From My Collection: Rushmore Movie Review

Wes Anderson’s filmmaking style has evolved over the years to such extremes of whimsical fantasy that to revisit his second feature, 1998’s Rushmore, feels tame and almost like a regular movie experience. He was just beginning to hone his skills at symmetrical and perfectly fastidiously set-dressed diorama-like compositions. Compare it to the brand new Grand Budapest Hotel or even The Royal Tenenbaums, his follow-up to Rushmore, where you’ll see clearly compartmentalized sets that resemble a doll’s house, and the earlier film reveals an artist who was learning what kind of worlds he wanted to create on film.

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.

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.

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.

The Last Emperor Movie Review: 25 Years Ago

The Last Emperor was released in New York and Los Angeles 25 years ago last month, but received its wide release in December 1987. So I revisit the film in between the two months. Look for a new 25 Years Ago review later this month when I take a look at Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun.

What a strange film is Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. Twenty-five years later it still has a powerful resonance. It remains a gorgeous visual piece with remarkable costumes, art direction, and set decoration. It helps that the production was given unprecedented access by the Chinese government to film in the Forbidden City. I’m not sure any set could stand in as effectively for the real thing, which is imposing with its mammoth surrounding walls and impenetrable gates that keep the young emperor locked away for all of his youth. But here is a historical epic about a man who is not a hero. He made no great impact on a way of life, or any government, or even a great number of individuals for that matter. Although the story is about the man who happened to be the last imperial ruler of the old feudal China, it is really a historical view of a China in transition to a Republic and then a Communist state, with a passive hero at its center.

Modern Classic Movie Review: The Silence of the Lambs

I probably saw this movie sometime when I was in high school. I was fairly familiar with it and I found it pretty damn frightening. It's not quite a horror movie in the same vein as a slasher film, but I thought it worth including because it's a variation on horror and it was part of my childhood and youth.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

The killer's gaze is turned back on the audience, turning the power structure of the horror film around.

The Silence of the Lambs turns the serial killer and slasher film genre on its head by crafting the most compelling character not as the killer whom the FBI is hunting, but as the already convicted Hannibal Lecter, who sits in a basement cell and may have crucial information to help them catch their man. More remarkable than that is that everyone remembers Lecter as this imposing and frightening villain, a role that helped Anthony Hopkins win the Best Actor Oscar, but he is on screen for all of 16 minutes. That speaks to the power of seduction that he possesses.

Kicking and Screaming Movie Review

Watching all those Whit Stillman movies a couple of months ago got me thinking again about Kicking and Screaming, a movie about four friends recently graduated from college, which I hadn’t seen since I was their age. It was Noah Baumbach’s first feature film (he shares a story credit with Oliver Berkman), made on a fairly low budget in the mid-90s when low budgets were sheik, and features the actor Chris Eigeman, whose presence is part of what connects the movie in my mind to Stillman’s work. That and similar writing styles that focus on educated characters who speak literately and engagingly on a variety of topics.

Chasing Amy Movie Review: From My Collection

At some point in my adult life I had to come to the sad conclusion, completing my disillusionment, that Kevin Smith is a much better writer than director. In fact, he doesn’t make very good movies. Clerks succeeds because it was all of a time and place: a scrappy little independent low budget film that had some very funny bits. His follow up was not well-received by anyone, but in 1997 Chasing Amy was something of a revelation. At the time I thought it was just about the perfect romantic comedy. Watching it again now for the first time in many years I still think it’s got some wonderful dialogue, keen relationship insights and still sets the bar for the genre, but I recognize how shoddy the filmmaking is.

Withnail & I Movie Review: 25 Years Ago This Month

In its first 15 minutes I half expected Withnail & I, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical tale of two unemployed actors boozing it up in the English countryside, to become a Beckett-influenced sojourn into existential trappings. While the two titular characters wallow in misery in their wretched London flat it begins to feel like two souls trapped in an endless loop. A little more happens than a bit of Waiting for Godot.

This was Richard E. Grant’s film debut playing Withnail and here he perfected his signature sneer, off-hand sarcastic remarks, and general temperament of displeasure with everything. His friend, flatmate and fellow struggling actor’s name is never spoken, although Marwood can be seen on an envelope. Played by Paul McGann he is no less a brooding personality than Withnail, although he is more replete with angst and a general queasiness about everything.

The Last Days of Disco Movie Review

For his third feature film The Last Days of Disco, Whit Stillman graduated to better financing and a bigger budget, but maintained his unique writing style and characterization depicting the “Urban haute bourgeoisie” of his first film Metropolitan. Again the characters are well-educated Ivy Leaguers and New England liberal arts college graduates who spend a lot of time talking. Stillman’s Barcelona brought these characters to another country, but this time he brought them back to New York City, where the well-to-do of that first film paraded around in tuxedos and ball gowns discussing philosophy, literature and social mores. The setting has changed slightly with the characters frequenting the dying disco scene of the early 80s, but the conversations are similar.

Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux Movie Review

The only film for which Charlie Chaplin grew a real mustache.

The vast majority of silent film stars faded into obscurity rather quickly with the advent of synchronized sound. Directors tended to fare better as their craft was built around telling stories. We forget (or in most cases don’t know) that John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock started in silent films. Actors tended to have the most trouble transitioning to sound films. Charlie Chaplin was most famous for his iconic tramp character who was necessarily a silent character. He made some headway by continuing to make artistically viable and successful films in the silent tradition with City Lights and Modern Times. But eventually something had to give.

The Great Dictator was his first dialogue-driven film, but even that had strong roots in the silent traditions. Truly it was not until Monsieur Verdoux in 1947 when Chaplin released his first film conceived entirely as a talking picture. Think for a moment about how incredible that is – that’s fully 20 years after the beginning of the talkies.

Classic Movie Review: Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator

Charlie Chaplin was ahead of his time in most respects when it came to his filmmaking. The greatest irony being that he was late to the game when it came to making talking films. His first film conceived and made completely with dialogue was The Great Dictator, released in 1940 – more than a decade after the advent of synchronized sound and dialogue. But even if he was the last significant holdout clinging to silent film, The Great Dictator was well ahead of the curve in terms of world politics.

Classic Movie Review: Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times

At a time when synchronized sound was the standard in moviemaking, there was increasingly less room for the silent stars, especially comedians who relied so heavily on pantomime to make their comedy work. Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp character was universal in being voiceless and without language he had no firm ties to a particular geographic location. He could be Russian or Japanese or Brazilian. The sentimentality of his stories could be understood anywhere in the world. Chaplin’s last completely silent feature film, City Lights, was released in 1931, four full years after Al Jolson’s profession, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” in The Jazz Singer ushered in a new era for motion pictures. Chaplin made Modern Times between 1932 and 1936 and though it is for all intents and purposes a silent film, it does utilize sound effects, a synchronized musical score and some spoken dialogue. It was Chaplin’s way of sticking to the type of film making he knew best while giving a small tip of the hat to the new mode.

Classic Movie Review: Charlie Chaplin's City Lights

As the cinematic rival of the stoic Buster Keaton it was Charlie Chaplin who infused his comedic work with great pathos through his perennial character of The Little Tramp. Chaplin constantly strove for that perfect balance between a lovably goofy man-child and moments of grand emotion. Never did he accomplish the blend so symmetrically and effortlessly it seems as with City Lights. It just might be his best work.

Made after the advent of synchronized soundtracks for films and at a time when studios had completely abandoned silent cinema, Chaplin insisted City Lights remained silent with respect to dialogue, retaining the custom of inter-titles because The Little Tramp was a universal character. He could be understood across cultures, across borders, across languages. Not to mention that every individual around the world who knew the character would have given him, in their own heads, a voice only they knew. To strip that all away would have been to unravel part of what made him so special.

Classic Movie Review: Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush

This review is based on the original 1925 version of The Gold Rush with accompanying music provided on the DVD. In 1943 Charles Chaplin personally supervised a re-release version with original musical score and voiceover narration provided by Chaplin himself.

It’s hard enough these days to get easily engrossed in a silent feature film. The classics are worth watching, especially if you’re at all interested in understanding the development of narrative form on screen. It takes a great deal of mental focus and a commitment that you’re going to stick it out through more than an hour of silent viewing. Surely, just as with subtitled films, the more you watch them, the easier it gets. But I find Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush to be, at times, tedious viewing. It has great classic bits, but the story that holds it together is occasionally thrown together in a ramshackle way.

Pina Movie Review

In his introduction before the presentation of his latest film, a documentary called Pina, director Wim Wenders claimed that if you’d asked him in the mid-80s if he’d ever make a film about dance, he’d have laughed. Then he saw a performance by the Tanztheater Wuppertal choreographed by Pina Bausch and he was hooked. After lengthy planning stages in preparation for a documentary, Pina suddenly died. Ready to abandon the project completely, Pina’s dance company, some of whom worked with her for 20 years or more, insisted they continue with a film but make it a tribute to her work and incredible artistry.

I, like Wenders, never would have thought I’d be so captivated by dance but this film hooked me from its first moments until the close. Not only is the dancing some of the most wonderfully beautiful work I’ve seen in any medium, but Wenders uses his 3D cameras to expertly capture the performances in a way that makes it feel more like a live production.

Antichrist Movie Review: I Have Seen the Antichrist and It is Woman

First published at American Madness on 4 October 2009.

Reposted here with the addition of a single sentence.

Lars von Trier has been known since his breakthrough film Breaking the Waves for putting not only his protagonists, but also his audience, through a series of torturous steps until reaching a climax surpassing all the pain that had come before it. Thus we are treated to the hanging death of the blind Selma in Dancer in the Dark and the gang rape of Grace in Dogville.

As such we don’t enter a von Trier film with the same expectations of being entertained as we would from most other films. His films are not designed with entertainment in mind, but as studies in the human condition with a particular focus on grief and torment as the principle emotions. In a certain respect, his films are highbrow torture porn.

The Hit Movie Review: Stephen Frears' First Feature Film

Terence Stamp is identified by John Hurt while Tim Roth holds a gun to his face.

Stephen Frears’ first feature film, The Hit, came in 1984 after a long career in British television. It is a rough production, bearing more resemblance to low-budget TV movies and independent cinema than to the polished work that defines his career today. I saw it recently as part of the Seville European Film Festival. Rather unfortunately it was presented not on 35mm, but in some kind of video format. It looked like VHS or Laserdisc blown up for the big screen. I found this to be largely distracting for the first several scenes. Surely my overall impression of the film itself was affected by the inferiority of the images.

Classic Movie Review: Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th'inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

--“Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard” by Thomas Gray (1716 – 1771)

I can think of three significant cinematic uses of “La Marseillaise,” the French National Anthem. Its appearance in Casablanca is defiantly patriotic, induced by Victor Laszlo in Rick’s Café to drown out the singing Germans. It’s sung by the French crowd supporting the Allied prisoner football team at the end of John Huston’s Victory. But Stanley Kubrick is the only film maker to take what might be the most patriotic national hymn and turn it into an ironic statement about patriotic duty.

Classic Movie Review: The Night of the Hunter

The actor Charles Laughton directed The Night of the Hunter, based on the novel of the same name by Charles Grubb, in 1955. He never directed another movie. This was the result of poor audience and critical reaction to the film. It was considered a disaster at the time. More than half a century later, the film often finds itself on lists of the best movies of all time and in 1992 was deemed culturally significant enough to be marked for preservation by the Library of Congress.