Quick recommendation: A return to the pleasures of the British gangster film. I think this is far superior to Guy Ritchie’s stuff, because both more brutal and more attentive to the consequences of brutality. The best antecedent, although some are naming The Long Good Friday (also great, but a different kind of flick), is Mike Hodges’ great Get Carter. Very entertaining.
I Don’t Know Jack / Team America
I’ve seen a wealth of incredible documentaries over the past year or so. In fact, I’d say each of these was better than almost any current-run feature films I’ve seen in the same time frame:
Rivers & Tides
Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns
Riding Giants, and perhaps the best of the bunch:
Stevie .
So maybe I was getting suckered into thinking that docs these days are just really good. Well, in any case I was excited to see I Don’t Know Jack appear at my local video store. It’s about Jack Nance, who died after a fight at a donut shop in South Pasadena. Nance was Eraserhead, and had roles in almost all of David Lynch’s films. Continue reading I Don’t Know Jack / Team America
adaptations
Today’s NY Times had a decent little article about films which superseded (or were superlative to) the book. I generally sidestep conversations about such matters–they get dull in an NPR tongue-clucking way (about the ostensible decline of the literate class) real fast–but: what are some good ones? Egregiously awful ones?
Continue reading adaptations
Toys
shudder I just had a flashback to what an awful fucking movie that was.
Anyway, I plan to post on a couple of films I’ve watched in a day or two.
After Life (2003… I think)
This flick was mentioned some time ago–but I just saw it, and at the least thought I’d throw up another nod. The scenario is a post-death fantasy where the recently-departed are asked to pick a single memory which they will inhabit (or something–we’re never really sure) from thereon out. What I liked especially was the rigorous sidestepping of whimsy or fantasy; the afterlife is a very solid place, the workers there follow a specific bureaucracy, and–nicest touch–the memory chosen is then reconstructed on film, a material re-enactment which the workers undertake very concretely (location scouting, sound effects, etc.).
Memory, Kincaid (aka Marco) will be glad to hear, is examined with both compassion and a shrewd dispassion. Everyone is making up what they need, and part of the bureaucrats’ job is to get people to recognize how they’re shaping, reshaping, fabulating a past…. But fabulation is not explicitly challenged or mocked–the “real” (material) re-enactment is itself explicitly a construction, but one consciously chosen and shaped…
Smart, engaging, very recommended.
Spielberg
War of the Worlds was 2/3 of a great movie. For the first hour, hour and fifteen minutes, the film creates a pervasive sense of dread and hopelessness, the gee-whiz special effects always coincident with aw-shit discomfort. By that I mean the razzle-dazzle of the special effects, or even more the precision of Spielberg’s direction, never outweighs a sense of fear, of terror–of awe. That is exactly what an alien invasion film ought to do; there is a sense of inconsequentiality to the choices the characters make, a sense of hopelessness, of the inefficacy of the individual against much larger forces (bug-eyed monsters here, awe-inspiring aliens in Close Encounters, history in Schindler or Private Ryan).
But that version of Spielberg’s humanism–compassion for the small and helpless (which is why he’s so damn good with the child’s point of view)–unfortunately runs up against his other, more conventional rah-rah version of humanism, where can-do spirit and gumption make things work, by jiminy. And War gets stuck when it tries to graft the two together. Continue reading Spielberg
Last Life in the Universe (2003)
Thai film–well, Thai director, ultrahip Japanese star (and cameo from Takashi Miike), played out in English, Thai, and Japanese. Shot beautifully by Christopher Doyle, which made me half-expect another Wong Kar Wai knock-off, but director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang has his own absurdist approach to narrative and imagery despite some nods toward WKW’s obsessions. Like so many films of the last few years (or narrative, always?), the movie plays around with issues of life & death, coincidence and meaning, romance, violence. Japanese expat protagonist Kenji (Asano Tadanobu) seeks to off himself at the beginning of the film–but, he takes pains to note, not for reasons most people commit suicide, although he never names the explicit reasons. Instead he gets mixed up with a local woman Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak) and… well, there’s a couple murders, an accident, a jealous boyfriend, Yakuza. But things never heat up, never boil over into plottedness.
Instead, the film seems willfully even derisively dismissive of explicit reasons. “Big” things occur offscreen, out of frame, or just out of the narrative; there’s a sly humor to the displacement of expectations, replacing our focus on the subtle interplay of the two lead characters. And they’re a joy to watch. The film’s enthralling.
Stevie
This documentary from Steve James came out a few years ago, and I remembered seeing the trailer, but missing the film. Finally saw it last night, and it’s an outstanding piece of personal filmmaking that addresses the nature of documentary and objectivism. It also closely examines justice, faith, love, family, personal responsibility and the failings that come with being human. (A character in the film laments that she might have been able to help more, if she just wan’t so human.)
Steve James directed Hoop Dreams, and of course I thought that was a great film, even though I couldn’t relate too much to basketball playing prodigies in a big city. Stevie on the other hand was nearly filmed in my backyard. Continue reading Stevie
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.
Denis Leary on tv
Has anyone seen “Rescue Me”? We talked tv some time ago, and no one ever mentioned this — his show about firefighters. We caught an episode last night, and … it’s good. I had been a fan of his short-lived “The Job,” where he played the same character but as a cop, and that show too is often superb, ‘though pitched more directly as a comedy. “Rescue” seems (from one episode) to have a broader set of objectives, pushing dark comedy but also some of the bleaker portrayals of working-class men destroying themselves which Leary tackled in the film “Monument Ave” some time back.
I ordered it from Netflix, but I’m curious if others have any opinions.