Author: reynolds

Four sweater vests!

I’m tempted to write down any number of great lines, or even to upload me humming some of the catchy verses — but we haven’t got the technology. Yet.

Go rent Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Outstanding entertainment — funny, and smart, and (damn!) at the end even surprisingly moving. It’s short, and began life as three acts of an online film, but don’t hold that against Joss Whedon’s genius here, against Neil Patrick Harris’ perfection as the eponymous Doctor, against the criminally-undervalued Nathan Fillion yet again showing why we should scratch our heads that the guy isn’t in many more films than insert-action-comedy-lead here.

The Class

I need to think more–and have more time to try to compose some kind of response to–Laurent Cantet’s The Class, but it is the best film I’ve seen in some while, even following my great experience the other evening with Happy-Go-Lucky. I could have watched the film for hours; it felt like we’d fallen into a world, and in its short running time the film worked the kind of wondrous challenging representation of the experience of public education undertaken over the course of the whole of season 4 in “The Wire.” (I actually have no idea how long the film was, as I felt both lost in it for some while and surprised/saddened as it came to a too-fast close.)

The first great film I’ve seen this year. And I guess actually better than anything I saw last year, to boot.

To the list of things about which I will mutter angrily to my ingrate son, in my dotage, from the recline of my pseudo-lazyboy, in the grim home where he’s placed me, add

The Pink Panther 2. It makes you kind of fond for the days when Blake Edwards was trying to squeeze a last few dollars out of Peter Sellers’ corpse with that guy from “Soap.”

Families and the work of genre

I’m mainly putting a placeholder here, and a little shout of joy at two recent, wonderful film experiences — both of which I want to write more about, and around each/both of which I have been thinking through the ways certain hard-nosed depictions of Grim family emotions and realities are teased out through certain escapist genre conventions. But I don’t have time, nor have I really gotten my head around this analysis. So, for the moment, I’ll say:

—Coraline is the best children’s film in years, which may be faint praise, but add this: it’s also one of the best films I’ve seen in some time, rich in glorious technique and baroque narrative detail and the flush of emotions (fear, despair, joy, awe) of the best fairy tales. The 3d version is … well, stunning, but I think I’d have loved the film regardless.

–So different on the surface–in technique, theme, intended audience–that it might seem like a wholly different medium, Frozen River shows up two of the best performances from last year (Melissa Leo and Misty Upham) in a tale that begins in the familiar backroads small-town deadends of any number of great film noirs. It plays a little like dirty realism, hung on a suspense-thriller hook–and it’s just wonderful, and heartbreaking, in so many ways.

See ’em both. I’d really like to talk about them.

Possible one-word reviews for RocknRolla

Tripe. Shite. Crap. Crockoshitta. Blusterfest. Inert. Exasperilla. Tedious. Arrhythmic. Yawn-inducing. Dull. Thumping-dickfest. Fun [and here, by using the term “fun,” I explicitly mean not fun]. Not-awful.

This film was about three-and-a-half hours long, and it moved like a steam train going up a very steep, very long hill. It had all these recognizable elements of a fun movie, and yet rather brilliantly cooked them together into a not-fun movie. I suppose it’s not dreadful. That’s about as effusive as I’m gonna get.

To counteract its impact on my brain, I watched two episodes of Steve Coogan’s wonderful “Saxondale,” about an aging ex-roadie now working as an exterminator in one of Britain’s trademark brick-flat shopping-mall dead-end small cities (cf. Slough). Coogan is meaner and funnier than any seven of Ritchie’s characters, and his show is a far slyer send-up of masculine posturing, and he even deploys guns and violence (albeit with pigeons and animal-rights protesters) more pleasurably. Skip Rolla and head immediately to “Saxondale.”

Appaloosa

There seems to be a new yearly ritual wherein a Western is released and critics crow about its return to basics. I’ll give Appaloosa some backhanded props: it is not particularly ambitious about genre reinvention, or even reinvigoration. It very well could have been made on a backlot in 1952, and it would now play twice yearly on TCM, with little fanfare, after a brief pointless but information-dense introduction by whatever grey-haired guy they have doing the introductions now.

But I’d not call this a signal of its competence, just its conventionality. Continue reading Appaloosa

“He used my great-grand-dad’s whoring spurs….

….Apparently whores back then were kind of logy. From all the tuberculosis.”

Frisky Dingo initially began, as I noted here, as a documentary about supervillain Killface’s attempts to destroy humanity. But things took a turn at season’s end: the super-annihilator machine’s couplers melted, and instead of driving the earth into the sun, the earth was simply moved about three feet further from the sun. (Oops — SPOILER.) Stunned by this event but not so stunned as to lose his tremendous, talon-footed agility, Killface ran for president. Season two–Behold a Dark Horse–is a documentary about his campaign, his opponent Xander Crews, and the various political functionaries attendant. And little baby penguin Lamont. It is the finest political documentary ever filmed.