Category: (by verdict)

Extremes

Recommended (pretty highly):

An anthology of … well, more “Disturbing” than Horror films: “3 Extremes,” by Chan-wook Park, Takashi Miike, and Fruit Chan. None will completely astound you–the plots are a little thin in each case, suffering from an anthology-movie mundaneness–but they each are quite impressive in catching a tone (or, in Chan & Park, a variety of shifting tones) with gorgeous compositions. They also all have lots of cool crackling squishy overly-loud sound effects, to highlight things being eaten, ghosts moving broken necks, etc. I wish I had a foley artist following me around all day. A foley artist following me around would make me appreciate the little things in life.

Beats me where you’ll find this. But if/when it ever pops up, check it out. It made me want to find some stuff by Chan (whom I don’t know), and it will hopefully encourage you to check out some stuff by Miike and Park, both of whom deserve your attention.

kinsey

another film recommended by well-known deviant james kincaid. and it is easy to see why kinky mcperv likes it so much: it takes the salacious, sex-mongering of a deviant and presents it as valid “research”. which, of course, is what kincaid himself does (once again see comment #4 here).

actually, “kinsey” is an excellent movie and i recommend it highly. directed by bill condon, who made the excellent “gods and monsters” some years ago, this is what every biopic should aspire to: an adult presentation of a complicated subject that neither canonizes him nor shoehorns his story into some existing template of well-meaning saint/savant triumphing against conventional morality. i don’t want to say too much about the content until more people have seen it, but i will say that i have not seen so many strong perfomances in one movie in a while. there isn’t a false note here: laura linney and peter saarsgard are excellent in the main supporting performances; in the smaller parts, timothy hutton and chris o’donnell do a lot with little; and even tim curry and the tragically underemployed oliver platt restrain themselves. at the center of all of this is a great performance by liam neeson–this is the kind of performance that makes you forget that there is “acting” going on.

watch it.

Rock Documentaries

Saw End of the Century a few weeks ago. I enjoyed it, but it was mildly depressing. Did everyone in that band hate each other, or what? The Clash documentary (Westway to the World) is excellent.

Jerry Lewis sings The Ramones, live on the Champs-Elysee: Gabba gabba wha-HOY!!!!

Welcome back, Michael.

a mixed bag

recently in the dvd player: “the alamo”, “zakhm”, “hum dil de chuke sanam” and “swades”. two pieces of crap, and two decent but overly worthy efforts. crap first:

“the alamo”: uninvolving, pointless, trivial. even something jingoistic would have been preferable to this lifeless mess. the sad thing is that it seems to think it is a clever movie which has interesting things to say about mythmaking and nationmaking. it does not. the only plus i can think of: i finally know what a bowie knife looks like. other than that this is an exercise in costume design. the guy playing santa anna chews some scenery but only half-heartedly.

“hum dil de chuke sanam”: i’m ambivalent about reviewing bad bollywood films here since most of you are unlikely to watch them unless i recommend them very highly (and of the ones i have recommended mike’s seen “company” and that’s about it i think). so i’m not going to spend too much time on this except to say that no one exoticizes india like indians themselves and that this film may have been written by a particularly stupid 12 year old. the liberalization of the indian economy in the 90s saw the rise of both a big spending leisure class and the expression of a complicated hindu chauvinism. this film, like many other 90s blockbusters, speaks to both–on the one hand providing aspirational fantasies and on the other, in the guise of critiquing it, repackaging patriarchal tradition.

Continue reading a mixed bag

Scenes, more than films

In the last week, I’ve been catching up. (School’s ended.) Saw three flicks–oddly similar, in terms of content–that I’d recommend, but primarily because they offer up two, three scenes apiece that… well, in terms of acting and dramatic complexity, astonish. The films then often go a bit awry, but why quibble when there’s some unexpected perfection, midway through?

The films: P.S., Birth, The Woodsman. I’ll handle ’em in that order: Continue reading Scenes, more than films

looking for shylock

last night: william shakespeare’s “the merchant of venice”

this is a handsome production which will likely finally be remembered only for pacino’s against all odds, restrained performance as shylock, giving us a hint of what might have become of him had scarface never happened. the film, of course, has a higher ambition than that and that is to take the play and make it about anti-semitism rather than a play shot through with the racism of its time from which only its poetry somewhat ambivalently rescues it (which is how i read it when i read it last). this sort of shift of emphasis in production is, i suppose, par for the course in the theater and i don’t really have a huge objection to it. but there are specific things that happen at the very beginning of the film that are not in the play, and which, while not huge, make me question if this is william shakespeare’s the merchant of venice. (and there are larger problems too–of which, more below.)
Continue reading looking for shylock

Kung Fu Hustle

I saw this, and I recommend it thus: funny, eccentric, energetic, Sith-free fun.

There are some beautiful moments, some fantastically funny shtick, some repetitive fighting (a must in most any Kung Fu film), and more gee-whiz pizzazz to the pleasures of its CGI than any filmmaker outside of Pixar’s stable.

I want to emphasize: the writer/director/star Chow has a real eye–not just Jackie Chan’s or Sammo Hung’s, for choreography, but for the look of film. There’s a loving homage to “Top Hat” (of all films!) midway through, and it never settles into some kind of fight-shot/edit groove, instead consistently altering the manner in which the big showdowns get put together. Very fun.

And maybe it’d be worth stepping back to unpack the film’s smorgasbord of generic influences, or to compare it to the local talent doing the same thing (primarily Tarantino), but… someone else can do all that.

David Gordon Green

I was just going to pipe up that “Undertow,” a Southern gothic about boys (including an excellent Jamie Bell) threatened and chased by a nasty death-dealing uncle (Josh Lucas, who resembles John Bruns with a handlebar moustache), isn’t so great.

It has an outstanding credit sequence: Bell and a young woman share a tender moment, then the film flips forward and we see him outside her window, throwing a rock through it. Then he’s chased by her gun-wielding, gun-firing father, and the film deploys all kinds of tricks stolen from ‘seventies genre flicks … and it’s just thrilling to watch, as narrative and as a flashy play of technique.

Once the film starts it slows to a crawl, but even that’s okay: watching Bell in the family dynamics with his father (Dermot Mulroney) and his brother (some very cute frail thin kid, who looks like a little Mark Mauer) — it’s odd, touching, surreal… quite wonderful.

It all goes kind of to hell when Uncle shows up. Continue reading David Gordon Green

noir (film, not drakkar)

watched lang’s “the big heat” last night and was struck by a couple of things:

(spoiler warnings apply for those who haven’t seen it)

1) michael’s right about the gloria grahame/annette bening thing

2) this is such a tautly shot/narrated film–the camera literally leads the viewer through it; lang’s use of slow zoom-ins and outs and pans works almost like a manual for the beginning filmmaker. i think mike mentioned earlier a connection between kubrick and lang–can see it in this film as well.

3) i am not as knowledgeable about noir’s generic narrative elements as some of you doubtless are but this film’s juxtaposition of corrupt public life with the possibility of an autonomous private life (which is then destroyed utterly by the public) seems to make it darker than most.

Continue reading noir (film, not drakkar)