Cypher–industrial spy-slash-scifi-slash-PhilipKDickian thriller with Jeremy Northam, who’s amazingly good, by the guy who directed Cube, Vincenzo Natali. Like that film, Cypher is a lot of fun and stylishly shot on shoestring budget for about half an hour, then once your confusion about the story kind of dissipates (and I got the ‘twist’ about halfway in), it remains stylish but isn’t that terribly engaging. But, still, Northam has some fun.
Continue reading More quick takes
Category: (random lists)
Blood of the Beasts
Speaking of disembowelment and the everyday, I recommend to you this 20 minute French documentary from 1949, though you will have to have a strong stomach to watch it, as it includes the matter of fact slaughter of a horse, a steer, several veal calves and a dozen or so sheep. In fact, the calves are decapitated in order “to keep the meat white.†The director Georges Franju says he made the film in black and white so the viewer would have a forceful “aesthetic response†rather than the convulsive physical response that color would have encouraged. The film depicts the everyday work of a couple of slaughterhouses in Paris where the work is done by hand, with very sharp knives, as though it might be 1249 instead of 1949.
Continue reading Blood of the Beasts
2005 Thus Far
Thinking about the best films of 2005 (released domestically thus far) and I’m stymied by the sheer mediocrity of most everything I’ve seen. I can think of one film I hope will be on my list at the end of the year: Howl’s Moving Castle. After that I can only come up with four lesser films to fill out the list: Millions, Crash, Mysterious Skin, and The Cinderella Man. How about you? Continue reading 2005 Thus Far
character actors
hijacking the brief nicky katt sidebar in the “layer cake” discussion and opening it up to other people we don’t see very often or in very large roles but would like to see more of.
(katt, by the way, is very good in “boiler room” and in a brief appearance in “school of rock”. he’s one of those people who disappears into his characters and i’m often surprised to see his name in the credits.)
i would add mark rufalo to the list but he’s in a lot lately. he was also wasted in “collateral”. how do you lot feel about giovanni ribisi? he was also excellent in “boiler room”–then again whoever directed that film also drew solid performances out of ben affleck and vin diesel. ribisi was also good in “the gift” which features a shockingly good performance by keanu reeves (who i don’t wish to see very much more of). has he been in anything which doesn’t feature crap actors acting unfeasibly well?
behind the numbers
an interesting article from slate on how hollywood movies really make their money. turns out that the theater box office contributes less than 20% of the money made on movies. dvd is where it is at, and with dvd sales up it isn’t always the movies that did best at the box-office that sell the most dvds. but no, this doesn’t mean that smaller movies have a more democratic shot at a second life:
For merchandisers like Wal-Mart, DVDs are a means to lure consumers, who may buy other products, into the store. The box-office numbers are of little relevance (especially since it’s teenagers who create huge opening weekends, and they cannot afford to buy more profitable goods like plasma TVs). Instead of box-office results, merchandisers look for movies with stars such as Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, who have traction with their highly desired older customers.
i guess the fact that it took “after hours” so long to come to dvd means that scorcese’s audience doesn’t buy plasma tv’s either.
offbeat bombay films
since no one else seems to be watching any movies (no new discussions in a week) i’ll start a thread on non-mainstream, yet not quite arty bombay cinema. in the u.s these might be equivalent to indie’s or studio-indies:
“company” and “naach” (both by ram gopal varma). varma is an interesting young director who formally and thematically works out his ambivalent relationship to the bollywood aesthetic in a number of his films. “naach” in particular seems to be very much about the question of relating to and functioning in an industry with a history of formulaic pandering to audience expectations. it also shows he’s been watching a bit too much of wong kar wai.
“haasil”–mentioned this earlier, will repeat the recommendation so someone watches it.
“yuva”–mani ratnam’s most recent. more within the bombay mainstream than the above but may warrant inclusion here. ratnam may be the most technically adept director working in bombay (he’s really a tamil filmmaker), certainly the flashiest. “yuva” is about the intersecting stories of three sets of young people in calcutta and their life-choices etc. some stunning set pieces, including a particularly violent opening game of kabbadi in a prison and the climactic fight scene in traffic on a bridge. should be quite accessible to americans.
will add more as they occur to me.
bollywood recommendations
following on my brief comments on indian art cinema in anothe thread i thought i’d make some recommendations of bollywood films for the benefit of those who might be interested in a somewhat structured experience of the industry. first, a little definitional clarification: “bollywood” refers to the popular bombay hindi film industry. it is not a catch-all term for any indian cinema (as it is often used in american circles) and nor are people like gurinder chadha or mira nair bollywood filmmakers. these people use certain bollywood conventions in some of their films (nair entirely exploitatively/exotically) but they’re no more bollywood than someone like baz luhrman in “moulin rouge”. second clarification: this list, sorted by decade, is restricted to what’s available from netflix. i can expand it to other titles as well if people are interested (i am not sure if netflix is a good indicator of availability) . this is, of course, an idiosyncratic, highly personal list. as it should be. not sure which of these will “translate”–take your chances.
indian regional and “art” cinema
the magazine outlook is celebrating its 10 year anniversary with a series of articles on indian film, 1995-2005. the entire issue is here. one of the more interesting articles is this one which makes the case that while bollywood has swamped all other indian cinema in marketing terms, excellent regional and parallel cinema continues to thrive. after summing up the dominance of bollywood chatterjee writes:
Male hysteria –> Stewart –> Hitchcock
(continuing from here.)
Stewart’s an emotional wreck in much of Hitchcock’s stuff. While Cary Grant maintains a kind of icy hauteur through the thick/thin of those thrillers, Stewart bubbles with barely-repressed confusion and turmoil. So–my wrongheaded snipe about melodramatics is completely, thoroughly wrong.
(I read an interesting little tidbit about Stewart yesterday in Jonathan Lethem’s collection, _The Disappointment Artist_–which I can’t recommend highly enough as a model of smart, personal criticism about art. He was noting how a biographer of Stewart had wondered how the “gentle†actor of early pictures turned, after his service in WWII, into the dark troubled soul of later pictures. And Stewart’s war record was, in part, sealed–protected as confidential. The biographer wondered if Stewart had been part of the Dresden bombing raid….)
There’s a project in here somewhere: Action films as male hysteria.
Shiri (and action-melodrama)
Shitty.
You liked this, Arnab? The camera did so many 360 turns I thought they had it rigged to a toilet. Okay, it wasn’t awful. But it wasn’t good, either. I don’t like it when there’s so much crying in an action movie. Suck it up, you fuckers. Sublimate your sadness in a good old-fashioned ass-whupping, like the rest of us.
I far prefer the action of “Nowhere to Hide” and the thriller politics of “J.S.A.” (and Park’s later films–“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “OldBoy”–are even better).