Maybe it’s my love of westerns that made me fall so hard
for John Singleton’s Four Brothers,
his 2005 Detroit-set revenge film and his best work since Boyz
N the Hood. I didn’t realize it then, or even the second time I watched
it, that it’s essentially a modern urban western. The lawlessness of the open
land and small towns has been replaced by the gutted and run down Motor City.
Instead of some evil landowner there’s a crime boss (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor
early in his Hollywood career and long before his star turn in 12
Years a Slave). Replacing the heroic gunslinger is a criminal and his
three brothers, in town for their mother Evelyn’s (Fionnula Flanagan) funeral
and to exact revenge for her murder in what appears to be a convenience store
robbery. Many of the western tropes are there. There are gunfights. There are
shots establishing the landscape, in this cast derelict buildings and
snow-swept (as opposed to wind) open spaces of frozen lakes.
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.
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Fat City Movie Review
From the annals of long since forgotten films comes Fat City from 1972. Every calendar year
is overloaded with movie releases that, even if modestly successful at the
time, are destined to recede into memory as the years pass. The status of
classic or cult classic is reserved fro only a handful of films each year. You
need only go back eighteen years to find a Best Picture nominee called The Full Monty, for example. It was a
small British film that found great success in the United States. But how many
people think of it now? How highly regarded is it by those who do recall it?
Now consider that film’s status with another twenty-five years of age. So The Full Monty is no Fat City, of course, if for no other
reason than the latter was directed by John Huston, a Hollywood legend. But
even his fame never elevated the film above the level of New Wave Hollywood
footnote.
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Cult Classic Movie Review: Horror of Dracula
In honor of the late Christopher Lee, whose June 7 death
was reported yesterday, I took a first look at the first of his series of
iconic career-defining roles as Dracula. Lee is best known to modern audiences
as the wizard Saruman in The
Lord of the Rings and The
Hobbit trilogies or as the Sith Lord Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones. But in the 50s and
60s, he starred in many of Hammer Films’ British horror films.
His first turn as the vampire was in Dracula, which was re-titled Horror
of Dracula in the United States to avoid confusion with the Tod
Browning-directed version from 1931 starring Bela Lugosi. The Hammer Films
series was the second big iteration of attempts to bring Bram Stoker’s novel to
the screen. Universal had made the Lugosi film and a few follow-ups, but Lee
became a new generation’s face of Count Dracula for several years. Since the
late 70s pop culture has been inundated with vampire stories ranging from the
grotesqueries of John Carpenter and Stephen King to the comedy of Once Bitten starring Jim Carrey and then
finally landing at teenage soap opera thanks to Stephanie Meyer by way of Anne
Rice.
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Selma Movie Review
Upon a second viewing of last year’s Selma, Ava DuVernay’s film about Martin Luther King and his leading
the protests in Selma, Alabama, that would ultimately lead to the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, I have warmed up to it more than when I first saw it. There was
some outspoken backlash bout the Academy’s failure to nominate DuVernay for an
Oscar. The same for David Oyelowo, who portrays King and carries the movie
through most of its emotional highs and lows. The paltry number of nominations
(a Best Picture nod and one for Best Song for which it won) was attributed by
some to Hollywood’s refusal to accept black stories or to afford them the same
status as stories about white people. These were rich arguments coming the year
after 12 Years a Slave won the Best
Picture Oscar. That film was about a challenging as they come. No, I think Selma was little recognized in the
awards season because it simply wasn’t as good as other movies last year.
Unless people believe in affirmative action for movie awards, I see no reason Selma and its director should have
bumped other worthy nominees from their recognition.
Monday, June 1, 2015
Avengers: Age of Ultron Movie Review
Does it really matter what anyone thinks of a movie like Avengers: Age of Ultron? These kinds of
movies don’t live and die by either critical or popular opinion. They are
guaranteed to rake in huge revenue not only at the box office, but through merchandising
tie-ins. The hype and excitement, the feeling of its being a cultural event THE
movie you must see this summer (or early spring as it opened in early May)
ensure that hordes of people will go to see it. And those multitudes have been
programmed from decades of action-packed, effects-laden event movies to believe
that all they have to do is stimulate the physical senses. As long as lots of
stuff blows up, implodes, collapses, cracks, breaks, splinters, and crunches
accompanied, of course, by appropriately deafening sound effects, then the
movie has accomplished its primary goal.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
How'd I Do? 93rd Academy Awards Nominations Edition
I got 36 out of 43 in the top eight categories. That's 83.7%. Getting 19/20 in the acting categories made up for the fact that I went on...
-
This film will open commercially in the United States on 22 April 2011. Immediately after being born, an infant child is tattooed ...
-
As I rewatched Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down for the first time I more than a decade, two other war Berchtesgaden more than a year late...
-
There are those moments when going to see a new movie in the cinema can allow you to be a witness to a sea change in filmmaking. When The...