Author: reynolds

Andrea Arnold’s Red Road

An intense character study of loneliness and mourning, tucked into a CCTV-p.o.v. portrait of grimmer Glasgow, disguised as a white-knuckled surveillance-age thriller, Andrea Arnold’s film follows a camera operator for the Scottish city’s string of public eyes, charged with tracking potential–and reporting actual–crimes. Borrowing neatly from Rear Window and The Conversation alike, the film also escapes its influences, wears them lightly on its sleeve. And I’m going to be cagy about what else happens in the film–burying it under the “more” and a big SPOILER tag–because the film is often quite surprising. Don’t want to undercut those pleasures.

Even as I tout this film, though, I want to first rave about one of the extras, the director’s short (and apparently Academy-Award-winning) Wasp, which in 23(ish) minutes packs a helluva wallop. Following a young single mom, trailing her three girls and lugging her infant boy, from an opening fight to their cluttered project flat to a night out on the town, the film seems to be both brilliantly composed and edited and yet caught on the fly–there are scenes in a bar that seem impossibly real, as if she had to be in there just filming. Yet it’s a gorgeous picture of dilapidated people and places, and edited with a virtuoso control–precisely crafted. This is a classic. Red Road is simply really damn good. Continue reading Andrea Arnold’s Red Road

Larry Sanders

So, slowly and with great relish I’ve been working my way through the collection of “Not Just the Best of The Larry Sanders Show,” and it’s no great surprise–to me, nor I imagine to any of you–how awesome the series is. And the collection, which cherry-picks 23 episodes from the entire run of the season, is excellent ‘though not quite the full run we fans might hope for, and we all (non-fans and fans alike) deserve. But it’s what we got. I recommend.

But I want to put in a plug for the extras, which… well, get pretty astounding. There are deleted scenes and some commentaries–intriguing, slightly illustrative, not bad. But still ye olde extras. There are some interviews with various cast members, done by a faceless interviewer, and those too can be fun–but this is all conventional stuff. Then there are these often very long, often quite moving, always strange and personal interviews between Garry Shandling and various guest or co-stars. I’m only into disc 2, but just disc one has this session between Garry and Alec Baldwin, who popped up for a cameo in season one, that is worth seeing even if you skip the shows. Continue reading Larry Sanders

The Comic Epic

Two strong recommendations, for films which I only coincidentally saw in sequence yet share a comic narrative structure that seems complementary: the very funny Superbad and the very unnerving, sly and riveting The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Both detail a one-night quest (for booze and sex, for medical attention) marked by many small and unforeseen conflicts and a reframing of the quest by journey’s (failed?) end, and both films display a compelling comic humanism, despite the derisive energies (scatological and satirical) which underpin the filmmakers’ visions. In each, the detailed and energetic search (to get laid, to get cured) is something of a mcguffin, and the movies open up to broad and specific portraitures of how we treat one another (and how we ought to treat one another). Continue reading The Comic Epic

Meanwhile…

I reached back in time and watched a tv movie from the early ‘seventies called “Pursuit,” directed by Michael Crichton and starring E.G. Marshall as crazed right-wing terrorist and Ben Gazzara as chain-smoking game-loving fed. It wasn’t very good, but I had this flash of nostalgia for the kinds of things I used to watch on television when young–mediocre movies like this one, which at 70+ minutes felt padded, but at least had some intriguing grit to it. Also watched the Italian crime film Revolver, which had Oliver Reed looking like Javier Bardem and plenty of very European pretty-boys and pretty-girls slumming about. It wasn’t very good, but it had awful dubbing (fun!) and a sleazy energy I kind of dug.

Oliver Reed. Maybe we should have a Reed retrospective. Anyone up for The Brood?

Atypical Cop Stories: Police Beat and The Negotiator

Two minor recommendations:
Robinson Devor’s Police Beat follows a West-African-immigrant police officer as he bikes his rounds outside Seattle and obsesses about his potentially-straying girlfriend. Be warned: the film is less about forward motion than surreal, sideways development. We often cut jarringly into the middle of some oddball bit of mayhem or crime, without much explication before or after, perhaps echoing Z’s experience of cop life or of America. (A postscript to the film notes that all of the depicted mayhem is taken from the pages of the Seattle criminal record.) Continue reading Atypical Cop Stories: Police Beat and The Negotiator

The Motel

Aside from a soundtrack that seems pleasant but overly familiar, the same guitar noodling found in five of seven independent films, this was a total, wonderful surprise. Michael Kang’s film follows Ernest (Jeffrey Chyau), a chubby 13-year-old trapped cleaning rooms at his family’s half-legitimate/hourly-rated motel, dealing with being 13. Not too much happens–none of the big moments or simple arcs of the conventional independent film, and equal parts funny and sad without ever reaching. It’s just a lovely, great little film. Continue reading The Motel

Meta-self-reflexive

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon may actually appeal beyond the limited fanbase for horror who pipe up in our group. (I.e., someone other than me might conceivably enjoy this.) After Scream, or even Wes Craven’s earlier self-reflexive horror flicks, many proclaimed the end of ‘real’ horror (killed off by that slasher irony). More recently folks like Rob Zombie and Eli Roth splatter with an ostensibly earnest glee, thus recuperating that ‘real’ horror (and irony gives up the ghost). Behind the Mask doesn’t have its cake and eats it, too: it’s a very smart, sly critical send-up of the slasher pic which reinvigorates the genre through, rather than against, its ironic stance. I dug it.

Continue reading Meta-self-reflexive

Ratatouille

I have no idea why the title is spelled this way, but…. just kidding. Bliss! A wonderful film–funny, engaging, smart, moving; the kind of kids’ movie you long to see (after so many hyperactive or tawdry maudlin blurs), where the intelligence shimmers behind every detail, where the film demands (or, better, assumes) a little bit of intelligence from its audience. But better yet: this is one of the best, most lovely pieces of cinema I’ve seen this year.

Near the opening the clan of rats scurry en masse away from a farmhouse and its shotgun-wielding, bespectacled granny. In ramshackle boats, rats spilling off the edges, each rat carefully defined to her or his own particular brand of bedraggled, they shiver, as raindrops pelt the dark-slate surface of the water all around them. There’s so much visual delight in this film–on top of the pleasures of narrative and score–that I think any of us would love it.