tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33353452024-02-19T14:00:02.202-05:00The Ongoing Cinematic Education of Steven CarlsonWe'll get there. God knows we'll try.Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.comBlogger1473125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-78460408442334544182009-02-02T15:24:00.001-05:002009-02-02T15:31:15.766-05:00Reports of my death, it seems, have been greatly exaggerated. <br /><br />This site's still going away... but I'm not. Mainly because I realized that, without a website, I can't participate in <a href="http://www.lucidscreening.com/2009/02/the_3rd_annual_white_elephant.html">The Third Annual White Elephant Blogathon</a>. And nobody wants to miss out on that.<br /><br />What has chafed about this, what I can't really keep up with, is the reviewing load. When you try to review everything you watch, it gets burdensome. Yet I didn't really feel that crunch until several years in, and changing the format just seemed wrong to me. At least, it does here. No one's to say that we can't get a fresh start elsewhere, though. So I've done just that. This will likely be a far more informal venture - just me riffing on movies, music, booze, whatever else. In other words, more like an everyday blog. Exciting, I know.<br /><br />I have thus taken a page from the Matt Prigge playbook. For those still interested, <a href="http://steveosteve.tumblr.com/">this is my new home.</a> See you in the funny pages...Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-10841972775684397792009-01-28T02:45:00.003-05:002009-01-28T03:03:52.326-05:00Nobody's going to read this, most likely, but it needs to be said anyway. Long time coming, at any rate.<br /><br />So. The other day (as in, last month) I saw Werner Herzog's <i>Stroszek</i>, a film that gets better every time I think about it. <i>Stroszek</i> is the kind of film whose impact cannot be judged while it unspools in front of you but only in the space that occurs from the moment you finish watching it to the moment you finish reflecting upon it. It famously ends on a shot of a chicken that has been trained to dance to a rudimentary tune whenever someone drops a coin in a slot. The metaphor seems obvious (the best summation I've read, as usual, comes from Roger Ebert, who writes "A force we cannot comprehend puts some money in the slot, and we dance until the money runs out"), yet it avoids didacticism through the force of its poetic potency. It has stuck with me like few movies have, and here's why.<br /><br />There are a lot of times through the past couple of years that I've felt like that chicken, and folks, I need to stop dancing. I work too much, I drink too much, I watch too much and I expect too much. This was all easy back when I was pulling forty-five hours a week and scribbling whatever came to mind, but as both my responsibilities and my personal standards have risen, I find I can't maintain this little corner any longer. Most nights, it becomes a choice between watching and writing. With my backlog at over 500 films now, I don't want to make that choice. One of the two must fall. So, here it is. We're pulling down the shutters for good. Thanks for having me.Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-52254770337347279382008-10-25T19:29:00.000-04:002008-10-25T19:29:33.398-04:00Week of September 8th:<br /><br /><a name="bounty"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068308/"><i>The Bounty Man</i></a> (1972): Bland TV-movie Western starring Clint Walker as a bounty hunter who goes to bring in John Ericson, a dangerous thief and murderer, while another group of unscrupulous bandits stick on his tail, intending to take the bounty for themselves. Does nothing unexpected or especially interesting; has the structure and psychological underpinnings of a Boetticher/Scott Western but lacks the lean, tough vigor. The ending is an abrupt pop-psych botch. Margot Kidder looks lost as Ericson's tenacious lady. <b>Grade: C</b><br /><br /><a name="brand"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443455/"><i>Brand Upon the Brain!</i></a> (2007): Who does alternate-universe perversity as well as Guy Maddin? Nobody, that's who. Even when he's wandering through ideas he's worked with before, he still manages to find new perspectives on them. Incestuous/Oedipal conflicts run through much of Maddin's work, as does gender fluidity; this time around, though, he's bundled said familiar thematics inside a memory piece framing a combination coming-of-age tale/Hardy Boys-type mystery that abruptly shifts into horror dynamics two-thirds of the way through. The genre-hopping craziness of the piece's main body reflects the emerging hormonal roil of the younger Maddin, on the cusp of puberty as he is; meanwhile, the framing device offers a rueful perspective on said flashback craziness, offering us a calmer time where the echoes of a painful childhood still resonate (both metaphorically and literally -- the present-day line sees elder Maddin refurbishing the family lighthouse, long since fallen into disrepair). Through all this, Maddin's dazzling formal abilities wane not a bit. Chews through ideas and images so quickly that it feels on the long side even at a mere 90-odd minutes, but when said running time includes the indelible bit where the narrator (I chose Crispin Glover) howls "RUMANIA!" ever more frantically while a dead man is shocked, Frankenstein-style, back into a grotesque simulacrum of life, it seems churlish to complain. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="prom"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117398/"><i>La Promesse</i></a> (1997): Breakthrough film for the Dardenne brothers serves as a solid introduction to their neorealism-by-way-of-Bresson ethos. Luc and Jean-Pierre direct with confidence and force yet never seem overbearing or intrusive, important given the hand-wringing potential evident in their socially-engaged scenario. The film deals with the slow moral evolution of Igor, a young man who begins to rebel against his slumlord father and the treatment of the immigrants in Dad's thrall, yet the film doesn't hector or deal in shades of black and white -- Amidou, an African immigrant whose death touches off the boy's epiphany in the form of a promise to look after his wife, has a gambling addiction, and his wife is often adamantly unwilling to accept Igor's benign help. In lesser hands, this material could easily become breast-beating polemics, but the Dardennes, who favor human activity over human speech, keep it grounded in a particular sense of everyday existence and an awareness of physical being. (There's a scene where Igor's father gives him a whupping that's as quick, violent and brutal as anything I've seen.) It becomes less about the politics of the particular situation and more about simply Doing What's Right, and it's wonderfully engrossing. Also, aside from the film's value in itself, <i>La Promesse</i> also introduced the cinema world to a soulful, ridiculously talented kid named Jérémie Renier. And the cinema world is much richer for it. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="post"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486640/"><i>Postal</i></a> (2008): Big surprise time: Cinematic bugbear Uwe Boll, as it turns out, can be funny. And I don't mean accidentally funny like Christian Slater shouting, "Don't be insane!" in <i>Alone in the Dark</i> or the sudden appearance of medieval ninjas in <i>In the Name of the King</i> -- I mean in an on-purpose, joke-telling, setup-punchline kind of way. <i>Postal</i> is a teeth-bared tasteless satire in the vein of <i>South Park</i>, and seeing Dr. Boll's tendencies towards the inexplicable harnessed for comedic ends carries its own fascinating charge, as it's the bursts of slapstick weird that keep this from sliding into anti-everything drudgery. I expect a number of the biggest laughs are taken from the source videogame, but that doesn't change the fact that tone is everything and there's a million ways to fuck up, for instance, the cat-silencer gag. That it got a hearty laugh out of this avowed cat-lover is to Boll's credit. But it wouldn't be a Boll film if he didn't ultimately find a way to fuck it up, and <i>Postal</i> goes to shit in a hurry roughly halfway through after it presumably runs out of inspiration and becomes a dull, noisy shoot-em-up. Is it a coincidence that this shift comes right after its funniest and most surreal joke (the ultimate fate of Verne Troyer, playing "Verne Troyer")? I doubt it. Better than anyone had any right to expect, really, but it comes so close to scraping the edge of quality that its ultimate failure irks all the more. <b>Grade: C</b>Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-16360838128948443302008-10-14T13:16:00.002-04:002008-10-14T13:17:41.910-04:00Week of September 1:<br /><br /><a name="gate"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493402/"><i>Boarding Gate</i></a> (2008): Another study of alienation disguised as a genre flick from Olivier Assayas, this could be seen as a companion piece to his awesome <i>demonlover</i>. Where <i>demonlover</i> was a tale of corporate espionage that linked spiritual/moral corruption with the ever-widening need to consume as a way to feel something (even something extreme and taboo), <i>Boarding Gate</i> goes the other way and gives us a cast of characters who already do and feel too much, with our heroine's ultimate goal being to unplug from the web in which she's caught and disappear into a more "normal" life. When Michael Madsen breaks out a pair of handcuffs, only to have Asia Argento proclaim, "I don't like them. They hurt."... well, there you go. The film would probably be even better if someone other than Argento was in the lead; though she's clearly been cast for her iconic value and not her acting range, the second half still feels like a letdown, if only because Asia can't really do anything other than feral animalism. Still, Assayas's eye is as sharp as ever, and if the film coasts on a terrific sense of dislocation that's still more than most other films have to their credit. Me like. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="heavy"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1092007/"><i>Heavy Metal in Baghdad</i></a> (2008): Strong documentary about Acrassicauda, Iraq's only heavy metal band, gets about as much mileage as would be possible out of its focus. By concentrating on the four members of the band, particularly thoughtful bassist Firas al Lateef, directors Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi manage to hit close to home and create the sense of a universal experience with a directness that isn't possible for an overview doc like <i>No End in Sight</i>. The members of Acrassicauda are engaging, angry fellows who remain verbose and realistic about their situation as the country spirals into chaos; when the film picks up with them after they've fled to Syria and documents their first show in four years, you're tempted to cheer in triumph even as their social conditions (no money, no practice space, generally treated like third-class citizens) mean that the film can in no possible way end on an up note. It doesn't matter what you think of heavy metal -- you should seek this one out. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="meet"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1073498/"><i>Meet the Spartans</i></a> (2008): This is what I get for thinking <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2007/02/epic-movie-2007-i-was-looking-for-one.html"><i>Epic Movie</i></a> might be a step in the right direction, isn't it? Latest issue from the bowels of the Friedberg/Seltzer "creative" team appears to have slapped together in a fortnight using only the most obvious and glancing nods to its source and pop culture in general, so that the effect is like watching some smarmy douchebag heartily bombing at an open-mike stand-up night. (Hey, did you notice that <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2007/03/300-2007-im-with-kent-beeson-when-he.html"><i>300</i></a> was really homoerotic? How about Britney Spears, is she crazy or what?) In retrospect, I think what I responded to in <i>Epic Movie</i> wasn't so much an improvement in the humor as an improvement in the casting -- somehow, actual funny people (Fred Willard, Jayma Mays, Kal Penn) thought it might be a lark to fashion a silk purse out of Friedberg & Seltzer's sow's ear, and while they didn't totally succeed, they did make the film seem more bearable than it should have been. Here we're relegated to Kevin Sorbo and a bunch of hacks from "Mad TV." The casting of Sorbo is meant in and of itself to be a joke, which is the ever-present problem with these things; at no time do the dynamic duo behind this try to turn it into anything other than a vast orgy of, "Hey, I understand that reference!" It's the kind of film where they have Paris Hilton in the role of Ephialtes the hunchback, and the fact that she says, "I'm not as dumb as I look," is an automatic punchline. Here's the thing, though: Paris Hilton is indeed smarter and cannier than she likes to appear, which gives her one up on these two self-satisfied assholes making fun of her. <b>Grade: F</b><br /><br /><a name="mom"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1122599/"><i>Momma's Man</i></a> (2008): Note the titular irony of this wryly effective portrait of depressive stasis. Matt Boren plays Mikey, a middle-aged married man back East for a quick business trip who visits his parents and then doesn't leave, and his performance is solid, hinting at gulfs of self-loathing agony without compromising the character's dissembling reticence; furthermore, Boren is entirely unafraid to jump headlong into the unsympathetic. Director Azazel Jacobs gets the maximum mileage out of his major set (his parents' loft), with the extraordinary clutter becoming ever more imposing the closer Mikey slides to total regressive stagnation. Mikey's parents are played by Azazel's real-life parents Ken and Flo Jacobs, with several pieces of avant-garde cinematic titan Ken's work making appearances during the course of <i>Momma's Man</i>. Most notably, there's a small chunk of <i>Spaghetti Aza</i> cut in during a crucial late-film moment, which serves as a fine linchpin to the film's (presumably personal) thematic dichotomy between safety and maturity. Also not to be discounted: The film's finely tuned sense of awkward humor. The scene where Mikey buys beer for some teenagers in a park is a marvel. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="shot"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0952682/"><i>Shotgun Stories</i></a> (2008): David Gordon Green served as executive producer on Jeff Nichols's debut feature, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest -- the rural poetry of Nichols's film owes a lot to Green's <i>George Washington</i> and, by extension, Charles Burnett's <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2007/09/last-of-dusty-backlog-films-hooray.html#sheep"><i>Killer of Sheep</i></a>. Here's the thing, though: Neither the Green nor the Burnett really had a narrative, being instead a collection of incidences that added up to the feel of a place and a time. Nichols, by contrast, does have a story he wants to tell, and there's nothing wrong with that in itself; unfortunately, the story he has in mind is shopworn and obvious, a simple iteration on how quests for vengeance can leads to endless vicious circles of violence. The mundanity of his narrative doesn't seem to fit the found-art quality of his visuals; if anything, the yearning for artistry present in his setups and cutting make the tired familiarity of the plot seem that much more glaring. It's not really a bad first film -- Nichols demonstrates a fine eye behind the camera, and he has the advantage of a solid performance by Michael Shannon as an anchor. I just hope his next time out doesn't feel so second-hand. <b>Grade: B-</b>Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-88607544395328160932008-09-23T09:58:00.002-04:002008-09-23T10:01:52.693-04:00And my burgeoning empire of not-for-pay criticism rolls on...<br /><br />Hey, didja know that the Encyclopedia Britannica has a blog? I didn't. But <a href="http://www.britannica.com/blogs/">they do</a>, and right now writer/film historian Raymond Benson is running a two-week series of posts about his favorite films of 1968. I have been tapped as an official film commentator. So, y'know, there's that. Take a look and follow along... should be fun, no?Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-64829422213667318082008-09-20T08:13:00.002-04:002008-09-21T12:30:33.659-04:00Week of August 25th:<br /><br /><a name="any"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062429/"><i>Any Gun Can Play</i></a> (1967): From what I've seen, spaghetti Westerns seem to hit the same blind spot I have for Japanese yakuza films -- while the good ones are very good, the bad ones (which far outnumber the good ones) try my patience with dull, overthought plots involving lots of double and triple crosses by guys with guns who all vaguely look like each other. This one, about a wayward cache of gold and the various unsavory characters after it, settles into that aggravating template nicely. From what I've read, this is intended as a knowing parody of Sergio Leone's <i>Dollars</i> trilogy, complete with Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef lookalikes getting gunned down at the film's outset. All I can say is that if director Enzo G. Castellari demonstrated a tenth of the enthusiasm and invention of Leone's hyperbolic-to-the-point-of-mythic mise-en-scene, this might be worthwhile. Side note: I saw this in a bad video print under the title <i>Go Kill and Come Back</i> which featured quite possibly the worst pan & scan job I've ever seen. I'm not making that a factor in my opinion -- proper framing might make the film more visually pleasant, but it won't help the story, and the ridiculously drastic pans used to fix the framing carry their own unintended entertainment value -- but I thought it was worth mentioning. <b>Grade: C-</b><br /><br /><a name="china"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289115/"><i>A Chinese Torture Chamber Story 2</i></a>: The first <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2002/09/chinese-torture-chamber-story-1994-in.html"><i>Chinese Torture Chamber Story</i></a> was about the best possible movie one could make from the material: a sick-minded industrial strength black comedy that aimed for the gross-out and didn't take itself too seriously. This unrelated followup shows that the people who made it missed the point of the first; what we have is a sequel that keeps the grotesquerie but for some reason appears to have been made in all earnestness on a budget of seventeen bucks. Roughly half the film is over before we get any torture, and when it finally shows up in an ever-nastier series of setpieces, it's displayed dispassionately, like everyone on set knew they were making a cash-in sequel and thus decided not to invest any of the trash-fueled energy that made the first film memorable. (No exploding penises, in other words.) I probably think I hate this film more than I actually do -- my aggravation was increased by my recognition of it being the kind of thing I should like were it not so incompetent and lackadaisical. Still, fuck this film. <b>Grade: D</b><br /><br /><a name="noon"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060486/"><i>Violence at Noon</i></a> (1966): I don't feel qualified to talk much about this disorienting film after one viewing, especially a VHS viewing. It's obviously an incredible achievement, and it's even more obviously an elusive one that I haven't quite absorbed. A big-screen viewing would probably help, considering how much information there is to take in, but I'm going to miss its sole screening at the New York Film Festival's Oshima retrospective sidebar. So I'll just say for now that I liked it and hope to encounter it again in the future. <b>Grade: B</b> (a placeholder grade if there ever was one)Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-46894489528793857662008-09-17T00:37:00.001-04:002008-09-18T12:18:26.228-04:00Week of August 18th:<br /><br /><a name="dr2k"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072856/"><i>Death Race 2000</i></a> (1975): Darkly funny rotgut satire masquerading as just another Corman-branded drive-in smash-em-up. The media-violence-as-pacifier isn't exactly new ground, but director Paul Bartel nails the balance between violence and commentary better than most, so that the film appears more trenchant than it probably is. What came as a genuine surprise to me was the post-script, which says in five minutes what it took <i>Massacre at Central High</i> half a film to say. Makes excellent use of Corman's notorious tight-fistedness -- the sparse, ramshackle art direction, everything pasted together as best as possible, truly gets across the premise of an America dancing on the edge of bankruptcy -- and though legend has it that Bartel intensely disliked directing car-chase films, you wouldn't know it from his sharp, economical eye. Plus it's entertaining as fuck. David Carradine, I'm starting to think, is not a person but a government experiment to isolate cool and give it human form. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="m/f"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060675/"><i>Masculin Féminin</i></a> (1966): "The children of Marx and Coca-Cola" is more than a cute pullquote, it's an unusually clear and handy summation of what Jean-Luc Godard is doing with this playfully knockabout concoction. As the famed phrase suggests, this captures a loose group of young people torn between increasing politicization/dissatisfaction with the Way Things Are and the constant desire for consumption of the capitalistic and ephemeral. The film Godard makes from this is at turns melancholic, hilarious, dull and droll, helped along by a typically winning performance by Jean-Pierre Leaud and the lightest touch Godard ever had and would never have again after his radicalism overwhelmed him. Full of sharp setpieces that may not be meant to add up to anything other than a cultural overview; most fascinating are occasional interludes where characters are peppered with a battery of question by an offscreen interviewer. Here, Godard all but stands up and shouts Do They Know What They Stand For? I Don't Think That They Do. Watching this, you can see how the '68 riots happened, and you can also see why that idealistic fervor collapsed so quickly. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="only"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031762/"><i>Only Angels Have Wings</i></a> (1939): Mostly terrific Hawksian men-being-men drama about mail pilots in South America and the deadly lives they lead. The flight scenes are expertly rendered, crisp and tense (it was a great idea for Hawks to lead us off with a fatal crash, so that we understand that he just might kill any of these sympathetic characters at any time), but I do think the film loses something whenever it switches gears and goes for the push-pull romantic tension between Cary Grant and Jean Arthur. Arthur's character strikes me as too inconsistent, and the chemistry between the two never quite sparks. I kinda wish that Arthur and Rita Hayworth had switched roles, as Hayworth kills in her small handful of scenes. Still, this is at bottom adventure drama at its most solid. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="tiger"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079803/"><i>Return of the Tiger</i></a> (1979): I wonder where Bruce Li's reputation would be if a cynical producer hadn't rechristened him with that name after the death of Bruce Lee. Because, at least on the evidence of this film, Li doesn't deserve to be lumped in with Bruce Le or Bruce Liang. He has an athletic grace in his movements that is far removed from the clumsy thuggery of Li or the abruptly effective savagery of Sonny Chiba, but more importantly he also has a measure of charm that sets him apart from the other Bruce clones. My perception may also be clouded by the fact that, unlike most Lee cash-ins (i.e. <i>The Dragon Lives Again</i>), this is tantalizingly close to being a good movie. The fight scenes are sharp and well-choreographed, the villains are properly hissable and there's a sense that the filmmakers were, for once, in on the joke. (There's no other excuse for the scene where Li avoids taking on a huge henchman until he can oil himself up.) The problem is, then, is in the story -- it's both overly complex and completely unimportant, with a series of double-and-triple crosses that nobody seems terribly concerned about sorting out. Coulda been a minor classic, but I'll stay satisfied with a ferocious entertainment. Needed more Angela Mao, but the glorious heap of Paul L. Smith in Hulk-smash mode at the end compensates. <b>Grade: B-</b><br /><br /><a name="rio"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053221/"><i>Rio Bravo</i></a> (1959): It's iconic! One could criticize Howard Hawks's now-legendary Western for trading explicitly in well-worn Western tropes right down to its casting, but that would be missing the point. From the beginning, where we're introduced to most of the main characters without a word of dialogue, Hawks uses audience familiarity as an entry point to his project. We know these characters and situations. We know them inside and out, and Hawks does too. He's not interested in telling just another story here but a story within those stories. That's why the siege-narrative structure is necessary -- a whole heap of downtime is the aim, so that we can see what these guys do and how they react in relation to one another when they're not beholden to the average B-plot. Though it has some wonderfully choreographed gunplay (not just the opening and closing scenes but a marvelous bit where Dean Martin has to suss out a shooter in a bar) <i>Rio Bravo</i> is more or less the opposite of what we expect -- the Western as inaction movie. Terrific, at any rate, and helpful for me in that I now understand what the big screaming deal about John Wayne is. <b>Grade: A-</b>Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-61738711160886656342008-09-11T11:05:00.000-04:002008-09-11T11:07:22.899-04:00Week of August 11th:<br /><br /><a name="kwai"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050212/"><i>The Bridge on the River Kwai</i></a> (1957): With this and <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2005/07/lawrence-of-arabia-1962-certainly-epic.html"><i>Lawrence of Arabia</i></a>, David Lean forever ruined the epic for everyone else. Here he is, making this ginormous movie with tons of extras and elaborate sets and on-location shooting and he forgets to leave behind the obsessive eye for tiny detail and refined character work that defined the spate of quiet British dramas and literary adaptations he was doing prior to blowing his muse up large. What a complete bastard. I mean, how are people supposed to get away with lazy, slipshod "spectacle" like <i>Around the World in 80 Days</i> or <i>The Greatest Story Ever Told</i> when this guy is stuff that's both terrific eye candy and psychologically valid character drama? Stirring, dynamic war saga with a performance from Alec Guinness that's a miracle of reserve. Why, though, did nobody warn me that this film is also an incredible downer. Why. <b>Grade: A-</b><br /><br /><a name="fort"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051808/"><i>The Hidden Fortress</i></a> (1958): Rousing historical action spectacle by Akira Kurosawa, whose sense of assurance is kinda scary. The avaricious peasant leads grate at times, but they also provide a useful contrast to the nobility of Toshiro Mifune and Misa Uehara. Mifune is his reliable badass self, and his spear duel with Tadokoro is one for the ages. A movie for the 12-year-old in us all, and there's not a damn thing wrong with that. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="life"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038650/"><i>It's a Wonderful Life</i></a> (1946): I never expected this film to live up to its lofty reputation, but it's thoroughly great. People speak of "Capra-corn" this and "heartwarming" that and "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings;" what they don't warn you about is the nearly two hours of hardship and misery that have to be waded through to make that happy ending feel earned instead of cheap. Yet it's never a pessimistic wallow, either -- Frank Capra's touch is light but honest, and he grounds his can-do little-guy optimism against the realities of the economic times, somehow crafting a quintessential crowd-pleasing slice of Americana out of what's essentially a Socialist parable. Also: Hey, I can understand what attracted thorny auteurs like Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock to Jimmy Stewart. Underneath that aw-shucks folksy exterior, he's got a surprising reserve of piss and vinegar; the scene where, in a fit of misplaced rage, he tells off a well-meaning schoolteacher carries an unexpected brutality with it. Summation: In expertly showing both the ups and downs of small-town America circa the Depression on into WWII, Capra's film becomes the best kind of uplift: The kind where we can celebrate our commonality and (hopeful) essential decency while acknowledging that sometimes shit's gonna get rough. <b>Grade: A</b><br /><br /><a name="mad"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116953/"><i>Mad Dog Time</i></a> (1996): A little better than writer/director Larry Bishop's subsequent <a href="http://www.halo-17.net/articles/index/Film+Review/Hell+Ride/11966:"><i>Hell Ride</i></a>, if only because there's a larger complement of real actors desperately trying to render Bishop's terrible dialogue in a manner that could be termed deliverable. Still DOA, though, boiling down as it does to a lot of posturing and yakking with occasional gunfire. Maybe worth seeing once for Gabriel Byrne's mesmerisingly awful performance -- rarely does a talented actor go so completely wrong -- but then again maybe not. <b>Grade: D</b><br /><br /><a name="mafi"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056210/"><i>Mafioso</i></a> (1962): Nearly gave up on this one halfway through, as it appeared to be mining the same broad, braying strain of Italian farce for which I've recently discovered a distaste, thanks to <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2008/08/week-of-july-21st-big-deal-on-madonna.html#big"><i>Big Deal on Madonna Street</i></a> and <i>Divorce Italian Style</i>. I'm rather glad I didn't, though; director Alberto Lattuada eventually reveals his film as an inversion of these films. While the aforementioned use serious subject matter as fodder for comedy, <i>Mafioso</i> is a comedy that unexpectedly turns deadly serious when the culture-clash stuff falls away and genial hero Antonio (played well by Alberto Sordi) is forced to confront what his heritage truly entails. An acidic social satire with a Kafka edge. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="mirr"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790686/"><i>Mirrors</i></a> (2008): What a piece of unreconstructed shit. Alexandre Aja spends much of the film's first half trying (poorly) to build some manner of creepy atmosphere, but shortly after Amy Smart has her jaw ripped off by an evil ghost, he gives up and just lets the increasingly-retarded plot play itself out to its moron end. (I know I've said it before, but I am so fucking sick of the J-horror discovery narrative.) A lot of bad laughs, a lot of dumb character moves and a waste of a premise fertile to bursting with potential for mind-bending, body-twisting balls-out horror. I no longer give a crap about whatever Aja's next project is. Kiefer Sutherland tries to grit his teeth and get through the film by pretending he's filming an episode of <i>24</i>; maybe this is why he fell off the wagon. <b>Grade: D</b><br /><br /><a name="boxer"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070564/"><i>The Prodigal Boxer</i></a> (1973): Stock-issue kung fu flick. Story feels far too distended to support even its slim running time (structure is essentially revenge-minded young upstart challenges bad guys, upstart gets whupped, upstart recuperates and trains more, repeat), though it does end strongly. More interesting to me than the film itself is its exhibition state; like so many others in its genre, it's been poorly dubbed, cut up and improperly framed. The downmarket treatment given these films, transforming potentially interesting work into fodder for drunken yahoos, is regrettable. Maybe this film works better when seen as intended -- there are still traces of themes that emphasize its plot as a progress towards maturity. Then again, maybe it would still seem repetitious. <b>Grade: C+</b><br /><br /><a name="step"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0838283/"><i>Step Brothers</i></a> (2008): More interesting to think about than to watch. There's a weirdly fascinating thread running through the heart of the latest issue of the Ferrell-McKay collaborative sweepstakes. In portraying the regressive mindsets shared by Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, <i>Step Brothers</i> uses juvenilia as a blatant metaphor for the kind of unhinged adolescent creativity that is no doubt tapped into by all involved parties when crafting a film such as this. Thus, the effectively melancholic third act where the boys join the straight world -- where their fault through the majority of the film was an overindulgence of their ids, the denial of such is seen as an ever greater transgression. The problem is that Tom Green already made a film about this in <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2007/02/freddy-got-fingered-or-daddy-would-you.html"><i>Freddy Got Fingered</i></a>, and Green's screaming anti-everything hostility is more bracing to me than the lumpy solipsism embraced here by Ferrell and company. Also, this film really needed to be funnier -- some of it works (Jenny Sekwa correctly cites Richard Jenkins' dinosaur monologue as a highlight, though the biggest laugh for me came during Ferrell's incongruous lumberjack burlesque), but a lot of it just kind of sits there, too impressed with its own vulgarity to make something out of it. <b>Grade: C+</b>Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-44618742942531550792008-09-02T22:50:00.001-04:002008-09-09T11:28:06.807-04:00Week of August 4th:<br /><br /><a name="mean"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069979/"><i>Mean Frank and Crazy Tony</i></a> (1973): The 'and' in the title is more important than you'd expect, since this Italian crime flick is really two films grafted onto each other. The first film is a wacky caper comedy about small-time dreamer Tony, played with a notable lack of subtlety by Tony Lo Bianco, and his attempts to ingratiate himself with imprisoned hardass capo Frank, played by Lee Van Cleef. The second film is a gritty action drama about steel-spined Frank and his inexorable progress towards settling a score with French rival Jean Rochefort. Combining the two makes for a strangely schizo buddy movie, with the more serious aspects of the film proving significantly more compelling than the farcical elements; fortunately, the slapstick wanes the deeper we get into the plot, and the film ultimately emerges as a flawed but reasonably entertaining genre entry. Also, Edwige Fenech is here as Lo Bianco's long-suffering girlfriend; she's given almost nothing to do in the story, but she does hang around long enough to provide her contractually-obligated nude scene, so that's a plus. <b>Grade: B-</b><br /><br /><a name="nin"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031725/"><i>Ninotchka</i></a> (1939): Legendary director Ernst Lubitsch filmed this sparkling culture-clash romantic comedy while riding out a delay in the start of production on <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2005/08/shop-around-corner-1940-ernst-lubitsch.html"><i>The Shop Around the Corner</i></a>. That means that he tossed off one masterpiece while waiting to make another. Did this guy just will masterpieces into being or something? Would that all romantic comedies could feature chemistry as electric as that between Melvyn Douglas and Greta Garbo or comic relief as consistently amusing as the three stoogeniks who set the plot in motion when they become seduced by the allure of Western decadence. A fleet and nimble film, hugely enjoyable; the scene where the film earns its famed tagline ("Garbo Laughs!") trumps the entirety of most other films all on its own. <b>Grade: A</b><br /><br /><a name="pine"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0910936/"><i>Pineapple Express</i></a> (2008): Slight, intermittently amusing stoner action flick is probably more valuable for its position in its creators' respective canons than it is as a standalone object. It's a melding of two kinds of humanism -- Judd Apatow's shaggy lovable-loser humanism and David Gordon Green's intentionally awkward poetic emo-humanism -- and the intersections and richochets between the two parallel yet different viewpoints is more interesting than the shrug of a plot. For Green watchers, this is valuable (more valuable than <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2005/06/undertow-2004-in-which-wunderkind.html"><i>Undertow</i></a>, anyway) as a demonstration that he can work within Hollywood constraints and genre frameworks without losing his very particular sense of the world. (The brief bit with Seth Rogen and James Franco blazed out of their skulls and playing leapfrog in the woods is as lovely and charming as anything in any studio offering this decade.) And for Apatow auteurists, this is twofold: It's proof that his way of thinking can come on strong and even exist symbiotically with another's distinctive outlook, meaning he doesn't necessarily have to hire the bland TV hacks with whom he's surrrounded himself, and it shows that his cockeyed idea of shlubby semi-realism, his can ground even the most ridiculous of premises. Now if only this thing were funnier, we might have something spectacular. Seth Rogen's screenplay, though, crosses the line at some point from being about slackers to merely being slack, leading to scenes that should work better than they do (i.e. the faux-gay escape attempt). Franco and Craig Robinson are the most consistently funny elements of the film; also, the car chase is some kind of loopy genius. <b>Grade: B-</b><br /><br /><a name="sig"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780607/"><i>The Signal</i></a> (2008): Low-budget triptych of linked tales centered around a mysterious frequency that drives people murderously nutty is passable in its begining and ending thirds, which tell the tale of an adulterous couple's dangerous attempt at a flight to safety from the vantage point of each of the involved parties, with the third segment holding together better than the first if only because Dan Bush seems a stronger director than David Bruckner and Justin Welborn's strong-jawed suitor makes for a more interesting protagonist than Anessa Ramsey's drippy adulteress. The second segment, though, is another beast. Directed by Jacob Gentry, it features Ramsey's cuckolded husband falling in with two neighbors trying to keep up appearances as they incongruousy prepare for a New Year's party, and it's marvelous -- a nervy high-wire black comedy that sees the imminent collapse of everything not as an excuse for angst but as a ghoulish chuckle of nihilism. It's a really rather bracing blast of quién-es-más-loco gallows humor, and it makes the film worth seeing all by itself while simultaneously pointing out how uninspired the other two segments are in comparison. This Gentry kid could really go places. <b>Grade: B</b>Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-53485120366209310222008-08-27T00:42:00.002-04:002008-08-27T12:15:55.981-04:00Week of July 28th:<br /><br /><a name="fren"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068611/"><i>Frenzy</i></a> (1972): <i>Everywhere I look, there's a darkness...</i> Alfred Hitchcock's darkest joke is also one of his grandest, an iconic wrong-man thriller given a contemporary viciousness and pumped up to Kafkaesque levels of persecution, and Jon Finch is in his own way the perfect protagonist, so beaten down by life that a murder rap is just another thing for him to impotently defy. But here's the thing: While a good deal of the film (especially the ride in the potato truck) is sick squirmy fun, there's something that most people miss or at least don't feel like discussing. Hitchcock beats Michael Haneke to the punch a good 25 years prior to the latter's ascendancy in indicting his audience for what they're not walking out on. Pay attention to the structure: The opening half-hour shows us a callous society obsessed with bloodlust, lacking any basic concern for the downtrodden and joking through in that black, head-down British way ("In one way I rather hope he doesn't [get caught]. We haven't had a good juicy series of sex murders since Christie. And they're so good for the tourist trade."), and we figure yeah, it's all a nasty larf, innit though? Then comes the uncomfortable rape and murder of Barbara Leigh-Hunt, shown to us unsparingly and unedited so that we're smacked full in the face with the ugly atrocity of it all. For a minute, you can see Hitchcock disgusted with the society he sees around him and letting both birds fly. Lovely, lovely indeed. <b>Grade: A-</b><br /><br /><a name="heart"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765141/"><i>Heartbeat Detector</i></a> (2008): Starts off vague and barely connected to itself, with emphasis on atmosphere and intimation; what with the air of mystery and the obsession with music, the general feel one gets from the first half of this is that of an Olivier Assayas film but without Assayas's intimidating formal command. (There's a party scene that falls just short of being a direct lift from <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2006/12/cold-water-1994-olivier-assayass.html"><i>Cold Water</i></a>.) Then the film stumbles into its answer-everything phase, and it goes from being irritatingly insubstantial to teeth-grindingly obvious. By the final monologue, my ability to care about the lessons director Nicolas Klotz was trying to impart had more or less atrophied to nothing. There's probably a fine film in this undisciplined mess, and that fine film is probably a lot shorter than the 130 minutes over which the film stretches. At least there's Mathieu Amalric, giving doing his usual solid work in the service of nothing much. Also: While I'm sympathetic to some of the film's political stance, isn't this essentially a cinematic representation of Godwin's Law? <b>Grade: C</b><br /><br /><a name="drac"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051554/"><i>Horror of Dracula</i></a> (1958): Robust re-interpretation of Bram Stoker's oft-filmed horror classic. Between Terence Fisher's nicely atmospheric direction, Peter Cushing's authoritative portrayal of Van Helsing and Christopher Lee's justly-famed turn as the Count, there's a lot to like here. It's easy to see why this was a starmaker for Lee -- he has the dapper countenance and charisma of Lugosi, yet his version of the Count is far more feral and savage. Simply put, he makes the vamp feel dangerous again. Good job, everyone. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="love"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052556/"><i>The Lovers</i></a> (1958): Here's your incandescent Jeanne Moreau. Here's your young, vibrant Louis Malle giving his all in deconstructing another genre after the triumph of <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2006/09/elevator-to-gallows-1958-louis-malles.html"><i>Elevator to the Gallows</i></a>. Here's your fashionable emptiness wielded like a straight razor three years before <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2006/10/lavventura-1960-i-simply-loathe-it-yet.html"><i>L'Avventura</i></a>. Here's your rich-man/working-class dichotomy as a social-commentary structure without feeling cliched or obnoxious. Here's your slow-burn ground-floor plot leading into an unexpected explosion of deliberate fairy-tale magic realism. Here's your still-potent black-and-white eroticism (the scandal is understandable). Here's your surprising glimpse at Jeanne Moreau's titties. Here's me feeling pretty satisfied. Here's me kinda falling in love with Louis Malle. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="naked"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144415/"><i>The Naked Venus</i></a>: (1959): About as good as a nudist-camp film could ever be, really. For one thing, it's got a real director behind the helm -- Edgar G. Ulmer, the poverty-row auteur best known for <i>Detour</i>. The clean black & white photography helps as well. The film's best innovation, though, is exceedingly simple: The nudie-camp scenes (which are surprisingly scant) serve the plot and not the other way around. That said, this is really no more than a trashy divorce-court TV-movie potboiler that, on occasion, shows us some titty. It's a friggin' masterpiece next to <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2008/08/week-of-july-21st-big-deal-on-madonna.html#diary"><i>Diary of a Nudist</i></a>, but it's still just a nudie-camp movie. <b>Grade: C+</b><br /><br /><a name="tell"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102545/"><i>No Telling</i></a> (1991): Ground-level modern-dress mutation of the Frankenstein story gains a lot of force from the simple act of being a character piece first and a horror movie second. Director Larry Fessenden, also responsible for <i>Habit</i> and <i>Wendigo</i>, has a special talent for using horror elements as an expression of emotional distress, and here the standard toying-in-God's-domain megalomania experienced by government scientist Geoffrey Gaines is an illustrative flipside to his relationship with his ever-more estranged wife Lilian. His attempts to create new life bump up against his inability to keep any life within his marriage. (There's also metaphorical import in the couple's stumbling, unsuccessful attempts to conceive a child.) Earnest, well-acted and very placid, this nonetheless rewards the patient with a genuinely pathetic nightmare figure at the end, where Geoffrey's attempts to control Nature literally fall apart before him. It's a little bit horror, a little bit social commentary and a little bit tragedy. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="storm"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1130759/"><i>Storm Troopers U.S.A.</i></a> (1969): What the fuck is this? Really, I can't describe the delirium that wafts off this strange, ill-advised Florida-lensed motherfuckery. There's a prologue that compresses Nazism into a five-minute history lesson, then there's some manner of plot that involves a modern-day Nazi splinter sect in America trying to rain terror down upon the populace by storming into a hotel and taking everyone hostage, then they're all undone by their libidos and there's some fight/chase scenes that are unexpectedly enjoyable if only for their convincing savagery. And that's just the bare outline. I haven't even gotten into the daffiness on the side, like the mind-blowingly awful choreography in the sequence where a mole in the Nazi organization is murdered or the cheesy charms of the three sailors on leave who float through this film like walking adverts for America awesomeness. Apparently, this never received a theatrical release, which doesn't surprise me, as people's brains might have melted on contact. Really rather amazing, this one. I'd go on, but you should really just see it for yourselves. <a href="http://www.somethingweird.com/cart.php?target=product&product_id=24105&category_id=340">Best ten bucks you'll ever spend.</a> <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="trig"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814365/"><i>Trigger Man</i></a> (2007): Minimalist spin on the <i>Deliverance</i> genre is, if anything, way too minimalist -- there's a fine line between "nothing" happening and nothing happening, and Ti West's screenplay lands firmly on the wrong side of the line. Furthermore, West's technique stymies his intent; while something like this really calls for rigorous discipline a la Gus Van Sant's <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2004/01/gerry-2003-second-viewing-not-only.html"><i>Gerry</i></a>, West instead belongs to the handheld shake-n-zoom school of filmmaking. The general paucity of incident and the unsteady camera cancel out any potential positive effects that might have arisen from each technique individually, so what we're left with is in essence a really bad home movie. The bit with the female jogger: time-padding at its lamest. <b>Grade: D</b>Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-60716362097993364572008-08-19T11:50:00.004-04:002008-08-19T12:05:00.024-04:00Quick announcement: Because I apparently feel I don't have enough to do, I'm now penning weekly reviews for a relatively new culture-centric site, <a href="http://www.halo-17.net/">Halo-17</a>. My inagural review last week was of Larry Bishop's dreadful <a href="http://www.halo-17.net/articles/index/Hell+Ride/11966"><i>Hell Ride</i></a>. This week it's Claude Chabrol's <a href="http://www.halo-17.net/articles/index/A+Girl+Cut+in+Two/11975"><i>A Girl Cut in Two</i></a>. I'll put up a link whenever a new review goes live.Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-2068183374440191882008-08-18T14:34:00.002-04:002008-08-18T19:06:47.788-04:00Week of July 21st:<br /><br /><a name="big"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052216/"><i>Big Deal on Madonna Street</i></a> (1958): I'm not sure this film is actually intended as a comedy. I guess the situations conceived by director Mario Monicelli are buffoonish enough to qualify as intended amusement, but a pallor of failure coats the characters, so that most of the jokes land with a wet thump and the actors are reduced to a lot of flailing and shouting in order to make the film seem livelier than it is. Didn't make me laugh, at any rate. What a sad bastard of a movie. <b>Grade: C</b><br /><br /><a name="diary"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054809/"><i>Diary of a Nudist</i></a> (1961): Congratulations Doris Wishman! You achieved something with this nudist-camp-expose that I didn't think possible: You made tits seem boring. I mean, <i>Nude on the Moon</i> was no great shakes, but it comes off like goddamn <i>2001</i> compared to this dispiriting jigglefest. Also: Having naked kids running around in addition to the acres of nude femme flesh may have helped your "just education" case if Johnny Bluenose decided to sue on grounds of indecency, but that doesn't stop it from feeling really creepy. No wonder this genre died an unlamented death. <b>Grade: D+</b><br /><br /><a name="night"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051994/"><i>A Night to Remember</i></a> (1958): Archetypal British prestige project, for better and for worse: This detailed tapestry about the sinking of the Titanic is meticulous, sober and respectful, festooned with dignified professionalism in front of/behind the camera and mostly free of histrionics. It's also as dead and bloodless a film as you're ever likely to see. Sometimes keeping a stiff upper lip means that you're just stiff. Given a choice between this and James Cameron's cheeseball melodramatics, I'll take the latter every time. <b>Grade: C</b><br /><br /><a name="song"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040820/"><i>A Song Is Born</i></a> (1948): Seven years seems like an awfully small turnaround window for a director to be remaking his own film. But even Howard Hawks needed to get paid, so here's a jazz-age redux of <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2006/04/ball-of-fire-1941-oh-barbara-barbara.html"><i>Ball of Fire</i></a>. The main surprise: Despite the legendary director's extreme distaste for the film, it ain't bad. The structure of <i>Ball of Fire</i> is left more or less intact, yet enough room is left for some terrific musical numbers featuring the likes of Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and a number of other musical greats. Also, the charming Danny Kaye is a marked improvement over Gary Cooper, if for no other reason than Kaye doesn't come off like he's made of oak. Hawks's direction, unsurprisingly, is pretty perfunctory (the climactic musical-number-as-ambush is as lazy and slack as anything in any great director's oeuvre); meanwhile, Virginia Mayo tries her best, so I guess I can't fault her for not being Barbara Stanwyck, but the difference is noticeable. Still, if it's not on the level of a classic, it's still a pleasant diversion jam-packed with great tunes. Nothing wrong with that. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="tell"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362225/"><i>Tell No One</i></a> (2008): And now, a thought experiment for those of you who've seen this film. Close your eyes and imagine the no-doubt-in-the-works English-language remake. Let's just say that, as an example, hack extraordinaire Gary Fleder was at the helm of this remake. As for a screenwriter for the adaptation... oh, I don't know, let's assume Wesley Strick. Just let your mind spool through the plot and see how it might appear. Got that image? Hey, isn't that funny? It'd be exactly the same moronic, contrived film, wouldn't it? Some things, it seems, transcend translation. <b>Grade: D+</b><br /><br /><a name="viol"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070393/"><i>The Violent Professionals</i></a> (1973): Awesome, over-the-top Italian police drama about a loose cannon cop who decides to avenge the death of a uniformed friend by going undercover and single-handedly destroying an entire crime syndicate. This meathead is pretty merciless, but then he is going up against guys who shoot pregnant women for no reason during the course of a bank robbery, so I guess you gotta be hard. Absolutely no good for anyone at all, but pretty deliciously entertaining in a one-damn-thing-after-another way; between the shoot-outs and the car chases and the beatings and all the silly '70s posturing and the occasional bit of inexplicable business (i.e. the bit where some low-level thugs have the cop strip jaybird-naked), I was never bored. Turns dark and cynical at the climax, as these things are wont to do. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="lily"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061177/"><i>What's Up, Tiger Lily?</i></a> (1966): Woody Allen's "debut" film, a comically redubbed Japanese spy flick, is really kind of inexcusable. Irrepressibly sophomoric and silly, overflowing with bad puns, cheesy vaudeville gags and leering sex humor, this film should be an embarrassment... but goddamn, is it ever funny. I'd like to say I'm bigger than this, that I didn't giggle at a villain named Wing Fat, the idea of "a non-existent but real-sounding country," and a man threatening to have his mustache eat another guy's beard, but I'm not -- this made me laugh a lot. If only everyone's juvenilia could be this much fun. <b>Grade: B+</b>Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-45504226437152366422008-08-07T21:17:00.001-04:002008-08-18T19:14:16.095-04:00Week of July 14th:<br /><br /><a name="anti"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337573/"><i>Antibodies</i></a> (2007): At this point, I'd say that the twin influences of <i>The Silence of the Lambs</i> and <i>Se7en</i> have arguably been even more damaging to world cinema than that of <i>Pulp Fiction</i>. Truth be told, this German genre entry isn't as bad as most -- André Hennicke cuts a menacing figure as the perverted antagonist (give the guy a couple choice roles and he could turn into the next Ulrich Mühe), and young director Christian Alvart demonstrates a striking eye for composition, especially in regard to his city/country dichotomy (country mostly darker earth tones, city filled with swaths of red and sickly greens amid high-contrast light). Unlike many of his ilk, Alvart might have the chops to someday stop stealing from David Fincher and actually become the next David Fincher... but first, he's going to have to do something about that thick streak of thundering pretentiousness that would embarrass even the guy who tried to make an AIDS allegory out of the third <i>Alien</i> movie. It's one thing to try and turn your garden-variety serial-killer movie into a treatise on the nature of evil; it's quite another to make it all a grand, galumphing Biblical allegory featuring a killer named Gabriel Engel and a climactic half-hour that references the story of Abraham and Isaac three times just to ensure that everyone in the audience gets a good whack in the temple by the symbolism shillelagh. I'll be keeping tabs on this Alvart guy, but he needs to calm the fuck down a bit in my opinion. <b>Grade: C</b><br /><br /><a name="clove"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1060277/"><i>Cloverfield</i></a> (2008): I'm glad to see <a href="http://www.nerve.com/CS/blogs/screengrab/archive/2008/01/28/separated-at-birth-quot-cloverfield-quot-and-quot-miracle-mile-quot.aspx">I'm not the only one</a> whose major reference point when viewing this first-person disaster flick was <i>Miracle Mile</i> rather than <i>The Blair Witch Project</i>. Beyond that, this movie is surprisingly good in my opinion. The first-person gimmick is well-utilized, revealing and withholding information (narrative and visual) as needed without feeling cheap; neither does it make a big deal out of it and drown itself in ouroborian self-referential douchery a la <a href="http://filmexperience.blogspot.com/2007/09/american-in-toronto-day-3-sixth-in.html"><i>Diary of the Dead</i></a>. The acting isn't Oscar-caliber, but it's as good as it needs to be to get across the character types. There's also a solid sense of place, which gets into what the film does best: By giving us believable group dynamics coupled with a sharply-detailed sense of panic and fear and parceling out information on a need-to-know basis, the filmmakers have (purposefully, I'd wager) crafted the potentially best metaphor-for-9/11 horror movie one could hope for. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="dark"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/"><i>The Dark Knight</i></a> (2008): Why should I write anything about this when so much is already available on the great big World Wide Internets. Especially when one of those things is <a href="http://www.comixology.com/articles/93/Windows-on-the-World">Kent Beeson's Watchman article</a>, which is stellar to the point of being definitive. I should add that the emphasis is indeed on the human need for belief, much as it was with Christopher Nolan's previous film <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2006/11/prestige-2006-pair-of-warring.html"><i>The Prestige</i></a>, which opens the window towards a more spiritual-minded inquiry. Someone else more intelligent than I should unpack that thread some day, as I really need to see both this and <i>The Prestige</i> more than once before I attempt that. Short version: Awesome stuff, exciting and thought-provoking in equal measure. Losing David Goyer's phone number was the smartest thing Nolan ever did. <b>Grade: A-</b><br /><br /><a name="quake"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080962/"><i>Earthquake 7.9</i></a> (1980): It's like Japan looked at <i>Earthquake</i> and said, "Like all American products, we can make that cheaper!" The problem is that films are not cars, and when you try to do Irwin Allen on a John Cassavetes budget, all you end up with is a shoddy, cruddy embarrassment. For those keeping tabs, there's about forty minutes of soap-opera plotting, then there's about ten to fifteen minutes of quake destruction, and then there's another forty minutes of melodrama and emoting and tears except now everyone's either wet or on fire. The quake effects are actually pretty cool and more savage than expected (a dude gets eaten by the earth!); everything else in the film stinks of sadness, shit and failure. Most dispiriting aspect: The screenplay was written by Kaneto Shindô, who in better times wrote <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2005/02/fighting-elegy-1966-i-dont-know-where.html"><i>Fighting Elegy</i></a> and both wrote and directed <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2005/11/onibaba-1964-creepy-dark-fable-set.html"><i>Onibaba</i></a>. How far the mighty have fallen, etc. <b>Grade: D</b><br /><br /><a name="five"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043539/"><i>Five</i></a> (1951): Sometimes obscure films are obscure for a reason. Case in point: Arch Oboler's high-concept post-apocalypse allegory, in which the whole of humanity is reduced to five individuals living together in a mountain cabin and trying to restart humanity. The terrific opening five minutes promise a dynamic, chilling what-if narrative that never shows up; what we get instead is a flat, logy film that talks its ideas into concentric circles and makes its characters serve the lockstep narrative rather than letting a story arise from believable conflicts. Ending unexpectedly nasty, at least until it jumps at the first glimmer of false hope. (Not that I'm endorsing blind nihilism, but the sudden turnaround after the third act's hell descent rings hollow.) Oboler later gave the world a notoriously awful pair of stinkers in <i>Bwana Devil</i> and <i>The Twonky</i>, and somehow I'm not surprised. <b>Grade: C</b><br /><br /><a name="heran"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043625/"><i>He Ran All the Way</i></a> (1951): Sweaty, paranoid film noir, a potential precursor to <i>The Desperate Hours</i>, about a high-strung young man who commits a payroll robbery, watches it all go bad and holes up in the apartment of a young woman he meets at a public pool. John Garfield, in the lead, strikes a rather impressive balance between charming and frightening -- his mercurial squirminess captures the idea of a nice guy trying to act the big shot, his toughness a facade for loneliness and panic. Shelley Winters is also good. What with the film being crafted by several persons caught in the blacklist fervor, it's easy to read metaphorical intentions into the film's depiction of a man helplessly struggling against a situation until it seems all the world is united against him; even without that, though, it's solid stuff. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="horse"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051739/"><i>The Horse's Mouth</i></a> (1958): Alec Guinness is stellar in this British eccentric-artist flick, turning in a far better performance than the film really deserves. Not that there isn't the elements of a great film here -- oftentimes, it works quite memorably as a ruminative drama about creativity and self-destruction, a Portrait-of-the-Artist-as-Bastard work which nevertheless keeps a lighter touch that helps it from succumbing to the kind of wearying misanthropy that mars, say, <i>Love Is the Devil</i>. It's then a damn shame that director Ronald Neame confuses lightness and silliness, allowing the good parts of the film to be interrupted by a raft of far-too-broad comedy. Gets better as it goes, and thank God -- the first twenty minutes or so are enough to induce headaches. <b>Grade: B-</b><br /><br /><a name="line"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051866/"><i>The Lineup</i></a> (1958): Tight, pulpy crime drama with an ace in its sleeve. Don Siegel starts the film as the kind of police procedural one would expect from a film based off a TV show that was created in the wake of "Dragnet," but the focus shifts for good once hired thugs Dancer and Julian get off a plane from Florida. The odd-couple contrast between the two (Dancer is a violent trigger man; Julian is a suave brains-type who likes to record people's dying words in a little notebook) seems straight from stock, but Eli Wallach and Robert Keith sell it uncommonly well. Wallach is the real MVP as the unhinged Dancer, and the film tends to follow his lead -- he starts as composed as his partner in crime, but as things get grittier his psychotic side becomes more prevalent, and as he gets more violent, so <i>The Lineup</i> gets tougher and more lurid. Siegel's talent for hard-hitting, punchy action is in full flower even at this early stage in his career, and like his adaptation of <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2006/04/its-angie-dickinson-day-for-todays.html"><i>The Killers</i></a>, he gets a lot of mileage out of the simple shock of carrying the violence a step further than expected. Were that all television adaptations this neat. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="roll"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076637/"><i>Rolling Thunder</i></a> (1977): This movie would be terrific if it didn't want to be <i>Death Wish</i>. Like Bob Clark's <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2003/10/deathdream-1972-odd-interesting-social.html"><i>Deathdream</i></a>, this deals with the discussion about Vietnam-era post-traumatic stress disorder by framing it inside a genre film; unlike Clark's film, director John Flynn isn't much interested in using it beyond plot reasons. One wonders what the original screenplay by then-neophyte Paul Schrader looked like -- I imagine it would have borne closer resemblance to the excellent opening half hour, in which William Devane struggles to adapt to a home life he no longer fits into after returning from seven years in a POW camp. This section of the film is so compelling, with Devane turning in a lovely, quiet performance, that it's a major disappointment that the plot decides it would rather be about a merciless vigilante. What was a fine character study subsequently devolves into a mean, dumb and violent road-trip/revenge movie, with the added bonus of a completely useless shaggy-dog subplot involving policeman Lawrason Driscoll. To watch Devane and Tommy Lee Jones, fantastic as a fellow soldier for whom awkward, haunted silence has since become a way of life, is to pine for the movie that could have been. <b>Grade: C+</b><br /><br /><a name="toys"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0153225/"><i>Toys Are Not for Children</i></a> (1972): In what dank, slimy fucking hole did Something Weird find this? And is tehre anything else in there? Stanley H. Brassloff's glorious grindhouse fable is several degrees more ambitiously crafted than the average sleazoid platter-burner. It's also several degrees more ill. The narrative is textbook Electra-complex stuff -- young Jamie Godard (Marcia Forbes, creepily convincing) gets stuck in arrested development after her parents split, eventually developing an unhealthy attachment to the dolls and stuffed animals her absentee father would send her as gifts. This bodes not well for Charlie (Harlan Cary Poe), the man she marries at film's outset, since our Jamie at this point knows nothing of the sex act; it bodes even worse for him (and everyone else) after she slides into a life of prostitution via Pearl (Evelyn Kingsley), a matriarchal friend and professional whore who might know where to find Jamie's daddy. The rest of the film should really be experienced as cold as possible; suffice to say, everyone's ugly, venal and out for their own gain, none more so than Jamie, who despite her naivete and lack of guile has a plan in mind the whole time. The depths this plumbs are really rather icky, yet there's a fascination about it all, not only from a how-low curiosity stance but from the fact that there's real technical and narrative accomplishment here. Especially surprising is Brasshoff's occasional use of achronology, skipping across time to show how events and mindsets connect to form Jamie's warped world (most effective instance: careful editing used to suggest both young Jamie and current Jamie watching a pivotal argument between Mom and Dad). We're given, in essence, a life refracted right before it shatters for good. Queasy, voyeuristic and wrong on every possible level, but unlike most skinflick fodder its trangressions pack a real gutter kick. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="frag"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0801526/"><i>The Tracey Fragments</i></a> (2008): Bruce McDonald's quasi-experimental teenpocalypse is pretty fabulous from a technical standpoint, with the screen fragmentation providing both a sharp approximation of the average flighty teenage mindset and a better commentary on modern information overload than <i>Southland Tales</i>. I could watch this on mute all day if I had to. But the story... oh dear, the story. I'm not annoyed that this tale of a wayward girl named Tracey (the ubiquitous Ellen Page) indulges in cliches aplenty; no, the film truly falters when it strikes out for unexplored territory. With restless, compelling image splintering like we get here and imaginative detours like Tracey's tabloid reverie, I'd forgive this being just a film about the kind of volcanic teenage angst we get in films like <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2003/09/thirteen-2003-people-are-actually.html"><i>thirteen</i></a>. But when the narrative hinges on a young boy being hypnotized into believing he's a dog, or when the retarded rising action of the film climaxes with a conveniently-placed aluminum can lid, my generosity dries up pretty fucking quickly. Still worth watching in the literal sense anyway, and there's also Ms. Page, proving that her sardonicism remains appealing even stripped of wit and tilted towards toxic. <b>Grade: B-</b>Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-61095706225689955442008-08-03T15:22:00.003-04:002008-08-18T19:25:22.571-04:00Week of July 7th:<br /><br /><a name="champ"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120618/"><i>Breakfast of Champions</i></a> (1999): Kurt Vonnegut's great, grumpy midlife-crisis novel is about as close to unadaptable into cinema as a novel can get because it's propelled almost entirely by Vonnegut's omniscent narration. Any director brave enough to attempt such an endeavor would need to recognize that the plot of the work is secondary to the tone (the book continues for some fifty to sixty pages after the climax of its ostensible plot); as such, capturing a mood and a point of view would be more important than moving the characters from Point A to Point B. Alan Rudolph's unfairly reviled run at the novel, then, can despite its faults (of which there are many) be seen as a interesting interpretation. The tone vacillates from mugging chaos to quiet despair, and while the more outsized portions of the film don't really work, the contemplative and downcast scenes work about as perfectly as they could be hoped to work. Acting is erratic as well (Omar Epps turns in a puzzling man-child performance that might be the worst thing anyone's done in front of a camera in the last ten years), but Rudolph gets a marvel of a performance out of Bruce Willis. As faltering car salesman Dwayne Hoover, Willis tilts his natural tendencies towards wiseassery and smirkiness just enough so that it feels desperate, the behavior of a man who's losing the battle to paper over the cracks in his carefully-controlled facade. Willis and Albert Finney, as misanthropic sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, represent the true soul of the narrative, and everything surrounding them is mere noise; their ultimate meeting propels both men towards epiphanies that preserve the ideas of Vonnegut's narrative while remaining a bit more hopeful. (If "Make me young" in the novel is a cry of helplessness in the face of the feeling that your life has been wasted, the film frames it as a serene striving towards a paradise that exists beyond the edges of a human's fragile mental stability.) Rudolph's film is imperfect, but to say he doesn't at root get at and communicate what the story's about is to be obtuse. <b>Grade: B-</b><br /><br /><a name="edge"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0880502/"><i>The Edge of Heaven</i></a> (2008): Hermetic and didactic in equal measure, Fatih Akin's contribution to the irksomely popular everyone's-connected genre brings nothing to the party that wasn't already covered as badly as possible by <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2007/02/babel-2006-i-can-pinpoint-exact-moment.html"><i>Babel</i></a> and <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2006/02/crash-2005-wow.html"><i>Crash</i></a> except a different set of languages. Clumsy screenwriting rife with enough contrivance and coincidence to gag a goat sink this one with a quickness. Just the "Temple of Love" scene in <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2006/03/head-on-2005-solidly-crafted-sorta.html"><i>Head-On</i></a> is superior to the entirety of this. <b>Grade: C-</b><br /><br /><a name="games"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808279/"><i>Funny Games</i></a> (2008): Even more so than Gus Van Sant's <i>Psycho</i>, Michael Haneke's English-language Xerox of his notorious audience-baiting anti-thriller proves that shooting the exact same movie twice won't result in the exact same movie twice. It could be a consequence of the act of meticulous, fussy recreation or it could be a mere quirk of translation, but what felt mean and unexpected in Austria comes off as studied in the United States. Furthermore, Michael Pitt is a poor substitute for Arno Frisch -- his particular brand of smarm comes off as foppish, not menacing, with his condescension borne out of haughtiness instead of cruelty. That said, the material is still hideously effective, and if Pitt falls asleep on the job, the remainder of the cast more than ably picks up his slack. Especially Brady Corbet. An intellectual curiosity, to be sure, but it's still <i>Funny Games</i>. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="han"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448157/"><i>Hancock</i></a> (2008): This movie would probably be a lot more interesting if it knew what exactly it wanted to do. Some of the comedy works (when it's not being blunted by the editing) and some of the ruminatory responsibility-of-heroism drama works (when it's not being subsumed in treacle), but the tones manage to mesh exactly once ("Oh, no you didn't!"); most of the time, it's like watching two films that keep interrupting each other. Acting is uneven as well: Will Smith once again subverts his image to great effect, but Jason Bateman's coasting and Charlize Theron turns in the single worst performance of her career. Then there's Peter Berg's horrid direction. Everyone's on Christopher Nolan's stick for his visually confused action scenes, but he looks like Don fucking Siegel when compared to the butchery Berg's whipped up for this film. His whip-blur action direction looks like he's trying to get his Greengrass on, but all it tells me is that he couldn't direct a bullet out of a gun. Despite all the negativity, I think this film does have moments (the bank robbery centerpiece is pretty great). But it could have been way better. <b>Grade: C+</b><br /><br /><a name="hb2"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0411477/"><i>Hellboy II: The Golden Army</i></a> (2008): Superior in pretty much every way to the first <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2004/04/hellboy-2004-big-fat-disappointment.html"><i>Hellboy</i></a> for one reason -- Guillermo Del Toro has stopped pretending he cares about the human characters in this universe. Everything that works about this film (the cleaner, less splayed-about plotting; the mind-melting visuals; the villain who is actually given enough screen time to be a presence) stems from Del Toro concentrating almost solely on the freakier aspects of the world with which he's playing. Still not perfect -- Abe's lovelorn subplot seems ill-advised, for one -- but at least this second installment delivers on the rip-snorting entertainment/eye-candy gluttony promised by its offbeat premise. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="import"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044744/"><i>The Importance of Being Earnest</i></a> (1952): Michael Redgrave was the shit. Oscar Wilde was the shit. Anthony Asquith was, if not the shit, a perfectly solid British director who could be counted on to class up the projects he took. Thus, this movie is mostly the shit: a well-timed, expertly acted and sharply funny filmic adaptation of a theatrical perennial. Rupert Everett and everyone else involved with that asinine redux that came out a few years back should be bloody well ashamed. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="boat"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037017/"><i>Lifeboat</i></a> (1944): Now this is how you do propaganda, folks. Taut, skillfully crafted close-quarters thriller never lets its ideological concerns get in the way of Alfred Hitchcock's intent to provide grand, exciting entertainment. Hitchcock's direction is typically masterful, making the most of the setting's claustrophobia and using physical crowding as a metaphor for mental/ideological friction; John Steinbeck's screenplay, meanwhile, works with subtlety in unexpected ways (even the German villain is not shown in mere black-and-white terms) while parceling out its plant-and-payoffs in expert fashion. Surprisingly gritty and violent for the era, as well -- the impromptu amputation must have been a real jolt in the '40s. Terrific stuff, really; I think I'm gonna go buy some war bonds now... <b>Grade: A-</b><br /><br /><a name="shine"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0893382/"><i>Shine a Light</i></a> (2008): Part concert documentary, part meditation on aging. Martin Scorsese's filmed record of a two-night stand by the Rolling Stones is foremost just that -- recorded concert footage. As such, it's a pretty good entry in the genre; the Stones aren't in their heyday anymore, but they can still blow the hat off the house when they get rolling ("Sympathy for the Devil," "Brown Sugar," an awesome version of "Champagne and Reefer" with Buddy Guy) and I wish I had could muster up the kind of energy that Mick Jagger, a man nearly forty years my senior, can apparently summon at will. But there's no getting around the fact that he is old enough to collect Social Security, and there's also no denying that the first couple of songs ("Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Shattered") find the band struggling to find their groove. Scorsese deals with this gap between what the band was and what they are now by splicing in interview footage from various points in their history, so that their progress from rock-n-roll bad boys to icons/traveling nostalgia act is always in the back of the mind. Considering how often the Stones' music pops up in Scorsese's films, there's a certain level where one could infer that Scorsese is thinking not just of their march away from youth but his own as well. <i>Shine a Light</i> is a blast, yet there's something slightly melancholic about it. Not for Jack White, though -- he looks like the happiest boy in the universe when he shows up for his onstage guest shot. <b>Grade: B+</b>Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-35603786183641362712008-07-25T22:08:00.002-04:002008-08-18T19:37:51.052-04:00Week of June 30th:<br /><br /><a name="toy"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067871/"><i>The Toy Box</i></a> (1971): A whacked-out mindbender of a sexploitation flick. This bizarre beaut involves a bunch of hedonists at a house where they put on sex shows for the notorious Uncle as part of a give-and-take game. The shows provide the softcore skin expected of the genre, but they also provide much of the entertaining derangement that makes director Ronald Victor Garcia's loopy opus stand apart from its ostensible bretheren. Whether the scenario involves a pastoral interlude gone horribly wrong (via fright mask and pitchfork), a butcher getting up close and personal with his human charnal or Uschi Digard being molested by a sentient bedsheet, the imaginative sex in this is far removed from your average '70s pasty-assed grind-n-moan. There's also some surprisingly competent acting (at times marred by the worst dub job ever -- in particular, the opening twenty minutes smell like Doris Wishman), a sci-fi/horror twist that anticipates Peter Jackson's <i>Bad Taste</i> and some quotably abysmal bedroom chatter. ("I feel like there's a tree trunk between my legs!") Halfway between hallucinatory and hilarious, terrific and terrible, <i>The Toy Box</i> is ultimately the kind of film that makes such distinctions meaningless. <b>Grade: B-</b><br /><br /><a name="want"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493464/"><i>Wanted</i></a> (2008): I grow ever more weary of video-game aesthetics being applied to action films. The nadir of this was the loathsome-on-purpose <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2006/09/crank-2006-id-like-to-think-that-this.html"><i>Crank</i></a>; while this film, apparently based off some terrible graphic novel, doesn't quite plumb that film's depths, its marriage of hyperactive flash and fire to art-film solemnity isn't effective in the slightest. I don't necessarily mind a lack of aspiration towards anything other than making fratboys yell, "DUDE! AWESOME!" but the success of such a venture is contingent on its Cool Moments coming off as cool and not desperate. There are two Cool Moments I liked here: the literal over-the-top culmination of the drive-by assassination and Angelina Jolie, at the story's climax, demonstrating just how well she can curve a bullet. The latter, with its perfect cut and slow-motion body falling out of focus in the background, is as close as director Timur Bekmambetov gets to gutter poetry; the rest of the time, he's too busy trying to demonstrate how many times he's seen <i>The Matrix</i> to be bothered with making his images mean something. Jolie continues to have the worst taste in scripts this side of Jeanne Tripplehorn. <b>Grade: D+</b><br /><br /><a name="west"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055614/"><i>West Side Story</i></a> (1961): I don't have much to say about this one other than holy crap is it ever great. The music is terrific and gets complemented by some unusual, muscular choreography that makes grace look difficult and brutality look easy. Leads are a bit soft, but the rest of the ensemble reels in the slack nicely. Ridiculously entertaining, what with the singing and the fighting and the hostility and the love and the dancing, always dancing. Good job of adapting the eternally flexible <u>Romeo and Juliet</u>, too. <b>Grade: A-</b>Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-84327690803628498952008-07-13T17:55:00.001-04:002008-08-18T19:41:46.751-04:00Week of June 23rd:<br /><br /><a name="rides"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051437/"><i>Buchanan Rides Alone</i></a> (1958): At first, I thought this would be leading into another thorny moral allegory on the level of <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2004/10/okay-so-im-not-back-at-full-strength.html"><i>Decision at Sundown</i></a>, maybe something about the nature of mob justice. Certainly, Randolph Scott's unflappable affability seemed to be hiding something more sinister. So I can say I was blindsided when the film started taking cues from that sneaky bemusement and twisted itself into a sharp comedy of venality, as Scott attempts to keep a young Mexican from getting his neck stretched while letting a greedy clan of brothers and cousins lay each other out. The darker aspects of human nature so favored by the Boetticher/Scott Westerns gets a thorough siring-out while the tone gets lightened considerably; what emerges is a delectable black amusement with Scott as the steel-eyed jester in the center of the hurricane. The rare Western that could conceivably be called droll. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="godd"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0195256/"><i>The Goddess</i></a> (1934): Chinese silent feature moves through prostitute-based melodramatics that must have been creaky even back in 1934, but does so with a sense of genuine heartbreak and an unexpected level of bluntness that keep the film watchable. Ruan Lingyu does well by the title role; director Wu Yonggang mostly keeps the film moving but every now and then throws in a nice directorial flourish. More valuable for its peek into social mores of the time than as entertainment, but not bad really. <b>Grade: B-</b><br /><br /><a name="hott"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804492/"><i>The Hottie and the Nottie</i></a> (2008): While watching this reviled romcom, I had something of a revelation: Paris Hilton isn't bereft of talent. I'm not going to say that she's ready for Merchant-Ivory or anything, but she can do light fizzy entertainments -- she exhibits a fine sense of self-possession and demonstrates that she can sell a decent line of dialogue. (I'll admit to chuckling at a sweetness-and-light warning she hollers at a stalker.) She wouldn't even appear atop a list entitled Worst Young Blond Blue-Eyed Actresses Who Starred in the Remake of <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2005/12/house-of-wax-2005-if-only-whole-film.html"><i>House of Wax</i></a>, and in an alternate world (i.e. one where she wasn't Paris Bloody Hilton), she could easily slide into a career as a third-tier ingenue a la Emmanuelle Chriqui. Her problem, then, isn't one of acting but of interacting; Ms. Hilton generally seems to be emoting in a vacuum, playing to her costars instead of with them. This isn't something that really works for <i>The Hottie and the Nottie</i> -- the film is of course not a monologue piece, and the air of unattainability she projects at all times rubs against her character's accessible-goddess characterization -- but I fail to see what differentiates her turn as "hottie" Cristabel from, say, the average Parker Posey performance. The problem, at root, is that her baggage as America's foremost spoiled rich twat keeps people from looking at her without daggers, and as it goes for her performance so it goes for the film that contains it: To see so much hatred and venom slung at a harmless, silly '80s throwback seems like wasted energy. It's not a good film, but neither is it really distinct from any number of recent teen-oriented films currently rotting in the depths of HBO's library, and it's certainly not The End of Cinema. The gross-out factor is needlessly higher than the average genre entry, owing to the times in which it's made, and the filmmaking craft is... well, I'll say sloppy. But it's still pretty generic, worthy of a shrug and not much else. Calm the fuck down world. <b>Grade: C</b><br /><br /><a name="lake"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071737/"><i>Lancelot of the Lake</i></a> (1974): Robert Bresson takes on the Arthurian myth and comes up with the anti-<i>Camelot</i>, a film without Romantic heromaking or gallantry. Bresson picks up at the end of the quest for the Holy Grail when everything in the legend is crumbling to nothing, metaphorically expressing the increasing pessimism about modern life exhibited in the rest of his latter-day work. He also signifies an atrophied spiritual presence by concentrating on the bodily realities of everyday existence; blood runs freely, armor clanks, swords clang and people spend their time politicking, but there's no evidence of a guiding hand. There's some hinting that Lancelot may be a Jesus figure, but his resurrection and return offers no spiritual salvation, merely a dirty muddy end. An exhausted film of physical brutality and cosmic silence; some dry stretches, tough to take, but overall worthwhile. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="mon"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050706/"><i>Mon Oncle</i></a> (1958): Good-natured and wistful, Jacques Tati's hilarious comedy captures a moment in time where everything is irrevocably changing. Monsieur Hulot, Tati's befuddled Everyman, and Hulot's peripatetic young nephew stand on one side of a generational divide, with his pipe and overcoat and insistence on taking the stairs; on the other side is his sister and her husband, forever fascinated with the newest and shiniest electronic things. (Never mind that they get trapped in their garage from time to time.) Appropriately enough, the big, broad comedic setpieces see Tati hearkening back towards another old-fashioned format (silent slapstick) to take the piss out of modernity, yet the rhythms are gentle instead of frenetic, owing a lot to Tati's incredible formal dexterity and his willingness to sit and watch a situation unfold rather than prod it into unfolding. One only has to watch the delirious controlled chaos of the punctured fountain gag or the dazzling use of set construction and light in the bit where Hulot makes a nighttime excursion to fix a bit of wounded plant life to feel the puckish joy that beams from the film; one imagines Tati directing this with a lopsided grin on his face. Yet there's still a melancholy at its heart, an elegy for things lost and forgotten in the rampage towards modernity. There's a lot of laughs, yet the essential sadness in the message comes through: We will spend the rest of our lives running into poles and calling it convenience. <b>Grade: A-</b><br /><br /><a name="story"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059715/"><i>Story of a Prostitute</i></a> (1965): Relatively straightforward for a Seijun Suzuki joint, which is to say it's still three measures more delirious than the average war flick. Suzuki keeps his more outré impulses in check for this tale of a woman who escapes a bad romantic situation by volunteering to be a whore to a company of soldiers during WWII, but he still lets his cynicism run wild and keeps the pace at a rolling boil. Anti-war message comes through pretty vituperatively even as the battle scenes are exquisitely crafted; that the ending comes off as both tragic and ironically triumphant is pretty keen. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="walle"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0910970/"><i>WALL·E</i></a> (2008): First off: Holy shit, is this ever gorgeous-looking. Even at its ugliest (i.e. the opening act on a garbage-choked Earth), there's a visual poetry in this that simply sings. By the time we get to something like the mid-space ballet for robot and fire extinguisher, enrapturement is nigh well impossible to avoid. The beauty coexists with the ugly, which is proper given the way the plot eventually develops. Even though this is ostensibly a kid's film from Pixar, the best kidfilm company in the business, there's an element of caustic social satire that mushrooms when WALL·E arrives at the Axiom and finds a human population fattened and made inactive by dozens of robots designed to cater to every function and need one could have. Cute though the film is, there's still something distressing about a future where humanity is depicted as inessential to its own survival, and it's not coincidental that the rising action and climax of the film sees one man casting aside the easy way and finally learning a measure of self-reliance. In that vein, the ending, which at first glance seems inappropriately rosy, speaks to the capability and ingenuity of man when working in tandem with machines as opposed to letting the machines do all the work. (This is summed up in a lovely credit coda showing the evolution of the new world through the evolution of art from primitive days to modernity.) Final note: The <i>2001</i> influence is obvious, but I see a lot of Tati in here too. <b>Grade: A-</b>Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-5820490261446417122008-07-04T12:53:00.002-04:002008-08-18T19:49:08.427-04:00Week of June 16th:<br /><br /><a name="gate"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058409/"><i>Gate of Flesh</i></a> (1964): Garish post-WWII madness from crazed auteur Seijun Suzuki. The reigning idea is that of the society of whores standing in for late-'40s Japan as an ugly expression of the free market, with everything and everyone for sale; yet, however predatory, it still functions as a society with carefully coded rules until true anarchic lawlessness shows up in the form of Jo Shishido. Film gets the full force of Suzuki's visual imagination, yet unlike a lot of the '60s-era color films I've seen of his, it never loses sight of the story. The sweaty ambiance and seedy fluorescence on display here hearken forward to the golden age of Japanese artsploitation -- films like <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2007/10/sex-and-fury-1973-lack-of-focus-that.html"><i>Sex and Fury</i></a> and <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2005/01/female-convict-scorpion-jailhouse-41.html"><i>Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41</i></a> clearly owe Suzuki a debt of gratitude. Pair with <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2005/05/marriage-of-maria-braun-1979-gripping.html"><i>The Marriage of Maria Braun</i></a> for a joyfully decadent evening. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="girl"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1050160/"><i>The Machine Girl</i></a> (2008): Manufactured by the Asian-extreme fanboy crowd for the Asian-extreme fanboy crowd, which isn't as surefire an idea as you might think. I would have thought that a film with geysers of blood, ninjas, chainsaws, a killer brassiere and a psychotic Japanese schoolgirl with a Gatling gun for an arm as its heroine could at the very least exude a sense of fun. Instead, this would-be cult readymade exhibits all the wit and charm of a steel-gray Toledo office building. I envision the filmmakers as grim-faced types, ruefully checking off items on a list entitled "Things That Tokyo Shock DVD Buyers Seem to Like" as they stand ankle-deep in rubber limbs and crimson Karo syrup. Takashi Miike or the much-maligned Lloyd Kaufman might have made something of this, since they tend to work in thematic resonance and emotion with their cult-approved frameworks; the people responsible for this, on the other hand, don't appear to have any artistic purpose beyond filling a mythical audience niche that even they don't believe in. <b>Grade: C-</b><br /><br /><a name="mamma"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056215/"><i>Mamma Roma</i></a> (1962): Heavy metaphor abound in this early feature from Pier Paolo Pasolini, which finds him splitting the difference between the neorealism that got him noticed and the allegorical narratives that he would explore further to great effect later in his career. Anna Magnani IS Mother Rome, both as a character and as a stand-in for the city, trying desperately to care for her offspring and adapt to a mercantile society after years and years of getting fucked (by johns, by Fascists, it's all the same). Unfortunately, while Anna's volcanic performance is a striking asset, Pasolini isn't so lucky with the younger members of his cast, most of whom slouch and mumble to little use. Furthermore, the craft of the film itself is ragged; while such looseness feels appropriate for, say, <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2006/06/canterbury-tales-1972-pier-paolo.html"><i>The Canterbury Tales</i></a>, here it just feels sloppy. Uneven, full of great moments (Magnani and son quasi-incestuously dancing to a jazz record; Magnani and son ripping around on a motorcycle) without ever really cohering, yet possessed with enough vitality and thought to mark it as a promising move from a man who would later make better films than this. Also: Christ symbolism! <b>Grade: B-</b><br /><br /><a name="orphan"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0464141/"><i>The Orphanage</i></a> (2007): Lovely, lyrical opening shot, which promises something along the lines of Lucille Hadzihalilovic's gorgeous poison pellet <i>Innocence</i>. Shame about the rest of the film then. J.A. Bayona is a talented man with a solid visual sense and a way with mood. But if there's a point to this film beyond his need to show everyone just how much J-horror he's been watching lately, I must have missed it. Guess being a friend of Guillermo Del Toro helps get your half-assed horror project some respect from people who wouldn't give <i>Infection</i> or <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2005/05/tale-of-two-sisters-2004-sometimes.html"><i>A Tale of Two Sisters</i></a> the time of day. <b>Grade: C</b><br /><br /><a name="reg"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443844/"><i>Regular Lovers</i></a> (2007): Clearly a response film to <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2004/09/dreamers-2004-in-my-dreams-i-remember.html"><i>The Dreamers</i></a>, not only in the dig at that film's director but in intent. The Bertolucci film is a film about idealism, and if Michael Pitt eventually departs from Eva Green and Louis Garrel at film's end, it still ends on a tide of revolutionary fervor. Phillipe Garrel's film reads more like idealism curdled; it starts with the '68 riots and follows past that to a sense of aimlessness, the confusion that comes once you've revolted. When you've positioned yourself in opposition, where do you go from there? In particular, Garrel the director (as opposed to Louis, Phillipe's son, who stars here as the flipside to his character in <i>The Dreamers</i>) draws a clear contrast between the one or two genuine revolutionaries in the loose artistic collective that provides the film's central focus and the pretenders who bitch, smoke hash and generally use the revolt as a pretext to do nothing. When one disillusioned fellow splits, he leaves a note calling out the others on their inability to affect change; "They're losing the revolution indoors" is the key line in this note, and it catches the spirit of the film quite well. Rich black-and-white cinematography, convincing performances, stellar sense of time and atmosphere; a long sit but worth the numb cheeks. <b>Grade: B</b>Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-59539591357846383342008-06-20T00:24:00.003-04:002008-08-18T19:54:00.197-04:00Finnegan! Begin again!<br /><br />So it seems we've come full circle here. After much deliberation (including thoughts of shutting down altogether), I've decided to go back to the digest format that worked so well for the first couple years of this site's existence. Short & sweet's what we're aiming for. Let's see how long this lasts.<br /><br /><a name="belly"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069343/"><i>The Black Belly of the Tarantula</i></a> (1971): Stunning opening sequence aside, this is pro forma <i>giallo</i> all the way. Even the stray moments of style seem forced or borne of necessity (example: the scene where Barbara Bach is killed is blocked inventively not because the director was inspired but because Bach apparently didn't want to do a nude scene). The method of murder is notably vicious: the killer paralyzes his victims with a poison-coated acupuncture needle to the neck, so that they will be conscious while he guts them. So there's that, but there's also a stretch of roughly forty-five very dull minutes in the middle (half the fucking film, in other words) where the filmmakers seem to forget that there's a murderer in the story. Giancarlo Giannini brings a world-weariness and a professionalism to his role that it doesn't really deserve, but I'm grateful all the same. Last note of interest: I saw this a day after seeing <i>Divorce Italian Style</i>, so it was a bit unexpected (pleasurably so) to catch that film's obscure object of desire Stefania Sandrelli here, all grown up and starring in a sex scene. <b>Grade: C</b><br /><br /><a name="cruel"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054286/"><i>Cruel Story of Youth</i></a> (1960): Title can be read as both a cruel story about youthful persons and a story of the cruelty of youthful persons; either interpretation fits Nagisa Oshima's breakthrough film. Certain aspects reads very specifically to the post-war Japan in which it's set, yet the youthquake malaise it outlines is ultimately universal: parents and authority figures are ineffectual, teenagers are short-sighted vicious fuckers and everything's basically going to Hell. What saves it from being as jejune as all that is twofold: its acknowledgement of the exhilaration of youth as well as the angst and its use of the older sister & country doctor as a mirror of the teenaged protagonists. The former relieves the oppressive squalor, while the latter adds a touch of rueful melancholy in the form of defeated idealism/political activism. Oshima counters his ugly material with sharp, oft-lovely filmmaking, and his divided sympathies for his protagonists result in things like the most defiant apple-eating scene ever put on celluloid. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="fat"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058090/"><i>The Fat Black Pussycat</i></a> (1963): Holy christ is this film ever terrible. It started as a low-grade police thriller, but somewhere down the line somebody (the director? the distributor?) filmed a whole bunch of new material and cut it into the film, creating some sort of slasher/beatniksploitation hybrid. The thing is, the new footage appears to have been beamed in from some other planet. Thus, what could have been merely an acceptable time-waster was transformed into a painful, incompetent and damn near unendurable mishmash. One funny moment at a poetry reading and a hilariously brutal machine-gunning during the film's false climax provide slight entertainment, but mostly this is agony. Fucking A, do I ever hate beatnik movies. <b>Grade: D</b><br /><br /><a name="happ"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0949731/"><i>The Happening</i></a> (2008): Not content with filming bedtime stories invented on the fly for his kids, M. Night Shyamalan has now filmed an idea that he had this one time. It's like he figured his work was done once he came up with the inciting incident. I can understand that it's gotta be tough for this guy trying to wriggle free of his reputation as Twistmaster Extraordinaire, but now he's gone from telling complex and obfuscatory stories to not telling one at all. I should be angry with this film and with Shyamalan -- this film is really awful, chock full of forced dramatics and bad acting yet minus any of the tension, dread or visual brio that the writer/director has previously been able to summon at will in even his worst works. Rarely have I witnessed such little return on my ten-dollar investment. But I can't get angry at it. I can't feel anything about <i>The Happening</i>, because directing some manner of emotion towards it would exert more effort on my part than went into making the damn thing. <b>Grade: C</b><br /><br /><a name="hulk2"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0800080/"><i>The Incredible Hulk</i></a> (2008): Louis Leterrier was the right man for the job here. I say this because, in a way, he'd already made this movie. Maybe you saw it. It's called <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2005/05/unleashed-2005-i-suppose-i-have-to.html"><i>Unleashed</i></a>, and it came out to little fanfare a couple of years ago. I didn't like it enough to recommend, but I thought there was something to it -- Leterrier's desire to mate morose melodrama with rock-em-sock-em pyrotechnics was an unusual approach, and under the right circumstances it could bear fruit. <i>The Incredible Hulk</i> bears that assessment out. Helped along by a typically unassuming Edward Norton performance, Leterrier and screenwriter Zak Penn have fashioned a film that walks a careful wire between emotion and motion, heart and muscle. It's a self-actualization tale masquerading as a comic-book feature, with Norton struggling to control/deny his inner demons (metaphorically represented by a physical symptom -- a racing pulse) before they destroy all he holds dear. It's that denial, though, that causes the bulk of Norton's problems, and only when he embraces his demons as an intrinsic part of himself can he emerge triumphant. (The last shot, with Norton finally making peace with himself and his solitude, is intensely satisfying in this regard.) What I'm trying to say, basically, is that this film is not dumb, merely direct. Also, the third act, starting with Tim Blake Nelson's entrance and climaxing in the slugfest between Norton's Hulk and the thing that, at one point in the film, is Tim Roth is glorious, goofy and entertaining as fuck. Liv Tyler, though, will hopefully be ditched for the sequel a la Katie Holmes. <b>Grade: B</b><br /><br /><a name="sop"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0896866/"><i>Standard Operating Procedure</i></a> (2008): Leave it to Errol Morris to make an Iraq doc that moves beyond mere recap. While there's a fair share of this-is-how-it-went-down in relation to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Morris is more interested in <i>why</i> things happened as they did -- not just the decisions and actions but the mindset. He has his subjects review every single detail, every thought they had, every moment of rashness, every photo they took, until what emerges is a portrait of exactly how things generally considered beyond the pale become standard operating procedure under extraordinary circumstances. There's also some fascinating material about the meaning, intention and second life of photography, the most painful example of which is the gulf between Sabrina Harman's stated goal in taking her photos (to alert the world to the ugly stuff being done in the name of freedom) and her grinning visage as captured in these photos. (The summation is: A photo can capture a moment in time, but it can't explain it or give it context.) Shame about the Danny Elfman score, which is all wrong for this. <b>Grade: B+</b><br /><br /><a name="12"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050083/"><i>12 Angry Men</i></a> (1957): Razor-sharp dialogue, keen performances carry the day in this classic, which pretty much set the gold standard for the courtroom thriller. Sidney Lumet overcomes the material's inherent staginess through stellar use of closeups and cross-cutting, creating an undeniable cinematic thrum for a script that takes place entirely within one room. To examine it is to realize that it's a bit contrived; to watch it is to not give a shit. There's not a weak link in the cast, but Henry Fonda is the clear MVP, showcasing a spine of steel and a forcefulness that generally gets belied by his folksy image. <b>Grade: A-</b><br /><br /><a name="under"></a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055571/"><i>Underworld U.S.A.</i></a> (1961): Terrific opening half hour -- in painting the character of Tolly Devlin (Cliff Robertson, memorably brusque), the night that changes his life and his subsequent driving lust for vengeance, Samuel Fuller uses all his filmmaking skills as a blunt object. Hatchet-force editing compresses the timeline accordion-style, and Fuller expects you to be smart enough to keep track with the jumps in time; additionally, his camera setups, restless and tight, give the revenge narrative a propulsive energy. Then Fuller unaccountably herds this lean framework into a aimless, bloated overview of crime-syndicate politics and loses much of what was working. Still has a lot of striking moments, what with Fuller's tough-guy aesthetics -- particularly memorable is the staging of a suicide, cut so hard that it drifts into the realm of the avant-garde -- but this could have been so much more interesting. Dolores Dorn's performance is indefensibly bizarre even by the wide-eyed standards set by other films by this director. <b>Grade: B-</b>Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-79123844679580872452008-05-06T15:20:00.000-04:002008-05-06T15:21:08.679-04:00So obviously, the bullet points ain't helping. <br /><br />I really only need two things to keep this site going: time and inspiration. Both, unfortunately, have been running in short supply lately. Thus, I'm tabling the OCE. We're on indefinite hiatus here until further notice. Until the next...Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-62531534822229705262008-04-01T10:05:00.001-04:002008-04-01T10:12:39.744-04:00<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118178/"><i>Wish Upon a Star</i></a> (1996)<br /><br />(Viewed for <a href="http://www.lucidscreening.com/2008/04/the_2nd_annual_white_elephant_2.html">The 2nd Annual White Elephant Blogathon</a>.)<br /><br />* PT: Alexia & Hayley Wheaton. Wadpaw: To get back to their own lives.<br /><br />* Film involves two sisters, shallow & pretty popular girl Alexia (Katherine Heigl) and introverted science geek Hayley (Danielle Harris), who each learn what the other has to deal with when a spur-of-the-moment wish on a falling star by Hayley results in the two switching bodies. Perfectly innocuous, perfectly dull Disney kidflick mostly marks time until the credits, hitting every obvious point that the sibling-rivalry bodyswitch premise would offer. Gets a little drippy at the end with the hugging and the learning and the sisterly bonding, but such is the genre.<br /><br />* What it's most valuable for is its indications towards a shift in in-house style for Disney. Every now and then, the plodding predictability of the narrative will be interrupted by some brow-furrowing bit of quirk or an unexpected sideline joke. (I'm thinking in particular of the everlasting evidence of Alexia's science project.) This digressive streak would later get explored further to fine effect by such Disney TV projects as <i>Lizzie McGuire</i> and <i>Kim Possible</i>, though its fullest and most satisfying expression would come with the anarchic, delightfully whacked-out <i>Even Stevens</i>. (That last show is ripe for rediscovery by snarky hipster types. I'm not joking. Can we get an <i>Even Stevens</i> DVD set? Shia's hot right now.)<br /><br />* There's one scene that makes the whole film worth watching, simply because it's so incredibly bizarre and out-of-place: Alexia-as-Hayley, in an attempt to embarrass her sister, goes to school dressed like a Goth slut and does a lunchtime table dance to some would-be Madonna pop orgasm, while Hayley-as-Alexia, in response, attempts to suck the face off a guy with whom Alexia had broken up with the night of the switch. It's like the film turns into a teenage Dave Friedman film for five minutes. Thus, it's ridiculously misguided and kinda fuckin' awesome.<br /><br />* I swear to God, there's a <i>Persona</i> shout-out near the end of the film. More young-adult entertainment should reference Bergman in my opinion.<br /><br />* Katherine Heigl: way cuter here than in anything she's done this decade. I know she's only seventeen in the film, but I gotta calls 'em like I sees 'em.<br /><br />* Film occasionally loses sight of what its characters are supposed to be. For example, what on Earth would a dim-bulb clotheshorse like Alexia be doing with a Roy Lichtenstein print in her room? For that matter, why would a sensitive, sweet guy like Kyle be doing dating rude bitch Alexia anyway? I know he's a jock, but still -- it don't ring true.<br /><br />* Leads give serviceable performances -- they're as cute as they need to be. Rest of the cast is basically there to react to the leads, and that's about all they do. Yeah, it's a TV movie.<br /><br />* Bottom line: Painless timewaster with some unexpected moments of inspiration/amusement. You've seen worse, so have I. In other words, I lucked the fuck out after <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2007/03/bio-dome-1996-seen-for-white-elephant.html">last year's heinous offering</a>. I can't complain, really.<br /><br />Grade: CSteve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-79500869727743236382008-03-20T22:56:00.000-04:002008-03-20T22:56:12.604-04:00<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0496806/"><i>Ocean's Thirteen</i></a> (2007)<br /><br />* PT: The whole Ocean crew. Wadpaw: To punish Willie Bank for his uncharitable nature.<br /><br />* Not as loathsome and self-satisfied as <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2004/12/oceans-twelve-2004-okay.html"><i>Ocean's Twelve</i></a>, but if anything this third installment feels like even more of a cash grab. As grateful as I am that we're not stuck with another version of <i>George and Brad's Vacation Snaps by Steven S.</i>, I'd much prefer something other than this lazy, weightless confection. It's slick and frictionless, designed to entertain in the moment yet evaporate on contact.<br /><br />* One's disbelief had to be suspended during <i>Ocean's Eleven</i>. It had to be held in place with pulleys and winches during <i>Twelve</i>. Here, suspending one's disbelief is pretty much impossible because the series isn't pretending to shoot for believability any longer. No problem is insurmountable, no solution is too ludicrous or expensive. With all the money thrown at The Destruction of Willie Banks by Our Men in Vegas, they could just as easily have purchased the entire state of Nevada and have Banks thrown out of town on a racketeering charge or a kiddie-porn rap or whatever.<br /><br />* As the elaborate plotting grows tiresome due to the lack of stakes, so does the endless cast parade and nods to the previous entries grow tiresome because doing so just dices the film up that much further and leaves little room for much of the cast to do anything besides fill a role in a Rube Goldberg machine. Eddie Izzard gets a good semi-monologue at the film's beginning then vanishes for pretty much the entire rest of it; meanwhile, there's a killer irony in Shaobo Qin finally rating trailer-cast status for the series entry in which he's most superfluous (he literally does absolutely nothing for the first hour of <i>Thirteen</i>).<br /><br />* The lone bright spot is Casey Affleck in Mexico. His misadventures in infiltrating a dice factory carry the genuine surprise and amusement that have gone missing from the rest of the film. Even his fake mustache is funny. Guess it's a shame then that it caps off with a punchline that gets uglier the more you think about it.<br /><br />* The closing fireworks consciously evoke the stirring go-team triumph that ends <i>Eleven</i>. Doing so only reminded me of how the sharp elegance of that first film has been swallowed by shagginess and in-jokery. Bleah in my opinion.<br /><br />* Can we start a petition to get Vincent Cassel out of Hollywood, seeing as how it obviously has no idea what to do with him?<br /><br />Grade: CSteve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-12748971822458697952008-03-20T22:14:00.000-04:002008-03-20T22:14:37.668-04:00<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060107/"><i>Andrei Rublev</i></a> (1969)<br /><br />* PT: Andrei Rublev. Wadpaw: To serve God as best he can.<br /><br />* The opening scene shows a man briefly flying in a large balloon only to have the contraption collapse, descend into a river and sink into a quagmire of mud and water. Pretty pointed metaphor for the Russian state, that one.<br /><br />* An absolute feast for the eyes; Andrei Tarkovsky uses crisp black-and-white cinematography and an unerring eye for composition to make this epic tale of the title character's journey through Russian history as he paints icons and wrestles to maintain his faith in a world which would conspire to do him harm never less than a sensory joy. <i>Rublev</i> swings from the shadowy, sinister timbre of the scene with the pagans to the brutal extravagance of the Tartan siege to the simple, chattering patience of the penultimate scenes involving the bellmaker's son without breaking a sweat. Even in a simple scene like the one where Kirill stalks off from the monastery, comparing the monks to moneychangers, there's an enormous wall of logs used as a backdrop that simply astonishes. Yet even at its most visually active, it never feels excessive; an early scene between Kirill and Theophanes the Greek establishes the sacred as being, "simplicity without gaudiness," and if this is a usable barometer, then the lack of gaudiness in <i>Rublev</i> mark it as sacred.<br /><br />* Quite effectively paced, with contemplative scenes balanced out nicely by sequences of great activity and boisterous energy. What's more, the reflective tone maintains an unusual level of patience without ever tipping over into ponderousness. Worth every one of its 205 minutes.<br /><br />* The central siege scene, with its cow on fire and falling horse is a thunderous example of cinematic brilliance, but it's also shattering in a way that few battle scenes are because of Andrei's eventual involvement in it. Tarkovsky lays out Rublev's faith and devotion, his need to live by the tenets of Christ, then shows him in a situation where he's forced to kill and thus violate those tenets. Rublev does it in the act of saving an idiot girl (read: innocence), but Tarkovsky doesn't gloss over the spiritual toll this takes -- the next section finds Rublev having taken a vow of silence and given up iconography in despair for a world that very well might have no use for the God in which he believes. Among other things, it's a cutting rebuke to that action-movie staple scene where the milquetoast peacenik finds his hidden savagery in the refuge of self-defense.<br /><br />* Said toll seems even harsher in the wake of the idiot girl's ultimate fate, which she chooses (as much as an "idiot" can choose) while Rublev looks on. At first glance, this seems like a cold and cynical thing, a repudiation of the notion of useful sacrifice, yet I think it's something other than that. What Tarkovsky seems to be striving towards is a comment on the nature of sacrifice and faith, that living in imitation of Christ means doing what you can even in recognition that Christ's own sacrifices were at the time/still are unappreciated.<br /><br />* The last segment of the film features a bellmaker's son who says that only he has the secret knowledge of perfect bellmaking, as this information was passed to him by his father while the latter was on his deathbed. In a lengthy, extraordinary examination of process, he defies conventional wisdom and crafts the bell his way, fighting naysayers all the time. This whole sequence makes a nifty simile for the faith of the truly devout, which makes its resolution impossibly moving.<br /><br />* At point, a character says, "You're always lying, Foma." Think Kurt Vonnegut saw this film a couple of times?<br /><br />Grade: A-Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-31953708674367611602008-03-20T21:05:00.002-04:002008-03-20T21:07:53.939-04:00<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084573/"><i>Raw Force</i></a> (1982)<br /><br />* PT: John Taylor. Wadpaw: To kick a whole mess of ass and keep his party from suffering casualties.<br /><br />* The title makes <i>Raw Force</i> sound like just another red-meat '80s action flick. But here's what you get in the first five minutes alone: A German guy with a Hitler 'stache and bad combover. A bunch of naked chicks in a bamboo cage. A group of evil Filipino monks in medieval garb who laugh a lot. Gratuitous bush shots. Zombie samurai. I'll repeat that last one: ZOMBIE FUCKING SAMURAI. Does the rest of the film live up to this insane moodsetter? Oh yeah you betcha.<br /><br />* Calms down a bit after the opening to introduce its characters (who might as well be interchangeable) and provide us with a soupcon of exposition via wonderfully awful dialogue. (Best line, bar none: "Go ahead, Cookie -- you don't have to tell him you're a member of the L.A. SWAT team." Which, besides being hilariously awkward, means that there's a SWAT cop named Cookie.) Once those pleasantries are handled, <i>Raw Force</i> settles into a comfortable groove where there is either asskicking or tits on screen at all times. Occasionally the film will find a way to get both in a once, as in the scene where two guys duke it out in a ship's cabin while a chick who's on the run after killing her Mafia boyfriend is tied to a bed naked and ass up. (It's even better if you reflect on the fact that the chick was tied up by the bad guy after attempting to beat him over the head with an empty gas can.) If only every B-movie brought the goods like this one.<br /><br />* Three of the main characters identify themselves at the start as members of the Burbank Karate Club. I'll bet that's a real thriving organization there.<br /><br />* At one point, director Edward D. Murphy splices in footage from Joe Dante's <i>Piranha</i>. I wouldn't dream of revealing the gut-busting circumstances under which that footage appears -- it's really just something you should experience for yourself.<br /><br />* Obviously filmed on the cheap using actors who didn't really know much kung fu (aside from Rey King, channeling his inner Bruce Le); somehow, this just makes it more endearing as it blows past its own limitations to provide all sorts of trashy entertainment. It may be crap, but it's fast, loose and incredibly silly crap, unashamed of its own crapitude and dedicated to bringing the drive-in delight. I kinda think I love this movie.<br /><br />* I wonder how drunk Cameron Mitchell was during the production. A whole lotta buncha drunk, I'd bet.<br /><br />* The whole movie in a nutshell: The first major fight scene is set in a strip bar, and in between fisticuffs, Murphy will periodically cut to a glassy-eyed stripper half-heartedly shaking her tits and seemingly unaware of the chaos around her. It's so blinkered yet so unabashedly open about its desire to titillate its audience's every possible desire all at the same time that I can't help but be impressed. I really think I love this movie.<br /><br />* Film fades out on a "To Be Continued" title card; sadly, that continuation never arrived. Damn.<br /><br />Grade: BSteve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-15428788940773978252008-03-20T20:33:00.001-04:002008-03-20T21:10:05.773-04:00<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0186419/"><i>Olga's Dance Hall Girls</i></a> (1969)<br /><br />* PT: Whichever housewife bimbo is doing the narration. Wadpaw: To shake off her housewife boredom and make some extra cash.<br /><br />* The triple-feature curse of Something Weird strikes again: On their special-edition triple-feature DVDs, the third film will almost always be worthless. (Other examples of this phenomenon include <a href="http://www.milkplus.blogspot.com/2004_11_21_milkplus_archive.html#110139582563715980"><i>The Brick Dollhouse</i></a> and <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2004/02/zero-in-and-scream-1970-if-i-wanted-to.html"><i>Zero in and Scream</i></a>.)<br /><br />* Um, hey, what the fuck? Where's Aubrey Campbell? Where's Joseph P. Mawra? How is this in any way a proper Olga film? I call shenanigans, goddammit.<br /><br />* This seems to have been made by people with only a vague understanding of the Olga series. Olga and her brother Nick are in the film, but they're played by different actors and have different personalities. There's a voiceover, but it's generic rather than the half-cracked purplish insanity of previous entries, and there's far too many synch-sound scenes. Naked girls show up, but instead of being whipped, whored out and force-fed drugs, they're dancing spastically. The people who made this know the notes but not the music.<br /><br />* Not only has Nick's personality changed from malevolently fey to unctuous, but his name might have changed too -- though the narration refers to him as Nick, dialogue scenes have him called Vince. What the fuck.<br /><br />* There's a last-minute jump into Satanism (foreshadowed by the opening voiceover's promise of "a journey through modern supersitions"), which should be at least goofily entertaining but instead smells like a desperate attempt to salvage a story that had nothing going on in it save for lots of bad dancing.<br /><br />* One bright side: It's short. Real short. Thank Christ.<br /><br />Grade: D-Steve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335345.post-92177407647467724572008-03-20T20:02:00.000-04:002008-03-20T20:02:29.781-04:00<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376538/"><i>Cheerleader Autopsy</i></a> (2003)<br /><br />* PT: Blake. Wadpaw: To learn the family business, I guess.<br /><br />* That title's supposed to be a warning, right? So why did I feel compelled to watch it? Maybe for the same reason I watched <a href="http://moviesteve.blogspot.com/2005/03/hookers-in-haunted-house-1999-doesnt.html"><i>Hookers in a Haunted House</i></a>: Because I'm stupid.<br /><br />* What the hell is the film even about? There isn't a plot to speak of; instead, things happen until they stop happening. The things in question are loosely organized around a bus crash that kills a group of cheerleaders, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't rearrange all the scenes before the crash and all the scenes after the crash without losing coherence.<br /><br />* One gets the impression watching the lowbrow yuks on display here that the people who made this fancy themselves clever and daring and dangerous or something. We get jokes about necrophilia, castration, abortion, cannibalism, fetus-eating, testicle-eating and so on and so on as director Stu Dodge tries his hardest to convince us that he'll go to any length to shock and entertain. But there's no panache or tonal control -- it's mere juvenile sniggering at an atrocity exhibition, a gross-out gag that rolls on with no end in sight. John Waters, this dude ain't.<br /><br />* The first fart joke comes two minutes after the credits, if that gives you any idea of the level of wit on display.<br /><br />* Makeup FX are atrocious, which is often true of no-budget productions. The problem is that we're allowed to stare at the rubber and paper-mache at length, so that the film stops being a gross-out horror comedy and starts being a study on bad actors manhandling latex. At least when Lloyd Kaufman uses a cranberry-sauce-filled melon to simulate a crushed head, he knows enough to cut away after the gag is done instead of letting us linger on it.<br /><br />* There's precious little nudity for a cheerleader film, and most of what we get is male nudity. (Cocks are a preoccupation.) What bloody audience was this made for, anyway?<br /><br />* So yeah, it's abysmal, but it's not even abysmal in a fun way or a way that allows a viewer to mock it. It's sad and pathetic in about equal measure, with great heaping dollops of misogyny to add flavor. If this accurately represents the sensibilities of Dodge & company, I'm pretty glad I don't know them.<br /><br />* I admit I laughed once at a faux magazine headline that linked fetus consumption to a cure for Alzheimer's. I thought the wording was amusing, though I don't remember it anymore. I'm not proud of that laugh.<br /><br />* The bottom line is, asking an audience to pay any amount of money to see this is the height of hubris. If I had somehow created this hopeless piece of shit, I wouldn't expect (or even really want) anyone who didn't know me to bother watching it. The fact that someone thought this was worth releasing into the public is more disturbing than anything actually in the film.<br /><br />Grade: FSteve C.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01958138092537744506noreply@blogger.com0