Author: reynolds

Looks like we’re in for a long night of cocaine.

Mystery Team seems like a great 4-minute sketch–three intrepid kid detectives grow up but never grow out of their roles. Smack ’em down among your typical foul-mouthed contemporaries, play up their naivete against risque shenanigans. And you can imagine this great sketch going horribly wrong at feature-length — fading into a coma from fatal whimsy, or yukking it up with the yucky yuks. But MT manages to have its chocolate milk and drink it, too. Despite the occasional twee or arch bit, despite a willingness to sink their hands deep into the muck (and to dig out some great laughs), this is a character-driven comedy — and about as idiosyncratic and winning as I’ve seen in some time. The first 20 minutes drag — it seemed like that high-concept sketch — but as the characters develop, the cast gets increasingly good at selling strange jokes, and the film delights in unforced delivery of very funny lines.

All this over a fucking shopping mall?

The first installment of the British miniseries Red Riding — 1974–is better than any film I’ve seen thus far this year. It’s a little flawed–a little too in love with impressionistic love scenes, but emphasis on me nagging when I should be crowing. Performances across the board are phenomenal, particularly a late-arriving heavy played with thick shaggy mane and thick shaggy Yorkshire accent by Sean Bean. It’s gorgeously filmed, almost impossible to tell it was television, given such rigorous attention to ’70s-influenced widescreen compositions and a showboat tracking shot or two. The story begins with and ostensibly centers on a possible serial killer, taking little girls, but that mystery is a thread through a thicket — dense social and political context, a thick ash-cloud gray-sky atmosphere, and a poisoned moral universe….

I got the UK dvd set, but I’d say this’d be very much worth catching in the theaters, as it sneaks around the country.

Interesting missteps

After wasting my time, like Chris, on the B13 sequel — how can you do a follow-up to a movie celebrated primarily for its parkour antics and pretty much dump the parkour? — I shifted my queue around to try and expand my horizons a bit. This was not entirely successful, but both of the following films offer intriguing performances and filmmakers playing to their own uncommercial instincts. Worth seeing, yet… Continue reading Interesting missteps

Live-blogging The Box

3:00 Wallpaper.

5:13 Cameron Diaz’s southern accent is kind of creepy.

6:45 Everybody talks real slow and weird-like. Creepy.

8:56 What’s up with that high school kid?

10:13 What’s up with her foot? Sartre?!!

14:54 Creepy.

18:23 I think it’s creepier to see the little digitized gaps in Langella’s profile than to see the digitized wound on his face.

20:23 Creepy music.

25:14 What the fuck?
Continue reading Live-blogging The Box

Meet the new man . . . (same as the old man?)

I tossed out a throwaway sputter about “audience” in the conversation debating — or, rather, digressive chatter circling around — Gio’s pointed, repeatedly noted complaint that we seem stuck in a manly-man rut. Gio notes that we boys watch an awful lot of boys’ films, and she wishes there were a little more engagement with women’s films. This usually cues my self-deprecation, a bit of nervous collar-pulling, a fair amount of defensive listing-of-women’s-films-we-love, a lot of “deconstructing” of the premise of genre (and avoiding the issue), etc. I tend to take it the way John did, smartly noting how his tastes do tend with film to veer toward a range of films (and techniques, filmmakers, genres) shaped with male audiences in mind… when his iPod might be far more diverse.

I could say that my iPod and my netflix queue are chockablock full of shoot-’em-ups and cock-rock, and sure tons of great stuff that shouldn’t be simply reduced to gender debates, but very few works coming out of or aimed toward viewers other than people like me. My bookshelf is another story (ahem), and I think John raised a very interesting question — let’s stipulate that our tastes aren’t wholly reducible to our subject positions in cultural categories, but those categories sure as hell inform our tastes. Why in some forms do we find a more catholic or eclectic openness. . . and in other forms less resist than fail to be at all attracted to such alternatives?

Which is not to say we should beat ourselves up about this, nor is that Gio’s point. She’s lamenting, not criticizing, I think. I’m not keen to expand my engagement with crap films to include not just the action shite I already enjoy but also the rom-com crapola that bores me silly. But . . . I wouldn’t on the other hand sidestep the fact that my cinematic tastes are thoroughly enmeshed with/embodied in visions of masculinity. Gio wishes this blog weren’t so man-centric in its reviews and discussions; I’m not sure we get around that completely, nor do I feel we need to–but it would sure be nice to try consciously to do more than have the occasional “women’s-film month” discussions. It’d probably work best if we just simply had more members (not a pun), so that the weight of our collective interests was more widely distributed. Continue reading Meet the new man . . . (same as the old man?)

Party Down

I don’t have Starz, as my cable provider only carries plurals using the letter “s”–those repressive motherfuckerz–so I had no clue that this even existed. And when I did hear some rumor that it existed, the it sounded crap: a series about down-on-their-luck Hollywood-wannabes who work for a catering company. Hijinks ensue! Every week new guest stars (“hosting” the parties where the catering goes down)! Love Boat meets Entourage–that’s one unseductive mashup, there.

But–with some wit and style from a creative team which included the Veronica Mars head honcho and Paul Rudd–season one is pretty damn funny. The cast is generally very strong, with a standout trademark loop-de-loop turn by Jane Lynch. But my favorite is Ken Marino, the schlub team-spirit work-ethic-chanting supervisor with a huge schlong (episode 4, I think). All of these are available on Netflix’s play-now, so… give it a go.

The Good Old Stuff

The fussy particulars of every stray image, every slightly off-center accent or line reading, make Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer a gloriously fun visually-enthralling puzzlebox, even if the storyline seems a bit thinner, a bit more dependent upon a too-easy associative political anxiety. (And a bit too invested in a shrill misogyny that seems both allusively and reductively Hitchcockian.)

Continue reading The Good Old Stuff

Zhaownrrhhh

I lack any good rationale for linking these three films under a loose “point” about genre, but I’m lazy and haven’t posted in forever.

Prachya Pinkaew’s Tom yum goong (renamed in the US The Protector by some dolt) is in many ways simply a showcase for Tony Jaa jumping really high and kicking people in the face, or flying through the air to land with his knees on someone’s nose, or jumping from a standstill to smash a lightpost over a guy’s head, or doing a backflip and landing on a narrow scaffold over a long fall to escape a crazy BMX guy trying to run him over. And so on. It’s got a prototypical faux-classical schmaltzy set-up: the ancient protectors of elephants lose an elephant–and her baby!–to mafiosi in Sydney. Revenge/rescue ensues. Cue Tony Jaa’s thighs and steel toes. Continue reading Zhaownrrhhh