Category: (by verdict)

Tropic Thunder

This was good giddy fun. Kicking off nicely even before it starts with four faux movie trailers that introduce each character, the latest Ben Stiller film is as good a movie about movies I’ve seen in a while (in fact, the faux movie trailers seemed uncannily at home with trailers for College and Righteous Kill). In brief, here’s the story and my take: Continue reading Tropic Thunder

Bloody hell

About once every three months I head to the local blood bank where I am hooked up to a machine which removes all of my blood, cycling in first some kind of plasma stuff then replacing my old, tired corpuscles with some from a chubby, fresh-faced 14-year-old Iowan. (Ex-fresh-faced, alas.) Anyway, I’m trapped there for two hours, and can’t move my arm. Whatever movie I’ve brought along and put on, I watch all the way through.

Today, I brought Smart People Continue reading Bloody hell

My Blueberry Nights

This is Kar Wai Wong’s first movie filmed in the United States. It is a very loosely linked set of three tales of obsession and lost love. Nora Jones stars. Hers is the first story, with Jude Law as the friendly cafe owner who holds her hand as she tries to get over a past relationship, and slowly falls for her. Then Jones travels west, where the second story (and easily the best) centers on David Strathairn, who spends his nights on a barstool pining for his ex-wife. Finally Jones meets up with Natalie Portman, as a gambler with father issues, before returning to New York and Jeremy (Law).  It is typically lush, and Kar Wai Wong does silences, and brief moments of slow motion as well as anyone. But the story is too thin to contain a movie, and the performances are weak, with the exception of Strathairn. This is ultimately a little disappointing coming from the director of Chunking Express, In the Mood for Love,  and 2046.

persepolis

we can’t be the only ones who’ve seen this. it came highly recommended by our friends jane and karen in boulder, not to mention the majority of reliable film critics, but i fear i found it a little disappointing. which is not to say i disliked it. the animation is wonderful, and a refreshing change from the pixar-realism of american animation, or for that matter the magical miyazaki style. however, the narrative was a little flat. the film may just be inheriting the graphic novel’s lack of thematic complexity (i have not read it), but i thought there was no real interesting connection made between the coming of age story and the potted history of the iranian revolution. by which i mean that the two were just there together, and neither illuminated or shaded the other in an interesting way. i appreciated the film (and the graphic novel’s, i presume) resistance to the mapping of personal growth onto a journey of salvation to the west, which is all too common a feature of the genre, but it would have been more interesting if the film paid more attention to questions of gender within the iranian revolution. from the little i know of it, i understand that older women, especially from the non-westernized classes were a large, public part of the revolution. and, of course, class itself is mostly elided here. i don’t wish to suggest that the story of a westernized, (presumably) upper-middle class kid cannot be the central story of a critique of the iranian revolution, but it needed to be situated a little more. why does she go to french school in tehran in the first place? how does her family have contacts in vienna and paris? (and, as sunhee asked, why is the film in french to begin with?) how does her immediate family survive in a time when all their radical friends are disappearing?

anyone else?

Spaced Pineapple

Saw the Express with Jeff last week, and have just finished up both series of Spaced with Kris, and they seem complementary experiences: heavily referential but more parroty homages than parody, attuned to the finer points of myriad pop cultural details iconic and not-so, each devoted to character more than plot, and equally invested in the many pleasures of forgetting forward motion to let said characters chatter and get wasted and circle around their intense emotional relationships with one another.

Both have been pumped up but I found them pleasurable, occasionally brilliant but not all that, even as they were always good company.

Blah di blah. My review is boring. I’d contemplated throwing out some noodling about a generation of filmmakers who commit to reflexivity yet avoid a kneejerk irony or detachment… but I’m feeling no burn to do so. It’s kind of neat that the adoring recreation of, say, a few shots from Tarantino are not just the filmmakers showing off but actually serve the characters–who shape themselves via such associations. And Spaced, in particular, can brilliantly weave such allusions into plots that explore and expand upon these characters’ worlds — the show deploys parody, but the parody’s not its own raison d’etre.

And now that I’ve casually used French, I bid you adieu.

X Files: I Want to Believe

[SPOILERS, so to speak] Russians are ugly, even gay Russians. Being molested by a Catholic priest turns you gay and makes you want to have your weird bald head transplanted onto the body of a woman. Russians do sophisticated surgery in dirty trailers, where dogs run free. They don’t even put on masks in operating rooms. Medical professionals get critical information off Google. Canada looks funny. Nobody minds when Amanda Peet gets killed. Nobody remembers the aliens on/in the earth. You can’t go home again.

Sucked

I should have posted on Dark Knight and schooled Arnab, but instead I watched other things. The Last Winter was an indie horror about global warming, and Larry Fessenden is an interesting director, and it had a good cast, and it mostly sucked. So I tried Six Reasons Why, a Canadian indie that Netflix convinced me was something I’d like, and it has Colm Feore in it, and was a post-apocalyptic Western thingy shot on about a 48 cents per day budget. And you can see almost every penny in it. Sucked. Sucked, sucked, sucked.

So then I watched about 45 minutes of Blades of Glory, which didn’t suck, but wasn’t good. And Netflix wouldn’t send me Spaced or Mad Men, and that, too, sucked.

The Dark Knight

I’m still kind of reeling, stunned by this, but I’ll jump out on the limb and assert (and later reflect and expand upon the assertion): this is the best American pop/genre film since Silence of the Lambs.

How’s that for pumping up your expectations? More crazy-ass assertions to come on the centrality of anarchy and disorder to great American pop . . .

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

I’ve been expecting someone to post on this all week. Since no one has, I’ll clear the decks before the Dark Knight comments appear (sadly I’m in Europe, where it doesn’t open for another week or so, so I’m looking forward to hearing your reactions). I was very enthusiastic about the second Hellboy right after watching it; a week on and I’m a little less enthralled. Still, this is the most visually inventive and lush movie I have seen in a long time. Setting aside plot, character and dialogue, the movie is worth watching just for the endless delight of its imagery. There is a forest god straight out Princess Monokoke, a bustling troll market that looks better than anything George Lucas managed, a character who is entirely gaseous, and a massive mechanical army, complete with cogs and clockwork machinery.

The movie itself is perfectly fine. The leads play off each other well, with Selma Blair particularly good. There is one wonderful scene involving a Barry Manilow song. But you watch this primarily to drink in the imagination of Guillermo del Toro.