Not Coming to a Theater Near You
You know him?”
“Not socially. His name’s Jaws, he kills people.
OUCH.
Full review
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: IFC Films 35mm print
25 Oct 2009 12:23 AM | Submit Comment
Peter Yates’s 1973 film pivots around Robert Mitchum’s defeated disposition. He favors a local pub on weekday afternoons, and spends much of his remaining time manipulating those who trust him (the titular “Friends,” most of whom are second-grade criminals). It’s crucial that this character appear to have been manifested straight from the 1970s Boston suburbs he inhabits (trust me when I say The Departed has nothing on this film in terms of authenticity). When he speaks, his voice carries a tone of such authoritative desperation that you have no other option then to help him out in his petty crimes. He is very much a product of his environment, toughened and uncompromising, but without the means to comfortably provide for his family or himself.
For comparison, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (which, coincidentally, I saw within a day of Eddie Coyle) has at its disposal many more resources in crafting its setting: period costumes, location photography, ballistic props (trebuchets, crossbows, etc.), and marquee talent (Kevin Costner, Christian Slater, an atypically buff Morgan Freeman). It fucks all of this up, because Kevin Costner, despite his near peerless capability to make drug rugs look like they’re indigenous fashions in any period in history, has the most incapable British accent I’ve ever heard. The only portions of this film that feel in any way authentic are when Alan Rickman’s merciless villain is scouring vehemently about the frame. But despite its near total failure in seeming authentic, the entire thing is worth watching if only for Rickman’s majestically overwrought death scene, not to mention the Bryan Adams’ music video superimposed under the end credits scroll.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Paramount Pictures 35mm print
19 Oct 2009 1:22 PM | Submit Comment
Couples Retreat offers just enough laughs to keep the viewer hoping, vainly, that the movie will turn itself around, that the few good barbs and funny-because-they’re-true jabs at married life will coalesce into a coherent comedy. Instead, our eight heroes slog forward, relying far too heavily on tired Blades of Glory-esque jokes about men touching each other, until any semblance of humor falls away and the final minutes are devoted to a lecture on the importance of sticktoitiveness in marriage. It’s a family-values lesson dressed up as a frat-boy comedy, and doesn’t do either especially well.
by Eva Holland | Source: 35mm Print
11 Oct 2009 6:30 PM | Submit Comment
At nine sentences and only twenty pages, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is imaginative precisely because of its brevity; what it lacks it encourages its reader to manifest in her own head. Needless to say, the forthcoming film adaptation – which took over half a decade to produce at a cost of nearly one-hundred million dollars – has, in its attempt to relay Sendak’s succinctness, a reasonably impossible task.
It’s a fine attempt, but the film lacks the encouragement I describe above. When one of the wild things – stinky, ragamuffin yet perceptibly kind melds of puppetry, costumes, and CGI – expresses anger or frustration, the emotion is relayed in a rubbery, computer-animated face that is just askew enough to look totally unreal. Nonetheless, the emotions at the core of each scene are sincere, and invariably true to the source. The sequences that do stand out are ballasted by little Max, and not one of his bestial companions, at the fore. In particular there’s a scene that has Max in the belly of KW (who’s hiding him from another of the wild things, Carol, who’s bent on eating Max), and this has precisely the ramshackle charm that characterizes Spike Jonze—this scene looks like it could have been shot with a down comforter and a flashlight, and it’s nonetheless emotionally resonant.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Warner Bros. 35mm print
06 Oct 2009 12:14 AM | Comments (2)
NYFF – One of the problems with being an incredibly cynical person – someone suspicious of just about anything, especially those things involving earnest social concern, major issues of class and race addressed in a populist manner, Mariah Carey, Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, and a whole lot of money – is that one finds oneself laughing at the most inappropriate things. And upon sitting down to watch Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, already wary of the neverending title, I was rather worried that I would be immediately betray myself as that smug shit guffawing indecorously at a corny, slice-of-life melodrama about a 300-lb. African-American teenager from a deeply impoverished background who is bearing her second child by her father, and is occasionally beaten over the head with a frying pan by her mother (who is played by Mo’Nique).
There are, to be sure, a few WTF-inspiring moments: a credit sequence written in illiterate scrawl (and translated into the Queen’s in stately Times New Roman) that, yes, includes the names Mimi, Oprah, Tyler, and Lenny Kravitz (!); the fact that Precious’ first child has Downs Syndrome and is literally named Mongo; disquisitions from Precious on the moral character of “homos” and from her pimply- and hairy-faced mother on how “cold pigs’ feet is nasty as shit”; the subtlety-free litany of urban blights piled one on top of the other. But I was surprised at how infrequently I laughed: not only was there enough unvarnished brutality to effectively shut me up, but also there were lots of unfunny things still joked about either explicitly or implicitly (yes, even the incest). Director Lee Daniels constantly shifts the tone of his movie, often by interjecting fantasy sequences: many of which are awful, but credible enough for their character, while others are the filmmaker’s own whims, like one based on a De Sica film. In any case, the film so nimbly leaps from a familiarly stylized sense of gritty realism to full-on melodramatic camp that it never sinks into the bathos one is anticipating. Nor does it beat that old “The More You Know” drum of sanctimonious uplift too hard—after all, the title-character’s situation has only the slenderest of silver linings.
Ultimately, in spite of what I was anticipating, I couldn’t help but admire Daniels’ gall. After all, Hollywood message picture clichés notwithstanding, it’s not every day you see a movie about a poor 300-lb. black girl. But more importantly, this film could really give a shit about my reaction, whether it’s admiration or smug, derisive laughter. Daniels knows who his audience is, and it’s not me. But he has an enormous faith in that audience’s ability to roll with his outlandish, bombastic, brutalizing punches, and the canniness to pull most of them off.
I should also note that Mo’Nique, Mariah, Lenny Kravitz, and especially newcomer Gabby Sidibe are all really, really good in the movie.
Part of the the 47th New York Film Festival
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Lionsgate 35mm Print
05 Oct 2009 7:57 PM | Comments (5)
NYFF – At 25, Filipino director Raya Martin is already prolific, having made about a half dozen shorts and features, his most recent a product of his residency with Cinéfondacion at Cannes. The second in a planned trilogy on imperialism in the Philippines, Independencia concerns the country’s occupation by the United States at the turn of the 20th century, more or less immediately after Spain granted its independence. (The previous film in the series, A Short Film about the Indio Nacional (or the Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos), which is in fact a feature, deals with the Spanish occupation, while a presumed third would deal with Japan’s rule.)
But historical realism, thank God, is not on Martin’s agenda. Instead, he offers a highly stylized interpretation that runs parallel to film history. Where A Short Film was apparently made in the idiom of silent cinema, Independencia has the look and feel of a studio picture, with post-synched sound, an awkwardly square aspect ratio, broad performances and characterizations, and – most fun of all – super-fake sets. Tracking a mother and her son as they flee the American military occupiers for a life in the jungle, Martin dresses his soundstage with a rich leafy foreground in front of simple, beautifully painted backdrops that are as flat as a pancake. In velvety black-and-white, lensed by French cinematographer and frequent Ozon collaborator Jeanne Lapoirie, the forest has the fake, yet rich feel of a mythological place, as mother and son enact their own form of independence, growing potatoes, learning to hunt, and so on. It recalls nothing so much as Josef Von Sternberg’s achingly beautiful, wonderfully phony-looking jungle saga, Anatahan, which also concerns a parallel history played out in isolation. If you’ve been fortunate enough to see the Von Sternberg, you’ll no this is no small praise, indeed.
Rendered flatly, almost simplistically, Indpendencia dwells mainly on quotidian activities even as the passage of time sees major changes in the characters’ lives: the son grows up, finds a woman in the woods (she is a victim of rape at American hands, of course), and eventually establishes a new family, complete with light-skinned son. But this flatness is clearly part of Martin’s point about the role of cinema in the telling of history (as is a rather blunt faux-newsreel about nasty, moustache-twirling Americans midway through the film). And the feigned ingenuousness of the film and its characters – each of whom is good-natured, two-dimensional, and uncomplicated by any overt politics of his own – reminded me of a nonetheless very different film from the same country, Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare. Like that film, Independencia toys with ethnic stereotypes and questions of representation, while gesturing furtively beyond, to alternate ways of watching and telling stories. My only slight disappointment with the film (other than missing the first ten minutes of it, the MTA’s fault and not mine or Martin’s, but in any case the reason for the lack of a full review) is that the film’s final sequence, with its hand-tinted frames and suggestion of true independence and escape, isn’t quite ambitious enough—it’s a lovely gesture that Martin could have pushed much farther. But at the rate he’s working now, he’ll no doubt have plenty of opportunities to do so in future.
Part of the the 47th New York Film Festival
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: 35mm print
05 Oct 2009 7:53 PM | Submit Comment
The second of Don Hertzfeldt’s trilogy of short films concerning Bill, an unimpressionable fellow in the middle of reconciling his potential for happiness and, in turn, his existence, I am so proud of you is thematically consistent with Everything Will Be OK. As a pair, the two films aren’t continuations of a principle narrative insofar as they are of Bill’s emotional spectrum. What impresses me most with these films is how they’re at once brazenly surreal and emotionally accessible.
Related: Don Hertzfeldt’s Bitter Films / Don Hertzfeldt Interview
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: bitter films DVD
05 Oct 2009 5:20 PM | Submit Comment
Upon his completion of The Meaning of Life – the most taxing and ambitious production of his career at the time – Don Hertzfeldt set forth on a trilogy of short films, the first two of which are complete as of this writing. The first, Everything Will Be OK, surpasses the technical innovations of The Meaning of Life: it is also made in painstaking antiquated fashion (each frame of the film is drawn and photographed individually), but it incorporates a “halo” technique that posits multiple images in the composition simultaneously. The main character, Bill, will be seen in one corner, and another will contain an image of the sun behind the branches of a tree, or the surf at a beach he visited as a child. These images form a composite of Bill’s mind state at different points in the narrative—it’s a technique I don’t recall in anything else I’ve seen, and it unambiguously illustrates the surfeit of competing emotions within him: the hope, the nostalgia, the depression. Hertzfeldt’s film is short – only 17 minutes – but it very ably brought me to tears.
Related: Don Hertzfeldt’s Bitter Films / Don Hertzfeldt Interview
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: bitter films DVD
05 Oct 2009 5:19 PM | Submit Comment
