Category: likey

Great white-knuckle nail-biter. Unlike the recent crop of horror films, Ils eschews the gore and simply ratchets up anxiety — with excellent steady editing, a shrewd use of shots and lighting, freaky sound. It opens cold, with a mother and irritating teen daughter crashing their car and finding themselves confronted by hidden antagonists. Then, switch gears to the real protagonists, we watch a French teacher and her husband in their country home find themselves subject to the same unexplained, merciless taunting and attack.

I gotta say, I loved it. At about 75 minutes, it’s deliberately paced but sleek and shorn of fat. Freaked me out something wonderful…

And I think the two directors are people to watch. Opening credits roll over a montage of the teacher’s car driving home. All of the shots are from above, composed with precision to follow the red vehicle along a straight line of highway, diagonally ‘up’ the shot through a neighborhood, around a curve. It’s a beautiful scene, disconnected from the story, but the imagery–this small motion, along precise geometrical lines–is both beautiful and a sly nod to the narrative structure, the cold hard precision of this kind of horror film.

Ousmane Sembene’s last film manages to keep its focus tight on one community, to weave in warmth and humor and a real sense of pleasure in the everyday, while tackling the big issue of female genital mutilation. It doesn’t preach, doesn’t lay on the horrors with a trowel, in fact while being terribly moving it’s not really melodramatic….

By keeping such a focus and tone, the politics of the movie–and its feminist ethos–also remains local, and hopeful. The challenges to the ritual practice emerge from certain women’s resistance, and their critique ripples out through and changes the community. The men blame the outside world, only audible via the radios all the women listen to, but the women’s resistance is carefully orchestrated and illustrated as entirely organic. If any of you folks do see this, I’d love to discuss its approach to politics more, what seems like the film’s disinterest in (or refutation of) the “postcolonial” or global as the engine of change…..

But don’t see it just to talk abstractions or political theory. It’s a very strong, lovely, small-scale film, deceptively simple and naturalistic.

We’re only half-done, 3 of 6 hour-longs, but this is a CRACKIN’ murder-slash-political thriller, witty and tense and very well-played. Great entertainment.

I promised a post on In Bruges, which Kris and I very much enjoyed, but I’ve been wracking my brain about what exactly grabbed me about it. The plot’s too Tarantino: two hitmen sent to cool their heels in Bruges, and they do the sightseeing thing, while one (Ray, played by Colin Farrell) suffers both a crushing (funny) ennui with all things Bruges and the lingering ethical after-effects of their last gig. Farrell is not just better than I’ve seen him, and not just finally good (since I don’t think I’ve ever really thought much of his performances), he’s pretty damn good–holds his own in the constant precise shadings and even more constant tonal shifts of writer-director McDonagh’s dialogue. Ralph Fiennes shows up two-thirds of the way through and rips it up, gloriously unblinkingly BenKingsleyinSexyBeastish as the ridiculous vicious boss Harry.

Ostensibly the film uses this black-comic set-up as cover for a plot/theme about violence, kids, … stuff McDonagh’s exploited before in his play “The Pillowman.” But as a morality play, the thing’s quite thin–clearly, the pleasures of viciousness don’t just outweigh a moral vision, they stomp the shit out of it. Continue reading Seductive destructions

I was never a player of video games, still lose interest too quickly to really dig in and learn, let alone master, any game. And when it cost a quarter to play, you had to have a lot of quarters–and an obsessive slant–to sit and become anything like good. I grew tired of such antics after the initial blast of interest in the graphics or style wore off.

And my experience of those obsessive players who got really good at games–in the arcade or at home–was for the most part equally trying. I couldn’t empathize with their obsession. And while most were members of the same geek posse I got lumped with, it was hard to get past the arrogance of many game players. I mean, if I wanted boys with big attitudes about bullshit pasttimes, I could have just hung out with my brother and the athletes.

So I came at King of Kong as an ethnographer familiar with the culture, not a current or former citizen. Continue reading King of Kong

The Ten perhaps deserves no major acclaim–as a sketchy chapter-driven film, it misses often enough to make it casually pleasurable. But it’s never less than amiably and enjoyably silly, and there are a few bits that are amazing, especially Liev Schrieber as a suburban homeowner sucked into a competition with his neighbor over CAT-scans. And it makes casual fun out of religious law, anal rape, and the death of children — what’s not to love? Certainly worth your time, although I’ll recommend Smiley Face again as being the best bet for funny-films-that-did-poorly-at-the-box-office-and-are-now-available-on-dvd.

I also have been watching The Love Bug with Max, who John is probably wondering about. I forgot the power of Dean Jones. And there’s a scene where Herbie tries to commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. The car actually perches on the railing, teetering precariously over the Bay. Hilarity! Now I’m going to queue up The Apple Dumpling Gang for its long-forgotten opium-withdrawal scene, Knotts and Conway wracked with feverish rage….

This goes on my year’s list, a great film about a sport that bores me silly. The film seems to be in real time, following first a man seeking his daughter who’s snuck off to see the Iranian team struggle with Bahrain’s for entrance into the World Cup, the catch being that women aren’t allowed to go to public sporting events. The film smoothly leaves the man behind, jumping to another van (as it passes by, flags waving, excited fans chanting) where a poorly-disguised woman nervously tries to avoid attention.

Continue reading Offside

Kris and I both loved this, its acid-tongued stream of one-liners a tart complement to its openhearted appreciation of all characters. Every performer in this film is pitch-perfect, special mention for Ellen Page who is as vivid and lovely and moving as everyone says, and has as good an ear for her lines as the always-remarkable Michael Cera (who seems to have an uncanny ability to find whole new symphonies of nuance in the blank-faced befuddlement of the poor guy to whom things happen).

I was most impressed by how the film, even as it turned into the skid toward certain generic expectations, confounded the tendency to lay blame or find a convenient villain or foil.

[Minor spoliers ahead]

Continue reading Juno