Category: (by verdict)

Martyrs

Give the French their due. They see an American genre wussing out, and they don’t just sit back and snarkez-vous. Take torture porn. (Please. *ahem*) Eli Roth, Hostel? Wuss-tacular. Let’s have Betty Blue try and get the fetus from a pregnant woman trapped in her home. Let’s have Monica Bellucci’s weird-looking boyfriend play inbreeding hicks (both genders!) enacting some barely-explicable satanic ritual on Parisian hipster douchebags.
Continue reading Martyrs

The Reader

Is there really no thread for this film? I’m still trying to figure out my reaction, and it is all but impossible to write about without spoilers, so I hope others have seen it. I assume we all know the story: 15 year-old Michael (David Kross) begins a relationship with 36 year-old Hannah (Kate Winslet) in 1958. She disappears and he sees her again when he is in law school and she is on trial for being a guard at a concentration camp. Hannah is convicted. The adult Michael is played by Ralph Fiennes, and he struggles with his memories of his time with Hannah, and reconnects with her as she serves her jail sentence. The title comes from the fact that Hannah asks the young Michael to read literature to her. It subsequently becomes clear that she had also asked girls in the camp to read to her. The law student Michael deduces that Hannah must have been illiterate. Continue reading The Reader

Star Trek

I think we need some burden-sharing here; I should not be the only one on the blog going to the opening day of these summer blockbusters. How about if Jeff goes to see Angels and Demons next week and Gio takes on Terminator Salvation the week after?

There are no surprises here. This is the prequel in which we see the young Kirk enter the Starfleet Academy and immediately get thrown into a battle to save the Earth from rebel Romulans from the future. Continue reading Star Trek

Crime/Labor

I have a fascination for heist narratives, onscreen or on the page: the lovingly-detailed build-up, where we delve into the lives of a varied group of criminals, the casing of joints, the hatching of plans; the equally painstaking attention to the execution of the gig, with and without hitches; the last-act which can diverge, in equally-satisfying ways, toward hair-breadth escapes and the caper’s happy-ending OR toward unplanned interference, the one detail missed which blows the escape, or the eruption of submerged tensions which tears apart the gang, or….

David Denby once, in an aside, thought filmmakers loved heist films because the elaborate planning and execution echoed the intricacies of filmmaking. (Denby so rarely says anything smart that it stuck in my head. [I only say this to get into the next edition of his book on _Snark_.]) I probably get sucked in by my own meta-narrative obsessions: heist stories are about the shaping of a tightly-defined, closed plot… and the impossibility of defining and closing such plots.

But another pleasure is less analytical: I enjoy watching these films because they are about work. How often do we see characters in film working? Sure, we may see an office, or occasionally a factory; there are occasionally subplots involving a big presentation or some event. But people defining an outcome, and then carefully doing all the little shit that needs doing to make that outcome occur — heist films, or more broadly certain variants of the crime narrative, are about workers and their tasks. Continue reading Crime/Labor

Favorite shots

I thought I’d try something different, though hardly unprecedented. Other film blogs take full advantage of image and video hosting capabilities. Ours, though rich in humor and ideas, is pretty stale visually. So here goes. What are some of your favorite shots? (no, Michael, Hackler is not what I had in mind). Dig around online and see if you can images of your faves! Continue reading Favorite shots

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Is really not that bad. It is solid entertainment, full of impressive action sequences (including one great one on Three Mile Island), loosely weaved together with the origin story to Wolverine and his brother, Sabretooth (played by Liev Schreiber, hamming it up). There is little effort made to ponder the dialectics of mutant existence, in contrast to the original movie trilogy, so instead we get a standard story of sibling rivalry, lost love, revenge, and admantium injection. It is fun to see more of the comic book mutants appear as extras, and even Xavier makes a late appearance. But nothing very complicated is being attempted in the movie, and it is a good way to ease into the summer blockbuster season.

As I was buying the ticket, the seller told me to “stay for the credits” and indeed, there is a fairly pointless 30 second scene right after the five full minutes of credits (during which I learned that what appeared to be the Canadian Rockies, were in fact mountains in New Zealand).  I wonder if this was an official message, or just an employee eager than I not miss a second of the origin story.

Caterina in the Big City

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

Music for the eyes

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