Author: reynolds

Zodiac

I loved this movie. Caveats: a) it’s my kind of film, and my reaction is horribly skewed given that it’s a very long, information-saturated, talky police procedural, more interested in the search for than the revelation of truth. b) There are one or two moments where a stray filmmaking detail (a Donovan song, a bit part played by a hip young actor) drew me out of the film. But more often we sink into the world constructed onscreen, and the almost three-hour running time flew by. I’d gladly have watched this for a year on HBO–it’s a film I was sad to see end, and highly recommend. Continue reading Zodiac

Lawless Heart

After reading an interview with Bill Nighy, where he talked up this little-seen British film, I tracked it down, and I’m glad I did. The storyline can seem reductively familiar: the film follows three men in a small coastal British town, each kind of grappling with their own sense of self and their respective love lives, following the funeral of a man close to all. What makes the film stand out–beyond its excellent performances–is its structure Continue reading Lawless Heart

Ab Tak Chhappan

I won’t do backflips selling this one, but Shimit Amin’s 2004 cop/crime drama is a strong genre piece, with a damn good central performance by Nana Patekar. Patekar’s Inspector is part of a unit whose primary function is assassination; big-shot members of Mumbai’s underworld are singled out, then Sadhu and his men collar them and essentially goad the criminals into resistance, setting up the thinnest rationale for gunning them down. (And, sometimes, skipping the rationale.) Continue reading Ab Tak Chhappan

13 Tzameti

Grimy, gritty, gut-wrenching–and damn good. A tight little no-budget thriller which starts obliquely, as a poor roofer, screwed out of pay for a job, decides to purloin a letter which promises great fortune for god-knows-what activities. The film locks him into that situation, and then slowly turns the screws (on him, and really on us). The film looks a stark, black-and-white dream, but my favorite thing about it is its resistance to allegorize; the plot has a whiff of the existential, but instead of portentous dialogue director/writer Gela Babluani sticks to stark images and under-played emotions.

I’ve avoided spoilers. But even knowing what was coming I still found it gripping. Put this into my inescapable escapist category: no way out, done with superior style.

My review of Smokin’ Aces, in bad Portuguese

Aces de Smokin de Joe Carnahan ‘ em suas mais melhores rachaduras um leer Louco-Cão-embebido, meth-abastecido como funciona seus crazies e criminosos assorted com seus ritmos. Chame-o noir carny: frequentemente engraçado, superaquecido, geralmente divertimento. Mas, como o carnival, a película pode ser um bocado muito. Você termina sentir como talvez você não deve ter gastado tudo que dinheiro, consumido todo esse açúcar. Talvez alguns dos passeios não eram realmente divertimento, nem estavam tentando a duramente ter o divertimento. A película desliza, também, em um tipo de (sincere? ao menos) histrionics quasi-quasi-sincere que sentiu silly. Após o quinto close-up da cara puffy de Jeremy Piven e rachado, redrimmed, os olhos rasg-enchidos, ele sentiu mais como prestar atenção a um clown dolorosa sad do que um homem na borda. Ainda, eu recomendo: Jason Bateman sozinho vale a pena o preço da admissão. Mas — Giovanna & Mauer — você sabe que minha recomendação deve absolutamente ser ignorada, e scoffed em, por você, direito? Você odiaria este.

Bring the funny

Another short post: I rarely watch stand-up. I catch snippets on Comedy Central, and remember why. I rent a very rare concert film, like Sarah Silverman’s, which is actually pretty good, and I’m still kind of underimpressed. It’s not a genre that intrigues me–it’s like 70% miss and 30% hit and completely formally uninteresting to boot.

But two recent viewings beat the percentages. Demetri Martin’s standup “Person” is not on dvd, but you can catch most of it on youtube. He’s odd, and his ratio of hits to misses is closer to 65-70 to 35-30, and he tries out a few interesting variations that make the act something a bit more involving, too. His shtick: he looks like he’s 10, and he’s one seriously silly person. My favorite bit involves a large pad with graphs/charts for comedy.

But even better–and a lot odder (in the form of the dvd, which has both stand-up and various filmed bits that aren’t sketches but are not exactly backstage chatter either)–is Zach Galifianakis’ Live at the Purple Onion. His jokes don’t always work, but he delivers them with such strangeness, you get the sense that half of his material is being born on the spot. He’s really intense, and then he’ll pull back for an exceedingly silly self-deprecatory chatter on the stage. I’d even say that I get the sense that the filming of the dvd gives us a skewed, inferior vision of his abilities–he gets a bit caught up in the camera, and while funny I have this feeling he’d be even stronger live. Favorite bit: he has a running series of gags about characters he’s developing. One is the Timid Pimp, and that had me laughing for about five minutes.

Pan

Jeff and I saw the superb Pan’s Labyrinth just over a week ago, and I’ve patiently waited him out, thinking: he’ll put up a good post about it, and I can virtually nod my head. But he’s remiss. So I’ll note quickly a couple things:

I loved the film’s negotiation of the “fantasy” and the “reality”–or, rather, I loved that it both invites our attention to the distinction between its represented worlds and also carefully decenters our certainties about both. One world depicts a young girl grappling with a beyond-evil stepfather, a Captain in the fascist Spanish military brutally quashing the local resistance (even as he sternly seeks control of his new wife’s pregnancy). But the girl frequently wanders off into an old maze on the edge of the property, where she encounters a faun who recognizes her as a long-lost princess, and sets her three tasks allow her return to her rightful royal heritage in the underworld. Continue reading Pan

Ridiculous Good Fun

Quick and dirty recommendation: Stephen Chow’s Forbidden City Cop might be a parody of martial arts films but for its loving deployment of fighting styles and mythologies; it slips into exceedingly silly slapstick but then, effortlessly, shows a formal self-reflexivity that seems far more attentive. And I laughed a lot. Chow plays a secret police agent for the Emperor, circa 1890s China. It’s got about 13 forms of chop-socky, some recognizable from the genre and some dreamed up by Chow for this film (Flying Fairy being one of my favorites). There’s a running set of gags riffing on James Bond, extraterrestrials, Chinese medicine, and crossdressing. Not quite the equal of his Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu Hustle, but well worth watching–even for those uninterested in martial arts action flicks, you’d dig this.

3:10 to Yuma

Taking a break from papers, prep for our spring semester, and the heavy-duty (and worthwhile) intellectual razzmatazz on this site (and our sibling blog on books), I watched an old western, based on an Elmore Leonard story. Yuma stars a really wonderful Glenn Ford, playing a manipulative, smart-talking serpent of a bad man (who may have some kind of code in there, under the smirk)–caught and guarded, before the titular train to prison, by a smalltime family-man rancher (Van Heflin) trying to make a few bucks to get through a drought. It’s nothing special, but it’s smart and well-made and I set all else aside and sank into the pleasures of a finely-etched B flick.

Anyone got any other less-known, escapist pleasures to recommend, as semesters get going?