Category: likey

I recommend this film, co-written and directed by Paolo Virzi. It’s a believable, and often moving story–albeit a familiar (and maybe for some, tiresome) one. A doll-faced hick moves to the big city with her family. As she struggle to fit in, to make friends and adjust, there are big disappointments and small triumphs, blah blah blah. Such a familiar tale is bound to be tedious unless we truly care about the characters. And in this film, we do–or I did, anyway. I cared not only about Caterina, but her father. And, in a way, the film could also be titled Caterina’s Father in the Big City, or Giancarlo in the Big City. Continue reading Caterina in the Big City

I have this probably false memory of seeing Peter Bogdanovich’s Nickolodeon as an ABC movie of the week, the film’s excesses–and there are a good number, usually to the film’s detriment–exacerbated by the noisy bombast of the intertitle ABC movie-of-the-week theme as we went to commercial, and the bullshit bombast of the slew of ads interrupting the film. Whether I saw it in that particular venue, the tone of that memory aligns with my more specific recollections of the film: many scenes of cluttered brouhaha, a tendency toward din rather than wit, lots of falling down. Burt Reynolds.

But while there are too many people falling down, a “comic” fight scene that is as long but about one-third as interesting as the alley brawl in They Live, an occasional bid toward wacky that makes one wince, and the leaden balloon that is Burt Reynolds playing wacky* [see below]…. the new director’s cut of Nickolodeon (which was I believe actually shortened from the theatrical release, but most pertinently transferred into a lovely black-and-white from the too-golden sugar-dust look of the color print) …. well, it’s lovely. It’s funny, just melancholic enough to be sweet and not saccharine, full of the trademark Bogdanovich eye for compositional perfection, replete with many bits of slapstick and screwball dialogue that work like gangbusters (the occasionally-great W.D. Richter co-wrote the film), and a genuinely moving sense of the silly wonder of moviemaking. I really enjoyed it. Continue reading Music for the eyes

Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes has great patience in setting up its jigsawed genre workout: we watch a bald, schlumpy, bulbous-nosed, non-hero-type fellow return to a vacation home, noodle about trying to nap, catch a passing glimpse through his binoculars of a naked woman, and wander into a loopy, neatly-closed loop of a time-travel plot. The dreamlike quality of the first thirty minutes had me enthralled: each crazy event led to the next, and our hero Hector never stops to think through what X and Y means–he just sees X, and assumes that therefore Y must follow. (If we ever stop to think too substantively about the choices most characters are making, I think the whole thing fizzles. But, like a dream, if you just keep wandering along, it makes perfect sense.)

Quite enjoyable. I think Primer was nuttier and neater, but also far knottier, and Timecrimes is remarkably lucid if utterly improbable in its plotting. But I urge you to rent it so that you can pull up from the extras a short film by Vigalondo called “7:35 in the Morning,” which works a small miracle on the improbability of song-and-dance numbers. A woman wanders into a cafe for breakfast, where the regulars fail to respond to her greeting and seem strangely quiet…. and then a man bursts from behind a pillar singing the title song, to which everyone in the joint joins. The reason for such behavior neatly reframes our engagement with the musical number, teases out the creepy and uncanny tone underlying most musical numbers — and it’s funny, smart, and well-shot. Great little short.

I’m tempted to write down any number of great lines, or even to upload me humming some of the catchy verses — but we haven’t got the technology. Yet.

Go rent Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Outstanding entertainment — funny, and smart, and (damn!) at the end even surprisingly moving. It’s short, and began life as three acts of an online film, but don’t hold that against Joss Whedon’s genius here, against Neil Patrick Harris’ perfection as the eponymous Doctor, against the criminally-undervalued Nathan Fillion yet again showing why we should scratch our heads that the guy isn’t in many more films than insert-action-comedy-lead here.

This might be my favorite British TV show since The League of Gentlemen (Not that I’ve seen a lot since then. Though Peep Show was funny).
It’s going to start running on Comedy Central in April, and like League it also came from a live stage show and radio program. It’s somewhat akin to Flight of the Conchords since there are songs, and it focuses on a duo, one more handsome than the other. Continue reading The Mighty Boosh

I’m mainly putting a placeholder here, and a little shout of joy at two recent, wonderful film experiences — both of which I want to write more about, and around each/both of which I have been thinking through the ways certain hard-nosed depictions of Grim family emotions and realities are teased out through certain escapist genre conventions. But I don’t have time, nor have I really gotten my head around this analysis. So, for the moment, I’ll say:

—Coraline is the best children’s film in years, which may be faint praise, but add this: it’s also one of the best films I’ve seen in some time, rich in glorious technique and baroque narrative detail and the flush of emotions (fear, despair, joy, awe) of the best fairy tales. The 3d version is … well, stunning, but I think I’d have loved the film regardless.

–So different on the surface–in technique, theme, intended audience–that it might seem like a wholly different medium, Frozen River shows up two of the best performances from last year (Melissa Leo and Misty Upham) in a tale that begins in the familiar backroads small-town deadends of any number of great film noirs. It plays a little like dirty realism, hung on a suspense-thriller hook–and it’s just wonderful, and heartbreaking, in so many ways.

See ’em both. I’d really like to talk about them.

this is the 2007 aussie movie that won a ton of aussie awards and that one can watch “instantly” on netflix if one has fast internet access (michael, are you still cut off from the world?). i’ve been away from movies and tv shows for a long time because i developed a strange phobia towards live screens — they weren’t speaking to me or telling me what to do or anything like that, just making me very nervous. but now i’m back, and i can watch pretty much anything except sci-fi, which proves to me that my strange phobia had no relation whatsoever to content, as i always claimed. so i’ll write about this movie out of sheer happiness and relief at my return to the pleasures of cinema. Continue reading noise

Ah, one of my favorite tropes: people behaving irresponsibly. Three very different sorts of films, each recommended as worthy if flawed: Continue reading Some misbehavin’

Go get it. Pretty damn good–great for an hour, then it kind of veers too much into the quirky conventional road-movie romance fantasy it so adroitly avoids and disrupts before that, but… I was sold by then. It’s anchored by a(nother) great performance by Lou Taylor Pucci, as a kid taken by an urge to get unstuck, so he steals a car… everything else about the plot emerges en route, so I won’t spoil up front. But there’s some dialogue and supporting performances that are sly, strange, occasionally idiosyncratically wonderful–particularly Bill Duke, as a traveling liquor salesman. And besides Pucci the film boasts a great M. Ward soundtrack.

…won’t win hearts or minds, but it’s a dandy little nasty entertainment with enough wit and style–and a kick-drum wonder of a final shot–and I think it’s worth a look. Andy Serkis and Reece Sheersmith (familiar to many of us from “The League of Gentlemen,” whose name itself seems a product of said League) star as brothers involved in low-level criminal thuggery, a foolish kidnapping of a boss’ daughter, and the film opens somewhere north-northeast of nastier comic noirs by the Coens or Ritchie. They’re imbeciles, if relatively likable. And then the film takes a left turn toward those Hills with eyes, and things get violent, genuinely creepy and suspenseful, and still generally likable and funny. Again, nothing spectacular–the director, one Paul Andrew Williams, is coming off a well-received and annoyingly-unavailable-in-the-States thriller called London to Brighton, and he displays far more patience, visual wit, and structural clarity than the aforementioned Ritchie. This may be more my cup of joe than Gio’s, or most of youse, as I remain a sucker for homicidal mutant hicks and needless chopping and spurting, but the leads are funny and fun to watch, and … well, there you have it.