Category: (by verdict)

Bernard and Doris

This HBO flick, directed by Bob Balaban, has some just astonishing, low-key acting — Ralph Fiennes seems to disappear into so many different kinds of roles, despite his rather singular looks. Here he’s a slightly-campy butler hired on by the lonely harridan tycoon Doris Dukes (an equally great Susan Sarandon). The movie is perversely unstructured, in ways that I like; it resists the beats and tempo of the three-acts we’re so used to in movies, it jumps from time to time, there are rarely big moments of crisis or conflict or catharsis. Instead, it burrows under the skin of each character through the prism of their strange, hard-to-categorize relationship.

This isn’t going to keep you on the edge of your seat, but the acting alone kept me engrossed. There’s a scene about mid-film in a hothouse, as the two late at night repot some orchids, where not much is really said and nothing truly plot-shifting happens, that is about the finest acting I’ve seen in some time. After seeing Fiennes tear off a hock of ham with glorious pleasure in Bruges, it was amazing to see him take the same techniques (a shifting of his physical carriage, precise and intimate movements of hands and eyes, a use of his voice that in pitch and rhythm gives us more information about the character) for a wholly different kind of act.

Iron Man

Against my expectations, I really enjoyed this. It is worth watching for three reasons:
1) Robert Downey Jr. He is more or less perfect for the role displaying his cynical brand of humor leavened with some low key but effective acting (especially early on when he is imprisoned by some Taleban-esque Afghans).
2) the dialogue is clever, quick and genuinely funny in places. Downey’s lines with Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges (both of whom handle their roles well) have the sort of zing that you don’t normally associate with a summer blockbuster.
3) the Iron Man him/itself. The usual superhero backstory is about how Bruce Wayne became Batman, or Peter Parker became Spiderman. Here the backstory is shorn of any real psychological drama. It is about mechanics and pulleys and “arc reactors” and stabilizers and such like. What we get is a strong sense of whizz-bangery (and several funny scenes of Downey testing the equipment).
Good old-fashioned entertainment. As one of my kids noted, it is rare that an audience applauds a movie like this when the final credits roll.

Gardens of Stone

Anyone seen this? I came across a reference to it in a review of “coming home from war” movies, I think in The New Yorker. I had never heard of it, and now, having watched it, I’m not too surprised. It’s a pity, though, because this movie could have been so much better. The Gardens of Stone are military cemeteries, specifically Arlington National Cemetery in 1968-69 at the height of the Vietnam War. An elite army detail known as the Old Guard has the responsibility of managing the burials and ceremonials surrounding them, and is of course marked by the mounting US military losses. James Caan is the older officer who is having doubts about the war. Most of the men (and they are all men) are happy to be out of harm’s way, but one young soldier (D.B. Sweeney) desperately wants to get to Vietnam. He does. Since the movie opens with his funeral and his voice over before flashing back, the consequences are no surprise. Continue reading Gardens of Stone

Street Kings

It seems like forever since I watched a movie. I had Lust, Caution out from Netflix for six weeks, and even then it took me three nights to watch it. So it had to be just the right movie to ease back into the practice of watching in preparation for the summer blockbuster season. Nothing that forces me to re-live the trauma of an aging relative, or worse, sit across the aisle from some dickhead in a plastic Iron Man costume. Thank goodness for Keanu Reeves. If you can get past the utter stupidity of the plot, Street Kings delivers solid B-movie entertainment. Keanu is a gung-ho cop with the LAPD who cuts corners to catch his suspects, and is as happy blowing them away as taking them in for questioning. Forest Whitaker has lots of fun playing his superior who runs this elite, corrupt Vice unit. We even get Hugh Laurie as the witty internal affairs guy with the phony American accent he has honed on House. The corruption and betrayal become more and more intricate, but it’s best to ignore it all and concentrate on the gun fights. Lots of them. Keanu is even referred to as “the gunslinger” on a couple of occasions. But here he is in his element, the best since Speed when Dennis Hopper wisely advised him not to think too much. Occasionally Keanu begins to look pensive, as when trying to figure out the web of intrigue, but these brief moments of painful acting are soon relieved with a spray of bullets. Fun.

Pain is funny. Or funnyish.

We recently saw two very good films that zero in on people in pain. In The Savages, there’s a scene where Philip Seymour Hoffman, having wrenched his neck during a game of tennis (and an argument with his sister Laura Linney about his idiocy in his relationship with a woman), stands with his head bound up in an absurd weighted contraption, meant to “balance” him. Linney looks on and laughs, and he can’t help it–bursts into giggles, too. And ‘though the pain doesn’t go away, not the nerve in his neck nor the loneliness of their lives nor the anguish of their family history and current reality (dad sinking into dementia, and needing to be put in a home), the laugh reframes the pain as less a personal blight than something the two share. Continue reading Pain is funny. Or funnyish.

The Orphanage

A gothic manor house located in a particularly beautiful, particularly remote spot on the Spanish coast is purchased by a woman who lived there decades before when it functioned as a Catholic orphanage. She and her husband, along with their six-year-old son, work to restore the home and transform it into a school for mentally disabled children, but when her child starts communicating with unseen forces and soon vanishes into thin air, the past finds a way to eerily push itself into the present. This film is creepy and atmospheric and evocatively affective–perhaps due to the fact that it’s plot ingeniously appropriates and recontextualizes the story of Peter Pan. There is a set piece about twenty-five minutes in that is stunning, and the ending’s perfect balance of the uncanny and the mythic will break your heart.

Fuck you, Gravy Robbers!

Adult Swim keeps upping the absurdist ante.

Walt Whitman’s review:
Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! is often aggravating,
but it’s never boring,
is never complacent,
and I sing of
its cascade of chubby men in thongs,
its fluids dribbling or spewing or squirting from mouths (and elsewhere),
its unibrowed whore-milk-drinking baby Chippy,
its frenetic love of (don’t we all) synthesizer dancing,
and its video tomfoolery circa 1982,
oh Zach Galifiniakis
Galifaniakis,
Kiss Zach,
drinking your gravy caught in your thick thick burly beard,
I-I-I-I-I watch in slackjawed wonder.

Lars and the Real Girl

I was dubious and this will definitely not appeal to all tastes, but I was completely enchanted and moved by this Capra-esque fantasy firmly rooted on the planet earth by smart, unadourned, emotionally resonant acting choices. Lars (an understated Ryan Gosling in a charming and warmly human-sized performance) suffered extreme trauma as an infant and the result, twenty-seven years later, is that he severely lacks interpersonal relationship skills. When he purchases a life-sized, sex doll for companionship, literally convincing himself she is real, his brother wants him packed off to a mental institution. His sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer) takes a different tact and soon the entire town rallies around Lars’ relationship with “Bianca.” None of this should work. None of it! The potential for treacly, saccharin-laced whimsy is undermined by a no-nonsense approach and a cast of characters straight out of an E. Annie Proulx novel (the original screenplay by “Six Feet Under” scribe Nancy Oliver was nominated for an Academy Award). The first act is a bit forced (give it a little time) and the ending, befitting the genre, is telegraphed from the next state, but the plot twists keep you engaged and even surprised.

Inside

HOT DAMN. Another great, vicious French horror film–not quite as smart, polished, and riveting as Ils/Them which I reviewed a little while back, but it is still sharply-shot, often unnerving, and about 10,000 times gorier.

The plot: a pregnant woman who recently lost her husband (how careless!) is being assaulted in her home late one Christmas eve by a profoundly freaky Beatrice Dalle (the Betty Blue), who wants to give her a Caesarean. Or, more precisely, wants the baby for herself, and plans to get it expeditiously, using whatever comes to hand.

I’m likely the only person who posts here who would love a film so unrepentantly gory, but maybe it might attract fans of stylish, audacious filmmaking; its qualities are not merely the repulsive but the perverse seductive beauties of such gore, and every shot is lovingly framed, the colors are vibrant, the use of shadow and haze outstanding. The directors rival Takashi Miike in their ability to yoke a vibrant, joyous aesthetic sensibility to such literally pulpy, vigorously vicious material.

Toilet Scissors

I can’t compete with Arnab’s Kids’ erotophilia. (I’m tempted to simply write: “Arnab Chakladar has an unhealthy love for Kids.” Let’s see that come up on google.)

But the Upright Citizens Brigade long-ago earned a place in my pantheon of great comedy shows. Their work comes out of a dedicated improv set-up, sketches developed live and on the fly, tweaked but still very free-form — and displaying an often-dizzyingly wonderful talent for absurd synchronicity. (I also have this huge love for depictions of people singularly, obsessively, aggressively focused on a plan of action. Whether promoting the use of ass pennies, teasing others at an ugly club, or trying to get a group of Christian-camp kids to confess to wrong-doing, the slow-burn build to angry exasperation always makes me laugh.)

Their concert film Upright Citizens Brigade: ASSSSSCAT illustrates the improv in action; following a monologue from a guest-speaker, on a topic thrown from the audience, the UCB troupe (supplemented by a few other guys, including a very very funny Horatio Sanz and Andrew Daly) riffs on elements of the story. The filmed show is grand; the extras include clips and scenes from a number of other shows, and they’re all great.