Category: (by verdict)

The fourth Rambo, and one assumes the last, is not horrible. It is crafted pretty simply and runs to a little over 80 minutes. Rambo is living a peaceful life on the river in Thailand. Missionaries ask to be taken by boat into Burma. After initially refusing, and insisting that words will never change anything, Rambo takes them. Missionaries are captured and imprisoned by brutal Burmese army, and Rambo takes a group of mercenaries back to retrieve them. Mayhem ensues. Continue reading Rambo

I have heard that comedy is greatly dependent on the specific manner of its delivery, and I will be undertaking an experiment to best evaluate this hypothesis. I started watching Ferrell’s last sportsy crazy-arrogant-guy-who-yells-a-lot movie in Widescreen, and never laughed once. I might have even been scowling. So I’ve just returned to the menu, opened the set-up, and arranged the film to be shown in Full Screen, with Mono sound. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The latest Indiana is exactly what you’d expect, for better and … well, maybe not “for worse” but certainly not for the best. The film hews exactly to its boilerplate, and it was never less than diverting, amusing. But only once–one glorious, extended, escalating car-chase in the jungle–is it enormous fun. If I really sat down to rewatch the first film, I might find that its flaws have been recreated each go-’round: a slew of great set-pieces, sewn together with Ford’s creaky charisma and hoping for a supporting cast that is equally lively. That latter element is true, I think, in Indy 1 and 3, and mostly true in 4. (Cate Blanchett, tongue circling around her “wowels” in a gloriously loony accent, clearly is having great fun; LaBoeuf, Winstone, and Hurt get saddled with less interesting characters, and do less interesting things.) So… sure, why not? It’s summer. And did I tell you about that chase?

But now that I have your attention, let me direct you to the far better, far more challenging, really damn interesting Aussie film Noise. Matthew Saville’s 2007 film attends to the aftermath of a massacre on a train, which left one survivor; we follow her, a low-level cop suffering from vaguely-sourced tinnitus (and maybe psychological problems?), and an assortment of well-drawn supporting characters, the importance of whom we are always trying to untangle. A note: any summary does injustice, fools you into certain expectations, when the film was dazzling in its confident refusal to collapse into a particular kind of story. Continue reading Me & Mr. Jones (and a special guest)

I agree with Jeff: Arnab sucks.

Comments don’t show up any more, and most movies are really bad.

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I’m not sure Teeth deserves its own thread (I tried posting a comment elsewhere but Word Press wouldn’t let me) but there’s something slyly (and comically) subversive about this story of a teenager, a good Christian girl who preaches abstinence and chastity, who discovers her vagina is blessed with a bite (a nuclear power plant forever looms in the background). It is crude and crass (there are a copious number of severed penises), but the film could also be read as a post-feminist, coming-of-age, “superhero-esque” origin story of a serial killer with a code (a la Showtime’s underrated “Dexter”) who targets brutal, oppressive, sexually abusive misogynists (teenage boys, wacky gynecologists, dirty-old-men). Though a favorite at Sundance in 2006, it didn’t do too well at the box office . . . will audiences be willing to line up for Teeth II???

I got out to see Mamet’s latest, Redbelt, which he refers to as an update of the classic fight flick, and it’s a strong homage, for better and worse. We follow a scraping-by, virtuous jujitsu master/instructor Mike Terry (the reliably great Chiwetel Ejiofor) who’s trapped–by some scheming and unreliable Hollywood types, an ambitious wife, mounting debts, and his own bullheaded determination to follow a fighter’s code–into a choice between competition or the loss of everything he holds dear. Besides Ejiofor, there’s a great cast (particularly regulars Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna, clearly delighted to be foul-mouthed lowlifes throwing their weight around), and for about 2/3 of the picture the dialogue and plotting are knotty and delightful, allowing us plenty of time to chew on what’s happening, and to read Terry against the grain: he’s calm, determined, likable, “perfect”–and perhaps misguided, foolish, selfish, and so on. For a good long while, the idea of living by a code seems both virtue and vice, and the film buzzes on that tension.

Then, in its last third, people do a lot less talking and start throwing fists and feet instead of four-letter words and opaque aphorisms, and I don’t think that’s necessarily what I want from a Mamet film. It becomes a fight flick, not entirely predictable but tonally, thematically, and (alas) ideologically in line with the kinds of sentimental affirmations of the “loser” whose code (backed up by his real talent) is worth sticking to.

Meh. But great fun for a good portion of its running time, and so I’d suggest a rental, for sure. But a far, far, far more interesting (although admittedly very different) take on the foolish virtue of sticking to one’s idealism can be found in the ink-black Danish comedy Adam’s Apples, which follows the religious Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen), a man impervious to any disruptions in his belief in the goodness of humanity, in the inevitable success of turning the other cheek, in the power of meek acceptance and affirmation of everyone around him. Ivan bedevils one of his ex-con wards Adam (Ulrich Thomsen), a neo-Nazi who puts up a photo of Hitler in his small room, who stares dumbfounded as Ivan blithely misreads or just plain misses the malice in the actions all around him, who develops a seething passion aimed at breaking Ivan’s belief. It’d be entirely worth seeing for its casual, almost joyful misanthropy, and it is often laugh-out-loud funny. But I was even more taken by its unwillingness to affirm or flatly refute Ivan’s beliefs; rather, the film draws even more pointed laughs from the possibility that a buffoonish faith might actually have force in one’s life, even if it’s never anything but buffoonish. What starts as a vicious parody in the end seems a far more complicated, still very funny and biting investigation of faith.

After the despair that Chelsea fans (myself included) feel after last night’s Champions League final, at least an excuse to connect the loss to movies. Someone on a Chelsea fan blog linked each Chelsea player to a classic of Soviet cinema:

Cech – The Diamond Arm – Gaidai 1968
That double save in the 1st half and he saved a penalty Continue reading Soviet Cinema and Soccer

Does anyone know of good sources on the material production of US movies, both studio and independent? I’m particularly interested in the treatment of actors as workers. This became salient recently when a friend who is a union rep. with SAG told me about a multi-union wildcat strike on the set of a David O. Russell movie (which sounds like a train wreck waiting to happen). There are apparently complicated rules about pension funds and how much of a film’s financing has to be put in escrow to pay actors before filming can begin, and so on. This is an area I know next to nothing about, so if anyone can suggest a source for this kind of information, I’d be grateful.

I’m amazed to say this, but a film based on a television cartoon, a film with an excess of production energy and an equally-excessive layer of dipshit dialogue, a film edited with an eye toward epileptic shock, a film with a lot of jokes predicated on a hammy fat kid, a film with about fifty chimpanzee reaction shots …. it isn’t half-bad. In fact, it’s maybe three-quarters-good. I had steeled myself for teeth-gritting ennui as Max stared with empty goggle eyes through the 2+ hours of frantic Speed Racer nonsense. But this film was incessantly pleasing to the eye, a candy-store of colors, clever anime-inspired and/or loopily-inventive cinematic tricks, and uncampy affectionate recreation of mediocre-cartoon tropes. I hereby nominate Spritl and Chim as easily the most entertaining “irritating-kid-and-animal sidekicks” in the history of cinema, by which I mean the only irritating-kid-and-animal sidekicks one would even want to see. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker repeats an old Groucho Marx joke as a way of criticizing the film’s primary audience as four-year-olds — I guess I’m in touch with my inner four-year-old, ’cause this was way more fun than anyone has a right to expect.

Oh, and the central notion that corporations are evil was a pleasant ‘though (see Iron Man discussion) self-contradicting message for a big-budget technospectacle to embrace. There was surprisingly little (if any?) product-placement in the film (‘though the ramped-up pitch to kids for all things Speed began at the ticket counter, where we all got “Pit Passes” with coupons for Target and Hot Wheels).