Category: (by verdict)

Boom chicka chicka, boom chicka chicka, boom chicka chicka, boom. Ta dum dum, Boom chicka chicka, boom chicka chicka, boom chicka chicka, boom.

Ta dum dum.

I had written positively but concisely about director Ti West’s first film (at comment #4), and I kind of kept an ear to the ground about his subsequent work. And last year, his second work–more restrained, in his words an attempt to strip away all the common tactical conventions of scare movies–got a good review here and a real rave from Scott Foundas here. So I was really looking forward to it.

I liked but didn’t love it; Foundas called it “Old Joy reconceived as a horror movie,” and that’s a fine mash-up pitch. The movie begins at a slow but dread-suffused pace, and takes about thirty minutes to get us well into the woods, wandering with three misplaced urbanites looking to hunt. And it’s never much of a thrill-ride, instead opting for a very deliberate white-knuckle approach to its conventional plot (the hunters start to get hunted). I liked its sense of dread, I loved its HighDef hand-held look, and I loved its disinterest in motive, backstory, resolution. Apparently shot on just over a dime (and produced by Larry Fessenden, who’s maybe the Orson Welles of indie horror films), it’s another solid small alternative for us horror fans not so into the Saw franchise or endless watered-down remakes of East Asian horror.

And it’s not Guy Ritchie, so that’s another plus.

Revolver: utterly worthless, incomprehensible, and pretentious to boot. Someone has probably described this as ‘Tarantino-esque.” It ain’t. Is it a horrible pastiche of movies, sampling Usual Suspects, the anime scene in Kill Bill volume 1, and every other crappy movie Guy Ritchie has made. At the end, over the credits, you have video of real psychologists (plus Deepak Chopra) discussing the role of the ego and the super ego. What was Ritchie thinking?

I see to have vague memories that both John Bruns and Arnab are big Rutles fans.

They got together for a showing at the Egyptian Theater last night and a Q&A and jam session – the first time the four have been together since it was filmed. Nicole Campos did a write-up and pictures for LA Weekly.

If you’re interested, it’s here:
blogs.laweekly.com/style_council/film/rutling-is-the-sincerest-form-1

I watched Badlands last night. Wasn’t nearly as poetic and grand as Days of Heaven. I was surprised. NOt sure what I think of it yet, though it was very good.

I have not seen the documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, that Werner Herzog re-made as this fictional account of Dieter Dengler’s captivity in Laos and then escape during the Vietnam War. I am not even sure why Herzog chose to tell Dengler’s story twice, once in documentary form and once in fictional form, with Christian Bale in the role of Dengler. Perhaps someone on this blog has seen them both and can offer an opinion?

The film itself has an oddly uplifting and wildly optimistic ending that is hard to square with the rest of the film. The only real justification for this ending is that it somehow mirrors the relentless optimism that Dengler manages to display throughout his captivity, in marked contrast to the five other prisoners (including a disappointing Steve Zahn). But the great majority of the film is enjoyable (that’s probably the wrong word) and beautifully made. It captures in a matter-of-fact (documentary?) style the torture, degradation, and long period on the run in the jungle that Dengler experienced. Bale is, as usual, expressive and manages to portray strength and vulnerability throughout. Recommended.

maybe we should have one place to park links to interesting conversations and articles with/about film-makers?

here’s a great interview on the onion’s av club with alex cox.

AVC: Is it hard to rectify what punk stands for and also make movies that cost a lot of money?

AC: Yeah! I think so. I think that’s right, because the money… we spend an awful lot of money on a movie. Twenty percent goes back to the studio for overhead. Who knows how much is going to get eaten up by the principal actors? Even making Repo Man for $1.5 million seemed like a waste of money to me. We had two guys in a car, and yet we have to have a tow truck, a car trailer, another huge vehicle behind it, police cars in front, motorcycle outriders. The only thing we were missing was a Roman Centurion riding along at the front with a big banner. “Here comes the movie!” And I think it’s grandiose. A lot of the time, this last one we did, nobody even knew we were there. We’d be shooting in places, and people would just walk right past us. You film much quicker and have more fun that way.

I saw two movies this weekend, and one was a hateful bit of crass tripe, stitching together bits of other better movies into a shoddy mass-produced mash-up, with a migraine-inducing soundtrack and not a whit of honest human compassion or sympathy.

And the other was Doomsday.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I knew I would love Doomsday when, out of a crowd of terrified Scots trying to escape the plague through a quickly closing security wall, one man reaches his hand forward, and we see not one but three separate shots, from different angles, of that hand brutally squashed off, blood and gristle spurting everywhere. I knew I would not love Dan when, after an opening which established the bare bones of silly-grieving-father trying to control his three sassy daughters while forgoing his own life, there were not three separate shots of Steve Carell’s hand brutally squashed off, blood and gristle spurting everywhere as the emo-indie-folkie on the soundtrack noodled away on a guitar only to be moments later exploded under the wheels of an armored personnel carrier.

A lovely film pitched as a “fable” from Mongolia ended up being stranger, more conventionally (or is that unconventionally) avant-garde than I’d expected. It riffs on an underlying sense of myth: a young nomadic sheepherder, in the bouts of epilepsy, has visions which lead him to combat the forces of modernity. But from its cold opening onward, the movie works a different kind of magic. A woman in a static shot stares at the camera, a multi-colored abstract mural on the wall behind seeming like some strange kind of halo; after some long gaze she begins (slowly) counting, and as the numbers go up she struggles to maintain her composure, gripped by an inexplicable sadness. I was hooked.

The film is more poem than narrative, and I was engrossed by how its opaque, allusive plot recedes so that the wash and connectivity of the film’s gorgeous imagery carries you along. I can’t remember where I heard about this, but I liked it.