Month: September 2008

Helloween. Hello mean. Holy ream.

My semi-annual festival of horror films has begun. Aren’t you excited? Can’t you smell the garish red corn syrup? Hear the resounding echoes of the tortured shrieking? Envision the amputated limbs, wriggling as they hit the shag carpeting? ‘Tis the season!

I began the other evening with a Swedish vampire flick called Frostbitten, and as the title suggests, it relentlessly plays to the sort-of-funny, nerdy-teens-going-vampy, hip-slash-gory low-budget conventions of eight thousand Hollywood versions. Yet there’s something there, for the fan. Continue reading Helloween. Hello mean. Holy ream.

Newman

In Nobody’s Fool, Newman’s character Sully seems at first a lovable type–smart-assed, generally good-spirited, prone to teasing and stiff-upper-lipping and too much drinking. But, throughout, Newman uses his eyes as props pointing to real anger, real anguish, real shame — the surface bluster revealing great storms at the character’s heart. It’s a great performance, greater yet for being so internal, so unshowy.

But I probably love any randomly-named fifteen of his performances at any given moment.

Traitor

The story of Samir Horn (Don Cheadle), a man of Sudanese and American parentage, as he navigates the jihadi world. The audience is meant to be in suspense as to whether Samir is a traitor to the jihadis who befriend him, or the American handlers who believe he is inflitrating a terrorist cell.  And Cheadle tries, only somewhat successfully, to convey how conflicted he is. This movie does a lot of things right, the most important being to give a co-starring role Said Taghmaoui, who was so superb in a minor role in Three Kings, and is far and away the most intersting thing about this movie. It paints a fairly gritty picture of the environment that produces suicide bombers, and the underground networks that recruit and nurture them.  The movie also deserves some credit for trying to explain Samir’s motivation in terms of his commitment to, and interpretation of, the Koran. Thus it presents an alternative view of Islam, one that empahsizes non-violence. That said, the movie is dull and efforts to ramp up the tension are limited to making the soundtrack more instrusive. Cheadle is also diappointing, wearing a single dour expression the entire time. He can be so much fun when he flashes a smile and avoids the cockney accent he is weighted down with in the Ocean movies, but here he is largely a cipher, forced to utter a series of earnest but silly lines.

Burn After Reading

The Coen Brothers’ latest black, black comedy of errors follows a group of thick-sculled, mean-spirited, surface-obsessed, selfish, moronic imbeciles. It’s an extreme and unflatteringly hilarious portrait of America but a believable one nonetheless. In terms of plot, tone and craft, Burn After Reading‘s kissing cousin is most certainly Fargo. Critics, understandably, are frustrated that the film lacks Fargo‘s moral center, but that film takes place in a rural winterland where one can make a happy living birthing babies and illustrating postage stamps. Burn takes place in Washington DC. Therein lies the film’s vicious, misanthropic, cold hearted conceit–in Washington DC everybody is both larger than life and a douche bag (and as goes Washington, sadly, so goes the nation). Given all the political nastiness occuring 24 hours a day on LCD screens large and small, the Coen Brothers have appropriated Aaron Sorkin’s dark other, offering up a gleefully caustic evisceration of human folly (though I will admit that amid the blood, the goat cheese, the Mamba Juice and the dildo there are hints of humanity struggling to reach the surface). I loved it. Sure, Brad Pitt overacts, but he’s so much fun to watch. Clooney, Malkovich, Richard Jenkins, Francis McDormand: all are top notch. The film is tightly edited and never drags. And J.K. Simmons masterfully (and uncharacteristically) underplays three brief scenes and nearly steals the entire show. His line reading in one particular moment (“Russia?”) is worth fifty bridges to nowhere.

Following

Apologies if this has been discussed before, but I can’t find it using the search feature. Following is Christopher Nolan’s first film, two years before Memento, produced for only $60K and lasting 70 minutes. The initial conceit is that unemployed writer Jeremy Theobald (simply called “the young man”) likes to follow random people. He breaks his own rules and repeatedly follows a man named Cobb, who turns out to be a thief. The premise serves only to set up the rest of the movie, which is pure and enjoyable noir as Theobald gets sucked into a a series of underworld crimes and a relationship with a woman (Lucy Russell) who is credited only as “the blonde”. What makes this worth watching, beyond the simple craft, the gritty black and white photography, and the fine performance from Theobald (who seems to have never acted again except for a bit part in Batman Begins), is Nolan’s trademark shattering of time. Scenes are played out of order so that we see elements of the story in fragments; Theobald appears with a different haircut and suit, then returns to his goatee and leather jacket; we see bruises on his face, then they disappear. It is all tied together at the end in far too neat a package, but you admire it nonetheless.

region madness

perhaps some of you are more tech-oriented than I am.  I want to buy a portable DVD player that will play DVD’s from other countries. Now some of them are labelled “multi-region” and others are labelled “region free.” apparently there are 6 global regions, most of Europe and Britain being region 2, India being a region of its own, etc.  When a player says it’s “multi-region,” does that mean it plays all 6 regions or does it select from those (perhaps only playing region 1, north america and region 2, Europe…) so if you want to play all regions, must you buy a “region free” player? I asked one of those online consultants at Amazon/Overstock or some such site and got the answer “I like stuff.”