Month: May 2007

the pursuit of happyness

i’m somewhat embarrassed to say that i liked this. i kept waiting for the schmaltziness to make me cringe, but it never happened. maybe i have high schmaltziness tolerance tonight, maybe it’s just a good movie. anyway, i realized only when i saw the special features that will smith chose an italian director to do pursuit. the guy barely spoke english at the time of the shooting. the funniest parts of the whole dvd are the ones in which muccino communicates with smith using the gesticulations for which italians are famous around the world while making some incomprehensible but frenetic sounds with his mouth. god, it must have been dreadful for him. i get a headache just thinking about it, because i have of course been there. with hindsight, i can see the italian style. unless we try to make american audiences go gaga, we italians are a surprisingly unemotional people who find wearing positive feelings on our sleeves mortifying (we are just fine with negative feelings). we like american movies, but wouldn’t imagine for a second that people might actually talk to each other like that in real life.

some nice shots of san francisco, no gratuitous nastiness (it’s life that’s getting gardner in the teeth, no people’s cussedness), no gratuitous miracles (no one shows up in the nick of time to rescue him), great restraint in showing gardner’s slow but determined climb into solvency, and fantastic chemistry between smith and his son. fast and effective editing, good pace. i enjoyed myself.

Levees

Has no one else seen this? I heard how good Spike Lee’s documentary on Katrina was, and so quickly bought it when released on dvd, then as quickly shelved it, as it was hard to drum up excitement about a film that was almost certainly good for me but would be painful to watch. Foolish. This is a great, great film–easily the best documentary I’ve seen since (and probably better yet than) the excellent Mondovino. It is heartwrenching but often startlingly funny; its powerful sociopolitical thrust complemented by a remarkable sense of rhythm, image, sound, editing. It’s just amazing filmmaking, and I’m enjoying the hell out of it, even as it is in equal parts enraging and enlightening.

I’ll write more later–but I wanted to see if others simply hadn’t posted . . . .

I think you could make the case that Spike Lee is our most important filmmaker–in every sense of “important.” I cannot believe a work this damn good came out so quickly after the event.

half nelson

just saw nelson. without gosling, epps, some cool photography, and the occasional good lines, this would be offensive, all those stereotypes lined up like pins and all. as it is, it’s watchable. gosling is an incredibly charismatic actor. i saw him for the first time a few days ago in fracture, which held mostly because of him. he seems to have been born in front of the camera. i wonder, though, if he ever acts without all those twitches. in fracture the twitching was even worse than in nelson, even though his character was as sober and clean as a whistle.

jane campion on the dearth of women directors

from yahoo

When Jane Campion was honored onstage at the Cannes Film Festival with about 30 other major directors Sunday, she was the lone woman of the bunch. And she’s still not used to how strange that feels.

The New Zealander is the only woman filmmaker to have won Cannes’ top prize, for “The Piano” in 1993. This year, she showed a fantasy short film about a ladybug — a woman dressed up in an insect costume — who gets stomped on in a movie theater. She said it was a metaphor for women in the film world.

“I just think this is the way the world is, that men control the money, and they decide who they’re going to give it to,” Campion said in explaining why so few women get movies made.

it really is quite depressing how few women seem to be able to break the glass ceiling when it comes to directing movies. it would be interesting to know what the percentages of men and women in film production programs are, and how this correlates with what they go on to do. anecdotally, based on informal attention to film credits, it seems as though more women’s names pop up in the technical end of things than did in the past, but the number of directors does not seem to be growing.

however, i am not sure about this bit from comrade campion:
Continue reading jane campion on the dearth of women directors

Fantasy Mogul

So, someone came up with a movie-studio version of those fantasy-sports games: pick your summer movie slate, compete on profits, etc. I started a league which can be found here, called “Watchers.” The password to join is “arnabpoop”.

Oh: I sent an email to almost everyone, except Sunhee and Michael, for neither of whom I have an email address. But–join! Others? (Lurkers? All welcome.)

Hot Fuzz

Nothing special, but a real blast. From the same team that brought us the wonderful Shaun of the Dead, this movie parodies cop action movies, repeatedly name-checking Bad Boys, Die Hard, and Point Break. These are not difficult to parody, but Hot Fuzz does it in a fresh, and uproariously funny way. A much smarter, funnier Reno 911. Supercop Nicholas Angel is sent to a bucolic English village as punishment for showing up his colleagues in the London police. Pretty soon the body count is on the rise, and the movie becomes ever more manic until it climaxes in a joyfully excessive 20 minutes shoot ’em up. Lots and lots of fun.

Old and another small Joy

First, to get it out of the way: many of us will try Deja Vu no matter what any of the rest of us say about the film. And why not? It’s got Denzel Washington, and a gloriously loony plot. Well–glorious for about 20 minutes, and then the film’s a flat bore. Not bad. Worse: boring.

But what I’m here to tell you is about two other films. Continue reading Old and another small Joy

Summer ’07 Blockbuster Season

First out of the box is Spiderman 3. It is by no means the best of the three, but this is certainly very enjoyable, and it shows that Raimi has stayed largely true to his vision of Spiderman. This is long (135 minutes), and even more talky than its predecessors. There is endless discussion of doing the right thing, of always having a choice, of being true to oneself, and saintly Aunt May is finally beginning to grate on me. Both Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst are too whinny and self-absorbed to really enjoy watching (unlike both the earlier movies). Maguire has become the Frodo Baggins of this franchise: he sucks the life out of it whenever he is out of costume.

But the movie succeeds because of the villains: they are all wonderful, and there is enough ambivalence and complexity about their characters that they never become cartoonish (if one can say that as a positive thing about a movie based on a comic book). James Franco returns in the Green Goblin role, and does a great job of managing his conflicting impulses. There is a great moment when he winks at Peter Parker and his entire face changes. He becomes the spine of the movie. Then Thomas Haden Church portrays Sandman, and again every scene with him conveys a tragic sense of despair. Finally we have Topher Grace as photographer and slime villain. He mostly provides comic relief, but he is so much more lifelike than Maguire that he steals every scene that they are in together.

The action sequences are astonishing, and worth whatever the CGI budget was. An aerial chase with the Goblin is particularly good. Finally, Raimi’s old pal from the Evil Dead franchise, Bruce Campbell, has a hysterical scene as a French maitre d’. It is played strictly for laughs, and I strongly recommend that you try to watch it in a French movie theater to see how the French react.