First, to get it out of the way: many of us will try Deja Vu no matter what any of the rest of us say about the film. And why not? It’s got Denzel Washington, and a gloriously loony plot. Well–glorious for about 20 minutes, and then the film’s a flat bore. Not bad. Worse: boring.
But what I’m here to tell you is about two other films. Continue reading Old and another small Joy
I’d never seen this. It’s sweet as hell. I wonder if it was intentionally marketed as a film “for the whole family” when it was released, or if it just ended up that way…
Though all four of the main characters (known by the pejorative “Cutters” as in stonecutters, which was the local industry) have enough of a backstory to understand their situations, we don’t get enough from them. Daniel Stern in particular gets the short shrift on his life story, and David, the main character, with his wannabe-Italian kitsch, might actually be the least interesting of the bunch, definitely the one that grows tiresome most quickly. I’m no fan of sports movies and last second victories, but this really did have me in its clutches through the end. I do vaguely remember as a kid that scene of David riding his bike on a highway in the slipstream of a semi-truck carrying Cinzano, with the driver giving him hand signals letting him know how fast he’s going – 60 mph at one point. Dennis Quaid looks like one of those half-nude Abercrombie & Fitch catalog models durng the “swimming hole” scenes – and Hart Bochner (!!!) of all people, looking a lot like Luke Wilson’s guest spots on That 70s Show, is better than decent as the ass-hole frat-boy. Continue reading Breaking Away (1979)
remarkably, if the search i just did is reliable (it didn’t look very reliable), no one has posted on this yet. we just saw it, at the theatre no less, and it was a well well spent $9 (it’s a cheapo theatre). forest whitaker is, of course, fantastic (did he win an oscar? i can’t remember and i don’t feel like checking); but it’s not just him. the whole cast is really good, gillian anderson is there only long enough for us to appreciate how good her english accent is and how damn beautiful she is, and james mcavoy, whom i had never seen before, looks a bit like russel crowe and is very attractive indeed. i don’t know any of the african (or meant-to-be-african) actors, but i really thought the ensemble was most effective. this is, however, indisputably, whitaker’s film. what an actor. Continue reading the last king of scotland
i liked shadowboxer very much. this is a little, ambitious-slash-pretentious film that i suspect no contributors to this blog will want to watch unless dragged to it by wild horses — i hope i’m wrong. helen mirren and cuba gooding jr are a team of hired killers who are also (adopted) mother and son and lovers. their different colors (as in skin) and age difference makes them triple taboo breakers, which of course is one of the main attractions of this film. director lee daniels is not timid about this. rose and mickey are frequently shown in bed and in various tender situations. their love for each other is, arguably, the main focus of the film. the visual representation of their relationship, though, betrays hidden complications. in one scene, mickey is asleep at the bottom of the bed, curled up, while rose lies normally, head to bottom. in the extras, lee says he didn’t want to show them side by side. i don’t know what kind of hierarchy he meant to emphasize, but the racial one is the one that jumped at me in that moment, even though mickey’s fetal position at the bottom of the bed evokes the mother-child theme as well. Continue reading shadowboxer
Just a quick note; this film isn’t out yet, but it did well at Sundance, and got a distributor, and you should keep your eyes peeled for it at festivals or art-houses. It’s called Once and it’s set in Dublin, and it’s remarkably well acted by Irish singer Glenn Hansard of the Frames and Markéta Irglová, a Czech singer. The music can sometimes go on a bit too long (they play songs for each other in real time), but it’s remarkably well acted and written, with an ending neither sappy nor crushing. And a small plug as well. The Frames’ new album is just out, called The Cost, and is much more available than this movie is currently. I think most people here except Arnab would enjoy it.
Look Both Ways is a rather good Australian movie about cancer, loneliness, uncontrollable thoughts, mortality, coping, smoking, children, purpose and family. Maybe it’s about more than that too, but it’s a good start. I’m eager to give the benefit of the doubt to any movie that tries to deal with dying, esp. when it’s both the person dying and the people left behind. I really admired The Barbarian Invasions for that reason. This doesn’t get nearly as deep and full of itself as that one; it just wouldn’t be Australian as if it did.
One characer is diagnosed with testicular cancer straight off, and another imagines scenes of her own demise around every corner. Do they meet and fall in love? Well, yeah. Nothing earth-shattering there, but the characters are believeable and try to do the right things, difficult as that may be. It’s too sappy and there’s a tendency to break into montage with some Damien Rice-esque Australian singer-songwriter strumming a tune far too often. But I give a lot of respect to the writer-director here anyway, Sarah Watt, who is primarily an animator. This is her first live-action film.
Dominion however, hoo boy. Continue reading Look Both Ways / Dominion a là Schrader
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
i’ve been trying to write these reviews for days now. these are troubling movies, not only for what they say about the iraq war and the war on terror, but also for the feelings of identification and alienation they evoked in me.
according to the ground truth, the iraq war’s difference from other wars the US fought consists in the fact that a) the psychological conditioning of soldiers to kill people they don’t hate without inhibition has achieved a phenomenal success, b) the enemy is pretty much indistinguishable from the non-inimical civilian, and c) body armor and surgical technologies save many more lives than in past wars but don’t save limbs, faces, and psyches. what you get is a phenomenal, brutal, free-for-all bloodbath and a lot of seriously damaged veterans. none of this is news to any of us, but filmmaker patricia foulkrod gives these known facts the support of some pretty amazing (and shocking) footage, and a remarkable cast of interviewees. Continue reading the ground truth and the road to guantanamo
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
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.