RED RIDING HOOD: Season of the Witch
2011 in general and the weekly viewing of films in particular have taught me a valuable lesson: there are many different kinds of terrible movies. THE EAGLE may be incompetently scripted, but it’s degrees of quality better than the immoral (THE LINCOLN LAWYER), the amoral (THE MECHANIC), and the thunderously boring (BATTLE: LOS ANGELES).
THE LINCOLN LAWYER: In Cold Blood
I felt dirtier walking out of Brad Furman’s THE LINCOLN LAWYER than its idol THE LONG GOODBYE, and not just because all that hero worship makes us into peeping toms.
OF GODS AND MEN: Putting the static in ecstatic
Can we please talk about the difference between contemplative and just slow? OF GODS AND MEN is the most recent César winner and France’s submission to the Oscars, beating Assayas’ CARLOS, Renais’ WILD GRASS, and most conspicuously Denis’ WHITE MATERIAL.
HEARTBEATS: Don’t you want me, baby?
HEARTBEATS is like Godard directing the kind of mad love music video the ‘80s were rife with (“Don’t You Want Me,” “Every Breath You Take,” “There is a Light That Never Goes Out,” etc.) where the bouncy electronic pop doesn’t come close to obscuring the dark edge that underscores passionate love
THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU: Patriarchy Rules
When will people learn? Mystery is greater than resolution. Curiosity lured us from hulking mouth-breathers into torture rationalizers—but torture-rationalizers who went to the Moon! Answers just remind us that George Nolfi’s THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU is a work of poorly planned screenwriting about half-forgotten ideas
JUSTIN BIEBER: NEVER SAY NEVER: Pinocchio
After a good three minutes of pulling my hair out trying not to have to write about UNKNOWN (about which Jett and Gareth have already covered the full spectrum of my faintly entertained response), THE MECHANIC (aka The Boor and the Bore), or—Gwyneth-willing—COUNTRY STRONG, I realized that the best reviewed 2011 wide release is a [...]
THE EAGLE: Love, Honor, and Obey
You could blame the monumental waste of Kevin Macdonald’s THE EAGLE on CENTURION‘s release last year, which preemptively renders its successor both outclassed and unnecessary, if the bulk of its ineptitude didn’t reside in the script. Yes, Jamie Bell heroically tries to balance an ensemble led by a statue and filled out with Donald Sutherland’s paycheck [...]
COLD WEATHER: The Big Wake-Up
Ironically, and here I’m talking about the artistic technique and not a pretend embrace of, say, Chuck Norris, Aaron Katz’s COLD WEATHER validates mumblecore by rejecting it. The first act is your standard mumblecore setup: a low-ambition young white male moves in with his sister, gets a routine job, meets an ex, all while making [...]
INTOLERABLE CRUELTY & THE LADYKILLERS: Bush League Coens
Seven or eight years ago, about the time of our conflict with Saddam and the Iraqis, the Coen brothers made two films so bad they closed up shop to recharge. At least, that’s the story ‘round these parts.
ANOTHER YEAR: Seasonal Affective Disorder
While THE KING’S SPEECH loudly, laughably declared it has a voice this weekend, sweeping the guild awards and hoodwinking a lot of people who should know better into thinking it’s more than a shallow, concave, lumpy golddigger, ANOTHER YEAR quietly expanded, a genuinely humanist portrait of middle-aged British people discovering the therapeutic power of friendship, [...]
Human nature: SWEETGRASS and ALAMAR
Through the vast winter wasteland, two films arrived to make me grateful for this period of weirdly timed horror and forgettable “rom”-“coms.” (Three, actually, as I caught CERTIFIED COPY on British DVD and have a new best film of 2010, but enough about that until it opens in the US.) Thanks to Netflix Watch Instantly, [...]
BLUE VALENTINE: Things Fall Apart
Aiming for Cassavetes gets you Cassavetes, which would be outstanding if we didn’t already have Cassavetes. Which isn’t to say that Derek Cianfrance’s BLUE VALENTINE is wholly derivative, but insofar as it’s an exploration of a crumbling relationship, it breaks no new ground and comes to no conclusions. This, thanks to its opening at a [...]
ECCENTRICITIES OF A BLONDE-HAIRED GIRL
It’s right there in the title. No, not the “BLONDE-HAIRED GIRL” part, that object of beauty framed in her window like an untouchable museum piece. The detractors don’t seem to notice anything beyond this crumbling skeleton of a Victorian romance, inspired as it is by realist writer Eca de Queiroz, but Manoel de Oliveira’s 2009 film [...]
SOMEWHERE: Lifestyles of the rich and famous
Still sucking up to the Italians, Sofia Coppola continues to explore the old bourgeois ennui picture—an increasingly pessimistic cycle from EUROPA ’51 to LA DOLCE VITA to LA NOTTE and beyond—in SOMEWHERE, another film about existential angst where the cause, contra the Italians, is not the soul-crushing effects of modernism but celebrity itself. The bourgeoisie [...]
TRUE GRIT: City of Mann
Comparing the Coen Brothers’ latest western, the chase film TRUE GRIT, to its predecessor, the camp classic (double entendre!) that finally won John Wayne his Oscar, is a triflin’ quarrel. Never mind that the original TRUE GRIT is dated by its tomboys with Mia Farrow voice, comic mugging accompanied by jaunty woodwinds, and an overall [...]
DOGTOOTH: Adventures in home-schooling
The night after I got to see Yorgos Lanthimos’ bone-dry Greek family comedy DOGTOOTH at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, that same room saw the Houston Film Critics Society name THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO the best foreign language film of the year. In the year Houston hosted CARLOS, WHITE MATERIAL, MOTHER, A [...]
BLACK SWAN: Hall of mirrors
Just once I’d like to see a film about an artist who achieves his masterpiece by seeking greater control. The popular fantasy is that artists are sensitive feelers who must completely lose themselves and let the spirit of Obi-Wan or whatever guide them to glory, not practicing communicators who ought to pinpoint precisely what they’re [...]
WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY: A Walt Disney Studios picture
Don Hahn’s WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY is almost as exciting as Al Gore’s AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. Wake me when Guy Maddin gets here. Hahn’s documentary on the second golden age of Disney—a climb from the nadir of THE BLACK CAULDRON all the way up to Pride Rock, with a glance at infinity and beyond—is more insidery [...]
WHITE MATERIAL: Stay the course
Boy, there’s nothing like watching a Claire Denis film to make a guy feel thankful. Especially if that guy happens to (perhaps secretly) love COLD MOUNTAIN, as WHITE MATERIAL has at least as much in common with Denis’ cinematic cousin Olivier Assayas and regional relatives like HOTEL RWANDA as it does with the Minghella story [...]
HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN
I’m not going to inspire any fainting spells by saying HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN is the best film in the franchise. I might when I say that the other six are barely watchable. Why is the Alfonso Cuarón entry so much better? Glad you asked.
FOUR LIONS: Boom Goes the Dynamite
I admit I was a mite concerned by the concept of FOUR LIONS—a self-proclaimed “jihad comedy” about bumbling terrorists—though less for any faintworthy controversy than for the unshakable image of a Benny Hill type running around London trying and failing to blow things up, Wile E. Coyote-style. I should have known better. Chris Morris (aka [...]
CARLOS: Almost Legal
Is there a better symbol for our historical moment than a tabloid terrorist? I don’t mean trash-mag doodler Perez Hilton; I mean a bona fide violent terrorist whose persona is more celebrity than revolutionary, whose exploits and impact are approached with bemused spectatorship in place of active engagement. Pop history has had years to streamline [...]
A Slasher Halloween: CALIGARI, THE LEOPARD MAN, & HOUSE OF WAX
I know, I know, Halloween’s over and you’re all ready to start celebrating Election Day or Guy Fawkes Day or The Holiday Formerly Known as Armistice Day or something, but I could hardly have told you how I spent my Halloween before Halloween. So, without further ado, brief thoughts on the evolution of the film [...]
ROSEMARY’S BABY: The Cult of Domesticity
In my quest to determine my favorite horror films, it’s become increasingly clear that I have no idea what constitutes horror. Don’t Look Now? Hour of the Wolf? The Shout? Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic Rosemary’s Baby seemed like a no-brainer to me, but rewatching, it’s slightly scarier than Bride of Frankenstein, and it’s not as [...]
