearance for the first time, thinks to drown the newborn in a river. As a young-old man, we see him bathed by Queenie, then getting a job on a tugboat and setting off to war in the Atlantic. He gets to know Tilda Swinton’s Elizabeth over boiling water and, years later, rejoices silently in a diner when she finally swims the English Channel. His biological father dies at the beach, at the same rundown place where Benjamin and Daisy spend time together before honeymooning in a location overcome in one scene by heavy rain—everyone flees but the newlyweds. And, most importantly, the frame story has an elderly and dying Daisy lying in a New Orleans hospital as Hurricane Katrina approaches, soon to drown the city and accompany the old woman’s passing.
An overbearing motif, to say the least, and yet, for me, this was the only true device holding the film together. (The frame story was also, to say the least, the only portion of the film I felt succeeded.) David Fincher’s 166-minute follow-up to Zodiac is unnecessarily long and overburdened by special effects. Yes, Swinton’s Elizabeth proves late in the film that age is irrelevant – even though, somehow, paradoxically, this film tends to say the opposite – but her scenes add nothing to the story of Benjamin himself. Similarly, Brad Pitt’s slow transformation from young-old man to old-young man is disjointed, with Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth devoted a lopsided amount of time to certain portions of his life – growing up, falling in love – rather than others, including Benjamin in his old age: A boy who grows increasingly younger.
I was hoping, given the premise and the talent involved, that this film would be something special—a great concept by a great American author struck to film with the best of intentions. Instead, this was a long and tedious disappointment.
by Adam Balz | Source: Theatrical Print
09 Jan 2009 12:09 PM | Comments (2)
When I was 14, I played Hans Van Daan in a summer-school production of The Diary of Anne Frank. My performance was the stilted kind of awful you’d expect from a self-conscious teenager; I tended to accent every line with my hands bolted to my side as I paced back and forth, eyes fixed to the same invisible point off-stage. I awkwardly interrupted others in the play, not knowing when to begin talking, and I found comfort in hiding behind the scant furniture we had. Needless to say, I was bad. Little did I realize, though, that all of this could someday qualify me to act in a Frank Miller film.
Mistakenly thinking Miller was the creative half of the Sin City directorial duo, and considering the man’s first-hand experiences with bad Hollywood interpretations of his work, combined with his unmistakable debt to Will Eisner, I expected The Spirit to be an breathtaking neo-noirÑMickey Spillane bathed in blurring, black-and-white special effects. Instead, it looked like something some friends and I might have made when we were teenagers, would we have had a garage-full of computers, millions of dollars in sets and costumes, and any kind of sway with Samuel L. Jackson. There is absolutely no reason for this film to be as bad as it is – the visuals alone should be able to distract from any shortcomings – and yet it is stupefyingly horrendous. The acting – from Gabriel Macht, Eva Mendes, and especially Scarlett Johansson – is unabashedly wooden and underthought, with the latter’s bespeckled sex-pot trying oh-so desperately to seem like the intellectual femme fatal, twirling her umbrella and sporting Nazi costumes while delivering her lines as though she’s just now reading them off a quick-moving teleprompter.
I was hoping that, like The Happening, there was a plausible reason for the acting to be as bad as it was – a directorial touch, perhaps a commentary on the coldness of cinematic violence or the abrasiveness of certain graphic novels – but I couldn’t find any. Perhaps Miller should have spent more time prepping his actors and less time, shall we say, killing Fluffy.
by Adam Balz | Source: Theatrical Print
09 Jan 2009 10:54 AM | Comments (1)
Historical accuracy is a fickle beast. On one hand you’re fighting for loyalty to the source, for the finished product to avoid any charge of embellishment or unjust editing; on the other, you don’t want to overburden and undervalue the cast, crew, or audience. With Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg seemed to have found the Hollywood balance, preferring good, albeit inaccurate, English-language performances over the alternative, of accurate but bad – or at least unmanageable – German-language performances, a balance Bryan Singer seems desperate to strike.
And, in truth, I respect Singer, as well as his co-writers, for avoiding outright any half-attempts at accuracy, especially with foreign languages and dialects, ala Harrison Ford’s Americanized Russian gargles in K-19: The Widowmaker. My only real qualm with Valkyrie came with an interview done by one of the film’s co-writers for the History Channel, in which he claimed that combining unnamed historical figures into unnamed composite characters was, to paraphrase, “no big deal,” especially since the marketing of this film has been aimed at educating audiences in this comparatively recent and sadly overlooked aspect of world history. Considering these are men and women who fought for what they thought was right, leaving their families to suffer from years, even decades, of humiliation at the hands of their fellow citizens, I’d think it at least polite and respectful to honor all participants rather than abridging their contribution for the sake of time.
by Adam Balz | Source: Theatrical Print
09 Jan 2009 10:52 AM | Submit Comment
Kudos to Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes fame for being the cherry at the top of his paranoia sundae. Each bite was just as gruelingly – and, therefore, effectively – inductive of fear and suspicion as the one before, commenced mere minutes into the film by her almost overlookable background news-report.
by Adam Balz | Source: DVD
09 Jan 2009 10:51 AM | Submit Comment
If Leo’s right that the original Gremlins is an allegory about Asian imports, then its belated sequel is an undisguised satire of homegrown American corporate culture: Mr. Wing’s mysterious Chinatown shop has been cleared to make way for Clamp Tower, “the world’s most automated building.” And if Chiranjit is right that Gremlins is about fear of immigration, then The New Batch, I would argue, is more about class anxiety per se: the Gremlins in this film are less invading aliens than the unwashed hordes in our own backyards, bent on exposing and dissolving America’s cosmopolitan pretensions even as their public face, the bespectacled Brain Gremlin (voiced by Tony Randall), claims that all they’re after is “civilization”:
The fine points: diplomacy, compassion, standards, manners, tradition… that’s what we’re reaching toward. Oh, we may stumble along the way, but civilization, yes. The Geneva Convention, chamber music, Susan Sontag. Everything your society has worked so hard to accomplish over the centuries, that’s what we aspire to.
Yeah right: they just want to destroy everything and kill each other. Immediately after giving this speech, Brain shoots a fellow Gremlin in the head, and goes on: “Now, was that civilized? No, clearly not. Fun, but in no sense civilized.”
So it’s lowbrow/highbrow rather than xenophobia this time around, and it’s no accident that The New Batch, rather than paying tribute to cheap horror as its precursor did, more often imitates old Warner Brothers cartoons, which played some of the same tricks with the chaotic appropriation of “legitimate” culture — think of the 1812 Overture scoring falling anvils, for instance. (Fittingly, Dante would go on to direct 2003’s Looney Tunes: Back In Action.) But the class dichotomy in Gremlins 2, significantly, is a false one: turns out the American human capitalists’ hearts were never in their newfangled modern skyscrapers anyway, which are dismissed with a speech that could serve as a pocket lecture on the Marxist concept of reification: “Maybe it wasn’t a place for people anyway. It was a place for things. You make a place for things… things come.” Almost making this strange reversal work is the redoubtable John Glover, who briefly specialized in the yuppie asshole roles which were de rigueur in 1980s comedies and action films (cf. Scrooged, RoboCop 2). As billionaire tycoon Daniel Clamp — shades of Donald Trump, of course, but also Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch — Glover is actually the most likable and charismatic person (or thing) in the movie, radiating charm and good nature and promoting everybody involved to top positions at the end of the film. He even agrees to build architect Tim Matheson’s vision of small town paradise instead of another steel and glass monstrosity: “People want the traditional community thing now. Quiet little towns, back to the earth.” Ergo, Gremlins 2, as cheeky and “subversive” as it is, ultimately accepts the Reaganomic premise so well described by Thomas Frank in his What’s The Matter With Kansas: we’ll tolerate domination by corporate giants, as long as they don’t pretend they’re better than us.
by Evan Kindley | Source: TV
04 Jan 2009 1:29 AM | Submit Comment
I didn’t actually see Metropolis tonight. I stood in the cold with several hundred other people for 45 minutes, waiting for my chance, but when the doors closed and the projector started up I was still two dozen hopefuls from the door.
The event was the grand re-opening of a vintage neighbourhood theatre here in Ottawa. It closed this fall and was slated for demolition or condofication, was but saved at the proverbial last minute, after much public outcry. Metropolis was the first movie ever screened there, way back in 1932, so it seemed a fitting way to kick off the new era.
I don’t know how unusual this would be where you live, but here, to see an old one-screen theatre, showing an 80 year-old movie, hit its fire code capacity (340) and still have a couple hundred people turned away at the door? That’s pretty special. (I don’t even mind that I missed the movie! At least, not much.) Thought I’d mention it here, where folks are likely to appreciate it.
by Eva Holland | Source: 35mm Print
03 Jan 2009 12:05 AM | Comments (1)
Max and Dave Fleischer’s ill-starred second feature was originally released, as Mr. Bug Goes To Town, two days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Not surprisingly, it was a massive failure, worsening the already strained relations between the Fleischers and Paramount and leading to the takeover of their fledgling production company. But the movie survives as a minor classic of animated filmmaking, and evidence of a possible world where Walt Disney didn’t achieve complete domination over the cartoon feature. In contrast to the gentle whimsy of Disney’s Silly Symphonies and the heartless anything-for-a-laugh anarchy of Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes, the Fleischers had always excelled at racy, “realistic” material like Betty Boop. Thus Hoppity, while basically following the sentimental template established by 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, is a bit coarser and scrappier than Disney’s contemporaneous output, playing to the New York-based Fleischers’ strengths by including strong doses of ethnic humor, social satire and slapstick to cut the fairy-tale treacle. It also has a broadly populist scenario (which may not have helped its chances in post-Depression America), playing out the evils of big business on two levels: a corrupt capitalist beetle (helped by two Italian-sounding rude mechanicals) plots the ruin a community of hardworking proletarian insects, at the same time as a new high-rise development threatens them all. Visually it’s less controlled than a Disney film; there’s a looseness, even a loucheness, to the Fleischer house style that gives a weird kick to scenes like Hoppity’s trip to a hot jazz nightclub, where he gets electrocuted into doing the jitterbug. The nearest reference point is less anything animated than comic strips like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat or Walt Kelly’s Pogo. (To put a finer point on it: Snow White looks like a picture book; Hoppity looks like the funny pages.) The stabs at high drama are less successful: the Fleischers’ background artists weren’t a patch on Disney’s, and the original plot lacks the mythic depth of the Grimm stories their competitors had to work with. But there’s plenty of incidental detail and invention along the way to make you wish they could have tried again.
While we’re on the subject, though, what about this microgenre of bugs-in-the-big-city stories? Apparently it took urban blight to make insects into sympathetic protagonists: a short list would also have to include Don Marquis’ archy and mehitabel newspaper stories (which eventually engendered the 1971 animated flop Shinbone Alley) and George Selden’s 1960 novel The Cricket in Times Square, both of which play on the same “imperiled pastoral in the heart of the modern” feeling that Hoppity does. (Pixar’s 1998 A Bug’s Tale, by contrast, shifts the action to the safety of the suburbs, thereby reducing the pathos somewhat. I haven’t seen Antz.) All of these, probably, can be traced back to Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” perhaps the first work of fiction to draw the connection between city dweller and vermin. An unlikely source for themes in children’s entertainment, but you take your masterstrokes where you can.
by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
02 Jan 2009 11:12 PM | Submit Comment