| Movie | Rating | Review | Date | Your Rating | Match | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Johnny Guitar - PG | This Nicholas Ray film would appear to be a standard Republic western at first sight, but it has become a staple of film school analysis because it has a number of subversive elements in its subtext. There?s an obvious anti-McCarthy allegory to the story with its sympathy toward people that are being persecuted by the elite of a town that tries to turn the gang against each other. There are also feminist elements to the film with Joan Crawford playing a very strong female protagonist and Mercedes McCambridge playing an equally strong female villain. This is definitely a step above its peers, but there are elements of cheese left over from its modest origins and it also has kind of a weak middle act between its strong beginning and stronger finish. | December 25, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Cache (Hidden) - R | This is a film that failed to blow my mind the first time I saw it, but I was watching it in less than perfect circumstances and I wanted to give it another shot. This time around I think I appreciated it a lot more. Firstly I think I got a lot more out of the film?s political undertones. There?s definitely a very smart message about how white privilege can lead people to a callous disregard for the suffering of those who are unlike themselves and for how society reacts to the guilt of past racial transgressions through denial. Stylistically, I?m a bit more mixed. Haneke is certainly able to set a really strong tone of dread with his long takes and smash cuts, but the downside to this is that the movie is cold as hell. The DVD case proclaims a kinship between Haneke and Hitchcock but he?s really a hell of a lot closer to Kubrick. Cold can be a good decision but it can also have a fairly disengaging effect to it, the style is so detached from the main character that I found it a bit harder to care about the main character than was probably for the best. Still, there?s a ton of stuff to respect here. | December 25, 2009 | N/A | |||
| The Apartment - Unrated | I love this movie. I was afraid the second viewing wouldn?t affect me as much as the first time I saw it years ago, but it?s as good as I remember it. This is one of the very best fusions of harsh drama and comedic relief that I?ve seen and it?s remarkably mature for a Hollywood film of the era. It manages to deal with themes like adultery and suicide without ever becoming a self-serious ?issue? movie like Wilder?s The Lost Weekend and it?s brought to life by astonishingly good performances by Lemmon, MacLaine, and MacMurray. It?s not particularly laugh out loud funny, as its advertising and reputation seem to paint it as, but it?s really charming when it needs to be and serious when that?s called for. It was also clearly an inspiration for the AMC series Mad Men, making it all the better to watch today. It may forever be known as the movie that ?stole? Psycho?s Oscar, but I think the award was deserved, Psycho didn?t need the laurals to be remembered for the ages, this might have. | December 25, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Roger Dodger - R | This is a sundancey little drama whose main strengths are its dialogue and its acting. The former is quite good and has a Mamet quality to it and the later is also pretty solid with Campbell Scott pouting over-thought advice like a self help pro and a young Jesse Eisenberg doing his thing that he will go on to do for the rest of the decade. That?s a solid foundation and it carries the movie, but this is definitely not the kind of film that really goes anywhere. It?s sort of trying to do a Catcher in the Rye thing, telling a coming of age story over the course one night that seems relatively uneventful but which will probably stay with the participants for a while. Good movie, worth seeing, but it?s probably not one for the ages. | December 25, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Irreversible - Unrated | Discussions of irreversible always seem to begin with a stern warning that it?s extreme violence is not for everyone, followed by a lengthy discussion about its reverse chronology. Everything I?d heard lead me to believe that this is an astonishingly polarizing film that will either have you walking out or in love with it, yet oddly I had a decidedly indifferent reaction to the whole thing. Part of the problem my simply be that most of it had been spoiled for me. The basic story and structure is the film?s strong point, there?s the frame of a good movie and most of the acting is excellent. However, the film?s first half is undone by a ridiculous camera style that makes Paul Greengrass look like fricken Ozu. I also found Gasper Noe?s effort to depicted the seediest of urban underbellies he possibly could to be unconvincing and juvenile. | December 25, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! - R | This is a documentary about the genre/exploitation movies being made in Australia during the 60s, 70s and 80s which ranged from horror movies to action films to sex comedies. As is usually the case with these kind of movie genre documentaries, Quentin Tarantino is an interviewee who seems to know more about the subject at hand than the people who actually made the movies. Most participants are not under the delusion that the movies at hand are any good, which adds a sort of self deprecating humor at hand. Mad Max is the one and only movie featured in this film which I?ve seen, and I have a feeling that most of these would not be very pleasant to actually sit through, but watching the selected clips on display here is actually quite enjoyable. A lot of the movies they talk about are absolutely bizarre, and some of these clips are positively surreal. I?m not really sure that there is much here to elevate this above the many other movie genre documentaries that have been made for TV, but it is certainly an energetic take on the subject at hand. | December 25, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Prince of Darkness - R | John Carpenter is a guy who?s made some pretty good movies, but all too often his films are plagued by a lot of B-movieish things. This is a bigger problem here than it usually is, this is a movie that doesn?t have as many of the things I like about Carpenter?s movies and delivers on the things I dislike about the guy in droves. The acting here is just straight up shitty and this isn?t helped by the lame dialogue. The whole movie plays out in one boring location and the supernatural scares are all really lame. Few redeeming values. | December 25, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Valentino: The Last Emperor - PG-13 | This documentary about fashion designer Valentino Garavani is one of the highest grossing and most buzzed about documentaries of the year, and it?s been longlisted for the Documentary Feature Oscar category. The praise made it sound like something worth checking out, but I?d been pretty hesitant to do so simply because I frankly don?t give a damn about Valentino or about the world of fashion. But I saw this was a available for instant streaming on Netflix and I had a couple hours to kill, what did I have to lose? Not a lot really, this proved to be fairly watchable but it certainly didn?t make me care about or particularly respect its subject any more than I did before. The year in the man?s life which this chronicles proves to not be very dramatic, it?s just sort of a few typical days in the guy?s life and I suppose his fans will find it pretty revealing. | December 25, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring - R |
Eastern philosophy is something I?ve never really been able to wrap my head around and Buddhism is not a subject I know a whole lot about. Because of this I was a little worried about how well I?d be able to understand this story of the happenings at a Buddhist monastery on a lake, but after a short while watching it was clear I had nothing to worry about.
The film has a unique structure, it?s told through five vignettes, as you can probably guess each one is named after a season, together they tell the story of a monk and the boy he?s training in the ways of Buddha. Each vignette is set a number of years apart, in Spring the boy is a young child, in Summer he?s a teenager, and so on. I feel like each of these segments (with the possible exception of ?Fall?) could function independently as a short film, but together they manage to tell the story of a life. The emphasis here is on cycles, clearly a tenant of eastern philosophy, in which the end is only the beginning. The seasons cycle, life is a cycle, and nature works in cycles. I can?t claim to understand every cultural trait on display here (a commentary track by an expert would have been really enlightening), but as meditative as the movie can be at times, it?s never boring, that?s one of its greatest triumphs. Even if one ignores a lot of the films philosophical elements, it still works pretty well as a mere human story. This is a movie that works whether you see it as being about life or merely a life. I was also very impressed by just how much of this story was told mainly through its visuals. In fact I think the ?winter? portion played out almost entirely without dialogue. This is helped by the fact that this has some excellent camera work and beautiful cinematography, and set in a beautifully scenic location and that it?s accompanied by a pretty cool score. |
December 25, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Up in the Air - R |
I?m not the first person to point this out, but it increasingly seems like George Clooney is the last representative of a certain kind of unapologetic movie-star acting. Clooney will never have his work analyzed the same way someone would analyze a performance by, say, Daniel Day-Lewis or Robert De Niro when he was at his best; but in the right role this can be more of a strength than a weakness. Much the way someone like Cary Grant became a legend by simply playing variations on an established persona, Clooney has been giving audiences what they expect from him since he left behind his TV origins. Clooney?s newest film, Up in the Air, is not an exception; he gives exactly the performance you expect him to give and that?s not a criticism.
The film is largely a character study about a man named Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) who claims to have only spent forty out of the last 365 nights at his one room apartment in Omaha, the rest of the time has been spent traveling. Bingham is not married, he has no children, and he neither has nor desires any possessions that can?t be fit into a carry-on bag. He is not merely content with his lifestyle; he takes pride in it, even going so far as to hold public speaking events where he preaches the values of cutting the burdens out of one?s life. The lifestyle is made possible by Bingham?s unconventional job; he works for a company which sends out agents to other companies in order to deliver the bad news to the employees that they?re laying off. Bingham doesn?t take pleasure in this somewhat morbid task, though he does see a sort of dignity in his methods, but he?s primarily doing this so he can continue to live in transit. But this way of life is being threatened. A young woman named Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), who has recently begun working at Bingham?s company, has proposed cutting the agency?s travel budget in favor of firing people via webcams. Bingham protests this new way of operating vehemently both because it strikes him as indecently impersonal and secondly because it would kill his traveling lifestyle. Bingham?s boss (Jason Bateman) decides to send Keener out on the road with Bingham in order to better assess the viability of her plan. Bingham reluctantly brings her along hoping he can convince her against her plans. That summery is really pretty deceptive, firstly because I have yet to bring up the character of Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) who is the main love interest for George Clooney. It?s hard to fit her into a brief summery because this script can be surprisingly un-formulaic in many ways. Goran and Bingham meet early in the film and bond over a shared love of air travel and the amenities it can entail. She then leaves the film for a while as the story between Bingham and Keener develops before re-emerging somewhere in the middle of the second act. First and foremost, it should probably be established that this whole business of Bingham?s agency threatening to turn into a web-based rather than travel based process is, for the most part, a rather elaborate MacGuffin. It?s also a MacGuffin that can rather stretch believability at times, I?m not sure I entirely buy that this company is going to be all that interested in Keener?s plans in the first place, nor do I particularly buy the elaborate on the road training they decide to put her through. However, quibbling about this is to miss the point, the real reason the film has brought these two characters together is to see how their world views will clash. Keener is someone with a rigid plan for life, she?s someone who has a very specific vision of her future which involves a husband, a suburban house, and two and a half kids; the notion of someone who would want something else for themselves is kind of a shock to her. This clash of views does play out in a pretty amusing way, but it?s also probably one of the film?s biggest weaknesses. Keener is a character that can be almost cartoonishly naïve at times, I can understand that they were trying to create a character who was as determined in their way of seeing the world as Bingham, but her worldview is derives less of conviction than it does of obliviousness. She says and does things that I can?t really picture anyone, no matter how naïve, saying. As such she comes off less like a natural character and more as some kind of walking symbol of everything that Bingham isn?t, at least during the scenes that place more emphasis on this clash of personalities. Fortunately, the Keener character does evolve over the course of the film and becomes more believable later on, the second half of the film fares a lot better than the first. The character of Goran also feels pretty artificial early in the film. They meet in an airport bar and start bonding over their wide array of traveler?s discount cards. Maybe there really are people who think that frequent flyer miles are dead sexy, but I?ve never met them and hope I never do. Of course that?s just a cutesy way to establish that this woman is pretty much the female equivalent of Bingham, but again the screenplay?s habit of tailoring characters to contrast the lead works against it. Fortunately, the Goran character becomes more human as the film progresses much the way the Keener character does. The relationship does work pretty well in the film as well, largely because Cloony and Farmiga have really good onscreen chemistry. Jason Reitman, who?s consistently proving to be a reliable director of slightly stylized realities, certainly crafts the film well. Reitman is a director with the valuable talent of being able to employ a number of tricks but without allowing them to become distractions. A good example of this are the methodical steady-cam shots of Bingham?s rolling carry-on bag as it twists and pivots. He shoots it in a way that perfectly expresses Bingham?s methodical nature, but he doesn?t get carried away and turn it into some sort of extended tracking shot. That kind of ambition with restraint is a very hard tightrope to walk and it?s a skill that?s easy to overlook. Watching Up in the Air I found myself reminded of a relatively forgotten 2005 film called The Weatherman, in which Nicholas Cage played a T.V. weatherman who needs to come to terms with their own mediocrity. Both are films about middle-aged men going through existential crises, both have similarly sarcastic voice-overs, hell, both even used Iggy Pop?s ?The passenger? for their trailers (then again what trailers aren?t using that song these days?). In spite of all these similarities the two movies are perhaps opposites if one thinks about it, The Weatherman is about someone who hates his job and comes to terms with it by the end while Up in the Air is about a man who loves his job and begins to question it by the end. Perhaps what can be learned from this unintentional similarity is that discontent can hit anyone and that the feeling will still be the same even if the paths it takes is pretty different. So, what we have here is a well acted and well directed movie with good dialogue? and it didn?t really do a lot for me. Like with An Education earlier this year, what we have here is a very well crafted movie with a story that maybe doesn?t deserve all the talent that?s been put behind it, especially during its rocky first half. This may simply case where I might just not be the right audience for this story. Though this isn?t really a comedy, the audience I was with were laughing at a lot of parts of this which weren?t all that funny to me. This is certainly a very enjoyable and entertaining movie which will probably deservedly be a hit with audiences, but I don?t think it really rises above the level of ?pleasant? all that often. |
December 24, 2009 | N/A | |||
| X-Men Origins - Wolverine - PG-13 |
Oh how the mighty have fallen. The X-Men franchise used to be a leader in the superhero genre; the original X-Men basically kicked off the current craze and X-Men 2 was able to one-up all the other emerging franchises back in 2003. Then a man named Brett Ratner came onto the scene and Yoko-ed the whole thing up. X-Men: The Last Stand was a major step down from its predecessors, eliminating all the classiness that kept the series ahead of its competitors and reduced the whole thing to merely being a generic 00s action movie in the worst possible sense of what that can mean. It?s like the series had gone from something on par with the Bourne Series and suddenly turned it into something closer to the XXX series. To turn this into a musical analogy; the band just put out a pathetic album and decided to split up, now the popular lead singer has put together a mildly talented group of studio musician and put out a bland solo record called X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Those who were somewhat intrigued by the prospect teased in the trailers of a story about an immortal living through the course of history, this movie will be a disappointment. All that material is finished by the end of the opening credits, in which the instantly healing Victor Creed (Liev Schreiber taking the role originally played by Tyler Mane) and Logan (Hugh Jackman) live through multiple wars throughout American history. This run ends in Vietnam where their power is discovered by Major William Stryker (Danny Huston taking the role originally played by Brian Cox in X-Men 2), who decides to recruit them for Team X, a group of mutants who engage in black ops for the government. Logan approves of this for a while, but the carnage begins to wear on him. After a particularly tense mission, Logan decides to leave and the team disbands. The film picks up six years later when Victor returns and murders the woman Logan was living with (Lynn Collins). Swearing revenge, Logan agrees to undergo physical enhancements from Stryker, but soon learns that Stryker is not someone to be trusted. The first problem here is the new set of mutants. Liev Schreiber is pretty good in his role, even if they make no attempt to connect the continuity between his role and the Sabretooth from the first X-men film. The rest of the cast is second string at best and embarrassingly stupid at the worst. Many of the actors here like Taylor Kitsch and Daniel Henney feel like bland models from central casting. Will.i.am, an incredibly lame musician who makes one of the worst screen debuts in recent memory, plays a teleporting mutant who?s basically a poor man?s Nightcrawler. Then there?s The Blob (Kevin Durand), a character they really just shouldn?t have tried to translate from page to screen. Compare this cast to the rest of the series, which was populated by great character actors like Patrick Stewart and Ian Mckellen, even the smaller roles were filled by cool character actors like Alan Cumming and Anna Paquin. To the film?s credit, it has two action set-pieces that are pretty cool. One is scene where Wolverine is attacked by a helicopter while fleeing on motorcycle, which is probably the film?s highlight. There?s also a fight scene towards the end which is fairly creative. However, outside of those two scenes the action here is lame. The problem is that all the mutants here are not just super-powered, they also seemed to have acquired crazy matrix-style acrobatic moves that they use to ridiculous results. The biggest offender here is the character of Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) who can apparently deflect the bullets of multiple fully automatic rifles with his swords and then split a bullet in half in mid air? right. He?s not the only one either. In the previous X-films the characters had powers, but were essentially human outside of them, this went a long way towards grounding the films. In this film pretty much every power automatically comes with superhuman speed, strength, endurance, agility, and balance. There?s a wide variety of other problems of course. The political allegories which even the bland Brett Ratner movie had the courage to tackle had basically been abandoned here. Also, the special effects can be pretty bad at times, they?re fine in the big set-pieces but the CGI gets iffy during some of the quieter scenes in need of effects. The movie also has a lot of trouble staying in the continuity of the series, I already mentioned the Sabretooth disconnection that can only be seen as a retcon, but there?s also a nonsense plot device added to explain how Wolverine no longer had his memories in the later installments. There?s also an astonishingly predictable twist that the audience is in on long before Wolverine is. What hurts about this movie is that it really could have been good if the people producing it had actually given a damn. There was room for interesting material in Wolverine?s origin, and every once in a while the movie shows signs of life, but its ultimately undone by its compromised by a central lack of ambition. It?s clear that the producers had done the math and realized they could get a great opening weekend by slapping the X-Men name onto any semi-competent movie and decided to deliver just that, a semi competent movie, and by all accounts they were able to fool a lot of people into showing up to see it. To return to my music analogy, the 20th Century Fox had better hope that this band can settle their differences and make a comeback album, because audiences aren?t going to put up with these half-assed solo albums for much longer. |
December 24, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Avatar - PG-13 |
You probably don?t need me to tell you about the hype that?s followed Avatar, the first film from director James Cameron since 1997?s Titanic. I?ve been following the project from a distance since it was nothing more than a vague story description years ago and have been awaiting Cameron?s return for just as long. It was only with a story that ran in Time Magazine earlier this year that the mythical project even seemed real. As the film started to be revealed, many decided to get a jumpstart on the backlash. Among the comments that people began lobbing comments like: ?it looks like an expensive FernGully,? ?it looks like a moving Yes album cover,? ?it sounds like Dances with Wolves in space,? and of course ?these characters look like Smurfs.? Even if there?s some slight truth to a couple of those statements, I don?t think the people who said them are going to stand by their sight unseen dismissals, what Cameron has delivered is a film that is far too big and too grand to be brought down by their cheap shots.
The film is set in the year 2154 on a moon called Pandora, a place with rich deposits of a rare and valuable mineral called unobtainium. There?s a corporation called SecFor seeking to mine this substance, but they must contend with the planet?s indigenous population, a species of tall blue humanoids called the Na?vi. Because there?s a particularly large concentration of unobtainium on the spot of the Na?vis? capital, a huge tree that?s been hollowed out and inhabited, and they?re beginning to think about using force to take over. Looking for an alternative, a scientific officer named Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) has started a program allowing the humans to create full sized Na?vis that can be controlled remotely by humans while lying in pods back at the base; these controlled clones are called ?avatars? and they hope that they can be used both for study and for the furthering of diplomacy with the Na?vi. That?s when our hero comes onto the scene. The company had developed an avatar to the genome of a man who was killed before he could start to control it. Rather than scrap the expensive avatar they invite his brother, an injured marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), to control it as he shares the genome and has enough military skills to be an effective security guard while the scientists are running missions on the surface of Pandora. Sully takes to the controlling of his avatar quickly but is still unfamiliar with the Pandoran terrain. After Sully is separated from his group and stranded in the unforgiving forests, he is saved by a Na?vi named Neytiri (Zoë Saldaña), who brings him into the Na?vi capital. Seeing an interaction between Sully and a forest entity as a sign from their gods, the Na?vi decide to allow Sully to stay with them and learn their ways. Sully begins to appreciate this culture, but his superior officers want him to use the opportunity to help them mount a military campaign. By its nature, the film is in many ways separated into two distinct sections which are both very impressive in their own ways, the hard sci-fi world of the human base and the lush natural world of the Pandoran forests. The human section is where Cameron shows off his ability to have live actors interact with environments that are almost entirely CGI. Among the cool technologies on display are computer interfaces that look like some kind of holograms, a massive cryo-stasis bay seen in an amazing opening scene, some really neat looking future helicopters, and some mechanized suits that are like the 7.0 version of the one used in the final scene of Cameron?s Aliens. But this isn?t going to be a movie that?s remembered for its well designed fort of the future, it?s going to be remembered as the film which brought the planet of Pandora to life. In the past, depictions of alien worlds were restrained by the flora and fauna of our own world. Tatooine was really just Tunisia, Hoth was really just Norway, and Vulcan was really just a soundstage with matte paintings of strange rocks in the distant background. Here though, the whole world and everything in it appear to have been built from the ground up to be a truly foreign and often beautiful. The creatures on the surface and in the air are wholly original, we see five legged beasts of burden, hammer headed charging rhino like things, and giant semi-reptilian flying creatures that are ridden by the local population. What?s truly amazing about all this besides the painstaking design is the way it?s all integrated with the characters and the action. It always feels like a seamless and integrated world. Then there are the Na?vi, the film?s greatest effects accomplishment. The Na?vi are fully CGI and but their movement and dialogue are based on performances by real actors. This revolution in motion capture technology is the element of all this that will probably prove to be this film?s most lasting legacy. The performances by all the people playing Na?vi is on screen and has not been muffled by the fact that they?re acting through a CGI character. It was one thing to have a single character like Gollum being conveyed through motion capture, but an entire species is a very different thing, especially when they have this much screen time. What we?re seeing here is less like Gollum and more like what Robert Zhemekis has been trying to do with his series of entirely motion captured films, only done significantly better. Now before I get too far in praising the film?s technological achievements, I do think there?s room for improvement with this technology. As cool as the Na?vi are, they aren?t human, and I suspect we have a long way to go before an actual human could be replicated through motion capture without the uncanny valley creeping in. You?ll also notice that there?s not a single scene in this movie where one of the Na?vi has any sort of meaningful interaction with a live action human. While the humans often interact quite well with the CGI environments, I do suspect that some of these CGI characters would look a little less impressive if they were being compared side to side with a living breathing human for extended lengths of time. It would seem that Cameron has pretty carefully created this story to show off everything that?s good about this technology and hide some of the things that aren?t quite there yet. There?s nothing wrong with that that and as far as the product at hand is concerned this is a wise filmmaking decision, just be a little careful before declaring this a revolution. All of these visuals are rendered if full 3D. I?ve been a critic of 3D ever since it started to be a craze again for the first time since the last time it died off in the 80s. 3D is a technology that for most of its lifetime has been used for one simple purpose to throw stuff at the audience for no reason other than to make the audience go ?ooh? while they do it. It?s been used largely for animated films that did not interest me and blatantly gimmicky horror films. I?ve done nothing but laugh whenever I?ve heard people say they envisioned a time when all movies are made in 3D, I mean, do we really need a world where The Informant is made in 3D? But for all I?ve railed against the technology, I?ve always tempered my criticism by adding the disclaimer: ?we?ll see what Cameron does with it before casting a final verdict.? So, now that Cameron has shown his hand my final verdict is that? the jury?s still out. The use of the technology is certainly different than I expected, objects never come out of the screen, instead what Cameron has created is a canvas where there are layers of Mise-en-scène existing in a three dimensional world. These layers look like they project backwards into the screen rather than out into the audience, and Cameron resists any and every urge to throw stuff out at the audience even when such an effect would be justifies by what?s on screen. The result is that we are shown a three dimensional, but self contained world rather than a two dimensional world in which objects occasionally escape the screen and invade the world of the audience. That said, technology does still seem a bit restrained by the sides of the frame, there?s a certain awkwardness when the three dimensional screen stops and the theater wall end and I think they?re still going to have to deal with this before I can fully embrace the idea, and no matter how much they improve the technology I still don?t think I?ll ever get to the point where a 3D version of Funny People is going to be worth fumbling with special glasses over. Still, I am convinced that it is worth dealing with for event movies like this. That the technology behind this project is amazing is probably going to be undisputed, the film?s script, specifically its storyline, which will probably be more hotly contested. The similarities between this and Dances With Wolves are not without merit, they are both largely about people from ?our? civilization who find themselves stranded with a ?foreign? society, where he comes to respect and ultimately defend those he once called the enemy. Now before you declare this a ripoff, remember that Kevin Costner?s epic wasn?t the first story to have that idea either, this formula can probably be traces all the way back to the Moses story in the Bible. Most of the best science fiction films basically retell age old stories in a new way, much the way that Star Wars an incarnation of the hero of a thousand faces or how Jurassic Park can be seen as a variation on Frankenstein. The other issue is that a lot of the characters here sort of fit into existing archetypes. This isn?t as much of a problem with the Jake Sully character, who mainly exists to be an everyman that the audience can relate to. More problematic are characters like the film?s villain played by Stephen Lang, who?s pretty much a gruff cliché of an army officer and Joel David Moore?s role which is a pretty standard geek scientist. Tough-as-nails women are a recurring theme in Cameron?s work, and there are three of them here: the main Na?vi woman fits pretty well in the Amazon warrior model, Sigourney Weaver plays a scientist fighting against the system (and the system never listens to people like this in movies), and Michelle Rodriguez plays a role that?s pretty much identical to the Vasquez character from Cameron?s own film Aliens. Also, the dialogue here is strictly workmen-like. There are no cringe inducing line readings, but there?s also nothing overly impressive in this writing either. So what we have is a not so creative story with a cast of somewhat stale characters and some unspectacular dialogue; why am I not concerned about this? After all, we critics make a habit of deriding effects vehicles that put all their emphasis on effects rather than on telling a great story, what makes this different? It?s mostly because the story, for all its familiarity, isn?t bad and neither is the dialogue or even the characters, the poor elements of the film never rarely intrude on the positive elements. While none of these elements really help the movie, they tend not to hurt it either. The other reason it works is that, while the story is thin, this movie isn?t mindless; there?s actually a pretty good allegory to the sad history of the Native Americans in addition to strong anti-war and pro-environment messages in the film. Not only is the film not mindless, it also isn?t uncreative, it?s just that it shows off its creativity in its visuals and in the world that it creates rather than in its storyline. I?m reminded in many ways, and this will probably be seen as a negative by some, of last year?s film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That was another film which people loved to dismiss for its similarities to an Oscar winning film from the 90s, and I saw their point, but to me that was a film which took a B minus grade script and turned it into something greater though smart and impassioned filmmaking. I should also stress that this is an action movie, and as an action movie it frickin? rocks. I think a big part of why the action scenes and battle scenes here are so effective is that Cameron knows that bigger isn?t always necessarily better. When given the ability to create unlimitedly large battlegrounds a lot of filmmakers have gone way overboard and created armies larger than the entire population of Chicago shooting streams of arrows that block out the sun. The result is usually an eyesore that is only ever seen in small parts. There?s none of that here, all the conflicts are reasonably sized; and Cameron also knows when to cut set-pieces off before they wear out their welcome the way that, say, the battle for Zion in The Matrix Revolutions did. The fun isn?t limited to the climactic battle scene either, there?s a great chase scene between Sully and a big lion type thing as well as an amazing fight towards the end involving the mechanized suit. Perhaps the greatest triumph of Avatar is that it manages to generate a genuine sense of awe, which projects of lesser ambition just cannot deliver. Cameron doesn?t just create amazing sights; he dwells on them and allows the viewer to inhabit the world of them before being shuffled off to the next adventure. Many are comparing the film to Star Wars, and for good reason, but I think that when the film is at its best it harkens back to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In that Spielberg film the visuals had both the characters and the audience mesmerized while staring at the magic they were witnessing, I had that feeling a number of times during the journey that Cameron took me on and that is a rare thing these days. Don?t give me nitpicks about the film?s flaws, all of which are more than made up for by the film?s many other virtues and I was positively giddy when I left the theater. |
December 24, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Entre les Murs (The Class) - PG-13 | Hollywood films that get ?inner-city? schools wrong are a major pet peeve of mine, and I tend to give a lot of credit to the movies that get them right, this is an example of the later. The film avoids the non-sense cliché of the teacher as an inspirational saint, the man trying to teach in this film is all too human: he doesn?t have ?the answer,? and he isn?t someone that can inspire people, but the film doesn?t go to Half Nelson levels of subversion either. The film never goes for the melodramatic twist, the whole thing feels remarkably real. I also really like how the filmmaker is willing to make the scenes go on for a decent chunk of time, it feels to me like movies today are so desperate to keep a super-fast pace that they refuse to allow a scene to go longer than two minutes if it doesn?t have any violence in it, this isn?t a movie that makes that mistake. Of course this movie isn?t great just for what it isn?t, it?s great because it presents a seemingly mundane aspect of society in a way that is constantly interesting. | December 16, 2009 | N/A | |||
| The Cove - PG-13 | I went into this documentary pretty skeptical, because frankly I don?t give a rat?s ass about dolphins. Sure they may be marginally more intelligent than the average farm animal, but I don?t for a minute think they?re anywhere near as smart as even the dumbest human. If some people should think that they?re delicious, more power to them. If a group of Hindus were to give me a lecture about eating hamburgers I wouldn?t be too impressed, why should I find it righteous to do basically the same thing to another country except with the revered animal reversed. While I continue to think that this is a stupid cause, I was impressed by the documentary itself. Like last year?s Man on Wire, the filmmakers here have basically done a heist movie in documentary form, they?re going through an elaborate scheme to get photographic evidence of dolphin killing and stopping at nothing to do it. I was also pretty interested by the ?character? of Ric O'Barry, who has come to regret his popularization of dolphins and feels he?s created a monster. The contradiction (which the film misses out on) is that if people didn?t think Dolphins were cute, I doubt they would have the kind of sympathy for them that this film sort of banks on. I was also fairly interested in the odd political situation that Japan seems to be in with this issue, it?s a pretty interesting quagmire even if I?m not so convinced by the elaborate media conspiracy that the film tries to establish. So, this movie didn?t really persuade me and it?s more treehuggerey elements do sort of get in its way, but it was still a pretty interesting ride in spite of itself. | December 16, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire - R |
Lee Daniel?s film Precious is a movie that has been heavily hyped by a number of critical forces since its debut at this year?s Sundance film festival. In spite of all the good marks the film has been getting, the prospect of actually seeing the damn thing is something I?d been dreading all year. There were a number of elements to this movie that had me apprehensions, chief among them being the movie?s title, which seems to set the movie up has some kind of kindergarten level self-esteem exercise about how everyone is ?special? and ?precious.? Even the film?s producers seem to be embraced by that title as evidenced by the awkward way they?ve been attaching ?based on the novel ?Push? by Sapphire? to the back of it every chance they get. The bigger force in making me dread this viewing experience is the film?s trailer, which sells the movie as exactly the kind of inspirational sappiness I was afraid it would be. The fact that Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, two people who are hardly adverse to the saccharine, were attaching their names didn?t boost my confidence either. My one hope was that the last prestige movie I dreaded this much was Brokeback Mountain, which looked like pure cheese from the trailer featuring the trademark ?I can?t quit you? line, but that movie proved to be a extremely well done and expertly restrained work. Knowing how bad trailers can make certain movies look when they?re being sold to the public, I held out hope that this was just a case of problematic advertising, that this really was as good as all the buzz would have me believe. Trust me; I really wanted this to be good, but for the most part this proved to be a sad case of truth in advertising.
The film centers on Claireece "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), who goes by her middle name and who is in a really bad situation. She?s a sixteen year old living in a squalid Harlem apartment with her mentally and physically abusive mother (Mo?Nique), who gets all her income from welfare. Claireece is illiterate, she gave birth to a mentally disabled child after being raped by her own father, and now she?s pregnant again with another of her father?s children. So what is the point of focusing on someone who is in this bad of a situation. If the not-so-subtle naming of its main character, the ?inspirational? quote the movie opens on, its tagline (Life is hard. Life is short. Life is painful. Life is rich. Life is....Precious.) and its website URL (weareallprecious.com) are any indication; the hallmark card-like goal of this movie is to prove to its audience that everyone even, if they are in dire straits, is precious. This is a message in search of an audience to convince. Does anyone really think a person is any less ?precious? simply because they suffer in life? I find it rather insulting that the filmmakers feel the need to prove this to the audience to begin with. What?s worse I don?t think the film even follows its own mantra. Let?s think about all the problems that the filmmakers have saddled Caireece with. It obviously isn?t Caireece?s fault that her mother is abusive, her mother is also implicated as the source of Claireece?s problems in school, and her parents are also the cause of her pregnancies either by direct action (in the case of her father) or from failing to prevent the situation (in the case of her mother). Sapphire and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher have basically constructed a character who is completely blameless for the situation she?s in, every one of her problems are without a shadow of a doubt placed squarely on the shoulders of her screwed up family. This, too me, is the root weakness of this movie. It?s very easy to generate sympathy for someone who?s had all their problems thrust upon them, its simplistic. Had they decided to create a character that was in a situation like this because they themselves made some bad decisions in life, and then established them as someone who was ?precious? it would have made for a movie that was significantly more challenging, provocative, and true to life. As such, I found myself significantly more interested in Claireece?s deeply flawed mother than I was in the blameless martyr for whom the film is titled. But the film isn?t really interested in exploring this mother either, or in adding many nuances to her character. She?s basically as evil as Claireece is sympathetic. This mother is pretty much everything that Ronald Reagan had in his head when he coined the term ?welfare queen.? She?s a fat, lazy woman who spends all her days watching game shows except when she occasionally leaves in order to play ?the numbers.? She constantly abuses and discourages Claireece, threatening to beat her whenever she fails to do everything she?s told and actively preventing her from furthering her education. Later in the movie she proves to be such a moustache twirling villain as to actively insult and toss a baby. But let?s hold on a second. I thought everybody was supposed to be precious. Therefore, shouldn?t that make Claireece?s mother precious too. I don?t think the content of the movie would support that, it produces a pretty simple dichotomy of the blameless child and the evil mother. In essence this is a movie that has a great deal of sympathy for people who are born into bad situations, but very little sympathy for those who have created a bad situation for themselves. This rather conservative message is a fair enough point of view, but I find the film?s endless claims of having a compassionate and non-judgmental world view to be disingenuous. Putting all that aside, there are other elements that make this a pretty uncompelling movie going experience, and chief among them is a character named Blu Rain, played by Paula Patton, who is meant to be a thinly disguised version of the movie?s author (get it, sapphire, Blue Rain). This character is a teacher at an alternative education facility that Claireece is sent to, and this school storyline is easily the most clichéd and sappy element of the whole movie. This whole subplot basically turns this into one of those horrible movies about saint-like inspirational teachers trying desperately to reach a diverse group of ?inner-city? youths. There is almost nothing that separates the classroom elements here from garbage like Dangerous Minds, Stand and Deliver, and Freedom Writers. I had thought that this ridiculous trope had been shattered once and for all by Ryan Fleck?s excellent 2006 drama Half Nelson, and perhaps by the great fourth season of David Simon?s ?The Wire,? both works which have significantly more knowledge of the condition of underprivileged youths than this movie could ever dream of possessing. The ineptitude of this sub-plot is magnified by Paula Patton?s less than stellar performance which is well below the standard set by the rest of the cast. When this character says to Caireece: ?your daughter loves you, I love you? it?s every bit as TV-movie worthy as the trailer would have you believe. Fortunately, the rest of the acting in this movie is a lot better than the work Patton displays. In fact I?d probably say that the excellent performances of Gabourey Sidibe and Mo'Nique are damn near the film?s only redeeming qualities. Sidibe, an unknown, is quite a find and is perfect for her role. Many have made the mistake of thinking that she was simply an underprivileged young girl that the filmmakers found on the street and essentially cast as herself in the role, but this isn?t really the case, she?s an actress playing a role and she plays it really well. Mo?Nique is even more of a revelation in her role, like Jamie Foxx before her she?s a comedian who has broken out of the ?black comedy? ghetto to prove herself to be a great and forceful actor. These are both roles that require the two thespians to inhabit very foreign roles which require a whole lot of yelling and crying, the kind of roles that are easy to give awards to, but both Sidibe and Mo?Nique do their jobs effectively and I think it is their work that has primarily tricked a multitude of critics and pundits into thinking this movie is something more than it really is. I wish I could say that there was another element that matched the performances of these two actresses, but there really isn?t. I suppose some of the dialogue was pretty well written, at least outside of the Blu Rain sub-plot, but otherwise I found a lot of the filmmaking here subpar. Lee Daniels? direction here seems confused and inconsistent. On one hand Daniels, whose only previous directing credit is the critically lambasted Shadowboxer, seems to want to give the movie a gritty handheld look to match the material, but he undercuts this style at all points with a variety of visual tricks and devices that are at odds with this. The movie is filled with montages, scenes where video is superimposed onto walls, obnoxious fantasy sequences that go nowhere and signify almost nothing, and the occasional Arronofsy-esque quick cut montage. It feels like Daniels is trying to use every crayon in his box of tricks to seeing what sticks rather than simply letting the story play out, and this is all the more problematic simply because a lot of these tricks aren?t even overly well executed. There?s one great scene towards the end, a confrontation between Claireece and her mother, in which the two actresses are finally allowed to talk in detail without being interrupted by one of Lee Daniel?s stupid tricks. It?s probably the only scene in the movie where the mother is given a shred of complexity and the film?s style really accentuates the scene rather than interrupt it. This is like an isolated scene from a much better movie and if the rest of the material here had been on par with that scene this might have been something great. Instead this is a major missed opportunity filled with sappy material, a confused message, told by a confused filmmaker that has somehow hypnotized America?s critics into ignoring its numerous flaws. |
December 5, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Red Cliff (Chi Bi) - R |
Much the way the Indian film industry has kept the musical alive long after Hollywood stopped caring, Chinese filmmakers have been keeping alive the large scale swordplay epics that Hollywood?s abandoned in favor of superhero-fare and movies based on toy-lines. The Chinese Wuxia genre, characterized by beautifully photographed fight scenes set in ancient China, has been one of the most popular genres of world cinema. Some of the most popular examples of this genre are Ang Lee?s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou?s Hero and The House of Flying Daggers. I?ve got to say that I?m a sucker for these movies; they?re action movies that have some real ambition being made in a time when Hollywood action movies seem to be made by people who don?t really seem to take their craft seriously. I?m not sure if John Woo?s Red Cliff strictly qualifies as a Wuxia movie, but it has all the elements that have made me dig the genre to begin with.
Set at the end of the Han Dynasty (around 200 C.E.), this film tells the story of the legendary Battle of Red Cliff. Ostensibly this is about a civil war between the Prime Minister Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), whose taken power through brute force, and a pair of southern warlords named Liu Bei (You Yong) and Sun Quan (Chang Chen). The movie opens with Liu Bei trying to defend civilian refugees from the oncoming army of Cao Cao, he?s able to escape but with massive casualties including his own wife. Knowing that he cannot beat Cao Cao alone, Liu Bei sends his chief strategist Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to convince Sun Quan into an alliance. Eventually Sun Quan agrees to the alliance and the forces decide to hold fort at the City of Red Cliff and prepare as Cao Caos massive naval fleet slowly approaches. There is of course a lot more to this; in fact I didn?t even bring up Tony Leung?s character, Zhou Yu, who?s a warrior who takes part in a lot of the action scenes. The film is not meant to be a historically accurate take on the battle; it?s more like the recounting of an exaggerated legend. It also isn?t exactly a complex study of the politics at hand, it?s basically a battle good guys who are really good and bad guys who are really bad. This is old fashioned storytelling in many ways, which is just sort of something that has to be accepted in order to enjoy the movie. While this material isn?t exactly Shakespeare, there also isn?t anything about it that?s irritating, I don?t mind an action movie story that exists just to string together action scenes as long as it isn?t actively bad, and the story here is mostly decent. What?s really important here are the battle scenes which are some of the best of their kind since Ridley Scott?s Kingdom of Heaven. Woo does need to uses some middling CGI for the wide shots of massive armies, which are not really the movie?s fortes, but for a lot of its duration the movie uses real people for its action scenes and during the medium shots the action is very strong. The fighting is very stylized with warriors able to engage in elaborate combat in the midst of the battlefield. That said, the fighting is not quite as stylized as it is in some of these movies like Hero, in which the characters are able to engage in extra-super-human moves like bating arrows out of the air with swords and you won?t see much wire-work either. This is a war movie first and a martial arts film second, there are scenes where great warriors will pair off and fight mano-e-mano, but for the most part this is about fights between large armies. Also, because the Chinese had access to gunpowder in their ancient warfare, some stuff blows up really good towards the end. The film was released in two parts in China, and the first part?s release was made to coincide with the 2008 Olympics so as to show the world the country?s power in filmmaking. In this sense they?ve mostly succeeded, the action and production values in this are every bit as good as anything coming out of Hollywood. For its international release the film?s two parts have been spliced together into a single film, consequently, more than two hours have been cut from the film. These cuts are not invisible, there?s an English language voice over at the beginning that sets up the conflict, and captions have been added to help audiences keep the characters straight. The movie does feel rushed and the cuts may explain the simplicity of some of these characters, but I think the story mostly holds up. I hope to someday see the two part original version which will inevitably be available on DVD and Blu-Ray, but this is a movie that should be seen at least once in theaters and I understand the problems with bringing the original version to western theaters. This version will have to do. This is the first movie which director John Woo has made in China since he left for Hollywood since his 1992 magnum opus Hard Boiled. I don?t think Woo?s best Hollywood works are really as different from his Hong Kong movies as some people think they are, in some ways I think he was the victim of the higher standards people seem to have for American action movies than they do for the exotic Asian ones. Still, his last couple of projects in Hollywood were undeniably poor, and he clearly was never allowed to make anything on this scale by the studio system. This is a return to form. I?m not going to call this a perfect movie, and if Hollywood had been making something other than half-assed CGI-fest as of late I might not have been as enthusiastic about this, but the movie delivers everything you?d expect out of it. |
December 5, 2009 | N/A | |||
| The Brothers Bloom - PG-13 |
If you listen to a lot of podcasts like I do, then you?ve more than likely heard of Rian Johnson, a promising young director who?s developed an impressive web presence. Johnson?s first movie was a film called Brick, which took all the style and lingo of film noir and pulp novels and places them into a high school setting. I thought Brick was a neat little film but I wasn?t wildly thrilled by it, it was a well made movies with a concept that was sort of fun, but it was a pretty shallow movie. Now Rian Johnson is back, and with a bigger budget and a cast full of name actors to make a film called The Brothers Bloom.
The elder of the two Blooms is Stephen Bloom (Mark Ruffalo) and the younger Bloom is known only as Bloom (Adrien Brody), and he?s the one we follow through the movie for the most part. These two brothers are con men and have been for years. They take part in elaborate ?long cons? that take them all over the world and usually seem to end with Adrian Brody pretending to get shot. Their partner in crime is a mysterious Japanese woman known only as Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi) who loves explosives and speaks very little English. Brody?s character has grown tired of this life and wants to retire but, to quote the third Godfather film, just when he thought he was out, his brother pulled him back in. The two plan to pull off one last con, the mark is a Penelope Stamp (Rachel Weisz) a rich young woman with no direction in life. The plan is to tell Stamp they are smugglers and have her take part in their smuggling endeavors, thus giving her the adventure she wants but ending that adventure by ripping her off. The only problem is that Brody?s character is beginning to really like this girl. Probably this film?s best asset is its cast who in many ways elevate a lot of this material. The standout is probably Mark Ruffalo, who?s a character actor that I shouldn?t underestimate as often as I seem to. With his performance here Ruffalo is able to balance the way his character tends to be likable while behaving like a bit of a fox. Brody also works here, I really like how that guy is able to do leading man performances without feeling like a phony movie star. Rachel Weisz is also pretty effectively charming, she?s doing sort of a giddy Natalie Portman kind of role here and she makes her character a lot more believable than it should be. Rinko Kikuchi is also a pretty neat little mysterious presence and there are also neat little parts here for Robbie Coltrane and Maximilian Schell. They even manage to bring Ricky Jay in as the narrator, an appropriate choice if ever there was one. The problem here is that this movie is way too clever for its own good. Rian Johnson is basically trying to make an anti-con man con man movie. Deciding that it is too predictable to have yet another one of these movies where one of the characters turns out to be playing everyone the whole time, he?s decided to play with that trope. The problem is that instead to reducing some of the trickery, he?s kept all the double and triple crosses and added extra meta-junk to the proceedings, and the result is a bit of a mess. The movie forces us to deal both with the crazy plot while also having to contend with the Adrian Brody characters lightweight existential crisis and the relationships between everyone, I?m not sure Rian Johnson really knew which of these elements he wanted to emphasize and the movie suffers for it. The other elephant that?s in the room is that Rian Johnson has ripped off Wes Anderson?s style from head to foot. This style theft is undeniable and Johnson seems completely unapologetic about it. This is problematic on many levels, not the least because Wes Anderson movies are getting tired enough when the real McCoy is making them without the imitators diluting the style further. It?s not just the bright visual style and use of classic rock that contributes to this either, the script also fits into the Wes Anderson mold pretty neatly with its use of twenty-something angst set against a playful adventure story in a whimsical environment. The pathos of these movies is beginning to feel pretty insincere and the comical quirks are quickly going from being charming to being obnoxious. I?m just really tired of seeing movies that have the tone of comedies without the laughs and that?s increasingly what these Wes Andersonian movies are beginning to boil down to. Rian Johnson is a promising filmmaker but he needs to stop trying to hide behind his cleverness and just tell a damn story. This movie is able to pass the time well enough but it amounts to nothing and I found the ending to be pretty unsatisfying both on an emotional level and as the end to a con. There are worse ways to spend two hours, but this is a movie without weight that I will quickly be forgetting about. |
December 5, 2009 | N/A | |||
| The Road - R |
In the waning years of this decade, 2005-2008, we began to see a number of powerful films from American directors (or at least directors working within the studio system) that seemed to be subconscious reactions to post-9/11 confusion, anxiety, and Bush era discontent. Among the film?s I?d include in this bubble of creativity are Children of Men, Zodiac, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and to some extent The Dark Knight. Though part of me is afraid that I?m just lumping together a bunch of great movies that happened to be made around the same time period, I can?t help but make this link. All of these movies seemed to be made with a certain intensity, they were all movies about uncertainty, about people who had to reconsider their assumptions or about people who fail to rethink their assumptions and paid for it. I bring this little movement up because I think it?s over, most of the films made in the last two years have not really seemed a part of this, possibly because the election of Barrack Obama has changed the political landscape, cynicism is out and hope is in. The Road, a film which was going to come out in 2008 before it was delayed, might just be the final film we?ll be seeing from this brief but rewarding movement of Hollywood cinema.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning Cormac McCarthy novel of the same title, The Road tells the story about a father and son trying to survive in a tough environment. In the vague future of this film, society has collapsed and the environment has become harsh. We are never told if this apocalypse is the result of environmental decay, nuclear warfare, or some sort of disease, but what?s important is that most of the people are gone, the cities are in ruins, and the sun is constantly being blocked by clouds. We see this world from the perspective of an unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) and his unnamed son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who must both try to walk south in order to escape the approaching winter cold. The son has never really known a better world than the one he lives in, we are told through flashbacks that he was born on the eve of the apocalypse and that his mother (Charlize Theron) has long since passed away. The film is all about survival, what survival is worth and what you?re willing to do in order to survive. The Mortensen character is someone who values surviving above all else, he?s not someone who is going to let the dimness of the world force him to give up on living as many other people in the situation are reported to have done. He tells his son that the two of them need to ?carry the flame,? to remain human in the face of the horrible things around them, he wants his son to think that the two of them are the ?good guys.? For the most part the two live up to this aspiration, at least when compared to the ?bad guys? that we encounter, particularly armed gangs of cannibals that roam the desolate countryside. At the same time, being a ?good guy? isn?t always easy and Mortensen?s character must make tough decisions about how to treat the people they encounter like a hungry old man (Robert Duvall) and a hungry thief (Michael K. Williams). One also gets the sense that Mortensen?s character has become understandably paranoid, that occasionally he displays caution that hurts him rather than saving him. These occasional moments when reality challenge the ?carry the flame? philosophy that he?s trying to hand down to his son, and in some ways his attempts to be a good man and a survivor become mixed messages for the boy. Viggo Mortenson is an actor who?s been working since the mid eighties, but he was completely off the radar until he came out of nowhere and appeared in the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a starring role in which, against all expectations, he thrived. He continued to deny expectations when he continued to do amazing work in his post-Aragorn work, partly because he seems to have refused to do roles in frivolous between his serious roles. Working with David Cronenberg he did great work in A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, both films where he must be a very tough character but one with a complexities and vulnerabilities beneath the surface. That?s probably what makes Mortensen so special, he?s like a modern Clint Eastwood, a strong silent type but one who?s more than a stupid action hero. This quality is what makes him perfect for his role here, he needs to be a strong person who?s been molded by a tough environment, but he?s also a caring father who needs to have the tough of a parent throughout. The rest of the cast has also been very well constructed. Any movie that has a large role for a ten year old kid has a pretty big hurtle to jump because nothing can kill a movie quite like an annoying kid. Fortunately the kid they found, Kodi Smit-McPhee, has pulled off his role admirably. It helps that the character he?s playing has had to mature to some extent beyond his years because of the tough situation he?s in. That tends to erode a lot of the lame kid stuff that can so frequently lead to groan inducing line readings. Aside from the two central roles, every person that these two encounter seems to be perfectly cast. Charlize Theron manages to deliver an understated performance for a character that might have easily been overplayed and there?s also a neat small role for Guy Pearce that I won?t give away. Of course this is a film that?s defined by its post-apocalyptic setting, and John Hillcoat has made this setting into a character. Hillcoat had done a similar thing with the Australian Outback in his previous film, The Proposition, which was reportedly inspired significantly by Cormac McCarthy?s earlier work. This is a director that knows how to film desolation and he does it exceptionally well here. In fact, visually, this is the best post-apocalypse on film since George Miller?s The Road Warrior, and it might even surpass that car warfare classic in its vision. Most of the film depicts bleak and worn out forests, filled with trees who seem to have shed their leaves. It?s always cold, that?s the threat they?re running from, and snow occasionally enters the frame which is an interesting departure from the desert locales that usually characterize the genre. The sky is always overcast and the world seems to have the color sucked out of it. The remnants of society that are left over, like a scavenged coca-cola can, add more to the feeling of loss than the destroyed landmarks that are usually found in this kind of movie. This is also a movie that is capable of operating like a thriller when it needs to. The movie opens with a tense standoff between a threatening raider and a frightened Viggo Mortensen. The tension here is excellent and the abrupt way it ends is the perfect capper. An even better scene occurs later on when they sneak into a seemingly abandoned house only to find some profoundly disturbing things are happening there. This scene is as frightening as anything seen in a horror movie this year, and the fact that it furthers most of the film?s themes while also providing visceral chills to the audience is a testament to Hillcoat?s abilities as a director. That said, this isn?t really a thriller even if individual scenes are very tense. I won?t lie, this movie isn?t exactly a laugh riot. This is a movie that can be a bit tough to watch, it?s a downer and it isn?t exactly ?fun.? Great films are usually challenging and they?re not always going to be a light-hearted evening out, but this is a movie about the end of the world and it isn?t some kind of juvenile work that things the end of the world is going to be a blast. If ?fun? is all you want out of a movie, then you?ll probably be well served by 2012, it?s your loss. That?s going to be one hurdle for this film; another is going to be the inevitable comparisons made to 2007?s Oscar winning Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men. No, this film isn?t going to be as great as that Coen Brothers opus, then again very few movies are. This may not be an instant classic that everyone will agree on the way No Country for Old Men was, but it is far and away better than most anything you?re likely to see in theaters on any given week. This isn?t 2007 and I don?t think we?re going to get too many more films like this for a while. Appreciate this one while it lasts. |
December 5, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Gran Torino - R | This is the first Clint Eastwood film I?ve skipped in theaters since 2002, something about it just looked kind of strange. When all is said and done, I think this is probably a good movie, but it has a lot of issues. First and foremost, the movie?s script is not the best written piece of work around; it has a lot of Eastwood talking to himself in order to convey exposition. Also, the teenage Hmong actors are really not all that great, nor is much of anyone except Eastwood. I also found it a bit strange just how much of this seems to have been recycled from Million Dollar Baby, and the ending seemed more than a little bit contrived. In spite of all this, I think the movie?s message is positive and Eastwood does most of his usual magic behind the camera. It?s a neat little movie, nothing more and nothing less. | November 27, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Pinocchio - G | This is not the Disney movie, but rather the 2002 Italian version made by Roberto Benigni. This was savaged in its initial run because of the daft decision to release it in a dubbed version that didn?t even have Benigni doing the voice over. I watched the subtitled version, but this really is still a pretty flawed movie without the dubbing. To the movie?s credit, the production design is quite good and as a whole this is a good visual movie. The story is meant to be a lot closer to the original book, which means there are a lot of, shall we say eccentric, bits of fairy tale silliness throughout. There was something good to be salvaged here but what scuttles the movie is the decision to cast Benigni, a fifty year old man, in the title role; there?s just something creepy about that. It also doesn?t help the Benigni does nothing to make it look like he?s made of wood. | November 27, 2009 | N/A | |||
| The Girlfriend Experience - R |
The end of 2009 is quickly approaching and in even though we still have an important month of watching ahead of us many are already jumping the gun and making lists of the decades best? everything. I shudder at just how many of these lists we?re going to have to sort through in the not too distant future, not that my hands are clean of this, I?ve been working on my lists for well over a year in advance. Anyway, I bring this up because many will be looking back and thinking about the various filmmakers who have defined a decade of cinema, and I cannot imagine a grouping of such filmmakers that won?t include Steven Soderbergh. If for nothing else Soderbergh must be recognized for just how prolific he is. In an era where major filmmakers can spend ten years and only make three to four films Soderbergh has made twelve, thirteen if you count Che as two. Some of these movies were blockbusters (the ?Ocean?s? movies), some were serious (Traffic), some were funny (The Informant), some were fantastical (Solaris), some were nostalgic (The Good German), and then there were the ones that were experimental even by Soderberghian standards. By these I am mainly referring to Full Frontal, Bubble, and this newer one, The Girlfriend Experience.
The Girlfriend Experience is a film about a woman named Christine (Sasha Grey) who?s recently begun working as a high class prostitute. The title refers to a particular type of prostitution that Christine specializes in; she will escort her Johns and pretend to be a longtime girlfriend throughout the night. She?s living with a (real) boyfriend named Chris (Chris Santos), a personal trainer who knows about Christine?s job but seems to be alright with it. As far as story goes, that?s about all there is to tell. This is a movie where not a lot happens, it?s all about simply taking a peak into this person?s life for a little while. The movie is set in a very specific time, at the height of the recent financial crisis and before the election of Barrack Obama. Almost everyone in the movie seems to have this crisis on the back of their mind and they talk about it a lot, only without saying much of anything insightful about it. As a matter of fact, not many people say much of anything insightful at all in this movie. All of the dialogue is naturalistic, possibly to a fault, it is very good at capturing with complete reality the way people tend to speak to each other, but that means listening to a lot of dull and banal conversations throughout. The conventional wisdom today when making something as aggressively realistic as this is to shoot in a similarly naturalistic, handheld style, on cameras that are almost consumer grade. But Soderbergh has completely ignored this conventional wisdom here and on his last film Bubble, instead he?s shot both films with some incredibly vivid widescreen cinematography. I suppose that one of the benefits of being your own cinematographer is that you don?t need to hire a second string DP when your budget is smaller than usual. The film?s star is Sasha Grey who started her career making hardcore pornography. She is an interesting choice for the role, after all the original plan for this series of experimental films was to find a location and use local non actors to form a story, and it?s not easy to cast an actual hooker. Grey does work in this film, though I have my doubts as to whether she has much more potential outside of the genre she?s traditionally worked in, this is a non-actor performance through and through. Chris Santos is good too, but in the same capacity. As has been said in pretty much any review of this movie, this is an experimental work and needs to be viewed as such, if you?re not interested in the experiment this movie has nothing for you. Sometimes I think critics are a bit too excited to heap praise on experimental works simply because they?re experimental. Often these movies will have a few interesting things going for them but they won?t really work for me as an actual cinematic viewing experience. I?ve definitely gotten that feeling from some of Gus Van Sant?s experimental work as of late, I got it from Bubble, and I definitely got it from this film. I won?t dismiss this, because there are some things to appreciate about it on some intellectual level, but it didn?t really elicited much from me except for a passive interest in some of the aspects of the filmmaking. This is for Soderbergh devotees only. |
November 27, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend) - Unrated |
Most audiences were first made familiar with the character of Tom Ripley from the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley, but the character really originated in a series of novels by Patricia Highsmith which date back to 1955. The aforementioned film was an adaptation of the first novel, this 1977 Wim Wenders film is an adaptation of the third novel, Ripley?s Game (which would be adapted again in 2002).
The film mostly follows a character named Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz, who would go on to play Hitler in Downfall), who has been diagnosed with a terminal blood disease. He encounters and befriends an American named Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) who has connection with the criminal underworld. Soon enough, Tom convinces Zimmermann to take part in a pair of crime assassinations in order to pay for his medical bills. This film?s depiction of the Ripley character differs greatly from the depiction in the Anthony Minghella film which I?ve long been fond of. In that film Matt Damon played Ripley as a bit of a dork, albeit a psychotic dork so desperate to be someone more glamorous than he was that he latched onto and eventually murdered an American playboy on vacation in Italy. Here, well? he?s Dennis Hopper, and he takes on most of the mannerisms you expect Dennis Hopper to have. Gone are the goofy, yet oddly disturbing grins and the creepy stares, in their place is? Dennis Hopper, in a cowboy hat. The performance isn?t completely without its charms (I particularly liked a scene where he lays down on a pool table and takes pictures of himself with a Polaroid), but as a whole I found this Ripley significantly less interesting than the one I was used to. It?s kind of like Going back to the movie Manhunter and seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal Lecture after having scene Anthony Hopkins dominate the role in Silence of the Lambs. Really, I have to say I feel the same way about the rest of the movie, it?s a pretty decent thriller but it didn?t strike me as remotely as interesting as The Talented Mr. Ripley. There is sort of a perverse friendship at the center of it all, but for the most part this is less of a psychological thriller and more of a Hitchcockian thriller and it works at its best during a pair of suspenseful set pieces. Wenders handles these scene very well, though I was surprised at just how pedestrian his style was here, this isn?t anything like the lyrical camera work of his more famous works Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas. I also found aspects of the plot fairly confusing, particularly the workings of the crime syndicate that?s trying to make things happen. So overall, this is a nice little movie that I enjoyed watching, but I don?t think it will stay with me. |
November 27, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Chelovek s kino-apparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) - Unrated | Dziga Vertov announces right from the beginning that his film will be an experiment; it will not include inter-titles, actors, scenario (story), or sets. He isn?t kidding, this is a non narrative film made with a variety of camera techniques. Basically, Vertov went out and filmed a whole lot of random stuff throughout the cities of Moscow, Odessa, and Kiev and had it edited together in a variety of innovative ways. The word ?editing? is perhaps a bit of an understatement, this was put together in ways that would make Michael Bay blush, this is a montage of flash frames, freeze frames, fast-motion time compressions, and strange camera angles. Some of these tricks feel like profound statements about life and community, but a fair number of them seem like little more than cinematic masturbation. I have trouble fully embracing this, because without all the trickery this material would be about as interesting as paint drying. But on the other hand, the way this is put together is compelling, it?s got a definite rhythm to it and it?s paved the way for a lot that?s come. Part of me wants to call this virtuoso filmmaking, and part of me wants to call it pretentious bullshit. Eh, I?ll split the difference. | November 27, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Antichrist - Unrated |
Lars Von Trier?s Antichrist premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and while it did not win the Palme D?or, its screening at that festival will be talked about long after the premier screening of the film that did win (Michael Hanake?s The White Ribbon) has long been forgotten. Von Trier has long been known as a provocateur but even those familiar with his work must not have known what hit them when, without warning, they were confronted by a film that so suddenly assaulted them with extreme images whose purpose were not entirely clear at first glance. Polarized reviews and detailed analysis began pouring out and stories of the film?s hostile press conferences in which Lars Von Trier acted as an amused ringmaster added to the mystique of the film. Some called it misogynistic, some called it deeply spiritual, some called it schlock, others called it profound art. The whole affair harkened back to an age when film artists like Luis Buñuel and Jean Renoir would deliberately shock their audience to the point where they nearly riot. As I far away from southern France when this was going on, I could do nothing but read story after story. I normally avoid plot details to movies before seeing them, but in this case I couldn?t help but read the many spoilers about what it was that had horrified a number of respected critics. Even though I?m generally not a huge fan of Lars Von Trier, all this hoopla tantalized me to the point where I hungered for the day when this thing would come to my city so I could weigh in on this international debate about a film which, love it or hate, has undeniably sparked more thought than most films ever will.
The film has only two speaking roles, that of a man and a woman who are played by Willem DaFoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg respectively. In the film?s prologue, the man and the woman (who are unnamed) are seen making passionate love, unaware that a tragedy is about to occur as their young child walks toward an open window. The boy falls and dies, plunging the two into a grief that is as intense as the joy they experienced in that opening scene. In fact intense emotions are a running theme that will be taken to an absurd extreme in the film?s climax. As the woman wallows in pain, the man (who is a therapist) decides that he will psychologically treat the woman himself. His goal is to discover what it is that the woman fears the most, and this quest leads him to Eden, a forest where the family had once stayed at so that the woman would have time to write her thesis on the subject of Gynocide (the study of witch burning and other such extreme forms of misogyny). Once they arrive at Eden their relationship becomes a rollercoaster of emotions, ranging from passionate lust to deep resentment and other strange things begin to occur; animals like a deer, a raven, and most memorably a fox, begin to appear who behave in ways that are decidedly unnatural and it becomes clear that this woman has a much deeper fear of this forest than the man initially realized. Lars Von Trier has been a frustrating filmmaker for me. On one hand I can appreciate that he is a man capable of presenting his films in ways that are visually innovative, and I also think he?s excellent at directing actors and actresses, but all too often this talent seems wasted on scripts in which characters behave in illogical ways that are contrary to my perception of reality. Authority figures in his films are moustache twirlingly intolerant, the women in his films are often confused children in need of guidance, and all of this is in service of stories that just don?t make a whole lot of sense. Most of these are criticisms that could be lobbed against Antichrist, which would lead one to believe that this movie would be torturous to me, but that?s not the case. In fact, I think this is the best work that Lars Von Trier has ever done. The film?s extreme nature (symbolic or otherwise) seems to make a lot of the usual Von Trierisms make a lot more sense; these characters inhabit an esoteric realm and this makes the film beholden only to its own internal logic and not to the real world. Perhaps one of the root problems with a lot of Von Trier?s previous work was his association with the Dogme 95 movement. I?m not completely opposed to Dogme, it?s produced some pretty good movies, but I?m not sure it was really the right mode for Von Trier, which I suppose was probably his own conclusion as evidenced by the fact that he?s only ever made one bonified Dogme film his entire career in spite of the fact that he was sort of the movement?s poster-boy. In fact Antichrist actively goes against all ten of that movement?s famous rules; though most of the camerawork is hand-held, the lush cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle features a look that is heavily filtered and stylized. Take the first scene for example, which is filmed on a set (breaking Dogme rule one), uses non-diegetic opera music (breaking rule two), has non-handheld camera (rule three), is in high contrast black and white (rule four), requires optical work (rule five), ends in a moment of superficial violence (rule six), is in service of what could be called a horror movie (rule eight), is in widescreen (rule nine), and comes after a very large credit belonging to the director (rule ten), oh and arguments could definitely be made that the whole film is temporally and geographically alienated (rule seven). So what we have here is a film that employs a degree of stylization unseen in Lars Von Trier?s work for a very long time, it harkens back to his early wunderkind days of films like The Element of Crime or Europa. But the Lars Von Trier work I?d most readily compare this film to is probably his unfinished project for Danish television called ?The Kingdom.? Like that work, this seems to tell a story against a spiritual/supernatural backdrop the nature of which is hard to really place a finger on, and like that work this is not afraid to provide the viewer with disturbing images that one is not expecting. Speaking of those disturbing images, they are probably the most polarizing element of the film. You?ve probably heard about this already, but there is some really extreme violence in this film and if you are someone who?s squeamish about such material, you should probably look elsewhere. In the film?s defense, though the violence is very graphic and disturbing, there isn?t really a large quantity of it. The movie?s reputation is earned mainly from two isolated scenes that come pretty late in the film and these shots aren?t much bloodier than the unrated versions of some of the more extreme horror films. What makes the material here so shocking isn?t necessarily how much is shown so much as the twisted ideas behind what is going on. The most infamous image (it involves a scissors) is a brief shot that doesn?t have a whole lot of blood, but the idea of the action itself is very disturbing. In this case I probably benefited from having read spoilers as this allowed me to mentally prepare for what was coming, the images that inhabited my mind from having read about the material proved a lot more disturbing than the actual images ever could have been. This is a luxury that the Cannes audience did not have, and this probably explains why the film has been better received in subsequent festival screenings. The two actors who are in the center of all this chaos, Willem DaFoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, do excellent work. Gainsbourg has the unenviable task of displaying extreme emotions without going over the top. When her character begins shouting and screaming it easily could have come off as ridiculous, but Gainsbourg makes it work. She has a physically taxing role and is clearly putting a lot into her craft. Dafoe has a slightly less challenging role, but that shouldn?t diminish his accomplishments. He gives a more subtle performance for a more subtle role, he internalizes more of his emotions and his character can be almost as violent as Gainsbourg?s albeit in a more passive-aggressive way. The film has so much symbolism and is made in such unconventional ways that it can at times feel like a puzzle demanding the viewer to discover its meaning. There are a number of art house movies that do this, but what perhaps makes this so special it that it actually works pretty well as a thriller even if you?re not interested in connecting the film?s thematic dots. I?m a bit hesitant to call this a horror film, because this doesn?t really operate like a ?mere? genre film, but it does achieve most of the goals that horror films try to achieve. It establishes an atmosphere of dread early on, the tension rises steadily throughout and there is a profound sense of evil throughout which must be directly confronted towards the end. In fact, when looked at as a thriller, the film has a lot in common with The Shining. Like that Kubrick film, this is set in an isolated area from which escape is difficult, this location is haunted by forces that are never explained and only show themselves in occasionally, and in the ending the forces manipulate one of the family members into trying to kill the other. Of course the violent images also link the film with the horror genre, but the images which I found more creepy were the mysterious animals which showed up at times as well as the moments in which limbs and bodies come out of the ground to turn the environment into a Bosch-like hellscape. But to simply say that this works as a thriller is a cop-out, the themes and symbolism here clearly invites close analysis, and I?m not too proud to admit that I?m not going to be able to explain everything on display here after only one sitting. I?m at a bit of a disadvantage with this one because almost every interpretation of it is either religious or feminist, and those are both disciplines I?ve never had a whole lot of patience for. I?m going to avoid tackling the feminist/antifeminist material, but I?ll take a stab at a religious interpretation, this will involve spoilers. The movie itself is a bit of a paradox as its title derives from a character of the book of Revelation (the final book of the bible) while it?s principle location of Eden is derived from the book of Genesis (the first book of the bible). What?s more Eden is a place you leave, not a place you enter, so perhaps what we?re witnessing is the bible in reverse. Man and woman are cast into Eden instead of out of it, and rather than being paradise it?s a hell. As man was created first and woman second, here woman is destroyed second and man first. So what?s the original sin? Chaos and murder, and the animals labeled the three beggars are the voice of temptation leading the characters toward it, woman first and then man. So, what?s the antichrist? Evidence would seem to suggest that it was the child killed in the first scene, note the positions of his arms as he falls, also the deformity of his feet. This would make Gainsborg?s character the mother of the antichrist, but what?s the polar opposite of a virgin? The answer to that might have something to do with the scene with the scissors. Is that an airtight theory about this? Hell no. In fact that interpretation has more holes in it than Swiss cheese, but I think it touches on one mode of watching the film. One could probably sit and theorize about it for ages, it?s a bit like Cries and Whispers era Bergman in the way it forces long contemplation in order to find meaning in its stark imagery and bleak subject matter. It may end up being one of those movies like Mullholland Dr or A Tale of Two Sisters that have people watching them a million times in order to post elaborate theories on the internet. Whatever. The meaning of life may or may not be encoded into this thing, but what really matters is that it?s made with the utmost conviction, it?s beautifully crafted, and it?s consistently compelling and thought-provoking. That?s great cinema whether or not it functions as a definitive statement about the fall of man. |
November 14, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (The Baader Meinhof Complex) - R |
It?s no secret that many people view the Best Foreign Language category of the Academy Awards as a mess. Between the country by country submission process, the process of selecting a shortlist, and the process of choosing five final films, there are a ton of roadblocks in which snubs can occur. This was made particularly clear in 2007, when important films like 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days were ignored in favor of off the radar oddities like Beaufort, Katy?, and 12. Many also complained about the 2008 lineup, but if you think about it they really stepped up that year. Among the nominees were the Palm D?or winner The Class, critical favorite and future Criterion-laureate Revanche, the wildly creative animated documentary Waltz With Bashir, and Departures, a film whose victory baffled many but which got solid reviews once people finally got a chance to see it. Really, that?s what the category?s major problem is, its dealing with movies which few people have actually had a chance to see and which have had no ability to get buzz stateside. That?s probably the problem that The Baader-Meinhof Complex had when its nomination baffled many. Had it had the stateside released then which it is now finally getting it might have been less of a shock.
The film tells the true story of the RAF, that?s not the Royal Air Force, it?s the Red Army Faction; a group of disillusioned youths who turned to violence in an attempt to cause social change in late sixties Germany. The group could probably be equated to The Weathermen, except that they were more violent and more active than that American group. In short, these were left wing domestic terrorists who reaped havoc throughout Germany for about a decade, and that?s a topic that needs to be approached carefully. The title refers to RAF members Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), who became the group?s most famous members. However, the movie does not necessarily focus on either of them and they do not appear to be bilateral leaders of the organization. Rather, this is an ensemble film about an organization that appears to have been somewhat loosely organized. Baader is the member who more closely lives up to what one would expect from an RAF member, he?s young, angry and political. The kind of person who?d normally just wear a Che Guevara T-Shirt but who instead ended up taking arms and emulating him. Meinhof is a bit more intriguing. She began her career as a respected left wing journalist, but finally came to sympathize and ultimately sacrifice everything in order to join the group. These young people are raging against a lot of things around them, particularly the ongoing war in Vietnam (for which the United States has been using bases in Germany), the treatment of Palestine by Israel, and the general belief that corporations have been controlling everything. They come to the conclusion that to do nothing in the face of all this would be as much of a sin as the conformity the previous generation showed in the face of Nazism. That?s what drove them philosophically, additionally; they were living in a time of worldwide counterculture which is something the film shows very well. The film has a number of montages (perhaps too many) that really drive home the environment which bread this organization and why so many of the youth in Germany came to sympathize with them. The group?s build is rather interesting as there is a fascinating gender equality to the Baader Meinhoff group. Three of the most important RAF members (Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek), Brigitte Mohnhaupt (Nadja Uhl), and Meinhof), are women and many of them act as aggressively as the men. Do not expect Baader and Meinhof to be some kind of Bonnie and Clyde style lovers in crime. This is the late 60s and the group practices free love, a fact that does not amuse their Palestinian colleagues as evidenced by a scene where they went to a terrorist training camp and gained the reputation of being screw-ups among their peers in the terror business. Of course, amidst all the 60s clothing and rock music, one must face the fact that these people were killers. Perhaps they were idealistic and well intentioned killers, but killers none the less. That?s what makes this subject matter so challenging; terrorist are probably the least popular people in the world today and with good reason, how do you make these characters sympathetic enough to follow without glorifying them or whitewashing their less savory aspects. This is perhaps not unlike the challenges posed by making a serious film about gangs and organized crime, but magnified by the political elements. To deal with this Edel has chosen to make this a straightforward film about historical events told with meticulous detail and research. Stefan Aust?s book was clearly important to this production for far more than its catchy title, one feels like Edel was interested as much in making an accessible illustrated historical record as he was in telling a cinematic story. The history here is interesting enough for such a treatment, but it?s also the movies Achilles Heel. The material is never dry, but because this is trying to be so accurate there are developments that go against the nature of film storytelling; important characters emerge in the final act and events occur that seem separate from the main narrative thrust and in general it affair seems a bit unfocused. One wonders if this would be perfected if Edel had been willing to composite a few characters and simplify elements. Quentin Tarentino lovingly asserted in the finale of Inglorious Basterds that film is a stronger force than history, and while I certainly am not recommending that The Baader Meinhof Complex needed to take any departures as radical as Tarentino did, I do think Edel probably should have taken his duties as a film maker a little more seriously than his duties as a historian. Still, the way the film steadfastly presents history in a way that is cinematically compelling if not narratively clan, does make for a very interesting film. |
November 14, 2009 | N/A |
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