31
October
2006
First of all, it’s hard to believe that the Andrew Douglas who directed Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is the same Andrew Douglas behind the Amityville Horror remake. That the same man responsible for one of the worst films of 2005 is also responsible for one of the best is not unheard of in the film business, but it is damn unusual. On second thought, the crazy dichotomy is an apt illustration for the eerie, extreme Jesusland that Wrong-Eyed Jesus puts under the macroscope.
Accompanied by tour guide/alt country performer Jim White (who drives us about in a buddy’s 1970 Chevy Impala instead of a cozy coach bus) and a bevy of other luminaries, including Johnny Dowd, 16 Horsepower, Harry Crews, and David Johansen, the filmmakers float through the Deep South, attempting to apprehend with their cameras and boom mikes that distinctive, Southern atmosphere that pervades so much of the music from that region. White proves to be a wise, voluble Virgil. His running commentary sounds more like free verse poetry than extemporaneous philosophical nuggets. The roots music filtering through the aural canopy of Wrong-Eyed Jesus’s soundtrack gives the singer the aura of having rehearsed his whole life just to tell a life’s story in three minutes, a record of subjective Truth more persuasive than any ancient Greek syllogism.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Articles, Reviews, Drama
30
October
2006
On a dark rainy night, in a secluded towering laboratory, Dr. Henry Frankenstein sets out to create a man assembled out of the body parts of human cadavers. And when it—lying on a table, hidden under linen sheets—becomes animated through the power of nature’s electricity, lightning from the sky, Henry Frankenstein comes face to face with the thing made of his imagining—a thing he sees not as a man, but as a monster. And he would eventually come to loathe and wish to destroy the Monster he made, along with the rest of the town’s villagers.
In Frankenstein and its successor, The Bride of Frankenstein, (both based on Mary Shelley’s novel) James Whale subverts horror conventions by turning the Monster into something feared not by its own nature (for example, it does not have a thirst for human blood), but feared by humans who persecute the Monster based on their perception of it. The Monster—although having the appearance of brutality—only engages in violence and murder, either through ignorance or when he is chased and cornered like an animal. And when the villagers come after the Monster with torches, he seeks to escape but isn’t able to—trapped in a windmill set on fire by the villagers.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Articles
26
October
2006
David Cronenberg is not a director for everyone. His very frank explorations of biology in relation to the human psyche can sicken or confuse viewers and critics alike. Still, his forays into borderline SF and fantasy have garnered a massive cult following–but A History of Violence is something new altogether. It is closest in tone to his 1996 film Crash, which alienated all but his most diehard fans for its heady mix of anything-goes sex and arousing violence. History similarly touches upon the entanglement of sex and violence, as well as the pervasive nature of violence in our pop culture and society.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Reviews, Drama, Action
25
October
2006
First of all, you should know that the best jokes from Thank You for Smoking are in the trailer. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve basically seen what the movie has to offer. What appear to be the highlights in a promising dark comedy are, in fact, the only stand-out moments in an ambitious (but ultimately very mediocre) film.
Based on the novel by Christopher Buckley, Thank You for Smoking tells the story of Nick Naylor (played with smug efficiency by the perfectly-cast Aaron Eckhart), a tobacco lobbyist of “flexible morals.” Naylor heads up the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a big tobacco house-organ whose job it is to obfuscate and spin the facts behind cigarette smoking. On a typical work day, Naylor brainstorms with his fellow shills trying to figure out how to make smoking “sexy” again, lunches with his fellow “Merchants of Death” (advocates for alcohol and firearms), and occasionally — when he can be bothered — tutors his twelve-year-old son in the ways of the ethical gray area.
Predatory and amoral, Naylor lives in a world where he is “never wrong,” simply because it’s his job to “be right.” As long as you can argue well (says Naylor to his son), the facts don’t really matter. This concept, by the way, seems to be at the heart of the film itself; as long as the script is full of “biting” humor and self-satisfaction, it doesn’t really matter if the film doesn’t say anything.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Reviews, Comedy
24
October
2006
Though Torchwood tries for a kind of sexy sensationalism which the Beeb clearly thinks will appeal to teenagers (the plot of episode one is straight out of 70s B-movie horror), it actually feels less edgy in many ways than the more family-friendly Dr Who. Part of the problem is that it is far too formulaic and self-conscious about pushing the boundaries –- it has a bit of token lesbianism, a bit of token sex, a bit of token alien life, a few token kisses introducing sexual tension between characters, a token suicide, but no real enjoyment of, or even confidence in, these excesses.
Torchwood is clearly aimed at the American market as well as the British, and part of the show’s problem is that it’s mired in an uneasy aesthetic compromise between dynamic, American-style shooting (aerial shots of Welsh roads, action framed in the glamorous setting of Cardiff’s bay area), and the rather more staid, soap-operalike cinematography that the BBC usually produces (facial close ups, wobbly plasticine sets). This extends into the acting. With Captain Jack being the only really vibrant character, John Barrowman delivers a performance that makes the British actors look timid and wooden. It would be hard to imagine a show with a more irritating female lead than Eve Myles’s Gwen Cooper. She’s been made so deliberately ordinary that she’s simply dull. The most interesting and competent thing she does in an hour and a half of screentime is create a ‘profile’ of a victim using the dead girl’s school reports, and stick a photograph of her on the wall. This fairly simple piece of research is touted as a mind-bogglingly brilliant breakthrough, equivalent to Einstein’s discovery of relativity, by the two other (horrendously underwritten) members of the Torchwood team, who apparently spend so long actually being competent at their jobs that they are in need of constant lectures about ‘what it means to be human’ and ‘the need for sympathy’ (yawn). All in all, this is a show with a lot to do if it’s not to follow in the path of the recent expensive flop Robin Hood.
Posted: Articles
24
October
2006
In his gap year, Prince William decided to go to southern Chile to do voluntary work. While he was there, he cleaned a toilet. We know this because the photographs of him crouching on the floor in yellow marigolds were splashed over newspapers across the world. The media frenzy that ensued was overwhelmingly positive about Britain’s future sovereign. Journalists commented affectionately that he appeared to have inherited his mother’s ‘common touch’, the public fawned over what they regarded as an indication of William’s democratic sensibilities.
This fascination with the ordinariness of the royal action is not new. In ‘The “Blue Blood” Cruise’, a miniature essay from the 1972 volume Mythologies, Roland Barthes satirized the tendency of the public to fixate on ‘contradictions of the Marie-Antoinette-playing-the-milkmaid type’:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Reviews, Drama
23
October
2006
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Altman, 1971) U.S.A.
Sometimes, life hands you a wild card. A stranger comes into your life and slowly but surely makes his presence felt. You may not feel it at first, but slowly this presence occupies your very being. Before you know it, you are riding a one-way express pass the point of no return. And just as slowly but surely, he leaves your sign post, never to return. You are but a station along the way, and the train continues its trek without you. You love this love forever, even if forever for you is never for him. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is the masterful filmic expression of this unfulfilled longing, a story of unexpected passion found a little too late. McCabe & Mrs. Miller began with McCabe riding his horse into a frontier town, to the music of Leonard Cohen’s The Stranger Song.
you find he did not leave you very much
not even laughter
Like any dealer he was watching for the card
that is so high and wild
he’ll never need to deal another
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger
The film played out much like the song. The desolate, foreboding atmosphere (beautifully photographed and directed by Robert Altman and co.) served as the psychological background for the slow collision of two lonely individuals - McCabe and Mrs. Miller (poignant performances by both Warren Beatty and Julie Christie). In the harsh and unforgiving environment that was the American frontier, survival depended on one’s ability to judge which devil to shake hands with while staying a few steps ahead of one’s predicament. The settlers struggled with the conflicting impulses: to plant their roots and branch out, or to continue exploring opportunities unknown.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Reviews, Drama
23
October
2006
Note: it will contain spoilers
Edward Scissorhands it he most beautiful movie ever made. Yes, this is just my opinion and it probably does not hold much merit, but I’m not one to care about that. It is easily the film I can relate to most, and Edward is my favourite film character of all time.
Edward is a symbol of innocence. Everyone has a little Edward deep inside of them, that innocent child standing over the spilt carton of milk, the kid who didn’t know that sticking a fork in the outlet is probably a bad idea. I do not just relate to Edward in that one way. We’re both lonely souls, who are not understood by the rest of the world. We are not accepted, because we are different, and because we are misunderstood. We long for acceptance, but it is not given to us.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Reviews, Drama
23
October
2006
War is hell. Calling a man a “hero” does not make him one. True heroes do not think of themselves as such. And, in the case of the WWII Marines in the world famous flag-raising photo of Iwo Jima, heroes are marketed, not made.
All of these ideas are established by William Broyles, Jr.’s and Paul Haggis’s screenplay for Flags of Our Fathers, and then revisited…and revisited…and revisited. From a storytelling standpoint, the film leaves much to be desired; it awkwardly threads together three separate timeframes, one of which is barely filled out at all, and makes its themes evident from the beginning. The strongest complaints against Haggis’s previous screenplays for Million Dollar Baby and Crash concerned their thematic exposition and lack of subtlety, especially in terms of such wrenchingly complex issues as euthanasia and racism. Flags continues this trend, putting into the mouths of characters such explicit statements of thesis and moral that one whole plotline (a post-photograph publicity tour for war bonds) amounts to a hokey, protracted lecture on all three of these topics: war, ethics, and racism.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Reviews, Drama
23
October
2006
When I first heard that Sofia Coppola’s latest movie had been booed at Cannes I instantly presumed that they must have felt that it was just a plain bad movie. After the roaring success of Lost in Translation it was almost inevitable anyway that she’d slip up somewhere along the line. It hadn’t, at the time, crossed my mind that an American director making a movie about the life of one of France’s most notorious political figures might be a controversial move. Having now seen the movie and noted the way that Coppola brushes over the political events at the end of her life that end in the French Revolution and her beheading, I can understand and sympathise with anyone who might initially be upset with the film. What right, after all, does someone from the land of Freedom fries, France’s new enemy, have to commentate so superficially on their history in this way?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Reviews, Drama
23
October
2006
I know I’m in the minority, but I absolutely love the Director’s Cut of Cinema Paradiso. Don’t get me wrong, the theatrical cut is very good as well. But I felt it was missing something (it needed closure) and the Director’s Cut delivered. The two cuts are completely different films. The theatrical cut focuses on the friendship between Toto and Alfredo. The DC focuses on Toto and his love for Elena, and it even goes as far as to vilify Alfredo. I could see how those who saw this film many years ago do not like the new cut as the entire story has changed. However, I truly love the love story in the new version. I found it far more moving than any other love story I have seen before.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Reviews, Foreign
22
October
2006
I don’t remember the first time I heard the theory that the death of the artist is necessary for creativity to flourish. The gist, if I recall correctly, was that the artist imparts bits of his soul into his work so that the audience may consume it and so that it may survive him. As a result, the artist, as Neil Young put it, burns out or fades away, perhaps a little earlier than the rest of us. ‘Tis a fascinating way to regard the creative process, and certainly supported by the raft of common metaphors associated with stages of the creative process: “pouring your lifeblood” into the ink of a page, or “murdering your children” in the revision process. Indeed, the conceit of creative works being invested with the “soul” of an artist is probably the most basic, ineffable way in the English language of describing what makes an artwork work ; it suggests that art is not inanimate, that there is something ephemerally spiritual in a great piece of literature, painting, music, theatre, or cinema. Though I think Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Christopher Priest’s novel, The Prestige, works on multiple levels, the only way I’ve been able to think about it is as a parallel metaphor for filmmaking.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Reviews, Drama
21
October
2006
Going into The Prestige, I was, in a word, skeptical. After seeing the early reviews for the film, I couldn’t tell if Christopher Nolan had created the next Memento, a film that I am very fond of, or the next Insomnia, a film that I found lacking, to say the least. However, once I walked into the theatre, I found that The Prestige is better than both those films, and the best film Christopher Nolan ever produced.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Reviews, Drama
19
October
2006
Miami Vice (Mann, 2006) U. S. A.
How to take Miami Vice? Since it’s a procedural film, perhaps a detail discussion of what worked and what did not work would be appropriate.
Let’s start with what worked. Everyone talked about the dream-like cinematography – which, I suspect, would look even better on a High Definition screen. The feel of the film was great, especially the money shots (Calabrese’s speech and follow up shot were just too much fun). But let’s skip the obvious and get right to the more interesting parts. Miami Vice dealt in duplicity and the film’s structure mirrored this theme. When it worked, it was brilliant. At one point, Tubbs and Crockett - along with the audience - scouted an empty hotel before meeting up with Isabella and the gang. A few slides later, we’d see the same hotel being occupied by them, yet the place took on a drastically different complexion. The characters occupying that very same space brought about changes and movements that could not have been predicted by advanced calculation, illustrating an interesting secondary theme in Miami Vice. There was also the scene of the two planes that occupied a single blip on the radar (was that symbolic enough for ya?), the book-ending hostage sequence with a girl being tied to a bomb (which showcased the essential difference between Tubbs/Crockett and other undercover agents – Alonzo’s nervous breakdown in contrast with Tubbs/Crockett’s level headed, survival reaction), and Isabella/El Tiburon’s house both occupied and emptied.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Reviews, Drama, Action
19
October
2006
“Fate had determined that he should leave none of his race behind him, and that he should finish his life poor, lonely and childless.”
Strange but true: the real star of Stanley Kubrick’s masterful Barry Lyndon is not Ryan O’Neal. It’s cinematographer John Alcott, whose lush, gorgeous photography work in this movie not only won him an Academy Award in 1975, but eclipses everything else in the film — and, given the scope and ambition of Barry Lyndon, that’s no small accomplishment.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Articles, Reviews, Drama
18
October
2006
Mabel Longhetti is just a little bit different, her husband insists. The extent of this difference, like a pendulum, swings back and forth throughout the film. When we first meet Mabel, unless we look carefully at the way she would get on her kid’s scooter, there seems to be little that would distinguish Mabel from other high-strung, nervous housewives. You know, the kind that would get overly worried about her kids being with her mother, and having the house looking just so? When her husband calls home to cancel their special date together, he’s more worried than the audience. We soon find out why, as Mabel goes out to a bar and comes home with a stranger, all drunk out of her mind. But Mabel does not just go to bed with the stranger out of vengeance; she promptly beats up on the poor, unsuspecting stranger for trying to advance on her (understandably, as she gives him the implied go-ahead social signals through out the evening). Then it’s morning, and Mabel wakes up to the sound of said stranger walking around the house, mumbling to himself. She calls out to him, then to his face: “Nick”. And after having to repeatedly deny that he is called Nick, the stranger (and the audience) finally sees Mabel’s ‘difference’. As it is, Mabel’s only lighthouse - symbolically, and sometimes literally - is the love that she shares with Nick, her husband. It is only natural that in her state of confusion, she refuses to believe that she has done anything to betray this love. And it is the crumbling of this love that brings about her eventual nervous break down.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Articles
18
October
2006
Tony Takitani grew up as a lonely child. His father, a jazz musician, was never there, and his American name—given at a time of American-Japanese conflict—alienated him from other children. And yet he was satisfied with his life alone, not particularly conscious of his solitude.
But one day Tony meets a woman. He is attracted to her grace and how she wears her clothes. He courts her, and for the first time in his life he doesn’t want to be alone anymore. He is in love. And so he asks her to marry him, and she does. And he realizes that not being alone anymore made his lonely past a painful thing, and doesn’t want to go back to that state of loneliness ever again.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Articles
18
October
2006
Junior high school is horrible.
This seems to be the message and raison d’etre (sorry) for Todd Solondz’s gut-wrenching and merciless indie film Welcome to the Dollhouse, a film I had to try for several days to find merit in after watching. While Netflix lists it as a “dark comedy,” I have to admit I found almost nothing funny about it — but plenty that was familiar, depressing, and unrelenting.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Articles, Reviews, Drama, Comedy
17
October
2006
*some spoilers*
Of all the directors in the United States, Martin Scorsese is one of the last people I would have expected to jump on the Asian remake bandwagon. As one of our premier directors (if not the most widely acclaimed American auteur working today), directing a movie that has already been done — and done well — seems a bit beneath his talent. As rich a Hollywood tradition as it may be, remakes today are generally regarded as the checkpoints at which promising or established directors surrender their immortal souls for a fat, studio paycheck. But if there’s one thing Martin Scorsese knows, it’s testosterone-fueled underworld drama. The Aviator was a large step into the mainstream for Scorsese, and The Departed cinches it. Whether or not it’s an artistically progressive trend is grounds for a whole other discussion. There is no doubt, though, that Scorsese, for the most part, has gotten cozier and cozier with Hollywood as the years have passed, and if his star has perhaps faded a bit with more recent releases (another open debate), he is still a formidable craftsman and one of the few living maestros of the American crime genre. For him to remake Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs, one of the most acclaimed crossover hits in recent memory, might make sense after all, though there are many things about The Departed which do not.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Articles
17
October
2006
“We’ll get him. We’ll get him. Man, dont worry about that, we’ll get him. And when we do, we’ll blow up his car, do something. I can guarantee you that. What makes me furious is thinking about the look on Bob’s fat face, thinking he pulled one over on us. I tell you another thing. If our paths cross again, you’re gonna see a side of Dignan that you havent seen before. A sick, sadistic side, cause I’m furious at Bob.”
I’m fairly backwards as far as Wed Anderson fandom goes. I really like Royal Tenenbaums, although I’m not a big fan of Rushmore, am fairly positive on Life Aquatic, and have never seen Bottle Rocket at all until now. Almost instantly, it became my favorite Anderson film by far.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Articles, Reviews, Comedy
