WARRIOR: Bodies in Motion
For a film about mixed martial arts, it would have been cool of Gavin O’Connor’s WARRIOR to demonstrate some mixed martial arts. But maybe I’m projecting my own priorities onto a film more interested in showing us, ad nauseam, how this great whatsit is provoking the audience.
APOLLO 18: The Truth is Out There
Gonzalo López-Gallego’s APOLLO 18 isn’t just a fun potboiler but an unlabeled conspiracy tape hiding in the wrong VHS sleeve, a straight-faced, paranoid political thriller spawned by the unholy union of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and Wikileaks.
COLOMBIANA Can’t Stop
As CONAN THE BARBARIAN represents the nadir of chaos cinema with its unfocused camerawork evoking nothing but a lazy director, Olivier Megaton’s COLOMBIANA represents its potential, finding purpose in the rapid cutting and manic energy that defines the End of Cinema.
THE HELP: Based on the Novel The Help by Uncle Remus
To call THE HELP caricature insults Aunt Jemima, but it’s difficult to define precisely how this grotesque sideshow operates without associating it with camp, melodrama, slapstick, Southern Gothic, and other broadly emotional modes
RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES: You say you want a revolution
I’ve never felt cognitive dissonance like reading my Twitter feed this week—but maybe that was all the cold medicine—seeing nonstop (and counterintuitive) raves for Rupert Wyatt’s blockbuster RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
Contributor Crosstalk 2: Back in the Habit (April-June 2011)
BRANDON NOWALK: Hello, and welcome to Contributor Crosstalk 2: Back in the Habit, the quarterly look back at the good, the bad, and the weird cinema offered us below-the-liners. This episode: April-June, or Planet Hollywood’s journey from SOURCE CODE to CARS 2. Oof.
CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER: That’s Entertainment
The only thing more tiresome than Marvel’s latest Shakespeare tragedy is the postmodern elevation of trash/pop/camp—a useful experiment, like shaving your head— so I won’t say Joe Johnston’s CAPTAIN AMERICA: WORLD-FRIENDLY SUBTITLE is a good film.
HARRY POTTER & THE DEATHLY HALLOWS 2: Childish Things
As half-films go, David Yates’ HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 2, FILM 8: ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET VOLDEMORT lurches from scene to setpiece like it’s Daniel Radcliffe’s awkwardly effortful performance.
MEEK’S CUTOFF: State of the Union
“Is he ignorant, or is he just plain evil?” Michelle Williams’ pioneer asks of hapless guide Stephen Meek as their wagon train of three loosely tied families winds up lost in the wasteland with depleting resources and a native prisoner in Kelly Reichardt’s MEEK’S CUTOFF.
CONAN O’BRIEN CAN’T STOP: I’m Still Here
The great joke of the title CONAN O’BRIEN CAN’T STOP is that I was wondering the whole time when he was going to start. It takes fifteen minutes for Rodman Flender’s topical documentary to find a funny scene
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS: L’Age D’Or
Speaking of pseudointellectuals, I’ve never—not even at SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE—seen a movie with an audience more vigorously engaged in the signaling to everyone else that, yes, old sport, they got the reference, they’re very smart, they had THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL over for dinner the other night
OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST: Burden of Dreams
I’ve started and stopped this review so many times it’s like I’m practicing Kegels while peeing. Fitting, too, considering my subject, a fictionalized documentary (think THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES) about its own crew searching for inspiration to film the outright fiction of its last act after a dead financier imperils the project
SUPER 8: Plan 9 From the Spielberg Home for Daddy Issues
The problem with making an entire movie about the wonder and torment of lens flares is that the human eye is hardwired to detect artifice.
Contributor Crosstalk – Quarterly Review (Spring 2011)
ERIC WHEELER: Hello! And welcome to the first installment of what we hope will become a long-lasting and beloved niche in the bowels of The Film Talk website: Contributor Crosstalk. The obvious idea here is that we ‘below the line’ talent (to use an industry phrase) clang our heads together and see what movies have [...]
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS: Birth of a Nation
I guess X-MEN: FIRST CLASS was set in the ‘60s to better reflect Matthew Vaughn’s thoughtless patriarchal identification, because it damn sure wasn’t about civil rights, the Cold War, liberation, or the Holocaust, weighty abstracts whittled into icons, the better for Vaughn to pretend his film has some deep, world-historical meaning
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST
It isn’t simply that I like DEAD MAN’S CHEST better than CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, that my sui generis brain chemistry arbitrarily prefers squid-pirates to skeletal specters and sexy rogues to straight-laced do-gooders, thought that’s certainly true.
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES
While the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN franchise started with a fun, fresh take on a notoriously stale brand of box office poison, eight years and two directors later, the plastic surgery is finally catching up to it.
BRIDESMAIDS: Funny Girl
I’m shocked—shocked!—to find the big, dirty bone of contention with Paul Feig’s BRIDESMAIDS is the centerpiece gross-out scene, when whole mailing lists of people expecting a nice, polite feminist comedy were driven to conniptions
THOR: Norwegian Wood
If you only see one small-town American story with an Oedipal skeleton enveloping space and time and prehistoric beasts this summer, please, for the love of all that is cinematically holy, make it Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE, because Kenneth Branagh’s nominally Norse still-life THOR is so cosmically incompetent
SCREAM 4: All About Neve
If you’re wondering what horror tropes are left for Wes Craven, Kevin Williamson, and blonde TV starlets to skewer with the resurrected corpse of the SCREAM franchise, SCREAM 4 isn’t much help.
JANE EYRE: Bride of Rochester
For a film about a singular meeting of minds, Cary Fukunaga’s JANE EYRE is kind of undistinguished. Now, the words remain delicious morsels straight from Charlotte Bronte’s novel, and the performances (Mia Wasikwoska, Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell, and Judi Dench) embody three-dimensions like James Cameron never dreamed of.
MILDRED PIERCE: A Woman’s Picture
In the grand tradition of Ingmar Bergman and Rainer Werner Fassbinder comes Todd Haynes’ television miniseries MILDRED PIERCE, which seems like a gray area for The Film Talk but such is the modern age: the difference between Michael Curtiz’ MILDRED PIERCE and Todd Haynes’ is one of degree, not kind, and if cinephilia embraces Youtube [...]
CERTIFIED COPY: Je ne sais quoi
It might be imperial to claim Abbas Kiarostami’s best film is his first outside Iran, not in Farsi, and starring an international star—in other words, the one that’s most European—but I have no guilt, because in my universe it’s true: CERTIFIED COPY is the most intellectually and emotionally stirring film I’ve seen since INLAND EMPIRE
