Category: (by verdict)

Faith and Reason – PBS – Bill Moyers

A quick, hearty recommendation for this series on PBS, third episode running tonight (Friday). Hour or half-hour length interviews with believers, atheists, and at some point I’d imagine, those in between. So far they’ve run interviews with Salman Rushdie, Mary Gordon and philosopher Colin McGinn. Coming up is Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood and the very in-the-news Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Moyers is damn good at this. And while his previous show, Now, tended to be a more depressing version of 60 Minutes, and a terrible way to spend a Friday night, this is surprisingly uplifting thoughtful material.

steve martin’s shopgirl and why we fight

why are movies as vile as shopgirl being made? why are they marketed in such a way that idiots like me fall for it and watch them? if movies such as this one can be made and sold, why don’t we make and sell really groundbreaking movies that unveil the lies and horror of what is happening to the world?

we watched why we fight last night. how do we make it required watching for everyone? anyway, i found it oddly peace-inducing. it’s all so much bigger than i. my activism is futile. i think i’ll have another mojito.

Superman‘s Big Fat Crying Jag

Well… I didn’t hate it.

The first half-hour, forty-five minutes has some nice touches. As in many of his big-budget extravagaction films, Bryan Singer displays a real fondness and talent for the character-driven, carefully-staged, small-scale suspenseful witty moments… even as such films invariably stomp all over such smaller pleasures, looking to supersede the sequence with CGItis.

What works: a lot of small character details and witty side-ways moments (again, mostly in that first third of the film). One particularly good sequence involving a henchman, a defiant Lois Lane, and her sickly little boy, the boy and h-man playing “Body and Soul” on the piano together. (It’s a really great bit.) Spacey, occasionally. Posey, less occasionally.
Continue reading Superman‘s Big Fat Crying Jag

clubland: white

i have not yet seen the extras but i’m eager to write on this, so i’ll pitch a few ideas. idea no. one: is this a comedy? what makes something a comedy? i’m sure there are people on this blog who are way more qualified than i to discuss the necessary requirements of comedy, but it was hard for me the first time around, ten years ago, and it is hard for me now to see this film as a comedy. there is no laughter. there is, instead, a lot of heartbreak. surely, though, laughter cannot be considered a necessary requirement for comedy, because laughter is so subjective and culture-dependent. simon’s suggestion is that this is a comedy because karol is a schlemiel, and since this sounds interesting to me, i’ll go with it a bit. Continue reading clubland: white

frisoli, er, ribisi

the 2003 i love your work is nothing special. it is apparently this guy’s adam goldberg’s life work — he wrote it, directed it, produced it, edited it, wrote the score for it, he did everything but star in it. evidently adam had something to get off his chest, a certain, bleak, obsessive view of hollywood and celebrity. i seem to have noticed before that it is not rare for first-time directors to do films about hollywood. is it true? in any case, you have a sense with this guy that he’s working out some personal issues about hollywood. the film is original and watchable enough: it’s edited well, the colors are very good, the real and unreal sequence blend nicely. yet it took us three days to watch it. make of it what you will.

i didn’t want to talk much about the film, as about giovanni ribisi, who i find a sweetly charismatic actor. he’s really good in this. he plays a celebrity who goes nuts — literally. he can’t take it any more. surprisingly, there’s few to no drugs in this movie, so ribisi has to do all the going-nuts work inside. it has to seep out of his eyes and his gestures and the way he cocks his head. i think he’s very effective. his face is incredibly mobile and he can go from scary-looking to childish and sweet very convincingly. i never noticed him much, not even when he starred in the mediocre heaven, but here he comes into his own and shines.

Egoyan – Where the Truth Lies

Atom Egoyan’s latest film, which seems to be quite far removed, in plot at least, from his previous film, Ararat. If a few words could accurately sum up Egoyan’s obsessions and themes, it would be "where the truth lies" which would make this a nice opportunity to look back on Canada’s second best memory obsessed director, except I’m not feeling up for a retorspective.

There are some big problems with Where the Truth Lies; among them the characters, the acting, the amateurish direction, and the plot. None of these are beyond redemption, but parts of each are weak enough to end up being unsatisfying.

Continue reading Egoyan – Where the Truth Lies

Val Lewton

Kris and I watched The 7th Victim last evening, a spooky noir-ish story about a young woman trying to track down her missing sister, and runs into a secretive group of (as opposed to a bunch of showboat) Satanists. Which sounds sensationalized, and for a film from the ’40s portends some obvious schlocky “evil” (pronounced, a la Kevin McDonald, EEEE-villllll). It ain’t; like Lewton’s other productions, this is spooky, intelligent. Continue reading Val Lewton

Save the Green Planet

I’m not even sure how, or what, to recommend–but a flat assertion that this is worth seeing won’t do.

The plot: a young man believes that aliens have infiltrated corporate culture, and are carrying out experiments on the Earth. To save all, the hero kidnaps a big-league asshole CEO and starts torturing the guy to get him to contact his e.t. cohorts and stop the destruction. The film begins in strange silly slapstick land and creeps, oddly, into serial killer territory; our hero is, unsurprisingly, a bit whacked, but a dark and often moving backstory turns the film into a kind of psychological thriller. With slapstick. And…

…well, genre’s hard to nail down. The director (Jun-hwan Jeong) has energy and style to burn, and while the film’s plot may suggest z-picture camp it’s done with A-level aesthetics. And, yeah, it actually has some emotional heft. It didn’t fully work for me, or it wasn’t the 5-star dazzle I’d hoped, but I was never less than engaged and always off-guard. Aren’t too many films that so ceaselessly, slyly tangle with genre. (‘Though I’m beginning to think that the great stuff coming out of South Korea has a lock on this hybridized aesthetic.) And now let this post linger without comment for years to come…..

Chappelle

Block Party is just plain fun. From the minute the menu loaded–a great clip of Chappelle, bullhorn in hand, yelling at a marching band and dancing–you get invited in; the sense of play makes this one of the best concert films I’ve ever seen, and I’m not even a particular fan of any of the musical acts (admiring all, but only really digging the Fugees on my own time). Like The Last Waltz, I ended up loving the performances because of so much context, so clear a sense of the performers’ joy, despite my prior disinterest in the musicians.

The movie does a wonderful job capturing the infectious energy of Chappelle, intercutting performances with clips of Dave preparing the site, encouraging folks from his hometown in Ohio to come (with golden tickets and bus) to the show in Bed-Stuy, goofing with the site’s residents. The film slips in sideways a pretty hard-edged critique (of racism, of politics, of the relationship between those two and celebrity) while remaining never less than party-minded; in fact, and this is what I’ve always loved about Chappelle (and separates his challenges from a comic like Sarah Silverman) is that sense of invitation. It’s a party, it’s silly… even as his material (and the musicians’ performances) remains explicitly political and incisive.

He has a fantastic joke about the D.C. snipers, that he slips in after a serious discussion of the pressures placed on black performers who are celebrated by predominantly white audiences (I won’t give it away) . . . and the joke conveys yet complicates, affirms while not simply asserting the problems discussed: the joke flirts with racism, confuses those of us in the audience just marked by the discussion as a problem. Great, great stuff. I want more Chappelle, and I’m also mightily impressed by Michel Gondry’s work directing.

the hills have eyes

Speaking of gore, I watched The Hills Have Eyes remake last night. I’m not much of a horror fan but this creepy, fucked up, gruesome and grisly shocker is quite good. It’s all in the writing, I think. The main characters are unusually believable, honestly drawn, sympathetic even (you actually feel a bit sad when certain characters die). I guess that shouldn’t surprise me but it does. The violence, of course, is ugly and graphic but the film is well shot and edited and rarely overplays its hand. While not everyone’s cup of tea, this is worth the rental. The first act is probably as good as any horror film I’ve ever seen. It starts to go a bit downhill from there but don’t they all. Oh, and as a nod to big Al, the film has its own tidy little eco-political subtext that the former next President of the United States would probably appreciate.