Author: reynolds

I watched two hip new documentaries, each with killer soundtracks, camerawork and cuts energizing the essentially talking-heads focus, flashy titles providing further information, and (in one) interwoven clips and photos which provide an Errol-Morrisian counterpoint to what a given talking-head is saying. Continue reading What’s up? Docs.

Fuck Brett Ratner. Chan’s return to Hong Kong for an old-school silly/pathos-drenched/action-thriller Robin B Hood is ridiculous and reasonably good fun. But I recommend it for its pedagogical import: this story of two burglars who end up caring for a baby they’ve kidnapped is really just like parenting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thrown a shit-filled diaper at Kris, and it’s splattered the wall and her to hilarious effect. Or accidentally tied the baby carriage to an armored truck, and then had to commandeer vehicles in a mad chase to rescue the happily-cooing Max. I was so glad to see a movie finally, finally get it right.

Seriously, if you like Jackie Chan, you’ll like this. A few great gags, in the stuntman sense–e.g., hopping from air conditioner to air conditioner down the side of a building. A lot of inane but harmlessly pleasant gags–e.g., diapers, a strange Brokeback Mountain joke, etc.

Oh, I’m thinking of opening a blog for discerning, film-loving parents. Besides these rare instances of films which accurately represent, I’ll be doing some serious kids’-film criticism. My first post will explore the numerous continuity errors I found in Scooby Doo on Zombie Island. Shameful.

Maybe now we can pry that fucking gun out of his hands.

This doesn’t “belong” on the blog, but The Darjeeling Limited‘s soundtrack had reminded me of a couple of great Kinks songs, and I spent some few months if they would ever release those tracks on iTunes (rather than forcing me to buy the whole album) or if the Kinks catalog would ever free up. Yesterday I gave up, and downloaded the whole old album: Part One Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround. And goddamn it is a great, great album, every song a wonder.

What have you been listening to?

There’s something about apocalyptic sci-fi that can amp up the pleasures of genre. Even pea-brained exercises like Reign of Fire (dragons ride again!), Doomsday (’80s b-movies ride again!), and Le Dernier Combat (Luc Besson’s only good movie!) have an infectious energy, and when directors syncopate the thrumming backbeat of social commentary (in Romero’s zombieworlds and the recent 28 reiterations, George Miller’s Max-world, or the delirious The Bed-Sitting Room) . . . it’s sheer delight.

But give a director with some recently-earned auteurial cred a chance to find his or her deeply-satirical vision of the world to come, and you get thudding shite like Zardoz, Quintet, and now Southland Tales.

Continue reading World’s end and the hapless auteur

Boom chicka chicka, boom chicka chicka, boom chicka chicka, boom. Ta dum dum, Boom chicka chicka, boom chicka chicka, boom chicka chicka, boom.

Ta dum dum.

I had written positively but concisely about director Ti West’s first film (at comment #4), and I kind of kept an ear to the ground about his subsequent work. And last year, his second work–more restrained, in his words an attempt to strip away all the common tactical conventions of scare movies–got a good review here and a real rave from Scott Foundas here. So I was really looking forward to it.

I liked but didn’t love it; Foundas called it “Old Joy reconceived as a horror movie,” and that’s a fine mash-up pitch. The movie begins at a slow but dread-suffused pace, and takes about thirty minutes to get us well into the woods, wandering with three misplaced urbanites looking to hunt. And it’s never much of a thrill-ride, instead opting for a very deliberate white-knuckle approach to its conventional plot (the hunters start to get hunted). I liked its sense of dread, I loved its HighDef hand-held look, and I loved its disinterest in motive, backstory, resolution. Apparently shot on just over a dime (and produced by Larry Fessenden, who’s maybe the Orson Welles of indie horror films), it’s another solid small alternative for us horror fans not so into the Saw franchise or endless watered-down remakes of East Asian horror.

And it’s not Guy Ritchie, so that’s another plus.

I saw two movies this weekend, and one was a hateful bit of crass tripe, stitching together bits of other better movies into a shoddy mass-produced mash-up, with a migraine-inducing soundtrack and not a whit of honest human compassion or sympathy.

And the other was Doomsday.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I knew I would love Doomsday when, out of a crowd of terrified Scots trying to escape the plague through a quickly closing security wall, one man reaches his hand forward, and we see not one but three separate shots, from different angles, of that hand brutally squashed off, blood and gristle spurting everywhere. I knew I would not love Dan when, after an opening which established the bare bones of silly-grieving-father trying to control his three sassy daughters while forgoing his own life, there were not three separate shots of Steve Carell’s hand brutally squashed off, blood and gristle spurting everywhere as the emo-indie-folkie on the soundtrack noodled away on a guitar only to be moments later exploded under the wheels of an armored personnel carrier.

A lovely film pitched as a “fable” from Mongolia ended up being stranger, more conventionally (or is that unconventionally) avant-garde than I’d expected. It riffs on an underlying sense of myth: a young nomadic sheepherder, in the bouts of epilepsy, has visions which lead him to combat the forces of modernity. But from its cold opening onward, the movie works a different kind of magic. A woman in a static shot stares at the camera, a multi-colored abstract mural on the wall behind seeming like some strange kind of halo; after some long gaze she begins (slowly) counting, and as the numbers go up she struggles to maintain her composure, gripped by an inexplicable sadness. I was hooked.

The film is more poem than narrative, and I was engrossed by how its opaque, allusive plot recedes so that the wash and connectivity of the film’s gorgeous imagery carries you along. I can’t remember where I heard about this, but I liked it.