Month: July 2009

Half-Blood Prince

This entry in the Harry Potter franchise constitutes four-fifths of a great film. The good? First, the art direction and special effects are excellent. The sequences involving the pensieve and the “liquid memories” are gorgeously unsettling. There is a Quidditch match which looks fantastic, and an early sequence in what appears to be a ramshackle manor house is playfully fun. In terms of art direction, David Yates seems to have cast a thick veil of coal smoke over everything. Hogwarts has never looked so dilapidated and distressed. More impressive, Yates ratchets up the emotional angst and agony, capturing strong performances from all and delivering one of the most ominously creepy installments of the series. Continue reading Half-Blood Prince

Torchwood

Torchwood is a spin off from Doctor Who. The marketing strategy is pretty clear: the BBC created one spin off for younger viewers (the Sarah Jane Chronicles) and this one for more adult viewers. Torchwood has much more sex and plenty of gore. Characters from Doctor Who move back and forth between the two series, with the lead being Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman). He leads a secret unit (Torchwood) set up by Queen Victoria to save the world from aliens. The first two seasons are enjoyable, and occasionally very good, but the third season — Children of Earth — is something special. It is a five-part miniseries, shown on five consecutive nights, dealing with a single alien threat. It is some of the best British drama I have seen in a while. If you get BBC America, look for it starting July 20th.

XXY

really great, complex, and thoughtful movie about an intersex kid who, although not reassigned at birth, has been raised as a girl and given appropriate medication to develop as such. am not sure about the biological accuracy — at 15, alex has small but nonetheless existing breasts, a high-pitch, definitely feminine voice, and looks most certainly like a girl — but the issues this small film (from the film movement) raises are doubtlessly rich and, it seems to me, as true to reality as fiction can make them. Continue reading XXY

Bruno

You know the story. Bruno is the host of a gossipy Austrian fashion TV program, enjoying inventive sex with Diesel, his long-time lover. His velco suit causes havoc at the Milan fashion show, he is fired and Diesel leaves him for another man. So Bruno heads for Hollywood to become a star. What to say? Well: Continue reading Bruno

This is creepy

Does anyone know how Facebook works? Or, more precisely, how it can be that today it recommended Gio to me as a possible “friend”? I have never met Gio. I am not “friends” with anyone on this blog. I am not aware of traveling in any circles in common with Gio. She and I disagree about every movie ever made. And yet Facebook has somehow ferreted out this slim connection. I recently re-watched Enemy of the State and nothing the CIA could do in that movie comes close to this kind of deep knowledge produced by some software algorithm.

Waltz With Bashir

Is there really no existing thread about this film? I would very much like others on the blog to watch this and give their reactions, not least because I am still processing my own reactions. The film is animated (until the end), and it follows the efforts of the director and writer, Ari Folman, to recover his own memories and those of his fellow Israeli soldiers, concerning the events surrounding the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in southern Lebanon in 1983. Continue reading Waltz With Bashir

Tokyo!

Mood, timing, context? This movie hit me just right. Or, rather, these movies–as this is another anthology loosely arranged around a city, emphasis on “loosely.”** Each is a fable, tone and approach very much tied to the sensibilities of each director (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-Ho). Gondry follows a young couple fresh to the city, struggling to adapt–until one finds an intriguing, bittersweet way to conform to the city’s design. Carax is easiest to summarize and the the looniest, loosest, and least coherent of the fables: a (white, red-bearded, crazed) man emerges from the sewers and raises havoc. Bong focalizes around a young hikikomori, a form of agoraphobic retreat, who finds himself enraptured by a pizza deliverywoman. I just loved them all, with a caveat: scratch the surface and they aren’t perhaps rich or deep in complex subtext. Continue reading Tokyo!