Author: reynolds

Superman‘s Big Fat Crying Jag

Well… I didn’t hate it.

The first half-hour, forty-five minutes has some nice touches. As in many of his big-budget extravagaction films, Bryan Singer displays a real fondness and talent for the character-driven, carefully-staged, small-scale suspenseful witty moments… even as such films invariably stomp all over such smaller pleasures, looking to supersede the sequence with CGItis.

What works: a lot of small character details and witty side-ways moments (again, mostly in that first third of the film). One particularly good sequence involving a henchman, a defiant Lois Lane, and her sickly little boy, the boy and h-man playing “Body and Soul” on the piano together. (It’s a really great bit.) Spacey, occasionally. Posey, less occasionally.
Continue reading Superman‘s Big Fat Crying Jag

Val Lewton

Kris and I watched The 7th Victim last evening, a spooky noir-ish story about a young woman trying to track down her missing sister, and runs into a secretive group of (as opposed to a bunch of showboat) Satanists. Which sounds sensationalized, and for a film from the ’40s portends some obvious schlocky “evil” (pronounced, a la Kevin McDonald, EEEE-villllll). It ain’t; like Lewton’s other productions, this is spooky, intelligent. Continue reading Val Lewton

Save the Green Planet

I’m not even sure how, or what, to recommend–but a flat assertion that this is worth seeing won’t do.

The plot: a young man believes that aliens have infiltrated corporate culture, and are carrying out experiments on the Earth. To save all, the hero kidnaps a big-league asshole CEO and starts torturing the guy to get him to contact his e.t. cohorts and stop the destruction. The film begins in strange silly slapstick land and creeps, oddly, into serial killer territory; our hero is, unsurprisingly, a bit whacked, but a dark and often moving backstory turns the film into a kind of psychological thriller. With slapstick. And…

…well, genre’s hard to nail down. The director (Jun-hwan Jeong) has energy and style to burn, and while the film’s plot may suggest z-picture camp it’s done with A-level aesthetics. And, yeah, it actually has some emotional heft. It didn’t fully work for me, or it wasn’t the 5-star dazzle I’d hoped, but I was never less than engaged and always off-guard. Aren’t too many films that so ceaselessly, slyly tangle with genre. (‘Though I’m beginning to think that the great stuff coming out of South Korea has a lock on this hybridized aesthetic.) And now let this post linger without comment for years to come…..

Chappelle

Block Party is just plain fun. From the minute the menu loaded–a great clip of Chappelle, bullhorn in hand, yelling at a marching band and dancing–you get invited in; the sense of play makes this one of the best concert films I’ve ever seen, and I’m not even a particular fan of any of the musical acts (admiring all, but only really digging the Fugees on my own time). Like The Last Waltz, I ended up loving the performances because of so much context, so clear a sense of the performers’ joy, despite my prior disinterest in the musicians.

The movie does a wonderful job capturing the infectious energy of Chappelle, intercutting performances with clips of Dave preparing the site, encouraging folks from his hometown in Ohio to come (with golden tickets and bus) to the show in Bed-Stuy, goofing with the site’s residents. The film slips in sideways a pretty hard-edged critique (of racism, of politics, of the relationship between those two and celebrity) while remaining never less than party-minded; in fact, and this is what I’ve always loved about Chappelle (and separates his challenges from a comic like Sarah Silverman) is that sense of invitation. It’s a party, it’s silly… even as his material (and the musicians’ performances) remains explicitly political and incisive.

He has a fantastic joke about the D.C. snipers, that he slips in after a serious discussion of the pressures placed on black performers who are celebrated by predominantly white audiences (I won’t give it away) . . . and the joke conveys yet complicates, affirms while not simply asserting the problems discussed: the joke flirts with racism, confuses those of us in the audience just marked by the discussion as a problem. Great, great stuff. I want more Chappelle, and I’m also mightily impressed by Michel Gondry’s work directing.

One more …

I gotta give one great big shout for the fabulous (in all senses) Kamikaze Girls: the pop-culture-saturated story of an improbable friendship between Momoko (Kyoko Fukada), a young woman striving like Wilde toward a “rococo” way of being in frilly Lolita-inspired dresses, and Ichigo/Ichiko (Anna Tsuchiya), a young woman striving to be a Wild One via a tough-grrl Yanki way of being.

The movie is a joy to watch, moving through flashbacks and fantasy sequences of exuberant playfulness, even presenting one sequence in cartoons (to keep “you kids” attentive, Momoko tells the camera). It’s one big sugary/drug-rush of a film, but not–for all that–simplistic or stupid; it avoids all the expected cliches (especially the seemingly-inevitable breakdown of female friendship into hetero courtship). And best of all it revels in the intelligence and agency of its protagonists–not suckered into prefab style but slyly finding in the trash of consumer culture means to make something of their own. But blah blah: it’s just a blast.

Clubland: Black Narcissus

So, many of us wanted to see a film at something closer to the same time, to get a collective discussion together. I chose Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Narcissus to start us off, and therefore I pitch at you a few, by-no-means-inclusive reactions and readings, intended merely as jumpstart: Continue reading Clubland: Black Narcissus

Gore

No, not another post on violence. I saw An Inconvenient Truth last evening, and it’s a pretty damn good documentary. Admittedly, I kind of enjoy well-spun, finely-crafted talking-head documentaries, and this is essentially one guy on a stage doing a very fine power-point/multi-media presentation. That said, with a generally-refined sense of how to “open” up the lecture, the lecture is smart, witty, engaging, challenging. I think it’s a helluva good introductory argument about global warming, but it’s also just a fine documentary about a subject by an expert.

Now, that expert happens to be an ex-Veep, famous for having been displaced from the Presidency. Continue reading Gore

Prairie Home

Depending on your appreciation of Keillor’s conflation of schmaltzy cornpone and dry, sly sting (which brings out, in the actors, ham on wry), either a dreamy afternoon in good company or a forceful lug-wrench to the soft area between your forehead and your ear. I fall in between: I am a sucker when Keillor stops singing and wanders around flatfooted, mumbling out yarns and sidestepping emotional reactions; I’m equally smitten with the extravagant “Midwestern” dramatics of Meryl Streep’s Johnson sister or the equally outsized snap of Lily Tomlin’s more bilious, bibulous Johnson sister. I also happily confess to loving John Reilly and Woody Harrelson shamelessly twanging and slanging away in the wings.

I’m less keen on the many false notes struck by the framing narratives (an odd misplaced wandering death angel, a vision more in keeping with Michael Landon than, say, Bergman; a dull plot about the end of the show, and a mean old capitalist from Texas, ably and acutely played by Tommy Lee Jones without one hint of whimsy but also lacking any hint of dramatic purpose); the waste of Kevin Kline and Maya Rudolph and a few other stray supporters, left drifting with the wisp of character and comic “bits”. And I almost always turn off the radio “Prairie” (if Kris will let me) whenever anyone starts singing; that ain’t my cup of joe, and it wears about as poorly when seen as when heard.
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The Agronomist

Jonathan Demme’s documentary about Haitian journalist/activist Jean Dominique gets a quick recommendation from me. It doesn’t reinvent the form, nor is it the one film to see about Haiti’s political struggles over the last 40 years. But–kind of like the doc on William Eggleston–this film emerges from a personal relationship between filmmaker and subject; its talking head footage of Dominique was collected over a few years, during his periods of exile in NYC, and after Dominique’s assassination Demme spliced it together, fleshed out the history, caught up with some others.

What I very much appreciated about the film was that it didn’t stop to provide tons of explication–it demands that you either inform yourself or pay close attention, rather than giving you Haiti 101 on a plate. I also loved Dominique, garrulous and theatrical and impassioned–the film hews to his personality as a vehicle for conveying the storm of Haiti’s history, but never in that too-pat bio-doc format that collapses personal and national histories into one shared story. Instead, we are learning about Dominique… and necessarily, with this committed social activist, we engage with Haiti.
Continue reading The Agronomist