No one is currently making movies about small town middle
Americans quite like Alexander Payne. He’s like the Frank Capra of Nebraska,
but with a drier sense of humor. It takes a special kind of disposition to tell
stories about people in flyover states without playing down to the erudite and
occasionally superior attitudes of the self-described educated people of New
York and Los Angeles. Nebraska tells
the story of simple people in a rather simple situation. There’s none of that
common-man-in-extraordinary-circumstances here, although Woody Grant is treated
like a hero or a celebrity for reportedly being named the lucky winner of a
million dollars.
A blog mostly dedicated to cinema (including both new and old film reviews; commentary; and as the URL suggests - movie lists, although it has been lacking in this area to be honest), but on occasion touching on other areas of personal interest to me.
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Short Cut Movie Review: Blackfish
A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.
In response to the popularity and Oscar win for the
documentary film The Cove, comes
another version of a marine mammals in distress call to action documentary in Blackfish. The subject here is killer
whales in captivity and specifically those used at sea amusement parks like the
famous Seaworld in Orlando, Florida.
Saving Mr. Banks Movie Review
The Walt Disney Company truly exists now to perpetuate
its own myths. They include, but are not limited to, the idea that Walt Disney
was the greatest human being who ever lived and was devoted exclusively to
making people smile, and that a good wholesome family entertainment can solve
most of life’s problems, often with a saccharine song and dance number. Saving Mr. Banks proposes some mythology
of its own about the origins of P.L. Travers’ series of Mary Poppins books and the way Uncle Walt convinced her to sign
over the rights.
Friday, December 20, 2013
Stories We Tell Movie Review
Actress and filmmaker Sarah Polley turns the camera on
her family’s history and, by extension, herself in her documentary Stories We Tell. She starts by asking,
in a series of on camera interviews with various family members and friends of
her mother’s, to tell their version of the story to her as if she didn’t
already know it. They all have an initial hesitation and some of her brothers and
sisters even suggest that they don’t really see their family’s story as
particularly unique or worth presenting to the world.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Movie Review
The Hunger Games:
Catching Fire does just about everything a studio wants from its sequels.
It basically repeats the successful formula of The Hunger Games, but adds a new bevy of recognizable Hollywood
faces. The one thing it mercifully resists is ramping up the action. The Hunger Games was an exercise in Gary
Ross’s control and his successor Francis Lawrence follows in his footsteps,
keeping the majority of the action within the centerpiece installment of the “games”
themselves even while the stakes have been greatly increased.
Labels:
2013,
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Amanda Plummer,
based-on-novel,
Donald Sutherland,
Elizabeth Banks,
Francis Lawrence,
Jeffrey Wright,
Jena Malone,
Jennifer Lawrence,
Josh Hutcherson,
Lenny Kravitz,
Liam Hemsworth,
Philip Seymour Hoffman,
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Woody Harrelson
Short Cut Movie Review: Dirty Wars
A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.
Anyone who is not, at the very least, deeply troubled by
the American government’s sanctioning of targeted killings of people classified
as enemy combatants, especially when some on the kill list are American
citizens, does not have a very deep appreciation of or respect for the
Constitution. Night time assassination squads of the recent past or drone
attacks of the present don’t cause me to lose a great deal of sleep. I see them
as part of a continuum of a new way of waging war. This is even while I do understand
and recognize why some people have very serious objections. But when those
targeted are citizens of this country and when there is no public evidence that
the target has committed any crime, we’re essentially looking at a death
sentence without due process, without any evidence brought to light, and
without a jury finding him guilty.
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Short Cut Movie Review: Pacific Rim
A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.
I’m really having a tough time figuring out if Guillermo
del Toro’s wild, CGI-packed, global-minded mindless summer action flick Pacific Rim is a serious movie that is
as badly written as the worst of the Transformers
films or a half-clever (and only half, really) satire and sort of send up of
big, dumb, and loud Hollywood action films. The fact that it’s not entirely
obvious is a sign of either a brilliant scheme to attract both fanboys and
cinema enthusiasts alike or a complete failure to signal exactly what it’s
trying to do.
Given del Toro’s record as a filmmaker, I’d like to think
he’s up to something interesting here, but even if he is, I didn’t really enjoy
most of the film. Written by del Toro and Travis Beacham, Pacific Rim is an amalgam of so many different films of recent
Hollywood history that it’s hard to keep track of the references. It combines
elements of Transformers, Alien, Top Gun, Star Wars, Starship Troopers, Godzilla, and countless old WWII films. The sum of all these
disparate parts suggest a comment on the direction of summer tent pole action cinema
as nothing more than further extensions of what has come before without regard
for originality, even if Pacific Rim
is ostensibly an “original” screenplay, it remains a largely derivative work.
The time is the near future and earth is under regular
attack by alien creatures called Kaiju entering from another dimension at the
bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The creatures take the form of enormous
dinosaur-looking creatures that have caused the world to band together and pool
resources to construct giant robots to battle them. The robots, known as
Jaegers, are so complex they require dual pilots who pass through “neural drift”
(really like a longer version of the Vulcan mind-meld) and work in
synchronicity. One of these crack pilots if Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam). Idris
Elba plays his superior officer and leader of the Jaeger program. There are a
couple of mad scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) with crazy theories and
even crazier behavior. Rinko Kikuchi plays a budding Jaeger pilot with a
traumatic history.
The dialogue is so over-the-top bad and the behaviors of
every character so clichéd and hackneyed that I ultimately have to believe it
was done intentionally. Still, apart from some pretty well-choreographed fights
involving gigantic CGI creatures, there was little I found thoroughly
enjoyable. Except the scenes with Ron Perlman (a del Toro regular) as a Hong
Kong black market dealer in Kaiju body parts. He’s fantastic and his dialogue
was actually well-written and delivered.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
25 Years Ago This Month: December 1988
Typical of December, the final month of 1988 was full of releases vying desperately for awards consideration, especially Oscars. Eight films released in this month received Academy Award nominations, including all five of the Best Picture nominees.
As always, we start with what I've seen...
Barry Levinson's Rain Man was the box office behemoth of the year and winner of the Best Picture Oscar the following year. It embodies everything a typical "best picture" is, but mostly it's a rather simplistic portrait of autism produced at a time when virtually no one knew anything about the disorder. A quarter century later, many people can probably tell you something about it, most mistakenly that it's caused by childhood vaccinations. Dustin Hoffman's autistic savant is the very rare exception among people on the spectrum, but in 1988 it led most people to believe that being autistic meant being able to count cards and take the house in a Las Vegas casino.
As always, we start with what I've seen...
Barry Levinson's Rain Man was the box office behemoth of the year and winner of the Best Picture Oscar the following year. It embodies everything a typical "best picture" is, but mostly it's a rather simplistic portrait of autism produced at a time when virtually no one knew anything about the disorder. A quarter century later, many people can probably tell you something about it, most mistakenly that it's caused by childhood vaccinations. Dustin Hoffman's autistic savant is the very rare exception among people on the spectrum, but in 1988 it led most people to believe that being autistic meant being able to count cards and take the house in a Las Vegas casino.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Short Cut Movie Review: Frozen
A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.
Disney’s Frozen
is a loose (very loose) adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy
tale The Snow Queen. As an example of
classic Disney animation, it succeeds wonderfully. This is gorgeously rendered
computer animation. The palette is beautiful icy blues blended with crystalline
whites with lots of shine and sparkle. The story, by Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee,
and Shane Morris is at least more contemporary in theme than Disney’s princess
movies have typically been, by which I mean this isn’t strictly about a young
woman desperate to meet a man to marry. Buck and Lee directed the film.
Elsa is the young woman with the often uncontrollable
power to turn the world around her to ice. She’s spent the majority of her
youth and first years of adulthood locked away from the world. Her sister Anna
has no memory of what she can do. Both women want the best for each other and
their primary goals are, in the case of Elsa, to avoid hurting her sister, and
for Anna, to have a normal life with access to and a relationship with Elsa.
Unable to resist the temptation to include adorable
non-human characters, there is a snowman come to life named Olaf (voiced by
Josh Gad), who has the best musical number in the movie in which he sings about
his desire to experience summer and warm sunshine. There’s also an interesting
colony of little trolls with the film’s second best number. Unfortunately, the
rest of the songs are close to dreadful. They capture little of the classical
style Disney used to do best. The music by Robert Lopez sounds like
contemporary pop rock: the same spiritless, over-produced music for mass
consumption that we get from any of the TV talent contest shows. Kristen
Anderson-Lopez’s lyrics often don’t help, performing the function that too many
modern musicals utilize which is to have dialogue and narration sung rather
than spoken. Songs in musicals should express ideas and emotions rather than
actions and instructions. Incidentally, the singing by Kristen Bell as Anna and
Idina Menzel as Elsa veers into ear-splitting awfulness. When Menzel strikes
the high notes in her big song, I literally cringed and winced at the piercing
shriek. But this is what passes for good singing today – the tightly strained
and forced cries that would never pass muster outside popular opinion. It would
have been much better movie without the songs.
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Philomena Movie Review
The trailer for Philomena
is selling a very different movie than what Stephen Frears made. I admit to
wanting to avoid this movie at all costs, but for my yearly goal of watching
everything that gets an Oscar nomination (and it’s looking ever more likely now
that I’ve seen it that Judi Dench will be nominated). But I should have given
Frears more credit as a director. After all, he’s made some movies I really admire and one I love (as well as a couple of stinkers). The publicity campaign
makes Philomena out to be a maudlin
story about a woman trying to find her long lost son, who was taken from her
and adopted fifty years earlier. It looks like the focus is on a daft old lady
who says silly little things, the kind of simplistic humor that appeals to the
lowest common denominator.
Shine a Light Movie Review
It’s only natural that Martin Scorsese would have made a
Rolling Stones concert film. He was one of the first film directors to employ
rock music on the soundtrack of his films and has continually returned to the
Stones, even using “Gimme Shelter” three times, although it is sort of
ironically absent from Shine a Light.
But also Mick Jagger is a quintessential Scorsese protagonist. Watching him
preen, gyrate, strut, and bounce on stage calls to mind Tom Cruise winning at
pool in The Color of Money, the
explosiveness of De Niro in Mean Streets,
or his unpredictability in Taxi Driver,
and the ferocious energy of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.
At the risk of sounding grandiose, there’s even a comparison to be made to
Willem Defoe in The Last Temptation of
Christ in Jagger’s ability to lead the crowd in The Beacon Theater, a
historic temple of performance. Archival interview footage even reveals Jagger’s
self doubt prior to performance – feelings that Defoe’s Jesus would find
familiar.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
The Counselor Movie Review
In general I try to avoid what other critics have to say
about a film before I see it. Sometimes I have a general idea of the critical
consensus, but in the case of The
Counselor I knew nothing. I was shocked to find that the majority of
critics had ripped it apart. It would have been surprising enough only for the
fact that it was directed by Ridley Scott from an original screenplay by
novelist Cormac McCarthy (his first produced). McCarthy is, after all, one of
the greatest contemporary fiction writers in America. It also features a
phenomenal cast of highly capable actors. Mostly my disbelief registered so
high because I thought The Counselor
was just wonderful, exemplifying the very best of what McCarthy accomplishes in
his novels.
Man of Steel Movie Review
I’m not even sure there’s much point in having a critical
view of a movie like Man of Steel.
What exactly does it add to the conversation? When an indie or an arthouse film
is bad, at least it’s bad in a way that still contributes something to cinema.
When big, bloated action films are bad – and most of them are – they’re just
plain bad. And anyway, they’re not made for people who actually try to put
nuanced thought into their movie watching.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Prisoners Movie Review
Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners
spends two hours being so good it comes as a bit of a disappointment that the
resolution is so utterly conventional. For an investigative thriller it is
almost unbelievably contemplative. It’s a movie that is more content to get
into the minds of its characters than to dutifully land on action beats at the
appropriate moments, although the action does arrive, often ferociously.
From My Collection: Eastern Promises Movie Review
I sort of remembered Eastern
Promises, David Cronenberg’s film about a woman who gets mixed up in the
dealings of the Russian mafia in London, as a much more significant movie the
first time around. The stakes felt much higher when I saw it on its initial run
in cinemas. Maybe this is a movie that really loses something once you know who
is who and what their real motivations are. When you don’t know what’s coming,
the film really feels dangerous because the Russian mafia might do anything to
anyone at any time.
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
25 Years Ago This Month: November 1988
Oliver & Company, inspired by Dickens' Oliver Twist, was Disney's predecessor to their animated musicals renaissance a year later. With songs by Billy Joel, it paved the way for The Little Mermaid and The Lion King.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown brought great international success, and a first Oscar nomination, to Pedro Almodóvar.
I always had a soft spot for the Bill Murray comedy Scrooged, a contemporary update of Dickens' A Christmas Carol with Murray as a cold-hearted TV executive who learns the meaning of Christmas through lessons delivered by a ghost played by Carol Kane, Bob Goldthwaite in the Bob Cratchit role. Also with Robert Mitchum, Karen Allen, and Alfre Woodard.
Blue Is the Warmest Color Movie Review
Is a three hour running time for a romantic drama a
little indulgent? In general, I’d say it probably is, but there’s no one size
fits all answer. If the story is suited to it and it’s compelling enough to
carry you through, then why not? The French drama Blue Is the Warmest Color, winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at
Cannes, takes cinematic romantic love to rarely touched emotional depths. The
epic length didn’t feel so long to me, which must be viewed as testament to the
humane and sensitive direction by Abdellatif Kechiche and the incredible and
brave performances by the two female leads, Adéle Exarchopoulos and Léa
Seydoux.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Dallas Buyers Club Movie Review
People make a big deal out of actors packing on or
shedding the pounds for the sake of a role. Think about De Niro in Raging Bull, Christian Bale in The Machinist, or Tom Hanks in Cast Away and images immediately come to
mind of an altered body paired with a great performance. It’s easy to conflate
physical transformation and great acting or to think that the one causes the
other. I suppose it helps the actor get into the mind of the character in some
cases, but regardless, the actor still has to do the work in his head even
after the physical aspect has taken root.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
All Is Lost Movie Review
The old man and the sea. |
So the post-apocalyptic trend that started the year in
cinema has given way to stories of survival – specifically a single survivor
persevering against all odds. Gravity
and Captain Phillips are now joined
by All Is Lost, which sees Robert
Redford as the sole cast member in a film about a man fighting against the
elements and a damaged sailboat in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
When we first meet Our Man (he’s not credited with a
name) he’s penning a message in a bottle, a letter to his children apologizing
for not doing a better job. He has obviously reached a point where he believes
all is lost. Eight days earlier he’s awakened by the crashing sound of a shipping
container smashing a hole in the hull of his yacht. From here, the plot is
simple: he fixes the hole; he attempts radio communication; he’s tossed about
by a storm; loses the boat; sets adrift in a life raft hoping to be rescued in
the main shipping lane. Talking about the particulars of what happens in All Is Lost is not nearly as interesting
as how Our Man reacts to his increasingly despairing turns of events.
12 Years a Slave Movie Review
The terrible and embarrassing legacy of slavery is a dark
mark on this country. It was a human atrocity that we have only just begun to
understand. It remains, more than 150 years after its eradication, the defining
factor in race relations. White people would not be where they are in terms of
status and privilege without having held black people in bondage. And blacks
continue to bear the burden of that time. I’m not sure any movie could possibly
do perfect justice as a representation of the horrors of slavery, punishments,
beatings, rapes, and other indignities that slaves suffered, but 12 Years a Slave comes closer than
anything I’ve seen. This is possibly the least sanitized version ever put on
film.
From My Collection: Boogie Nights Movie Review
On big happy dysfunctional family. |
From the explosively charged opening tracking shot that
introduces most of the major characters to the quietly triumphant closing, Boogie Nights never lets up. It flogs
you with an emotional paddle again and again. The ups are sometimes as extreme
in their euphoria as the downs are dismal. For me, it is still the most
exciting film Paul Thomas Anderson has made. It was only his second feature,
but his dialogue is truly second to none and he squeezes in a remarkable amount
of character development. He can economize better than any other
writer-director working.
Thursday, November 14, 2013
From My Collection: Sleepers Movie Review
Back in 1996 I was truly taken in by Barry Levinson’s Sleepers, adapted from Lorenzo
Carcaterra’s allegedly autobiographical novel relating his experiences as a boy
growing up in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, becoming the victim
of terrible physical and sexual abuse at a boys’ reform school, and the revenge
he and his friends exacted upon their tormentors as adults years later. When
the book was published and then later when the film was released, there were
many who questioned the validity of the story. There is no independent record
of any of the events described. Of course juvenile records are expunged and
Carcaterra claims he changed locations, which offers reasonable explanations as
to why journalists were unable to unearth any court records similar to what
takes place in the second half of the story. Just looking at it in terms of
sheer believability, the first half involving Carcaterra (his character goes by
the nickname Shakes) and his three best friends as adolescents is selling
something so much easier to swallow than the revenge-filled latter half.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
From My Collection: The Hudsucker Proxy Movie Review
Full disclosure: I’m an almost shameless lover of the
Coen brothers. There’s hardly a film they’ve made that I don’t like and with
one exception, I own every one of their films on DVD. That doesn’t mean I’m
blind to the things that don’t work and the films that fail in some very
important aspects. With that said, The
Hudsucker Proxy was always a film I liked for its quirky Coen-ness, but
clearly I wasn’t crazy about it because it took me fourteen years after I got
my first DVD player (and nineteen years after the film was released) to
purchase a copy.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Short Cut Movie Review: Behind the Candelabra
A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.
I didn't know much of anything about Liberace except that he was a flamboyant pianist with grand spectacle performances and outlandish costumes. I can't say after seeing Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra that I know much more about the man and his life overall because it's a biopic that steers clear of the wide scope vision to focus on a several years period of his late life and the effect he had on one individual in particular.
In fact, it's more the story of Scott Thorson, Liberace's secret lover for about six years in the late 70s and early 80s. After all, Richard LaGravenese adapted Thorson's book for the screenplay so while it spends its early moments sort of enamored with Liberace's fashion sense, warm and generous personality, and lavish lifestyle, it eventually reveals him to be narcissistic, grandiose, fickle, and self-serving. But he still doesn't come off as a bad guy! Whether or not it's an accurate portrayal of the man or not is beside the point. It's a study of how a larger-than-life force of fame can have such a strong effect on others, especially a young and vulnerable man like Scott, although he is certainly not without his faults as he gradually falls into jealousy and despair (spurred on by Liberace's waning affections and fleeting attention) and drug abuse.
Soderbergh took a long time to bring this story to the screen and in the end it took HBO, not a Hollywood studio, to take a chance on a romantic film involving two men that was unflinching in its depiction of physical affection. It was well worth the wait. It is a stylish film with two fantastically entertaining performances from Matt Damon as Scott and Michael Douglas as Liberace. These are two actors who took big risks with this production and it pays off because the result is an honest portrayal of love and jealousy.
Before Midnight Movie Review
Roger Ebert talked about coming back to Fellini's 8 1/2 about every decade and having a very different reaction to and feelings about Guido each time. Obviously the character hadn't changed, but Roger had. So as he matured, so did his perception of the film. It's in a somewhat similar vein that I have found myself approaching what Richard Linklater (and also Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who are equal collaborators in the story and screenplay process) has done with the Before Sunrise triolgy. That first film was a big deal for my high school friends when it came out, though I skipped it at the time. I caught up with it finally before its sequel Before Sunset was released. I admired Before Sunrise, but I was enamored with Before Sunset. Now that I've seen the most recent installment, Before Midnight, which is nine years after the last film and eighteen after Jesse and Celine first met on a Vienna train, I can say I love it even more. But then I wonder if my expanding admiration for this series has more to do with the way I've changed along with Jesse and Celine over the years.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Short Cut Movie Review: Oblivion
A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.
Oblivion is a
movie that looks almost perfect in terms of production design and visual
effect. It deftly recalls and references several science fiction classics, but
then fails to live up to the standards set by those that came before.
Tom Cruise is Jack Harper, a technician working to repair
battle drones on earth that are in place to defend some big energy-producing
machines from attack by Scavs, an alien race that lost a war with humans
several decades ago. He explains everything in a narration that precedes the
title. If you miss anything, don’t fret because it is all repeated almost
verbatim later in the film as dialogue between Jack and Beech (Morgan Freeman),
the leader of a band of humans found to still be living on earth.
Short Cut Movie Review: Only God Forgives
A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.
After the stylish and rather brilliant Drive, I had high hopes and anticipation
for Nicholas Winding Refn’s follow up Only
God Forgives. The same great look is there with the seedy underworld of
Bangkok replacing Los Angeles. The film is bathed in neon lights and deep reds,
but it lacks any heart.
Drive worked
because we cared about the characters. This time Refn doesn’t give us a hero.
Sure, Julian (Ryan Gosling), a drug smuggler in Thailand, has some redemption
when he prevents the murder of an innocent child, but apart from that one act I
couldn’t find anything to get behind.
Friday, October 25, 2013
Gravity Movie Review
Gravity is a
beautiful and poetic movie. It is a technical marvel and one of the tensest 90
minutes of movie viewing I can recall. And it is about one of the little talked
about, but ever present, dangers of space travel and orbiting earth.
There are so many satellites floating around up there and
every now and then something comes apart, leaving space junk out there. This
space junk sometimes travels at mind-boggling speeds. If it comes into contact
with a shuttle or another satellite or an astronaut on a spacewalk, it could
have devastating consequences. The particular event in Gravity, directed and co-written by Alfonso Cuarón, along with his
son Jonás, is the destruction by missile of a Russian satellite. All those
little pieces of debris are orbiting at a speed of 20,000 kilometers per hour.
They rip through the space shuttle where mission commander Matt Kowalski
(George Clooney) and Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) are completing work on the
Hubble. The two are left stranded in space, their only remaining hope being the
escape pods on the International Space Station. And at the speed the debris is
traveling, they have about 90 minutes before they’re in for another shit storm.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
The Fifth Estate Movie Review
We’ve set up our society in the midst of the digital
information age in such a way that we want everything and we want it now and if
you have the opportunity to provide something and make an impact, you’d better
do it this instant before someone beats you to it. There’s no prize for the guy
who sits on an idea and gets beaten to the punch by his competitor. There’s no
recognition for having had the idea first. Action counts. News works this way.
Because of the Internet and 24 hour cable news there is no longer as much
emphasis placed on getting a breaking story right as there is on just getting
it out. The result is new reporting that is often shoddy, under-sourced, and
sometimes entirely inaccurate.
Don Jon Movie Review
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s acting career has been loaded with
good choices. He has starred in unique twists on familiar genres with director
Rian Johnson, appeared in mammoth event films for Christopher Nolan, and even
his populist choices like the romantic comedy (500) Days of Summer or the thriller Premium Rush have been pleasant exceptions to the rule. That’s why
I had high hopes (perhaps a bit too lofty) for his writing and directing debut Don Jon. It looked like another great
departure from the usual romantic film bullshit and that it might really have
something to say, being about a man who can’t make an intimate connection with
a woman because he’s far too enamored with Internet pornography.
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Captain Phillips Movie Review
The difference between bad acting and good acting is
fairly obvious to most people. It’s the difference between stiff mimicry and
genuine imitation, or even expression, of emotion. But to distinguish between
good and great acting is something else. There’s a much more subtle
distinction. It comes down not only to how well the actor reads a line of
dialogue or how convincingly he portrays an emotional moment, but to the
choices he makes and the wholesale embodiment of the emotional dips and rises
that the scene demands. I can understand how an actor depicts certain emotions.
I can imagine working myself up to a frenzy for a manic scene or well up with
anger to express rage. I can even imagine pushing myself to a dark place to
show sadness or melancholy. But as Captain Richard Phillips, the cargo ship
captain who was held hostage for several days by Somali pirates in 2009, Tom
Hanks gives us one final scene that is so off-the-charts good, it mesmerizes
and reveals exactly how brilliant his choices were for the first two hours.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
From My Collection: Leaving Las Vegas Movie Review
To understand a little about the kind of person I was in
high school, I probably need only tell you that a movie I and my friends wanted
to see was Leaving Las Vegas, Mike
Figgis’s film about an alcoholic who decides to drink himself to death and
strikes up an odd relationship with a prostitute. And believe me when I tell
you it had nothing to do with seeing Elisabeth Shue’s (star of childhood
favorite Adventures in Babysitting)
breasts. A friend and I went to see it because it had challenging subject
matter, because it was a reprieve from the usual populist fare. If I was like
that at 17, then imagine how my taste runs today.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Enough Said Movie Review
I didn’t see any eulogies for James Gandolfini earlier
this year that didn’t talk about how surprisingly good an actor he was and
capable of real heart in spite of his tough-guy persona and sometime
typecasting. Prior to “The Sopranos” he mostly portrayed heavies and after that
he became indelibly linked to the role of Tony. But for a taste of just how
incredible he could be even if you strip away the rough veneer and harsh
language, take a look at the romantic comedy Enough Said, where he and co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus are divorcees
who start dating one another.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Elysium Movie Review
If Neill Blomkamp isn’t careful, he’s going to be forever
remembered as a writer-director of allegorical science fiction. Not that that’s
necessarily a bad thing, but remember M. Night Shyamalan survived for a handful
of films being known for doing something very specific and then became so
hamstrung by a sense of his own greatness that his films became, one after
another, more absurd and awful than the last. If District 9 was Blomkamp’s take on apartheid South Africa and
immigration, Elysium is not just about
a guy trying to illegally enter a forbidden and exclusive paradise to cure
himself of fatal radiation exposure. Working on a larger scale and with a
bigger budget, Blomkamp hasn’t lost sight of what makes a good movie work:
namely good characters and story. He’s also made another technically sound
piece of entertainment that puts most of the other big releases to shame. A
coherently edited and structured movie? Who greenlit this thing? I’m almost
shocked this sort of thing is allowed to pass muster.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
25 Years Ago This Month: October 1988
The biggest movie of October 1988 was The Accused with Jodie Foster as a woman who is gang raped in a bar and Kelly McGillis as prosecuting attorney. This was the first big movie to deal directly with the issue of rape and really helped create a conversation about the role of the victim in rape. Foster won her first Oscar for the film.
Michael Myers returned to Haddonfield in Halloween 4, which I've already covered before.
Mary Gross, who got her start through 4 seasons of "Saturday Night Live", starred alongside Rebecca De Mornay in Feds, a not-so-funny comedy about two women struggling through the rigors of FBI training. Gross is the brainy one and De Mornay is physically capable, and they help each other through a male-dominated program.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Classic Movie Review: Planet of the Apes
As I’m not in the habit of keeping the lid on a secret
movie ending that’s 45 years old, I suggest you stop reading now if you’ve
never seen and don’t know the ending of Planet
of the Apes. If you also don’t know what Rosebud is or that Holly Martens
faked his own death, then you need to go back to school. Also, Janet Leigh is
killed in the first 40 minutes of Psycho.
I mention these things because they are such well-known and deeply engrained
plot points of famous movies that it’s virtually impossible to have a
discussion about them while maintaining the secret.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Classic Movie Review From My Collection: Rear Window
I never fully realized before, but only just accepted it
on face value, that Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear
Window is one hell of a movie. The two or three times I’d seen it
previously I guess I sort of accepted its status as a classic great movie. This
time I absorbed it fully and saw in it how its technical prowess supports a
great story and ironic commentary on both marriage and on watching other
people’s lives unfold on a screen from a darkened movie house.
Voyeurism as a theme runs throughout much of Hitchcock’s
work, of course, but Rear Window is
the one time he’s thumbing his nose at the audience for being so interested in
the lives of others. The image that plays behind the opening titles is of the
shades going upon on L.B. Jeffries’ windows onto the back courtyard, like the
curtain rising on his personal theatrical stage or movie screen. Jeffries
(James Stewart) spends the next 100 minutes or so observing his neighbors or
thinking about their actions. But what begins as casual observing becomes
obsessive watching and a paranoia about possible dirty deeds committed by Lars
Thorwald (Raymond Burr) across the way. In the end Jeffries ceases to be a
passive audience member and becomes what no member of a movie audience can be:
an actor in the real life (to him) drama playing out.
Monday, September 9, 2013
Lee Daniels' The Butler Movie Review
It’s not so much that Lee
Daniels’ The Butler is a bad movie, but that it’s completely toothless.
Here’s a movie made by a black filmmaker whose audacious breakout was Precious, a film that doesn’t dare shy
away from the hard circumstances of being black in America, specifically of
being black and desperately poor in America. The brunt of the problem with the
story is in Danny Strong’s screenplay, which drew on a Washington Post article
about a black man who worked in the White House as a butler through eight
Presidential administrations for inspiration. Still, Daniels chose the material
to direct. And I’m not insisting that a black filmmaker must be consigned to
telling black stories or that when he does, they always have to be gritty, but
it seems to me there is some moral imperative to battle and to make audiences
feel uncomfortable. Unfortunately, The
Butler is so intent on being a moneymaker for the studio that it
compromises pretty much all of its values so it can appealing to a mass
audience.
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Friday, September 6, 2013
Closed Circuit Movie Review
Closed Circuit
is about as grim and pessimistic a view of governments and spy agencies as you’ll
get at the movies, but don’t be fooled by the adverts that tout its having the
same producers as Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy. That was a smart, taut, realistic, and pleasurable spy thriller. This
is a derivative of every other spy thriller with the exception of an ending
that doesn’t have us cheering star Eric Bana as the hero and champion of truth
and righteousness.
Monday, September 2, 2013
Short Cut Movie Review: Admission
A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.
Paul Weitz was very wise not to allow himself to get
pigeonholed into making more movies like his debut feature, American Pie, which he co-directed with
his brother. Audiences were lucky that American
Pie wound up in the hands of directors who were sensitive to character
issues. That film was notable for being outrageously hilarious while not losing
sight of the fact that the audience still needs to connect with the characters
on the screen. Weitz has continued to bring that human touch to all of the
films he directs, especially as he has moved away from outright comedy to stretch
himself with dramatic films.
Admission is
his latest, released earlier this year and now available on home video. Like About a Boy (probably the best film he’s
made), it is a drama, but with plenty of comedy born of the absurdities of
everyday life. It is funny because its stars, Paul Rudd and Tina Fey, can’t be
anything but hilarious in their delivery. Fey is a Princeton admissions officer
and Rudd is the founder and director of an alternative school. He’s identified
one of his graduating seniors as an exceptionally bright student who has
nevertheless failed to excel academically. He thinks the kid deserves a chance
to attend Princeton. Oh, and he believes Fey is the boy’s biological mother who
gave him up for adoption back in college.
Karen Croner’s screenplay, based on the novel by Jean
Hanff Korelitz, is part family comedy and part romantic comedy. But this isn’t
your average rom-com with pratfalls and cheap plot points recycled over and
over for the last 75 years. It mostly feels natural and honest. The film is
greatly aided by some fantastic supporting cast members including Lily Tomlin
as Fey’s hippie feminist mother; Michael Sheen as her feckless boyfriend; and Wallace
Shawn as the Dean of Admissions.
25 Years Ago This Month: September 1988
Of course you can see in the September releases that the big summer blockbusters have finished and the studios are trotting out the stuff they think will contend for awards (at least the first of them anyway). So that's how you end up with...
Michael Apted's adaptation of Dian Fossey's story, Gorillas in the Mist, starring Sigourney Weaver as the doomed zoologist murdered in her cabin in the mountains of Rwanda.
Richard Dreyfuss starred alongside Raul Julia and Sonia Braga in Moon Over Parador, a comedy about an actor hired to play the part of a dictator of fictional Latin American country Parador after the death of the actual dictator. Obviously made to resemble Augusto Pinochet, he ended up looking like a cross between the Chilean dictator and Gaddafi.
Michael Apted's adaptation of Dian Fossey's story, Gorillas in the Mist, starring Sigourney Weaver as the doomed zoologist murdered in her cabin in the mountains of Rwanda.
Richard Dreyfuss starred alongside Raul Julia and Sonia Braga in Moon Over Parador, a comedy about an actor hired to play the part of a dictator of fictional Latin American country Parador after the death of the actual dictator. Obviously made to resemble Augusto Pinochet, he ended up looking like a cross between the Chilean dictator and Gaddafi.
25 Years Ago This Month: Eight Men Out Movie Review
John Sayles’ Eight
Men Out, the story of the 1919 Chicago “Black Sox” scandal, is, on the one
hand, an odd outlier compared to the rest of his work, and on the other,
somewhat right in line with his plight of the working man sensibility. I’ve
always been a great admirer of Sayles’ films. I especially enjoy the fact that
he can make films illustrating the challenges of capitalism for laborers
without being preachy or overtly socialist. He’s the more toned down American
version of Ken Loach. In that respect, Eight
Men Out fits right in because his version of the story, which is based on
the book by Eliot Asinof, focuses more on the accused players as put-upon
contracted laborers in thrall to a greedy owner who exploits their talents for
financial gain. But amid his full body of work as writer and director it stands
out as one of only two films he adapted from source material. So while he’s
chosen to focus on the aspects that do appeal to him as a storyteller, the crux
of the film is that it’s a historical sports movie, standing very much apart
from his other work.
Saturday, August 31, 2013
To the Wonder Movie Review
“Weak people never bring anything to an end themselves.
They wait for others to do it.”
There’s a reason I have such trouble remembering details
from any of Terrence Malick’s films. He composes them with fleeting touches.
There are no traditional movie scenes involving events or actions coupled with
dialogue. These are the things that are easy to recall: “Remember that scene
when so and so says…?” With Malick the best you get are snapshots that almost
float freeform from one to another. They are like memories of a life
remembered, says star Ben Affleck in one of the DVD extras. Even the one Malick
film I’ve seen more than once, The Thin
Red Line, stands in my memory more as a series of images in no particular
order, but because there’s no real A to Z plot there’s no glue to hold it
together in my mind.
Friday, August 30, 2013
In a World Movie Review
We’re so accustomed to hearing those deep baritone voices
intoning the details of the latest blockbuster that we hardly even think about
the fact that there’s an actual person behind that voice. The trailer for Jerry
Seinfeld’s Comedian called attention to
this and movie trailer voiceover conventions about a decade ago. But then you
realized you can’t ever recall hearing a female voice promotion a big Hollywood
release. Lake Bell, who wrote, directed, produced, and stars in In a World must have taken note because
she came up with an amusing take on a woman’s quest to break through that glass
ceiling an swipe voiceover work from a the familiar male voices that have
always dominated the industry.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Classic Movie Review From My Collection: Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee’s first two feature films clearly established
him as a filmmaker concerned with issues within the African American community
(She’s Gotta Have It showed him also
being particularly sensitive to feminist issues), but his third time at bat
proved to be the magnum opus – the film that would tie together race relations
on Stuyvesant Avenue in Brooklyn, a microcosm perhaps for the entire borough or
even the whole city of New York. Do the
Right Thing remains to this day one of his greatest accomplishments for the
skill in direction and writing to bring together good entertainment value,
social issues, sound filmmaking techniques, and a clearly delineated personal
vision into one concise film.
Labels:
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Saturday, August 24, 2013
Blue Jasmine Movie Review
Woody Allen is well known for writing excellent female
characters. They are realistic, they delve into the feminine psyche in a way
most male writers never even attempt let alone achieve, and they are great
roles for actresses. I’m not sure any other single director has been
responsible for directing more actresses to Oscar nominations, at least while
also failing to equal the feat for male actors. When you think of the iconic
female characters he’s written it’s like a treasure trove of great female roles:
Annie Hall; Maria Elena (Vicky Cristina Barcelona); Linda Ash (Mighty
Aphrodite). His titular character in Blue
Jasmine might very well be his best creation since Annie Hall.
Classic Movie Review: Safety Last
The story goes that one day Harold Lloyd noticed a crowd
of people gathered on the street looking up at what was then one of Los
Angeles’s tallest buildings. When he looked up, he saw a man scaling the
outside of the building with no net and no safety lines. The man was Bill
Strothers, who would take the role of Lloyd’s pal in Safety Last, a movie written to satisfy Lloyd’s desire to feature a
man climbing that building in a feature film.
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Short Cut Movie Review: Mama
A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.
In horror and monster movies it is generally understood
that what remains unseen is far more frightening than what a director can show
you. Jaws is one of the most famous examples
of this. Steven Spielberg couldn’t use the expensive rubber shark through most
of the shoot due to technical issues. The result is a terrifying film because
our imaginations fill in the gaps, conjuring horrifying images of the terror in
the water. Since then almost every monster movie has attempted to repeat the
formula to some extent.
In Mama, a
ghost story written and directed by Andrés Muschietti and co-written by Neil
Cross and Barbara Muschietti, a spirit watches over two young girls whose
father went off the deep end and was about to take their lives before the ghost
whisked him away. The girls are discovered five years later living animal-like
in a cabin deep in the forest. Put into the care of their uncle Lucas (Nikolaj
Coster-Waldau) and his wannabe rock star girlfriend (Jessica Chastain) their
maternal spirit protector follows them, jealously guarding them from any
outside influence.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Short Cut Movie Review: Upstream Color
A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.
Upstream Color
is another puzzler of a movie from writer-director Shane Carruth. In his first
feature after the time-bending confusion of Primer,
he tackles romance, animal treatment, and psychotropic drugs, although note in
any straightforward manner. Any description of what takes place will fall far
short of sufficient. Carruth makes films that need to be experienced and
puzzled over. Suffice it to say there is a woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) who
becomes akind of puppet victim at the
hands of a thief who uses a plant extract and a parasitic worm to drug people
and then exert ypnotic control over them until he gets thousands of dollars out
of their bank accounts. Kris’s life falls apart after she’s unable to explain
an extended absence from work or the loss of all equity in her house. Later she
meets Jeff (Carruth), a man who seems to
have many share experience with her and they fall in love, or at least have
some kind of affinity and connection to one another.
Parallel to the human action there is a pig farmer
(Andrew Sensenig) who also performs sound experiments from esoteric recordings
made using different found objects. The pigs that he sometimes lulls with the
sound records seem to have some metaphysical connection to the humans who have
been victimized by the thief.
I don’t want to pore too deeply into the mysteries of the
movie or what all the symbolism may or may not mean. I have some theories, but
to me it’s much more interesting to read the film as one of the best
intersections of experimental and narrative filmmaking. Carruth’s style looks
an awful lot like Terrence Malick’s and TheTree of Life especially appears to have been a major influence on the
editing and movement of Upstream Color.
The moment I decided I wasn’t going to try to understand
in a conventional sense what the film was about, the easier it became to be
enveloped by its trance-like or dream-inducing qualities. The scenes transport
you between moments that appear to be disconnected from one another, yet the
film never feels disjointed. It’s elegant and beautiful and a fascinating
experiment in using images to craft a story. The nearly complete lack of
dialogue through the first half of the film is as close to pure cinema as
anyone has come since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey.
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Primer Movie Review
“The permutations were endless.”
I saw it in cinemas nine years ago, but all I remembered
was that I liked it and thought it was a unique and confident first feature
from a man named Shane Carruth. When his second feature played Sundance and
then received a small theatrical release earlier this year, I was reminded that
I should take another look at Primer.
This second viewing I’m sure I paid closer attention, especially knowing that
the details, plot intricacies, and timelines are utterly confounding, but even
having some idea of what was to come doesn’t really help you get a firm grasp
on what’s happening.
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