My fingers grew back!

Some day in the future, someone will write a treatise on the many conventions of the commercial blockbuster in the era of globalization, and they will hit on key elements of the formula: a mash-up of violence with sexual overtones; a heroic protagonist who seeks answers to and resolves that central violence, living on the outside of conventions, and looking damn cool; product placements for McDonald’s, Coke, Red Bull; a seepage of American “cool” aesthetics into everything, everywhere.

And then that someone, basking in the glow of their treatise’s Asimovian precision in explaining all film, will come upon Takashi Miike. And they will see all of the requisite conventions, and the film will still defy any and all commercial sense. Detective Story may somewhere deep down be a conventional serial-killer narrative, but even deeper down it’s got the loony heart of Hammer horror films and its protagonist channels the spirit of Robert Mitchum on mushrooms and while never being horribly gruesome or traditionally gory nonetheless features pureed organs and layers of viscous blood and urine. It is about 1000 times funnier and more enjoyable than every Saw film put together. It isn’t top-drawer Miike, but even as a toss-off its lunatic precision and constant small goofball details and tactics would keep most filmmakers in milk and honey for several films.

Martyrs

Give the French their due. They see an American genre wussing out, and they don’t just sit back and snarkez-vous. Take torture porn. (Please. *ahem*) Eli Roth, Hostel? Wuss-tacular. Let’s have Betty Blue try and get the fetus from a pregnant woman trapped in her home. Let’s have Monica Bellucci’s weird-looking boyfriend play inbreeding hicks (both genders!) enacting some barely-explicable satanic ritual on Parisian hipster douchebags.
Continue reading Martyrs

The Reader

Is there really no thread for this film? I’m still trying to figure out my reaction, and it is all but impossible to write about without spoilers, so I hope others have seen it. I assume we all know the story: 15 year-old Michael (David Kross) begins a relationship with 36 year-old Hannah (Kate Winslet) in 1958. She disappears and he sees her again when he is in law school and she is on trial for being a guard at a concentration camp. Hannah is convicted. The adult Michael is played by Ralph Fiennes, and he struggles with his memories of his time with Hannah, and reconnects with her as she serves her jail sentence. The title comes from the fact that Hannah asks the young Michael to read literature to her. It subsequently becomes clear that she had also asked girls in the camp to read to her. The law student Michael deduces that Hannah must have been illiterate. Continue reading The Reader

Star Trek

I think we need some burden-sharing here; I should not be the only one on the blog going to the opening day of these summer blockbusters. How about if Jeff goes to see Angels and Demons next week and Gio takes on Terminator Salvation the week after?

There are no surprises here. This is the prequel in which we see the young Kirk enter the Starfleet Academy and immediately get thrown into a battle to save the Earth from rebel Romulans from the future. Continue reading Star Trek

Crime/Labor

I have a fascination for heist narratives, onscreen or on the page: the lovingly-detailed build-up, where we delve into the lives of a varied group of criminals, the casing of joints, the hatching of plans; the equally painstaking attention to the execution of the gig, with and without hitches; the last-act which can diverge, in equally-satisfying ways, toward hair-breadth escapes and the caper’s happy-ending OR toward unplanned interference, the one detail missed which blows the escape, or the eruption of submerged tensions which tears apart the gang, or….

David Denby once, in an aside, thought filmmakers loved heist films because the elaborate planning and execution echoed the intricacies of filmmaking. (Denby so rarely says anything smart that it stuck in my head. [I only say this to get into the next edition of his book on _Snark_.]) I probably get sucked in by my own meta-narrative obsessions: heist stories are about the shaping of a tightly-defined, closed plot… and the impossibility of defining and closing such plots.

But another pleasure is less analytical: I enjoy watching these films because they are about work. How often do we see characters in film working? Sure, we may see an office, or occasionally a factory; there are occasionally subplots involving a big presentation or some event. But people defining an outcome, and then carefully doing all the little shit that needs doing to make that outcome occur — heist films, or more broadly certain variants of the crime narrative, are about workers and their tasks. Continue reading Crime/Labor

Favorite shots

I thought I’d try something different, though hardly unprecedented. Other film blogs take full advantage of image and video hosting capabilities. Ours, though rich in humor and ideas, is pretty stale visually. So here goes. What are some of your favorite shots? (no, Michael, Hackler is not what I had in mind). Dig around online and see if you can images of your faves! Continue reading Favorite shots

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Is really not that bad. It is solid entertainment, full of impressive action sequences (including one great one on Three Mile Island), loosely weaved together with the origin story to Wolverine and his brother, Sabretooth (played by Liev Schreiber, hamming it up). There is little effort made to ponder the dialectics of mutant existence, in contrast to the original movie trilogy, so instead we get a standard story of sibling rivalry, lost love, revenge, and admantium injection. It is fun to see more of the comic book mutants appear as extras, and even Xavier makes a late appearance. But nothing very complicated is being attempted in the movie, and it is a good way to ease into the summer blockbuster season.

As I was buying the ticket, the seller told me to “stay for the credits” and indeed, there is a fairly pointless 30 second scene right after the five full minutes of credits (during which I learned that what appeared to be the Canadian Rockies, were in fact mountains in New Zealand).  I wonder if this was an official message, or just an employee eager than I not miss a second of the origin story.

Caterina in the Big City

I recommend this film, co-written and directed by Paolo Virzi. It’s a believable, and often moving story–albeit a familiar (and maybe for some, tiresome) one. A doll-faced hick moves to the big city with her family. As she struggle to fit in, to make friends and adjust, there are big disappointments and small triumphs, blah blah blah. Such a familiar tale is bound to be tedious unless we truly care about the characters. And in this film, we do–or I did, anyway. I cared not only about Caterina, but her father. And, in a way, the film could also be titled Caterina’s Father in the Big City, or Giancarlo in the Big City. Continue reading Caterina in the Big City