Stuff piles up, especially when you go festival-crazy and then give those movies priority. So, to clean out my notebook, it's time to give capsules to six months of movies that fell between the cracks. I really wish I could give some of them more time, but they're just not fresh enough in my mind for me to do them justice.
Gads, there's a DVD link available on Amazon for all of these. Where does the time go?
First-Run Films
The Ice Harvest
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2005 at Loews Boston Common #9 (first-run)
A fun crime movie promoted as a caper comedy - sure, the director did Groundhog Day, but that's not particularly relevant. I don't know how well that sort of marketing works - it gets the first guy in the door, but does he then give it bad word-of-mouth because it's not really a comedy? Dunno. What I liked about it was how it was a bleak, noir-ish thriller with opportunistic comedy. John Cusack gives a thoroughly enjoyable performance as the (mostly) down-on-his-luck guy at the center, and Billy Bob Thornton is good as his partner in crime, and Oliver Platt steals every scene he's in as he is wont to do.
Jarhead
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 December 2005 at AMC Fenway #1 (first-run)
This does a pretty nifty job of showing the insanity of military service during the first Gulf War. I've often read that the American military's unofficial motto is "hurry up and wait", and that's what's going on here, as directionless young men wind up in a service that provides them with structure but little direction, even when they're sent to war. Jake Gyllenhaal is as good as usual, and the director captures the right kind of smart-assery, something I think Mendes failed to do with American Beauty (which just annoyed the heck out of me).
Aeon Flux
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 December 2005 at Loews Boston Common #17 (first-run)
Here is something that could have been a great movie. I love so many things about it, from the funky visuals and tech to the far-out sci-fi concept that serves as its underpinning. The central idea of who the guys running the city are is basically swiped from C.J. Cherryh's Cyteen, but it's a good idea to swipe and the focus is different. I'll even forgive that it uses idea of clones being connected to their predecessors' lives by more than their DNA, even though the story could really do without it.
Unfortunately, despite having more cool ideas than about ten typical sci-fi movies put together, it doesn't execute in a cool way. It's like the actors and director can't really relate to that kind of thing, and thus can't invest any emotion in it. It's why I half suspect that really great science fiction will remain the sole province of the written word for a long time - it just requires the writer and the reader to grasp the concepts, rather than the writer, audience, and an entire cast and crew.
Syriana
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 December 2005 at AMC Fenway #12 (first-run)
Did I really mark this down as near-perfect six months ago. Huh. A lot of details have escaped me since then, but what I remember, I like a lot: George Clooney gaining weight to make his matter-of-fact delivery seem less charismatic and more beaten down. Alexander Siddig being one of the few Star Trek supporting characters to ever have a great role after his series ended. Jeffery Wright, who is rapidly becoming recognized as an enormously valuable supporting actor, finding his ethics in conflict with his greed. The stark pessimism about where the world's dependence on oil is leading us. The only issue I had was that there were a lot of characters who would occasionally disappear for a bit; you might need a scorecard to keep track of how some of the characters are connected.
Playing at the Brattle with Why We Fight this coming week (7-8 June), and worth checking out.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 December 2005 at AMC Fenway #12 (first-run)
The Narnia books are some of the last books I remember being read to me; the early ones, at least, were read alound by my fifth-grade teacher after lunchtimes. The story is as good as I remembered it, and the adaptation is very nice. Tilda Swinton is a fantastic White Witch, and the talking animals and mythological creatures are fanciful, but not cartoony or overly childish. It's material that could easily be juvenile, but manages to be kid-friendly without being kid-exclusive.
The way the end is written kind of bugs me. It hinges on the kids being pure of heart and honest at the like, but Aslan is kind of skating on technicalities and misleading his friends and rivals alike. But, hey, that's the sort of thing most Christian allegories leave out, right?
Fun With Dick & Jane
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2005 at AMC Fenway #12 (first-run)
I like Jim Carrey. I like Alec Baldwin. Heck, I even like Tea Leoni, and they all seem to be doing the right thing in this movie. And yet, it doesn't quite come together. It's funny more often than not, and enjoyable absurd at times, but even though Carrey is really trying so hard, it's not nearly as funny as it should be. Maybe he's being too zany while the rest of the cast is going for deadpan; or maybe it's just a disconnect between the larger-than-life comedy and the way it rails against corporate excess and greed.
Especially when you see a whole screenful of credits about Mr. Carrey's assistants, hairdressers, drivers, trainers, etc. I mean, way to miss the point, Mr. Carrey.
The Family Stone
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2006 at AMC Fenway #1 (first-run)
Nice cast. Good sentiment. Most of the funny bits work, at least a little. But, when I got out of it, it was just sort of time spent. I think it tries to force the family's quirkiness on the audience a little, like they're being aggressively eccentric. I guess you need to do that to make Sarah Jessica Parker's character sympathetic, because otherwise she's just unlikably standoffish. That does introduce Clare Danes into the picture, though, which is a Good Thing, as she's as easily charming as the rest of the cast is trying to be.
I kind of question the ending, though. It's awfully tidy. What are the chances of brothers or sisters (let alone both) changing parties that smoothly?
Munich
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2006 at AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)
Steven Spielberg has been on one of the more incredible rolls in modern film history over the past few years, setting projects up and knocking them out with an efficiency few other modern-day directors can match. And not little movies, either - big, elaborate productions. Munich continues this string; it's tense and despairing, demonstrating just what a toll the missions are taking on the characters. It starts out as a thriller and darkens until it's a pit that seems impossible to climb out of.
It's not quite that dark; this is a Spielberg film, after all, but one where the optimism is tempered. It never compromises and makes the targets sympathetic, but slowly reveals the taking of vengeance and the rage that leads to it as being just as destructive as the original assassination of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
Spielberg's good. He's been good for a long time, but this is the type of movie that makes everyone realize how good he is - even the people who think themselves too sophiticated for Steven Spielberg movies.
Match Point
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 January 2006 at Landmark Kenall Square #2 (first-run)
Eh. This is what lowered expectations get you.
Match Point isn't a bad movie at all. If it had been a British film produced by a small English company with a director that had been working for the BBC, it would have popped up in a few theaters in the U.S. and barely been noticed. But, it's Woody Allen's new one, and since Woody's movies have been so bad for so long, this looks pretty good. Heck, just the fact that it's got a significantly different feel from his other recent movies makes it feel fresher than it is.
But when you get right down to it, it's a familiar movie about the attempts to break into English gentility that's unusal only in the auteur making it and being set in the here and now, rather than the early part of the twentieth century. The big negative is that it doesn't display any of the wit that Allen at his best is capable of and traditionally leavens this cold genre.
The Matador
* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 January 2006 at AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run)
Pierce Brosnan wasn't my favorite James Bond, but he handled the role competently enough, given how uninspiring the movies surrounding him were. But he's been enormously successful deconstructing the character, first with the amoral, corrupt spy of The Tailor of Panama and now with this movie's hit man on the verge of a breakdown.
It's a funny movie, as Brosnan's role of international assassin is a life many in the audience would dream about and he can do and say anything he feels, whether it be hedonistic or callous, because who is someone like that accountable to? No-one. But he lives up to the script's declarations of how toxic that life is. Greg Kinnear makes a darn good straight man for him, jealous of the freedom but ultimately better than that. The two have great chemistry with each other, and make it a fun movie to watch, even when it turns serious.
The Producers
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 January 2006 at AMC Fenway #4 (first-run)
As much as it may surprise people who've talked to me, I don't have anything against the musical as a form. I just really think it's got no room for error. Failure to live up to potential that would only hurt a regular film (or play) will make a musical unwatchable. Fortunately, the film of The Producers never takes that kind of hit. It accepts its artifice and works with it.
What problems it has really have nothing to do with being a musical. If this had just been a straight remake of the original movie, it would have worked with the same issues: It abandons its cynicism in the last act, and Matthew Broderick just doesn't quite grab the audience the way the rest of the cast does.
Still, the rest of the cast is good enough to make up for it. Nathan Lane is a guy who can ham his way through anything and have it work, and his exuberance is exactly what the film needs from him. And Uma Thurman is fantastic - she throws every ounce of her considerable sex appeal on-screen, plays dizzy-blonde without being alienating. Expanding her role seems to have been a great choice.
The New World
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 January 2006 at AMC Fenway #12 (first-run)
Terrence Malick does beautiful well. This film chronicalling the arrival of English sailors on the untamed Virginia coast and their early encounters with the local people is lush and gorgeously shot; several sequences were captured in 65mm and it's a crying shame it wasn't projected that way in very many places (including Boston). As with his last film, The Thin Blue Line, Malick leads the audience through his world without much reliance on dialogue.
One thing I really liked is that Malick doesn't play this as simply "cruel Europeans destroy beautiful nature-loving native people". John Smith encountering the unspoiled Americas is only half the story; we also get to see Pocahontas coming to England and being astonished by cities and the hectic, crowded life there. It doesn't make the history any less tragic, but does make the story more nuanced.
Caché
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 January 2006 at Landmark Kendall Square #2 (first-run)
Art films that pick up genre trappings are among the most frustrating type of movie for me to watch. I love mystery stories, and when the filmmakers set up a mystery only to be more interested in subverting it, avoiding resolution and enjoying the feeling of paranoia. I want a bloody resolution, and I don't find being denied it particularly clever or enjoyable.
Which is the point, of course. Doesn't mean I have to like it.
But maybe I'll give it another chance; it's playing at the Brattle June 14-15.
Hostel
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 January 2006 at AMC Fenway #4 (first-run)
Takashi Miike makes a cameo in this movie, and I always imagined him watching the dailies with Eli Roth, saying "yes, that's kind of fucked up. But have you considered slicing off her nipples?"
Hostel brings the exploitation, but that's about it. The violence and mutilation of the human body makes one uncomfortable, but never really takes it to the next level, where it's disturbing, even to someone who's been desensitized by years of horror movies.
A Good Woman
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 February 2006 at AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run)
Not really a terrible movie, but it didn't do a whole lot for me. My ears pricked up at "Scarlett Johansson in a film based on an Oscar Wilde play", but Johansson doesn't really have a lot to do until the end other than look pretty. Helen Hunt is well-cast as a beautiful but aging woman who has come to Italy after wearing out her welcome in New York, setting her sights on Johansson's character's husband. The movie's smooth and not unpleasant, and some of the casting is spot-on. It just should be a lot better.
Hoodwinked
* * (out of four)
Seen 5 February 2006 at AMC Fenway #1 (first-run)
Ugh. I know, we all like to say that you can make a good movie without much of a budget, but there are times when a little money spent would be much appreciated. Take Hoodwinked, which actually gets some mileage out of its kind of played-out premise (a fairy-tale world where folks talk in modern vernacular and have present-day attitudes) by doing a nice multiple-perspective thing and having a few good voices (Patrick Warburton, for instance). It's got a better song from Ben Folds than anything he did for Over The Hedge.
But, man, is it cheap-looking. We're talking video-game quaity computer animation, and not even during the cut scenes. It's just a thoroughly unimpressive movie visually, mostly bland but with the occasional strong element, thoroughly undercut by the low-quality animation.
Why We Fight
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2006 at Landmark Kendall Square #8 (first-run)
It's almost a lecture delivered on film, but it's a well-delivered one. Why We Fight has a strong opinion, but it manages to avoid being insulting to those with a different one. It feels well-sourced, with ego checked at the door. It constructs its argument methodically, with information that may seem familiar from high school social-studies class but which you haven't likely heard put together so well in this long.
Playing at the Brattle this week (7-8 June) with Syriana.
The World's Fastest Indian
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2006 at Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)
This has a flat-out fantastic trailer, and the movie isn't the straight-ahead adrenaline rush that that is. It's still a whole bunch of fun. Anthony Hopkins is all laid-back charm as Burt Munro, a New Zealand engineer spending his retirement customizing his classic Indian motorcycle. He goes to America to test-run it on the Utah salt flats, and it's a fun road movie as Munro encounters a crop of American eccentrics. Then he gets there and the speed freak stuff begins.
And that's the super-fun stuff, though everything coming before is a blast, too.
Tristam Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2006 at AMC Harvard Square #4 (first-run)
This sucker's playing at the Brattle the next couple days (5-6 June, with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), and if the Red Sox weren't playing the Yankees, I'd be tempted to give it a second chance. The metahumor is fun, if on the dry side, and maybe a little excessive. It really, really seemed to drag while I was watching it, and I don't know if a second chance is going to make it better.
Pity. I've liked Steve Coogan before, and him playing a weird, snotty Steve Coogan is almost always a kick. Gillian Anderson has an extended cameo type role.
Maybe I'll give it another try. Sometime. When it doesn't interfere with Sox-Yankees.
Firewall
* * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2006 at AMC Fenway #8 (first-run)
This is a pretty bad movie, dull and full of "thriller" clichés. Harrison Ford is capable of so much better, and it just makes me sad to see the most consistently good movie star of my lifetime reduced to something that is, at its best, competent. I think I had more fun waiting for Mary Lynn Rajskub to do something Chloe-esque, and then enjoying it when it happened.
Although, I have to admit that I did enjoy finding a glitch in the AMC MovieWatcher system through watching a movie about security holes. It works like this: The system at the theater downloads your MovieWatcher points from a master database every morning, so if you have, say, 88 points on the morning of 18 February, you can go to Tristam Shandy in Harvard Square and have it say "90 points! You get a free movie ticket!", then hike to Fenway to see Firewall and have it say "90 points! You get a free movie ticket!" Then, when you see another movie the next day, it has sent all that information back and added it up so that you have 92 points to start with. I'd feel bad about exploiting this, but, hey, I first discovered it when I was denied a free soda because it though I reached 48 points twice, rather than 50.
16 Blocks
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2006 at AMC Fenway #12 (first-run)
It's distressingly easy to forget that Bruce Willis can be a darn good actor when properly motivated, especially if he's in a run of uninspiring crap. Working with a name director like Richard Donner can bring out good Willis, as will having co-stars like Mos Def and Barry Morse. It's the Sean Connery syndrome: Coast when you can, but don't let the audience leave the theater talking about how much they like the other guys.
I think he's also enjoying the idea of showing his age. Here he plays an aging cop limping to retirement, when this sudden attack of conscience motivates him to do the right thing, even if it means facing down the crooked cops who have allowed him to be lazy for the past few years. The cast and crew wind up making a movie that works like the best westerns and action dramas of yore - not wall-to-wall pyrotechnics, but a quest that has room for some good set pieces but also focuses the audience on the imperfect hero.
Ultraviolet
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2006 at AMC Fenway #7 (first-run)
The first five minutes or so of Kurt Wimmer's follow-up to the spiffy Equilibrium have such potential - mocked-up comic book covers from the industry's best artists, a crazy-fun over-the-top special-effects sequence, and some decent action. And then it all goes to hell. The fight between human-types and vampire-types becomes arbitrary, the action choreography seems to get worse as the film goes on (often, Milla Jovovich seems to be posing rather than fighting), and Cameron Bright shows up (I'm guessing directors like him because he's very professional and grown-up on the set, because he's sure not a likable presence).
By the end, it's just loud and stupid, completely failing to live up to that early promise.
The Pink Panther '06
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2006 at AMC Fenway #8 (first-run)
As much as I feared this being a disaster, it's really not. The idea to mostly refocus "The Pink Panther" it as a kid-oriented franchise is not exactly ideal, but it gives Steve Martin the chance to make his character less a completely slavish imitation of Peter Sellers and more another take on the character. The slapstick works at a reasonable rate, Kevin Kline does a very nice frustrated slow burn, and the Clive Owen "guest appearance" is extremely funny. As is Jean Reno dancing, after being so reserved for the rest of the movie.
Do I necessarily want to see a new Steve Martin Pink Panther movie every couple of years? I could do without it, easily. It's not the horrifying prospect it was when this movie was being made and its release was being delayed, though.
The Three Burials of Meliques Estrada
* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 March 2006 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #1 (first-run)
Tommy Lee Jones is a guy we really don't see often enough. He makes every movie he's in better, and his combination of keen intelligence and down-home straightforwardness is on display here as he makes his directing debut as well as starring in the picture. We're given a picture of a couple people having a hard time dealing with the world the live in: One, Jones's ranch-hand, is angry over the lack of justice and concern for his friend; the other, January Jones's Lou Ann, is going stir-crazy because her husband has put her in a position where she's nothing but a wife.
The film is beautiful, with Jones encountering a number of interesting characters as he brings his friend's body back to his home in Mexico to be laid to rest, and Jones knows and understands the land like a Wester director of old.
Winter Passing
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 March 2006 at the AMC Harvard Square #4 (first-run)
Gads, another "writers are so friggin' tortured, and they mess up their loved ones, too" movie. In this case, the writer is Ed Harris, the messed-up daughter is Zooey Deschanel, and they are re-united because a book publisher wants Zooey's character to retrieve her parents' love letters. Mom is deceased, which is apparently what set Harris's character all the way around the bend.
There's also Amelia Warner as the former grad student who is calm and devoted enough to make the rest of the cast seem extra-special dysfunctional, and Will Ferrell to annoy people. They're all very sad in their own ways, because writers think that makes them sound even more interesting.
Gah. Enough already.
Failure to Launch
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 March 2006 at the AMC Fenway #13 (first-run)
I sometimes get the impression that Matthew McConaughey isn't a big star because he chooses movies based on how much fun they look like, as opposed to whether they'll wind up particularly good or benefit his career. Failure to Launch probably looked like a lot of fun - kiss Sarah Jessica Parker, be laid-back and charming, shoot on boats and other nifty places, have some outright silly scenes where otherwise peaceful animals attack him.
And there are probably worse criteria for choosing a project. This is by no means a great movie, but it's a somewhat above-average way to pass a couple hours. It's got what initially seems like a mean premise but turns out to be populated by softies. McConaughey really should be a big star, the way he can breeze through this sort of movie and make you overlook the flaws. Terry Bradshaw and Kathy Bates are fun as his parents who want him out of the house but are still fiercely protective of him, and Justin Bartha and Bradley Cooper are fine foils as his other still-at-home friends. And, hey, Zooey Deschanel is Sarah Jessica Parker's quirky roommate. She's at her best when being funny with a sardonic edge like she is here (especially compared to the drag she was in the other movie I saw that day).
Lucky Number Slevin
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 April 2006 at the AMC Fenway #12 (first-run)
Aw, man... There is a whole metric ton of folks I like in this movie, and the best thing I can think of to say about it is that I really wish Lucy Liu would play funny and charming more often, because she's unexpectedly good at it, considering all the ice queens she's played. Seriously, the lady needs to re-evaluate her choices.
This is a movie that takes a sharp turn that doesn't really please me - it goes from "guy caught up in bizarre and dangerous situation" to "elaborate revenge plot", and that's not nearly as much fun; it sucks the playfulness right out of the movie. It's also got Bruce Willis sort of coasting, along with Morgan Freeman and Sir Ben Kingsley in supporting roles that aren't nearly as amusing as they should be. And once Josh Hartnett isn't just a guy in over his head and incapable of panicking, all there is to really watch is Liu.
Next up: Brattle (and the like) catch-up.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Friday, June 02, 2006
Eye-Openers
The Brattle Theater and The Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film run an occasional series of Sunday morning films called the "Eye-Opener". It was on hiatus much of last year as Ned & Ivy worked on making sure that the Brattle was still around, but returned this spring for an eight-film series (not reviewed here are The Proposition, seen at IFFB, and Survive Style 5+, which I saw on a Fantasia screener last year, and the Academy Award-nominated live-action shorts). Over all, it's a pretty strong set. I've been waiting for someone to talk about Survive Style 5+ with, and there are some I wouldn't have seen without the series. I didn't necessarily love everything I saw, but I think most was worth seeing.
Except I Am a Sex Addict. The downside of these things is when you see a movie, and hate it, but everyone else around you is talking about how clever it is. And though I can't deny that... Well, I mention a calculus metaphor in the review, and here it is (it sort of applies to how I judge all movies): Imagine two curves on a graph. The first represents how interested I am in what the movie has up its sleeve at a given moment in time; the second represents how interested I am in what's going on outside the theater at the same moment. Find the integral of the two curves and subtract the second from the first (or subtract and integrate); the resulting value is how good or bad the movie experience is. I Am A Sex Addict has a very negative value there. It's one of those movies where I spend a lot of time wanting out, and the clock on the Brattle's wall taunts me.
It's going to be strange having Sunday mornings free, though. Maybe I'll try sleeping in.
Sisters In Law
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 April 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye-Opener)
Journalism has two ideals that often seem to stand in direct opposition to each other. The first is transparency, also often referred to as "fairness", "balance", or "objectivity". It's the idea that a journalist or documentarian should report facts in a clear manner, allowing his or her audience to form an informed opinion. The other is the desire to advocate which is often the basis of the reporter's urge to investigate - one doesn't dig unless she suspects that something is buried. At first glance, Sisters In Law may appear to be simple documentation, but directors Kim Longinotto and Florence Ayisi have activism in mind - they're just subtle about how they go about it.
The film takes us to the small town of Kumba in Cameroon, with the focus on the family court presided over by Beatrice Ntuba. She is an authoritative figure who represents the country's written, secular law, but her authority is seldom given full precedence over religious doctrine and community pressures. We follow several cases that Prosecutor Vera Ngassa brings before her court: Two are divorce procedures (though only one of these marriages actually has any sort of official standing; one has a ten-year-old girl accusing her neighbor of rape; the last is an allegation of child abuse.
Read the rest at HBS.
I Am a Sex Addict
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 April 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye-Opener)
I had a metaphor planned to describe how I could despise I Am a Sex Addict despite recognizing the validity in all the arguments that the other folks seeing the movie made. The metaphor, however, involved calculus, and while using calculus might earn me some points in appearing smart, it would bore many of the people reading this paragraph senseless. So I excised the calculus metaphor in favor of speaking plainly: I Am a Sex Addict is pretentious and dull.
(See what I did there? I got my point across by talking directly to you, but while doing it I made sure that you knew that I'm smart and sophisticated - after all, I casually drop references to relatively advanced mathematics, just like filmmaker Caveh Zahedi casually mentions going to France to make a movie about a poet you've probably never heard of, unless you're as smart as Caveh. And I've tried to be all self-deprecating about it, like Caveh does with his dry delivery, but you know - we think we're smarter than you are, and we may be right - after all, we love calculus and French poetry.)
Read the rest at HBS.
Hard Candy
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 April 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye-Opener)
Hard Candy lets the folks in the audience know from the start that it intends to make them uncomfortable. It's all of five minutes into the movie before we see that young Hayley Stark is about a decade younger than what the guy she's meeting should be looking at. By the time the film is over, it will be what people do rather than what they threaten to do that makes people uncomfortable, and not the way that the first scene suggests.
Hayley (Ellen Page) met Jeff Kohlver (Patrick Wilson) online. He's handsome and charming, and probably more than twice her age (she could still be in junior high). They meet face-to-face for the first time at a local diner. He invites her back to his place for a drink and a look at his photography studio; she's cautious, but goes anyway. Arriving there, she sees that all of the pictures on the wall are young girls, but she turns out to be a step ahead of him - it's Jeff who has something he didn't plan on in his drink, and regains consciousness to find himself in a situation he's not ready for.
Read the rest at HBS.
Mutual Appreciation
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 May 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye-Opener)
Andrew Bujalski makes movies that drive me nuts. I can plainly see that the man is good with a camera, and his storytelling technique is frequently very impressive. It's no wonder that film scholars find his movies fascinating and important. It's the application of that talent which is so maddening: Chronicling the moments between when people take control of their lives.
There's room for movies about the mundane. Indeed, recording and depicting everyday life is a vital part of why we have art in the first place. Someone from another culture, place, or time can look at Mutual Appreciation and gain an understanding of what the life of a certain group of New Yorkers in the early twenty-first century is like while being entertained a bit. And that sort of anthropological audience, along with the film scholars I'm told are Bujallski's biggest fans, will probably find this film exciting. But the film's drama is low-key, with climaxes and resolution deliberately avoided. It's possible to get excited by this kind of movie, but it requires an effort.
Read the rest at HBS
Sir! No Sir!
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 May 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye-Opener)
Most movie watchers can recite the standard narrative about about the American experience in Vietnam with little prompting: Naive Americans are sent overseas not knowing what they're getting into. They witness horrors as the war is waged from Washington by people who don't understand it, while the peace movement at home slowly makes remaining in Vietnam politically unviable. And then, when they come home, the GIs are ostracized. The thing is, at least as Sir! No Sir! tells it, this story is at best incomplete and at worst a fabrication.
The omission, as filmmaker David Zeiger points out, is that the peace movement was not just a factor on the homefront. The Vietnam war saw an unprecedented amount of soldiers refusing orders, undergrounds newspapers and organizations within the army, and open mutiny. The film ends with a deconstruction of the oft-repeated myth of soldiers being spat upon as they returned home. Throughout, it is documented by primary sources, soldiers recounting their own experiences both on bases and on the front lines.
Read the rest at HBS
Except I Am a Sex Addict. The downside of these things is when you see a movie, and hate it, but everyone else around you is talking about how clever it is. And though I can't deny that... Well, I mention a calculus metaphor in the review, and here it is (it sort of applies to how I judge all movies): Imagine two curves on a graph. The first represents how interested I am in what the movie has up its sleeve at a given moment in time; the second represents how interested I am in what's going on outside the theater at the same moment. Find the integral of the two curves and subtract the second from the first (or subtract and integrate); the resulting value is how good or bad the movie experience is. I Am A Sex Addict has a very negative value there. It's one of those movies where I spend a lot of time wanting out, and the clock on the Brattle's wall taunts me.
It's going to be strange having Sunday mornings free, though. Maybe I'll try sleeping in.
Sisters In Law
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 April 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye-Opener)
Journalism has two ideals that often seem to stand in direct opposition to each other. The first is transparency, also often referred to as "fairness", "balance", or "objectivity". It's the idea that a journalist or documentarian should report facts in a clear manner, allowing his or her audience to form an informed opinion. The other is the desire to advocate which is often the basis of the reporter's urge to investigate - one doesn't dig unless she suspects that something is buried. At first glance, Sisters In Law may appear to be simple documentation, but directors Kim Longinotto and Florence Ayisi have activism in mind - they're just subtle about how they go about it.
The film takes us to the small town of Kumba in Cameroon, with the focus on the family court presided over by Beatrice Ntuba. She is an authoritative figure who represents the country's written, secular law, but her authority is seldom given full precedence over religious doctrine and community pressures. We follow several cases that Prosecutor Vera Ngassa brings before her court: Two are divorce procedures (though only one of these marriages actually has any sort of official standing; one has a ten-year-old girl accusing her neighbor of rape; the last is an allegation of child abuse.
Read the rest at HBS.
I Am a Sex Addict
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 April 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye-Opener)
I had a metaphor planned to describe how I could despise I Am a Sex Addict despite recognizing the validity in all the arguments that the other folks seeing the movie made. The metaphor, however, involved calculus, and while using calculus might earn me some points in appearing smart, it would bore many of the people reading this paragraph senseless. So I excised the calculus metaphor in favor of speaking plainly: I Am a Sex Addict is pretentious and dull.
(See what I did there? I got my point across by talking directly to you, but while doing it I made sure that you knew that I'm smart and sophisticated - after all, I casually drop references to relatively advanced mathematics, just like filmmaker Caveh Zahedi casually mentions going to France to make a movie about a poet you've probably never heard of, unless you're as smart as Caveh. And I've tried to be all self-deprecating about it, like Caveh does with his dry delivery, but you know - we think we're smarter than you are, and we may be right - after all, we love calculus and French poetry.)
Read the rest at HBS.
Hard Candy
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 April 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye-Opener)
Hard Candy lets the folks in the audience know from the start that it intends to make them uncomfortable. It's all of five minutes into the movie before we see that young Hayley Stark is about a decade younger than what the guy she's meeting should be looking at. By the time the film is over, it will be what people do rather than what they threaten to do that makes people uncomfortable, and not the way that the first scene suggests.
Hayley (Ellen Page) met Jeff Kohlver (Patrick Wilson) online. He's handsome and charming, and probably more than twice her age (she could still be in junior high). They meet face-to-face for the first time at a local diner. He invites her back to his place for a drink and a look at his photography studio; she's cautious, but goes anyway. Arriving there, she sees that all of the pictures on the wall are young girls, but she turns out to be a step ahead of him - it's Jeff who has something he didn't plan on in his drink, and regains consciousness to find himself in a situation he's not ready for.
Read the rest at HBS.
Mutual Appreciation
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 May 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye-Opener)
Andrew Bujalski makes movies that drive me nuts. I can plainly see that the man is good with a camera, and his storytelling technique is frequently very impressive. It's no wonder that film scholars find his movies fascinating and important. It's the application of that talent which is so maddening: Chronicling the moments between when people take control of their lives.
There's room for movies about the mundane. Indeed, recording and depicting everyday life is a vital part of why we have art in the first place. Someone from another culture, place, or time can look at Mutual Appreciation and gain an understanding of what the life of a certain group of New Yorkers in the early twenty-first century is like while being entertained a bit. And that sort of anthropological audience, along with the film scholars I'm told are Bujallski's biggest fans, will probably find this film exciting. But the film's drama is low-key, with climaxes and resolution deliberately avoided. It's possible to get excited by this kind of movie, but it requires an effort.
Read the rest at HBS
Sir! No Sir!
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 May 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye-Opener)
Most movie watchers can recite the standard narrative about about the American experience in Vietnam with little prompting: Naive Americans are sent overseas not knowing what they're getting into. They witness horrors as the war is waged from Washington by people who don't understand it, while the peace movement at home slowly makes remaining in Vietnam politically unviable. And then, when they come home, the GIs are ostracized. The thing is, at least as Sir! No Sir! tells it, this story is at best incomplete and at worst a fabrication.
The omission, as filmmaker David Zeiger points out, is that the peace movement was not just a factor on the homefront. The Vietnam war saw an unprecedented amount of soldiers refusing orders, undergrounds newspapers and organizations within the army, and open mutiny. The film ends with a deconstruction of the oft-repeated myth of soldiers being spat upon as they returned home. Throughout, it is documented by primary sources, soldiers recounting their own experiences both on bases and on the front lines.
Read the rest at HBS
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Testify!: The Notorious Bettie Page and Thank You For Smoking
The unexpected theme for this week's films is "congressional hearings". I say "unexpected" because I was figuring on getting into Inside Man last Thursday, but a slow bus and folks at the box office just yakking instead of BUYING TICKETS bumped me to the next show. Drat; I really feel like I missed out.
I'm trying to remember the last movie I saw with Congressional hearings where they were a good thing. In both of these films, it's about grandstanding and trying to impose one's morality on people, and even if you agree with that morality, it's still arrogance in action.
(yawns) Not really much to say about these. Bettie Page is good, making me really fond of its subject and giving me unexpected Sarah Paulson (I thought I was getting unexpected Enrico Colantoni too, but it wound up being Chris Bauer). Thank You is slicker, but ultimately pretty hollow. And it gives you Cameron Bright. I normally don't like saying I dislike child actors, because I have images in my head of them reading it and crying, but he's thirteen and has amassed a body of work that is not just truly unpleasant, but snobbish. I eagerly await his first projected emotion.
I doubt that either movie quite manages to drive home the point that it would like to. Bettie Page refused to become a symbol and Thank You For Smoking isn't cynical enough to be shocking in this day and age. Bettie, at least, is entertaining, which is the most important thing.
The Notorious Bettie Page
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 May 2006 at AMC Harvard Square #4 (First-run)
Up until a few years ago, I didn't realize Bettie Page was a real person. I'd seen Bettie Page comic books, action figures, and other assorted merchandise; even when I saw a photograph of her, I thought it was just some random model portraying the Bettie Page character. So this film about her is interesting to me, as it makes this brand name that has persisted for decades beyond her heyday far more human while still allowing the audience to assign what qualities to her that they see fit - much like they did during her career.
Bettie Page was a pin-up model in the 1950s. Born to a conservative Nashville family, she moved to New York City for a new start, got noticed by an amateur photographer on a local beach, and quickly made other contacts, eventually working primarily for Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer), whose movie stills business is something of a front for racier things. This eventually leads them be called before Congress as a purveyor of unwholesome material, raising the question of how this sweet southern girl can be a threat to the country's morality.
Read the rest at HBS.
Thank You for Smoking
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 May 2006 at AMC Fenway #1 (First-run)
Thank You for Smoking is just too glib for me to really enjoy. There's funny bits and occasionally energetic direction and performances, and they add up to a good movie, but the vital spark is missing. The creature that Jason Reitman has built from a good novel, an outstanding cast, and an abundance of style never leaps to life and moves about under its own power.
The plot, taken from Christopher Buckley's novel, follows Nick Naylor, Tobacco Industry Lobbyist (Aaron Eckhart), on his quest to keep cigarette legal and unregulated. He reports to BR (J.K. Simmons), the domineering head of the Institute for the Study of Tobacco, and "Captain" Doak Boykin (Robert Duvall), a courtly but steel-willed tobacco magnate. His nemesis is crusading Vermont senator Ortolan Finistirre (William H. Macy). In the meantime, he tries to be a good weekend dad to his son Joey (Cameron Bright), co-operate (and then some) with a pretty newspaper reporter (Katie Holmes), and hangs out with his fellow "Merchants of Death": Alcohol lobbyist Polly Bailey (Maria Bello) and gun-industry spokesman Bobby Jay Bliss (David Koechner). His world is turned upside down when he is kidnapped and plastered with a hugely excessive amount of nicotine patches: He survives, but is told that his next cigarette could kill him.
Read the rest at HBS.
I'm trying to remember the last movie I saw with Congressional hearings where they were a good thing. In both of these films, it's about grandstanding and trying to impose one's morality on people, and even if you agree with that morality, it's still arrogance in action.
(yawns) Not really much to say about these. Bettie Page is good, making me really fond of its subject and giving me unexpected Sarah Paulson (I thought I was getting unexpected Enrico Colantoni too, but it wound up being Chris Bauer). Thank You is slicker, but ultimately pretty hollow. And it gives you Cameron Bright. I normally don't like saying I dislike child actors, because I have images in my head of them reading it and crying, but he's thirteen and has amassed a body of work that is not just truly unpleasant, but snobbish. I eagerly await his first projected emotion.
I doubt that either movie quite manages to drive home the point that it would like to. Bettie Page refused to become a symbol and Thank You For Smoking isn't cynical enough to be shocking in this day and age. Bettie, at least, is entertaining, which is the most important thing.
The Notorious Bettie Page
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 May 2006 at AMC Harvard Square #4 (First-run)
Up until a few years ago, I didn't realize Bettie Page was a real person. I'd seen Bettie Page comic books, action figures, and other assorted merchandise; even when I saw a photograph of her, I thought it was just some random model portraying the Bettie Page character. So this film about her is interesting to me, as it makes this brand name that has persisted for decades beyond her heyday far more human while still allowing the audience to assign what qualities to her that they see fit - much like they did during her career.
Bettie Page was a pin-up model in the 1950s. Born to a conservative Nashville family, she moved to New York City for a new start, got noticed by an amateur photographer on a local beach, and quickly made other contacts, eventually working primarily for Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer), whose movie stills business is something of a front for racier things. This eventually leads them be called before Congress as a purveyor of unwholesome material, raising the question of how this sweet southern girl can be a threat to the country's morality.
Read the rest at HBS.
Thank You for Smoking
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 May 2006 at AMC Fenway #1 (First-run)
Thank You for Smoking is just too glib for me to really enjoy. There's funny bits and occasionally energetic direction and performances, and they add up to a good movie, but the vital spark is missing. The creature that Jason Reitman has built from a good novel, an outstanding cast, and an abundance of style never leaps to life and moves about under its own power.
The plot, taken from Christopher Buckley's novel, follows Nick Naylor, Tobacco Industry Lobbyist (Aaron Eckhart), on his quest to keep cigarette legal and unregulated. He reports to BR (J.K. Simmons), the domineering head of the Institute for the Study of Tobacco, and "Captain" Doak Boykin (Robert Duvall), a courtly but steel-willed tobacco magnate. His nemesis is crusading Vermont senator Ortolan Finistirre (William H. Macy). In the meantime, he tries to be a good weekend dad to his son Joey (Cameron Bright), co-operate (and then some) with a pretty newspaper reporter (Katie Holmes), and hangs out with his fellow "Merchants of Death": Alcohol lobbyist Polly Bailey (Maria Bello) and gun-industry spokesman Bobby Jay Bliss (David Koechner). His world is turned upside down when he is kidnapped and plastered with a hugely excessive amount of nicotine patches: He survives, but is told that his next cigarette could kill him.
Read the rest at HBS.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
All Wet: Poseidon in IMAX
So, next time Matt and I head out to see a movie at (deep breath) the Comcast IMAX 3-D Theater at Jordan's Furniture Reading, we'll do a few things different:
(1) We will do it on a sunny day. Heading out to Reading in the middle of a rainstorm that was at times about as nasty as could be without there being actual thunder, lightning, or hail is not particularly wise, since there's a half-mile walk between the train station and the furniture store. This was exacerbated by...
(2) We will not trust the directions we've gotten from Google. Google Maps gave us directions to 50 John Street. John Street sort of becomes Walker's Point Drive, but we're talking two completely different #50s. For those in the Boston area looking to make this trip: At the Reading commuter rail/bus station, orient yourself so that you're facing northeast. Turn right, and then left onto Washington. Follow that until it sort of dead-ends in a T-shaped intersection, and turn right. That gets you onto Village, which gets you onto Walker's Brook. Unlike the Jordan's in Natick, a pedestrian can get there, although the sidewalks sort of jump from one side of the street to the other at points. And there are puddles on a rainy day.
(3) We will go without time contraints, so we can hang around Jordan's looking at furniture we can't afford and other seemingly random stuff: There's a jellybean shop, a Fuddrucker's, and a trapeze in there. It's crazy. And we even saw one of the brothers from the store's commercials (Elliot, I think. The one with the ponytail), which counts as nifty celebrity-sighting in Massachusetts.
(4) We'll see something better than Poseidon. I don't know that that was an $18 movie, even with the beautiful 3-D IMAX Happy Feet teaser.
Still, I did have ample opportunity to joke about how while everyone else in the audience just got great picture and sound from the IMAX experience, we had the tactile "soaked to the skin" sensation. I said this to Matt, I said it to the young lady at the box office, I said it to our mom when I called to wish her a happy Mother's Day, and now that I'm using it here, it's going out everywhere. So I'm done with that bit. I got far more use out of it than it likely merits.
The next IMAX Hollywood movie on the schedule is Superman Returns, with twenty minutes of 3-D goodness. I may wind up seeing that some morning/afternoon in Montreal, what with holiday weekend stuff being planned up in Maine and plans to head to Fantasia on the 6th. So the next time I'm out to Reading will probably be in August for The Ant Bully.
Unless I wind up seeing Superman in French and want to know what people are actually saying. Which could happen; my French isn't so hot (as in, I haven't used any of my three years of high-school French in a decade) and I didn't hit a multiplex before checking into my hotel last year because I didn't know what language they'd be speaking.
Poseidon
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 May 2006 at Jordan's Furniture Reading (The IMAX Experience)
There's no fat on Warner Brothers' new adaptation of The Poseidon Adventure. It establishes the setting and sketches its characters out quickly before getting to the meat of the picture, the action. The problem with there not being much fat on the picture is what anybody who has gone for the low-cal version of anything knows: You lose the fat, you lose half the flavor.
It takes maybe ten minutes to introduce us to the double handful of people on the ocean liner Poseidon during its New Year's Eve voyage that will turn out to be significant. Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell) is a former mayor of New York, traveling with his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) and her boyfriend Christian (Mike Vogel); he's uncomfortable with her being all grown up and having girl parts. Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) is a professional gambler (or so he says!); he hits on Maggie James (Jacinda Barrett) and isn't scared off by her ten-year-old son Conor (Jimmy Bennett). Ramsey and Johns are playing poker with "Lucky Larry" (Kevin Dillon), while on the other side of the ballroom, Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss) is getting ready to jump off the side of the ship because his partner stood him up at the dock. Elena Gonzalez (Mia Maestro) has stowed away with galley mate Marco Valentin (Freddy Rodriguez). Shortly after the captain (Andre Braugher) announces that midnight has passed, an enormous rogue tidal wave hits, leaving the ship upside down. Johns decides he's not going to wait for rescue in the ballroom, the others fall in, and the group sets off to climb up to the bottom of the ship.
Read the rest at HBS.
(1) We will do it on a sunny day. Heading out to Reading in the middle of a rainstorm that was at times about as nasty as could be without there being actual thunder, lightning, or hail is not particularly wise, since there's a half-mile walk between the train station and the furniture store. This was exacerbated by...
(2) We will not trust the directions we've gotten from Google. Google Maps gave us directions to 50 John Street. John Street sort of becomes Walker's Point Drive, but we're talking two completely different #50s. For those in the Boston area looking to make this trip: At the Reading commuter rail/bus station, orient yourself so that you're facing northeast. Turn right, and then left onto Washington. Follow that until it sort of dead-ends in a T-shaped intersection, and turn right. That gets you onto Village, which gets you onto Walker's Brook. Unlike the Jordan's in Natick, a pedestrian can get there, although the sidewalks sort of jump from one side of the street to the other at points. And there are puddles on a rainy day.
(3) We will go without time contraints, so we can hang around Jordan's looking at furniture we can't afford and other seemingly random stuff: There's a jellybean shop, a Fuddrucker's, and a trapeze in there. It's crazy. And we even saw one of the brothers from the store's commercials (Elliot, I think. The one with the ponytail), which counts as nifty celebrity-sighting in Massachusetts.
(4) We'll see something better than Poseidon. I don't know that that was an $18 movie, even with the beautiful 3-D IMAX Happy Feet teaser.
Still, I did have ample opportunity to joke about how while everyone else in the audience just got great picture and sound from the IMAX experience, we had the tactile "soaked to the skin" sensation. I said this to Matt, I said it to the young lady at the box office, I said it to our mom when I called to wish her a happy Mother's Day, and now that I'm using it here, it's going out everywhere. So I'm done with that bit. I got far more use out of it than it likely merits.
The next IMAX Hollywood movie on the schedule is Superman Returns, with twenty minutes of 3-D goodness. I may wind up seeing that some morning/afternoon in Montreal, what with holiday weekend stuff being planned up in Maine and plans to head to Fantasia on the 6th. So the next time I'm out to Reading will probably be in August for The Ant Bully.
Unless I wind up seeing Superman in French and want to know what people are actually saying. Which could happen; my French isn't so hot (as in, I haven't used any of my three years of high-school French in a decade) and I didn't hit a multiplex before checking into my hotel last year because I didn't know what language they'd be speaking.
Poseidon
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 May 2006 at Jordan's Furniture Reading (The IMAX Experience)
There's no fat on Warner Brothers' new adaptation of The Poseidon Adventure. It establishes the setting and sketches its characters out quickly before getting to the meat of the picture, the action. The problem with there not being much fat on the picture is what anybody who has gone for the low-cal version of anything knows: You lose the fat, you lose half the flavor.
It takes maybe ten minutes to introduce us to the double handful of people on the ocean liner Poseidon during its New Year's Eve voyage that will turn out to be significant. Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell) is a former mayor of New York, traveling with his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) and her boyfriend Christian (Mike Vogel); he's uncomfortable with her being all grown up and having girl parts. Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) is a professional gambler (or so he says!); he hits on Maggie James (Jacinda Barrett) and isn't scared off by her ten-year-old son Conor (Jimmy Bennett). Ramsey and Johns are playing poker with "Lucky Larry" (Kevin Dillon), while on the other side of the ballroom, Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss) is getting ready to jump off the side of the ship because his partner stood him up at the dock. Elena Gonzalez (Mia Maestro) has stowed away with galley mate Marco Valentin (Freddy Rodriguez). Shortly after the captain (Andre Braugher) announces that midnight has passed, an enormous rogue tidal wave hits, leaving the ship upside down. Johns decides he's not going to wait for rescue in the ballroom, the others fall in, and the group sets off to climb up to the bottom of the ship.
Read the rest at HBS.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Blackballed and Black Orpheus at the Brattle
Huh, Black Orpheus isn't in the HBS database. Go figure. Must write Scott.
That's the end of the last Brattle schedule, which wasn't bad at all. I'm a little less psyched about the current one; we're about to hit Gene Kelly & Fred Astaire and then Ken Russell, which will be fun, although not really must-sees for me.
The July/August schedule will be the vertical one, which scares/reassures me a little - it means I likely won't miss a whole great series while off at Fantasia for a week and a half. But it'll probably mean missing a chunk of a couple good series.
Planning for that is kind of crazy. You now need a passport as opposed to just a birth certificate and an ID to cross the border into Canada now, so there's that paperwork to fill out. Of course, I appear to have lost the copy of my birth certificate while moving earlier this year, so I had to order one from Worcester, which is disturbingly easy on one hand but needlessly difficult on the other, since the city's website choked on Firefox while collecting a little data and eleven dollars. I should be able to get everything in line before July. I'm looking forward to it; it was the highlight of my moviegoing year last year, and hope to make it an annual thing.
So, anyway, these two movies ran consecuitve weeks at the Brattle and both have "black" in their title. Otherwise, they're night and day: One's a colorful, lush drama shot in Brazil by a French director; the other is a washed-out mockumentary that couldn't have cost more than a few bucks to make. I prefer the first, not there are many situations where anybody will face an either/or decision between Blackballed and Black Orpheus. Still, Black Orpheus does several things well enough that every moment has some worth, where Blackballed just sort of flails when any of the jokes falls flat.
Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro, aka Orfeu do Carnival)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 April 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagement)
The idea of a setting being an integral part of a story, to the point where it's called a character in the movie, is particularly apt where Black Orpheus is concerned. The Orpheus myth, like so many, can be removed form its setting and be relevant to anyone; that's what myths are for. It can be related in a few seconds, so by transplanting it to Rio de Janeiro, and portraying Rio so vividly, filmmaker Marcel Camus is not just retelling a classic, but using it as a pretext to explore.
After all, everybody knows the story of Orpheus, here Orfeo, a streetcar conductor with a passion for the guitar played by soccer star Breno Mello. When he applies for a marriage license, the clerk says "this must be Eurydice, because everyone knows that Orpheus loves Eurydice". The thing is, Orfeo was with Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira), who is a bit on the jealous side. Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) has just arrived to visit her cousin Serafina (Lea Garcia). Serafina lives in Orfeo's neighborhood, and it's not long before they're formally introduced. But Mira isn't the only obstacle between them; Eurydice is fleeing a death-masked stalker.
The story takes place in the days leading up to Carnival, which gives the characters an excellent opportunity to participate in intrigues involving disguise: As much fun as they are in classical theater and literature, masked balls are far from common these days. Carnival, with its elaborate costumes, throngs of people, and masks which cover the whole face, offers a chance to use this plot device in a modern setting without it seeming odd. It also makes the film as stunning as Carnival itself, as every square inch of the big screen fills with a riot of colorful clothing, dancers parade in awesome syncopation, and joyous calypso plays on the soundtrack. It would be a complete showstopper, if it weren't half the reason to have the show in the first place.
It's not just by showing Carnival that Camus immerses us in Rio. The entire film is shot on location, and not always in the clean, touristy areas. Ofeo and Serafina live in a hillside shantytown with stray animals wandering in and out. There's trash strewn everywhere, with it becoming a natural part of the landscape. The two kids who follow Orfeo around wear the same ripped clothes throughout the entire film. We don't dwell on poverty, though, since we're given nothing to place them in another context; the characters get by, what they want is generally within reach, they're planning an elaborate celebration, and even wealthy Mira seems familiar with pawn shops. It's not just the vibrant, beautiful parts of Rio we see, though - the bureaucratic offices, morgue, and spooky spirituals that represent the underworld in the last act are chillingly atmospheric.
Much as the film is shot on real locations, it also features a cast of non-professional locals - or at least, people who started acting with this movie. Mello gives Orfeo a roguish charm; the man has obviously been free with his attentions to the fair sex, and he's pretty quick to shift his attention from the woman he allegedly wishes to marry, often finding her a nuisance. But he remains likeable; it's like he's been able to coast and now he's figuring out how to be serious. Miss Dawn is perfectly sweet as Eurydice; we initially see her amazed at the big city and we're as charmed as we were by Mello; it makes them a good pair. Lourdes de Oliveira drips sex as Mira, and not entirely because of her skintight outfits; she's primal, direct and not someone you'd want to cross. Lea Garcia is arguably the glue that holds the film together; her Serafina is the common point of reference for all the other characters and she not only has to have all the mechanics of plot bounce off her, but gets her own comic story with a soldier boyfriend just in town for the weekend. None of them give perfect, polished performances - we occasionally see the effort to recite memorized lines, let alone create the illusion that they arise naturally - but we get the feeling, and have a handle on the characters.
The story is mythic, both in source material and in execution. Orfeo doesn't have a literal underworld to search, but characters are aware of the myth being re-enacted. Indeed, toward the end, there's references to this being a cyclic process, with Orfeo not being the first Orpheus and an implication that others will follow him. That Camus was able to make that point while also handling what must have been a tremendously difficult shoot, with amateur actors and huge crowd scenes, is no small accomplishment.
Black Orpheus may not be the best-ever retelling of the Orpheus myth, but it's as beautiful and charming as any. As it stands, it's worth seeing just as a travel movie; it's a delightful capsule time capsue of Rio in the late 1950s and the joyful madness of Carnival. That there's a fine narrative to go along with it is almost a bonus.
Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2006 at the Brattle Theater (First-run)
The film festival circuit is kind of like awards season: Both generally tends to recognize and spotlight good films, but from a skewed sample. One area where both tend to fall down is comedies; awards shows either separate them from the "important" movies or maybe recognize supporting players, and lately it seems that the only way a comedy can crack a festival line-up is by being a "mockumentary". So movies like Blackballed play festivals and maybe even win awards despite not really being that funny.
Oh, Blackballed has its moments, and more than a few come about as a result of using the documentary format. It also has a lot of moments where the format is an obvious crutch, leaning hard on "hey, isn't this conversation awkward and weird and thus real?" The format also calls attention to the scale of the movie: Do people make "real" documentaries about local legends? Well, of course, but there's usually some acknowledgment that this is a guy that you probably wouldn't have heard of if you haven't been within fifty miles of the setting in that case. Blackballed seems to avoid putting that bit in, so we're never really sure of the level of fame/infamy Bobby Dukes (Rob Corddry) achieved before his fall from grace. Was he a guy with national renown among paintballers now trying to work his way back to that, or is he trying to regain the respect of this small town because he's nothing outside it? The film kind of plays coy, almost as if it wants to imply the first case even though the second is all they can really afford to present.
Read the rest at HBS.
That's the end of the last Brattle schedule, which wasn't bad at all. I'm a little less psyched about the current one; we're about to hit Gene Kelly & Fred Astaire and then Ken Russell, which will be fun, although not really must-sees for me.
The July/August schedule will be the vertical one, which scares/reassures me a little - it means I likely won't miss a whole great series while off at Fantasia for a week and a half. But it'll probably mean missing a chunk of a couple good series.
Planning for that is kind of crazy. You now need a passport as opposed to just a birth certificate and an ID to cross the border into Canada now, so there's that paperwork to fill out. Of course, I appear to have lost the copy of my birth certificate while moving earlier this year, so I had to order one from Worcester, which is disturbingly easy on one hand but needlessly difficult on the other, since the city's website choked on Firefox while collecting a little data and eleven dollars. I should be able to get everything in line before July. I'm looking forward to it; it was the highlight of my moviegoing year last year, and hope to make it an annual thing.
So, anyway, these two movies ran consecuitve weeks at the Brattle and both have "black" in their title. Otherwise, they're night and day: One's a colorful, lush drama shot in Brazil by a French director; the other is a washed-out mockumentary that couldn't have cost more than a few bucks to make. I prefer the first, not there are many situations where anybody will face an either/or decision between Blackballed and Black Orpheus. Still, Black Orpheus does several things well enough that every moment has some worth, where Blackballed just sort of flails when any of the jokes falls flat.
Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro, aka Orfeu do Carnival)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 April 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagement)
The idea of a setting being an integral part of a story, to the point where it's called a character in the movie, is particularly apt where Black Orpheus is concerned. The Orpheus myth, like so many, can be removed form its setting and be relevant to anyone; that's what myths are for. It can be related in a few seconds, so by transplanting it to Rio de Janeiro, and portraying Rio so vividly, filmmaker Marcel Camus is not just retelling a classic, but using it as a pretext to explore.
After all, everybody knows the story of Orpheus, here Orfeo, a streetcar conductor with a passion for the guitar played by soccer star Breno Mello. When he applies for a marriage license, the clerk says "this must be Eurydice, because everyone knows that Orpheus loves Eurydice". The thing is, Orfeo was with Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira), who is a bit on the jealous side. Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) has just arrived to visit her cousin Serafina (Lea Garcia). Serafina lives in Orfeo's neighborhood, and it's not long before they're formally introduced. But Mira isn't the only obstacle between them; Eurydice is fleeing a death-masked stalker.
The story takes place in the days leading up to Carnival, which gives the characters an excellent opportunity to participate in intrigues involving disguise: As much fun as they are in classical theater and literature, masked balls are far from common these days. Carnival, with its elaborate costumes, throngs of people, and masks which cover the whole face, offers a chance to use this plot device in a modern setting without it seeming odd. It also makes the film as stunning as Carnival itself, as every square inch of the big screen fills with a riot of colorful clothing, dancers parade in awesome syncopation, and joyous calypso plays on the soundtrack. It would be a complete showstopper, if it weren't half the reason to have the show in the first place.
It's not just by showing Carnival that Camus immerses us in Rio. The entire film is shot on location, and not always in the clean, touristy areas. Ofeo and Serafina live in a hillside shantytown with stray animals wandering in and out. There's trash strewn everywhere, with it becoming a natural part of the landscape. The two kids who follow Orfeo around wear the same ripped clothes throughout the entire film. We don't dwell on poverty, though, since we're given nothing to place them in another context; the characters get by, what they want is generally within reach, they're planning an elaborate celebration, and even wealthy Mira seems familiar with pawn shops. It's not just the vibrant, beautiful parts of Rio we see, though - the bureaucratic offices, morgue, and spooky spirituals that represent the underworld in the last act are chillingly atmospheric.
Much as the film is shot on real locations, it also features a cast of non-professional locals - or at least, people who started acting with this movie. Mello gives Orfeo a roguish charm; the man has obviously been free with his attentions to the fair sex, and he's pretty quick to shift his attention from the woman he allegedly wishes to marry, often finding her a nuisance. But he remains likeable; it's like he's been able to coast and now he's figuring out how to be serious. Miss Dawn is perfectly sweet as Eurydice; we initially see her amazed at the big city and we're as charmed as we were by Mello; it makes them a good pair. Lourdes de Oliveira drips sex as Mira, and not entirely because of her skintight outfits; she's primal, direct and not someone you'd want to cross. Lea Garcia is arguably the glue that holds the film together; her Serafina is the common point of reference for all the other characters and she not only has to have all the mechanics of plot bounce off her, but gets her own comic story with a soldier boyfriend just in town for the weekend. None of them give perfect, polished performances - we occasionally see the effort to recite memorized lines, let alone create the illusion that they arise naturally - but we get the feeling, and have a handle on the characters.
The story is mythic, both in source material and in execution. Orfeo doesn't have a literal underworld to search, but characters are aware of the myth being re-enacted. Indeed, toward the end, there's references to this being a cyclic process, with Orfeo not being the first Orpheus and an implication that others will follow him. That Camus was able to make that point while also handling what must have been a tremendously difficult shoot, with amateur actors and huge crowd scenes, is no small accomplishment.
Black Orpheus may not be the best-ever retelling of the Orpheus myth, but it's as beautiful and charming as any. As it stands, it's worth seeing just as a travel movie; it's a delightful capsule time capsue of Rio in the late 1950s and the joyful madness of Carnival. That there's a fine narrative to go along with it is almost a bonus.
Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2006 at the Brattle Theater (First-run)
The film festival circuit is kind of like awards season: Both generally tends to recognize and spotlight good films, but from a skewed sample. One area where both tend to fall down is comedies; awards shows either separate them from the "important" movies or maybe recognize supporting players, and lately it seems that the only way a comedy can crack a festival line-up is by being a "mockumentary". So movies like Blackballed play festivals and maybe even win awards despite not really being that funny.
Oh, Blackballed has its moments, and more than a few come about as a result of using the documentary format. It also has a lot of moments where the format is an obvious crutch, leaning hard on "hey, isn't this conversation awkward and weird and thus real?" The format also calls attention to the scale of the movie: Do people make "real" documentaries about local legends? Well, of course, but there's usually some acknowledgment that this is a guy that you probably wouldn't have heard of if you haven't been within fifty miles of the setting in that case. Blackballed seems to avoid putting that bit in, so we're never really sure of the level of fame/infamy Bobby Dukes (Rob Corddry) achieved before his fall from grace. Was he a guy with national renown among paintballers now trying to work his way back to that, or is he trying to regain the respect of this small town because he's nothing outside it? The film kind of plays coy, almost as if it wants to imply the first case even though the second is all they can really afford to present.
Read the rest at HBS.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Made In China: The Promise and Mission: Impossible III
Before an unfortunate shrimp-related stomach problem last weekend, I got in two movies at least partially made in China and whose releases caused some controversy.
Mission: Impossible III played nice with the People's Republic, which only lets a few foreign films play in theaters each year, shooting on location with a local and not making evil Communists the bad guys. For this they're getting screwed over, bumped from their release date until a good two months after release in the rest of the world because part of June and July are apparently "no foreigners allowed" month. Which means it'll be good and bootlegged by the time it gets there. It's tempting to laugh, because the victims are Viacom and Tom Cruise, and that's like feeling bad about Derek Jeter and the New York Yankees getting a raw deal on something, but it's still a kind of a jerk move.
Meanwhile, coming the other direction, The Promise originally had its distribution rights purchased by the Weinstein Company, who promptly showed that it wasn't Disney demanding cuts by getting out the scissors. The Chinese studio balked, the rights reverted, and Warner Independant picked up the rights. And, by the time it got released in the U.S., half an hour was cut out anyway.
This drive me nuts. When Mission: Impossible opens in China, will it have fifteen or twenty minutes cut out? Does Warner really make enough in extra ticket sales to justify what it costs to hire an uncredited editor to do this, especially when they also have to be losing ticket sales from people who will just get it off YesAsia or the like if they can't see it uncut?
Now, The Promise probably wouldn't have become a good movie with another twenty-five or so minutes, although there were spots where it could, perhaps, use some airing out. Of course, I've read reviews of the full-lenth version on festival and Asian film blogs saying it could use cutting. But when you consider that this didn't add an extra showtime, what good does it do, commercially?
One other thing that's interesting is that the two films have complementary weaknesses. The Promise is lush and out there, while Mission: Impossible is kind of businesslike. They're both big time action movies, but I think I'd prefer the crazy to the professional. I like M:I 3, but there were times when I didn't think I was liking it as much as I was expected to, whereas The Promise dropped my jaw on a regular basis. Sure, sometimes it was in disbelief, but it at least had the ability to surprise me at any moment.
Mission: Impossible III
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 May 2006 at AMC Boston Common #14 (First-run)
Three is the dangerous number in franchises. It's where the audience sort of knows what to expect and starts wondering why they should watch the new one which may not be any good when they've got the ones they know they like on DVD. Producers Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner knew this going in, and sought to forestall it by making each Mission Impossible entry a fresh start with new co-stars, writers, directors, etc. It's a dangerous game, especially since they chose a guy with no feature experience to follow two very big names for the director's chair. Choosing a guy on his way up rather than guys whose best work may be behind them seems to work out, though, as J.J. Abrams turns in a solidly enjoyable movie.
Fans of Abrams's spy series Alias will recognize the gimmick he uses to open the movie right off: The hero in deep trouble - here, Cruise's Ethan Hunt is chained to a chair while Philip Seymour Hoffman's Owen Davian threatens a woman who clearly means a lot to him. One shocking denouement later, we jump back in time to examine how Hunt got himself into this situation: He was pulled out of the party celebrating his engagement to Julia (Michelle Monaghan), by a mission to rescue Lindsey Ferris (Keri Russell), an agent he'd trained. Accompanying him on the mission is old friend Luther Strickell (Ving Rhames), along with pilot/driver Declan (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and infiltration specialist Zhen (Maggie Q). The mission leads to a suspected mole, an off-the-books mission, and Davian swearing revenge, all of which involve people and things being shot at and blowing up.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Promise (Wu Ji)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 May 2006 at AMC Harvard Square #1 (First-run)
The Promise is crazy, but it is for the most part the good kind of crazy. It's big, fantastical and epic, combining grand scale with individual passion. It's absolutely gorgeous to look at. It's also utterly ridiculous, with action that leaps from exaggerated to cartoonish, a plot driven by trivial things, and special effects that occasionally fall well short of the cinematography that surrounds them. The film careens back and forth across the line between glorious excess and excessive excess.
Back in the time of myth and legend, there was a kingdom where gods and men lived alongside each other. It was not a peaceful place, though - when we first meet Qingcheng, she's a girl of about five, scavenging among the dead soldiers for food and clothes. As she flees the scene, she meets the goddess Manshen (Hong Chen), who offers her the chance to grow up a beauty among beauties, rich, and wanting for nothing, except that she will lose every man she loves. Being five, hungry, and not able to comprehend what it means to be in love, she accepts the bargain.
Read the rest at HBS.
Mission: Impossible III played nice with the People's Republic, which only lets a few foreign films play in theaters each year, shooting on location with a local and not making evil Communists the bad guys. For this they're getting screwed over, bumped from their release date until a good two months after release in the rest of the world because part of June and July are apparently "no foreigners allowed" month. Which means it'll be good and bootlegged by the time it gets there. It's tempting to laugh, because the victims are Viacom and Tom Cruise, and that's like feeling bad about Derek Jeter and the New York Yankees getting a raw deal on something, but it's still a kind of a jerk move.
Meanwhile, coming the other direction, The Promise originally had its distribution rights purchased by the Weinstein Company, who promptly showed that it wasn't Disney demanding cuts by getting out the scissors. The Chinese studio balked, the rights reverted, and Warner Independant picked up the rights. And, by the time it got released in the U.S., half an hour was cut out anyway.
This drive me nuts. When Mission: Impossible opens in China, will it have fifteen or twenty minutes cut out? Does Warner really make enough in extra ticket sales to justify what it costs to hire an uncredited editor to do this, especially when they also have to be losing ticket sales from people who will just get it off YesAsia or the like if they can't see it uncut?
Now, The Promise probably wouldn't have become a good movie with another twenty-five or so minutes, although there were spots where it could, perhaps, use some airing out. Of course, I've read reviews of the full-lenth version on festival and Asian film blogs saying it could use cutting. But when you consider that this didn't add an extra showtime, what good does it do, commercially?
One other thing that's interesting is that the two films have complementary weaknesses. The Promise is lush and out there, while Mission: Impossible is kind of businesslike. They're both big time action movies, but I think I'd prefer the crazy to the professional. I like M:I 3, but there were times when I didn't think I was liking it as much as I was expected to, whereas The Promise dropped my jaw on a regular basis. Sure, sometimes it was in disbelief, but it at least had the ability to surprise me at any moment.
Mission: Impossible III
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 May 2006 at AMC Boston Common #14 (First-run)
Three is the dangerous number in franchises. It's where the audience sort of knows what to expect and starts wondering why they should watch the new one which may not be any good when they've got the ones they know they like on DVD. Producers Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner knew this going in, and sought to forestall it by making each Mission Impossible entry a fresh start with new co-stars, writers, directors, etc. It's a dangerous game, especially since they chose a guy with no feature experience to follow two very big names for the director's chair. Choosing a guy on his way up rather than guys whose best work may be behind them seems to work out, though, as J.J. Abrams turns in a solidly enjoyable movie.
Fans of Abrams's spy series Alias will recognize the gimmick he uses to open the movie right off: The hero in deep trouble - here, Cruise's Ethan Hunt is chained to a chair while Philip Seymour Hoffman's Owen Davian threatens a woman who clearly means a lot to him. One shocking denouement later, we jump back in time to examine how Hunt got himself into this situation: He was pulled out of the party celebrating his engagement to Julia (Michelle Monaghan), by a mission to rescue Lindsey Ferris (Keri Russell), an agent he'd trained. Accompanying him on the mission is old friend Luther Strickell (Ving Rhames), along with pilot/driver Declan (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and infiltration specialist Zhen (Maggie Q). The mission leads to a suspected mole, an off-the-books mission, and Davian swearing revenge, all of which involve people and things being shot at and blowing up.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Promise (Wu Ji)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 May 2006 at AMC Harvard Square #1 (First-run)
The Promise is crazy, but it is for the most part the good kind of crazy. It's big, fantastical and epic, combining grand scale with individual passion. It's absolutely gorgeous to look at. It's also utterly ridiculous, with action that leaps from exaggerated to cartoonish, a plot driven by trivial things, and special effects that occasionally fall well short of the cinematography that surrounds them. The film careens back and forth across the line between glorious excess and excessive excess.
Back in the time of myth and legend, there was a kingdom where gods and men lived alongside each other. It was not a peaceful place, though - when we first meet Qingcheng, she's a girl of about five, scavenging among the dead soldiers for food and clothes. As she flees the scene, she meets the goddess Manshen (Hong Chen), who offers her the chance to grow up a beauty among beauties, rich, and wanting for nothing, except that she will lose every man she loves. Being five, hungry, and not able to comprehend what it means to be in love, she accepts the bargain.
Read the rest at HBS.
Monday, May 08, 2006
Monsters: Slither, Gamera 3, Silent Hill
Matt and I went to Silent Hill after failing to spend a bunch of money in Cambridge SoundWorks - I had a coupon, but they didn't have the Sony DVR that was hooked up to a TV in the demo room for sale, and they wouldn't allow a coupon to be used on a Creative MP3 player. And that wound up being a sort of unsatisfying experience, as well.
I've generally stopped participating in the "that's it, I'm not going to theaters any more" on the HTF because it's kind of hopeless. The folks who complain on those threads either have much thinner skins than me, are looking to justify the money they spent on their home systems, or just live in less pleasant places to go out for a movie. I still figure that it's a pretty good value for money, but sometimes even my patience is tested.
Silent Hill was just filled with people apparently unable to just sit down and watch a movie and respect that the other people in the theater did not come to listen to them. I've got no problem with laughing, gasping, applauding, or even the rare comment that just comes out because, hey, it can't be held in. But keeping up a running commentary that I can hear four rows in front of you is not cool, and the miscreant to our left... If you say "this sucks, I'm leaving", do the lot of us a favor and actually do so.
At least it was during an awful movie. Even more annoying was the just plain sparse attendance for Slither, a thoroughly enjoyable horror with comedy that completely tanked at the box office despite a likable cast, working both the scary and the funny well, and some cool effects. It got crushed under Ice Age 2 and deserved much, much better.
As to Gamera 3... It actually stands alone pretty well - I haven't seen any previous Gamera movies, though I may seek the others out. Not a great movie, and it sort of bites off more than it can chew, but it's better to see a movie aspire to something big and not quite make it than go overboard on something small.
Speaking of which... Next week's Eye-Opener at the Brattle is Mutual Appreciation, which will likely drive me nuts if director Andrew Bujalski's last film, Funny Ha Ha is any indication. Bujalski is also appearing with the film tomorrow night at the Harvard Film Archive; it's not clear whether or not he'll be at the Brattle Sunday morning.
Not like I'd have the stones to ask why he opts to waste people's time by chronicling the mundane, anyway. I talk big online but in a genuine Q&A...
Slither
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 April 2006 at the AMC Fenway #9 (First-run)
At some point during the pre-production of Slither, I imagine James Gunn getting lost walking through the Universal office building. He's supposed to get someone from Rogue Pictures to sign off on his micro-budgeted direct to video horror movie. But, instead, he winds up with the main studio guys, who see his paperwork and absently sign off on it, since it looks legit. Suddenly, he's got a whole bunch of extra money and a decent cast, and he decides to make the most of it.
The story is standard B-movie stuff: Meteor falls to Earth near a small southern town. A couple people off in the woods get killed, and the little slugs that emerge from it wind up inside a local (Michael Rooker), who starts acting weird. Well, weirder; anyone with a name like Grant Grant is going to be unusual to start with. Soon, people and livestock are disappearing, and local sheriff Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion) is on the case, along with mayor Jack MacReady(Gregg Henry), the wife of the possessed man, Starla Grant (Elizabeth Banks), whom Bill has had a crush on since elementary school. They track Grant to the woods behind the Strutemyer farm, where they realize that their problems are decidedly not of this Earth.
Read the rest at HBS.
Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (Gamera 3: Iris Kakusei)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Modern Japanese Film)
Shusuke Kaneko realizes something that a lot of other kaiju directors often ignore: Giant monsters kill. And not just other giant monsters, either - those buildings they knock over on their way to fight other monsters are occupied. Where most movies portray a kaiju rampage as mostly a tragedy to historic preservationists and insurance companies (but a boon to the Japanese construction industry!), a skyscraper-sized flying turtle plowing through the city is going to leave widows and orphans.
Such is the message at the beginning of the movie, where pretty scientist Mayumi Nagamine (Shinobu Nakayama) is investigating a Gyaos attack in a remote Micronesian village. Gamera had foiled the Gyaos four years earlier, destroying a good deal of Tokyo in the process - with the fatalities including (then) eight-year-old Ayana's mother and father. Now living with cousins in the country, Ayana (Ai Maeda) doesn't have much patience for those who say Gamera is their friend. As it would happen, her classmate Tatsunari Moribe (Yuu Koyama) has been given the responsibility to guard a rocky egg by his grandfather. No worries - this egg hasn't done anything in centuries; no-one can move it. Except, apparently, Ayana. It hatches, Ayana names it "Iris" after her cat that Gamera killed, and they bond over their mutual dislike of the giant turtle. Those who don't anticipate a Gamera-Iris smackdown clearly entered the theater without noting the name of the movie.
Read the rest at HBS.
Silent Hill
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2006 at AMC Boston Common #1 (First-run)
At the turn of the century, a French filmmaker named Christophe Gans made one of the best action/adventure films in recent memory, The Brotherhood of the Wolf. Since that time, he's been attached to other promising-sounding projects, but they all seemed to get stuck in development hell somewhere along the line. His name being attached to the Silent Hill movie was a surprise, but one which perhaps said good things about a film derived from a video game than rather than bad things about his career. The good news is, that turned out to be the case. The bad news is, it's not nearly enough.
Gans is a talented director, and he and his crew throw some great, creepy visuals up on screen. He's good at using special effects, he can stage a heck of an action scene, and he's not bad at building tension at all. When the movie finally got to its big ending set piece, it kicked into pretty high gear, delivering a whole raft of nasty/fun gross-out bits and a suitably cataclysmic finale. I'd be pretty willing to absolve him of blame for all the parts that aren't up to snuff - not reasonable, I know, but I loved Brotherhood so much - except that the thing could probably stand to lose twenty minutes, and his name did pop up when the writing credits appeared on screen. Sure, Roger Avary is credited with the screenplay, but screwing things up this bad takes a team effort.
Read the rest at HBS.
I've generally stopped participating in the "that's it, I'm not going to theaters any more" on the HTF because it's kind of hopeless. The folks who complain on those threads either have much thinner skins than me, are looking to justify the money they spent on their home systems, or just live in less pleasant places to go out for a movie. I still figure that it's a pretty good value for money, but sometimes even my patience is tested.
Silent Hill was just filled with people apparently unable to just sit down and watch a movie and respect that the other people in the theater did not come to listen to them. I've got no problem with laughing, gasping, applauding, or even the rare comment that just comes out because, hey, it can't be held in. But keeping up a running commentary that I can hear four rows in front of you is not cool, and the miscreant to our left... If you say "this sucks, I'm leaving", do the lot of us a favor and actually do so.
At least it was during an awful movie. Even more annoying was the just plain sparse attendance for Slither, a thoroughly enjoyable horror with comedy that completely tanked at the box office despite a likable cast, working both the scary and the funny well, and some cool effects. It got crushed under Ice Age 2 and deserved much, much better.
As to Gamera 3... It actually stands alone pretty well - I haven't seen any previous Gamera movies, though I may seek the others out. Not a great movie, and it sort of bites off more than it can chew, but it's better to see a movie aspire to something big and not quite make it than go overboard on something small.
Speaking of which... Next week's Eye-Opener at the Brattle is Mutual Appreciation, which will likely drive me nuts if director Andrew Bujalski's last film, Funny Ha Ha is any indication. Bujalski is also appearing with the film tomorrow night at the Harvard Film Archive; it's not clear whether or not he'll be at the Brattle Sunday morning.
Not like I'd have the stones to ask why he opts to waste people's time by chronicling the mundane, anyway. I talk big online but in a genuine Q&A...
Slither
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 April 2006 at the AMC Fenway #9 (First-run)
At some point during the pre-production of Slither, I imagine James Gunn getting lost walking through the Universal office building. He's supposed to get someone from Rogue Pictures to sign off on his micro-budgeted direct to video horror movie. But, instead, he winds up with the main studio guys, who see his paperwork and absently sign off on it, since it looks legit. Suddenly, he's got a whole bunch of extra money and a decent cast, and he decides to make the most of it.
The story is standard B-movie stuff: Meteor falls to Earth near a small southern town. A couple people off in the woods get killed, and the little slugs that emerge from it wind up inside a local (Michael Rooker), who starts acting weird. Well, weirder; anyone with a name like Grant Grant is going to be unusual to start with. Soon, people and livestock are disappearing, and local sheriff Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion) is on the case, along with mayor Jack MacReady(Gregg Henry), the wife of the possessed man, Starla Grant (Elizabeth Banks), whom Bill has had a crush on since elementary school. They track Grant to the woods behind the Strutemyer farm, where they realize that their problems are decidedly not of this Earth.
Read the rest at HBS.
Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (Gamera 3: Iris Kakusei)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Modern Japanese Film)
Shusuke Kaneko realizes something that a lot of other kaiju directors often ignore: Giant monsters kill. And not just other giant monsters, either - those buildings they knock over on their way to fight other monsters are occupied. Where most movies portray a kaiju rampage as mostly a tragedy to historic preservationists and insurance companies (but a boon to the Japanese construction industry!), a skyscraper-sized flying turtle plowing through the city is going to leave widows and orphans.
Such is the message at the beginning of the movie, where pretty scientist Mayumi Nagamine (Shinobu Nakayama) is investigating a Gyaos attack in a remote Micronesian village. Gamera had foiled the Gyaos four years earlier, destroying a good deal of Tokyo in the process - with the fatalities including (then) eight-year-old Ayana's mother and father. Now living with cousins in the country, Ayana (Ai Maeda) doesn't have much patience for those who say Gamera is their friend. As it would happen, her classmate Tatsunari Moribe (Yuu Koyama) has been given the responsibility to guard a rocky egg by his grandfather. No worries - this egg hasn't done anything in centuries; no-one can move it. Except, apparently, Ayana. It hatches, Ayana names it "Iris" after her cat that Gamera killed, and they bond over their mutual dislike of the giant turtle. Those who don't anticipate a Gamera-Iris smackdown clearly entered the theater without noting the name of the movie.
Read the rest at HBS.
Silent Hill
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2006 at AMC Boston Common #1 (First-run)
At the turn of the century, a French filmmaker named Christophe Gans made one of the best action/adventure films in recent memory, The Brotherhood of the Wolf. Since that time, he's been attached to other promising-sounding projects, but they all seemed to get stuck in development hell somewhere along the line. His name being attached to the Silent Hill movie was a surprise, but one which perhaps said good things about a film derived from a video game than rather than bad things about his career. The good news is, that turned out to be the case. The bad news is, it's not nearly enough.
Gans is a talented director, and he and his crew throw some great, creepy visuals up on screen. He's good at using special effects, he can stage a heck of an action scene, and he's not bad at building tension at all. When the movie finally got to its big ending set piece, it kicked into pretty high gear, delivering a whole raft of nasty/fun gross-out bits and a suitably cataclysmic finale. I'd be pretty willing to absolve him of blame for all the parts that aren't up to snuff - not reasonable, I know, but I loved Brotherhood so much - except that the thing could probably stand to lose twenty minutes, and his name did pop up when the writing credits appeared on screen. Sure, Roger Avary is credited with the screenplay, but screwing things up this bad takes a team effort.
Read the rest at HBS.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Found just lying around: Old capsules
Just Friends
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 November 2005 at the AMC Boston Common #11 (First-run)
I like Ryan Reynolds and Amy Smart. Reynolds has a fun, relaxed persona that constantly threatens to be snide and off-putting but almost always pulls up just short; Smart is pretty and looks like she has the Cameron Diaz thing going on, where she seems like she'd be most comfortable in a sports bar, having fun as just one of the guys. They're both kind of minor talents, when you get down to it, but a lot of folks have had more success with less ability.
So why does it seem like everything they're in sucks? Come on, it's not like like you can't tell what their strengths are by now. So why are you putting Reynolds in a fat suit in half the scenes and making him flat-out unpleasant in most of the rest? Why aren't you giving Smart any sort of personality she can exaggerate into goofy lovability? Shouldn't one of the first goals of any romantic comedy be to make the main characters interesting and appealling? Instead, we get a pairing that is bland at best; it's lucky the film has Anna Faris as an over-the-top pop star trapped in a small town and Chris Marquette as Reynolds's obnoxious little brother.
This shouldn't be that hard; everyone in the cast is a known quantity. Maybe you won't get a great movie out of them, but an entertaining hour and a half doesn't seem like too much to ask.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 November 2005 at the AMC Boston Common #13 (First-run)
Harry Potter is a complete tool.
When you get right down to it, he's got to be one of the least impressive chosen ones ever. Through the first few movies, he's mostly spent his time getting his butt kicked, only to have his friends or the ghost of his dead mother pull him out. Here, he winds up literally being Voldermort's tool, easily manipulated without ever really getting a handle on what's going on.
Also, maybe I'm expecting a little much from my children's-entertainment-with-appeal-to-adults, but some things in the story just don't scan: The whole tri-wizard tournament thing. I'm trying to imagine the permission slip that parents have to sign for this. "Why, yes, I'm totally okay with my child participating in potentially lethal bloodsports. Don't let down the side, son!" Maybe it makes more sense in the original novel; the series has progressed to the point where it's adapting giant-size books, and I seem to remember a fan telling me that the Quiddich tournament briefly glipsed in the opening is a major subplot in the book, providing comic relief in terms of how it stays hidden from the mundane humans. I imagine other things which are treated as important in the end are actually built up: A character dies in a way that I gather is supposed to be shocking, but he wasn't used enough in the film for it to really have an effect, and Hermione makes a comment about how the schools must work together rather than against each other wihch doesn't really seem to reference the events of the film.
But, to a certain extent, that's just me being cranky. To say that the film does make up for its thin script with a few exceptional set pieces is putting it mildly; all the tasks in the Tri-Wizard Tournament are suitably grand scale, and the effects guys have had enough experience with specific visuals and the general look of the series that the whole thing looks much smoother, without the occasional unevenness the first film displayed. Director Mike Newell picks up right where Alfonso Caroun left off, using mostly "civilian" costumes and putting more sinister corners in Hogwarts. The cast, by now, is familiar and comfortable in their roles, working together with the apparent ease of that of a long-running television series.
I don't find the Harry Potter series magical; as I've said, Harry's a tool and I really don't like the way it sets up its world - the idea of escaping to a secret world where you're the chosen one despite your parents' apparent disdain is great for kids, but as an adult I wonder why, if these magicians can do so freaking much, they feeding the hungry or ending war (really, they're self-absorbed jerks who think they're above us poor muggles). But they're fun annual diversions.
Shopgirl
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 November 2005 at the Landmark Embassy #3 (First-run)
Movies like this one are why I've moved to just playing quick catch-up when I've alread reviewed the last movie I've seen. Back in November, I had some strong feelings on this movie, and how, even though it remained fairly faithful to the text of the book, the tone and feel struck me as far, far off. But now, it's almost four months later, and it's just not cohering as well.
What it comes down to, I think, is that in bringing his novella to the screen, Steve Martin has downgraded Ray Porter, the wealthy middle-aged man he plays from a co-lead on his onw sort of journey of discovery to a supporting player, and given Jason Schwartzman's Jeremy more screen time. Claire Danes's Mirabelle remains about the same, but the result is that her story becomes more conclusive - where in the book, Jeremy seems more like The Next Step, in the movie he's well-rounded enough to possibly be The One. Maybe making a movie made Martin more squeamish about ending it on Ray and Mirabelle having a sort of father-daughter relationship (considering the earlier, you know, sex) and he opted to make their relationship more clearly exploitive on Ray's part.
The end result, though, mostly works. Martin and director Anand Tucker find the proper amount to preserve the novel's relative austerity without making the film a chore to get through. A big part of that is Schwartzman, whose stumbling awkwardness is out there for all to see rather than tightly reined in like the other characters'. There's a real sense of the aimlessness of their lives, and one can see how the characters might even feel they're almost pointless. Danes, especially, is able to breathe life into her character and make her feel far more solid than the Mirabelle we always viewed from a remove in the book.
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 November 2005 at the AMC Boston Common #11 (First-run)
I like Ryan Reynolds and Amy Smart. Reynolds has a fun, relaxed persona that constantly threatens to be snide and off-putting but almost always pulls up just short; Smart is pretty and looks like she has the Cameron Diaz thing going on, where she seems like she'd be most comfortable in a sports bar, having fun as just one of the guys. They're both kind of minor talents, when you get down to it, but a lot of folks have had more success with less ability.
So why does it seem like everything they're in sucks? Come on, it's not like like you can't tell what their strengths are by now. So why are you putting Reynolds in a fat suit in half the scenes and making him flat-out unpleasant in most of the rest? Why aren't you giving Smart any sort of personality she can exaggerate into goofy lovability? Shouldn't one of the first goals of any romantic comedy be to make the main characters interesting and appealling? Instead, we get a pairing that is bland at best; it's lucky the film has Anna Faris as an over-the-top pop star trapped in a small town and Chris Marquette as Reynolds's obnoxious little brother.
This shouldn't be that hard; everyone in the cast is a known quantity. Maybe you won't get a great movie out of them, but an entertaining hour and a half doesn't seem like too much to ask.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 November 2005 at the AMC Boston Common #13 (First-run)
Harry Potter is a complete tool.
When you get right down to it, he's got to be one of the least impressive chosen ones ever. Through the first few movies, he's mostly spent his time getting his butt kicked, only to have his friends or the ghost of his dead mother pull him out. Here, he winds up literally being Voldermort's tool, easily manipulated without ever really getting a handle on what's going on.
Also, maybe I'm expecting a little much from my children's-entertainment-with-appeal-to-adults, but some things in the story just don't scan: The whole tri-wizard tournament thing. I'm trying to imagine the permission slip that parents have to sign for this. "Why, yes, I'm totally okay with my child participating in potentially lethal bloodsports. Don't let down the side, son!" Maybe it makes more sense in the original novel; the series has progressed to the point where it's adapting giant-size books, and I seem to remember a fan telling me that the Quiddich tournament briefly glipsed in the opening is a major subplot in the book, providing comic relief in terms of how it stays hidden from the mundane humans. I imagine other things which are treated as important in the end are actually built up: A character dies in a way that I gather is supposed to be shocking, but he wasn't used enough in the film for it to really have an effect, and Hermione makes a comment about how the schools must work together rather than against each other wihch doesn't really seem to reference the events of the film.
But, to a certain extent, that's just me being cranky. To say that the film does make up for its thin script with a few exceptional set pieces is putting it mildly; all the tasks in the Tri-Wizard Tournament are suitably grand scale, and the effects guys have had enough experience with specific visuals and the general look of the series that the whole thing looks much smoother, without the occasional unevenness the first film displayed. Director Mike Newell picks up right where Alfonso Caroun left off, using mostly "civilian" costumes and putting more sinister corners in Hogwarts. The cast, by now, is familiar and comfortable in their roles, working together with the apparent ease of that of a long-running television series.
I don't find the Harry Potter series magical; as I've said, Harry's a tool and I really don't like the way it sets up its world - the idea of escaping to a secret world where you're the chosen one despite your parents' apparent disdain is great for kids, but as an adult I wonder why, if these magicians can do so freaking much, they feeding the hungry or ending war (really, they're self-absorbed jerks who think they're above us poor muggles). But they're fun annual diversions.
Shopgirl
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 November 2005 at the Landmark Embassy #3 (First-run)
Movies like this one are why I've moved to just playing quick catch-up when I've alread reviewed the last movie I've seen. Back in November, I had some strong feelings on this movie, and how, even though it remained fairly faithful to the text of the book, the tone and feel struck me as far, far off. But now, it's almost four months later, and it's just not cohering as well.
What it comes down to, I think, is that in bringing his novella to the screen, Steve Martin has downgraded Ray Porter, the wealthy middle-aged man he plays from a co-lead on his onw sort of journey of discovery to a supporting player, and given Jason Schwartzman's Jeremy more screen time. Claire Danes's Mirabelle remains about the same, but the result is that her story becomes more conclusive - where in the book, Jeremy seems more like The Next Step, in the movie he's well-rounded enough to possibly be The One. Maybe making a movie made Martin more squeamish about ending it on Ray and Mirabelle having a sort of father-daughter relationship (considering the earlier, you know, sex) and he opted to make their relationship more clearly exploitive on Ray's part.
The end result, though, mostly works. Martin and director Anand Tucker find the proper amount to preserve the novel's relative austerity without making the film a chore to get through. A big part of that is Schwartzman, whose stumbling awkwardness is out there for all to see rather than tightly reined in like the other characters'. There's a real sense of the aimlessness of their lives, and one can see how the characters might even feel they're almost pointless. Danes, especially, is able to breathe life into her character and make her feel far more solid than the Mirabelle we always viewed from a remove in the book.
Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006, Day 6: The Proposition
And we close the book on another IFFB. I started the night out with short package 1 at the Coolidge, having more than a few good laughs. It contained a couple repeats from ones playing with other films at the fest. Then it was onto the T and up to Davis Square, where the line for The Proposition (and the other closing night shows) literally reached around the block, if you allow that the building housing the Somerville Theater, Someday Café and assorted other businesses is about the size of a city block. When they finally let pass-holders in for the movie, I got a much better seat than my place in line probably merited because I had come to rest near the entrance to the theater and I was much closer than the people technically ahead of me but on the other side of the building.
Pretty darn great movie, though. My only irritation was that I was supposed to get back home and let Matt in before 11 or so and it started almost 45 minutes later than scheduled, and was followed by one of those Q&A sessions that fall into control of people who love to hear themselves talk. I probably harp on this a lot, but I feel very strongly about this: None of the other four hundred people in the theater came to hear you run on about the actor's past works, or basically answer your own question. Getting Danny Huston to say "I think you've summed it up nicely" is not a personal victory for you.
Ah, well. That's enough festival-ing until Fantasia, when I will thankfully be trying to balance three-plus movies a day with vacation, rather than work.
The Proposition
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #1 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
Just when you think the Western has been completely de-romanticized, someone goes and makes a movie that shows you that there was still, in fact, a little rose coloring left in those glasses. For The Proposition, director John Hilcoat and writer Nick Cave manage this by packing the whole works up and shipping it to a hot, insect-ridden corner of the Australian Outback. There they drop a nasty moral dilemma on us, with the only way to the other side through a violent path of blood. It's fantastic.
The proposition of the title is a simple one - two of the three notorious Burns brothers have been captured. Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), in charge of the local garrison, makes Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) a terrible offer: He will hang youngest brother Mike (Richard Wilson) in seven days unless Charlie brings back the corpse of their oldest brother, Arthur (Danny Huston). It's a terrible deal, but Charlie takes it - Mikey is a little slow and decent-hearted, and Arthur is a sociopath; if Stanley keeps his word, Charlie and Mike will go free. But a lot can happen in a week: The Burns gang is all being held responsible for the brutal slaughter of a local family, and don't take kindly to the idea of any of them getting off scott-free - even Stanley's wife Martha (Emily Watson) disagrees with this tactic. The natives are stirred up and ready to kill any white man. And as much as Charlie has come to hate his older brother and took Mike away from his influence, he's going to try to find a way to save both.
Read the rest at HBS.
Pretty darn great movie, though. My only irritation was that I was supposed to get back home and let Matt in before 11 or so and it started almost 45 minutes later than scheduled, and was followed by one of those Q&A sessions that fall into control of people who love to hear themselves talk. I probably harp on this a lot, but I feel very strongly about this: None of the other four hundred people in the theater came to hear you run on about the actor's past works, or basically answer your own question. Getting Danny Huston to say "I think you've summed it up nicely" is not a personal victory for you.
Ah, well. That's enough festival-ing until Fantasia, when I will thankfully be trying to balance three-plus movies a day with vacation, rather than work.
The Proposition
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #1 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
Just when you think the Western has been completely de-romanticized, someone goes and makes a movie that shows you that there was still, in fact, a little rose coloring left in those glasses. For The Proposition, director John Hilcoat and writer Nick Cave manage this by packing the whole works up and shipping it to a hot, insect-ridden corner of the Australian Outback. There they drop a nasty moral dilemma on us, with the only way to the other side through a violent path of blood. It's fantastic.
The proposition of the title is a simple one - two of the three notorious Burns brothers have been captured. Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), in charge of the local garrison, makes Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) a terrible offer: He will hang youngest brother Mike (Richard Wilson) in seven days unless Charlie brings back the corpse of their oldest brother, Arthur (Danny Huston). It's a terrible deal, but Charlie takes it - Mikey is a little slow and decent-hearted, and Arthur is a sociopath; if Stanley keeps his word, Charlie and Mike will go free. But a lot can happen in a week: The Burns gang is all being held responsible for the brutal slaughter of a local family, and don't take kindly to the idea of any of them getting off scott-free - even Stanley's wife Martha (Emily Watson) disagrees with this tactic. The natives are stirred up and ready to kill any white man. And as much as Charlie has come to hate his older brother and took Mike away from his influence, he's going to try to find a way to save both.
Read the rest at HBS.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006, Day 5: Hitting the Wall (Thin)
There was supposed to be more than one review here, but I bit off far more than I could chew. I wanted to get a review of Abduction up in time for the second showing, so that kept me up until four, then there was a certain minimum amount of cleaning to do before Matt could get moved in. Then an hour and a half of sleep, a shower, and helping Mom & Bill dump all the stuff I left in their basement seven years ago in our kitchen, emptying out Matt's Northeastern dorm room, dumping that in our living room, and then taking them to Fire & Ice for breakfast because, really, it had to be a sort of crappy trip for them - load up the van with stuff, leave North Yarmouth at about six in the morning, help move stuff, and then head back North because I had film festival stuff I wanted to do and Matt had to help his girlfriend move, too. By the time we finished eating, I'd missed out on the start of Red, White, Black, and Blue.
The thing about Fire & Ice is that you get unlimited trips to the grill. So after the first trip which involved a big ol' pancake with coconut, raspberries, and chocolate chips, I felt like I had a little room left, and I might not eat again until late, so why not get an omelette, too? Answer: Because between the time I picked out my ingredients and the time I arrive back at the table, the pancake had sort of settled. By the time I finished the omelette, I was overstuffed to the point of lethargy. I wound up watching most of the baseball game before heading out to Coolidge Corner.
For a film about anorexics. Man, there is nothing so odd as watching a movie about eating disorders with a big lump of food in your gut. It's humbling, though, just because it puts me in a place where I can't really feel any superiority towad the extreme cases on screen. After all, my own relationship with food isn't exactly perfect, at least not on that day.
Q&A afterward was handled by Amanda Micheli, who served as cinematographer and producer and came to the festival a couple years earlier with her own film, Double Dare.
So, after, that, it's a rush to Somerville to see The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes. It's the new one by the Brothers Quay, whom I make a real effort to like. See, they've got uncanny skills with visuals - if you've seen Frida, they did the surreal puppet sequence - but they can't make a story exciting. Now, certainly, I was not in the best position to see the movie - two hours of sleep all day, a big breakfast pushing me toward a food coma, and seats toward the front of the theater where I really would have to crane my head up to see. I think I can safely say that I saw about fifteen minutes of the film's 100, more or less randomly scattered throughout. I truly hope there wasn't anybody in the "rush" line who was denied a ticket so that I could nap there.
Thin
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 April 2006 at Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
Thin is difficult to watch. Eating disorders are an uncomfortable subject under any circumstances, but Lauren Greenfield's film steps it up a notch by being exactly what we say we want documentaries to be - clearheaded, objective, and non-judgmental. That's a rough deal, since there will likely be a number of times during the film's running time when the audience will want to yell at the camerawoman to do something, even if they're not sure what.
Greenfield sets her cameras up in the Renfrew Center, a residential clinic for women with anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders. Mainly, we follow four women: 15-year-old Brittany, who learned her bad habits young; 25-year-old Shelly, who has been fed with a surgically implanted tube for the last two years but learned that it provides, as she puts it, "direct access to [her] stomach", making purging with a syringe much less unpleasant than the usual methods; 29-year-old Polly, who becomes Shelly's best friend at the clinic; and 30-year-old Alisa, a mother of two worried that she won't be able to see her kids grow up. We follow them through morning and evening weigh-ins, precisely monitored meals, group therapy, one-on-one psychological, medical, and nutritional examination. We see them receive visitors, and watch them break the facilities every rule.
Read the rest at HBS.
The thing about Fire & Ice is that you get unlimited trips to the grill. So after the first trip which involved a big ol' pancake with coconut, raspberries, and chocolate chips, I felt like I had a little room left, and I might not eat again until late, so why not get an omelette, too? Answer: Because between the time I picked out my ingredients and the time I arrive back at the table, the pancake had sort of settled. By the time I finished the omelette, I was overstuffed to the point of lethargy. I wound up watching most of the baseball game before heading out to Coolidge Corner.
For a film about anorexics. Man, there is nothing so odd as watching a movie about eating disorders with a big lump of food in your gut. It's humbling, though, just because it puts me in a place where I can't really feel any superiority towad the extreme cases on screen. After all, my own relationship with food isn't exactly perfect, at least not on that day.
Q&A afterward was handled by Amanda Micheli, who served as cinematographer and producer and came to the festival a couple years earlier with her own film, Double Dare.
So, after, that, it's a rush to Somerville to see The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes. It's the new one by the Brothers Quay, whom I make a real effort to like. See, they've got uncanny skills with visuals - if you've seen Frida, they did the surreal puppet sequence - but they can't make a story exciting. Now, certainly, I was not in the best position to see the movie - two hours of sleep all day, a big breakfast pushing me toward a food coma, and seats toward the front of the theater where I really would have to crane my head up to see. I think I can safely say that I saw about fifteen minutes of the film's 100, more or less randomly scattered throughout. I truly hope there wasn't anybody in the "rush" line who was denied a ticket so that I could nap there.
Thin
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 April 2006 at Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
Thin is difficult to watch. Eating disorders are an uncomfortable subject under any circumstances, but Lauren Greenfield's film steps it up a notch by being exactly what we say we want documentaries to be - clearheaded, objective, and non-judgmental. That's a rough deal, since there will likely be a number of times during the film's running time when the audience will want to yell at the camerawoman to do something, even if they're not sure what.
Greenfield sets her cameras up in the Renfrew Center, a residential clinic for women with anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders. Mainly, we follow four women: 15-year-old Brittany, who learned her bad habits young; 25-year-old Shelly, who has been fed with a surgically implanted tube for the last two years but learned that it provides, as she puts it, "direct access to [her] stomach", making purging with a syringe much less unpleasant than the usual methods; 29-year-old Polly, who becomes Shelly's best friend at the clinic; and 30-year-old Alisa, a mother of two worried that she won't be able to see her kids grow up. We follow them through morning and evening weigh-ins, precisely monitored meals, group therapy, one-on-one psychological, medical, and nutritional examination. We see them receive visitors, and watch them break the facilities every rule.
Read the rest at HBS.
Friday, April 28, 2006
Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006, Day 4: Three cities
The plan on Saturday had been like the plan on Friday - go to Somerville for the animated shorts at noon, hang around there all day, following the schedule I'd mapped out days before, then head to the Coolidge for a midnight show and walk home. Because this is a festival, specifically the IFFB, things didn't go according to plan.
Good reason, though - a whole bunch of people wanted to see Chalk, so it got moved from one of the small downstairs theaters to the big main screen. This meant a forty-five minute delay, which means in collides with plans for other films. So once I get out of that, I head back to Cambridge for Wordplay at the Brattle, then quickly back to Somerville for Abduction.
Happily, all four of the features were very good to excellent. To re-iterate what I said right after seeing it, Abduction is a fantastic documentary that starts out as true crime and becomes an international spy story. It's going to be a big deal if it gets a release.
Chalk
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
It's not necessarily a good thing when folks who should know say a movie is dead on; my least favorite movies are the ones that capture something unexceptional perfectly. Still, when the teachers behind me said that Chalk pretty much nailed the experience of being relatively new at that job, I was glad to hear it. Nothing wrong with the movie making us think about how stressful a teacher's life can be, especially since it's so funny throughout.
Chalk is presented in the half-documentary format of television shows like Arrested Development and The Office: There's little indication that the characters are aware of a camera, and it seemed to have more coverage and close-ups than a real low-budget documentaries would probably have, but makes frequent use of "confessional" and post-shoot interview footage. It follows four teachers in an Austin high school: Mr. Lowrey (Troy Schremmer), a first-year history teacher whose lack of self-confidence is countered by Mr. Stroope (Chris Mass), on his third year whose ambition is to win Teacher of the Year within his first five despite not really being that good at teaching history. The gym teacher, Coach Webb (Janelle Schremmer) would like us to know that despite having short hair and being a gym teacher (and kind of pushy), she is not gay; her friend Mrs. Reddell (Shannon Haragan) is starting her first year as an assistant principal after having been the chorus leader.
Read the rest at HBS.
Wordplay
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
Wordplay is this year's big word-nerd documentary, following in the footsteps of Spellbound and Word Wars. As a member of that constituency, I'm pleased to see that the independent filmmakers of the world are catering to me in this way, and that they're not catering to me with crap, either. Wordplay continues the streak of these movies being highly entertaining.
(Obligatory Boston-based-guy complaint: The constant praise of the New York Times crossword as the gold standard got old for me fairly quickly. The Globe's daily crossword is not the greatest, but on Sundays they alternate between Henry Hook and Emily Cox & Henry Rathvon, who are in my humble opinion better than Shortz. Of course, since the Times owns the Globe, Shortz could very well be their editor.)
Yes, folks, people have favorite crossword puzzle constructors, although the vast majority of people who solve these puzzles probably don't give that much thought to how those puzzles come to be. It turns out that even before landing arguably the top job in American puzzledom, Shortz was a big name in the hobby: He created his own major and curriculum for "enigmatology" in college, and not long after was one of the organizers of the first National Crossword Puzzle Championship in Stamford, CT, which he still heads up today. When he took the job as the Times's puzzle editor in the early 1990s, it was a major shift in direction for the paper - his style of using fewer obscure words and more humor and pop culture was a big shift for the Times.
Read the rest at HBS.
Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
I'm not doing the thing. I'm not saying that Abduction is one of the best movies I've seen in the past year, and certainly the best documentary, just because it has important subject matter. I hate when people do that, whether they be critics, award voters, or just plain snobs. I'm saying Abduction is a great film because it tells a fascinating story in a suspenseful, exciting way, delivering the kind of emotional gut punches we go to the movies for.
If you're going in cold, it starts out like a fairly straightforward cold-case kidnapping story. On November 15, 1977, thirteen year-old Megumi Yokota and her best friend were walking home from badminton practice and went their separate ways. The friend comes home safely; Megumi vanishes as if into thin air. She's initially thought to be a runaway, though her family is at a loss as to why she would leave home. A couple years later, a crime reporter gets a tip that something strange is happening along Japan's west coast: Young couples in their early twenties are disappearing, though one pair escapes. Megumi's abduction isn't thought to be connected, as it doesn't fit tte pattern. It's not until 1997 that the truth is confirmed: Megumi and the others were kidnapped by North Korean spies and shipped in tiny containers across the Sea of Japan to train NK agents to better impersonate Japanese.
Read the rest at HBS.
District B13 (Banlieue 13)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
There are two kinds of action movie in the world. There's the ones that make the audience ooh and ahh and whoop from an adrenaline rush, and then there's the ones like District 13, where you get some of that, but you as often wince, draw a sharp intake of breath, and kind of turn halfway from the screen. You lean over to the guy sitting next to you and whisper "that, mon ami... that has got to hurt."
It's to be expected. We're informed right off the bat that Paris's District 13 is a violent place, so bad that in 2010 it's been walled off from the rest of the city with the police pulling out to just let the riffraff kill each other. Still, there's one guy in there willing to fight for what's right: Leito (David Belle) has intercepted a suitcase full of heroin and is destroying it. This displeases gangster Taha (Bibi Naceri), so he sends henchman K2 (Tony D'Amario) to stop him. There's a big fight, Taha and K2 decide to kidnap Leito's sister Lola (Dany Verissimo), and there's another big fight. The film then skips six months and introduces us to Damien (Cyril Raffaelli), a crack undercover operative (via a big fight), who is sent undercover into B13 to retrieve a neutron bomb that has fallen into Taha's hands, with prisoner Leito as a guide. Big fights ensue.
Read the rest at HBS.
Good reason, though - a whole bunch of people wanted to see Chalk, so it got moved from one of the small downstairs theaters to the big main screen. This meant a forty-five minute delay, which means in collides with plans for other films. So once I get out of that, I head back to Cambridge for Wordplay at the Brattle, then quickly back to Somerville for Abduction.
Happily, all four of the features were very good to excellent. To re-iterate what I said right after seeing it, Abduction is a fantastic documentary that starts out as true crime and becomes an international spy story. It's going to be a big deal if it gets a release.
Chalk
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
It's not necessarily a good thing when folks who should know say a movie is dead on; my least favorite movies are the ones that capture something unexceptional perfectly. Still, when the teachers behind me said that Chalk pretty much nailed the experience of being relatively new at that job, I was glad to hear it. Nothing wrong with the movie making us think about how stressful a teacher's life can be, especially since it's so funny throughout.
Chalk is presented in the half-documentary format of television shows like Arrested Development and The Office: There's little indication that the characters are aware of a camera, and it seemed to have more coverage and close-ups than a real low-budget documentaries would probably have, but makes frequent use of "confessional" and post-shoot interview footage. It follows four teachers in an Austin high school: Mr. Lowrey (Troy Schremmer), a first-year history teacher whose lack of self-confidence is countered by Mr. Stroope (Chris Mass), on his third year whose ambition is to win Teacher of the Year within his first five despite not really being that good at teaching history. The gym teacher, Coach Webb (Janelle Schremmer) would like us to know that despite having short hair and being a gym teacher (and kind of pushy), she is not gay; her friend Mrs. Reddell (Shannon Haragan) is starting her first year as an assistant principal after having been the chorus leader.
Read the rest at HBS.
Wordplay
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
Wordplay is this year's big word-nerd documentary, following in the footsteps of Spellbound and Word Wars. As a member of that constituency, I'm pleased to see that the independent filmmakers of the world are catering to me in this way, and that they're not catering to me with crap, either. Wordplay continues the streak of these movies being highly entertaining.
(Obligatory Boston-based-guy complaint: The constant praise of the New York Times crossword as the gold standard got old for me fairly quickly. The Globe's daily crossword is not the greatest, but on Sundays they alternate between Henry Hook and Emily Cox & Henry Rathvon, who are in my humble opinion better than Shortz. Of course, since the Times owns the Globe, Shortz could very well be their editor.)
Yes, folks, people have favorite crossword puzzle constructors, although the vast majority of people who solve these puzzles probably don't give that much thought to how those puzzles come to be. It turns out that even before landing arguably the top job in American puzzledom, Shortz was a big name in the hobby: He created his own major and curriculum for "enigmatology" in college, and not long after was one of the organizers of the first National Crossword Puzzle Championship in Stamford, CT, which he still heads up today. When he took the job as the Times's puzzle editor in the early 1990s, it was a major shift in direction for the paper - his style of using fewer obscure words and more humor and pop culture was a big shift for the Times.
Read the rest at HBS.
Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
I'm not doing the thing. I'm not saying that Abduction is one of the best movies I've seen in the past year, and certainly the best documentary, just because it has important subject matter. I hate when people do that, whether they be critics, award voters, or just plain snobs. I'm saying Abduction is a great film because it tells a fascinating story in a suspenseful, exciting way, delivering the kind of emotional gut punches we go to the movies for.
If you're going in cold, it starts out like a fairly straightforward cold-case kidnapping story. On November 15, 1977, thirteen year-old Megumi Yokota and her best friend were walking home from badminton practice and went their separate ways. The friend comes home safely; Megumi vanishes as if into thin air. She's initially thought to be a runaway, though her family is at a loss as to why she would leave home. A couple years later, a crime reporter gets a tip that something strange is happening along Japan's west coast: Young couples in their early twenties are disappearing, though one pair escapes. Megumi's abduction isn't thought to be connected, as it doesn't fit tte pattern. It's not until 1997 that the truth is confirmed: Megumi and the others were kidnapped by North Korean spies and shipped in tiny containers across the Sea of Japan to train NK agents to better impersonate Japanese.
Read the rest at HBS.
District B13 (Banlieue 13)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
There are two kinds of action movie in the world. There's the ones that make the audience ooh and ahh and whoop from an adrenaline rush, and then there's the ones like District 13, where you get some of that, but you as often wince, draw a sharp intake of breath, and kind of turn halfway from the screen. You lean over to the guy sitting next to you and whisper "that, mon ami... that has got to hurt."
It's to be expected. We're informed right off the bat that Paris's District 13 is a violent place, so bad that in 2010 it's been walled off from the rest of the city with the police pulling out to just let the riffraff kill each other. Still, there's one guy in there willing to fight for what's right: Leito (David Belle) has intercepted a suitcase full of heroin and is destroying it. This displeases gangster Taha (Bibi Naceri), so he sends henchman K2 (Tony D'Amario) to stop him. There's a big fight, Taha and K2 decide to kidnap Leito's sister Lola (Dany Verissimo), and there's another big fight. The film then skips six months and introduces us to Damien (Cyril Raffaelli), a crack undercover operative (via a big fight), who is sent undercover into B13 to retrieve a neutron bomb that has fallen into Taha's hands, with prisoner Leito as a guide. Big fights ensue.
Read the rest at HBS.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Another screening heads-up for the weekend
Survive Style 5+ will be this Sunday's Eye Opener at the Brattle Theater. It's a colorful, crazy movie from Japan that hasn't gotten distribution in the U.S. yet, apparently in part due to music rights issues. I only saw it on a (VHS!) screener, so it'll be very nice to see it on the big screen.
So, that's at the Brattle Theater, Sunday at 11am. $10 for drop-ins, $50 for the series of eight films ($30 for Clotrudis or Brattle members), three of which have already screened. Ivy leads a discussion afterwards. It's a good time and a great film you might not otherwise get a chance to see.
So, that's at the Brattle Theater, Sunday at 11am. $10 for drop-ins, $50 for the series of eight films ($30 for Clotrudis or Brattle members), three of which have already screened. Ivy leads a discussion afterwards. It's a good time and a great film you might not otherwise get a chance to see.
Saturday night (4/29) heads-up
Got an email yesterday mentioning a screening of Red Doors at the Museum of Fine Arts this coming Saturday night. Looks pretty good from the website. Tickets are on sale now.
Might be worth a look; I can't get to Tribeca this year (thought I was gong to have jury duty and I'm still working on my IFFB reviews), but this won some prizes there last year.
Might be worth a look; I can't get to Tribeca this year (thought I was gong to have jury duty and I'm still working on my IFFB reviews), but this won some prizes there last year.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006, Day 3: Friday night at the Coolidge
One of the things I tried to do this year, at least initially, is try and stay in one place all day. Which meant wanting to see the movie with Julie Delpy and the new Quay Brothers thing (more on that in a couple days) locked me into the Coolidge for the night. Which was fine; I wasn't going to go for a midnight at Somerville, even though it meant Saturday's midnight would be in Brookline, too, as opposed to the easier-to-walk-home-from Brattle. It also got me into Brothers of the Head, which wasn't really on my list of stuff to check out; "conjoined twin punk rockers in the seventies" is the sort of thing that seems a little too odd for me.
The line and Q&A for Lucy Keyes was interesting; I'm looking at the description and seeing "horror movie", and then I'm standing in line with a whole bunch of kids. It turns out this was made locally, so a lot of families who knew the filmmaker came out, and I think some of the kids were friends of the child actors in the cast. I was fairly impressed with how it was a good family ghost story; it's not a genre people play in nowadays.
Of course, one of those kids saw my Press pass and asked if I wrote for the paper. I said "no, a website", and he didn't say another word. No respect.
Then a quick stop at The Upper Crust, where they were out of pepperoni slices. Now, if you've got cheese slices, can't you throw some pepperoni on them if you're going to be heating it anyway? Please? Ah, well. That was followed by Death Trance, which is a ton of fun. I was kind of dragging by this point; I'd gone in to work early so I could leave early, and I'd been writing stuff up between movies. Long. Day. And then I gave up on the bus too quickly, so had to walk home at 1:30am.
Still, it was the start of a very solid weekend.
Brothers of the Head
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2006 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe are documentarians by trade most known for films about show business like Lost in La Mancha. Thus, this adaptation of a Brain Aldiss novel takes on that form. It's not just a case where every problem looks like a nail when you're good with a hammer, though; it's a way to bring the audience into an unusual situation.
That situation is the lives of Tom and Barry Howe, a pair of conjoined twins raised in isolation until a musical impresario more or less purchases the seventeen-year-old brothers from their father in the mid-1970s. Rather than becoming the pop novelty act the man envisioned, the pair pick up a punk sensibility, as Barry's songs especially are suffused with anger and raw emotion; they are getting their first chance to express themselves to the outside world and they're not messing around. It's far from an easy or idyllic life, of course, as the house in which they life includes an intrusive documentarian, a "keeper" who locks them in their room and beats them, and a pretty graduate student studying them who quickly comes between the brothers.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Legend of Lucy Keyes
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2006 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
The best ghost stories aren't really about ghosts; a ghost is a concept to ill-defined to really work as the focus of a story that aims to have a real plot and play fair with its audience. Stick a ghost into another kind of story, though, and you can not only add a little extra suspense, but misdirect the audience into thinking they're watching a different sort of movie.
The Legend of Lucy Keyes looks like a horror movie; it gives us a family of of city folk moving out to tiny Prniceton, Massachusetts where father Guy Cooley (Justin Theroux) will hopefully be helping to build a windmill farm, while mother Jeanne (Julie Delpy) is mostly looking for a new start after seeing their youngest daughter killed by a car in a city street. Daughters Molly (Kathleen Regan) and Lucy (Cassidy Hinkle) are in tow. There's some weird people in town, from the too-cheerful woman spearheading the windmill campaign (Brooke Adams) to the creepy woman basically saying that disturbing that land will disturb restless spirits (Jamie Donnelly), to the grumpy farmer next door who fertilizes his crops with awful-smelling clam bellies. Jeanne eventually learns about another Lucy who disappeared some two hundred and fifty years earlier and the girl's mother who is said to haunt the woods
Read the rest at HBS.
Death Trance
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2006 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
A few years ago, a movie by the name of "Versus" came out of Japan. Almost revolutionary in its simplicity, it married old-school Hong Kong martial arts style - let there be many well-choreographed fights, and let them come at the drop of a hat - to modern Japanese willingness to throw genre into a blender, stuck a talented young director on it, and pretty much hit people square in the id. That director's gone on to bigger things; now that film's action director, Yuji Shimomura, has taken the big chair for the first time and refined the formula a little more.
As much fun as Versus was, it wore the audience out and then hit us with convoluted backstory. Shimomura and his co-writers know that we're here to see butts kicked, and never loses sight of that. There's story, but it's doled out in manageable pieces between the action scenes. It's also not complicated enough that we feel the need to keep track of a whole bunch of elements to get something out of the action - each revelation means that someone's going to try and get possession of the coffin that serves as the movie's MacGuffin, the guy who has possession will fight him, and then the chase is on again. It's shallow, sure, but the fight scenes are good, and we learn enough to have a rooting interest even though we're given more than two sides, not always easily labeled "good" and "evil". And even if the story often seems like "just enough to get ninety minutes of movie out of fifty minutes of violence", it's also enough to get us to lean forward in our seats a little in the last act when the MacGuffin's about to start MacGuffing.
Read the rest at HBS.
The line and Q&A for Lucy Keyes was interesting; I'm looking at the description and seeing "horror movie", and then I'm standing in line with a whole bunch of kids. It turns out this was made locally, so a lot of families who knew the filmmaker came out, and I think some of the kids were friends of the child actors in the cast. I was fairly impressed with how it was a good family ghost story; it's not a genre people play in nowadays.
Of course, one of those kids saw my Press pass and asked if I wrote for the paper. I said "no, a website", and he didn't say another word. No respect.
Then a quick stop at The Upper Crust, where they were out of pepperoni slices. Now, if you've got cheese slices, can't you throw some pepperoni on them if you're going to be heating it anyway? Please? Ah, well. That was followed by Death Trance, which is a ton of fun. I was kind of dragging by this point; I'd gone in to work early so I could leave early, and I'd been writing stuff up between movies. Long. Day. And then I gave up on the bus too quickly, so had to walk home at 1:30am.
Still, it was the start of a very solid weekend.
Brothers of the Head
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2006 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe are documentarians by trade most known for films about show business like Lost in La Mancha. Thus, this adaptation of a Brain Aldiss novel takes on that form. It's not just a case where every problem looks like a nail when you're good with a hammer, though; it's a way to bring the audience into an unusual situation.
That situation is the lives of Tom and Barry Howe, a pair of conjoined twins raised in isolation until a musical impresario more or less purchases the seventeen-year-old brothers from their father in the mid-1970s. Rather than becoming the pop novelty act the man envisioned, the pair pick up a punk sensibility, as Barry's songs especially are suffused with anger and raw emotion; they are getting their first chance to express themselves to the outside world and they're not messing around. It's far from an easy or idyllic life, of course, as the house in which they life includes an intrusive documentarian, a "keeper" who locks them in their room and beats them, and a pretty graduate student studying them who quickly comes between the brothers.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Legend of Lucy Keyes
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2006 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
The best ghost stories aren't really about ghosts; a ghost is a concept to ill-defined to really work as the focus of a story that aims to have a real plot and play fair with its audience. Stick a ghost into another kind of story, though, and you can not only add a little extra suspense, but misdirect the audience into thinking they're watching a different sort of movie.
The Legend of Lucy Keyes looks like a horror movie; it gives us a family of of city folk moving out to tiny Prniceton, Massachusetts where father Guy Cooley (Justin Theroux) will hopefully be helping to build a windmill farm, while mother Jeanne (Julie Delpy) is mostly looking for a new start after seeing their youngest daughter killed by a car in a city street. Daughters Molly (Kathleen Regan) and Lucy (Cassidy Hinkle) are in tow. There's some weird people in town, from the too-cheerful woman spearheading the windmill campaign (Brooke Adams) to the creepy woman basically saying that disturbing that land will disturb restless spirits (Jamie Donnelly), to the grumpy farmer next door who fertilizes his crops with awful-smelling clam bellies. Jeanne eventually learns about another Lucy who disappeared some two hundred and fifty years earlier and the girl's mother who is said to haunt the woods
Read the rest at HBS.
Death Trance
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2006 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
A few years ago, a movie by the name of "Versus" came out of Japan. Almost revolutionary in its simplicity, it married old-school Hong Kong martial arts style - let there be many well-choreographed fights, and let them come at the drop of a hat - to modern Japanese willingness to throw genre into a blender, stuck a talented young director on it, and pretty much hit people square in the id. That director's gone on to bigger things; now that film's action director, Yuji Shimomura, has taken the big chair for the first time and refined the formula a little more.
As much fun as Versus was, it wore the audience out and then hit us with convoluted backstory. Shimomura and his co-writers know that we're here to see butts kicked, and never loses sight of that. There's story, but it's doled out in manageable pieces between the action scenes. It's also not complicated enough that we feel the need to keep track of a whole bunch of elements to get something out of the action - each revelation means that someone's going to try and get possession of the coffin that serves as the movie's MacGuffin, the guy who has possession will fight him, and then the chase is on again. It's shallow, sure, but the fight scenes are good, and we learn enough to have a rooting interest even though we're given more than two sides, not always easily labeled "good" and "evil". And even if the story often seems like "just enough to get ninety minutes of movie out of fifty minutes of violence", it's also enough to get us to lean forward in our seats a little in the last act when the MacGuffin's about to start MacGuffing.
Read the rest at HBS.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
No sleep tonight - Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
This is just critic-hostile scheduling. You show a movie at 8:30 Saturday night, with the next show at Sunday noon, and I'm supposed to get a review written in time for it to be useful? Even if I wasn't going to try and see a midnight movie afterward, and taking for granted that probably no other member of the press attending is committed to helping their younger brother move the next morning, that's what you call a tight deadline. I know, that's what daily newspaper reporters and actual conscientious bloggers have to manage every day, but I'm just an enthusiastic amateur with a day job.
--sigh-- Damn that press pass and that excellent movie for creating a sense of obligation to push this thing. Because it's a really fantastic film, and on top of that, the IFFB screenings have not just the directors, but the brothers of two of the abductees mentioned in the movie who have stopped in Boston on the way to testify before Congress about North Korea's kidnapping of Japanese citizens. So there's the opportunity for a truly great Q&A here, as well.
Anyway - Coolidge Corner, 12pm. Be there if you can.
And now, the full review as posted on HBS/EFC:
Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
I'm not doing the thing. I'm not saying that Abduction is one of the best movies I've seen in the past year, and certainly the best documentary, just because it has important subject matter. I hate when people do that, whether they be critics, award voters, or just plain snobs. I'm saying Abduction is a great film because it tells a fascinating story in a suspenseful, exciting way, delivering the kind of emotional gut punches we go to the movies for.
If you're going in cold, it starts out like a fairly straightforward cold-case kidnapping story. On November 15, 1977, thirteen year-old Megumi Yokota and her best friend were walking home from badminton practice and went their separate ways. The friend comes home safely; Megumi vanishes as if into thin air. She's initially thought to be a runaway, though her family is at a loss as to why she would leave home. A couple years later, a crime reporter gets a tip that something strange is happening along Japan's west coast: Young couples in their early twenties are disappearing, though one pair escapes. Megumi's abduction isn't thought to be connected, as it doesn't fit tte pattern. It's not until 1997 that the truth is confirmed: Megumi and the others were kidnapped by North Korean spies and shipped in tiny containers across the Sea of Japan to train NK agents to better impersonate Japanese.
This sounds like the fanciful stuff of spy dramas, but it's very real. We hear from An, a North Korean defector who met Megumi in 1989, and it becomes a huge story in Japanese politics, with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi eventually pressed into cutting off humanitarian aid to North Korea unless the abductees are acknowledged and returned. It's strongly suggested that it would be grounds for a military strike if such things weren't forbidden by the Japanese constitution.
Although heads of state and defectors and other spies obviously play big roles in this story, filmmakers Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim focus on the stories of those left behind. This is, after all, billed as "The Megumi Yokota Story", so we spend a lot of time with her parents, Shigeru and Sakie. They are ordinary people - a banker and a housewife with two younger children, and as torturous as losing one's thirteen-year-old daughter is under any circumstances, the revelation of the circumstances behind her kidnapping thrust them into the public eye in the late 1990s, a time when they should have been enjoying their retirement rather than campaigning for the government to search out their daughter. Sukie becomes religious, finding inspiration in the book of Job, while Shigeru has the opposite reaction; how could a benevolent God allow such things to happen? The mother of another abductee has a complete nervous breakdown, and though we're given relatively brief glances of her and her husband (who was also in very ill health by the time this film was in production, and died during its filming), it's very unsettling to see what a horrific effect the disappearance of a child, even a grown one, can have on a parent's life. And then there's Teruaki Masumoto, whose sister Rumiko disappeared along with her boyfriend in 1978, who eventually quits his job to devote himself full-time to searching for her, even running for Parliament to try and force the issue. We feel terrible for all those left behind, and understand why they can't let go, even when it would be the sensible way to spend what time they have left.
We understand this because Kim and Sheridan are almost cruel in how they slowly dole out information. Though this film runs a short eighty-five minutes, it feels much longer. They jump back and forth in time to give the audience a sense of the scale of the story, and draw out the listing of the names and fates of the victims with suspenseful music to work the audience's nerves, and then, even though it feels like the film has gone on an hour and a half and the credits should be about to roll, there's more movie left than you might expect - after all, to believe that this is a definitive ending would involve accepting what North Korea says, and would you trust Kim Jong-Il if it was your missing family member? Didn't think so. Still, it means that the last act is so full of acting against the evidence as to almost be painful - we almost want Matsumoto and the others to drop it and get on with their own lives, but suspect (hope) that we'd be just as determined in their situation.
Even more impressive is that the filmmakers don't really have that much material to work with where their title character is concerned. 1977 is before there were many consumer video cameras, so we're working from grainy stills, mainly, and not very many. We get reminiscences from her family and friends, and a tape of her singing a solo in the school choir during her elementary school graduation ceremony. We see even less of the other abductees. And yet we do get an idea of what Megumi's like, and what her disappearance means to those who loved her. It's a lot done with relatively little.
Which is part of what makes this film so great - as big a deal as these abductions are, and how much information is out there, there's relatively little ready-made footage for a film, so it's a good job to see it put together like this. Patty Kim and Chris Sheridan make a big, sprawling story affecting on a personal, emotional level - and isn't that the best thing a documentary can do?
--sigh-- Damn that press pass and that excellent movie for creating a sense of obligation to push this thing. Because it's a really fantastic film, and on top of that, the IFFB screenings have not just the directors, but the brothers of two of the abductees mentioned in the movie who have stopped in Boston on the way to testify before Congress about North Korea's kidnapping of Japanese citizens. So there's the opportunity for a truly great Q&A here, as well.
Anyway - Coolidge Corner, 12pm. Be there if you can.
And now, the full review as posted on HBS/EFC:
Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
I'm not doing the thing. I'm not saying that Abduction is one of the best movies I've seen in the past year, and certainly the best documentary, just because it has important subject matter. I hate when people do that, whether they be critics, award voters, or just plain snobs. I'm saying Abduction is a great film because it tells a fascinating story in a suspenseful, exciting way, delivering the kind of emotional gut punches we go to the movies for.
If you're going in cold, it starts out like a fairly straightforward cold-case kidnapping story. On November 15, 1977, thirteen year-old Megumi Yokota and her best friend were walking home from badminton practice and went their separate ways. The friend comes home safely; Megumi vanishes as if into thin air. She's initially thought to be a runaway, though her family is at a loss as to why she would leave home. A couple years later, a crime reporter gets a tip that something strange is happening along Japan's west coast: Young couples in their early twenties are disappearing, though one pair escapes. Megumi's abduction isn't thought to be connected, as it doesn't fit tte pattern. It's not until 1997 that the truth is confirmed: Megumi and the others were kidnapped by North Korean spies and shipped in tiny containers across the Sea of Japan to train NK agents to better impersonate Japanese.
This sounds like the fanciful stuff of spy dramas, but it's very real. We hear from An, a North Korean defector who met Megumi in 1989, and it becomes a huge story in Japanese politics, with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi eventually pressed into cutting off humanitarian aid to North Korea unless the abductees are acknowledged and returned. It's strongly suggested that it would be grounds for a military strike if such things weren't forbidden by the Japanese constitution.
Although heads of state and defectors and other spies obviously play big roles in this story, filmmakers Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim focus on the stories of those left behind. This is, after all, billed as "The Megumi Yokota Story", so we spend a lot of time with her parents, Shigeru and Sakie. They are ordinary people - a banker and a housewife with two younger children, and as torturous as losing one's thirteen-year-old daughter is under any circumstances, the revelation of the circumstances behind her kidnapping thrust them into the public eye in the late 1990s, a time when they should have been enjoying their retirement rather than campaigning for the government to search out their daughter. Sukie becomes religious, finding inspiration in the book of Job, while Shigeru has the opposite reaction; how could a benevolent God allow such things to happen? The mother of another abductee has a complete nervous breakdown, and though we're given relatively brief glances of her and her husband (who was also in very ill health by the time this film was in production, and died during its filming), it's very unsettling to see what a horrific effect the disappearance of a child, even a grown one, can have on a parent's life. And then there's Teruaki Masumoto, whose sister Rumiko disappeared along with her boyfriend in 1978, who eventually quits his job to devote himself full-time to searching for her, even running for Parliament to try and force the issue. We feel terrible for all those left behind, and understand why they can't let go, even when it would be the sensible way to spend what time they have left.
We understand this because Kim and Sheridan are almost cruel in how they slowly dole out information. Though this film runs a short eighty-five minutes, it feels much longer. They jump back and forth in time to give the audience a sense of the scale of the story, and draw out the listing of the names and fates of the victims with suspenseful music to work the audience's nerves, and then, even though it feels like the film has gone on an hour and a half and the credits should be about to roll, there's more movie left than you might expect - after all, to believe that this is a definitive ending would involve accepting what North Korea says, and would you trust Kim Jong-Il if it was your missing family member? Didn't think so. Still, it means that the last act is so full of acting against the evidence as to almost be painful - we almost want Matsumoto and the others to drop it and get on with their own lives, but suspect (hope) that we'd be just as determined in their situation.
Even more impressive is that the filmmakers don't really have that much material to work with where their title character is concerned. 1977 is before there were many consumer video cameras, so we're working from grainy stills, mainly, and not very many. We get reminiscences from her family and friends, and a tape of her singing a solo in the school choir during her elementary school graduation ceremony. We see even less of the other abductees. And yet we do get an idea of what Megumi's like, and what her disappearance means to those who loved her. It's a lot done with relatively little.
Which is part of what makes this film so great - as big a deal as these abductions are, and how much information is out there, there's relatively little ready-made footage for a film, so it's a good job to see it put together like this. Patty Kim and Chris Sheridan make a big, sprawling story affecting on a personal, emotional level - and isn't that the best thing a documentary can do?
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006, Day 2: The Giant Buddhas, Before the Music Dies
Thursday's movies were an interesting example of the conflicting requirements to make a good documentary: You need to present interesting information, on the one hand, but the how of what you present is just as important as the what. The Giant Buddhas has an intriguing subject, but terribly dry presentation. Before the Music Dies tells me little I didn't know before, but does it in an entertaining, exciting way.
One thing I wonder about the second is how well music distribution over the internet will really work for new bands. That's the new model, giving the music away online and supporting oneself off deluxe CDs, live performances, and the like. It seems to work OK for webcomics, but a thousand fans of a musician distributed across the country aren't likely to go to a concert or gig the way a thousand fans in the Boston area area will.
The Giant Buddhas
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
The giant Buddha statues carved out of cliffs at Bamiyan were not, according to Thomas Byron, particularly magnificent works of art. He describes them as ugly works created by monks who could barely be called craftsmen. Even if one agrees with that assessment, they were still remarkable in their dimensions - fifty-three meters tall and hundreds of years old. That they were deliberately destroyed by a government looking to eradicate evidence of other cultures is an obscenity, a point which filmmaker Christian Frei makes repeatedly but yet, somehow, never quite forcefully.
It's not quite clear what got Frei fixated on these two statues, which the Taliban destroyed five years ago. The narration is structured initially as letters to Nelofer Pazira, a one-time Afghani refugee living in Toronto, who later tells us she'd seen first them in pictures her father took on his travels, but it isn't really important. What matters is that it sends him around the world, from Bamiyan where he speaks to a man whose family lived in the caves Paris, where a professor of archeology is preparing an expedition to find other Buddhist monuments in the areas. There are also stops in Toronto, China (where he speaks to Buddhist monk scholars and attempts to view a replica), Kabul, and Qatar, where he meets the al-Jazeera reporter who covered the statues' demolition.
Read the rest at HBS.
Before the Music Dies
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #3 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
I strongly suspect that for many people in the audience, Before the Music Dies isn't saying much they don't already know. What passes for mainstream pop music is manufactured pap whose performers don't have the skills for performing live. Relaxation (nearly to the point of elimination) of ownership regulations has sucked much of the life out of commercial radio. Record companies being owned by large media corporations has made artist development and management all about short-term returns. It could very easily become the rantings of a cranky old man put on the big screen, but filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rassmussen are a little more optimistic than that.
Starting this project after each lost a music-loving sibling who had been very concerned about the direction of the music industry, they start from their home base in Austin, Texas and criss-cross the country talking to musicians, executives, fans, journalists, and others to survey the state of music in America. The underlying message is clear: The traditional infrastructure of the industry has become rigid and corporatized to the point where it no longer serves musicians or enthusiasts very well, but the internet has picked up much of the slack, giving proactive fans and artists the chance to connect like never before.
Read the rest at HBS.
One thing I wonder about the second is how well music distribution over the internet will really work for new bands. That's the new model, giving the music away online and supporting oneself off deluxe CDs, live performances, and the like. It seems to work OK for webcomics, but a thousand fans of a musician distributed across the country aren't likely to go to a concert or gig the way a thousand fans in the Boston area area will.
The Giant Buddhas
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
The giant Buddha statues carved out of cliffs at Bamiyan were not, according to Thomas Byron, particularly magnificent works of art. He describes them as ugly works created by monks who could barely be called craftsmen. Even if one agrees with that assessment, they were still remarkable in their dimensions - fifty-three meters tall and hundreds of years old. That they were deliberately destroyed by a government looking to eradicate evidence of other cultures is an obscenity, a point which filmmaker Christian Frei makes repeatedly but yet, somehow, never quite forcefully.
It's not quite clear what got Frei fixated on these two statues, which the Taliban destroyed five years ago. The narration is structured initially as letters to Nelofer Pazira, a one-time Afghani refugee living in Toronto, who later tells us she'd seen first them in pictures her father took on his travels, but it isn't really important. What matters is that it sends him around the world, from Bamiyan where he speaks to a man whose family lived in the caves Paris, where a professor of archeology is preparing an expedition to find other Buddhist monuments in the areas. There are also stops in Toronto, China (where he speaks to Buddhist monk scholars and attempts to view a replica), Kabul, and Qatar, where he meets the al-Jazeera reporter who covered the statues' demolition.
Read the rest at HBS.
Before the Music Dies
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #3 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
I strongly suspect that for many people in the audience, Before the Music Dies isn't saying much they don't already know. What passes for mainstream pop music is manufactured pap whose performers don't have the skills for performing live. Relaxation (nearly to the point of elimination) of ownership regulations has sucked much of the life out of commercial radio. Record companies being owned by large media corporations has made artist development and management all about short-term returns. It could very easily become the rantings of a cranky old man put on the big screen, but filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rassmussen are a little more optimistic than that.
Starting this project after each lost a music-loving sibling who had been very concerned about the direction of the music industry, they start from their home base in Austin, Texas and criss-cross the country talking to musicians, executives, fans, journalists, and others to survey the state of music in America. The underlying message is clear: The traditional infrastructure of the industry has become rigid and corporatized to the point where it no longer serves musicians or enthusiasts very well, but the internet has picked up much of the slack, giving proactive fans and artists the chance to connect like never before.
Read the rest at HBS.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006, Day 1: Half Nelson
My second experience attending a film festival as a member of the recognized media is thus far a bit smoother than the first: The IFFB organizers got me a pass quickly, even though I only arrived about 20-25 minutes before Half Nelson was scheduled to start. Sure, it was a blank one, but handled much more quickly than a similar situation was at Fantasia (that the people at the desk and I spoke the same primary language was probably immensely helpful). It was also a huge difference from my attempt to attend the IFFB's opening night show last year: Mingling in the Somerville Theater lobby, having people come up and ask if I need anything when they saw the badge around my neck, as opposed to standing in the rain for an hour only to be told that I wasn't getting tickets.
Yes, I resented the people with passes last year. I'm a total hypocrite.
Half Nelson wound up being a pretty good way to start the festival. It's kind of documentary-style, with us just sort of meeting and following the characters, not worrying about plot twists or a whole lot of foreshadowing. The filmmakers have a documentary background - they've been to IFFB with both documentary shorts and features before - so this is probably natural for them.
Actaully, it's kind of amusing - this is the fourth IFFB, and filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden have come with a documentary short, a narrative short, a documentary feature, and a narrative feature. I think their options for next year are doing something with animation, a lecture, or a midnight movie. They also did an entertaining Q&A - Fleck's got a great, dry sense of humor, and they played off their sixteen-year-old star very well. Ms. Boden's from Newton, and I think their local ties and history with the festival made for a cool, laid-back opening night.
This could be a very fun festival; I can't remember going to one that handed out raffle tickets on the way into the theater before. I just hope I can escape from the day job early enough for two movies tonight.
Half Nelson
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #1 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
Movies about great teachers aren't unusual; they're almost standards in their way. Nearly as common are movies about great students. Often they're the same movie, with the two having a symbiotic relationship, keeping each other from being swallowed up by the pressures inside and outside the school. Half Nelson is that kind of movie, but it avoids being saccharine. Audiences may consider it inspirational, but in a very low-key way.
Our teacher is Daniel Dunne (Ryan Gosling); a white man teaching American History at a primarily black middle school in Brooklyn. He's not quite one of the great teachers, but he tries - he's writing a book, and he makes an effort to get his students to understand what history is and why it's worth studying rather than just filling them with the facts that will be on standardized tests. He also coaches the girl's JV basketball team, and both the team and his history class include Drey (Shareeka Epps), a thirteen year-old girl whose older brother is in jail, whose whose mother works long hours, and whose father is frustratingly absent. She's caught the interest of Frank (Anthony Mackie), a drug dealer who had previously recruited her older brother Mike. Oh, and speaking of drugs? Dunne's got a big problem with the crack; Drey finds him all but passed out in the locker room after the game.
Read the rest at HBS.
Yes, I resented the people with passes last year. I'm a total hypocrite.
Half Nelson wound up being a pretty good way to start the festival. It's kind of documentary-style, with us just sort of meeting and following the characters, not worrying about plot twists or a whole lot of foreshadowing. The filmmakers have a documentary background - they've been to IFFB with both documentary shorts and features before - so this is probably natural for them.
Actaully, it's kind of amusing - this is the fourth IFFB, and filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden have come with a documentary short, a narrative short, a documentary feature, and a narrative feature. I think their options for next year are doing something with animation, a lecture, or a midnight movie. They also did an entertaining Q&A - Fleck's got a great, dry sense of humor, and they played off their sixteen-year-old star very well. Ms. Boden's from Newton, and I think their local ties and history with the festival made for a cool, laid-back opening night.
This could be a very fun festival; I can't remember going to one that handed out raffle tickets on the way into the theater before. I just hope I can escape from the day job early enough for two movies tonight.
Half Nelson
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #1 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
Movies about great teachers aren't unusual; they're almost standards in their way. Nearly as common are movies about great students. Often they're the same movie, with the two having a symbiotic relationship, keeping each other from being swallowed up by the pressures inside and outside the school. Half Nelson is that kind of movie, but it avoids being saccharine. Audiences may consider it inspirational, but in a very low-key way.
Our teacher is Daniel Dunne (Ryan Gosling); a white man teaching American History at a primarily black middle school in Brooklyn. He's not quite one of the great teachers, but he tries - he's writing a book, and he makes an effort to get his students to understand what history is and why it's worth studying rather than just filling them with the facts that will be on standardized tests. He also coaches the girl's JV basketball team, and both the team and his history class include Drey (Shareeka Epps), a thirteen year-old girl whose older brother is in jail, whose whose mother works long hours, and whose father is frustratingly absent. She's caught the interest of Frank (Anthony Mackie), a drug dealer who had previously recruited her older brother Mike. Oh, and speaking of drugs? Dunne's got a big problem with the crack; Drey finds him all but passed out in the locker room after the game.
Read the rest at HBS.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Animated doldrums: Ice Age 2 and The Wild
By now, I really should be over expecting Disney's animation work to be special. It's not Walt, it's not the nine old men, heck, it's not even the nineties group of Clements & Musker and Wise & Trousedale any more. And I suspect we really can't blame Disney for the crushing mediocrity that is The Wild, other than that they agreed, at some point in development, to acquire and distiribute it. Still, the opening plays with the logo, which just re-inforces that this is Disney's.
Should we care? After all, until the buyout of Pixar, Disney proper wasn't where good feature animation was happening. The really big hits and arguably high-quality stuff was coming out of DreamWorks/PDI and Pixar, with Fox's Blue Sky making a good showing and Paramount's Nickelodeon being the name kids cared about. Meanwhile, Disney has been further diluting their good name by sticking it on mediocrities like Valiant and The Wild.
Disney's a name that has the better part of a century of history behind it, and I think many of us would like to see that continuity. As distasteful as them swallowing Pixar whole might be for those of us who are fans of Pixar but not recent Disney, it's worth remembering that Pixar's story is intimately entangled with Disney, and completely severing the two probably wouldn't have done Pixar any favors. It is, I think, remarkable, that Disney has been able to revitalize itself twice in my lifetime, even if it's unfortunate that they had to.
As to the other film reviewed here, it's familiar and Fox is probably starting work on Ice Age 3. It's worth noting that none of the writers of the first Ice Age were involved with #2, and the original primary director is apparently off doing something else - Chris Wedge was probably still working on Robots when production on this started, since these things take a fair amount of time. The collaboration between Fox and Blue Sky is certainly working out well commercially, although each film has been less exciting than the one before.
But, these movies had previews for Over The Hedge, Happy Feet and Cars. Things look to be getting better before the year is out.
Ice Age: The Meltdown
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 April 2006 at AMC Boston Common #2 (First-run)
The teaser for Ice Age 2 kicked around for about a year before the movie came out, and delivered pretty much everything I wanted from new "Ice Age" stuff, quite frankly: Wonderfully executed slapstick featuring Scrat, the sabertoothed squirrel-rat from the first movie who wants nothing more than to recover one of the few acorns left in the desolate landscape. There's about fifteen minutes of Scrat chasing his nut in The Meltdown, and it is by and large brilliant. The other hour-plus is more of a mixed bag.
The characters from the first movie - Scrat, Manny the mammoth (voice of Ray Romano), Sid the sloth (voice of John Leguizamo), and saber-toothed tiger Diego (voice of Denis Leary) have been living in an icy, but fairly temperate, valley. They soon discover that the dam that overlooks their home is about to burst, and soon they and the other residents are making their way to a boat that a vulture tells them is ready to take the residents of this basin to safety. On the way, they'll encounter melting icefields (Diego, like most cats, hates water and doesn't know how to swim); a crazy sloth cult; the first mammoth other than Manny that anyone has seen in a while, though Ellie (voice of Queen Latifah), however, was raised by opossums and doesn't realize she's a mammoth; and a pair of sea monsters, apparently frozen ages ago, that have thawed and are looking for fresh meat.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Wild
* * (out of four)
Seen 15 April 2006 at AMC Fenway #5 (First-run)
The last time Disney feature animation was in such doldrums, there was no DreamWorks and no Blue Sky, so people could be forgiven for assuming that there was just no interest in animation as a medium. Now, though, when we see something as disappointing as The Wild, it's after sitting through trailers for Over the Hedge and Happy Feet, which makes it seem like everyone but Disney knows what they're doing. Even if this movie is an acquisition rather than something produced in-house, Disney's darn lucky to have John Lasseter around to play the same role Clements and Musker played in the late eighties/early nineties, because this just won't do.
There was a very similar movie last year by the name of Madagascar; here, the lion that serves as the New York Zoo's star attraction is Samson (voice of Keifer Sutherland). It's his son Ryan (voice of Greg Clipes) who wants to see the wild, and he winds up on a boat back to Africa, Samson and friends - streetwise squirrel Benny (voice of James Belushi), London-raised koala Nigel (voice of Eddie Izzard), dopey snake Larry (voice of Richard Kind), and the giraffe Benny has a biologically challenging crush on, Bridget (voice of Janeane Garofalo) - must rescue him. A boat is hijacked and runs aground, and the city animals find themselves confronted by a pack of crazy jungle beasts - here, wildebeests led by Kazar (voice of William Shatner), convinced that if he turns carnivore by eating a lion, he'll be king of the jungle.
Read the rest at HBS.
Should we care? After all, until the buyout of Pixar, Disney proper wasn't where good feature animation was happening. The really big hits and arguably high-quality stuff was coming out of DreamWorks/PDI and Pixar, with Fox's Blue Sky making a good showing and Paramount's Nickelodeon being the name kids cared about. Meanwhile, Disney has been further diluting their good name by sticking it on mediocrities like Valiant and The Wild.
Disney's a name that has the better part of a century of history behind it, and I think many of us would like to see that continuity. As distasteful as them swallowing Pixar whole might be for those of us who are fans of Pixar but not recent Disney, it's worth remembering that Pixar's story is intimately entangled with Disney, and completely severing the two probably wouldn't have done Pixar any favors. It is, I think, remarkable, that Disney has been able to revitalize itself twice in my lifetime, even if it's unfortunate that they had to.
As to the other film reviewed here, it's familiar and Fox is probably starting work on Ice Age 3. It's worth noting that none of the writers of the first Ice Age were involved with #2, and the original primary director is apparently off doing something else - Chris Wedge was probably still working on Robots when production on this started, since these things take a fair amount of time. The collaboration between Fox and Blue Sky is certainly working out well commercially, although each film has been less exciting than the one before.
But, these movies had previews for Over The Hedge, Happy Feet and Cars. Things look to be getting better before the year is out.
Ice Age: The Meltdown
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 April 2006 at AMC Boston Common #2 (First-run)
The teaser for Ice Age 2 kicked around for about a year before the movie came out, and delivered pretty much everything I wanted from new "Ice Age" stuff, quite frankly: Wonderfully executed slapstick featuring Scrat, the sabertoothed squirrel-rat from the first movie who wants nothing more than to recover one of the few acorns left in the desolate landscape. There's about fifteen minutes of Scrat chasing his nut in The Meltdown, and it is by and large brilliant. The other hour-plus is more of a mixed bag.
The characters from the first movie - Scrat, Manny the mammoth (voice of Ray Romano), Sid the sloth (voice of John Leguizamo), and saber-toothed tiger Diego (voice of Denis Leary) have been living in an icy, but fairly temperate, valley. They soon discover that the dam that overlooks their home is about to burst, and soon they and the other residents are making their way to a boat that a vulture tells them is ready to take the residents of this basin to safety. On the way, they'll encounter melting icefields (Diego, like most cats, hates water and doesn't know how to swim); a crazy sloth cult; the first mammoth other than Manny that anyone has seen in a while, though Ellie (voice of Queen Latifah), however, was raised by opossums and doesn't realize she's a mammoth; and a pair of sea monsters, apparently frozen ages ago, that have thawed and are looking for fresh meat.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Wild
* * (out of four)
Seen 15 April 2006 at AMC Fenway #5 (First-run)
The last time Disney feature animation was in such doldrums, there was no DreamWorks and no Blue Sky, so people could be forgiven for assuming that there was just no interest in animation as a medium. Now, though, when we see something as disappointing as The Wild, it's after sitting through trailers for Over the Hedge and Happy Feet, which makes it seem like everyone but Disney knows what they're doing. Even if this movie is an acquisition rather than something produced in-house, Disney's darn lucky to have John Lasseter around to play the same role Clements and Musker played in the late eighties/early nineties, because this just won't do.
There was a very similar movie last year by the name of Madagascar; here, the lion that serves as the New York Zoo's star attraction is Samson (voice of Keifer Sutherland). It's his son Ryan (voice of Greg Clipes) who wants to see the wild, and he winds up on a boat back to Africa, Samson and friends - streetwise squirrel Benny (voice of James Belushi), London-raised koala Nigel (voice of Eddie Izzard), dopey snake Larry (voice of Richard Kind), and the giraffe Benny has a biologically challenging crush on, Bridget (voice of Janeane Garofalo) - must rescue him. A boat is hijacked and runs aground, and the city animals find themselves confronted by a pack of crazy jungle beasts - here, wildebeests led by Kazar (voice of William Shatner), convinced that if he turns carnivore by eating a lion, he'll be king of the jungle.
Read the rest at HBS.
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