The MBTA somehow knows when I'm trying to get someplace by a specific time, and responds by slowing their bus service down to a crawl. I honestly thought that two and a half hours would be enough time to run an errand between getting out of work at 5pm and the start of Dante's Inferno at 7:30pm. Apparently, not the case.
So, just the one film last night instead of two. I'll be trying to make up for it today with a program of shorts, When is Tomorrow, Urban Explorers, The Hamster Cage, and Viva. Tight fit between Urban Explorers and The Hamster Cage, especially since the short before the latter is only two minutes long and they're at different theaters, but I've handled tighter at other festivals
The 4th Life
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival IX)
The funny thing about The 4th Life is that for a film that is having its North American premiere at an "Underground Film Festival", there's arguably a pretty conventional film inside it, yearning to break free. Whether by temperment or budget, director François Miron makes something that feels bizarre and unreal, but that's what works for him.
Right now, Marie March (Janet Lane) is married to an antique dealer about to go under, and although she doesn't love him nearly as much as he loves her, she's well aware things could be worse. Her husband has heard of a collection for sale in far-off Darckeville, so she hops a freight train (passenger trains and buses to that area were just discontinued) and makes her way out. Meanwhile, Caz (Andrea Sheldon) is breaking out of an asylum for the criminally insane along with her brain-damaged brother George (Tod Fennell). Caz and Marie were lovers in the past, and having one's crazy, homicidal lover on the loose is never a good thing.
The plot is not quite conventional, but unlike a lot of filmmakers who work beyond the fringes of mainstream film, François Miron does concentrate on his story. He uses flashbacks well, illustrating the history Marie and Caz share so that we're clear where everybody whenever that information is going to be useful. Nothing ever seems to happen without a good reason, and the plentiful strange events seldom seem to simply be the result of a whim. The climactic scenes are fairly tight and suspenseful, so often a weakness among arty filmmakers.
Full review at HBS.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Friday, March 23, 2007
Boston Underground Film Festival Opening Night: American Stag
First, I'd like to note that I've got a review up on HBS for Maxed Out. It'll show up in the blog next week, along with the Hot Fuzztival and HD/BD viewings that surrounded it.
First night of the Boston Underground Film Festival last night. It's definitely a laid-back atmosphere - the festival started with the Alloy Orchestra accompanying silent adult movies, programmers Kevin Monahan and Anna Feder joked with the audience when there were early technical issues, and later tossed a vibrator into the audience as a door prize (hey, they're a festival sponsor).
There was also a short film, "Beyond the Pearly Gates of Ill-Repute", that fit with the theme of the night quite well - it was silent, a bit risqué, and funny.
Today's plan: Work, then Dante's Inferno and The 4th Life. Hopefully I'll be able to get screeners of some of the stuff I'll miss, because End of the Line looks pretty darn good (but has already been reviewed for HBS/EFC), and Bulldog in the White House looks agreeably bizarre.
American Stag
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival IX)
No matter what the subject, apparently, it's possible to say things were better before everything went commercial. At least, that's the case made by American Stag, which has its eye not on the modern porn film, but on the blue movies made up until about 1968, when the courts ruled that film was protected by the First Ammendment.
After all, as soon as something is legal, it's ripe for commercial exploitation. Before this, American Stag tells us, blue movies - called "stag pictures" or "smokers" because of how they were exhibited in the smoke-filled, men-only rooms in V.F.W. halls or Elks' lodges where "stag parties" were held - were generally the work of amateurs. They were shot on consumer 8mm or 16mm equipment, were seldom more than one reel in length, and produced in almost complete anonymity due to their questionable legality. Even well into the sound era, they were frequently silent films.
And, based upon what director Benjamin Meade shows us, kind of charming. Production values weren't that great, and the people involved tended to be ordinary people, with original-issue breasts, pasty skin, excess hair and all. The staging and camera work isn't sophisticated, but there is the sense of people having fun, telling a story and having sex because they enjoy it. Certainly, not everyone will agree with this assessment - Meade has fun juxtaposing a female film historian discussing how they were disgusting and even worse when interracial pairings were involved with a male one saying they could be considered educational (where else were men going to learn new ways to please their partners at the time?) and, hey, they were integrated when people of different skin colors couldn't even hold hands in commercial film. Admittedly, there' s no real response to the charge that these films presented rape as good fun.
Full review at HBS.
First night of the Boston Underground Film Festival last night. It's definitely a laid-back atmosphere - the festival started with the Alloy Orchestra accompanying silent adult movies, programmers Kevin Monahan and Anna Feder joked with the audience when there were early technical issues, and later tossed a vibrator into the audience as a door prize (hey, they're a festival sponsor).
There was also a short film, "Beyond the Pearly Gates of Ill-Repute", that fit with the theme of the night quite well - it was silent, a bit risqué, and funny.
Today's plan: Work, then Dante's Inferno and The 4th Life. Hopefully I'll be able to get screeners of some of the stuff I'll miss, because End of the Line looks pretty darn good (but has already been reviewed for HBS/EFC), and Bulldog in the White House looks agreeably bizarre.
American Stag
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival IX)
No matter what the subject, apparently, it's possible to say things were better before everything went commercial. At least, that's the case made by American Stag, which has its eye not on the modern porn film, but on the blue movies made up until about 1968, when the courts ruled that film was protected by the First Ammendment.
After all, as soon as something is legal, it's ripe for commercial exploitation. Before this, American Stag tells us, blue movies - called "stag pictures" or "smokers" because of how they were exhibited in the smoke-filled, men-only rooms in V.F.W. halls or Elks' lodges where "stag parties" were held - were generally the work of amateurs. They were shot on consumer 8mm or 16mm equipment, were seldom more than one reel in length, and produced in almost complete anonymity due to their questionable legality. Even well into the sound era, they were frequently silent films.
And, based upon what director Benjamin Meade shows us, kind of charming. Production values weren't that great, and the people involved tended to be ordinary people, with original-issue breasts, pasty skin, excess hair and all. The staging and camera work isn't sophisticated, but there is the sense of people having fun, telling a story and having sex because they enjoy it. Certainly, not everyone will agree with this assessment - Meade has fun juxtaposing a female film historian discussing how they were disgusting and even worse when interracial pairings were involved with a male one saying they could be considered educational (where else were men going to learn new ways to please their partners at the time?) and, hey, they were integrated when people of different skin colors couldn't even hold hands in commercial film. Admittedly, there' s no real response to the charge that these films presented rape as good fun.
Full review at HBS.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Across Asia: Sha Po Lang, I Live in Fear, and The Namesake
Not much time before I head for the Boston Underground Film Festival, so here's some movie reviews, including one for Puzzlehead, which I saw waaaay back during the SF marathon.
Sha Po Lang (aka Kill Zone)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 March 2007 in Jay's Living Room (upconverted DVD)
Sha Po Lang (even if I don't understand the astrological reference, it still makes more sense to me than the generic title The Weinstein Company have used to sell the movie) is an impressive movie, no question. It's a fine example of the slick neo-noir style exemplified by Infernal Affairs, but that's not quite what I was expecting. I was drawn in by the promise of action, so imagine my surprise when the stuff in between the punching and kicking wasn't just filling time, but the basis for what would be a pretty decent crime movie without the martial arts.
Remember: When Jackie Chan first started alternating between Hollywood and Hong Kong, he commented in an interview how much more focus American movies placed on story compared to his usual work... and this was in response to working on Rush Hour, of all things. So finding a story that twists and turns a bit and uses a little subtlety in the middle of an expected beat 'em up is a pleasant surprise.
The story's not that complicated: Detective Chan-Kwok Chung (Simon Yam) wants to put gangster Wong Po (Sammo Hung) away in the worst way: Three years ago, Po was let off after a witness Chung was guarding was murdered by Po's men. Chung adopted the witness's daughter, but the attack left him with a tumor that could kill him at any time. He formed a team of young detectives who weren't afraid to break the rules if it meant taking down organized crime. Days before retiring and handing his team over to Inspector Ma Kwan (Donnie Yen), he's delivered evidence that is enough to put Po away for life... if they tamper with it a bit, intimidate a witness, and dispose of the man who actually delivered the killshot. Which, as one might imagine, is the sort of thing that earns them visits from Jack (Wu Jing), Po's best assassin.
Full review at HBS.
I Live in Fear (Ikimono no Kiroku)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2007 at the Harvard Film Archive (Cold War Films)
My most recent viewing of I Live in Fear was as part of a double feature with Godzilla during a series on films of the Cold War. It's an apt pairing, as both tackle, in their own way, the fear of the atomic bomb - an anxiety which Japan would of course feel especially strongly. Where the other film makes nuclear destruction into a tangible monster to fight, I Live in Fear spends its time on how we deal with the real one.
Dr. Harada (Takashi Shimura) must ponder the question of how much time people should spend worrying about the atomic bomb. A dentist by trade, he is also respected enough for family courts to use him as a mediator, and his latest case is an unusual one - the family of Kiichi Nakajima (Toshiro Mifune) is suing to have him declared incompetent. Over the past year, he has become so obsessed with the idea of nuclear war that he first spent millions of yen to build an underground bunker to his family to move into, then, deciding that was not safe enough, hatched a plan to move the lot (including the children fathered with a series of mistresses) to Brazil. Since he is willing to trade the family business that supports them all, they feel they have no other recourse.
In retrospect, the idea seems crazy, but what makes the film compelling is that Harada is able to see the sanity in the elder Nakajima's actions. Everyone he talks to admits to being frightened of the atomic bomb, but, they say, there's nothing that they can do about it, so worrying does little good. But if Nakajima can do something about it, isn't he obligated to? Harada spends most of the film as an observer, sometimes thrashing the case around with his son, and Takashi Shimura does a fine job of showing Harada's growing sympathy for Nakajima without going over the edge into madness himself.
Full review at HBS.
Godzilla (Gojira)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2007 at the Harvard Film Archive (Cold War Films)
Kid of a weird screening - the HFA didn't get the first reel of the film, so they showed twenty minutes from a DVD before switching over to 35mm.
Still the greatest monster movie ever made, though. No matter how many times I see it, I'm still impressed by what a somber film it is - it's hard to believe that it could spawn the franchise it did. Don't get me wrong, I love movies like Godzilla Mothra King Ghidorah: Giant Monster All Out Attack! (heck, I just like names like Godzilla Mothra King Ghidorah: Giant Monster All Out Attack!), but this is a movie with real heft to it.
The Namesake
* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2007 at the Brattle Theater (preview)
In an era of previews that give every event in the film away, the promos for The Namesake have been pleasantly deceptive. To see the advertising, one would think that the film centers around Kal Penn's character, and how his and his parents don't see eye to eye about his unusual name or white girlfriend. That's there, but it's only part of the movie, and the preview cuts pieces from opposite ends of the film together to give the story a very different shape.
Indeed, Penn's Gogol Ganguli isn't even born until about a half-hour into the movie, and isn't grown until nearly halfway through. The first scene introduces us to his father, Ashoke Ganguli (Irfan Khan), who is wiling away a long train ride by reading a book by Nikolai Gogol as the guy in the next seat tells him he should see the world in person, rather than through books. There's a loud noise, a glimpse of a recuperating Ashoke, and then we meet Ashima (Tabu), whose parents are arranging a marriage between the two. They come to New York, and though it's a difficult adjustment for Ashima, they do well for themselves, moving to the suburbs where they raise two children, Gogol and Sonia (Sahira Nair). The kids are thoroughly assimilated Americans, and Gogol especially chafes at his odd name and family traditions. After finishing college, he tends to spend more time with the family of his girlfriend Maxine (Jacinda Barrett) than his own. They, of course, have found a nice Bengali girl (Zuleikha Robinson) for him.
The first half of the movie belongs to Khan and Tabu, both popular actors in India but nearly unknown in the United States. It's intriguing to watch them get used to each other and their new country in the first half-hour, as the color and beauty of their wedding ceremony serves as a sharp contrast to wintry New York. The way they grow closer out of familiarity and raising children together is understated yet beautiful, from the way Ashima appears stiff the first time Ashoke touches her to how they can't conceive of being separated the first time he leaves her for any great length of time, over twenty-five years later. Both actors play the characters from start to end, with aging accompanied by very good make-up jobs. Tabu's performance is especially strong at the center of the film; Ashima does many of the things such a character is expected to do without becoming a cliché, and there's a very real balance between her curiosity about America and her nervousness at confronting it. I like how she never quite seems to embrace her new life, seeming much more at ease on her back to India. Khan is very good, too, aging more visibly over the course of the film, showing Ashoke as sometimes frustrated that he doesn't quite seem to bond with his son as he'd like to, but almost always flawless in his scenes with Tabu.
Full review at HBS.
Sha Po Lang (aka Kill Zone)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 March 2007 in Jay's Living Room (upconverted DVD)
Sha Po Lang (even if I don't understand the astrological reference, it still makes more sense to me than the generic title The Weinstein Company have used to sell the movie) is an impressive movie, no question. It's a fine example of the slick neo-noir style exemplified by Infernal Affairs, but that's not quite what I was expecting. I was drawn in by the promise of action, so imagine my surprise when the stuff in between the punching and kicking wasn't just filling time, but the basis for what would be a pretty decent crime movie without the martial arts.
Remember: When Jackie Chan first started alternating between Hollywood and Hong Kong, he commented in an interview how much more focus American movies placed on story compared to his usual work... and this was in response to working on Rush Hour, of all things. So finding a story that twists and turns a bit and uses a little subtlety in the middle of an expected beat 'em up is a pleasant surprise.
The story's not that complicated: Detective Chan-Kwok Chung (Simon Yam) wants to put gangster Wong Po (Sammo Hung) away in the worst way: Three years ago, Po was let off after a witness Chung was guarding was murdered by Po's men. Chung adopted the witness's daughter, but the attack left him with a tumor that could kill him at any time. He formed a team of young detectives who weren't afraid to break the rules if it meant taking down organized crime. Days before retiring and handing his team over to Inspector Ma Kwan (Donnie Yen), he's delivered evidence that is enough to put Po away for life... if they tamper with it a bit, intimidate a witness, and dispose of the man who actually delivered the killshot. Which, as one might imagine, is the sort of thing that earns them visits from Jack (Wu Jing), Po's best assassin.
Full review at HBS.
I Live in Fear (Ikimono no Kiroku)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2007 at the Harvard Film Archive (Cold War Films)
My most recent viewing of I Live in Fear was as part of a double feature with Godzilla during a series on films of the Cold War. It's an apt pairing, as both tackle, in their own way, the fear of the atomic bomb - an anxiety which Japan would of course feel especially strongly. Where the other film makes nuclear destruction into a tangible monster to fight, I Live in Fear spends its time on how we deal with the real one.
Dr. Harada (Takashi Shimura) must ponder the question of how much time people should spend worrying about the atomic bomb. A dentist by trade, he is also respected enough for family courts to use him as a mediator, and his latest case is an unusual one - the family of Kiichi Nakajima (Toshiro Mifune) is suing to have him declared incompetent. Over the past year, he has become so obsessed with the idea of nuclear war that he first spent millions of yen to build an underground bunker to his family to move into, then, deciding that was not safe enough, hatched a plan to move the lot (including the children fathered with a series of mistresses) to Brazil. Since he is willing to trade the family business that supports them all, they feel they have no other recourse.
In retrospect, the idea seems crazy, but what makes the film compelling is that Harada is able to see the sanity in the elder Nakajima's actions. Everyone he talks to admits to being frightened of the atomic bomb, but, they say, there's nothing that they can do about it, so worrying does little good. But if Nakajima can do something about it, isn't he obligated to? Harada spends most of the film as an observer, sometimes thrashing the case around with his son, and Takashi Shimura does a fine job of showing Harada's growing sympathy for Nakajima without going over the edge into madness himself.
Full review at HBS.
Godzilla (Gojira)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2007 at the Harvard Film Archive (Cold War Films)
Kid of a weird screening - the HFA didn't get the first reel of the film, so they showed twenty minutes from a DVD before switching over to 35mm.
Still the greatest monster movie ever made, though. No matter how many times I see it, I'm still impressed by what a somber film it is - it's hard to believe that it could spawn the franchise it did. Don't get me wrong, I love movies like Godzilla Mothra King Ghidorah: Giant Monster All Out Attack! (heck, I just like names like Godzilla Mothra King Ghidorah: Giant Monster All Out Attack!), but this is a movie with real heft to it.
The Namesake
* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2007 at the Brattle Theater (preview)
In an era of previews that give every event in the film away, the promos for The Namesake have been pleasantly deceptive. To see the advertising, one would think that the film centers around Kal Penn's character, and how his and his parents don't see eye to eye about his unusual name or white girlfriend. That's there, but it's only part of the movie, and the preview cuts pieces from opposite ends of the film together to give the story a very different shape.
Indeed, Penn's Gogol Ganguli isn't even born until about a half-hour into the movie, and isn't grown until nearly halfway through. The first scene introduces us to his father, Ashoke Ganguli (Irfan Khan), who is wiling away a long train ride by reading a book by Nikolai Gogol as the guy in the next seat tells him he should see the world in person, rather than through books. There's a loud noise, a glimpse of a recuperating Ashoke, and then we meet Ashima (Tabu), whose parents are arranging a marriage between the two. They come to New York, and though it's a difficult adjustment for Ashima, they do well for themselves, moving to the suburbs where they raise two children, Gogol and Sonia (Sahira Nair). The kids are thoroughly assimilated Americans, and Gogol especially chafes at his odd name and family traditions. After finishing college, he tends to spend more time with the family of his girlfriend Maxine (Jacinda Barrett) than his own. They, of course, have found a nice Bengali girl (Zuleikha Robinson) for him.
The first half of the movie belongs to Khan and Tabu, both popular actors in India but nearly unknown in the United States. It's intriguing to watch them get used to each other and their new country in the first half-hour, as the color and beauty of their wedding ceremony serves as a sharp contrast to wintry New York. The way they grow closer out of familiarity and raising children together is understated yet beautiful, from the way Ashima appears stiff the first time Ashoke touches her to how they can't conceive of being separated the first time he leaves her for any great length of time, over twenty-five years later. Both actors play the characters from start to end, with aging accompanied by very good make-up jobs. Tabu's performance is especially strong at the center of the film; Ashima does many of the things such a character is expected to do without becoming a cliché, and there's a very real balance between her curiosity about America and her nervousness at confronting it. I like how she never quite seems to embrace her new life, seeming much more at ease on her back to India. Khan is very good, too, aging more visibly over the course of the film, showing Ashoke as sometimes frustrated that he doesn't quite seem to bond with his son as he'd like to, but almost always flawless in his scenes with Tabu.
Full review at HBS.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
New Stuff: Starter for 10, Black Snake Moan, The Wind That Shakes the Barley
New Stuff
A few years ago, there was a middling film called The Baxter that told a romantic comedy from the point of view of the Other Guy - you know, the one the female lead is dating/engaged to who has nothing wrong with him, but just isn't exciting enough for her.
Watching Starter for 10, I wonder about the possibility of the coming-of-age film told from the point of view of the Obviously Pretty Girl - the one played here by Alice Eve, who is blonde and busty but, of course, not nearly as cool as the smart brunette who is fairly pretty herself. Starter for 10 does a better job than usual in making the Obviously Pretty Girl a fun character in her own right, but it strikes me that there's got to be some fun way to turn the cliché on its head.
Starter for 10
* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 March 2007 at Landmark Kendall Square #1 (preview)
There is almost nothing in Starter for 10 which isn't somewhat familiar from nearly every coming of age film ever made: The dorky yet kind of good looking narrator, the awkward parents, the weird friends, the obviously pretty girl and the cooler (but also pretty) girl. You can see what's coming a mile away. That's not exactly a bad thing; it just means the movie has to make up for its lack of creativity with execution, and it does all right there.
The dorky narrator is Brian Jackson (James McAvoy), a bloke from Essex starting at Bristol College. He meets Rebecca Epstein (Rebecca Hall) at a "tarts and vicars" party his first night there, and then meets Alice Harbinson (Alice Eve) when they both sign up for the "University Challenge" team (he remembers random facts, she wants to be on television). Alice proves impossible to resist, and even though a Christmas break spent at her family's cottage shows he's more interested in her than vice versa, it's not quite so simple to jump to the other girl.
It's pretty obvious where all this is going, so it's important that the getting there be enjoyable. It is, mostly because writer David Nicholls has provided the cast with a bunch of amusing characters to play. Aside from the main three, there's Dominic Cooper and James Corden as Spencer and Tone, Brian's friends from back home who are worried about university making him a complete wanker; Spencer is in the leather jacket and too cool for the room while Tone is the excitable one in the jean jacket. Patrick (Benedict Cumberbatch) is precisely the sort of wanker they're talking about, a Challenge-obsessed grad student who freezes up on camera and is more than a bit of an upper-class snob. That Brian is better at this than him confuses Nigel, and he tends to respond with a hilarious blank stare. The students' parents are also a stitch: Catherine Tate is charmingly maternal as Brian's mother, with John Henshaw as the ice cream man she's taken up with. Charles Dance and Lindsay Duncan are Alice's parents, bohemian types who insist on being called by their first names and who completely fail to understand Brian's dorky pop-culture jokes - vacation goes straight to hell after the inevitable Graduate reference. And then there's the guy at every party who just got back from India...
Full review at HBS.
Black Snake Moan
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 March 2007 at AMC Fenway #4 (first-run)
Craig Brewer has my respect - this is his second film in a row that has delivered more than I expected. That's impressive, really - after all, not only does his new film have a couple of actors I like in Samuel L. Jackson and Christina Ricci, but it's the new film from the maker of Hustle & Flow. Anyone who can get me to like a movie about a pimp trying to make it as a rapper is going to have high expectations the next time around.
This time, Brewer gives us a couple of people with self-control trouble. Rae (Ricci) is a nymphomaniac, collapsing with sexual need as soon as her boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) is out of sight on the way to his hitch in the National Guard; she's soon looking for relief from others. Lazarus (Jackson) is a farmer who used to be a blues singer. His wife has just left him for his best friend - whom Lazarus nearly kills in a fit of temper when they meet up in a bar. Their paths collide when a messed-up Rae laughs at the wrong guy's manhood and his response is to beat her and leave her for dead near Lazarus's front door. Lazarus nurses her back to health, but is determined to cure more than her cough and bruises - even if that means chaining her to his radiator.
The movie's set-up promises exploitation, and there's no shortage of shots that would make good pulp-magazine covers, as those who've seen its advertising will attest. Brewer spends some time delivering on that promise, too, with Jackson howling about getting right with God and the camera tracing every inch of Ricci's curvy, barely-dressed body as she practically sweats sex. You want the Angry Black Man and the Wanton White (Trash) Woman, you've got it. Or at least you do on the surface; the film's not about race at all. It just uses the strong emotional response race can create to get off to a running start. It's the same with the sex; the audience that hoots a little at Rae falling down to pleasure herself even as Ronnie drives away may look back on that scene and see more despair than sex appeal.
Full review at HBS.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 March 2007 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye Opener)
There's a school of thought that says that every conflict comes down to economics at some level - the haves pushing around the have-nots and the have-nots rebelling. There's a certain amount of truth to this thinking, but taking it too literally can make for some relatively dry entertainment. Ken Loach's interest in presenting Ireland's fight against the British Empire in the 1920s as a fundamentally socialist rebellion - or at least, one that should have been - saps a little life from the film's last act. Not all, or even most of it, but the abstract nature of the conflict makes it somewhat less powerful than it could be.
It's a shame, because the film is, at its heart, a story about brothers, and squandering even the least bit of their role reversal is a shame. As the film starts, Cillian Murphy's Damien is apolitical; he's studied to be a doctor and is about to travel to a London hospital for his internship. Padraic Delaney's Teddy is not; he's in with the IRA. A front-row seat to various abuses by British and mercenary troops - a friend is beaten to death after refusing to give his name in English, his train's driver is arrested for following his union's edict not to transport armed troops - he joins up. Being a soldier in a secret army has its costs, though: Sometimes, you have to kill Irish as well as English; sometimes you can only hide and watch as troops burn your beloved's family home. And you may not agree on when victory can be declared.
Loach and the writer, Paul Laverty, make the audience work a bit in the early going. Teddy and Damien aren't introduced as brothers, and it's some time before they're revealed as such. The Irish accents are also laid on rather thick in the first twenty minutes or so - one audience member wished for subtitles, and it took me a moment to realize that the man killed early in the film was in fact speaking Gaelic rather than heavily accented English. I'm glad Loach (and the film's American distributor) chose not to use subtitles, as has occasionally been done when the accent is thick and the dialect working-class; soon enough my ear was trained. I suspect the accents were deliberately thicker in the early going to highlight the contrast between the two sides; once that was done, they back off a bit with a few exceptions (mostly older characters).
Full review at HBS.
A few years ago, there was a middling film called The Baxter that told a romantic comedy from the point of view of the Other Guy - you know, the one the female lead is dating/engaged to who has nothing wrong with him, but just isn't exciting enough for her.
Watching Starter for 10, I wonder about the possibility of the coming-of-age film told from the point of view of the Obviously Pretty Girl - the one played here by Alice Eve, who is blonde and busty but, of course, not nearly as cool as the smart brunette who is fairly pretty herself. Starter for 10 does a better job than usual in making the Obviously Pretty Girl a fun character in her own right, but it strikes me that there's got to be some fun way to turn the cliché on its head.
Starter for 10
* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 March 2007 at Landmark Kendall Square #1 (preview)
There is almost nothing in Starter for 10 which isn't somewhat familiar from nearly every coming of age film ever made: The dorky yet kind of good looking narrator, the awkward parents, the weird friends, the obviously pretty girl and the cooler (but also pretty) girl. You can see what's coming a mile away. That's not exactly a bad thing; it just means the movie has to make up for its lack of creativity with execution, and it does all right there.
The dorky narrator is Brian Jackson (James McAvoy), a bloke from Essex starting at Bristol College. He meets Rebecca Epstein (Rebecca Hall) at a "tarts and vicars" party his first night there, and then meets Alice Harbinson (Alice Eve) when they both sign up for the "University Challenge" team (he remembers random facts, she wants to be on television). Alice proves impossible to resist, and even though a Christmas break spent at her family's cottage shows he's more interested in her than vice versa, it's not quite so simple to jump to the other girl.
It's pretty obvious where all this is going, so it's important that the getting there be enjoyable. It is, mostly because writer David Nicholls has provided the cast with a bunch of amusing characters to play. Aside from the main three, there's Dominic Cooper and James Corden as Spencer and Tone, Brian's friends from back home who are worried about university making him a complete wanker; Spencer is in the leather jacket and too cool for the room while Tone is the excitable one in the jean jacket. Patrick (Benedict Cumberbatch) is precisely the sort of wanker they're talking about, a Challenge-obsessed grad student who freezes up on camera and is more than a bit of an upper-class snob. That Brian is better at this than him confuses Nigel, and he tends to respond with a hilarious blank stare. The students' parents are also a stitch: Catherine Tate is charmingly maternal as Brian's mother, with John Henshaw as the ice cream man she's taken up with. Charles Dance and Lindsay Duncan are Alice's parents, bohemian types who insist on being called by their first names and who completely fail to understand Brian's dorky pop-culture jokes - vacation goes straight to hell after the inevitable Graduate reference. And then there's the guy at every party who just got back from India...
Full review at HBS.
Black Snake Moan
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 March 2007 at AMC Fenway #4 (first-run)
Craig Brewer has my respect - this is his second film in a row that has delivered more than I expected. That's impressive, really - after all, not only does his new film have a couple of actors I like in Samuel L. Jackson and Christina Ricci, but it's the new film from the maker of Hustle & Flow. Anyone who can get me to like a movie about a pimp trying to make it as a rapper is going to have high expectations the next time around.
This time, Brewer gives us a couple of people with self-control trouble. Rae (Ricci) is a nymphomaniac, collapsing with sexual need as soon as her boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) is out of sight on the way to his hitch in the National Guard; she's soon looking for relief from others. Lazarus (Jackson) is a farmer who used to be a blues singer. His wife has just left him for his best friend - whom Lazarus nearly kills in a fit of temper when they meet up in a bar. Their paths collide when a messed-up Rae laughs at the wrong guy's manhood and his response is to beat her and leave her for dead near Lazarus's front door. Lazarus nurses her back to health, but is determined to cure more than her cough and bruises - even if that means chaining her to his radiator.
The movie's set-up promises exploitation, and there's no shortage of shots that would make good pulp-magazine covers, as those who've seen its advertising will attest. Brewer spends some time delivering on that promise, too, with Jackson howling about getting right with God and the camera tracing every inch of Ricci's curvy, barely-dressed body as she practically sweats sex. You want the Angry Black Man and the Wanton White (Trash) Woman, you've got it. Or at least you do on the surface; the film's not about race at all. It just uses the strong emotional response race can create to get off to a running start. It's the same with the sex; the audience that hoots a little at Rae falling down to pleasure herself even as Ronnie drives away may look back on that scene and see more despair than sex appeal.
Full review at HBS.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 March 2007 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye Opener)
There's a school of thought that says that every conflict comes down to economics at some level - the haves pushing around the have-nots and the have-nots rebelling. There's a certain amount of truth to this thinking, but taking it too literally can make for some relatively dry entertainment. Ken Loach's interest in presenting Ireland's fight against the British Empire in the 1920s as a fundamentally socialist rebellion - or at least, one that should have been - saps a little life from the film's last act. Not all, or even most of it, but the abstract nature of the conflict makes it somewhat less powerful than it could be.
It's a shame, because the film is, at its heart, a story about brothers, and squandering even the least bit of their role reversal is a shame. As the film starts, Cillian Murphy's Damien is apolitical; he's studied to be a doctor and is about to travel to a London hospital for his internship. Padraic Delaney's Teddy is not; he's in with the IRA. A front-row seat to various abuses by British and mercenary troops - a friend is beaten to death after refusing to give his name in English, his train's driver is arrested for following his union's edict not to transport armed troops - he joins up. Being a soldier in a secret army has its costs, though: Sometimes, you have to kill Irish as well as English; sometimes you can only hide and watch as troops burn your beloved's family home. And you may not agree on when victory can be declared.
Loach and the writer, Paul Laverty, make the audience work a bit in the early going. Teddy and Damien aren't introduced as brothers, and it's some time before they're revealed as such. The Irish accents are also laid on rather thick in the first twenty minutes or so - one audience member wished for subtitles, and it took me a moment to realize that the man killed early in the film was in fact speaking Gaelic rather than heavily accented English. I'm glad Loach (and the film's American distributor) chose not to use subtitles, as has occasionally been done when the accent is thick and the dialect working-class; soon enough my ear was trained. I suspect the accents were deliberately thicker in the early going to highlight the contrast between the two sides; once that was done, they back off a bit with a few exceptions (mostly older characters).
Full review at HBS.
Friday, March 09, 2007
Odd lots
I did something kind of dumb last month, waiting for my bank to send me a new ATM card by the end of the month rather than calling them and saying, hey, I need to be able to access my money in March. When I finally got around to it, I found out that they had sent one of the new RFID-enabled ones to my old apartment last year, only to have it returned to sender. So I went into this weekend, when movies that I actually wanted to see were coming out, somewhat cash-poor. Indeed, when I was through grocery shopping on Sunday, I found myself thinking that seeing The Devil's Backbone at the HFA Saturday night was an extravagance.
It's given me the excuse to finally watch some of the DVDs I've been accumulating. So did this article on HBS about John Carpenter - to which I ironically contributed a couple lines about how Carpenter doesn't give home video the slightest thought when shooting a movie.
The Thing
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2007 in Jay's Living Room (HD DVD)
I've really got no excuse for not having seen this before, other than not renting many movies. I've seen The Thing from Another World, I've probably read "Who Goes There" at some point, and I've got the nasty-looking toys Todd MacFarlane made in one of his Movie Maniacs lines (I'd actually purchased a box and distributed the extra Ashes and Snake Plisskens to Matt and Justin). And with the fuss it took to get this movie properly in my home - Deep Discount DVD initially sent me the regular DVD when I'd ordered the HD version, and by the time I'd sent it back, postage had eaten up any savings I would have seen from just buying it on Amazon - you'd think I would have watched it just to claim victory.
Ah, well. At least I did get around to it. John Carpenter's take on this story is the rare horror movie that is both gleefully disgusting and full of genuine tension. It starts with a nifty shot of the Thing's flying saucer which could be lifted directly from a fifties monster movie and then jumps to the present with an opening scene that seems both off-kilter and desperate at the same time, with a Norwegian helicopter desperately trailing and attempting to kill a beautiful dog. The American outpost where they wind up doesn't know what to make of it, yet. They soon will, though, as the Thing first finishes of the other dogs and then starts to work on them, duplicating its victims and taking on bizarre, alien forms when it's caught and has to escape.
That's when the gross stuff starts, and it's a blast. The special effects department gets to be very creative, coming up with all manner of ways to mutilate the human (and canine) body to create a number of grotesqueries. It quite frequently made me cry out in shock and revulsion, even as a part of me was delighted at the design sense - the biology looks good. Still, the effect that probably made me jump the most was one of the simplest, as alien blood leaps from its petri dish upon sensing a threat.
Great stuff, and a potent reminder of how right the article on HBS was - this is nitty-gritty genre filmmaking without anything wasted. It's not today's style, but it gets the audience to the edge of its seat. It also shows just why John Carpenter deserves every second chance we give him - he's got movies this great in him.
The Devil's Backbone (El Espinazo del Diablo)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2007 at the Harvard FIlm Archive (The Spanish Civil War on Film)
This is kind of embarrassing. The Devil's Backbone is a fantastic movie, and yet twice during the past year I've been certain I haven't seen it. I picked up the DVD when Tower was blowing DVDs out a few months ago, and then a week ago I decided to go see it at the Harvard Film Archive, even though I really shouldn't have been spending the money, for much the same reason. And then, as I did so, I found each scene familiar, soon realizing that I had, in fact, seen it on its U.S. release.
How does one forget seeing a movie like this? Makes no sense.
The Secret Life of Words
* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2007 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye-Opener)
One of the people I saw The Secret Life of Words with described it as a "feel-bad movie", which isn't quite fair: Hope does occasionally manage to crack its dour nature. Its goals are, I think, a little more abstract than making the audience feel good or feel bad; writer/director Isabel Coixet seems to be more interested in the difference between feeling and not feeling at all.
"Not feeling" is represented by Hanna (Sarah Polley), a Balkan refugee who has been quietly working at a silk plant in England for the past four years without a sick day or vacation. Indeed, her boss insists she take a month off, lest the other employees think their jobs are in danger if they don't meet her example. A seaside holiday doesn't bring her any pleasure, though, so when she overhears a man at a nearby table talking on the phone about the difficulty of hiring a nurse to tend a patient on an oil rig, she immediately offers her services. That patient is Josef (Tim Robbins), who feels far too much, thanks to severe burns from an accident that killed his friend.
Hanna and Josef are both damaged people, in a very literal sense: Hanna's hearing is severely impaired (she won't discuss how other than to say she wasn't born that way. On top of the burns, Josef was blinded by his accident. It will, of course, be some time before they tell us what has hurt them emotionally; Hanna won't even respond truthfully to Josef's most innocent questions, even to the point of revealing her name.
Full review at HBS.
Tears of the Black Tiger (Fah Talai Jone)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2007 at Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run)
When I saw Wisit Sasanatieng's Citizen Dog at the Montreal Fantasia festival last year, the introduction included a fair-sized rant on how Miramax had done a major disservice to people in North America who like movies by keeping his debut in limbo for five years or so. I can't disagree - how many movie-lovers have died or lost their vision while Miramax spent years trying to figure out how to market it, trying to fit it into a schedule, or just plain ignoring it before giving up and selling the rights to Magnolia? How can they begin to apologize to those people?
I exaggerate, of course, but this is the sort of movie that inspires grandiose statements. I have heard it described as a "Thai Western", but that is a woefully incomplete description. I can best approximate the experience by saying that it is like an old-fashioned Western fused with a Wong Kar-wai period romance, but with heaping helpings of Raimi-esque splatstick and Tarantinoid genre awareness. But that makes it sound like some sort of disjointed imitation, when it's not. It's a Wisit Sasanatieng film, with all the colorful environments, comedy tinged with melancholy, and fantasy that will eventually imply as he grows in fame.
The story has a straightforward love triangle at its heart - Rumpoey (Stella Malucchi) is soon to be engaged to police captain Kumjorn (Arawat Ruangvuth), but is none too happy about it, for she has loved Dum (Chartchai Ngamsan) ever since they were children, even though her father was a successful businessman and his a mere peasant. What she does not know is that Dum is The Black Tiger- a gunslinger working for Fai (Sobat Metanee), the province's worst bandit, whom Kumjorn has vowed to capture.
Full review at HBS.
Hellboy: The Sword of Storms
* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2007 in Jay's Living Room (direct-to-video)
I'm in for all the Hellboy I can get. In some ways, I actually like the adaptations better than the original comics, because Mignola gothic style (which the newer artists on Hellboy and B.P.R.D. have taken up) sometimes obscures what a fun group of characters he's created. The animation style for Sword of Storms is very different from both the comics and Guillermo del Toro's movie, but it works just fine for this story which takes Hellboy to Japan and then a strange spirit world. There are monsters to be slain and adventures to be had, and Tad Stones packs his 77-minute movie full of fun.
That said, I already know I'm going to miss David Hyde Pierce as the voice of Abe Sapien in the next movie; Doug Jones just isn't the same. Still, I think I liked Selma Blair more this way, and Peri Giplin is a great call as B.P.R.D. bookworm Kate Corrigan. I also wonder if Liz's repeated line that water is not her element suggests they're looking to eventually bring in Johan and Roger. I hadn't really looked at the B.P.R.D. crew that way, but they do sort of make up the four elements - Liz is fire, Abe is water, homunculus Roger is earth, disembodied psychic Johan is air.
At least, it seems they're thinking along those lines, even if the characters don't seem to appear in Blood & Iron, either. Hopefully that means they're planning on doing a lot of these.
It's given me the excuse to finally watch some of the DVDs I've been accumulating. So did this article on HBS about John Carpenter - to which I ironically contributed a couple lines about how Carpenter doesn't give home video the slightest thought when shooting a movie.
The Thing
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2007 in Jay's Living Room (HD DVD)
I've really got no excuse for not having seen this before, other than not renting many movies. I've seen The Thing from Another World, I've probably read "Who Goes There" at some point, and I've got the nasty-looking toys Todd MacFarlane made in one of his Movie Maniacs lines (I'd actually purchased a box and distributed the extra Ashes and Snake Plisskens to Matt and Justin). And with the fuss it took to get this movie properly in my home - Deep Discount DVD initially sent me the regular DVD when I'd ordered the HD version, and by the time I'd sent it back, postage had eaten up any savings I would have seen from just buying it on Amazon - you'd think I would have watched it just to claim victory.
Ah, well. At least I did get around to it. John Carpenter's take on this story is the rare horror movie that is both gleefully disgusting and full of genuine tension. It starts with a nifty shot of the Thing's flying saucer which could be lifted directly from a fifties monster movie and then jumps to the present with an opening scene that seems both off-kilter and desperate at the same time, with a Norwegian helicopter desperately trailing and attempting to kill a beautiful dog. The American outpost where they wind up doesn't know what to make of it, yet. They soon will, though, as the Thing first finishes of the other dogs and then starts to work on them, duplicating its victims and taking on bizarre, alien forms when it's caught and has to escape.
That's when the gross stuff starts, and it's a blast. The special effects department gets to be very creative, coming up with all manner of ways to mutilate the human (and canine) body to create a number of grotesqueries. It quite frequently made me cry out in shock and revulsion, even as a part of me was delighted at the design sense - the biology looks good. Still, the effect that probably made me jump the most was one of the simplest, as alien blood leaps from its petri dish upon sensing a threat.
Great stuff, and a potent reminder of how right the article on HBS was - this is nitty-gritty genre filmmaking without anything wasted. It's not today's style, but it gets the audience to the edge of its seat. It also shows just why John Carpenter deserves every second chance we give him - he's got movies this great in him.
The Devil's Backbone (El Espinazo del Diablo)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2007 at the Harvard FIlm Archive (The Spanish Civil War on Film)
This is kind of embarrassing. The Devil's Backbone is a fantastic movie, and yet twice during the past year I've been certain I haven't seen it. I picked up the DVD when Tower was blowing DVDs out a few months ago, and then a week ago I decided to go see it at the Harvard Film Archive, even though I really shouldn't have been spending the money, for much the same reason. And then, as I did so, I found each scene familiar, soon realizing that I had, in fact, seen it on its U.S. release.
How does one forget seeing a movie like this? Makes no sense.
The Secret Life of Words
* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2007 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye-Opener)
One of the people I saw The Secret Life of Words with described it as a "feel-bad movie", which isn't quite fair: Hope does occasionally manage to crack its dour nature. Its goals are, I think, a little more abstract than making the audience feel good or feel bad; writer/director Isabel Coixet seems to be more interested in the difference between feeling and not feeling at all.
"Not feeling" is represented by Hanna (Sarah Polley), a Balkan refugee who has been quietly working at a silk plant in England for the past four years without a sick day or vacation. Indeed, her boss insists she take a month off, lest the other employees think their jobs are in danger if they don't meet her example. A seaside holiday doesn't bring her any pleasure, though, so when she overhears a man at a nearby table talking on the phone about the difficulty of hiring a nurse to tend a patient on an oil rig, she immediately offers her services. That patient is Josef (Tim Robbins), who feels far too much, thanks to severe burns from an accident that killed his friend.
Hanna and Josef are both damaged people, in a very literal sense: Hanna's hearing is severely impaired (she won't discuss how other than to say she wasn't born that way. On top of the burns, Josef was blinded by his accident. It will, of course, be some time before they tell us what has hurt them emotionally; Hanna won't even respond truthfully to Josef's most innocent questions, even to the point of revealing her name.
Full review at HBS.
Tears of the Black Tiger (Fah Talai Jone)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2007 at Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run)
When I saw Wisit Sasanatieng's Citizen Dog at the Montreal Fantasia festival last year, the introduction included a fair-sized rant on how Miramax had done a major disservice to people in North America who like movies by keeping his debut in limbo for five years or so. I can't disagree - how many movie-lovers have died or lost their vision while Miramax spent years trying to figure out how to market it, trying to fit it into a schedule, or just plain ignoring it before giving up and selling the rights to Magnolia? How can they begin to apologize to those people?
I exaggerate, of course, but this is the sort of movie that inspires grandiose statements. I have heard it described as a "Thai Western", but that is a woefully incomplete description. I can best approximate the experience by saying that it is like an old-fashioned Western fused with a Wong Kar-wai period romance, but with heaping helpings of Raimi-esque splatstick and Tarantinoid genre awareness. But that makes it sound like some sort of disjointed imitation, when it's not. It's a Wisit Sasanatieng film, with all the colorful environments, comedy tinged with melancholy, and fantasy that will eventually imply as he grows in fame.
The story has a straightforward love triangle at its heart - Rumpoey (Stella Malucchi) is soon to be engaged to police captain Kumjorn (Arawat Ruangvuth), but is none too happy about it, for she has loved Dum (Chartchai Ngamsan) ever since they were children, even though her father was a successful businessman and his a mere peasant. What she does not know is that Dum is The Black Tiger- a gunslinger working for Fai (Sobat Metanee), the province's worst bandit, whom Kumjorn has vowed to capture.
Full review at HBS.
Hellboy: The Sword of Storms
* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2007 in Jay's Living Room (direct-to-video)
I'm in for all the Hellboy I can get. In some ways, I actually like the adaptations better than the original comics, because Mignola gothic style (which the newer artists on Hellboy and B.P.R.D. have taken up) sometimes obscures what a fun group of characters he's created. The animation style for Sword of Storms is very different from both the comics and Guillermo del Toro's movie, but it works just fine for this story which takes Hellboy to Japan and then a strange spirit world. There are monsters to be slain and adventures to be had, and Tad Stones packs his 77-minute movie full of fun.
That said, I already know I'm going to miss David Hyde Pierce as the voice of Abe Sapien in the next movie; Doug Jones just isn't the same. Still, I think I liked Selma Blair more this way, and Peri Giplin is a great call as B.P.R.D. bookworm Kate Corrigan. I also wonder if Liz's repeated line that water is not her element suggests they're looking to eventually bring in Johan and Roger. I hadn't really looked at the B.P.R.D. crew that way, but they do sort of make up the four elements - Liz is fire, Abe is water, homunculus Roger is earth, disembodied psychic Johan is air.
At least, it seems they're thinking along those lines, even if the characters don't seem to appear in Blood & Iron, either. Hopefully that means they're planning on doing a lot of these.
Friday, March 02, 2007
Academy Awards Weekend
Not that I did a whole lot of Oscar-oriented stuff to get ready for the ceremony. I saw The Last King of Scotland, which was very good, but that was as much about seeing movies at two AMC theaters on the same day as it was about cramming for the awards show.
Not that there was a whole lot of need for that. The top four awards (Picture, Director, Actor, and Actress) were pretty easy to guess; no matter how much the guy who used to cover movies for MTV talked about how many surprises we had seen, the last four were going to go pretty much as expected. I did like Will Ferrell's and Jack Black's song about how comedians don't get any respect, and as much as I preferred Letters From Iwo Jima to The Departed, I think the reaction to Eastwood beating Scorcese for the second time in three years would have been ugly.
Although The Departed winning best adapted screenply - crap. The writer took one of the leanest, most exciting suspense films in recent years and (a) compacted the two girlfriends unnecessarily, (b) added two or three extra police characters that brought nothing to the film (well, other than (d)), (c) thought it would be really clever to make Jack Nicholson's character a thinly-veiled Whitey Bulger, and (d) inserted approximately two thousand instances of the words "fuck", "cocksucker", and their various adjective/gerund forms. I won't say that every good thing in the movie came from Infernal Affairs, but every good thing in the screenplay did.
Well, that was crankier than truly necessary. I suppose it's like the thing with Trail of the Screaming Forehead last week - it didn't truly upset me at the time, but the more I think about it, the more it chafes.
The Astronaut Farmer
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2007 at Regal Fenway #8 (first-run)
The Astronaut Farmer, on the other hand, grows on me the more I think about it. It's a big, warm fuzzy hug of a movie, aimed straight at families in a way that's tough to describe without being dismissive: It has high ideals about the importance of dreaming big and pulling together for a common goal that it articulates plainly, and an adult moviegoer might dismiss this as unsophisticated if not for the kids in the next row who are dilligently absorbing it the way they should at that age. But it's also not really about kids, and is very true in how its adults act, how they can be cynical or immature or mean, and there's a good argument to be made that Billy Bob Thornton's Charles Farmer is hugely irresponsible in how he tries to achieve his dream. You almost need to be in that kind of family setting to truly appreciate its different facets, and that's fascinating.
The Polish Brothers are playing with some pretty potent stuff in terms of technique, too. There's a scene in the middle of the film, almost dead-center, that plays like it would be a dream sequence in most movies, the sort of thing where the character wakes up and thinks, well, I'd better make sure that doesn't happen. But it goes on until the audience realizes that this is actually happening, and that's sort of a weird sensation. It's also quietly anti-authoritarian while still allowing us to like the civil servants who carry out the orders of an overzealous government: The FBI agents assigned to watch the Farmers are genial enough fellows, while Bruce Willis's completely uncredited cameo as an astronaut who trained with Farmer, once upon a time, makes him worthy of our respect even as he tells Farmer why this can't happen (and that, yeah, NASA is kind of messed up).
That's something their previous film, Northfork, did very well, although it and The Astronaut Farmer are almost literally night and day. The Polishes get some dazzling footage of New Mexico doubling for Texas; indeed, the film opens with the surreal image of an astronaut on horseback against a beautiful red sunrise. There's a real affection for small-town America in this film - the room to breathe, the eccentrics it produces, and the practical people like Virginia Madsen's Audie who hold it together.
The Last King of Scotland
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2007 at AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run)
Forest Whitaker has this movie more or less handed to him. The story, of course, is about James MacAvoy's brash young doctor who goes to Africa for the wrong reasons and is swept up by Idi Amin's charisma; it opens with him leaving home and ends when his story is finished, leaving us to learn about Amin's later life in text. But Whitaker plays Amin so well that just as in real life, he's always the most captivating figure in the room. MacAvoy, charming as he is, doesn't have a chance.
Breach
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2007 at AMC Harvard Square #1 (first-run)
Breach is an actors' piece in the form of a procedural. It's got an intriguing story, and those who love cat and mouse games will probably get a real kick out of the scenes in the center of the movie where the FBI tries to gather evidence on a mole who is better at counter-intelligence than any of them. But even as you're watching that, the first thing that catches your notice is Chris Cooper and how he's doing some fantastic acting.
Part of what makes it so good is that this character would be well worth watching even if he wasn't a mole. If he was just an brilliant but abrasive man who took his religion far more to heart than is fashionable for many Americans, he'd still draw the audience's attention. We're never really given a motive for his treason other than pure ego, although what more do we really need? Cooper's not alone in the great acting, though - Laura Linney also does a great job in grabbing the audience in her relatively limited screen time, all-business to the point of not existing outside the Bureaui; with her and Cooper's Robert Hanssen as dueling mentors, it's no wonder Ryan Philippe often looks like he sees no future but misery as an agent. The supporting cast is filled with people who have been convincing leads in other projects - Gary Cole and Dennis Haysbert as fellow agents, Caroline Dhavernas and Kathleen Quinlan as the wives of Philippe and Cooper, respectively.
Not that there was a whole lot of need for that. The top four awards (Picture, Director, Actor, and Actress) were pretty easy to guess; no matter how much the guy who used to cover movies for MTV talked about how many surprises we had seen, the last four were going to go pretty much as expected. I did like Will Ferrell's and Jack Black's song about how comedians don't get any respect, and as much as I preferred Letters From Iwo Jima to The Departed, I think the reaction to Eastwood beating Scorcese for the second time in three years would have been ugly.
Although The Departed winning best adapted screenply - crap. The writer took one of the leanest, most exciting suspense films in recent years and (a) compacted the two girlfriends unnecessarily, (b) added two or three extra police characters that brought nothing to the film (well, other than (d)), (c) thought it would be really clever to make Jack Nicholson's character a thinly-veiled Whitey Bulger, and (d) inserted approximately two thousand instances of the words "fuck", "cocksucker", and their various adjective/gerund forms. I won't say that every good thing in the movie came from Infernal Affairs, but every good thing in the screenplay did.
Well, that was crankier than truly necessary. I suppose it's like the thing with Trail of the Screaming Forehead last week - it didn't truly upset me at the time, but the more I think about it, the more it chafes.
The Astronaut Farmer
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2007 at Regal Fenway #8 (first-run)
The Astronaut Farmer, on the other hand, grows on me the more I think about it. It's a big, warm fuzzy hug of a movie, aimed straight at families in a way that's tough to describe without being dismissive: It has high ideals about the importance of dreaming big and pulling together for a common goal that it articulates plainly, and an adult moviegoer might dismiss this as unsophisticated if not for the kids in the next row who are dilligently absorbing it the way they should at that age. But it's also not really about kids, and is very true in how its adults act, how they can be cynical or immature or mean, and there's a good argument to be made that Billy Bob Thornton's Charles Farmer is hugely irresponsible in how he tries to achieve his dream. You almost need to be in that kind of family setting to truly appreciate its different facets, and that's fascinating.
The Polish Brothers are playing with some pretty potent stuff in terms of technique, too. There's a scene in the middle of the film, almost dead-center, that plays like it would be a dream sequence in most movies, the sort of thing where the character wakes up and thinks, well, I'd better make sure that doesn't happen. But it goes on until the audience realizes that this is actually happening, and that's sort of a weird sensation. It's also quietly anti-authoritarian while still allowing us to like the civil servants who carry out the orders of an overzealous government: The FBI agents assigned to watch the Farmers are genial enough fellows, while Bruce Willis's completely uncredited cameo as an astronaut who trained with Farmer, once upon a time, makes him worthy of our respect even as he tells Farmer why this can't happen (and that, yeah, NASA is kind of messed up).
That's something their previous film, Northfork, did very well, although it and The Astronaut Farmer are almost literally night and day. The Polishes get some dazzling footage of New Mexico doubling for Texas; indeed, the film opens with the surreal image of an astronaut on horseback against a beautiful red sunrise. There's a real affection for small-town America in this film - the room to breathe, the eccentrics it produces, and the practical people like Virginia Madsen's Audie who hold it together.
The Last King of Scotland
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2007 at AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run)
Forest Whitaker has this movie more or less handed to him. The story, of course, is about James MacAvoy's brash young doctor who goes to Africa for the wrong reasons and is swept up by Idi Amin's charisma; it opens with him leaving home and ends when his story is finished, leaving us to learn about Amin's later life in text. But Whitaker plays Amin so well that just as in real life, he's always the most captivating figure in the room. MacAvoy, charming as he is, doesn't have a chance.
Breach
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2007 at AMC Harvard Square #1 (first-run)
Breach is an actors' piece in the form of a procedural. It's got an intriguing story, and those who love cat and mouse games will probably get a real kick out of the scenes in the center of the movie where the FBI tries to gather evidence on a mole who is better at counter-intelligence than any of them. But even as you're watching that, the first thing that catches your notice is Chris Cooper and how he's doing some fantastic acting.
Part of what makes it so good is that this character would be well worth watching even if he wasn't a mole. If he was just an brilliant but abrasive man who took his religion far more to heart than is fashionable for many Americans, he'd still draw the audience's attention. We're never really given a motive for his treason other than pure ego, although what more do we really need? Cooper's not alone in the great acting, though - Laura Linney also does a great job in grabbing the audience in her relatively limited screen time, all-business to the point of not existing outside the Bureaui; with her and Cooper's Robert Hanssen as dueling mentors, it's no wonder Ryan Philippe often looks like he sees no future but misery as an agent. The supporting cast is filled with people who have been convincing leads in other projects - Gary Cole and Dennis Haysbert as fellow agents, Caroline Dhavernas and Kathleen Quinlan as the wives of Philippe and Cooper, respectively.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
One marathon overlaps another
The Brattle Movie-Watch-a-Thon is finished. Go here if you would still like to make a donation. With these films, I reached 19 Brattle films seen and 25 elsewhere, which means 63 "points" total (or 31.5, depending on whether Brattle films count for two or other films count for ½)
Actually, that "elsewhere" number could be as high as 31, since I saw six films in the sci-fi marathon before midnight, with no sleeping done until 2am or so. There could have been some really sick numbers, but I opted not to try and survive the Brattle's "Schlock Around the Clock" marathon, which would have started at 9:30pm on Saturday and run straight through until 12:30pm Sunday (overlapping the start of the Sci-Fi Marathon by a half-hour). I don't know if I have that kind of strength.
I've avoided visiting the sci-fi marathon's message board all week, wanting to organize my thoughts a little and just not looking forward to the annual "watching bad movies is not nearly as much fun as watching good movies" argument. And, of course, I'm going to have bad things to say about Trail of the Screaming Forehead, because that's a movie just designed to irritate me - watching movies that are deliberately bad is a much more painful experience than watching a bad movie whose filmmakers really felt they were making he best movie they can.
D.O.A.
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2007 at The Harvard Film Archive (Cold War Films) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
D.O.A. has one of the classic mystery hooks - a man given a "luminous toxin" searches for his murderer before the slow-acting poison finishes its work. It's one of those ideas so simple and brilliant that anyone who tries to use it at a later date must obviously be doing a remake whether it is credited as such (the Dennis Quaid film of the same name) or simply uses it as an obvious source of inspiration (the godawful Crank).
This version is an obvious B movie, and initially exhibits a lot of that kind of pulp cinema's weaknesses: After the scene that sets up the flashback, much of the first act is actually clumsy and annoying - the protagonist takes off to San Francisco to escape his clingy girlfriend/secretary, and while she's annoying enough that you can't really blame him, the sound effects as he looks at other women are outright juvenile enough that he becomes a pain, too. But then we see his drink switched, he goes to doctors and learns his fate, and the movie kicks into high gear. It's like a season of 24 crammed into eighty-odd minutes in its propulsive urgency. Where many noirs are hard-boiled, D.O.A. lets its characters wear their desperation on their sleeves, so that even the scenes with the annoying secretary become poignant by the end.
Rocketship X-M
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2007 at The Harvard Film Archive (Cold War Films) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
I'm not sure which is more annoying about Rocketship X-M - the obviously awful science or the jaw-droppingly ridiculous way in which it handles its one female character. The latter probably has some sort of basis in fact, but it's still sort of stunning for a modern audience to watch a film like this where the woman scientist has obviously proved her brilliance only to be patronized at every turn.
Is that more annoying than a rocket designed for a round-trip to the moon being nearly able to get to Mars and back because the passengers overslept? Maybe not. In any event, it's a deeply stupid movie, no matter how interesting what they actually find on Mars is.
The Eagle
* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2007 at the Institute for Contemporary Art (The Alloy Orchestra) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
Rudolph Valentino is a name most film fans know, even if they couldn't pick him out of a lineup they way they could with, say, Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. He's a vaguely remembered symbol of roaring twenties virility who died too young to appear in talking pictures or grow into more substantial roles. People vaguely remember that he did a couple of movies where he played a sheik. But, then again, how many of us can expect that much after we've been dead and gone for seventy-five years?
The Eagle is a fun Valentino movie - he romances the daughter of the man who stole his family's land, and we buy it, because Valentino does project a great deal of charm and come off as a believable lover and warrior. He probably would have made a great Batman in another era, and Vilma Banky has genuine chemistry with him. There's a fair amount of swashbuckling and derring-do, but Valentino and Banky are the core of the movie and there's no real slowdown when he's pretending to be her French tutor.
The Alloy Orchestra contributed a new score to sister group Box 5's restoration; it's as much fun as usual - I wish more contemporary filmmakers would hire Alloy for a score, because they have a great knack for letting the audience know when it's time to get down to business. The print is very nice, if not as eye-popping as the work done on Phantom of the Opera. All in all, a fun time at the movies.
Ghost Rider
* * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2007 at AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
You've got to feel kind of sorry for Nicolas Cage here. He's a huge comic book nut - he took his stage name from Marvel's Power Man, he and his son are co-writing a comic for Virgin, he was attached to play Superman when Tim Burton was going to be directing, and named his youngest child Kal-El after the man of steel. So I figure he really deserves a good comic book movie, rather than this bland thing.
The shame of it is, there's enough right in the setup to make it disappointing. Writer/director Mark Stephen Johnson has the right idea in making it feel more like Blade with western influences than other superhero movies, and casts people who are fun to watch - Cage makes Johnny Blaze eccentric without making him a freak show. Eva Mendes would be fun even if the producers had allowed her to button her shirt ("Eva Mendes's cleavage" really should get a co-starring credit) - there's a funny scene where she's waiting for Blaze in a restaurant and pulls a magic eight ball out of her purse to ask whether he'll show, and we buy this random, goofy thing because we like her. And Sam Elliott as the mentor character - Sam Elliott's a gimme. You can't screw him up.
Sadly, the film is bereft of interesting bad guys, so while, yeah, Ghost Rider is pretty neat, there's not much of a story to stick him into. The character's also a pretty goofy visual: I remember when the trailer first came out, I figure that that's as good as you're going to get Ghost Rider to look, and it was still kind of silly. Sometimes the character looks really good, and sometimes the expensive technology looks like something from The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra set afire.
But, some good might still come of this: Cage is talking about producing a She-Hulk movie to star Mendes. I'd be all over that.
The General
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2007 at the Institute for Contemporary Art (Alloy Orchestra) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
If you like film, then this should be a rule: If The General is playing in your neighborhood, you do see it. Period, end of story. If The General is playing with the Alloy Orchestra accompanying, there's a good chance of a "blackout" situation, where one has the tickets in hand even before quite realizing that they were on sale.
Which is as it should be.
Music & Lyrics
* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2007 at Regal Fenway #12 (first-run) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
There's something almost perversely clever about having the sanest person in a movie be the washed-up 80s pop star. Hugh Grant winds up playing the straight man in this movie, a thinly disguised "other guy from Wham!" who has a chance for a comeback when a loopy pop tart asks him to write a song for her and he recruits his substitute cleaning lady to write the lyrics.
It's a lightweight little romantic comedy, and that's no bad thing. Indeed, at one point during the movie, Grant's character defends such things, if not directly: A good, catchy three-minute pop song will affect millions more people than even the greatest novels, so don't apologize for liking or creating them. They work, and that's all that needs to be said.
Music & Lyrics works. Not transcendently, so that you'll remember much of it long afterwards, but in the moment? It elicits smiles and occasionally surprises you with something clever. Which is all it needs to do.
Happy Birthday Daffy
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2007 at the Brattle Theater (Bugs Bunny Film Festival) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
Ninety minutes of Daffy Duck cartoons, in all his various incarnations - the deliciously egocentric Chuck Jones version who works as a perfect foil for Bugs Bunny, the fast-talking, genuinely daffy fellow, the victim of circumstance.
Daffy doesn't work on his own; he needs a straight man. But we love him, even as he sells out Bugs Bunny because he is "a duck bent on self-preservation". He's got the best lines and his bill is one of the funniest bits of maulable cartoon anatomy ever devised.
Forbidden Planet
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
The first film in this year's Sci-Fi Film Festival (after the obligatory Duck Dodgers cartoon) is one I just reviewed a month or so ago. Still good stuff: Warner does appear to have made new prints available, and it looks even nicer on-screen than it did on HD-DVD.
Full review (still) at HBS.
Metropolis
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
I love this movie. Watching it with the marathon audience, after getting into a bit of an online shouting match with people who were reading to simply dismiss it for being anime (animated films are okay, Japanese films are okay, but put the two together and it apparently makes perfect sense to just dismiss them out of hand), I cringed a little, because I know that it plays into what a lot of people don't like about many anime films - it's dense with ideas and visuals, it doesn't stop to explain, it makes seemingly incongruous choices.
But that's what's great about it - it's a full world, and even though the audience initially laughs at "I Can't Stop Loving You" playing as a the city is laid waste, it's perfect - it prevents us from enjoying the destruction too much, and it encapsulates the theme of unrequited (and unrequitable) love perfectly
And some people passed on it because of the tools used to make it. Fools.
Full review at HBS.
Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster is a movie whose title garners low expectations, and yet it somehow manages to not meet them. It gives us both a NASA android prototype going haywire and the aliens who shot it down kidnapping Earth women for breeding stock, but never succeeds in making either really fun, unless you enjoy laughing at how something is badly produced. In that case, sure, go ahead and laugh at the scientists zipping around Puerto Rico on their motorscooter, the static and poorly-acted scenes on the alien ship, or the clumsy and non-threatening robot.
It's easy to say that one shouldn't expect much, but even with such a silly premise - and maybe even with such an obviously limited budget - the filmmakers could do better. This film is seldom even bad in a way where one can really soak in the badness and admire the effort.
Puzzlehead
* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
This one will get a full review at some point in the near future, but for right now, I'll just say I liked it. It's the story of an engineer who builds a robot using himself as a model, only to find himself eventually struggling with his creation for control over his own life - with the woman they love caught in the middle of the increasingly bizarre tug-of-war. It's told from the robot's perspective, which makes the narration interesting: "Puzzlehead" attempts to describe the sensation of being reactivated after a long time switched off, or having his autonomy neutered, and it's an intriguing idea. Necessary, too, because otherwise Puzzlehead's narration might humanize him, so these bits which emphasize his non-humanity are important.
The story this narration is wrapped around is just the right kind of creepy, noirish stuff, too: A messy, occasionally violent game of alternating identity theft that not only intrigues the audience in terms of what the next step in the dance will be, but eventually leads us to wonder what effect this will have on the robot's moral parameters, since he is like a child learning from every action. That's what makes the movie unique, in the end - it's neither an evil robot or exploited robot film, but a psychological thriller in which one of the characters is an android.
Flash Godon - Rocketship
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
This is why comic books can't be adapted directly into movies, if you figure each issue of the comic is equivalent to an episode of a Saturday serial. By themselves, I imagine each episode of "Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe" was a fun experience, full of action and intrigue and a new element to be added to the plot. With a week between them, they're each exciting and the audience can let the bad parts fall away by the time they come back for the next installment. Take in a lot of the installments back-to-back, even (or, perhaps, especially) edited down to feature length, and the absurdity accumulates, the reversals piling on so quickly that one laughs at what the creators expect us to buy rather than just running along with it.
Also? As much as I can intellectually applaud the filmmakers for giving the women as much skin to ogle as the men, I'm sure that the ladies will agree with me when I say that some of these people really should be wearing pants.
Trail of the Screaming Forehead
* * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
To be fair to Trail of the Screaming Forehead, it's nowhere near as bloody awful as the writer/director's previous genre spoof, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, which sets a low standard almost impossible to live down to. Indeed, Forehead has a few moments of genuine humor, even as Larry Blamire beats his two or three jokes to death with repetition. But even if Forehead were executed well, I strongly suspect it would be obsolete. That's not the fault of Blamire, but three blokes from England: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright have killed this sort of parody dead.
They didn't do it alone, of course, but Shaun of the Dead will likely be seen as a turning point in the coming years: It's the moment when comedians stopped taking the easy way out, and instead of just highlighting and exaggerating a genre's flaws, put their efforts into making a movie that obeyed the rules of the genre, but applied them intelligently while still making the audience bust a gut.
Word has it that Hot Fuzz is more of the same. Heck, the next film in the line-up, Slither, is easily much funnier than Forehead, and rather than mocking the things that monster movies have often done badly, it embraces what's done well. Forehead has a little game, but unless the audience is going to laugh non-stop at "Look! Monster movies in the fifties and sixties were poorly acted with stilted dialog, and this is even more poorly acted with worse dialog!", it's got fifteen minutes of jokes to stretch into an hour and a half of movie.
Mel Brooks got away with this sort of thing for a long time, but at his best, he knew he had to have more. Sure, this form of parody isn't dead yet - "____ Movie" keeps coming out - but with any luck, it's on its way out.
Slither
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
As I said, this is great fun. It's funny, thrilling, full of creatively disgusting visuals, witty line readings.
And, it kept me awake between midnight and two. Always a good indication a movie is doing something right.
Full review at HBS.
Chopping Mall
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
Here, I had a little more trouble staying awake. Three A.M. is a killer, isn't it? Same thing happened at another one of these - I don't remember falling asleep, but the cast seems to be mysteriously reduced without my knowing how someone bit the dust.
Ah, well. Not like I missed something really great. Security robots go kill-crazy thanks to a lightning strike, and of course a bunch of teenagers are partying in the mall where they work after hours. Think the virgins will survive? Damn right.
I've seen worse. But I'm not going to seek it out to find out what I missed.
The Stepford Wives
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
There may have been sleeping here, too. But The Stepford Wives is the sort of movie where you can drift off for a few minutes and come back and still not necessarily feel like you missed anything. Not that it feels padded or over-extended; it just procedes at a steady pace, working a slow build until, by the time it gets to the big revelations, it feels inevitable.
Part of this, of course, is that as I mentioned when I saw the remake a couple years ago, everyone knows what The Stepford Wives is and what it's about. Thirty years ago, would it have been so obvious? Maybe. The end would have been just as chilling, though, and that's what counts.
Blade Runner (Original Theatrical Cut)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
Supposedly, Warner Brothers and the various other entities that are involved with this film are planning something special for its twenty-fifth anniversary, probably another special edition (this would, I guess, be version 3.0). The talk was that we likely won't see this original theatrical version again, and we weren't supposed to talk about it being shown.
Well, okay, I'm breaking that. I didn't sign anything. It played, it was good, and the voice-over isn't nearly as terrible as the reputation it has acquired.
Dark Star
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
Heh. It's been a while since I saw this, probably some late weekend night my sophomore year of college, so, geez, twelve years or so. I've got to find time to revisit this sort of movie every once in a while, rather than just waiting for them to show up at the Brattle or marathon or the like. I've just got too many movies on my shelf.
And that doesn't even include this one, although it probably will sooner or later. It's a fun, goofy little movie that's probably smarter than a lot of more serious science fiction films. John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon have ideas in their head, and even if they're often cribbed from others like Ray Bradbury. This is way before John Carpenter got pigeonholed as a horror director; willing to try anything in this student film which he expanded into a feature.
Monster House
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
I liked this movie in theaters; quite a bit, really, although upon seeing it at the marathon, it's clear that a great chunk of the appeal was technology. Scenes which looked awesome in 3-D look merely neat here.
And what's this doing at a sci-fi marathon, anyway? It's a cute little movie, but if the organizers felt they needed something cute, recent, animated, and kid-friendly, why not Robots?
Full review at HBS.
RoboCop
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
Somehow I'd never seen RoboCop before. That is a crying shame; it's as smart as it is over-the-top and violent, making good use of the news story devices Verhoven would later use to excess in Starship Troopers. The corporatization of services like law enforcement and the military, which seemed perhaps a little paranoid when the film was first made, seems prescient today, and more credit than I expected for making the corporate politics more interesting than I expected.
Indeed, it may seem kind of odd, but the thing that stuck with me from this movie was the observation of how corporate executives have evolved. The first generation is founders, people who had ideas and wanted to do remarkable things. The second generation is loyal to the company, though they often see the company as an entity whose survival is more important than the goals for which it was founded. The third generation is simply mercenary, playing politics as a game and out for nothing but their own gain.
Everything else - the willingness to accept authoritarianism, the idea that crime will spin so out of control as to require radical solutions, the nifty action, the idea that all the new technology is useless unless it has a human heart - that's good too, and just goes to show what a great, classic movie this is, even if it did spawn less impressive follow-ups.
Actually, that "elsewhere" number could be as high as 31, since I saw six films in the sci-fi marathon before midnight, with no sleeping done until 2am or so. There could have been some really sick numbers, but I opted not to try and survive the Brattle's "Schlock Around the Clock" marathon, which would have started at 9:30pm on Saturday and run straight through until 12:30pm Sunday (overlapping the start of the Sci-Fi Marathon by a half-hour). I don't know if I have that kind of strength.
I've avoided visiting the sci-fi marathon's message board all week, wanting to organize my thoughts a little and just not looking forward to the annual "watching bad movies is not nearly as much fun as watching good movies" argument. And, of course, I'm going to have bad things to say about Trail of the Screaming Forehead, because that's a movie just designed to irritate me - watching movies that are deliberately bad is a much more painful experience than watching a bad movie whose filmmakers really felt they were making he best movie they can.
D.O.A.
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2007 at The Harvard Film Archive (Cold War Films) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
D.O.A. has one of the classic mystery hooks - a man given a "luminous toxin" searches for his murderer before the slow-acting poison finishes its work. It's one of those ideas so simple and brilliant that anyone who tries to use it at a later date must obviously be doing a remake whether it is credited as such (the Dennis Quaid film of the same name) or simply uses it as an obvious source of inspiration (the godawful Crank).
This version is an obvious B movie, and initially exhibits a lot of that kind of pulp cinema's weaknesses: After the scene that sets up the flashback, much of the first act is actually clumsy and annoying - the protagonist takes off to San Francisco to escape his clingy girlfriend/secretary, and while she's annoying enough that you can't really blame him, the sound effects as he looks at other women are outright juvenile enough that he becomes a pain, too. But then we see his drink switched, he goes to doctors and learns his fate, and the movie kicks into high gear. It's like a season of 24 crammed into eighty-odd minutes in its propulsive urgency. Where many noirs are hard-boiled, D.O.A. lets its characters wear their desperation on their sleeves, so that even the scenes with the annoying secretary become poignant by the end.
Rocketship X-M
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2007 at The Harvard Film Archive (Cold War Films) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
I'm not sure which is more annoying about Rocketship X-M - the obviously awful science or the jaw-droppingly ridiculous way in which it handles its one female character. The latter probably has some sort of basis in fact, but it's still sort of stunning for a modern audience to watch a film like this where the woman scientist has obviously proved her brilliance only to be patronized at every turn.
Is that more annoying than a rocket designed for a round-trip to the moon being nearly able to get to Mars and back because the passengers overslept? Maybe not. In any event, it's a deeply stupid movie, no matter how interesting what they actually find on Mars is.
The Eagle
* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2007 at the Institute for Contemporary Art (The Alloy Orchestra) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
Rudolph Valentino is a name most film fans know, even if they couldn't pick him out of a lineup they way they could with, say, Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. He's a vaguely remembered symbol of roaring twenties virility who died too young to appear in talking pictures or grow into more substantial roles. People vaguely remember that he did a couple of movies where he played a sheik. But, then again, how many of us can expect that much after we've been dead and gone for seventy-five years?
The Eagle is a fun Valentino movie - he romances the daughter of the man who stole his family's land, and we buy it, because Valentino does project a great deal of charm and come off as a believable lover and warrior. He probably would have made a great Batman in another era, and Vilma Banky has genuine chemistry with him. There's a fair amount of swashbuckling and derring-do, but Valentino and Banky are the core of the movie and there's no real slowdown when he's pretending to be her French tutor.
The Alloy Orchestra contributed a new score to sister group Box 5's restoration; it's as much fun as usual - I wish more contemporary filmmakers would hire Alloy for a score, because they have a great knack for letting the audience know when it's time to get down to business. The print is very nice, if not as eye-popping as the work done on Phantom of the Opera. All in all, a fun time at the movies.
Ghost Rider
* * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2007 at AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
You've got to feel kind of sorry for Nicolas Cage here. He's a huge comic book nut - he took his stage name from Marvel's Power Man, he and his son are co-writing a comic for Virgin, he was attached to play Superman when Tim Burton was going to be directing, and named his youngest child Kal-El after the man of steel. So I figure he really deserves a good comic book movie, rather than this bland thing.
The shame of it is, there's enough right in the setup to make it disappointing. Writer/director Mark Stephen Johnson has the right idea in making it feel more like Blade with western influences than other superhero movies, and casts people who are fun to watch - Cage makes Johnny Blaze eccentric without making him a freak show. Eva Mendes would be fun even if the producers had allowed her to button her shirt ("Eva Mendes's cleavage" really should get a co-starring credit) - there's a funny scene where she's waiting for Blaze in a restaurant and pulls a magic eight ball out of her purse to ask whether he'll show, and we buy this random, goofy thing because we like her. And Sam Elliott as the mentor character - Sam Elliott's a gimme. You can't screw him up.
Sadly, the film is bereft of interesting bad guys, so while, yeah, Ghost Rider is pretty neat, there's not much of a story to stick him into. The character's also a pretty goofy visual: I remember when the trailer first came out, I figure that that's as good as you're going to get Ghost Rider to look, and it was still kind of silly. Sometimes the character looks really good, and sometimes the expensive technology looks like something from The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra set afire.
But, some good might still come of this: Cage is talking about producing a She-Hulk movie to star Mendes. I'd be all over that.
The General
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2007 at the Institute for Contemporary Art (Alloy Orchestra) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
If you like film, then this should be a rule: If The General is playing in your neighborhood, you do see it. Period, end of story. If The General is playing with the Alloy Orchestra accompanying, there's a good chance of a "blackout" situation, where one has the tickets in hand even before quite realizing that they were on sale.
Which is as it should be.
Music & Lyrics
* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2007 at Regal Fenway #12 (first-run) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
There's something almost perversely clever about having the sanest person in a movie be the washed-up 80s pop star. Hugh Grant winds up playing the straight man in this movie, a thinly disguised "other guy from Wham!" who has a chance for a comeback when a loopy pop tart asks him to write a song for her and he recruits his substitute cleaning lady to write the lyrics.
It's a lightweight little romantic comedy, and that's no bad thing. Indeed, at one point during the movie, Grant's character defends such things, if not directly: A good, catchy three-minute pop song will affect millions more people than even the greatest novels, so don't apologize for liking or creating them. They work, and that's all that needs to be said.
Music & Lyrics works. Not transcendently, so that you'll remember much of it long afterwards, but in the moment? It elicits smiles and occasionally surprises you with something clever. Which is all it needs to do.
Happy Birthday Daffy
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2007 at the Brattle Theater (Bugs Bunny Film Festival) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
Ninety minutes of Daffy Duck cartoons, in all his various incarnations - the deliciously egocentric Chuck Jones version who works as a perfect foil for Bugs Bunny, the fast-talking, genuinely daffy fellow, the victim of circumstance.
Daffy doesn't work on his own; he needs a straight man. But we love him, even as he sells out Bugs Bunny because he is "a duck bent on self-preservation". He's got the best lines and his bill is one of the funniest bits of maulable cartoon anatomy ever devised.
Forbidden Planet
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
The first film in this year's Sci-Fi Film Festival (after the obligatory Duck Dodgers cartoon) is one I just reviewed a month or so ago. Still good stuff: Warner does appear to have made new prints available, and it looks even nicer on-screen than it did on HD-DVD.
Full review (still) at HBS.
Metropolis
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
I love this movie. Watching it with the marathon audience, after getting into a bit of an online shouting match with people who were reading to simply dismiss it for being anime (animated films are okay, Japanese films are okay, but put the two together and it apparently makes perfect sense to just dismiss them out of hand), I cringed a little, because I know that it plays into what a lot of people don't like about many anime films - it's dense with ideas and visuals, it doesn't stop to explain, it makes seemingly incongruous choices.
But that's what's great about it - it's a full world, and even though the audience initially laughs at "I Can't Stop Loving You" playing as a the city is laid waste, it's perfect - it prevents us from enjoying the destruction too much, and it encapsulates the theme of unrequited (and unrequitable) love perfectly
And some people passed on it because of the tools used to make it. Fools.
Full review at HBS.
Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster is a movie whose title garners low expectations, and yet it somehow manages to not meet them. It gives us both a NASA android prototype going haywire and the aliens who shot it down kidnapping Earth women for breeding stock, but never succeeds in making either really fun, unless you enjoy laughing at how something is badly produced. In that case, sure, go ahead and laugh at the scientists zipping around Puerto Rico on their motorscooter, the static and poorly-acted scenes on the alien ship, or the clumsy and non-threatening robot.
It's easy to say that one shouldn't expect much, but even with such a silly premise - and maybe even with such an obviously limited budget - the filmmakers could do better. This film is seldom even bad in a way where one can really soak in the badness and admire the effort.
Puzzlehead
* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
This one will get a full review at some point in the near future, but for right now, I'll just say I liked it. It's the story of an engineer who builds a robot using himself as a model, only to find himself eventually struggling with his creation for control over his own life - with the woman they love caught in the middle of the increasingly bizarre tug-of-war. It's told from the robot's perspective, which makes the narration interesting: "Puzzlehead" attempts to describe the sensation of being reactivated after a long time switched off, or having his autonomy neutered, and it's an intriguing idea. Necessary, too, because otherwise Puzzlehead's narration might humanize him, so these bits which emphasize his non-humanity are important.
The story this narration is wrapped around is just the right kind of creepy, noirish stuff, too: A messy, occasionally violent game of alternating identity theft that not only intrigues the audience in terms of what the next step in the dance will be, but eventually leads us to wonder what effect this will have on the robot's moral parameters, since he is like a child learning from every action. That's what makes the movie unique, in the end - it's neither an evil robot or exploited robot film, but a psychological thriller in which one of the characters is an android.
Flash Godon - Rocketship
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
This is why comic books can't be adapted directly into movies, if you figure each issue of the comic is equivalent to an episode of a Saturday serial. By themselves, I imagine each episode of "Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe" was a fun experience, full of action and intrigue and a new element to be added to the plot. With a week between them, they're each exciting and the audience can let the bad parts fall away by the time they come back for the next installment. Take in a lot of the installments back-to-back, even (or, perhaps, especially) edited down to feature length, and the absurdity accumulates, the reversals piling on so quickly that one laughs at what the creators expect us to buy rather than just running along with it.
Also? As much as I can intellectually applaud the filmmakers for giving the women as much skin to ogle as the men, I'm sure that the ladies will agree with me when I say that some of these people really should be wearing pants.
Trail of the Screaming Forehead
* * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
To be fair to Trail of the Screaming Forehead, it's nowhere near as bloody awful as the writer/director's previous genre spoof, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, which sets a low standard almost impossible to live down to. Indeed, Forehead has a few moments of genuine humor, even as Larry Blamire beats his two or three jokes to death with repetition. But even if Forehead were executed well, I strongly suspect it would be obsolete. That's not the fault of Blamire, but three blokes from England: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright have killed this sort of parody dead.
They didn't do it alone, of course, but Shaun of the Dead will likely be seen as a turning point in the coming years: It's the moment when comedians stopped taking the easy way out, and instead of just highlighting and exaggerating a genre's flaws, put their efforts into making a movie that obeyed the rules of the genre, but applied them intelligently while still making the audience bust a gut.
Word has it that Hot Fuzz is more of the same. Heck, the next film in the line-up, Slither, is easily much funnier than Forehead, and rather than mocking the things that monster movies have often done badly, it embraces what's done well. Forehead has a little game, but unless the audience is going to laugh non-stop at "Look! Monster movies in the fifties and sixties were poorly acted with stilted dialog, and this is even more poorly acted with worse dialog!", it's got fifteen minutes of jokes to stretch into an hour and a half of movie.
Mel Brooks got away with this sort of thing for a long time, but at his best, he knew he had to have more. Sure, this form of parody isn't dead yet - "____ Movie" keeps coming out - but with any luck, it's on its way out.
Slither
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
As I said, this is great fun. It's funny, thrilling, full of creatively disgusting visuals, witty line readings.
And, it kept me awake between midnight and two. Always a good indication a movie is doing something right.
Full review at HBS.
Chopping Mall
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
Here, I had a little more trouble staying awake. Three A.M. is a killer, isn't it? Same thing happened at another one of these - I don't remember falling asleep, but the cast seems to be mysteriously reduced without my knowing how someone bit the dust.
Ah, well. Not like I missed something really great. Security robots go kill-crazy thanks to a lightning strike, and of course a bunch of teenagers are partying in the mall where they work after hours. Think the virgins will survive? Damn right.
I've seen worse. But I'm not going to seek it out to find out what I missed.
The Stepford Wives
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
There may have been sleeping here, too. But The Stepford Wives is the sort of movie where you can drift off for a few minutes and come back and still not necessarily feel like you missed anything. Not that it feels padded or over-extended; it just procedes at a steady pace, working a slow build until, by the time it gets to the big revelations, it feels inevitable.
Part of this, of course, is that as I mentioned when I saw the remake a couple years ago, everyone knows what The Stepford Wives is and what it's about. Thirty years ago, would it have been so obvious? Maybe. The end would have been just as chilling, though, and that's what counts.
Blade Runner (Original Theatrical Cut)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
Supposedly, Warner Brothers and the various other entities that are involved with this film are planning something special for its twenty-fifth anniversary, probably another special edition (this would, I guess, be version 3.0). The talk was that we likely won't see this original theatrical version again, and we weren't supposed to talk about it being shown.
Well, okay, I'm breaking that. I didn't sign anything. It played, it was good, and the voice-over isn't nearly as terrible as the reputation it has acquired.
Dark Star
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
Heh. It's been a while since I saw this, probably some late weekend night my sophomore year of college, so, geez, twelve years or so. I've got to find time to revisit this sort of movie every once in a while, rather than just waiting for them to show up at the Brattle or marathon or the like. I've just got too many movies on my shelf.
And that doesn't even include this one, although it probably will sooner or later. It's a fun, goofy little movie that's probably smarter than a lot of more serious science fiction films. John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon have ideas in their head, and even if they're often cribbed from others like Ray Bradbury. This is way before John Carpenter got pigeonholed as a horror director; willing to try anything in this student film which he expanded into a feature.
Monster House
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
I liked this movie in theaters; quite a bit, really, although upon seeing it at the marathon, it's clear that a great chunk of the appeal was technology. Scenes which looked awesome in 3-D look merely neat here.
And what's this doing at a sci-fi marathon, anyway? It's a cute little movie, but if the organizers felt they needed something cute, recent, animated, and kid-friendly, why not Robots?
Full review at HBS.
RoboCop
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2007 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/32)
Somehow I'd never seen RoboCop before. That is a crying shame; it's as smart as it is over-the-top and violent, making good use of the news story devices Verhoven would later use to excess in Starship Troopers. The corporatization of services like law enforcement and the military, which seemed perhaps a little paranoid when the film was first made, seems prescient today, and more credit than I expected for making the corporate politics more interesting than I expected.
Indeed, it may seem kind of odd, but the thing that stuck with me from this movie was the observation of how corporate executives have evolved. The first generation is founders, people who had ideas and wanted to do remarkable things. The second generation is loyal to the company, though they often see the company as an entity whose survival is more important than the goals for which it was founded. The third generation is simply mercenary, playing politics as a game and out for nothing but their own gain.
Everything else - the willingness to accept authoritarianism, the idea that crime will spin so out of control as to require radical solutions, the nifty action, the idea that all the new technology is useless unless it has a human heart - that's good too, and just goes to show what a great, classic movie this is, even if it did spawn less impressive follow-ups.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Romance, mostly
REMINDER: The Brattle Movie-Watch-a-Thon is in progress. Drop me a line if you would like to sponsor me, go here to make a donation, and check back on a near-daily basis to see how well I'm doing. With these films, I reached 18 Brattle films seen and 19 elsewhere, which means 55 "points" total (or 27.5, depending on whether Brattle films count for two or other films count for ½)
Romance became more of a theme than I intended, with the non-Brattle films sort of fitting into the category if you push had enough. Okay, you have to push real hard.
Ugh. Late, and I've still got the end of the Watch-a-Thon period to write up. G'night.
The Princess Bride
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 February 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Classic Romance II) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
I suppose that there are people out there who need The Princess Bride described to them, but I find that difficult to conceive. The film is a good-natured fairy tale packed with memorable characters and performances, along with swashbuckling fun. It's got just the right level of self- and genre-awareness, always able to dance around where things seem silly by virtue of good pacing and characters who refuse to be grimly serious just because that's the convention.
I find I've grown to appreciate the Peter Falk/Fred Savage bookends a bit more; identifying the story so definitively as something a grandfather tells to his grandson gives it a little more leeway for anachronism and self-referentiality, but William Goldman and Rob Reiner are always careful to never overplay that hand or even specifically connect the two. They're content to be clever without hitting the audience over the head with how clever they are.
The Mummy
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 February 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Classic Romance II) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
I'll say it - I rather like the Stephen Sommers remake better than this original. It's not a bad movie, by any means, but at times it moves as slow as its title character (who suffers from rigor mortis), and its Western heroes are rather stiff themselves. It's difficult to get too terribly frightened by some of its threats.
On the flip side, it does have Karloff, tall and imposing and wearing an excellent makeup job to make him seem convincingly re-animated, dried out like a mummy but still able to walk and function in the living world. Zita Johnson is easy on the eyes as the target of both the hero's and villain's affections, not much of an actress but a striking presence. And even when it's at its most ludicrous, The Mummy at least seems to be making an effort toward believability, or at least cohesiveness, enough so that its trips into the realm of the macabre do have an edge of genuine creepiness.
The Bride of Frankenstein
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 February 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Classic Romance II)
Bride of Frankenstein starts off kind of slow, with an annoying old woman and a demonstration of Dr. Pretorius's successes in making miniature people that seem even more designed to pad the film's running time to seventy-five minutes than the opening scene with Shelley, Mary Wollestencraft, and Lord Byron. I admit, there are times when I watch it and wonder why I've always liked it so much.
But, man, does this movie pick up a head of steam. Its simple premise, that we all need love to survive and thrive, manifests itself in a number of ways, from the Monster growing smarter and more articulate from the friendship of the blind hermit to Frankenstein's wife fighting for his soul as Pretorius and the Monster try to harness his genius. In the end, it's unselfish, giving love that wins the day, and even the Monster knows it.
Dreamgirls
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 February 2007 at Belmont Studio Theater (second-run) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
I'm no big fan of musicals; as I've commented before, they need to be perfect or they're just not going to work. Dreamgirls is a surprising exception to that: It's not perfect, but it avoids crashing and burning. Maybe it's because Dreamgirls is about a topic that specifically interests me.
I think part of it is that it's got more soul than most musicals. "Showtunes" is recognized as a specific genre, and it's a frequently insipid one, with hokey call-and-answer structures, dull orchestration, and bland, declarative lyrics that make for poor pop. Dreamgirls isn't just trying to tell a story with its songs, it's trying to capture a sound, and Motown is a great sound to capture. It doesn't hurt that a movie starring Beyonce Knowles openly snorts at "R&B" and features a fantastic scene where Eddie Murphy's character has a scene that epitomizes the evolution of pop music during the past forty years - James Brown soul buried under Lionel Richie blandness eventually bursts out as prototypical hip-hop. It doesn't end well in the story, but it's a beautiful thing to see.
As much as I don't much like musicals, I wish Bill Condon would stop being such a wuss and let his musicals be musicals. Chicago took pains to stage its musical numbers as the fevered imaginings of its main character, and even when Dreamgirls allows its characters to burst into song, it's often contained in a stage or some other venue where the audience might find singing "acceptable" or not out of place.
Babel
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2007 at AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
Babel is a clever movie, though not nearly as painfully satisfied in its cleverness as the filmmakers' previous English-language film, 30 Grams. It hits its point hard - unless we communicate, the collisions of different cultures has the constant potential for disaster - but makes each of the individual stories compelling. Each story could probably be expanded enough to fill a movie on its own, but the tapestry is greater than the sum of its parts.
The Philadelphia Story
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Classic Romance II) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
The Philadelphia Story is darn-near perfect, a breezy romantic comedy from an era when such films were appreciated as more than simply disposable entertainment - it was nominated for and received several Academy Awards, and it may have deserved more. A part of me doesn't think it ends with the right pairings (or, indeed, that it needed to finish with pairing-off), but any disappointment I felt over the last couple minutes is of small magnitude, not nearly enough to tip the balance against the joy brought by the previous hundred and ten.
Two years ago, Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) and C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) had an acrimonious divorce. Now Tracy intends to marry George Kittredge (Josh Howard), a very serious former coal miner who worked his way to upper management, the polar opposite of the well-born and laid-back Haven. As the Lord family is one of the northeast's most prominent, Spy magazine wants pictures and a story from the wedding. To that end, they intend to send writer Macaulay Connor (James Stewart) and photographer Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) in undercover - introduced by Haven, who will claim they are friends of Tracy's brother, an ambassador to a South American country who cannot make it back to the wedding. Tracy, being no dummy, twigs to the plot almost immediately, and has no interest in making their job easy.
Donald Odgen Stewart has famously claimed that the screenplay for The Philadelphia Story was the easiest money he ever earned, since there was nothing about Philip Barry's original play, which also starred Hepburn during its year-long run on Broadway, that needed changing. Whether that's true or false modesty, the film is filled with fast-paced, funny banter, opportunities for characters to steal scenes, and earnest observations on how relationships can fall apart. Director George Cukor and his cast take this material and fashion a movie whose comedy stops just short of zany (except when zany is really called for), but which can quickly take things down a notch to make sure the characters are taken seriously.
Full review at HBS.
Breaking and Entering
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 February 2007 at Landmark Embassy Theater #3 (Classic Romance II) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
Who would ever have thought that Anthony Mingella would direct a movie with parkour sequences? Seriously, that blows my mind. Almost as surprising is that Mingella directing a movie that feels less that seven hours in length.
Pretty decent little movie; nice performances by Jude Law, Robin Wright Penn, and Juliette Binoche.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 February 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Classic Romance II) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
A few years ago, I gave a set of cousins movie posters for Christmas presents. It'd been a while since I'd seen the film, so I was mostly choosing based upon the fantastically stylish design. Catching up with it, I wonder what my aunt and uncle thought about my pointing their sixteen-year-old daughter at a film about a gigolo falling in love with a call girl. It's a fantastic film, but, still...
The gigolo is Paul Varjak (George Peppard), a once-promising writer who moves into the apartment above Holly Goloightly (Audrey Hepburn). Holly probably enters "actress" or "model" on her tax returns (just as Paul likely enters "writer"), but supports herself one a hundred dollars a week to visit jailed mafioso Sally Tomato (Alan Reed) and pass a "weather report" on to his lawyer every Thursday, along with occasional fifties for "trips to the powder room". The two of them hit it off immediately and become fast friends, but their situations prevent them from acting on their attraction: Paul's "patron" (Patricia Neal) wants him to herself and Holly intends to land a millionaire for a husband, so that she can support her brother when he leaves the army (he's a bit slow).
Audrey Hepburn had several memorable roles in her career, though this is undoubtedly her signature part. Holly Golightly requires both cheerful pluck and fragile sadness, and part of what makes the film such a rewatchable delight is that even after the second time through, we can still take her simple, child-like enthusiasm at face value. There's a funny scene toward the end, well after we've learned that her history is darker than her flighty party-girl persona would suggest, where she lights up like a lantern upon seeing cameras, and it elicits simple, genuine laughter rather than thoughts on how being so chipper might be some sort of front. Hepburn presents Holly to us as sad, scared, and lonely, but doesn't let those traits entirely define her. She's genuinely charming and funny, and like Paul, we fall in love with her all over again every time we meet her.
Full review at HBS.
Annie Hall
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 February 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Classic Romance II)
Normally, old Woody Allen movies just make me upset with Woody Allen, for the vast amount of crap and mediocrity he's produced in the last fifteen years or so. Annie Hall is especially annoying in that regard - it's a very good movie, but it also brings into sharp relief what Diane Keaton's career has become. Annie Hall is a genuinely interesting, amusing, eccentric character. And now she just plays a succession of smart but flusterable mothers distinguishable primarily by which young actress with half the personality she had at their age plays her daughter. It's dispiriting, really.
It is interesting to notice that these earlier Woody Allen movies are more the work of a comedian than a filmmaker; Allen is basically telling jokes, stringing them together like a rambling stand-up act even as he uses filmic devices to make his jokes. I often wonder if the disappointment of Allen's later films is in part because as he became more of a filmmaker, he strayed from his roots as a comedian, and as good a director as he became, he was a great comedian.
Romance became more of a theme than I intended, with the non-Brattle films sort of fitting into the category if you push had enough. Okay, you have to push real hard.
Ugh. Late, and I've still got the end of the Watch-a-Thon period to write up. G'night.
The Princess Bride
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 February 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Classic Romance II) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
I suppose that there are people out there who need The Princess Bride described to them, but I find that difficult to conceive. The film is a good-natured fairy tale packed with memorable characters and performances, along with swashbuckling fun. It's got just the right level of self- and genre-awareness, always able to dance around where things seem silly by virtue of good pacing and characters who refuse to be grimly serious just because that's the convention.
I find I've grown to appreciate the Peter Falk/Fred Savage bookends a bit more; identifying the story so definitively as something a grandfather tells to his grandson gives it a little more leeway for anachronism and self-referentiality, but William Goldman and Rob Reiner are always careful to never overplay that hand or even specifically connect the two. They're content to be clever without hitting the audience over the head with how clever they are.
The Mummy
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 February 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Classic Romance II) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
I'll say it - I rather like the Stephen Sommers remake better than this original. It's not a bad movie, by any means, but at times it moves as slow as its title character (who suffers from rigor mortis), and its Western heroes are rather stiff themselves. It's difficult to get too terribly frightened by some of its threats.
On the flip side, it does have Karloff, tall and imposing and wearing an excellent makeup job to make him seem convincingly re-animated, dried out like a mummy but still able to walk and function in the living world. Zita Johnson is easy on the eyes as the target of both the hero's and villain's affections, not much of an actress but a striking presence. And even when it's at its most ludicrous, The Mummy at least seems to be making an effort toward believability, or at least cohesiveness, enough so that its trips into the realm of the macabre do have an edge of genuine creepiness.
The Bride of Frankenstein
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 February 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Classic Romance II)
Bride of Frankenstein starts off kind of slow, with an annoying old woman and a demonstration of Dr. Pretorius's successes in making miniature people that seem even more designed to pad the film's running time to seventy-five minutes than the opening scene with Shelley, Mary Wollestencraft, and Lord Byron. I admit, there are times when I watch it and wonder why I've always liked it so much.
But, man, does this movie pick up a head of steam. Its simple premise, that we all need love to survive and thrive, manifests itself in a number of ways, from the Monster growing smarter and more articulate from the friendship of the blind hermit to Frankenstein's wife fighting for his soul as Pretorius and the Monster try to harness his genius. In the end, it's unselfish, giving love that wins the day, and even the Monster knows it.
Dreamgirls
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 February 2007 at Belmont Studio Theater (second-run) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
I'm no big fan of musicals; as I've commented before, they need to be perfect or they're just not going to work. Dreamgirls is a surprising exception to that: It's not perfect, but it avoids crashing and burning. Maybe it's because Dreamgirls is about a topic that specifically interests me.
I think part of it is that it's got more soul than most musicals. "Showtunes" is recognized as a specific genre, and it's a frequently insipid one, with hokey call-and-answer structures, dull orchestration, and bland, declarative lyrics that make for poor pop. Dreamgirls isn't just trying to tell a story with its songs, it's trying to capture a sound, and Motown is a great sound to capture. It doesn't hurt that a movie starring Beyonce Knowles openly snorts at "R&B" and features a fantastic scene where Eddie Murphy's character has a scene that epitomizes the evolution of pop music during the past forty years - James Brown soul buried under Lionel Richie blandness eventually bursts out as prototypical hip-hop. It doesn't end well in the story, but it's a beautiful thing to see.
As much as I don't much like musicals, I wish Bill Condon would stop being such a wuss and let his musicals be musicals. Chicago took pains to stage its musical numbers as the fevered imaginings of its main character, and even when Dreamgirls allows its characters to burst into song, it's often contained in a stage or some other venue where the audience might find singing "acceptable" or not out of place.
Babel
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2007 at AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
Babel is a clever movie, though not nearly as painfully satisfied in its cleverness as the filmmakers' previous English-language film, 30 Grams. It hits its point hard - unless we communicate, the collisions of different cultures has the constant potential for disaster - but makes each of the individual stories compelling. Each story could probably be expanded enough to fill a movie on its own, but the tapestry is greater than the sum of its parts.
The Philadelphia Story
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Classic Romance II) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
The Philadelphia Story is darn-near perfect, a breezy romantic comedy from an era when such films were appreciated as more than simply disposable entertainment - it was nominated for and received several Academy Awards, and it may have deserved more. A part of me doesn't think it ends with the right pairings (or, indeed, that it needed to finish with pairing-off), but any disappointment I felt over the last couple minutes is of small magnitude, not nearly enough to tip the balance against the joy brought by the previous hundred and ten.
Two years ago, Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) and C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) had an acrimonious divorce. Now Tracy intends to marry George Kittredge (Josh Howard), a very serious former coal miner who worked his way to upper management, the polar opposite of the well-born and laid-back Haven. As the Lord family is one of the northeast's most prominent, Spy magazine wants pictures and a story from the wedding. To that end, they intend to send writer Macaulay Connor (James Stewart) and photographer Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) in undercover - introduced by Haven, who will claim they are friends of Tracy's brother, an ambassador to a South American country who cannot make it back to the wedding. Tracy, being no dummy, twigs to the plot almost immediately, and has no interest in making their job easy.
Donald Odgen Stewart has famously claimed that the screenplay for The Philadelphia Story was the easiest money he ever earned, since there was nothing about Philip Barry's original play, which also starred Hepburn during its year-long run on Broadway, that needed changing. Whether that's true or false modesty, the film is filled with fast-paced, funny banter, opportunities for characters to steal scenes, and earnest observations on how relationships can fall apart. Director George Cukor and his cast take this material and fashion a movie whose comedy stops just short of zany (except when zany is really called for), but which can quickly take things down a notch to make sure the characters are taken seriously.
Full review at HBS.
Breaking and Entering
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 February 2007 at Landmark Embassy Theater #3 (Classic Romance II) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
Who would ever have thought that Anthony Mingella would direct a movie with parkour sequences? Seriously, that blows my mind. Almost as surprising is that Mingella directing a movie that feels less that seven hours in length.
Pretty decent little movie; nice performances by Jude Law, Robin Wright Penn, and Juliette Binoche.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 February 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Classic Romance II) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
A few years ago, I gave a set of cousins movie posters for Christmas presents. It'd been a while since I'd seen the film, so I was mostly choosing based upon the fantastically stylish design. Catching up with it, I wonder what my aunt and uncle thought about my pointing their sixteen-year-old daughter at a film about a gigolo falling in love with a call girl. It's a fantastic film, but, still...
The gigolo is Paul Varjak (George Peppard), a once-promising writer who moves into the apartment above Holly Goloightly (Audrey Hepburn). Holly probably enters "actress" or "model" on her tax returns (just as Paul likely enters "writer"), but supports herself one a hundred dollars a week to visit jailed mafioso Sally Tomato (Alan Reed) and pass a "weather report" on to his lawyer every Thursday, along with occasional fifties for "trips to the powder room". The two of them hit it off immediately and become fast friends, but their situations prevent them from acting on their attraction: Paul's "patron" (Patricia Neal) wants him to herself and Holly intends to land a millionaire for a husband, so that she can support her brother when he leaves the army (he's a bit slow).
Audrey Hepburn had several memorable roles in her career, though this is undoubtedly her signature part. Holly Golightly requires both cheerful pluck and fragile sadness, and part of what makes the film such a rewatchable delight is that even after the second time through, we can still take her simple, child-like enthusiasm at face value. There's a funny scene toward the end, well after we've learned that her history is darker than her flighty party-girl persona would suggest, where she lights up like a lantern upon seeing cameras, and it elicits simple, genuine laughter rather than thoughts on how being so chipper might be some sort of front. Hepburn presents Holly to us as sad, scared, and lonely, but doesn't let those traits entirely define her. She's genuinely charming and funny, and like Paul, we fall in love with her all over again every time we meet her.
Full review at HBS.
Annie Hall
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 February 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Classic Romance II)
Normally, old Woody Allen movies just make me upset with Woody Allen, for the vast amount of crap and mediocrity he's produced in the last fifteen years or so. Annie Hall is especially annoying in that regard - it's a very good movie, but it also brings into sharp relief what Diane Keaton's career has become. Annie Hall is a genuinely interesting, amusing, eccentric character. And now she just plays a succession of smart but flusterable mothers distinguishable primarily by which young actress with half the personality she had at their age plays her daughter. It's dispiriting, really.
It is interesting to notice that these earlier Woody Allen movies are more the work of a comedian than a filmmaker; Allen is basically telling jokes, stringing them together like a rambling stand-up act even as he uses filmic devices to make his jokes. I often wonder if the disappointment of Allen's later films is in part because as he became more of a filmmaker, he strayed from his roots as a comedian, and as good a director as he became, he was a great comedian.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Russian Fantastik Cinema, mainly
REMINDER: The Brattle Movie-Watch-a-Thon is in progress. Drop me a line if you would like to sponsor me, go here to make a donation, and check back on a near-daily basis to see how well I'm doing. With these films, I'm at 14 Brattle films seen and 16 elsewhere, which means 44 "points" total (or 22, depending on whether Brattle films count for two or other films count for ½)
Hollywood is not making the movie watch-a-thon thing easy. Seriously, would it kill them to release something that looks vaguely appealing? Smokin' Aces and The Messengers really never looked like much, but they at least had people I liked behind the cameras. This weekend looked positively barren aside from the Brattle's enjoyably off-beat Classic Romances program.
It's like Hollywood is making a deliberate effort to make the time period between Christmas and the Oscars suck as much as possible. Why, guys? Why must there be sucking?
The Messengers
* * (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2007 at AMC Fenway #14 (First-Run) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
The Messengers is the kind of movie that makes me wonder if I've become too jaded. I don't really consider two stars a "bad" rating - it's below average, but there's something of merit to be found within - but for the most part, The Messengers just sort of sat there, inert, occasionally throwing something a bit creepy on screen, but I never seemed to feel even a fraction of what the boisterous crowd around me felt. Are they just easily scared people, doing something interactive (as in, there were points where I could see jumping if someone poked me at that moment, but not from what was going on on-screen), or is it me having analyzed so many of the movies I've watched that I can't connect on a purely emotional level?
I don't think it's the latter; I have seen movies that can genuinely creep me out recently. But this one's just so by-the-numbers with its vaguely-in-trouble teenage girl, actors who not long ago seemed bound for better things (Penelope Ann Miller, Dylan McDermot, John Corbett), and obviously-reshot ending.
In fact, that ending makes me sad. It's pretty well-known that someone other than Danny and Oxide Pang directed the studio-mandated reshoots, which is always unfortunate, but it's even worse when a favorite who has had his own studio-fighting experiences like Sam Raimi is listed as a producer. Nobody likes seeing one of the good guys go over to the dark side.
Planet of Storms (Planeta Bur)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2007 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Remis Auditorium (Russian Fantastik Cinema) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
B-movies are B-movies no matter where they come from. This Russian example of the genre isn't bad as cold-war era sci-fi goes - it's certainly at least got all the trappings that those who love fifties/sixties cheese go for: Lizard men, a man in a robot suit, a woman fretting about her boyfriend down on the planet. It's an itch-scratcher, at the very least.
It does have a fairly cool visual effect for the cloudy surface of Venus as seen from orbit, even if the planet itself does seem like the Russian equivalent of Bryce Canyon. It's even got a sense of humor about the tendency of Soviet films to dip into propagandizing - the robot starts annoying the human crew with its talk about how it is a citizen, too, because all thinking beings are treated equally. But, overall, it sort of falls into the "we came, we did some dumb things and almost got killed, we left" trap.
To the Stars by Hard Ways (Cherez Ternii k Zvyozdam)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2007 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Remis Auditorium (Russian Fantastik Cinema) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
Like Star Wars, To the Stars by Hard Ways is a product of the late seventies/early eighties that was given a fresh new coat of paint twenty years later, to once again be devoured by nostalgic boomers. Like a lot of ambitious science fiction films made on either side of the iron curtain, To the Stars is a bit too long for its own good and hammers at its audience with a message, but it's playful enough to be worth watching a few times.
It seems to take forever to get going, as the first half is overly preoccupied with showing Niya (Yelena Metyolkina), a bald, telepathic girl found on a derelict space station, what it means to be human and social and stuff, before eventually rocketing back to her home planet, where pollution has driven the residents underground and they're doomed without Earth's water-purification technology. But, of course, the powers that be don't want any outsiders involved and blah blah blah...
Pretty standard stuff, but there are some parts that are worth notice. For instance, an actual effort was made to simulate zero-gravity by filming space station scenes underwater, and it looks pretty cool. Still, it's kind of amazing to me that the version the museum showed actually cuts twenty-five minutes - it seems to be the wrong twenty-five, at least, as the first half seems endless and the second sort of lurches about.
First on the Moon (Pervye Na Lune)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2007 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Remis Auditorium (Russian Fantastik Cinema) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
First on the Moon isn't the first "documentary fantasy" I've seen to postulate a Soviet space program that achieved even greater things than the real thing, and I'm reasonably certain that there's another out there I haven't yet seen. I also suspect that there's more to come: Shooting documentary-style isn't terribly expensive for an independent filmmaker, and the Soviet space program did enough remarkable things that speculating on what they could have accomplished if things went just a little better is fertile ground.
Not that First on the Moon limits itself to "just a little better" - it purports to tell us the true story of Ivan Kharlamov (Boris Vlasov), who landed on the moon in 1938. It's an audacious premise, but one which director Aleksey Fedorchenko and writers Aleksandr Gonorovskiy and Ramil Yamaleyev frequently prove themselves equal to. After all, they've got documentary proof - the NKVD (the predecessor of the more famous KGB) was filming the Soviet people clandestinely, especially in highly sensitive areas like the secret space program, and though the archives are a mess, there's plenty of film to be found by dedicated searchers.
So we learn about Kharlamov, Khanif Fattakov (Aleksei Slavnin), pretty athlete Nadezhda Svetlaya (Viktoriya Ilyinskaya), and circus midget Mikail Roschin (Viktor Kotov). Some of it is via archive footage, with the narrator noting that few records of Kharlamov's early life exist. There are also interviews, with the uncooperative camera operator assigned to Kharlamov, various circus performers who know of Roschin via their community's oral history, and with an elderly Fattakhov (Anatoli Otradnov). The present-day Kharif Fattakhov would have to be around ninety if the "present day" segments are meant to be 2005, and while he does look like the sort of rugged, fit individual that could be vital into his tenth decade, he's charming in a gruff way, talking about the crush he had on Nadezhda or the way the government hushed up the program's existence without undue wistfulness or rancor. He's a guy who's seen a lot in his time and survived long enough to know there's no good in wishing for things to have turned out differently.
Full review at HBS.
The Painted Veil
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 February 2007 at Landmark Embassy #3 (First-run) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
The plot of this movie is quite off-putting, almost to the point where I couldn't enjoy what it was setting out to accomplish: A man spitefully drags his unfaithful wife into the middle of a cholera epidemic, and through the experience they find true love? I can't say that hit me quite right. I get that the story arc, about people who married in haste for the wrong reasons finding love afterward, is a fine one, but bringing someone into a hot zone is not behavior I would be able to forgive. Of course, my reaction would likely be "pride and propriety be damned".
It is a beautifully filmed period piece, and Naomi Watts is something close to excellent. Edward Norton is good, too, although I didn't quite buy his English accent. It's always a pleasure to see Diana Rigg turn up in a good part, and she makes a fine Mother Superior at the convent where Norton's character has set up shop to treat the epidemic.
Apropos of nothing, considering the setting and time period, I kept expecting to see Jet Li appear and put the hurt on westerners trying to exploit his homeland.
Disappearances
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2007 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagements) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
The difference between the trailer for Disappearances that played in front of every movie the Brattle played for the past month and the one that appears on the film's website is instructive - the trailer on the website is far more representative of the actual film, but the newer one that shows up in theaters sells the movie better: It cuts out most of the mystical elements, focusing tightly on the action-movie elements and playing up Kris Kristofferson's performance. It's a shame Vermont filmmaker Jay Craven didn't realize this during the actual making of the film.
The story, like many of Craven's other films, is taken from a Howard Frank Mosher novel about the people of Kingdom County, Vermont. The central focus is on "Wild Bill" Bonhomme (Charlie McDermott), the 16-year-old son of "Quebec Bill" Bonhomme, a retired bootlegger who is drawn back into the business when his barn (and the alfalfa in it) burns down during a Prohibition winter, necessitating some quick money. His mother (Heather Rae) objects, especially when Quebec Bill suggests their son accompany him on this "scouting mission", but Quebec Bill's sister Cordelia (Genevieve Bujold) convinces her that it's in the Bonhomme bloodline and young Bill should at least see it. So father and son head north in a boat, where they'll meet up with Quebec Bill's brother-in-law Henry (Gary Farmer) and Rat Kinneson (William Sanderson), an escaped con who works at their farm. The job looks bad on the face of it, and when the Bonhommes encounter the man they intend to steal the whiskey from - a demonic-looking amnesiac calling himself Carcajou (Lothaire Bluteau) - things quickly go straight to hell.
There's the makings of a strong "northeastern western" there, but that description omits a few things. Mainly, what it leaves out is the mystical elements tied up in Bujold's Cordelia - she makes predictions about the future, talks about how the men in their family tend to disappear, appears to Wild Bill to deliver cryptic messages, and just generally acts weird. Ms. Bujold does a generally very good job with the part: Cordelia is meant to be spooky and eccentric, and the trouble is never that we don't believe in her; it's that she's just a crazy old woman who initially seems to be serving no purpose other than to distract from what could be some good, pulpy crime. When the mystical stuff does start to have some relevance, it doesn't add a whole lot to the story (indeed, the first "disappearance" we see feels like a gigantic rip-off).
Full review at HBS.
Hollywood is not making the movie watch-a-thon thing easy. Seriously, would it kill them to release something that looks vaguely appealing? Smokin' Aces and The Messengers really never looked like much, but they at least had people I liked behind the cameras. This weekend looked positively barren aside from the Brattle's enjoyably off-beat Classic Romances program.
It's like Hollywood is making a deliberate effort to make the time period between Christmas and the Oscars suck as much as possible. Why, guys? Why must there be sucking?
The Messengers
* * (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2007 at AMC Fenway #14 (First-Run) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
The Messengers is the kind of movie that makes me wonder if I've become too jaded. I don't really consider two stars a "bad" rating - it's below average, but there's something of merit to be found within - but for the most part, The Messengers just sort of sat there, inert, occasionally throwing something a bit creepy on screen, but I never seemed to feel even a fraction of what the boisterous crowd around me felt. Are they just easily scared people, doing something interactive (as in, there were points where I could see jumping if someone poked me at that moment, but not from what was going on on-screen), or is it me having analyzed so many of the movies I've watched that I can't connect on a purely emotional level?
I don't think it's the latter; I have seen movies that can genuinely creep me out recently. But this one's just so by-the-numbers with its vaguely-in-trouble teenage girl, actors who not long ago seemed bound for better things (Penelope Ann Miller, Dylan McDermot, John Corbett), and obviously-reshot ending.
In fact, that ending makes me sad. It's pretty well-known that someone other than Danny and Oxide Pang directed the studio-mandated reshoots, which is always unfortunate, but it's even worse when a favorite who has had his own studio-fighting experiences like Sam Raimi is listed as a producer. Nobody likes seeing one of the good guys go over to the dark side.
Planet of Storms (Planeta Bur)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2007 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Remis Auditorium (Russian Fantastik Cinema) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
B-movies are B-movies no matter where they come from. This Russian example of the genre isn't bad as cold-war era sci-fi goes - it's certainly at least got all the trappings that those who love fifties/sixties cheese go for: Lizard men, a man in a robot suit, a woman fretting about her boyfriend down on the planet. It's an itch-scratcher, at the very least.
It does have a fairly cool visual effect for the cloudy surface of Venus as seen from orbit, even if the planet itself does seem like the Russian equivalent of Bryce Canyon. It's even got a sense of humor about the tendency of Soviet films to dip into propagandizing - the robot starts annoying the human crew with its talk about how it is a citizen, too, because all thinking beings are treated equally. But, overall, it sort of falls into the "we came, we did some dumb things and almost got killed, we left" trap.
To the Stars by Hard Ways (Cherez Ternii k Zvyozdam)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2007 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Remis Auditorium (Russian Fantastik Cinema) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
Like Star Wars, To the Stars by Hard Ways is a product of the late seventies/early eighties that was given a fresh new coat of paint twenty years later, to once again be devoured by nostalgic boomers. Like a lot of ambitious science fiction films made on either side of the iron curtain, To the Stars is a bit too long for its own good and hammers at its audience with a message, but it's playful enough to be worth watching a few times.
It seems to take forever to get going, as the first half is overly preoccupied with showing Niya (Yelena Metyolkina), a bald, telepathic girl found on a derelict space station, what it means to be human and social and stuff, before eventually rocketing back to her home planet, where pollution has driven the residents underground and they're doomed without Earth's water-purification technology. But, of course, the powers that be don't want any outsiders involved and blah blah blah...
Pretty standard stuff, but there are some parts that are worth notice. For instance, an actual effort was made to simulate zero-gravity by filming space station scenes underwater, and it looks pretty cool. Still, it's kind of amazing to me that the version the museum showed actually cuts twenty-five minutes - it seems to be the wrong twenty-five, at least, as the first half seems endless and the second sort of lurches about.
First on the Moon (Pervye Na Lune)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2007 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Remis Auditorium (Russian Fantastik Cinema) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
First on the Moon isn't the first "documentary fantasy" I've seen to postulate a Soviet space program that achieved even greater things than the real thing, and I'm reasonably certain that there's another out there I haven't yet seen. I also suspect that there's more to come: Shooting documentary-style isn't terribly expensive for an independent filmmaker, and the Soviet space program did enough remarkable things that speculating on what they could have accomplished if things went just a little better is fertile ground.
Not that First on the Moon limits itself to "just a little better" - it purports to tell us the true story of Ivan Kharlamov (Boris Vlasov), who landed on the moon in 1938. It's an audacious premise, but one which director Aleksey Fedorchenko and writers Aleksandr Gonorovskiy and Ramil Yamaleyev frequently prove themselves equal to. After all, they've got documentary proof - the NKVD (the predecessor of the more famous KGB) was filming the Soviet people clandestinely, especially in highly sensitive areas like the secret space program, and though the archives are a mess, there's plenty of film to be found by dedicated searchers.
So we learn about Kharlamov, Khanif Fattakov (Aleksei Slavnin), pretty athlete Nadezhda Svetlaya (Viktoriya Ilyinskaya), and circus midget Mikail Roschin (Viktor Kotov). Some of it is via archive footage, with the narrator noting that few records of Kharlamov's early life exist. There are also interviews, with the uncooperative camera operator assigned to Kharlamov, various circus performers who know of Roschin via their community's oral history, and with an elderly Fattakhov (Anatoli Otradnov). The present-day Kharif Fattakhov would have to be around ninety if the "present day" segments are meant to be 2005, and while he does look like the sort of rugged, fit individual that could be vital into his tenth decade, he's charming in a gruff way, talking about the crush he had on Nadezhda or the way the government hushed up the program's existence without undue wistfulness or rancor. He's a guy who's seen a lot in his time and survived long enough to know there's no good in wishing for things to have turned out differently.
Full review at HBS.
The Painted Veil
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 February 2007 at Landmark Embassy #3 (First-run) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
The plot of this movie is quite off-putting, almost to the point where I couldn't enjoy what it was setting out to accomplish: A man spitefully drags his unfaithful wife into the middle of a cholera epidemic, and through the experience they find true love? I can't say that hit me quite right. I get that the story arc, about people who married in haste for the wrong reasons finding love afterward, is a fine one, but bringing someone into a hot zone is not behavior I would be able to forgive. Of course, my reaction would likely be "pride and propriety be damned".
It is a beautifully filmed period piece, and Naomi Watts is something close to excellent. Edward Norton is good, too, although I didn't quite buy his English accent. It's always a pleasure to see Diana Rigg turn up in a good part, and she makes a fine Mother Superior at the convent where Norton's character has set up shop to treat the epidemic.
Apropos of nothing, considering the setting and time period, I kept expecting to see Jet Li appear and put the hurt on westerners trying to exploit his homeland.
Disappearances
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2007 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagements) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)
The difference between the trailer for Disappearances that played in front of every movie the Brattle played for the past month and the one that appears on the film's website is instructive - the trailer on the website is far more representative of the actual film, but the newer one that shows up in theaters sells the movie better: It cuts out most of the mystical elements, focusing tightly on the action-movie elements and playing up Kris Kristofferson's performance. It's a shame Vermont filmmaker Jay Craven didn't realize this during the actual making of the film.
The story, like many of Craven's other films, is taken from a Howard Frank Mosher novel about the people of Kingdom County, Vermont. The central focus is on "Wild Bill" Bonhomme (Charlie McDermott), the 16-year-old son of "Quebec Bill" Bonhomme, a retired bootlegger who is drawn back into the business when his barn (and the alfalfa in it) burns down during a Prohibition winter, necessitating some quick money. His mother (Heather Rae) objects, especially when Quebec Bill suggests their son accompany him on this "scouting mission", but Quebec Bill's sister Cordelia (Genevieve Bujold) convinces her that it's in the Bonhomme bloodline and young Bill should at least see it. So father and son head north in a boat, where they'll meet up with Quebec Bill's brother-in-law Henry (Gary Farmer) and Rat Kinneson (William Sanderson), an escaped con who works at their farm. The job looks bad on the face of it, and when the Bonhommes encounter the man they intend to steal the whiskey from - a demonic-looking amnesiac calling himself Carcajou (Lothaire Bluteau) - things quickly go straight to hell.
There's the makings of a strong "northeastern western" there, but that description omits a few things. Mainly, what it leaves out is the mystical elements tied up in Bujold's Cordelia - she makes predictions about the future, talks about how the men in their family tend to disappear, appears to Wild Bill to deliver cryptic messages, and just generally acts weird. Ms. Bujold does a generally very good job with the part: Cordelia is meant to be spooky and eccentric, and the trouble is never that we don't believe in her; it's that she's just a crazy old woman who initially seems to be serving no purpose other than to distract from what could be some good, pulpy crime. When the mystical stuff does start to have some relevance, it doesn't add a whole lot to the story (indeed, the first "disappearance" we see feels like a gigantic rip-off).
Full review at HBS.
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