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.
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
Survival of the Shiftiest: Richard Stanley and the Deep Magic of DUST DEVIL
Jett here: I’m excited to introduce a new contributor to the site – Tim Hayes. Tim’s a freelance writer based in the UK, who earns his living writing about business, science, art, and other topics in a land where, according to legend, the work of the journalist is respected and rewarded.
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, [...]
MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE: Sins of the Father
A Werner Herzog film should be an event, but he never gets quite the same buzz as, say, the latest French New Wave auteur-genarian. When he does, it’s for eating shoes or hunting man. Maybe it’s because he’s constantly making movies—they’re not Franzen novels—but so is Clint Eastwood, and we’re constantly told about his “latest [...]
Start the Week
An Education Hi there folks – a new week, the sun is shining (but it’s making no impact on the snow in my garden, and the car windscreen isn’t going to clear for a while), Buddy Miller is doing his thing on the – what do you call ‘em these days? hi-fi?, a sealed Netflix [...]
The Tuesday Top Five: Anthropomorphic Animals in the Cinema Zoo
Chaos Indeed One of the questionable delights of Lars von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’, which we still haven’t seen at The Film Talk due to those oh-so-frustrating regional distribution patterns, is the appearance of a demonic fox who enlightens the audience with the motto: ‘Chaos Reigns’. And so it does, in Trier’s universe, this time round (you [...]
Escapism Preview #4: Flash Gordon, The Goonies, Return to Oz, Back to the Future
The Queen of an Imaginary Land Yesterday was fantastic, a genuine surprise – ‘Superman’ is as close to a perfect version of its particular story as you could imagine; ‘The Black Hole’ looks astonishing and sounds awful – who knows what they were trying to do, but one can certainly imagine Disney not being all [...]
'I'm Up to My Neck in Being an American, whether I Like it or Not'
Wallace Shawn – you know, Wallace Shawn, man of wit and letters, agreeable suppers with theatre directors, and potentially poisoned cups of mead, has some things to say about life. Haymarket Books have gathered his elegant essays in a book (remarkably enough it’s titled ‘Essays‘) which turns out to be one of the wisest and [...]
Better the Devil You Know: What I Learned from Satan in the Movies
I’ve spent a monumentally pleasurable afternoon in the presence of Satan; in the form of the ridiculous and wonderful performance that Walter Huston (above) gives in ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’, a film about American history and the mythopoetics of the Yankee soul that deserves to be compared with ‘Citizen Kane’ (and not just because [...]
Ben Foster – Still the Greatest Actor in the Movies?
UPDATE: Our Ben Foster Podcast Interview on ‘The Messenger’ is Now Online – Click Here to Listen or Click Here to Subscribe for Free to the Podcast and have the interview downloaded automatically. – – – In February I asked the question of that character actor you may have seen in a comic western, or [...]
The Movie of the Year 2009: Overtures
[Read the first part of this post here] OVERTURES Three opening sequences have embedded themselves in my mind this year: Youssou N’Dour’s anthemic call, at the beginning of Elizabeth Chai Versalihis’ ‘I Bring What I Love’ to the young people of Africa, tears streaming down his face, asking his people to be guided by their [...]
The Exodus of Henry Gibson
You know Henry Gibson. He’s one of those character actors who beefed up everything he was in, and indelibly so. Fully worthy of Jett’s appellation ‘an OTG actor’ (no matter how bad the movie, when he’s on screen, your reflex is to say ‘Oh Thank God’). You can’t imagine ‘Magnolia’ without his Luciferian bar-loiterer [...]
Karl Malden
So, here’s the thing about Karl Malden. Best role? Playing a liberationist priest in ‘On the Waterfront’. The priest may not know that he’s a liberationist, but Malden does. It’s an astonishing, grounded, fiery performance of balanced light and heat. It makes you want to believe. Last role? Playing a priest in ‘The West Wing’. [...]
The Film Talk – Part 70 – The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 / The Taking of Pelham One Two Three / Food, Inc.
This Episode: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 / The Taking of Pelham One Two Three / Food, Inc. Get TFT delivered weekly via iTunes Subscribe to our podcast Subscribe to our blog Follow us on Twitter
'The Great Buck Howard'
The Great Buck Howard / Featuring John Malkovich – Colin Hanks – Emily Blunt / Written and Directed by Sean McGinly Look at John Malkovich. You can’t take your eyes off him. He’s got it. Malkovich is a compelling, magnetic performer. He’s the reason to see ‘The Great Buck Howard’. Unfortunately he’s not the focus [...]
'Two Lovers' – A Young Man Who Would Rather Care for Someone Else Than Be Cared For
Two Lovers / Featuring Joaquin Phoenix – Vinessa Shaw – Gwyenth Paltrow – Isabella Rossellini – Moni Moshonov / Directed by James Gray (warning: possible spoilers) What a wonderful movie. Computerised recommendation systems, (such as those employed by Netflix), encounter difficulty with using people’s ‘star ratings’ as accurate data due to humans tendency to reward [...]
The Film Talk – Part 51 – The Oscars
Films Reviewed This Week: Jett and Gareth’s Live Commentary from the Belcourt Theatre Oscar Night America Benefit Plus we continue our DVD Commentary Competition Get TFT delivered weekly via iTunes Subscribe to our podcast Subscribe to our blog Follow us on Twitter – – – (Photo above from Gareth Higgins blogging at the Belcourt before [...]
‘Taken’ aka "We used to outsource these things"
Taken / Featuring Liam Neeson / Directed by Pierre Morel / Produced By Luc Besson (warning, this review contains spoilers for ‘Taken’ and ‘Atanarjuat’) Look at the man above. He is alone and miserable. Look at him below. Two Chinese take-out cartons. You only see this in movies. This film does not waste time straining [...]
William H. Macy's Hair
Via Screencrave, have just seen a trailer for the new film ‘Bart Got a Room’, (see trailer below – warning, for those who are sensitive to incorrect aspect ratios = this is especially bad – it’s like hearing an instrument out of tune – but not out of tune enough to be interesting). The film [...]
Inspector Clouseau
Look at the image above, the DVD menu screen for Inspector Clouseau, with Alan Arkin as the eponymous detective. I can only refer to it as anti-funny. If I was in a good mood, laughing; this pic would shut me right down. You know when Professor Dr. Gareth Higgins suggested we watch the Pink Panther [...]
Films that Don't Get Old #1: 'Midnight Run'
I watched ‘Midnight Run’ last night – for the umpteenth time. I remembered it as one of the funniest US comedies of the 80s – a decade in which Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy competed with Steve Guttenburg for a crown that seems to belong to Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler these days. ‘Midnight Run’ [...]
The Film Talk – Part 49 – Revolutionary Road and The Wrestler
Films Reviewed This Week: Revolutionary Road / The Wrestler Plus we continue our DVD Commentary Competition
Is 'Revolutionary Road' Totally Unrepresentative, Disingenuous and Easy for Them to Say?
Jett and I discuss ‘Revolutionary Road’ on the next episode of TFT – and it perhaps should go without saying that we have responded differently. The film’s getting a lot of coverage for what some see as its piercing evaluation of US suburban life in the immediate post-war period; the suggestion being that conformity is [...]
