Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
As a kid, and probably into my late teens, this was my favorite movie, but as I grew up, I saw a much vaster world of movies, and just as the Lawrence character as portrayed in this movie, I saw not just all this as new and appealing other places, but as other views, other ways of looking. How to abstract the whole range of that world (even all these pages of comments are only a partial attempt), all the other views and articulations and tones and registers and shifts of axis for "world," for the world itself: Soviet film, Claire, Godard, Ray, Lubitsch, German expressionism, Italian neorealism, non-narrative, "experimental" -- so much more, and more diversity to absurdly gloss, even trying to get the idea across here. It wasn't till I was in my 30s that I found out about David Lean's own Oliver Twist! Which I now consider his real masterpiece. For me, what made this movie smaller wasn't even so much what Pauline Kael set forth about the discrepancy with the actual T.E. Lawrence, or other accounts of him, including his own. It's the tale of the two parts, divided precisely at intermission. The first part is, even as Kael attests, more beautiful than other big spectacles, but I would say literate in a way that's sophisticated -- was more so then and still is now -- photographically. The technical quality itself is great, but also the composition, for example in the well scene which is the appearance of Omar Sharif's character, and there's a way the whole first part follows this patient, attentive, but incisive manner that's like that of Lawrence, or at least its character of him. It's a different kind of epic, even the pacing, that approaches analogously the poetic extent that its Lawrence wants to understand the Arab people and their culture. After the intermission, the movie becomes almost a parody of tragedy. The "who are you" moment at the canal sets it fairly obviously in that direction, but even that is subtle compared to the wild swings of soul-searching on the stormy sea of identity -- I'm not extraordinary; all right, I am extraordinary -- where Peter O'Toole swirling about in his white robes rivals silent movie divas. What the real Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom or any other account of him would most generally show up about this scriptwriting is putting all the evaluation of him and the events in the mouths of the characters, and especially his.
As a kid, and probably into my late teens, this was my favorite movie, but as I grew up, I saw a much vaster world of movies, and just as the Lawrence character as portrayed in this movie, I saw not just all this as new and appealing other places, but as other views, other ways of looking. How to abstract the whole range of that world (even all these pages of comments are only a partial attempt), all the other views and articulations and tones and registers and shifts of axis for "world," for the world itself: Soviet film, Claire, Godard, Ray, Lubitsch, German expressionism, Italian neorealism, non-narrative, "experimental" -- so much more, and more diversity to absurdly gloss, even trying to get the idea across here. It wasn't till I was in my 30s that I found out about David Lean's own Oliver Twist! Which I now consider his real masterpiece. For me, what made this movie smaller wasn't even so much what Pauline Kael set forth about the discrepancy with the actual T.E. Lawrence, or other accounts of him, including his own. It's the tale of the two parts, divided precisely at intermission. The first part is, even as Kael attests, more beautiful than other big spectacles, but I would say literate in a way that's sophisticated -- was more so then and still is now -- photographically. The technical quality itself is great, but also the composition, for example in the well scene which is the appearance of Omar Sharif's character, and there's a way the whole first part follows this patient, attentive, but incisive manner that's like that of Lawrence, or at least its character of him. It's a different kind of epic, even the pacing, that approaches analogously the poetic extent that its Lawrence wants to understand the Arab people and their culture. After the intermission, the movie becomes almost a parody of tragedy. The "who are you" moment at the canal sets it fairly obviously in that direction, but even that is subtle compared to the wild swings of soul-searching on the stormy sea of identity -- I'm not extraordinary; all right, I am extraordinary -- where Peter O'Toole swirling about in his white robes rivals silent movie divas. What the real Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom or any other account of him would most generally show up about this scriptwriting is putting all the evaluation of him and the events in the mouths of the characters, and especially his.
The Mechanic (1972)
Scruffier like the hair or the flared clothes, this predecessor to the 2011 Jason Statham version has that early 70s roughness where scenes can seem so slack and off focus, you have to catch up to what they're trying to do. In one case, there's even a nice idea of misdirection for a scene between Charles Bronson and his off-screen wife Jill Ireland, but even that's drifty, off track and you have to clear the confusion after. The premise is a good use of the stone-faced Bronson, as a hit man and outsider, and his training of a newcomer with other entanglements, played by Jan-Michael Vincent, makes for a nice analogy for work relationships, and a guidebook that's also reflexive comment to story operations. The ending also has a more grim outcome than the remake, but that makes its abruptness better even for tragic symmetry.
Scruffier like the hair or the flared clothes, this predecessor to the 2011 Jason Statham version has that early 70s roughness where scenes can seem so slack and off focus, you have to catch up to what they're trying to do. In one case, there's even a nice idea of misdirection for a scene between Charles Bronson and his off-screen wife Jill Ireland, but even that's drifty, off track and you have to clear the confusion after. The premise is a good use of the stone-faced Bronson, as a hit man and outsider, and his training of a newcomer with other entanglements, played by Jan-Michael Vincent, makes for a nice analogy for work relationships, and a guidebook that's also reflexive comment to story operations. The ending also has a more grim outcome than the remake, but that makes its abruptness better even for tragic symmetry.
Fast X (2023)
The plot and action are no more ridiculous, i.e. impossible, than in the previous installment, but everyone seems to have acquired Krypton or James Bond villain lair technology, and in addition to a cargo plane, choppers and a submarine, there's a mini Death Star and TIE fighters. Well, at least the sound of them, which is only -- appropriately? -- more ludicrous. Absurd? Insane? I don't even know how to describe the level of this anymore. Most of the music, especially during the closing credits that include a scene revealing this isn't putting everyone out of our misery, but only a cliffhanger setup for more, cinches this as shitpop. It was written by artificial unintelligence, splattering guest stars, globe hops, subplots, registers, tones, flashbacks, references, and the shtick of its villain -- well, indeed, fast and furious. And everyone looks like they were badly de-aged.
The plot and action are no more ridiculous, i.e. impossible, than in the previous installment, but everyone seems to have acquired Krypton or James Bond villain lair technology, and in addition to a cargo plane, choppers and a submarine, there's a mini Death Star and TIE fighters. Well, at least the sound of them, which is only -- appropriately? -- more ludicrous. Absurd? Insane? I don't even know how to describe the level of this anymore. Most of the music, especially during the closing credits that include a scene revealing this isn't putting everyone out of our misery, but only a cliffhanger setup for more, cinches this as shitpop. It was written by artificial unintelligence, splattering guest stars, globe hops, subplots, registers, tones, flashbacks, references, and the shtick of its villain -- well, indeed, fast and furious. And everyone looks like they were badly de-aged.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)
Despite good stuff, including the performances, the whole gets tiresome, with the relentless and pretty much smug aside gimmick. Based on a graphic novel, the movie falls prey to the martial arts and action movie hazard of foregone conclusion: when you know what's coming, even if not the outcome, it can get tedious, especially if it's not inventive, and the more it's dragged out. Here even the machinations of the romance and coming of age fall into the cycle with that. One surprise turn, however: the most inventive thing about this movie is actually the way it starts up the fight sequences, in precisely comic, animation or video game style, with the split-screen inset announcements of the competitors flying at each other. Another indication of how the graphic novel format probably works better for this.
Despite good stuff, including the performances, the whole gets tiresome, with the relentless and pretty much smug aside gimmick. Based on a graphic novel, the movie falls prey to the martial arts and action movie hazard of foregone conclusion: when you know what's coming, even if not the outcome, it can get tedious, especially if it's not inventive, and the more it's dragged out. Here even the machinations of the romance and coming of age fall into the cycle with that. One surprise turn, however: the most inventive thing about this movie is actually the way it starts up the fight sequences, in precisely comic, animation or video game style, with the split-screen inset announcements of the competitors flying at each other. Another indication of how the graphic novel format probably works better for this.
X-Men (2000)
X2: X-Men United (2003)
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
It looks quainter now, after the sophistication of computer graphics and the refinement of the Marvel formula balancing humor and drama in successive movies (and the non-20th Century Fox ones with other superheros), and compared to at least some of the comics' developments, especially in the early 80s when this was the mainstream comic that synced most with the underground and fringe surge that come out of the roughly punk and New Wave zeitgeist. As with their developments with Spider-Man and others in the 60s, more psychological complexity, Marvel made a twist on superheros that also shifted the empathetic play: mutants -- freaks, outcasts, misfits, nonconformists -- not just playing out power as wish fulfillment, but as the drama of the difference from others. While these movies pick that up as readymade, and deal with it as plot points without contributing much more aesthetically, other than big movie production, the best thing about them is the chess game of powers and the complication of simplistic good/evil scheme, something Marvel did even before Alan Moore's Watchmen. Just as regular humans and mutants twist in and out of antagonistic positions, the conundrum of power gets played out at least at the formal level of the symbolic super ones, but that has reflexive play, too, even if not explicit. (See "The Circular Superlative" in Monster: Division of Power.) Despite the stuff that makes fans cringe about the last one, it nonetheless carries out this play to further extent. But the X-men's stamp is on all the superhero movies after: The Avengers constantly fight their own battle of being outside the law, and even DC now uses the term "metahuman" and has the same conflict. There is also a RiffTrax treatment of all three of these movies, if you need to cut your superhero movies with some irreverence, or just want some cutting up.
X2: X-Men United (2003)
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
It looks quainter now, after the sophistication of computer graphics and the refinement of the Marvel formula balancing humor and drama in successive movies (and the non-20th Century Fox ones with other superheros), and compared to at least some of the comics' developments, especially in the early 80s when this was the mainstream comic that synced most with the underground and fringe surge that come out of the roughly punk and New Wave zeitgeist. As with their developments with Spider-Man and others in the 60s, more psychological complexity, Marvel made a twist on superheros that also shifted the empathetic play: mutants -- freaks, outcasts, misfits, nonconformists -- not just playing out power as wish fulfillment, but as the drama of the difference from others. While these movies pick that up as readymade, and deal with it as plot points without contributing much more aesthetically, other than big movie production, the best thing about them is the chess game of powers and the complication of simplistic good/evil scheme, something Marvel did even before Alan Moore's Watchmen. Just as regular humans and mutants twist in and out of antagonistic positions, the conundrum of power gets played out at least at the formal level of the symbolic super ones, but that has reflexive play, too, even if not explicit. (See "The Circular Superlative" in Monster: Division of Power.) Despite the stuff that makes fans cringe about the last one, it nonetheless carries out this play to further extent. But the X-men's stamp is on all the superhero movies after: The Avengers constantly fight their own battle of being outside the law, and even DC now uses the term "metahuman" and has the same conflict. There is also a RiffTrax treatment of all three of these movies, if you need to cut your superhero movies with some irreverence, or just want some cutting up.
Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) ♠
When Werner Herzog remade F.W. Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, the other major work of German expressionist film along with Caligari, as part of the the New German Cinema of the 1970s, it wasn't only a tribute and a bridge to that earlier era, or an updating in Herzog terms. It was also the culmination of Herzog's minimal, counterpoint approach, throughout his work, but especially from Aquirre, Wrath of God and Heart of Glass, where the counterpoint was with a more formal tack (as opposed to things like Stroszek that were more generally realist). What might be more apt than "minimal" to describe this is "pathetic." Herzog's low-key approach with production, the acting style that is both less and more affected, naive and formalized, here go with a sense of horror that has a squalid quality. It's the opposite of puffing up or putting on big airs or what vanity aims for, and Herzog also goes the opposite way of trying to impress with action. Along with the usual frail people, the vampire is also scraggly, clammy, batlike in that way. This is part of his grim but interesting showing up of the human conceit of control, especially with nature (Dracula here, with the rats and the plague, is as much nature as death). The usually manic Klaus Kinski is here surprisingly composed, and with this toned down approach, Herzog gets excellent emphasis on effects that can be got with little or basic, not only movie-making, but pretending: a storybook contrast with his halo or frame lighting effects, his use and placement of borrowed and new music, his silent-film style theatrical graphic moments, like the close-up of Kinski in the square where he then runs away, and the climactic bedroom scene that is more fairy-tale but more affecting than just scary or the usual scary rhetoric. It's pathetic and creepy and ghastly and beautiful and more far-reaching than the typical vampire movie.
When Werner Herzog remade F.W. Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, the other major work of German expressionist film along with Caligari, as part of the the New German Cinema of the 1970s, it wasn't only a tribute and a bridge to that earlier era, or an updating in Herzog terms. It was also the culmination of Herzog's minimal, counterpoint approach, throughout his work, but especially from Aquirre, Wrath of God and Heart of Glass, where the counterpoint was with a more formal tack (as opposed to things like Stroszek that were more generally realist). What might be more apt than "minimal" to describe this is "pathetic." Herzog's low-key approach with production, the acting style that is both less and more affected, naive and formalized, here go with a sense of horror that has a squalid quality. It's the opposite of puffing up or putting on big airs or what vanity aims for, and Herzog also goes the opposite way of trying to impress with action. Along with the usual frail people, the vampire is also scraggly, clammy, batlike in that way. This is part of his grim but interesting showing up of the human conceit of control, especially with nature (Dracula here, with the rats and the plague, is as much nature as death). The usually manic Klaus Kinski is here surprisingly composed, and with this toned down approach, Herzog gets excellent emphasis on effects that can be got with little or basic, not only movie-making, but pretending: a storybook contrast with his halo or frame lighting effects, his use and placement of borrowed and new music, his silent-film style theatrical graphic moments, like the close-up of Kinski in the square where he then runs away, and the climactic bedroom scene that is more fairy-tale but more affecting than just scary or the usual scary rhetoric. It's pathetic and creepy and ghastly and beautiful and more far-reaching than the typical vampire movie.
The Yakuza (1974)
A scriptwriting team-up of Paul Schrader and Robert Towne is tantalizing, but this is almost laughably exposition at times, the disquisition passed as the characters' reverent observance, despite Sydney Pollack directing and fine performances from Robert Mitchum, Brian Keith, Richard Jordan, and Ken Takakura, who was ported over from Japanese fame to American (see An Outlaw).
A scriptwriting team-up of Paul Schrader and Robert Towne is tantalizing, but this is almost laughably exposition at times, the disquisition passed as the characters' reverent observance, despite Sydney Pollack directing and fine performances from Robert Mitchum, Brian Keith, Richard Jordan, and Ken Takakura, who was ported over from Japanese fame to American (see An Outlaw).
What's New Pussycat (1965)
Barely articulating the barely articulable. A Romper Room approach to sex. Trendy in it's cartoonish caricature, with some touches we'd come to see later as sharper Woody Allen, like when the "artist's message" label flashes on the screen during O'Toole's comearound dialogue with Romy Schneider. It's as if a sex farce for the stage were done by an ant colony in cross-section. It's all bumbling pizzazz, which makes for me just buzz. I start glazing over reflexively.
Barely articulating the barely articulable. A Romper Room approach to sex. Trendy in it's cartoonish caricature, with some touches we'd come to see later as sharper Woody Allen, like when the "artist's message" label flashes on the screen during O'Toole's comearound dialogue with Romy Schneider. It's as if a sex farce for the stage were done by an ant colony in cross-section. It's all bumbling pizzazz, which makes for me just buzz. I start glazing over reflexively.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)
Injecting more sleaziness and Jerk-like humor and pretense into the swank facade, Steve Martin and Michael Caine help scriptwriters Stanley Shapiro and Paul Hennings update their own Bedtime Story to a more enjoyable farce with screwball flourishes. The script, which Dale Launer also contributed to, works out the mechanics of the triangle better -- Glenne Headly holds her own, and is a nice choice here, not a flashy one, although the great Barbara Harris is underused -- and adds a nice twist. Frank Oz directed, and Ian McDiarmid takes a stint as a butler in between those as galactic emperor.
Injecting more sleaziness and Jerk-like humor and pretense into the swank facade, Steve Martin and Michael Caine help scriptwriters Stanley Shapiro and Paul Hennings update their own Bedtime Story to a more enjoyable farce with screwball flourishes. The script, which Dale Launer also contributed to, works out the mechanics of the triangle better -- Glenne Headly holds her own, and is a nice choice here, not a flashy one, although the great Barbara Harris is underused -- and adds a nice twist. Frank Oz directed, and Ian McDiarmid takes a stint as a butler in between those as galactic emperor.
The Bank Job (2008)
Here's a case where it's not a Jason Statham vehicle, an action thriller, but a more ambitious drama based on an actual event that occurred in 1971. It's also somewhat of a twist on heist movies because of how that works into a larger tangle of affairs touching even the royal family, something more towards Scandal. Director Roger Donaldson sometimes revs it up, but for the most part trusts the story to hold interest.
Here's a case where it's not a Jason Statham vehicle, an action thriller, but a more ambitious drama based on an actual event that occurred in 1971. It's also somewhat of a twist on heist movies because of how that works into a larger tangle of affairs touching even the royal family, something more towards Scandal. Director Roger Donaldson sometimes revs it up, but for the most part trusts the story to hold interest.
The Transporter (2002)
Lighter, sleeker, neither the grasping, shaky action pop of Safe, nor the more intricate drama of The Bank Job. That pretty much works for Jason Statham generally, too. He's more workable at different levels, a more subtle action hero, if that's possible, and can punch above his weight, though it depends on the direction and how he's used.
6/8/23
Lighter, sleeker, neither the grasping, shaky action pop of Safe, nor the more intricate drama of The Bank Job. That pretty much works for Jason Statham generally, too. He's more workable at different levels, a more subtle action hero, if that's possible, and can punch above his weight, though it depends on the direction and how he's used.
The Mechanic (2011)
Remake of 1972 Charles Bronson vehicle featuring mainly Jason Statham and Ben Foster as uneasy hitman partners. There are some big jumps in the plot and some pretty big leaps in plausibility, especially involving a tall building, but the secret ops twisty stuff keeps it intriguing and provides some better characterization.
Remake of 1972 Charles Bronson vehicle featuring mainly Jason Statham and Ben Foster as uneasy hitman partners. There are some big jumps in the plot and some pretty big leaps in plausibility, especially involving a tall building, but the secret ops twisty stuff keeps it intriguing and provides some better characterization.
Blitz (2011)
Different from the typical Jason Statham vehicle, more like a Brit series than an action movie, with Paddy Considine, Mark Rylance and especially Aiden Gillen giving good performances in interesting roles, despite the Dirty Harry derivation, the affectionately crusty backward remarks of Statham contradicted by his actions, the very Scorpio killer-like character of Gillen and the similar conclusion, though with their own sly twist to that.
Different from the typical Jason Statham vehicle, more like a Brit series than an action movie, with Paddy Considine, Mark Rylance and especially Aiden Gillen giving good performances in interesting roles, despite the Dirty Harry derivation, the affectionately crusty backward remarks of Statham contradicted by his actions, the very Scorpio killer-like character of Gillen and the similar conclusion, though with their own sly twist to that.
Safe (2012)
Its obvious ploys, Jason Statham set upon and kicked to the curb by everyone, and then crossed with a young Chinese girl who's also a math prodigy, and the direction of Boaz Yakin trying to keep everything constantly manic, don't entirely drown out the fun or interest, mainly from the performances, by Statham, Catherine Chan, Chris Sarandon, Robert John Burke and James Hong, among others.
Its obvious ploys, Jason Statham set upon and kicked to the curb by everyone, and then crossed with a young Chinese girl who's also a math prodigy, and the direction of Boaz Yakin trying to keep everything constantly manic, don't entirely drown out the fun or interest, mainly from the performances, by Statham, Catherine Chan, Chris Sarandon, Robert John Burke and James Hong, among others.
Spy (2015)
The fine line between absurd extrapolation and just treading things out or treading on them is tested throughout, in the various humorous sidebars and in the overall plan. The ending is like a farewell party, with Melissa McCarthy's character having one send-off meeting after another. Mainly it's the usual American comedy problem of still wanting to play it serious, the plot, so it shifts registers and the comic take is generally sidebar rather than the main thrust or frame.
The fine line between absurd extrapolation and just treading things out or treading on them is tested throughout, in the various humorous sidebars and in the overall plan. The ending is like a farewell party, with Melissa McCarthy's character having one send-off meeting after another. Mainly it's the usual American comedy problem of still wanting to play it serious, the plot, so it shifts registers and the comic take is generally sidebar rather than the main thrust or frame.
Fat Legs (2015)
It's hard to tell if the limited scope of the lead character is the frame of the portrait. When the main character, played by writer and director Sophie Mathisen, ignores her friend's advice and meets her ex-lover, it seems so clearly, drastically near-sighted and wrongheaded, I wondered what sort of observation, if not perception, the writer/director thinks is being offered.
It's hard to tell if the limited scope of the lead character is the frame of the portrait. When the main character, played by writer and director Sophie Mathisen, ignores her friend's advice and meets her ex-lover, it seems so clearly, drastically near-sighted and wrongheaded, I wondered what sort of observation, if not perception, the writer/director thinks is being offered.
PET.E.R O'Toole: Along the Sky Road to Aqaba (2022)
By contrast to The Fastest Woman on Earth, here's a documentary about a more widely famous actor and movie star, featuring many other artists, that's more scattered. Various parties, including fellows and relatives, jaw about Peter O'Toole, and while the anecdotal ease seems apt for O'Toole and sometimes fun, it's meandering and repetitious the way it's spread out. The biggest thread is given to Sian Phillips, O'Toole's wife of 20 years, and there's plenty of talk about his persona off stage and screen, as big as on, the drinking, provocation and philandering.
By contrast to The Fastest Woman on Earth, here's a documentary about a more widely famous actor and movie star, featuring many other artists, that's more scattered. Various parties, including fellows and relatives, jaw about Peter O'Toole, and while the anecdotal ease seems apt for O'Toole and sometimes fun, it's meandering and repetitious the way it's spread out. The biggest thread is given to Sian Phillips, O'Toole's wife of 20 years, and there's plenty of talk about his persona off stage and screen, as big as on, the drinking, provocation and philandering.
The Fastest Woman on Earth (2022)
Regardless of what you think about the subject or subjects, car culture, racing, rocket cars and land speed records, or even this particular person, Jessi Combs, this documentary is well composed. Christopher Otwell and Graham Suorsa spent lots of time, over a long period of time, gathering lots of good material of their own, but then assembling that with lots of other coverage -- computers, phones, cameras used with the vehicles, archival footage for example of predecessors and heroes of Combs, news coverage, etc. They tell the story mostly chronologically, but then double back at times to put things together for other significance, and that's the really nice job of following or conducting the pertinence and building the context. Whether you know about this otherwise, going through this account is a challenging experience in its own right. The degree of exception or fame may only bear out all the more that the way we make life significant hangs over the abyss of any necessary or ultimate value. We're all ultimately making it up as we go along, and Combs also gives (and relays from her heroes) women the inspiration and courage for that in areas they may have feared to tread.
Regardless of what you think about the subject or subjects, car culture, racing, rocket cars and land speed records, or even this particular person, Jessi Combs, this documentary is well composed. Christopher Otwell and Graham Suorsa spent lots of time, over a long period of time, gathering lots of good material of their own, but then assembling that with lots of other coverage -- computers, phones, cameras used with the vehicles, archival footage for example of predecessors and heroes of Combs, news coverage, etc. They tell the story mostly chronologically, but then double back at times to put things together for other significance, and that's the really nice job of following or conducting the pertinence and building the context. Whether you know about this otherwise, going through this account is a challenging experience in its own right. The degree of exception or fame may only bear out all the more that the way we make life significant hangs over the abyss of any necessary or ultimate value. We're all ultimately making it up as we go along, and Combs also gives (and relays from her heroes) women the inspiration and courage for that in areas they may have feared to tread.
Film: The Living Record of Our Memory (2021)
Documentary about archiving, preservation and restoration of motion pictures, mainly the nitrate stock of the silent film era, but also the significance of this through the various changes in technology, even into the digital age, that require constant migration. It features many stars of the preservation endeavor, although as it also informs us, there aren't enough involved in the world. They discuss even home movies, the way the distribution of exhibition copies all over the world requires a truly global and international effort, as well as how countries like Nigeria and India figure in, being with the U.S., the greatest producers of movies. It's easy for us to take for granted the recorded images we have at our fingertips, because of digital technology and the Internet, but thus to overlook the necessity and the task of preservation. Strangely enough, this has always been the case, even the earliest products of film thought of as ephemeral and disposable. The digital dissemination of movies has been at once their loss and survival, their afterlife, as I discussed here: See Through Film.
Documentary about archiving, preservation and restoration of motion pictures, mainly the nitrate stock of the silent film era, but also the significance of this through the various changes in technology, even into the digital age, that require constant migration. It features many stars of the preservation endeavor, although as it also informs us, there aren't enough involved in the world. They discuss even home movies, the way the distribution of exhibition copies all over the world requires a truly global and international effort, as well as how countries like Nigeria and India figure in, being with the U.S., the greatest producers of movies. It's easy for us to take for granted the recorded images we have at our fingertips, because of digital technology and the Internet, but thus to overlook the necessity and the task of preservation. Strangely enough, this has always been the case, even the earliest products of film thought of as ephemeral and disposable. The digital dissemination of movies has been at once their loss and survival, their afterlife, as I discussed here: See Through Film.
Bedtime Story (1964)
Compare this to its remake, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and it's funny looking backwards to see Marlon Brando and David Niven in the roles taken by Steve Martin and Michael Caine. But that also shows how the latter gave a twist of smarm and silliness to spice it up, because the original is flat despite Brando leaving a house in his underwear and Niven's gliding charm. Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning wrote the script for both. Brando's company produced the first one and Brando said this was one of his most enjoyable experiences making a movie, particularly because of Niven who kept making him break up on set. It's also interesting how Brando, who could be quite a cutup himself, and punctured so much formality in serious acting, wasn't very good at comic acting, even by his own account.
Compare this to its remake, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and it's funny looking backwards to see Marlon Brando and David Niven in the roles taken by Steve Martin and Michael Caine. But that also shows how the latter gave a twist of smarm and silliness to spice it up, because the original is flat despite Brando leaving a house in his underwear and Niven's gliding charm. Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning wrote the script for both. Brando's company produced the first one and Brando said this was one of his most enjoyable experiences making a movie, particularly because of Niven who kept making him break up on set. It's also interesting how Brando, who could be quite a cutup himself, and punctured so much formality in serious acting, wasn't very good at comic acting, even by his own account.
The Covenant (2023)
The dispatch Guy Ritchie has in his recent movies serves well here, especially the first half, and on the whole it's not quite as thick with the posturing of a lot of movies about combat and conflict. But when it shifts into the latter part, about the American sergeant trying to return the favor for his Afghan interpreter, non-combat business gets treated with action-movie tactics, which does rather press the seriousness. The subject is an interesting one for not being covered much as well, the relationships that translators have with foreign troops, and Dar Salim is particularly good as the interpreter.
6/2/23
The dispatch Guy Ritchie has in his recent movies serves well here, especially the first half, and on the whole it's not quite as thick with the posturing of a lot of movies about combat and conflict. But when it shifts into the latter part, about the American sergeant trying to return the favor for his Afghan interpreter, non-combat business gets treated with action-movie tactics, which does rather press the seriousness. The subject is an interesting one for not being covered much as well, the relationships that translators have with foreign troops, and Dar Salim is particularly good as the interpreter.
Taxi Driver (1976) ♠
The way M or High and Low give a characterization of society, the characters mapped out in their social relation, Taxi Driver does too, but almost from an inverted perspective. It's a kind of psychological point of view of Travis Bickle's perception, his experience and reaction. Martin Scorsese had already demonstrated this approach in Mean Streets and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, the way that, if it's to be thought of as realism, it's more responses to and feelings about things, the moods and states of the characters, than some documentary objectivity or third-person omniscience. So for Paul Schrader's script about a man stretching alienation to psychopathy, Scorsese gives us a sensuous account. If that sounds contradictory, even a joke, it has that kind of irony, or turn to it. New York in even its stereotypical reputation in the 70s is the landscape. The close-ups of Robert De Niro's eyes, the languid slow-motion dissolves -- slow motion is used notably as a sort of reaction cutaway, rather than for action, like Bickle zoning out into apprehension or repulsion at his surroundings -- the Bernard Hermann soundtrack hissing like the steam coming up from the streets or a sax swoozing like a lurid romance score or even the hints of Hitchcockian dreaminess, the montages that stream the detached time and the groping of Bickle -- it's all a lushness that's even more affecting than the considerable info and savvy about the character's makeup and situation. And we watch an attempt at romance, a date, that's awry from the start and plays out in increasing awkwardness only exposing Bickle more. It's this affective approach, an almost romantic closeness, but for an actually sobering view -- it's a counterpoint, can't be mistaken for identifying with or directly romanticizing the characters or their views -- that makes Scorsese's movies even more cathartic. And Taxi Driver was the peak of this. More than even The Godfather, Taxi Driver's violent climax (see Pauline Kael on the whole displaced sexuality of Bickle) demonstrates the affective discharge, the consequences we don't want to see and why we should see them in a way that's not just typical sublimation. It's part of the same lyrical stroke, but has a clinical abruptness. It's a nightmare, it's a crime scene diagram, but in the same slow motion of Bickle's reverie, and even overhead, as if his disembodied view. It was the grown-up movie of the 70s that gave us this encounter with violence as the potential of real situations, like Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, observing what already existed before John Hinckley Jr.
The way M or High and Low give a characterization of society, the characters mapped out in their social relation, Taxi Driver does too, but almost from an inverted perspective. It's a kind of psychological point of view of Travis Bickle's perception, his experience and reaction. Martin Scorsese had already demonstrated this approach in Mean Streets and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, the way that, if it's to be thought of as realism, it's more responses to and feelings about things, the moods and states of the characters, than some documentary objectivity or third-person omniscience. So for Paul Schrader's script about a man stretching alienation to psychopathy, Scorsese gives us a sensuous account. If that sounds contradictory, even a joke, it has that kind of irony, or turn to it. New York in even its stereotypical reputation in the 70s is the landscape. The close-ups of Robert De Niro's eyes, the languid slow-motion dissolves -- slow motion is used notably as a sort of reaction cutaway, rather than for action, like Bickle zoning out into apprehension or repulsion at his surroundings -- the Bernard Hermann soundtrack hissing like the steam coming up from the streets or a sax swoozing like a lurid romance score or even the hints of Hitchcockian dreaminess, the montages that stream the detached time and the groping of Bickle -- it's all a lushness that's even more affecting than the considerable info and savvy about the character's makeup and situation. And we watch an attempt at romance, a date, that's awry from the start and plays out in increasing awkwardness only exposing Bickle more. It's this affective approach, an almost romantic closeness, but for an actually sobering view -- it's a counterpoint, can't be mistaken for identifying with or directly romanticizing the characters or their views -- that makes Scorsese's movies even more cathartic. And Taxi Driver was the peak of this. More than even The Godfather, Taxi Driver's violent climax (see Pauline Kael on the whole displaced sexuality of Bickle) demonstrates the affective discharge, the consequences we don't want to see and why we should see them in a way that's not just typical sublimation. It's part of the same lyrical stroke, but has a clinical abruptness. It's a nightmare, it's a crime scene diagram, but in the same slow motion of Bickle's reverie, and even overhead, as if his disembodied view. It was the grown-up movie of the 70s that gave us this encounter with violence as the potential of real situations, like Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, observing what already existed before John Hinckley Jr.
John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)
Action movie as rave. Despite some ingenuity, the John Wick movies were already stringing out fight sequences well beyond my tolerance, so at nearly three hours long, this is not going the right direction. The affected delivery, with all the world's mobs as some kind of Illuminati, is only a level above The Matrix, like undergraduate to teenager, but here some of it at the beginning is so cringing the house music fighting tracks come as relief. But then go on and on. Like watching someone else play a video game, and the approach is quite like that, with the somewhat slower calibrated cadence centered around one fighter. Maybe it's just longer because Keanu Reeves is slower. You can put this on in the background at a party and just turn off the dialogue track. The microcosm of all this is the scene when Reeves falls downs steps in Paris. How long would you want to watch someone fall down steps? That's not rhetorical, I'm asking. Go ahead and find out.
Action movie as rave. Despite some ingenuity, the John Wick movies were already stringing out fight sequences well beyond my tolerance, so at nearly three hours long, this is not going the right direction. The affected delivery, with all the world's mobs as some kind of Illuminati, is only a level above The Matrix, like undergraduate to teenager, but here some of it at the beginning is so cringing the house music fighting tracks come as relief. But then go on and on. Like watching someone else play a video game, and the approach is quite like that, with the somewhat slower calibrated cadence centered around one fighter. Maybe it's just longer because Keanu Reeves is slower. You can put this on in the background at a party and just turn off the dialogue track. The microcosm of all this is the scene when Reeves falls downs steps in Paris. How long would you want to watch someone fall down steps? That's not rhetorical, I'm asking. Go ahead and find out.
The Last Supper (1995)
This may seem somewhat foresighted, considering how the political division has become so much greater since, though it's also still on the scale of the 90s in not seeing what extremes would come to the fore. The frankness of even the confrontation it promises at the first dinner scene -- where Bill Paxton also gives the best performance not only of the guests, but perhaps of all -- quickly washes into the current of a much breezier comedy plot that gives a succession of caricatures as serial murders. What really makes for the derailing, though, is the music video style montage stuff, like some swaggery lifestyle commercial that takes over, neither suspenseful nor funny.
This may seem somewhat foresighted, considering how the political division has become so much greater since, though it's also still on the scale of the 90s in not seeing what extremes would come to the fore. The frankness of even the confrontation it promises at the first dinner scene -- where Bill Paxton also gives the best performance not only of the guests, but perhaps of all -- quickly washes into the current of a much breezier comedy plot that gives a succession of caricatures as serial murders. What really makes for the derailing, though, is the music video style montage stuff, like some swaggery lifestyle commercial that takes over, neither suspenseful nor funny.
Crazy Love (2007)
This documentary about an outrageous on-and-off relationship going back to the 50s was co-produced and co-directed by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens (yes, the actor in Hackers, Short Circuit, The Flamingo Kid, Columbo). It takes the rambling course of its eccentric subjects and for a while seems to be accumulating a sneaky cultural portrait, like Errol Morris or the Maysles. But when it concentrates on the tabloid coverage of the incidents, and even that style of coverage from local TV news, it doesn't seem any less sensational or different from the lurid interest.
This documentary about an outrageous on-and-off relationship going back to the 50s was co-produced and co-directed by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens (yes, the actor in Hackers, Short Circuit, The Flamingo Kid, Columbo). It takes the rambling course of its eccentric subjects and for a while seems to be accumulating a sneaky cultural portrait, like Errol Morris or the Maysles. But when it concentrates on the tabloid coverage of the incidents, and even that style of coverage from local TV news, it doesn't seem any less sensational or different from the lurid interest.
Here's a start to a Jim Brown festival.
Mars Attacks (1996)
The more comic version of Independence Day is also like a Nashville version of 50s sci-fi, or the sci-fi It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Like that latter, it's broad action comedy, with some weirder Tim Burton twists, but even the gruesomer blows come off like Roadrunner cartoons, and in red and green for the Burton Christmas fixation. Jack Nicholson does his Dennis Hopper impersonation for one of his two roles, and Jim Brown ends up sort of the hero of the whole thing.
The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Seven Samurai via The Magnificent Seven is probably the main movie source, if not origin, of the lost cause team, but The Dirty Dozen certainly stands as model for so many doomed gangs after, from direct descendants like Kelly's Heroes to all the ragtag character crews via Aliens, and so many other heist and commando and oddball superhero crews. Such movie pedigree as Nunally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath among many others) helped write the screenplay and Robert Aldrich directed. It's not the stylistic bravura of The Wild Bunch, nothing close to what that did formally as ambivalence with violence, despite Aldrich making his own turns with Kiss Me Deadly a decade earlier (and I think his later Emperor of the North is better directed). But it's interesting how this movie domesticates what are supposed to be murderers, mobsters, psychopaths and racists as lovable underdogs. Without pulling some of those punches in dialogue -- John Wayne reportedly turned down the movie because of adultery in the script, and Jack Palance because they wouldn't change the explicit racism of the character Telly Savalas ended up playing -- the film is pretty neat and trim otherwise, even for a war picture. There are three acts -- pitching the deal to the convicts; the big test against regular army; the mission -- so the latter isn't really the focus. Jim Brown retired from football during filming when Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell gave him an ultimatum of the sport or acting.
I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988)
This blaxsploitation spoof written and directed by, and starring Keenen Ivory Wayans, is well connected to its source material, with Jim Brown, Isaac Hayes, Bernie Casey and Antonio Fargas, but it's not as fun, wild or funny as a lot of that material.
Mars Attacks (1996)
The more comic version of Independence Day is also like a Nashville version of 50s sci-fi, or the sci-fi It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Like that latter, it's broad action comedy, with some weirder Tim Burton twists, but even the gruesomer blows come off like Roadrunner cartoons, and in red and green for the Burton Christmas fixation. Jack Nicholson does his Dennis Hopper impersonation for one of his two roles, and Jim Brown ends up sort of the hero of the whole thing.
The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Seven Samurai via The Magnificent Seven is probably the main movie source, if not origin, of the lost cause team, but The Dirty Dozen certainly stands as model for so many doomed gangs after, from direct descendants like Kelly's Heroes to all the ragtag character crews via Aliens, and so many other heist and commando and oddball superhero crews. Such movie pedigree as Nunally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath among many others) helped write the screenplay and Robert Aldrich directed. It's not the stylistic bravura of The Wild Bunch, nothing close to what that did formally as ambivalence with violence, despite Aldrich making his own turns with Kiss Me Deadly a decade earlier (and I think his later Emperor of the North is better directed). But it's interesting how this movie domesticates what are supposed to be murderers, mobsters, psychopaths and racists as lovable underdogs. Without pulling some of those punches in dialogue -- John Wayne reportedly turned down the movie because of adultery in the script, and Jack Palance because they wouldn't change the explicit racism of the character Telly Savalas ended up playing -- the film is pretty neat and trim otherwise, even for a war picture. There are three acts -- pitching the deal to the convicts; the big test against regular army; the mission -- so the latter isn't really the focus. Jim Brown retired from football during filming when Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell gave him an ultimatum of the sport or acting.
I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988)
This blaxsploitation spoof written and directed by, and starring Keenen Ivory Wayans, is well connected to its source material, with Jim Brown, Isaac Hayes, Bernie Casey and Antonio Fargas, but it's not as fun, wild or funny as a lot of that material.
Nothingwood (2017)
Despite a slack, diffident approach from this film's maker Sonia Kronlund, whose efforts are also on display in her movie, it's hard not to get the irrepressible subject, Salim Shaheen, the Afghan auteur who makes low-budget Bollywood-style action movies with himself as the hero star. Shaheen has made more than 100 movies, and has been able to continue even through the takeover by the Taliban, whether by reputation or dumb luck. Whatever eloquence may be lacking may state the case all the better for the bare minimum of creativity, freedom of expression, art or culture, in the face of those who want to suppress it.
Despite a slack, diffident approach from this film's maker Sonia Kronlund, whose efforts are also on display in her movie, it's hard not to get the irrepressible subject, Salim Shaheen, the Afghan auteur who makes low-budget Bollywood-style action movies with himself as the hero star. Shaheen has made more than 100 movies, and has been able to continue even through the takeover by the Taliban, whether by reputation or dumb luck. Whatever eloquence may be lacking may state the case all the better for the bare minimum of creativity, freedom of expression, art or culture, in the face of those who want to suppress it.
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (2023)
It doesn't have quite the offhand insight of Val, but it does give an interesting mix of prepared autobiographical narrative, interview, and then editing from Fox's shows and movies to parallel what he's telling about his life. Like Val Kilmer, Fox shows not just courage and good humor in the face of his condition, but the mettle for the perspective on his life. It's not just facing up to the condition, which he doesn't have much choice about, but what it contributes to looking at his life otherwise, for example, fame compared to care.
5/23/23
It doesn't have quite the offhand insight of Val, but it does give an interesting mix of prepared autobiographical narrative, interview, and then editing from Fox's shows and movies to parallel what he's telling about his life. Like Val Kilmer, Fox shows not just courage and good humor in the face of his condition, but the mettle for the perspective on his life. It's not just facing up to the condition, which he doesn't have much choice about, but what it contributes to looking at his life otherwise, for example, fame compared to care.
Miami Blues (1990)
When Alec Baldwin started appearing on Saturday Night Live it was a revelation what a good comic actor he was. But this was also because of the contrast to serious dramatic roles he had in movies at the time, some good, or at least good performances, like The Hunt for Red October, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Edge, some not so, like Malice and this. Director George Armitage leaves lots of room for the actors, but that's also a kind of blankness of style. It's hard to tell how straight or ironic this is trying to be, whether noirish or humorous. Baldwin's working hard at it, there are some good strokes, but it's missing somehow. You can see how it's mapped out, like a satire. Fred Ward, who makes this a funny twist on Miami Vice with trappings quite the opposite of the swank vice cops, by contrast is more in the woof, but even in a scene where he's being a pushy cop by inviting himself to dinner, there's an idleness that's more like the shapelessness of the whole execution. By the time we get to the climax and denouement with Jennifer Jason Leigh, there's just not the dramatic weight they're going for.
When Alec Baldwin started appearing on Saturday Night Live it was a revelation what a good comic actor he was. But this was also because of the contrast to serious dramatic roles he had in movies at the time, some good, or at least good performances, like The Hunt for Red October, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Edge, some not so, like Malice and this. Director George Armitage leaves lots of room for the actors, but that's also a kind of blankness of style. It's hard to tell how straight or ironic this is trying to be, whether noirish or humorous. Baldwin's working hard at it, there are some good strokes, but it's missing somehow. You can see how it's mapped out, like a satire. Fred Ward, who makes this a funny twist on Miami Vice with trappings quite the opposite of the swank vice cops, by contrast is more in the woof, but even in a scene where he's being a pushy cop by inviting himself to dinner, there's an idleness that's more like the shapelessness of the whole execution. By the time we get to the climax and denouement with Jennifer Jason Leigh, there's just not the dramatic weight they're going for.
Possession (1981)
Not just an absurdist horror movie, it might be the absurdist horror movie. More than Vampyr or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or anything by Lynch that might be described this way, or anything that by first being absurd or surreal might seem to involve the nightmarish or horrific, this seems to be a jealous fever dream through the conventions of a horror film, like Rosemary's Baby on drugs. Co-writer (with Federic Tuten) and director Andrzej Zulawski keeps it at such a pitch of absurdist theater throughout, it has a cadence. It's not just horror effects, it's an absurdist opera or dance. Naturalistic details are called out, almost mocked, like Sam Neill turning a light off and on while talking on the phone, or talking to the person on the other end as if he's faking and exaggerating; or an unexplained sound, ambiguously score or effect, the closest correlate of which is Neill earlier making airplane noises for his kid; or abrupt cuts that also cut the music, Godard-like. It follows more a horror film template -- the title itself suggests all the play on the word from that to jealousy's double-edged sword -- but like with Lynch or Polanski, what makes it much more effective is what else it expresses, the other nerves it touches, the allegorical breadth.
Not just an absurdist horror movie, it might be the absurdist horror movie. More than Vampyr or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or anything by Lynch that might be described this way, or anything that by first being absurd or surreal might seem to involve the nightmarish or horrific, this seems to be a jealous fever dream through the conventions of a horror film, like Rosemary's Baby on drugs. Co-writer (with Federic Tuten) and director Andrzej Zulawski keeps it at such a pitch of absurdist theater throughout, it has a cadence. It's not just horror effects, it's an absurdist opera or dance. Naturalistic details are called out, almost mocked, like Sam Neill turning a light off and on while talking on the phone, or talking to the person on the other end as if he's faking and exaggerating; or an unexplained sound, ambiguously score or effect, the closest correlate of which is Neill earlier making airplane noises for his kid; or abrupt cuts that also cut the music, Godard-like. It follows more a horror film template -- the title itself suggests all the play on the word from that to jealousy's double-edged sword -- but like with Lynch or Polanski, what makes it much more effective is what else it expresses, the other nerves it touches, the allegorical breadth.
The Wolverine (2013)
Diversifying Wolverine's portfolio, Batman or even James Bond style, doesn't really add flavor when it's the same clatter of action as typical superhero movies. Ninjas and samurai are simply more of the pile-on of other mutants and villains and bosses and subplots.
Diversifying Wolverine's portfolio, Batman or even James Bond style, doesn't really add flavor when it's the same clatter of action as typical superhero movies. Ninjas and samurai are simply more of the pile-on of other mutants and villains and bosses and subplots.
Compartment No. 6 (2021)
A study in, if not ode to, detour (or "destinerrance," as Jacques Derrida coined to try to describe more of what's involved in the paradox of route or way as both right and wrong, the drift or diversion of significance) that could make a type with Irma Vep. Without the movie business reflexive part of that one, this is more mundane, but precisely what both are doing is holding up the real, or what the ideal overlooks: off the beaten path, against expectation, catch as catch can. As a Finnish student makes her way by train from Moscow to an archaeological attraction in Murmansk, the chance of her encounters, especially in the disposition of her most persistent compartment companion, a young Russian miner, reflects even on her feelings for what she left. The twists and turns occur for the place of departure and destination, past and future. She experiences exuberance, attachment and alienation, the ups and downs of being thrown or detached, including the fondness in associations for experience that isn't what you'd want in the first place, like people you would never have met otherwise, or affectionately corny music.
A study in, if not ode to, detour (or "destinerrance," as Jacques Derrida coined to try to describe more of what's involved in the paradox of route or way as both right and wrong, the drift or diversion of significance) that could make a type with Irma Vep. Without the movie business reflexive part of that one, this is more mundane, but precisely what both are doing is holding up the real, or what the ideal overlooks: off the beaten path, against expectation, catch as catch can. As a Finnish student makes her way by train from Moscow to an archaeological attraction in Murmansk, the chance of her encounters, especially in the disposition of her most persistent compartment companion, a young Russian miner, reflects even on her feelings for what she left. The twists and turns occur for the place of departure and destination, past and future. She experiences exuberance, attachment and alienation, the ups and downs of being thrown or detached, including the fondness in associations for experience that isn't what you'd want in the first place, like people you would never have met otherwise, or affectionately corny music.
Unwelcome (2022)
Part ordeal, part horror fantasy, part Inside No. 9 episode, which is part comedy, these come off in the broadest way as conflicting registers. I'm not sure the prologue part about what happens to the newly expecting couple is necessary, except to provide more payoff for a turnabout on vulnerable mothers. What works best is the stuff about the house repair crew being a holy terror as a social comedy, even more than the major pitch of the Irish folk version of Gremlins.
Part ordeal, part horror fantasy, part Inside No. 9 episode, which is part comedy, these come off in the broadest way as conflicting registers. I'm not sure the prologue part about what happens to the newly expecting couple is necessary, except to provide more payoff for a turnabout on vulnerable mothers. What works best is the stuff about the house repair crew being a holy terror as a social comedy, even more than the major pitch of the Irish folk version of Gremlins.
The Bourne Legacy (2012)
Within the same formula -- which is curiously formatted like a space mission, with a command room full of technicians trying to keep track of a rogue agent -- this manages to be more interesting, drawn down to the drama more than the action. Granted you've still got wrestling with wolves, roof-hopping and motorcycle acrobatics, though even that latter mercifully doesn't end in the mano a mano it seems to be setting up for. Despite the absence of Matt Damon, Jeremy Renner also serves to make this more concentrated, as do others like Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton and Oscar Isaac. After The Bourne Identity, the second installment The Bourne Supremacy put a fright wig on, made it too flashy frenzied, so this brings it back to sleeker bluster.
Within the same formula -- which is curiously formatted like a space mission, with a command room full of technicians trying to keep track of a rogue agent -- this manages to be more interesting, drawn down to the drama more than the action. Granted you've still got wrestling with wolves, roof-hopping and motorcycle acrobatics, though even that latter mercifully doesn't end in the mano a mano it seems to be setting up for. Despite the absence of Matt Damon, Jeremy Renner also serves to make this more concentrated, as do others like Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton and Oscar Isaac. After The Bourne Identity, the second installment The Bourne Supremacy put a fright wig on, made it too flashy frenzied, so this brings it back to sleeker bluster.
Law Abiding Citizen (2009)
If you're always a step ahead, then by definition, how can anyone ever catch up? This movie carries out the mastermind antagonist toying with everyone else to an absurd extent, if not in hyperbolic action -- good grief, how would you be able to even go through all the cases of this sort of thing in action, sci-fi, fantasy, superhero -- then in conceptual ways: one specially trained op is more intelligent, skilled, capable than entire agencies beyond the one that created him. There's a decent cast for it, especially Jamie Fox, Gerard Butler, Colm Meaney, Bruce McGill and Viola Davis; F. Gary Gray's direction isn't too obtrusive; and the script by Kurt Wimmer deals with some ambiguity and even ambivalence about law and order that's also pertinent today. You just have to accept a thick slice of evil genius and revenge hokum for the sake of the parable, or at least as camp fun.
5/11/23
If you're always a step ahead, then by definition, how can anyone ever catch up? This movie carries out the mastermind antagonist toying with everyone else to an absurd extent, if not in hyperbolic action -- good grief, how would you be able to even go through all the cases of this sort of thing in action, sci-fi, fantasy, superhero -- then in conceptual ways: one specially trained op is more intelligent, skilled, capable than entire agencies beyond the one that created him. There's a decent cast for it, especially Jamie Fox, Gerard Butler, Colm Meaney, Bruce McGill and Viola Davis; F. Gary Gray's direction isn't too obtrusive; and the script by Kurt Wimmer deals with some ambiguity and even ambivalence about law and order that's also pertinent today. You just have to accept a thick slice of evil genius and revenge hokum for the sake of the parable, or at least as camp fun.
Mandingo (1975)
Dino De Laurentiis produced this for Paramount, which was the top studio by then thanks to its string of hits including The Godfather, but this wasn't such a special case of aiming low, despite this seeming like a move into exploitation movies. Rosemary's Baby, Love Story and The Godfather had all been potboiler books. Perhaps seeming if not being substandard allowed freedom from convention, or the lack of ceremony or frankness of poor relations, but the crudity of the production in some cases goes along with a more unvarnished view of slavery and the South than at least American popular movies may have had before. The plantation seems squalidly sparse, but if it was the means of production it makes the white family look as if in a state of decline, wasted, the white trash spirit of the status or grand facade. James Mason is the microcosm of this, with his stature as an actor but his bizarre attempt at a southern accent making the patriarch seem even more depraved.
Dino De Laurentiis produced this for Paramount, which was the top studio by then thanks to its string of hits including The Godfather, but this wasn't such a special case of aiming low, despite this seeming like a move into exploitation movies. Rosemary's Baby, Love Story and The Godfather had all been potboiler books. Perhaps seeming if not being substandard allowed freedom from convention, or the lack of ceremony or frankness of poor relations, but the crudity of the production in some cases goes along with a more unvarnished view of slavery and the South than at least American popular movies may have had before. The plantation seems squalidly sparse, but if it was the means of production it makes the white family look as if in a state of decline, wasted, the white trash spirit of the status or grand facade. James Mason is the microcosm of this, with his stature as an actor but his bizarre attempt at a southern accent making the patriarch seem even more depraved.
Super Fly (1972)
Following Elvis Mitchell's lead -- see Is That Black Enough for You? -- this may be the prime example of where blaxploitation was also the delivery system for subversion, but also where the movie is the delivery system for the soundtrack. Mitchell discusses the significance of Curtis Mayfield's music, which made a bigger profit than the movie itself, but in that light it's interesting to see this aesthetically in the movie. Apart from Mayfield and his band featured, there are entire segments for songs, including an extended montage of stills, with snazzy 70s split screen arrangements.
Following Elvis Mitchell's lead -- see Is That Black Enough for You? -- this may be the prime example of where blaxploitation was also the delivery system for subversion, but also where the movie is the delivery system for the soundtrack. Mitchell discusses the significance of Curtis Mayfield's music, which made a bigger profit than the movie itself, but in that light it's interesting to see this aesthetically in the movie. Apart from Mayfield and his band featured, there are entire segments for songs, including an extended montage of stills, with snazzy 70s split screen arrangements.
Death Takes a Holiday (1934)
I don't know if the original Italian play or its Broadway adaptation was like this, but the way it's delivered here is hard not to take as the epitome of bad theater -- overwrought, tritely grand abstraction, quivering and moaning overenunciation, grasping undergraduate earnestness and handling of concepts -- if not parody of it. There are some decent, if expedient effects and good cinematography, but nothing to cut through the high-toned self-sacrifice.
I don't know if the original Italian play or its Broadway adaptation was like this, but the way it's delivered here is hard not to take as the epitome of bad theater -- overwrought, tritely grand abstraction, quivering and moaning overenunciation, grasping undergraduate earnestness and handling of concepts -- if not parody of it. There are some decent, if expedient effects and good cinematography, but nothing to cut through the high-toned self-sacrifice.
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
Apart from the pop movie from a game (or whatever other thing) matter -- see Dungeons and Dragons -- there's the build your castle from the sky one. Or make it up as you go. A movie based on this game doesn't have the kind of material of, say, a book to build on -- this edition isn't even connected to the previous movies, and is really not much besides a CG effects update -- which might make it an original fantasy, but it just makes the contrivance seem all the more arbitrary. Like playing the game with an overbearing dungeon master, but with no dice at all.
Apart from the pop movie from a game (or whatever other thing) matter -- see Dungeons and Dragons -- there's the build your castle from the sky one. Or make it up as you go. A movie based on this game doesn't have the kind of material of, say, a book to build on -- this edition isn't even connected to the previous movies, and is really not much besides a CG effects update -- which might make it an original fantasy, but it just makes the contrivance seem all the more arbitrary. Like playing the game with an overbearing dungeon master, but with no dice at all.
Millionaires' Express (1986)
Blissfully unhindered by almost any concern for larger continuity, whether this takes place in WWII or WWI Russia, the American West anywhere between 1886 and 1986, somewhere and when in Hong Kong or China or wherever it was actually shot, makes as little difference as introduction of characters or the clothing they're wearing in any given scene. In costume and even set decor hodgepodge, you can try to keep track of who belongs to which group, who's ally and who foe, or just enjoy the flurry of fight gymnastics, lots of running around on and falling off of roofs, and gangs playing hide and seek in one room.
Blissfully unhindered by almost any concern for larger continuity, whether this takes place in WWII or WWI Russia, the American West anywhere between 1886 and 1986, somewhere and when in Hong Kong or China or wherever it was actually shot, makes as little difference as introduction of characters or the clothing they're wearing in any given scene. In costume and even set decor hodgepodge, you can try to keep track of who belongs to which group, who's ally and who foe, or just enjoy the flurry of fight gymnastics, lots of running around on and falling off of roofs, and gangs playing hide and seek in one room.
Renfield (2023)
It's hard to fault this for getting beat to the punch by What We Do in the Shadows, particularly the series which involves the whole familiar relationship, but even that movie was primed for the social comedy if not satire. Here it's the typical problem of action plot and melodrama taking precedent, and while the whole thing is set up to play as codependency, the insights or humor there aren't the sharpest. Mockup of the Bela Lugosi Dracula is used for a flashback, but with Nicolas Cage's well reported references to German Expressionism as an influence on his acting, it seems like a chance missed for more with him if not generally.
It's hard to fault this for getting beat to the punch by What We Do in the Shadows, particularly the series which involves the whole familiar relationship, but even that movie was primed for the social comedy if not satire. Here it's the typical problem of action plot and melodrama taking precedent, and while the whole thing is set up to play as codependency, the insights or humor there aren't the sharpest. Mockup of the Bela Lugosi Dracula is used for a flashback, but with Nicolas Cage's well reported references to German Expressionism as an influence on his acting, it seems like a chance missed for more with him if not generally.
Return to Seoul (2022)
Director Davy Chou, who co-wrote with Laure Badufle, has enough dryness and keenness to difference and contrast that the more emotional and fanciful stuff comes off as what's observed rather than how. The story of an adopted woman raised in France who goes back to Korea to find her birth parents is about the many cultural differences and the various reactions in all directions, which works as a thread despite the jumps in time that work like different acts.
Director Davy Chou, who co-wrote with Laure Badufle, has enough dryness and keenness to difference and contrast that the more emotional and fanciful stuff comes off as what's observed rather than how. The story of an adopted woman raised in France who goes back to Korea to find her birth parents is about the many cultural differences and the various reactions in all directions, which works as a thread despite the jumps in time that work like different acts.
The Notebook (2004)
Like a Boy Scout manual or Ikea instruction booklet version of a romance. You watch how the pieces are put together and the lines never seem to have any more revelation or inspiration than that.
Like a Boy Scout manual or Ikea instruction booklet version of a romance. You watch how the pieces are put together and the lines never seem to have any more revelation or inspiration than that.
Women Talking (2022)
Twice removed from the source, the women of a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, Sarah Polley's adaptation of a novel is a stage play kind of expression with a movie way of getting extra mileage from the same things with cut-up and overlapping, flashing back and forward. It's not the acumen Polley showed in Stories We Tell, and besides the removal, the kind of artistic translation, the combination of reverence and license, doesn't strike me as giving voice to these women.
Twice removed from the source, the women of a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, Sarah Polley's adaptation of a novel is a stage play kind of expression with a movie way of getting extra mileage from the same things with cut-up and overlapping, flashing back and forward. It's not the acumen Polley showed in Stories We Tell, and besides the removal, the kind of artistic translation, the combination of reverence and license, doesn't strike me as giving voice to these women.
Adieu Godard (2021)
The story of an old man who discovers Godard movies by accident and then tries to introduce them to his village only gets as far as a studentish cuteness to portray even the provincial backlash.
The story of an old man who discovers Godard movies by accident and then tries to introduce them to his village only gets as far as a studentish cuteness to portray even the provincial backlash.
Tonight or Never (1931)
An example of the early movies extending the theater, this is based on a Hungarian play that was on Broadway, and is also notable as the movie debut of Melvyn Douglas, who played his role on stage, too. As a pre-code picture it was scandalous in its day for a "love" scene between Gloria Swanson and Douglas, but today it's scandalous for all the silly coyness and yo-yoing and not doing. Perhaps this sort of thing is more tolerable as live theater, or perhaps the adaptation boiled it down so much there's not even any cleverness to the runaround.
5/5/23
An example of the early movies extending the theater, this is based on a Hungarian play that was on Broadway, and is also notable as the movie debut of Melvyn Douglas, who played his role on stage, too. As a pre-code picture it was scandalous in its day for a "love" scene between Gloria Swanson and Douglas, but today it's scandalous for all the silly coyness and yo-yoing and not doing. Perhaps this sort of thing is more tolerable as live theater, or perhaps the adaptation boiled it down so much there's not even any cleverness to the runaround.
Triangle of Sadness (2022)
Writer and director Ruben Ostlund, who also did Force Majeure, gets a tone between comedy and drama close enough on either side of the line to be a workable and interesting ambiguity. It's a distance, a somewhat documentary feel. Nothing seems to be directly comic, but the drama has a social satire filter. The effect can be seen in the contrast with the Americanized version of Force Majeure, Downhill, where even a more direct cringe comedy approach, a la The Office or Curb Your Enthusiasm, missed at just the quieter, more eerie play of the implication. Triangle has an arc that can seem like curious, intriguing connections, but also capricious. Sometimes it feels like a comedy that's not working, or that it's being too flip for its drama, and perhaps the worst sense of that is approaching a provocateur smugness. It seems to be working towards a social or political parable, but there's also a drift to it that works against that neatness. Ostlund's approach is compelling, if the material doesn't always add up or seem consistent, compared to The Menu, which had the idea and some material to be provocative but didn't play it out in the best surreal way. Ostlund has a grand meal scene in this movie, the Captain's Dinner, that tops that alone, and is the peak here, a symphony of disaster.
Writer and director Ruben Ostlund, who also did Force Majeure, gets a tone between comedy and drama close enough on either side of the line to be a workable and interesting ambiguity. It's a distance, a somewhat documentary feel. Nothing seems to be directly comic, but the drama has a social satire filter. The effect can be seen in the contrast with the Americanized version of Force Majeure, Downhill, where even a more direct cringe comedy approach, a la The Office or Curb Your Enthusiasm, missed at just the quieter, more eerie play of the implication. Triangle has an arc that can seem like curious, intriguing connections, but also capricious. Sometimes it feels like a comedy that's not working, or that it's being too flip for its drama, and perhaps the worst sense of that is approaching a provocateur smugness. It seems to be working towards a social or political parable, but there's also a drift to it that works against that neatness. Ostlund's approach is compelling, if the material doesn't always add up or seem consistent, compared to The Menu, which had the idea and some material to be provocative but didn't play it out in the best surreal way. Ostlund has a grand meal scene in this movie, the Captain's Dinner, that tops that alone, and is the peak here, a symphony of disaster.
Birdemic 2: The Resurrection (2013)
Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle (2022)
Consider this case for auteur: James Nguyen. When people have said that an artist makes the same work over and over, they may never have had this extent of literal in mind. Nguyen's Birdemic: Shock and Terror quickly picked up steam as a bad movie on the legendary level of The Room, and with something Tommy Wiseau didn't quite tackle: special effects (if they can be so called, though Wiseau's use of green screen was its own mysterious directorial move). Nguyen, who seems much more imperturbable even for self-consciousness than Wiseau, set about following that success and got backers and a crew to make a sequel. Nearly ten years later, with new digital camera technology, he made another. Each movie repeats the formula of the first, the plan of it cookie cutter, all the basic traits of its -- ahem -- distinction -- the sub-gradeschool dialogue and delivery; the humble locations used for pretending despite whatever grandeur of the region (#2 is in Hollywood and even opens and closes with what are meant to be majestic shots of the Hollywood sign); the long, jerky sequences and even shots of driving or walking, or just about anything really; the titular subject not appearing for more than half the duration, with all the setup and exposition providing no actual connection; after meaningful table conversation the jump to relationship signified by holding hands and the obligatory motel scene with making out in underwear or bathing suits; the global warming cant; those bird effects -- but actually adds to the, creates new levels of, absurdity, ineptitude, badness. With a film crew in the second one, Nguyen managed to get no better stability with his long tracking of walkers and drivers, got the cameraman in a reflection at least three times (so much for editing, too), was even more slack with topographical continuity, and added an equally low-bar effect as cause, not explanation, for the "resurrection" of prehistoric birds, zombie cavemen, and then some fresher zombies for good measure. For yet another effort that came out in 2022, now located mostly at the Santa Cruz boardwalk (Nguyen is quite the California trotter), the camera either had an automatic color and level adjustment, or was corrected in post, or both, but the saturation and contrast change with almost every shot, and the general palette of the whole is skewed teal and orange, often with blazes of oversaturation washing out faces or shirts. While Nguyen got into some fancy reflexive stuff in #2 with a horror movie within a horror movie, showing us exactly the sort of exploitative bare breasts his in-story representatives protested to some jacket-wearing Hollywood execs, in #3 he outbids all his own loitering quality with a scene where we watch the lead watch a program about global warming on his big video monitor (presumably also to show us how great the digs). Nguyen knows enough to cut to the inset program, make that the main frame, but he nonetheless prefers cutting back to moving the camera back and forth behind the head of his character watching. For a man who claims that he learns more with each outing, he does indeed surpass himself, but in which direction -- and that's part of the fascination: you could get lost in debating which of these is the worst. An artist staying true to his vision.
Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle (2022)
Consider this case for auteur: James Nguyen. When people have said that an artist makes the same work over and over, they may never have had this extent of literal in mind. Nguyen's Birdemic: Shock and Terror quickly picked up steam as a bad movie on the legendary level of The Room, and with something Tommy Wiseau didn't quite tackle: special effects (if they can be so called, though Wiseau's use of green screen was its own mysterious directorial move). Nguyen, who seems much more imperturbable even for self-consciousness than Wiseau, set about following that success and got backers and a crew to make a sequel. Nearly ten years later, with new digital camera technology, he made another. Each movie repeats the formula of the first, the plan of it cookie cutter, all the basic traits of its -- ahem -- distinction -- the sub-gradeschool dialogue and delivery; the humble locations used for pretending despite whatever grandeur of the region (#2 is in Hollywood and even opens and closes with what are meant to be majestic shots of the Hollywood sign); the long, jerky sequences and even shots of driving or walking, or just about anything really; the titular subject not appearing for more than half the duration, with all the setup and exposition providing no actual connection; after meaningful table conversation the jump to relationship signified by holding hands and the obligatory motel scene with making out in underwear or bathing suits; the global warming cant; those bird effects -- but actually adds to the, creates new levels of, absurdity, ineptitude, badness. With a film crew in the second one, Nguyen managed to get no better stability with his long tracking of walkers and drivers, got the cameraman in a reflection at least three times (so much for editing, too), was even more slack with topographical continuity, and added an equally low-bar effect as cause, not explanation, for the "resurrection" of prehistoric birds, zombie cavemen, and then some fresher zombies for good measure. For yet another effort that came out in 2022, now located mostly at the Santa Cruz boardwalk (Nguyen is quite the California trotter), the camera either had an automatic color and level adjustment, or was corrected in post, or both, but the saturation and contrast change with almost every shot, and the general palette of the whole is skewed teal and orange, often with blazes of oversaturation washing out faces or shirts. While Nguyen got into some fancy reflexive stuff in #2 with a horror movie within a horror movie, showing us exactly the sort of exploitative bare breasts his in-story representatives protested to some jacket-wearing Hollywood execs, in #3 he outbids all his own loitering quality with a scene where we watch the lead watch a program about global warming on his big video monitor (presumably also to show us how great the digs). Nguyen knows enough to cut to the inset program, make that the main frame, but he nonetheless prefers cutting back to moving the camera back and forth behind the head of his character watching. For a man who claims that he learns more with each outing, he does indeed surpass himself, but in which direction -- and that's part of the fascination: you could get lost in debating which of these is the worst. An artist staying true to his vision.
Eraserhead (1977) ♠
Nobody, especially in American movies, realizes their dreams the way David Lynch does. The way that works as a joke, especially with his first feature length movie, also gives him the last laugh. More than outer space fairy tales, enormous wealth, great fame, Lynch has a distinct, inimitable (and people try) style, manner, tone, quality that seems to involve a connection to dreamwork or dreamlike states or ways of thinking, feeling, musing, that perhaps most people can't or don't maintain because of the habits and strictures of waking life and thinking. It's throughout his work, but this first feature length movie, which he worked on for years living hand to mouth, was the realization. Considering the way it was brought about, it was probably more experimental, but it eventually got exhibition, built a reputation, then got wider distribution, and in the form of narrative feature there is nothing like it in American movies. Even in underground, avant-garde, experimental or film made for art exhibition, there's nothing quite like this blend of the canny and the uncanny that works like dreams, without the conspicuous framing of conventional narrative, or the more detached formalism of non-narrative movies. For one thing, by no means the least, the distinction between form and content is not just a theoretical issue, but the material is already its form, the way things occur in dreams, relaying subject and predicate, identity and quality rebus-like as Freud described it. Lynch's own ingenuousness is no less involved with the grotesque or dire, and it's the way these are confounded, an ambivalence often resulting in absurd humor, that sets him apart. The processing, the sublimation, are different from sheer wish fulfillment or acting out, especially as that is expressed by movie standards where registers are separated -- good or bad, funny or serious -- even when they're being played out together, not to mention separation as genre. This makes him the equivalent of Franz Kafka (see David Foster Wallace's "Laughing with Kafka") where though he's popular enough, and can nonetheless hold fascination, his work still provokes questions about resolving or decoding or identifying, even in audiences that go to see him. What does this mean? What is this supposed to be? Or as someone said while watching Eraserhead with me once, "Is this a joke?"
Nobody, especially in American movies, realizes their dreams the way David Lynch does. The way that works as a joke, especially with his first feature length movie, also gives him the last laugh. More than outer space fairy tales, enormous wealth, great fame, Lynch has a distinct, inimitable (and people try) style, manner, tone, quality that seems to involve a connection to dreamwork or dreamlike states or ways of thinking, feeling, musing, that perhaps most people can't or don't maintain because of the habits and strictures of waking life and thinking. It's throughout his work, but this first feature length movie, which he worked on for years living hand to mouth, was the realization. Considering the way it was brought about, it was probably more experimental, but it eventually got exhibition, built a reputation, then got wider distribution, and in the form of narrative feature there is nothing like it in American movies. Even in underground, avant-garde, experimental or film made for art exhibition, there's nothing quite like this blend of the canny and the uncanny that works like dreams, without the conspicuous framing of conventional narrative, or the more detached formalism of non-narrative movies. For one thing, by no means the least, the distinction between form and content is not just a theoretical issue, but the material is already its form, the way things occur in dreams, relaying subject and predicate, identity and quality rebus-like as Freud described it. Lynch's own ingenuousness is no less involved with the grotesque or dire, and it's the way these are confounded, an ambivalence often resulting in absurd humor, that sets him apart. The processing, the sublimation, are different from sheer wish fulfillment or acting out, especially as that is expressed by movie standards where registers are separated -- good or bad, funny or serious -- even when they're being played out together, not to mention separation as genre. This makes him the equivalent of Franz Kafka (see David Foster Wallace's "Laughing with Kafka") where though he's popular enough, and can nonetheless hold fascination, his work still provokes questions about resolving or decoding or identifying, even in audiences that go to see him. What does this mean? What is this supposed to be? Or as someone said while watching Eraserhead with me once, "Is this a joke?"
Aftersun (2022)
The drama of the color draining out of the day, or time suddenly becoming tedious or awkward or heavy: rarely do we see this as the main action of a movie. If you find yourself expecting other things to happen here, it's because of what so many other movies are about. Writer and director Charlotte Wells has a larger frame for this, and in fact it may be larger than that of other action in the bulk of movies. But the telling is not the realism we've come to think of as just dramatized action, a documentary or objective view or time. It's in the evidence we get in the sequences already cut out in "real" life, the time we have in encounters where we see effects of what goes on elsewhere, inference, memory that can't be verified, suggestion, speculation, what we see at one time that we may realize differently in another, from childhood to adulthood in particular. It's a study, in the poetic sense, of the intricate details of the day that are not ordinary, and that is not ordinary.
The drama of the color draining out of the day, or time suddenly becoming tedious or awkward or heavy: rarely do we see this as the main action of a movie. If you find yourself expecting other things to happen here, it's because of what so many other movies are about. Writer and director Charlotte Wells has a larger frame for this, and in fact it may be larger than that of other action in the bulk of movies. But the telling is not the realism we've come to think of as just dramatized action, a documentary or objective view or time. It's in the evidence we get in the sequences already cut out in "real" life, the time we have in encounters where we see effects of what goes on elsewhere, inference, memory that can't be verified, suggestion, speculation, what we see at one time that we may realize differently in another, from childhood to adulthood in particular. It's a study, in the poetic sense, of the intricate details of the day that are not ordinary, and that is not ordinary.
Ghosted (2023)
This starts out such a cringingly, honkingly bad romcom -- virtue signaling, a term I don't like because it's as precious as what it's describing, but that's all the more apt for this -- and then comes one well-done action scene -- not even the first twist, but a beat or two later -- that capsizes the first part to make it almost seem the badness was intended, like the way Predator made such a good twist on cloddy commando movies. The bus scene is adroit fun with action, as with the guys flying by outside the window, but then it's back to more cloddish action and making fun of the cloddish romance but cloddishly. Even the editing gets worse. Director Dexter Fletcher smoothed out the action in that one scene, but then is jumpy with regular dialogue scenes, making them annoyingly, not cleverly, punchy. We make movies unities, complete packages, think of them like that by default, conveniently, but in the same way directors -- or anything -- can vary from movie to movie, they can vary within a movie, so that there can be bad parts, or bad things, or a really good sequence (Hitchcock is a prime example), or good or bad turns.
This starts out such a cringingly, honkingly bad romcom -- virtue signaling, a term I don't like because it's as precious as what it's describing, but that's all the more apt for this -- and then comes one well-done action scene -- not even the first twist, but a beat or two later -- that capsizes the first part to make it almost seem the badness was intended, like the way Predator made such a good twist on cloddy commando movies. The bus scene is adroit fun with action, as with the guys flying by outside the window, but then it's back to more cloddish action and making fun of the cloddish romance but cloddishly. Even the editing gets worse. Director Dexter Fletcher smoothed out the action in that one scene, but then is jumpy with regular dialogue scenes, making them annoyingly, not cleverly, punchy. We make movies unities, complete packages, think of them like that by default, conveniently, but in the same way directors -- or anything -- can vary from movie to movie, they can vary within a movie, so that there can be bad parts, or bad things, or a really good sequence (Hitchcock is a prime example), or good or bad turns.
Ishtar (1987)
The legendary failure has more to do with the budget and expectations for the likes of writer and director Elaine May and the heavyweight leads Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty. It's not really the kind of bad that would be intriguing for that, but more the sort of fizzling out humdrum of pop movie comedies that try to be big plots. The bad it's aiming for, Beatty and Hoffman as songwriters whose talent doesn't match their aspiration, is more interesting in the first part and for other plays on their real-life personae. But when it then pitches into arms dealers, the CIA and the fictitious country of the title -- so much wasted from that name -- despite business for Charles Grodin, the comedy doesn't make the measure of absurdity. It's not Laurel and Hardy skewing WWI, for example, it just becomes a din of clownish business, shuffling with robes and camels liable to make you zone out rather than think about why it's not interesting.
4/28/23
The legendary failure has more to do with the budget and expectations for the likes of writer and director Elaine May and the heavyweight leads Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty. It's not really the kind of bad that would be intriguing for that, but more the sort of fizzling out humdrum of pop movie comedies that try to be big plots. The bad it's aiming for, Beatty and Hoffman as songwriters whose talent doesn't match their aspiration, is more interesting in the first part and for other plays on their real-life personae. But when it then pitches into arms dealers, the CIA and the fictitious country of the title -- so much wasted from that name -- despite business for Charles Grodin, the comedy doesn't make the measure of absurdity. It's not Laurel and Hardy skewing WWI, for example, it just becomes a din of clownish business, shuffling with robes and camels liable to make you zone out rather than think about why it's not interesting.
The Sadist (1963)
Real-time ordeal played mostly in the theatrical style of 50s and 60s TV, with a fiercely unibrowed Arch Hall Jr. offering a contemporary take on conspicuous abnormality. The three victims are subjected to sadistic tic, feral man acting and the viewer to having to wait a lot longer before he shoots someone to prove he will and fill feature length. Maybe it was in the air, but it nonetheless brings to mind The Incident of a few years later (a much better movie) which is then another curious association. Hall's character was supposedly based on Charles Starkweather, and The Incident was the debut of Martin Sheen, who went on to play the much more Starkweather based character in Badlands. Also of note about this movie: this was the feature-length debut of Vilmos Zsigmond as cinematographer, and it prefigures Halloween and Alien with a woman survivor.
Real-time ordeal played mostly in the theatrical style of 50s and 60s TV, with a fiercely unibrowed Arch Hall Jr. offering a contemporary take on conspicuous abnormality. The three victims are subjected to sadistic tic, feral man acting and the viewer to having to wait a lot longer before he shoots someone to prove he will and fill feature length. Maybe it was in the air, but it nonetheless brings to mind The Incident of a few years later (a much better movie) which is then another curious association. Hall's character was supposedly based on Charles Starkweather, and The Incident was the debut of Martin Sheen, who went on to play the much more Starkweather based character in Badlands. Also of note about this movie: this was the feature-length debut of Vilmos Zsigmond as cinematographer, and it prefigures Halloween and Alien with a woman survivor.
Night Nurse (1931)
If you want to see the treatment -- taking a subject and fleecing it, stuffing it with melodrama and suspense, but keeping enough of its skin as a pretense to the seriousness of its issues -- the way Hollywood did it in the 30s, this is a doozie. It's a pretext to have Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell, pre-code, show their undies -- even the title teases that -- and the former falls in with gangsters and is assigned to a home watch over two "poor little babies," she moans repetitiously, deal with drunkards and get punched in the face by the evil chauffeur, played by Clark Gable before he was a lead. You know, typical stuff, a day in the life of a night nurse. A scene of the nurses taking an oath after training is the play at message-movie honor of the subject, the solemnity only more incongruous. There's a great bookend bit of a POV shot in an ambulance of the day, tearing through the streets full of Model-A Tudors and street cars, long before Bullitt.
If you want to see the treatment -- taking a subject and fleecing it, stuffing it with melodrama and suspense, but keeping enough of its skin as a pretense to the seriousness of its issues -- the way Hollywood did it in the 30s, this is a doozie. It's a pretext to have Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell, pre-code, show their undies -- even the title teases that -- and the former falls in with gangsters and is assigned to a home watch over two "poor little babies," she moans repetitiously, deal with drunkards and get punched in the face by the evil chauffeur, played by Clark Gable before he was a lead. You know, typical stuff, a day in the life of a night nurse. A scene of the nurses taking an oath after training is the play at message-movie honor of the subject, the solemnity only more incongruous. There's a great bookend bit of a POV shot in an ambulance of the day, tearing through the streets full of Model-A Tudors and street cars, long before Bullitt.
An Outlaw (1964)
Somewhere between spy movie, hardboiled, B noir, and the ero guru that writer and director Teruo Ishii would later become known for, with lead actor Ken Takakura on his way to stardom in the middle of a run with Ishii. Takakura plays a hit man who gets used in a way that goes against his scruples. Like the roman or film noir antihero, but coming from the other side rather than a private detective, Takakura's character is adrift, the existential ghost that wants to belong to no order. Ishii's effort here is the Japanese equivalent of the French noir or appropriation of American B movie ethos, long on character and attitude rather than fancy plot or elaborate action. There's even a jazz score by Masao Yagi whose interest in Thelonious Monk can be heard in places. The action that does occur, like Ishii's use of some neorealist style location shooting, favors a more realistic grittiness, but some flashes of erotic and grotesque are rhetorical, more sensory than sensible. The locations of Yokohama, Macao, and Hong Kong, interior and exterior, especially give this flavor as treated by Ishii, a sort of sleazier tourism, an underworld Roman Holiday.
Somewhere between spy movie, hardboiled, B noir, and the ero guru that writer and director Teruo Ishii would later become known for, with lead actor Ken Takakura on his way to stardom in the middle of a run with Ishii. Takakura plays a hit man who gets used in a way that goes against his scruples. Like the roman or film noir antihero, but coming from the other side rather than a private detective, Takakura's character is adrift, the existential ghost that wants to belong to no order. Ishii's effort here is the Japanese equivalent of the French noir or appropriation of American B movie ethos, long on character and attitude rather than fancy plot or elaborate action. There's even a jazz score by Masao Yagi whose interest in Thelonious Monk can be heard in places. The action that does occur, like Ishii's use of some neorealist style location shooting, favors a more realistic grittiness, but some flashes of erotic and grotesque are rhetorical, more sensory than sensible. The locations of Yokohama, Macao, and Hong Kong, interior and exterior, especially give this flavor as treated by Ishii, a sort of sleazier tourism, an underworld Roman Holiday.
Camille (1936)
Paving the way to the decorous classical style of 40s Hollywood was MGM in the 30s, and this is a prime example. Was there a production design, if not movie, more florid and flat at once? Greta Garbo's retiring manner plays off the declamatory style of the day, and particularly here, most of all the constant remonstration of Robert Taylor, who perhaps shouldn't be blamed too much for a worse version of the acting when he had to deliver the worst part of the script. So much of the premise, at least as adapted (from a play and novel by Alexandre Dumas fils), as well as the character is put in his professions to Garbo's. This movie makes a reflexive comment for Garbo herself, the character she plays deflecting the weight others give her, just as the fuss about her as a star often made her out as more profound or at least grave.
Paving the way to the decorous classical style of 40s Hollywood was MGM in the 30s, and this is a prime example. Was there a production design, if not movie, more florid and flat at once? Greta Garbo's retiring manner plays off the declamatory style of the day, and particularly here, most of all the constant remonstration of Robert Taylor, who perhaps shouldn't be blamed too much for a worse version of the acting when he had to deliver the worst part of the script. So much of the premise, at least as adapted (from a play and novel by Alexandre Dumas fils), as well as the character is put in his professions to Garbo's. This movie makes a reflexive comment for Garbo herself, the character she plays deflecting the weight others give her, just as the fuss about her as a star often made her out as more profound or at least grave.
The Wandering Earth (2019)
And for a more outrageous example, though deriving from so much else derived from Spielberg, there's China's entry in the family-fawning, apocalyptic, hyperbolic blockbuster, outbidding Armageddon and Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow for outrageous premise and frenzied pace. What's bigger than an asteroid that could cause devastation on Earth? How about the whole solar system exploding and Earth crashing into Jupiter? But that's because they're moving the planet with giant rocket-type propulsion silos! And for some reason, the ever more freezening planet is covered with future super trucks, which are the main source of action, so I guess they're outbidding Ice Road Truckers, too.
And for a more outrageous example, though deriving from so much else derived from Spielberg, there's China's entry in the family-fawning, apocalyptic, hyperbolic blockbuster, outbidding Armageddon and Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow for outrageous premise and frenzied pace. What's bigger than an asteroid that could cause devastation on Earth? How about the whole solar system exploding and Earth crashing into Jupiter? But that's because they're moving the planet with giant rocket-type propulsion silos! And for some reason, the ever more freezening planet is covered with future super trucks, which are the main source of action, so I guess they're outbidding Ice Road Truckers, too.
UFO Sweden (2022)
The story of a loveable, scruffy UFO watch association and one member's daughter who tries to goad them out of habitual thinking and complacency. At this late stage, is it even worth it to point out the Spielberg derivation, since it's everywhere else? Though slight on special effects, with constant starts and thwarts and close getaways, dolly-ins and pushy dramatic emphasis, it's a Goonies version of Close Encounters.
The story of a loveable, scruffy UFO watch association and one member's daughter who tries to goad them out of habitual thinking and complacency. At this late stage, is it even worth it to point out the Spielberg derivation, since it's everywhere else? Though slight on special effects, with constant starts and thwarts and close getaways, dolly-ins and pushy dramatic emphasis, it's a Goonies version of Close Encounters.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
The gang that can shrink well below ant scale have their own trippy cosmos to rival Doctor Strange, but this movie that features it sticks to a pretty literal-minded transference of matters. There's some weirdness, mostly as mishmash of creatures, but then there's action, a lot of fighting, that looks pretty much like the Newtonian physics of the human earthly scale, albeit with special powers. Is Michelle Pfeiffer pulling Black Widow style takedown moves quantum physics, let alone metaphysics? We don't get as much of the bending and warping, figurative play, as even with Doctor Strange, notwithstanding the obvious convenience of imagination (like how do you breathe if you're smaller than oxygen atoms).
4/20/23
The gang that can shrink well below ant scale have their own trippy cosmos to rival Doctor Strange, but this movie that features it sticks to a pretty literal-minded transference of matters. There's some weirdness, mostly as mishmash of creatures, but then there's action, a lot of fighting, that looks pretty much like the Newtonian physics of the human earthly scale, albeit with special powers. Is Michelle Pfeiffer pulling Black Widow style takedown moves quantum physics, let alone metaphysics? We don't get as much of the bending and warping, figurative play, as even with Doctor Strange, notwithstanding the obvious convenience of imagination (like how do you breathe if you're smaller than oxygen atoms).
Paris the 13th (2021)
A bit more savvy about relationships, observation that's not leaning too much towards romantic or erotic indulgence or provocation, this seems to work like different vignettes but then doesn't work the same way for all parties in the main triangle. It's a bit more cosmopolitan than kitchen sink, but still more circumspect as the latter. Somewhat like the Olympiades themselves. The French title of the movie is Les Olympiades, which is a district of residential towers, in the 13th arrondissement, built around an esplanade with a shopping mall, not exactly upscale but not exactly projects, trying to cater to young professionals of cultural diversity. Directed by Jacques Audiard, written by him, Lea Mysius, and Celine Sciama, whose Tomboy and Portrait of a Lady on Fire showed similar attention to the outside and inner world.
A bit more savvy about relationships, observation that's not leaning too much towards romantic or erotic indulgence or provocation, this seems to work like different vignettes but then doesn't work the same way for all parties in the main triangle. It's a bit more cosmopolitan than kitchen sink, but still more circumspect as the latter. Somewhat like the Olympiades themselves. The French title of the movie is Les Olympiades, which is a district of residential towers, in the 13th arrondissement, built around an esplanade with a shopping mall, not exactly upscale but not exactly projects, trying to cater to young professionals of cultural diversity. Directed by Jacques Audiard, written by him, Lea Mysius, and Celine Sciama, whose Tomboy and Portrait of a Lady on Fire showed similar attention to the outside and inner world.
M [M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder] (1920) ♠
(See here.) The early sequence of the indirect reference to the abducted girl is famous for its chilling effect, but this is also part of the plan of the whole, trailing away to other views of things that separate from what is heard, especially dialogue. As Rene Clair did with Sous les toits de Paris and Le Million, Fritz Lang here expresses a principle, effectively if he didn't hold it outright, of not simply subordinating sound to image or vice versa. This is not just making movies the theater, but extending the image rhetoric of the silent movies and creating more of that with sound, for it, because of it. Even problems with sound recording are used for this, virtue of necessity, like with the shot of the police roundups in the street, what are supposed to be external, that have no sound at all, despite the automobiles, the many police marching, etc. This has a good rhetorical effect, too, another emphasis because of no sound. This sensory plan also emphasizes, takes up, and is extended with the blind man who recognizes the killer by his whistling, "Hall of the Mountain King," the relay, displacement, complement that is not just a unity that obscures the difference of sound and image. Passages throughout work this kind of elaboration, giving us more to see and hear, and thus the overall elaboration of this investigation that becomes a cross-section of society: a montage of images of the factory break-in accompany reading of the details from the report; the criminal court reacts to the impassioned speech of one who is more like them than they want; a close-up of a typewritten document shows a pen cross out a mistake as we hear the chief inspector mutter "idiot"; and even the view cutting to the shadows on the wall of speaking men when one rises at a crucial moment. It's a document of the material of the times but also expression of the character.
(See here.) The early sequence of the indirect reference to the abducted girl is famous for its chilling effect, but this is also part of the plan of the whole, trailing away to other views of things that separate from what is heard, especially dialogue. As Rene Clair did with Sous les toits de Paris and Le Million, Fritz Lang here expresses a principle, effectively if he didn't hold it outright, of not simply subordinating sound to image or vice versa. This is not just making movies the theater, but extending the image rhetoric of the silent movies and creating more of that with sound, for it, because of it. Even problems with sound recording are used for this, virtue of necessity, like with the shot of the police roundups in the street, what are supposed to be external, that have no sound at all, despite the automobiles, the many police marching, etc. This has a good rhetorical effect, too, another emphasis because of no sound. This sensory plan also emphasizes, takes up, and is extended with the blind man who recognizes the killer by his whistling, "Hall of the Mountain King," the relay, displacement, complement that is not just a unity that obscures the difference of sound and image. Passages throughout work this kind of elaboration, giving us more to see and hear, and thus the overall elaboration of this investigation that becomes a cross-section of society: a montage of images of the factory break-in accompany reading of the details from the report; the criminal court reacts to the impassioned speech of one who is more like them than they want; a close-up of a typewritten document shows a pen cross out a mistake as we hear the chief inspector mutter "idiot"; and even the view cutting to the shadows on the wall of speaking men when one rises at a crucial moment. It's a document of the material of the times but also expression of the character.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
The Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung restoration, done for the 2014 Kino Classics 4K Blu-Ray release, digital image restoration by L'Immagine Ritrovata - Film Conservation and Restoration in Bologna, especially highlights the tinting and title cards and how they fit in with the famous set design. The movie plan was reconstructed from different surviving prints and the original negative to make up for missing parts. In one scene where a group are searching through an office at night, the tint goes from blue to yellow when they turn on a light. The titles, words, blend further into the scene when the asylum director has the obsessive imperative to "become Caligari" float around him and on the wall. The lifelong sleepwalker in his coffin (Conrad Veidt) looks possibly more striking than he ever did. This version also has a modern score produced by the Studio for Filmmusik der Hochschule für Musik Freiburg im Breisgau, with a very modernist approach, music as sound techniques and minimalist melodies.
The Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung restoration, done for the 2014 Kino Classics 4K Blu-Ray release, digital image restoration by L'Immagine Ritrovata - Film Conservation and Restoration in Bologna, especially highlights the tinting and title cards and how they fit in with the famous set design. The movie plan was reconstructed from different surviving prints and the original negative to make up for missing parts. In one scene where a group are searching through an office at night, the tint goes from blue to yellow when they turn on a light. The titles, words, blend further into the scene when the asylum director has the obsessive imperative to "become Caligari" float around him and on the wall. The lifelong sleepwalker in his coffin (Conrad Veidt) looks possibly more striking than he ever did. This version also has a modern score produced by the Studio for Filmmusik der Hochschule für Musik Freiburg im Breisgau, with a very modernist approach, music as sound techniques and minimalist melodies.
Infinity Pool (2023)
Identity has its own abyss of fascination, the narcissistic pool, the doppelganger, or as Georges Bataille offers for consideration in the division of the cell. All these play out the division already involved in identity, how it becomes subject and object to consider itself. Brandon Cronenberg (son of David) has this as part of the premise in this story he wrote and directed, but he spins around it such a projection of other conspicuous effects. It's as if Poe's William Wilson were turned into a gangbanger for an episode of Black Mirror. Long before we get to what all is weird, Cronenberg hails industrial strength score to let us know it's supposed to be weird, and at one point turns the world upside down for us, in case we don't quite get to that feeling by ourselves. There are moments that come as a better payoff, the parts of the concept that are more interesting, but that's in a manipulation of the main character that becomes a jerking around by the story itself. And leading all that is Mia Goth, whose horror sex doll act was pat and tired before this movie, and as if her voice isn't bad enough, she's given a scene of screeching that's horrific in a way that is not even hipster chic.
Identity has its own abyss of fascination, the narcissistic pool, the doppelganger, or as Georges Bataille offers for consideration in the division of the cell. All these play out the division already involved in identity, how it becomes subject and object to consider itself. Brandon Cronenberg (son of David) has this as part of the premise in this story he wrote and directed, but he spins around it such a projection of other conspicuous effects. It's as if Poe's William Wilson were turned into a gangbanger for an episode of Black Mirror. Long before we get to what all is weird, Cronenberg hails industrial strength score to let us know it's supposed to be weird, and at one point turns the world upside down for us, in case we don't quite get to that feeling by ourselves. There are moments that come as a better payoff, the parts of the concept that are more interesting, but that's in a manipulation of the main character that becomes a jerking around by the story itself. And leading all that is Mia Goth, whose horror sex doll act was pat and tired before this movie, and as if her voice isn't bad enough, she's given a scene of screeching that's horrific in a way that is not even hipster chic.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)
The first outing was the most Marvel-like of DC movies (see Shazam!; Suicide Squad and the Peacemaker series followed with the more humorous take) and though they try to keep to form, here, there's so much plotification of the usual villains of the cosmos kind that it washes out, the typical problem of inflation with CG hyperbole, the push for more that becomes less.
The first outing was the most Marvel-like of DC movies (see Shazam!; Suicide Squad and the Peacemaker series followed with the more humorous take) and though they try to keep to form, here, there's so much plotification of the usual villains of the cosmos kind that it washes out, the typical problem of inflation with CG hyperbole, the push for more that becomes less.
65 (2023)
Planet of the Jurassics. The title sequence a bit over 15 minutes in makes the revelation -- or, well, just tells us outright -- so for some reason co-writers and directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods didn't go for a climactic reveal a la Pierre Boulle or even the movie version of his book, and despite the fact that the timing with a famous pre-historical event would have made for a more subtle and interesting way of suggesting it, whether it were parallel or not. They draw things down to a smaller scale -- Adam Driver is good for that -- so that they're not going for the full parade effect of the Jurassic Park movies, and they have some intriguing and obscure fauna that might've been a more likely encounter in certain regions, but they can't help going for a T-Rex crescendo. Following The Last of Us series, which has already prompted a meme of Pedro Pascal riding a horse with his surrogate daughter and baby Yoda, despite being decently done this doesn't really distinguish itself as apocalyptic family, space, dinosaur or monster movie.
Planet of the Jurassics. The title sequence a bit over 15 minutes in makes the revelation -- or, well, just tells us outright -- so for some reason co-writers and directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods didn't go for a climactic reveal a la Pierre Boulle or even the movie version of his book, and despite the fact that the timing with a famous pre-historical event would have made for a more subtle and interesting way of suggesting it, whether it were parallel or not. They draw things down to a smaller scale -- Adam Driver is good for that -- so that they're not going for the full parade effect of the Jurassic Park movies, and they have some intriguing and obscure fauna that might've been a more likely encounter in certain regions, but they can't help going for a T-Rex crescendo. Following The Last of Us series, which has already prompted a meme of Pedro Pascal riding a horse with his surrogate daughter and baby Yoda, despite being decently done this doesn't really distinguish itself as apocalyptic family, space, dinosaur or monster movie.
Tetris (2023)
The story of a software company owner who got an inside angle on the handheld game device market to become a major player for the rights to Tetris and helped its Soviet creator is snazzed up with retro-inspired graphics and then later with heavy-handed tactics to heighten the drama and suspense. There's enough interesting here despite the fact that the movie makers felt treating it like Cold War spy and action intrigue would make it more so.
4/13/23
The story of a software company owner who got an inside angle on the handheld game device market to become a major player for the rights to Tetris and helped its Soviet creator is snazzed up with retro-inspired graphics and then later with heavy-handed tactics to heighten the drama and suspense. There's enough interesting here despite the fact that the movie makers felt treating it like Cold War spy and action intrigue would make it more so.
The April Fools (1969)
If you used an AI device to create a 60s movie with Jack Lemmon, Jack Weston, Peter Lawford, (it's even got Kenneth Mars and Harvey Korman) and a European actress popular at the time for appeal in the U.S., you'd probably come up with something resembling this. Catherine Deneuve takes her turn at the more popular American market movie and Lemmon plugs in modular as his everyman, 60s version, where the modern world is too fast and crowded and built on pretense, parties, apartments, clubs, work associates all like the spouses whose characters are dummies for oblivious conjugal malfunction, all so readily justifiable to flee, in this case to Paris (60s movies like this stop short of finding out about the ever after place, as if Paris wouldn't have its superficial and too eager to be hip, but apparently that's not unrealistic as it's what people did, too). As directed by Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke, Pocket Money) and photographed by Michel Hugo it looks interesting in places, but Hal Dresner's script just buzzes the exercise, even the attempt at comedy.
If you used an AI device to create a 60s movie with Jack Lemmon, Jack Weston, Peter Lawford, (it's even got Kenneth Mars and Harvey Korman) and a European actress popular at the time for appeal in the U.S., you'd probably come up with something resembling this. Catherine Deneuve takes her turn at the more popular American market movie and Lemmon plugs in modular as his everyman, 60s version, where the modern world is too fast and crowded and built on pretense, parties, apartments, clubs, work associates all like the spouses whose characters are dummies for oblivious conjugal malfunction, all so readily justifiable to flee, in this case to Paris (60s movies like this stop short of finding out about the ever after place, as if Paris wouldn't have its superficial and too eager to be hip, but apparently that's not unrealistic as it's what people did, too). As directed by Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke, Pocket Money) and photographed by Michel Hugo it looks interesting in places, but Hal Dresner's script just buzzes the exercise, even the attempt at comedy.
The Born Losers (1967)
The precursor to Billy Jack was filmed in three weeks and looks it, especially in the beginning. But it settles down into its own brand of dragging out the obvious, and then in its select moments the action is almost comically obscured by the framing and editing, perhaps a different kind of torture than it wants to portray. It has some typical scrappers like Jeremy Slate, Robert Tessier and Stuart Lancaster, but Jane Russell steals the show with her wail [sic] of a scene.
The precursor to Billy Jack was filmed in three weeks and looks it, especially in the beginning. But it settles down into its own brand of dragging out the obvious, and then in its select moments the action is almost comically obscured by the framing and editing, perhaps a different kind of torture than it wants to portray. It has some typical scrappers like Jeremy Slate, Robert Tessier and Stuart Lancaster, but Jane Russell steals the show with her wail [sic] of a scene.
The Object of Beauty (1991)
Michael Lindsay-Hogg, perhaps best known for the 1981 Brideshead Revisited mini-series, apart from lots of Beatles and Rolling Stones films and videos, wrote and directed this sly study of scoundrels with a Robert Altman vibe, thanks also to the music of Tom Bahler. If you haven't known compulsively sham people like this, from families where wealth is part of the dysfunction, this might come off as some quirky romance or caper, but the dark humor has its undercurrent in the observation of the characters, and the role is especially good for John Malkovich. Haughty but dissolute, disdainful, impudent, sarcastically obliging, he makes the character outside this world and pathetically bound to it, as one brief phone call with the father makes clear in another way. The contrast between the fraudulent rich people schemes and the desperate measures of the poor may seem heavy-handed, but apart from the measure of those sides, it also gives a kind of demonstration of use and exchange value, and of how those categories themselves can't hold strictly, another kind of value: a work of art, a small Henry Moore statue that's one sense of the title.
Michael Lindsay-Hogg, perhaps best known for the 1981 Brideshead Revisited mini-series, apart from lots of Beatles and Rolling Stones films and videos, wrote and directed this sly study of scoundrels with a Robert Altman vibe, thanks also to the music of Tom Bahler. If you haven't known compulsively sham people like this, from families where wealth is part of the dysfunction, this might come off as some quirky romance or caper, but the dark humor has its undercurrent in the observation of the characters, and the role is especially good for John Malkovich. Haughty but dissolute, disdainful, impudent, sarcastically obliging, he makes the character outside this world and pathetically bound to it, as one brief phone call with the father makes clear in another way. The contrast between the fraudulent rich people schemes and the desperate measures of the poor may seem heavy-handed, but apart from the measure of those sides, it also gives a kind of demonstration of use and exchange value, and of how those categories themselves can't hold strictly, another kind of value: a work of art, a small Henry Moore statue that's one sense of the title.
Johnny Guitar (1954)
The script by Philip Yordan, Roy Chanslor and Nicholas Ray is a machine gun of quips. Before they get to the gunfire, the characters all fire phrases at each other, meant to sound like adages, clever turns, figures, profound summations, or swipes. Sometimes a character will have a paragraph of dialogue and it will be one such phrase after another. I kept wanting another character to reply, "Agh! -- you pumped me full o' bromides." And Ray directing has the actors deliver the script like this. It's like an oratorio, with a choir making stances and belting, especially Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge and John Carradine.
The script by Philip Yordan, Roy Chanslor and Nicholas Ray is a machine gun of quips. Before they get to the gunfire, the characters all fire phrases at each other, meant to sound like adages, clever turns, figures, profound summations, or swipes. Sometimes a character will have a paragraph of dialogue and it will be one such phrase after another. I kept wanting another character to reply, "Agh! -- you pumped me full o' bromides." And Ray directing has the actors deliver the script like this. It's like an oratorio, with a choir making stances and belting, especially Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge and John Carradine.
Black Sheep (1996)
The centerpiece is Chris Farley and David Spade in a mountain cabin, but the story is trying to do so much with the premise of Farley cursing his brother's political campaign as setup and clothesline for gags that for about the first half hour it's a marvel of malfunction on another level. There's a whole opening series of scenes that seem barely connected, and I was imagining this as a whole other premise, an absurd non sequitur burlesque of narrative logic. Director Penelope Spheeris's unmannered touch helped make Wayne's World precisely not this prosaic of tagline comedy.
The centerpiece is Chris Farley and David Spade in a mountain cabin, but the story is trying to do so much with the premise of Farley cursing his brother's political campaign as setup and clothesline for gags that for about the first half hour it's a marvel of malfunction on another level. There's a whole opening series of scenes that seem barely connected, and I was imagining this as a whole other premise, an absurd non sequitur burlesque of narrative logic. Director Penelope Spheeris's unmannered touch helped make Wayne's World precisely not this prosaic of tagline comedy.
Tommy Boy (1995)
Surprisingly soft from what might be expected of Saturday Night Live or the kind of snide of David Spade's "Hollywood Minute," but it's of the stripe of heartland melodrama like Gung Ho. That keeps it from being the zany madcap excesses of Chris Farley, but also from being really any sort of sharp comedy.
4/5/23
Surprisingly soft from what might be expected of Saturday Night Live or the kind of snide of David Spade's "Hollywood Minute," but it's of the stripe of heartland melodrama like Gung Ho. That keeps it from being the zany madcap excesses of Chris Farley, but also from being really any sort of sharp comedy.
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
Getting the two casts together, old and new, was the appeal, so time travel was the device to do so. The approach to time travel is more interesting, working within a person so there aren't two versions of the traveler that all the typical time travel stories have, but the impetus for this, the super mutant robots, is one of those capricious conjurations of outbidding that of course is necessary to challenge a team full of already super powers, but in some cases like this one, comes off even more cartoonishly zippy, and the scenes for this confrontation, which are supposed to be somewhere in China, look like a computer game level mashup of industrial medieval church and demonic sacrifice temple. The past light of day with the new cast plays much better, with the usual twists and turns of mutant repute and infighting, stirred up by those nasty normal people, "the most pernicious race of little, odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth" (Swift). Makes for good 3-D if as much because of the closeup, mixed-level two shots.
Getting the two casts together, old and new, was the appeal, so time travel was the device to do so. The approach to time travel is more interesting, working within a person so there aren't two versions of the traveler that all the typical time travel stories have, but the impetus for this, the super mutant robots, is one of those capricious conjurations of outbidding that of course is necessary to challenge a team full of already super powers, but in some cases like this one, comes off even more cartoonishly zippy, and the scenes for this confrontation, which are supposed to be somewhere in China, look like a computer game level mashup of industrial medieval church and demonic sacrifice temple. The past light of day with the new cast plays much better, with the usual twists and turns of mutant repute and infighting, stirred up by those nasty normal people, "the most pernicious race of little, odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth" (Swift). Makes for good 3-D if as much because of the closeup, mixed-level two shots.
Airheads (1994)
As the plot arc sticks to one situation, so does it keep to the dimensions of an ensemble performance, which is not skidding too far with any one of them, for example, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley or Michael Richards. That's the best part of this, watching them all play off each other, and makes up for it being not the sharpest or most inspired, even though it would be This Is Spinal Tap meets Dog Day Afternoon.
As the plot arc sticks to one situation, so does it keep to the dimensions of an ensemble performance, which is not skidding too far with any one of them, for example, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley or Michael Richards. That's the best part of this, watching them all play off each other, and makes up for it being not the sharpest or most inspired, even though it would be This Is Spinal Tap meets Dog Day Afternoon.
The Alibi (1937)
Fluffier than other work they've done, this is nonetheless still interesting for the performances of Eric von Stroheim, as a mannerly scoundrel, and Louis Jouvet, as an eagle-eyed inspector, with Jany Holt and Albert Prejean not far behind.
Fluffier than other work they've done, this is nonetheless still interesting for the performances of Eric von Stroheim, as a mannerly scoundrel, and Louis Jouvet, as an eagle-eyed inspector, with Jany Holt and Albert Prejean not far behind.
Land and Freedom (1995)
Ken Loach's drama about the POUM militia and leftist factionalism during the Spanish Civil War doesn't entirely avoid the problem of conventional movie sentimentalism, what some would consign to the bourgeoisie, but there are few movie makers that would get into the subject this much even for a documentary. There are a couple of scenes, especially an extended one of a meeting to debate the privatization of land, where Loach gets a remarkably candid feel to the statements and arguments and reactions and squabbles. This serves as a microcosm for the factionalism, with an air much less scripted or polished or melodramatic.
Ken Loach's drama about the POUM militia and leftist factionalism during the Spanish Civil War doesn't entirely avoid the problem of conventional movie sentimentalism, what some would consign to the bourgeoisie, but there are few movie makers that would get into the subject this much even for a documentary. There are a couple of scenes, especially an extended one of a meeting to debate the privatization of land, where Loach gets a remarkably candid feel to the statements and arguments and reactions and squabbles. This serves as a microcosm for the factionalism, with an air much less scripted or polished or melodramatic.
Bibliotheque Pascal (2010)
Writer and director Szabolcs Hajdu glides intently through registers, from recent Romanian style realism to Slavic surrealism, and through scenes so that even jumps in the storyline have twilight effects, transitions that are surprising and seductive, with the same sly irony as the music. The plan in each scene and for the whole has an unassuming absurd humor that plays out a much more tragic referent. It's a bit Kusturica, a bit Zvyaginstev and a bit The Florida Project, but something all its own.
Writer and director Szabolcs Hajdu glides intently through registers, from recent Romanian style realism to Slavic surrealism, and through scenes so that even jumps in the storyline have twilight effects, transitions that are surprising and seductive, with the same sly irony as the music. The plan in each scene and for the whole has an unassuming absurd humor that plays out a much more tragic referent. It's a bit Kusturica, a bit Zvyaginstev and a bit The Florida Project, but something all its own.
Ears, Eyes and Throats: Restored Classic and Lost Punk Films 1976-1981 (2019)
Curated by Peter Conheim, who also did picture and track restoration and sync with Cinema Preservation Alliance, with sources such as Pacific Film Archive, USC, The Cryptic Corporation and Devo themselves, this collection ranges from music videos to a mini-doc about the Pittsburgh scene. It's also nicely arranged roughly from short to long so you don't have to wait through the longest to see the short ones. And the high point is definitely one of the shorts, The Residents, like the Brothers Quay version of MTV. Includes: Deaf/Punk (1979) directed by Richard Gaikowski; In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution (1976) Chuck Statler; The Residents: Third Reich and Roll (1977) The Residents; Hello Skinny (1979), One Minute Movies (1980), MX-80: Why Are We Here (1981), Renaldo and The Loaf: Songs for Swinging Larvae (1981) Graeme Whifler; In the Red (1978) Liz Keim and Karen Merchant; Moody Teenager (1980) Richard Gaikowski; Debt Begins at 20 (1980) Stephanie Beroes.
Curated by Peter Conheim, who also did picture and track restoration and sync with Cinema Preservation Alliance, with sources such as Pacific Film Archive, USC, The Cryptic Corporation and Devo themselves, this collection ranges from music videos to a mini-doc about the Pittsburgh scene. It's also nicely arranged roughly from short to long so you don't have to wait through the longest to see the short ones. And the high point is definitely one of the shorts, The Residents, like the Brothers Quay version of MTV. Includes: Deaf/Punk (1979) directed by Richard Gaikowski; In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution (1976) Chuck Statler; The Residents: Third Reich and Roll (1977) The Residents; Hello Skinny (1979), One Minute Movies (1980), MX-80: Why Are We Here (1981), Renaldo and The Loaf: Songs for Swinging Larvae (1981) Graeme Whifler; In the Red (1978) Liz Keim and Karen Merchant; Moody Teenager (1980) Richard Gaikowski; Debt Begins at 20 (1980) Stephanie Beroes.
Greenfingers (2000)
Clive Owen and Helen Mirren can make anything look good, but even they can't prevent this from funneling any interesting subject matter (it's based on a true story) into feel-good formula.
Clive Owen and Helen Mirren can make anything look good, but even they can't prevent this from funneling any interesting subject matter (it's based on a true story) into feel-good formula.
The Grilling [Garde a vue] (1981)
Under Suspicion was another version of this, both in turn based on a British novel Brainwash, and the way the later movie opened this up and stretched it out shows just how this is better: leaner, more fitting for the circumstance, trusting that a police interview in one setting and the details of the matter itself will hold interest. The flow of the interrogation, the starts and feints, backsteps and backtracking, don't seem as contrived and the twists and revelations aren't fanned up. Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman were the best thing about the other version, and Lino Ventura and Michel Serrault are their equivalents in more than one way here.
3/28/23
Under Suspicion was another version of this, both in turn based on a British novel Brainwash, and the way the later movie opened this up and stretched it out shows just how this is better: leaner, more fitting for the circumstance, trusting that a police interview in one setting and the details of the matter itself will hold interest. The flow of the interrogation, the starts and feints, backsteps and backtracking, don't seem as contrived and the twists and revelations aren't fanned up. Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman were the best thing about the other version, and Lino Ventura and Michel Serrault are their equivalents in more than one way here.
Shin Ultraman (2022)
If you had any fear that a somewhat more sophisticated presentation of kaiju in Shin Godzilla was going to do away with the hokey charm, the follow-up will put you at ease. It's a somewhat more sophisticated presentation of the hokey charm of the kaiju size capable kaiju fighter, especially where that means camera angles from the backs of office chairs or at the base of some playground fixture across a park from the speaking subjects. If that's not wacky enough scale and angle for you, besides kaiju there's alien visitors with various colossal guises of their own, an agent woman turned skyscraper scale, and a destructive space contraption that makes Ultraman look lilliputian.
If you had any fear that a somewhat more sophisticated presentation of kaiju in Shin Godzilla was going to do away with the hokey charm, the follow-up will put you at ease. It's a somewhat more sophisticated presentation of the hokey charm of the kaiju size capable kaiju fighter, especially where that means camera angles from the backs of office chairs or at the base of some playground fixture across a park from the speaking subjects. If that's not wacky enough scale and angle for you, besides kaiju there's alien visitors with various colossal guises of their own, an agent woman turned skyscraper scale, and a destructive space contraption that makes Ultraman look lilliputian.
Piranhaconda (2012)
In the "I meant to do that" category of crappy made-for-cable movies following the Sharknado school, not only does this manage to be not good at trying to be badly funny, but it even tries to be reflexive about it: within the story they're making a horror movie. Some shitty CG that's supposed to be a mix of piranha and anaconda for no other reason given than splicing two horror items in the title takes on a lot of cleavage, silicone and died hair, real or fake. Michael Madsen draws a paycheck. Tough to have to go from Species to this. This is notable for its approach to location or topography, which is apparently no concern whatsoever in dialogue, character names, editing. Best I can tell, they're supposed to be in some botanical garden next to arid back roads in some Amazonian jungle in some Spanish-speaking -- well, poor Spanish accent, Spanish name -- country in Hawaii in the vicinity of L.A.
3/22/23
In the "I meant to do that" category of crappy made-for-cable movies following the Sharknado school, not only does this manage to be not good at trying to be badly funny, but it even tries to be reflexive about it: within the story they're making a horror movie. Some shitty CG that's supposed to be a mix of piranha and anaconda for no other reason given than splicing two horror items in the title takes on a lot of cleavage, silicone and died hair, real or fake. Michael Madsen draws a paycheck. Tough to have to go from Species to this. This is notable for its approach to location or topography, which is apparently no concern whatsoever in dialogue, character names, editing. Best I can tell, they're supposed to be in some botanical garden next to arid back roads in some Amazonian jungle in some Spanish-speaking -- well, poor Spanish accent, Spanish name -- country in Hawaii in the vicinity of L.A.
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023)
Guy Ritchie has taken on a more formulaic approach his last three movies, but it's also concentrating more on basics, toning down the blockbuster level, and for a less ambitious scale, it's more interesting and fun (than the great gobs of, say, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword). In one case, Wrath of Man, he made his best movie. The fun of Operation Fortune is almost entirely in the cast, Jason Statham, Aubrey Plaza and Hugh Grant in particular, and it streamlines from the sort of overworking of that in The Gentlemen. The plot and action just give them a wave to surf on.
Guy Ritchie has taken on a more formulaic approach his last three movies, but it's also concentrating more on basics, toning down the blockbuster level, and for a less ambitious scale, it's more interesting and fun (than the great gobs of, say, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword). In one case, Wrath of Man, he made his best movie. The fun of Operation Fortune is almost entirely in the cast, Jason Statham, Aubrey Plaza and Hugh Grant in particular, and it streamlines from the sort of overworking of that in The Gentlemen. The plot and action just give them a wave to surf on.
Cocaine Bear (2023)
It's not as fun hammy as Snakes on a Plane, it's certainly not anywhere near the sort of inspired loopiness of unselfconsciously fun bad movies, but it's not entirely plain bad or boring either. It's sort of spunky, with the edge and punch of its wit concentrated in the gore and action, which comes off more to the side of Roadrunner cartoons than horror movies, if more evocatively graphic. Despite the attitude, even with the actors, there's not a lot to its characters and plot, so pretty much filler and fodder for bear. The movie has a dedication to Ray Liotta, who died after filming, but its placement makes a funny suggestion, something he might have enjoyed himself, as reportedly he did getting into the part.
It's not as fun hammy as Snakes on a Plane, it's certainly not anywhere near the sort of inspired loopiness of unselfconsciously fun bad movies, but it's not entirely plain bad or boring either. It's sort of spunky, with the edge and punch of its wit concentrated in the gore and action, which comes off more to the side of Roadrunner cartoons than horror movies, if more evocatively graphic. Despite the attitude, even with the actors, there's not a lot to its characters and plot, so pretty much filler and fodder for bear. The movie has a dedication to Ray Liotta, who died after filming, but its placement makes a funny suggestion, something he might have enjoyed himself, as reportedly he did getting into the part.
Barry Lyndon (1975)
The counterpoint of Stanley Kubrick seems to work against all grains, or certainly defies perception according to conventional categories. The black comedy of Dr. Strangelove contrasted Kubrick's sleek manner with Terry Southern's mocking wit. A Clockwork Orange and The Shining gave a burlesque flourish to grim. Barry Lyndon contributes more to the study as the counterpoint doesn't go in just that direction. In this case, Kubrick, who also wrote the screenplay, changes from picaresque novel form in several ways so that it contrasts the source, William Makepeace Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon and also Tony Richardson's Tom Jones, the movie version of Henry Fielding's book The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Apart from obvious stylistic differences, Kubrick also made more structural decisions that would not tread the path of Richardson, the translation of bawdy, satirical flourishes in movie terms of the day, 1963 in that case. The connection here is closer than you might think. Thackeray used Fielding as a model for his book, though he was also using the picaresque form as a lure for his own twist: his book is told by the main character who has a greater impression of himself than what the events he narrates suggest about him, as a satire about the character himself, an unreliable narrator, and what Thackeray called "the novel without a hero." That last is significant, even for Kubrick's version, for while he changed it so that there is a narrator other than Barry Lyndon, and the tone and register seem much more grim, certainly in significant sequences like the excruciating duel near the end, the shift makes Barry more like an everyman, the portrait like a cross-section of the times and Barry a product, unwitting more by the overwhelming of circumstance than by sheer vanity. Somewhat like with Dennis Potter, everyone shows good and awful behavior. There are no heroes. The cold, slow brutality with all the manners expresses the vanity of the era about its own civilization, the savagery barely sublimated, and Kubrick's mechanized motion and action convey this period as well, so that it's not just some comment of modernity or a projected future as his other movies might suggest. This offers also a way to see other expansion of this manner or stylistic device of Kubrick's, another counterpoint, even with his music selections, the way Handel's Sarabande is drawn out to become the grueling clockwork pressing anxiety, or the lush look of it all -- costumes, sets, locations, the photography of John Alcott with as much incidental lighting as possible, including candlelight, and based on the paintings of William Hogarth, whom Thackeray also admired -- with the drained, automaton cadence. It's not just icy, distanced, a depiction of dehumanization, an affectation or distancing technique. It works in more than one direction just as repetition, rhythm, pulse, beat are both mechanical and natural. As Kubrick would go to all the lengths to present a more muckraking turn with such a beautiful look, it's not undercutting, or merely so, but actually a tension to enhance in a different way. The scene where Ryan O'Neal (whose casting was another example of defying type or expectation, but even making for analogy of the sense of persona between outside and inside the frame) as Barry tells the story to his son while crying, after we've already had the contrast of the brutality of the story for a child, is another example showing the different orientation, but also what's represented as well as the representation. Whereas normally there is little emotion or even contrasting emotion, here there's a burst of emotion but telling the story against it, and as something that happens in the main story, not just the manner in which it's depicted.
The counterpoint of Stanley Kubrick seems to work against all grains, or certainly defies perception according to conventional categories. The black comedy of Dr. Strangelove contrasted Kubrick's sleek manner with Terry Southern's mocking wit. A Clockwork Orange and The Shining gave a burlesque flourish to grim. Barry Lyndon contributes more to the study as the counterpoint doesn't go in just that direction. In this case, Kubrick, who also wrote the screenplay, changes from picaresque novel form in several ways so that it contrasts the source, William Makepeace Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon and also Tony Richardson's Tom Jones, the movie version of Henry Fielding's book The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Apart from obvious stylistic differences, Kubrick also made more structural decisions that would not tread the path of Richardson, the translation of bawdy, satirical flourishes in movie terms of the day, 1963 in that case. The connection here is closer than you might think. Thackeray used Fielding as a model for his book, though he was also using the picaresque form as a lure for his own twist: his book is told by the main character who has a greater impression of himself than what the events he narrates suggest about him, as a satire about the character himself, an unreliable narrator, and what Thackeray called "the novel without a hero." That last is significant, even for Kubrick's version, for while he changed it so that there is a narrator other than Barry Lyndon, and the tone and register seem much more grim, certainly in significant sequences like the excruciating duel near the end, the shift makes Barry more like an everyman, the portrait like a cross-section of the times and Barry a product, unwitting more by the overwhelming of circumstance than by sheer vanity. Somewhat like with Dennis Potter, everyone shows good and awful behavior. There are no heroes. The cold, slow brutality with all the manners expresses the vanity of the era about its own civilization, the savagery barely sublimated, and Kubrick's mechanized motion and action convey this period as well, so that it's not just some comment of modernity or a projected future as his other movies might suggest. This offers also a way to see other expansion of this manner or stylistic device of Kubrick's, another counterpoint, even with his music selections, the way Handel's Sarabande is drawn out to become the grueling clockwork pressing anxiety, or the lush look of it all -- costumes, sets, locations, the photography of John Alcott with as much incidental lighting as possible, including candlelight, and based on the paintings of William Hogarth, whom Thackeray also admired -- with the drained, automaton cadence. It's not just icy, distanced, a depiction of dehumanization, an affectation or distancing technique. It works in more than one direction just as repetition, rhythm, pulse, beat are both mechanical and natural. As Kubrick would go to all the lengths to present a more muckraking turn with such a beautiful look, it's not undercutting, or merely so, but actually a tension to enhance in a different way. The scene where Ryan O'Neal (whose casting was another example of defying type or expectation, but even making for analogy of the sense of persona between outside and inside the frame) as Barry tells the story to his son while crying, after we've already had the contrast of the brutality of the story for a child, is another example showing the different orientation, but also what's represented as well as the representation. Whereas normally there is little emotion or even contrasting emotion, here there's a burst of emotion but telling the story against it, and as something that happens in the main story, not just the manner in which it's depicted.
The Boost (1988)
Though it's an interesting idea to portray cocaine addiction from a hopped up perspective, I don't think that's what was intended. For one thing, you can't tell James Woods before from after. His manic monologues even pre-cokehead are even sped up from the story and direction pace, as if director Harold Becker is doing a hurry-up walkthrough.
Though it's an interesting idea to portray cocaine addiction from a hopped up perspective, I don't think that's what was intended. For one thing, you can't tell James Woods before from after. His manic monologues even pre-cokehead are even sped up from the story and direction pace, as if director Harold Becker is doing a hurry-up walkthrough.
Green Lantern (2011)
OK, try to put aside the received wisdom on this for a minute. The "darker" gloppy kind of seriousness of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, starting with Batman Begins in 2005, was all the rage, and even Casino Royale (2006), also directed by Martin Campbell who did this, took Bond in that direction. Marvel had not quite sharpened the wit that would become part of the formula that would overtake even the popularity of such a Batman and drastically outpace DC. The Dark Knight was 2008 and Rises 2012. At this point, Marvel had put out Iron Man (2008), The Incredible Hulk (2008), at least as bad as this, probably worse, Iron Man 2 (2010), Thor (2011), the worst of its series and way before they got the tone right with him in Ragnarok, and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). The Guardians of the Galaxy didn't even come till 2014, and obviously Deadpool came after this. So consider the context. The Green Lantern was not overserious like Batman and it wasn't even the kind of brooding of Zack Snyder that would come with the later DC stuff (Man of Steel was 2014). It may be that the bad rap comes in contrast to that Batman tone. The costume -- or lack of -- got lots of grief, though in the story it makes more sense working as the do-it-all green energy than the logistics of other superheroes' costumes, the family stuff is run of the mill and in fact the story is too earthbound in more than one way. The Lantern Corps space stuff is what makes this comic book character interesting, not necessarily everything done with it but the fact that he acts both individually on Earth and as part of an intergalactic police team. Also Mark Strong makes a great Sinestro, maybe the best thing in the movie, so it would've been good to have more of him. Peter Sarsgaard as a more typical monstrous antagonist and contact for the colossal CG boss force is the inflation of the scale these movies want to get to that's the other side of the coin of the prosaic, as if spectacle takes care of clever or interesting. The way it's resolved, despite being on the hyperbolic scale of this comic book series which has its own inflationary problems, is more interesting, gives us the defining moment of Hal Jordan as a Lantern and works the human factor quite nicely. Temuera Morrison and Taika Waititi were also in this, the former as first Lantern Corps ace Abin Sur.
3/17/23
OK, try to put aside the received wisdom on this for a minute. The "darker" gloppy kind of seriousness of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, starting with Batman Begins in 2005, was all the rage, and even Casino Royale (2006), also directed by Martin Campbell who did this, took Bond in that direction. Marvel had not quite sharpened the wit that would become part of the formula that would overtake even the popularity of such a Batman and drastically outpace DC. The Dark Knight was 2008 and Rises 2012. At this point, Marvel had put out Iron Man (2008), The Incredible Hulk (2008), at least as bad as this, probably worse, Iron Man 2 (2010), Thor (2011), the worst of its series and way before they got the tone right with him in Ragnarok, and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). The Guardians of the Galaxy didn't even come till 2014, and obviously Deadpool came after this. So consider the context. The Green Lantern was not overserious like Batman and it wasn't even the kind of brooding of Zack Snyder that would come with the later DC stuff (Man of Steel was 2014). It may be that the bad rap comes in contrast to that Batman tone. The costume -- or lack of -- got lots of grief, though in the story it makes more sense working as the do-it-all green energy than the logistics of other superheroes' costumes, the family stuff is run of the mill and in fact the story is too earthbound in more than one way. The Lantern Corps space stuff is what makes this comic book character interesting, not necessarily everything done with it but the fact that he acts both individually on Earth and as part of an intergalactic police team. Also Mark Strong makes a great Sinestro, maybe the best thing in the movie, so it would've been good to have more of him. Peter Sarsgaard as a more typical monstrous antagonist and contact for the colossal CG boss force is the inflation of the scale these movies want to get to that's the other side of the coin of the prosaic, as if spectacle takes care of clever or interesting. The way it's resolved, despite being on the hyperbolic scale of this comic book series which has its own inflationary problems, is more interesting, gives us the defining moment of Hal Jordan as a Lantern and works the human factor quite nicely. Temuera Morrison and Taika Waititi were also in this, the former as first Lantern Corps ace Abin Sur.
Shrek (2001)
Shrek 2 (2004)
Still at the stage where computer animation seemed an expedient and regrettable alternative to hand-drawn, at least for the best that could produce, this nonetheless codified the trend after Toy Story: personification of some stratum that makes for cartoonish subjects -- toys, insects, fairy tale characters, monsters -- voiced by all-star cast (these animated movies are what disaster movies were for the 70s), with a soundtrack of pop music as kiddie movies for grownups. While there are interesting twists to the implications of some fairy tales for moderns, the hip spin is still kept within a quaint scale, passable as family fare. The music soundtrack is really annoying, even more so in the second movie, just a cultural reference -- i.e. pandering -- barrage, even if some of the songs are good, and a really mixed bag from different eras and styles that feels more like aiming wide than choosing well. The CG did not improve much from the first movie.
Shrek 2 (2004)
Still at the stage where computer animation seemed an expedient and regrettable alternative to hand-drawn, at least for the best that could produce, this nonetheless codified the trend after Toy Story: personification of some stratum that makes for cartoonish subjects -- toys, insects, fairy tale characters, monsters -- voiced by all-star cast (these animated movies are what disaster movies were for the 70s), with a soundtrack of pop music as kiddie movies for grownups. While there are interesting twists to the implications of some fairy tales for moderns, the hip spin is still kept within a quaint scale, passable as family fare. The music soundtrack is really annoying, even more so in the second movie, just a cultural reference -- i.e. pandering -- barrage, even if some of the songs are good, and a really mixed bag from different eras and styles that feels more like aiming wide than choosing well. The CG did not improve much from the first movie.
Death to Smoochy (2002)
The idea is irresistable -- cf. the SNL skit of Charles Barkley v. Barney which originally aired 9/25/93 (you can find the video clip on YouTube). It's nice to see Edward Norton playing a nice guy, even a patsy, and not the shitheel for a change, to see Robin Williams playing the shitheel, to see Harvey Fierstein playing a crime/charity boss, and it's got Catherine Keener, Jon Stewart, Michael Rispoli, Danny Woodburn and Danny DeVito in it, and DeVito directed it. It's good-natured, about it's sardonic take, and it's certainly got lots of energy. But it's not particularly clever. There's no great crack of wit in either the dialogue or its action. Writer Alan Resnick also did Cabin Boy, so depending on how you like that Chris Elliot level of humor, this is neither that high nor low.
The idea is irresistable -- cf. the SNL skit of Charles Barkley v. Barney which originally aired 9/25/93 (you can find the video clip on YouTube). It's nice to see Edward Norton playing a nice guy, even a patsy, and not the shitheel for a change, to see Robin Williams playing the shitheel, to see Harvey Fierstein playing a crime/charity boss, and it's got Catherine Keener, Jon Stewart, Michael Rispoli, Danny Woodburn and Danny DeVito in it, and DeVito directed it. It's good-natured, about it's sardonic take, and it's certainly got lots of energy. But it's not particularly clever. There's no great crack of wit in either the dialogue or its action. Writer Alan Resnick also did Cabin Boy, so depending on how you like that Chris Elliot level of humor, this is neither that high nor low.
Scream VI (2023)
The arbitrariness of the contrivance of slasher movies now includes the self-consciousness about that arbitrariness. That means the reflexive stuff is also used arbitrarily, in case you didn't get that, and I think that opens up some infinite regress vortex to hell. This is the soap opera of slashers, now -- and there's also a glaring line about "family," as if you wouldn't notice the family stuff enough, that makes it a play for the Fast and Furious of slashers -- and I didn't have to see any of the prior numbers to get this. If you must see only one Scream movie in the franchise, don't see another. I won't make a joke about how the scariest thing in the movie is Courteney Cox because that wouldn't be nice, with her being a producer and having top billing and all.
The arbitrariness of the contrivance of slasher movies now includes the self-consciousness about that arbitrariness. That means the reflexive stuff is also used arbitrarily, in case you didn't get that, and I think that opens up some infinite regress vortex to hell. This is the soap opera of slashers, now -- and there's also a glaring line about "family," as if you wouldn't notice the family stuff enough, that makes it a play for the Fast and Furious of slashers -- and I didn't have to see any of the prior numbers to get this. If you must see only one Scream movie in the franchise, don't see another. I won't make a joke about how the scariest thing in the movie is Courteney Cox because that wouldn't be nice, with her being a producer and having top billing and all.
Brazil (1985)
The best movie by a Monty Python member outside the group and easily the best of Terry Gilliam's. The slam bang and lurid manner (Gilliam became so famous for wide-angle shots that a special lens he used at the time is now nicknamed after him) can actually make the story confusing on first viewing, although chaotic is suitable for the experience. Gilliam wrote it with Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown (who also has a part in the movie, as the pathetic, desk-sharing agent Lime) and the "somewhere in the 20th century" idea is the brilliant stroke, making for a Yesterday's Tomorrows version of Blade Runner. Apart from the fun of all the hybrid technology and the production design, typewriter guts with video monitors and magnifying glasses, pneumatic tubes and automated apartments, the past shows us the vanity of our future, including doomsday tales, and this is better than 1984, certainly the movie version, because of the black comedy approach.
The best movie by a Monty Python member outside the group and easily the best of Terry Gilliam's. The slam bang and lurid manner (Gilliam became so famous for wide-angle shots that a special lens he used at the time is now nicknamed after him) can actually make the story confusing on first viewing, although chaotic is suitable for the experience. Gilliam wrote it with Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown (who also has a part in the movie, as the pathetic, desk-sharing agent Lime) and the "somewhere in the 20th century" idea is the brilliant stroke, making for a Yesterday's Tomorrows version of Blade Runner. Apart from the fun of all the hybrid technology and the production design, typewriter guts with video monitors and magnifying glasses, pneumatic tubes and automated apartments, the past shows us the vanity of our future, including doomsday tales, and this is better than 1984, certainly the movie version, because of the black comedy approach.
Once Were Warriors (1994)
If it's a bit stiff, like a green our crew show, that serves to set up even more the surprise of what this drama is really about, and it's not just a figurative punch. Somewhat like Powwow Highway, this is an unflinching depiction of problems within an indigenous community, in this case Maori in New Zealand. This became the highest grossing film in New Zealand up to that time (topping The Piano, as it does otherwise in my estimation), and director Lee Tamahori went on to projects beyond his native country after this feature debut, e.g. The Edge. It was also the breakout role for Temuera Morrison, more ambivalent than even Jango or Boba Fett.
If it's a bit stiff, like a green our crew show, that serves to set up even more the surprise of what this drama is really about, and it's not just a figurative punch. Somewhat like Powwow Highway, this is an unflinching depiction of problems within an indigenous community, in this case Maori in New Zealand. This became the highest grossing film in New Zealand up to that time (topping The Piano, as it does otherwise in my estimation), and director Lee Tamahori went on to projects beyond his native country after this feature debut, e.g. The Edge. It was also the breakout role for Temuera Morrison, more ambivalent than even Jango or Boba Fett.
48 Hrs. (1982)
As much as director Walter Hill is credited with establishing the buddy cop genre, if there is such a thing (both cops who are always buddies), there was already a bigger line of odd couples. See Freebie and the Bean and Scarecrow for a rundown. Hill did improve his own act, certainly since The Driver. This is tighter than that 70s spread and what it led to, the typical urban landscape drift of the 80s (cf. Miami Vice), even for a thriller, and with bells and whistles like overcrowded police stations and a grandstanding scene with Eddie Murphy that cuts against the grain of verisimilitude for sheer rhetorical effect (which may be as provocative for mixing up San Francisco and Los Angeles as race relations). What stands out, maybe even more now, is the photography of Ric Waite. The opening landscapes serve as counterpoint lead-in, but it's the city locations and particularly the night scenes with the lights that distinguish this and contribute to it's heftier tone.
As much as director Walter Hill is credited with establishing the buddy cop genre, if there is such a thing (both cops who are always buddies), there was already a bigger line of odd couples. See Freebie and the Bean and Scarecrow for a rundown. Hill did improve his own act, certainly since The Driver. This is tighter than that 70s spread and what it led to, the typical urban landscape drift of the 80s (cf. Miami Vice), even for a thriller, and with bells and whistles like overcrowded police stations and a grandstanding scene with Eddie Murphy that cuts against the grain of verisimilitude for sheer rhetorical effect (which may be as provocative for mixing up San Francisco and Los Angeles as race relations). What stands out, maybe even more now, is the photography of Ric Waite. The opening landscapes serve as counterpoint lead-in, but it's the city locations and particularly the night scenes with the lights that distinguish this and contribute to it's heftier tone.
Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
That this was not originally a showcase project for Eddie Murphy only emphasizes the way it was a showcase project, a property that was rehashed -- the original idea was about a cop transferring from East L.A. to Beverly Hills -- and shopped around, offered to Mickey Rourke, Sylvester Stallone, a usual A-list of the day (including Richard Pryor), and even Martin Scorsese and David Cronenberg to direct. Once Murphy signed on, it was of course rewritten. It's not nearly as good as Murphy's debut, 48 Hrs., in just about every way, and even though the project was around before that movie's release and had all those other showcase targets, it looks derivative of that Murphy role. It would nonetheless become a far bigger hit. But the looseness compared to even 48 Hrs. has an interesting effect. The gappy, hanging out stuff approximates -- it's debatable whether this is a direct attempt at representation -- real life activity even for cops, and minimizes thriller hyperbole, though it still has flimsy mechanics for that. One way it is better than 48 Hrs. is in toning down the brazen showboating stuff for Murphy's character. The soundtrack was also a part of the movie's success. The theme music, somewhat innovative at the time for movies, became a hit, but if you watch this movie you may never want to hear it again, the way it flogs you with it.
That this was not originally a showcase project for Eddie Murphy only emphasizes the way it was a showcase project, a property that was rehashed -- the original idea was about a cop transferring from East L.A. to Beverly Hills -- and shopped around, offered to Mickey Rourke, Sylvester Stallone, a usual A-list of the day (including Richard Pryor), and even Martin Scorsese and David Cronenberg to direct. Once Murphy signed on, it was of course rewritten. It's not nearly as good as Murphy's debut, 48 Hrs., in just about every way, and even though the project was around before that movie's release and had all those other showcase targets, it looks derivative of that Murphy role. It would nonetheless become a far bigger hit. But the looseness compared to even 48 Hrs. has an interesting effect. The gappy, hanging out stuff approximates -- it's debatable whether this is a direct attempt at representation -- real life activity even for cops, and minimizes thriller hyperbole, though it still has flimsy mechanics for that. One way it is better than 48 Hrs. is in toning down the brazen showboating stuff for Murphy's character. The soundtrack was also a part of the movie's success. The theme music, somewhat innovative at the time for movies, became a hit, but if you watch this movie you may never want to hear it again, the way it flogs you with it.
Predators (2010)
It's not particularly incompetent or poorly done, and certainly not the goofy conception problems of the alien versus predator movies, but the problem is that the premise, which follows naturally enough from the original Predator -- this time they bring their prey to their own sort of preserve for hunting -- was apparently too basic to leave alone. Various types of skilled killers find themselves literally dropped into a new world, but this action thriller version of sci-fi or metaphysical drama doesn't create the same interest in the motley crew of the original, for all they're cracked up to be. Trying to get to a more typical melodramatic path, instead of sticking to the existential ordeal, if not abstract, may have made sense to the scriptwriters (Alex Litvak and Michael Finch) or director (Nimrod Antal), or maybe it was the producers and executives who demanded it, but it makes for more ordinary even in this line.
It's not particularly incompetent or poorly done, and certainly not the goofy conception problems of the alien versus predator movies, but the problem is that the premise, which follows naturally enough from the original Predator -- this time they bring their prey to their own sort of preserve for hunting -- was apparently too basic to leave alone. Various types of skilled killers find themselves literally dropped into a new world, but this action thriller version of sci-fi or metaphysical drama doesn't create the same interest in the motley crew of the original, for all they're cracked up to be. Trying to get to a more typical melodramatic path, instead of sticking to the existential ordeal, if not abstract, may have made sense to the scriptwriters (Alex Litvak and Michael Finch) or director (Nimrod Antal), or maybe it was the producers and executives who demanded it, but it makes for more ordinary even in this line.
The Predator (2018)
And another crew has their go at the predator, this time Shane Black (Lethal Weapon), and Fred Dekker (Robocop 3, Night of the Creeps), who also co-wrote The Monster Squad (1987), and here they switch off with Black as director. The lovable band of crazy convicts, especially as brought off by Keegan-Michael Key and Thomas Jane, is the best contribution, but the family business, the nighttime action, the secret labs, and the additions to Predator lore which copy the Alien sequels for speciousness, don't add anything special to the middling, if competent, action ride.
3/10/23
And another crew has their go at the predator, this time Shane Black (Lethal Weapon), and Fred Dekker (Robocop 3, Night of the Creeps), who also co-wrote The Monster Squad (1987), and here they switch off with Black as director. The lovable band of crazy convicts, especially as brought off by Keegan-Michael Key and Thomas Jane, is the best contribution, but the family business, the nighttime action, the secret labs, and the additions to Predator lore which copy the Alien sequels for speciousness, don't add anything special to the middling, if competent, action ride.
Backlog
See the new page of assorted unfinished and refinished comments from the past, spanning a period from the mid 90s to about 2015, including Lost in La Mancha, The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, La Grande illusion, Blade Runner, Raging Bull, Apocalypse Now, Blow-Up, L'Avventura, Nobody Knows, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Deliverance. All entries have also been added to the index.
3/7/23
See the new page of assorted unfinished and refinished comments from the past, spanning a period from the mid 90s to about 2015, including Lost in La Mancha, The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, La Grande illusion, Blade Runner, Raging Bull, Apocalypse Now, Blow-Up, L'Avventura, Nobody Knows, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Deliverance. All entries have also been added to the index.
Night of the Creeps (1986)
Feature debut as writer and director for Fred Dekker, who gave a surprising turn to Robocop 3 and wrote 2018's The Predator. But it's not a particularly auspicious beginning, since, as teen sex comedy and horror film, it's the run of the two biggest mills of the 80s. Perhaps Tom Atkins provides interest. As the cop who's peeved by nearly everything around him, he's a stand-in for the audience.
Feature debut as writer and director for Fred Dekker, who gave a surprising turn to Robocop 3 and wrote 2018's The Predator. But it's not a particularly auspicious beginning, since, as teen sex comedy and horror film, it's the run of the two biggest mills of the 80s. Perhaps Tom Atkins provides interest. As the cop who's peeved by nearly everything around him, he's a stand-in for the audience.
Dogma (1999)
Kevin Smith got away with rambling spirals and other kinds of colloquial bullshit as curlicues of scriptwriting in Clerks because he was defying mainstream movies as a raggedy-assed little independent. Trying to drive the big vehicle, with more backing and loads of stars only makes the script seem all the more amateurish. He gets all these tops spinning and forgets about them, not just as all the subplots, but in single paragraphs of dialogue.
Kevin Smith got away with rambling spirals and other kinds of colloquial bullshit as curlicues of scriptwriting in Clerks because he was defying mainstream movies as a raggedy-assed little independent. Trying to drive the big vehicle, with more backing and loads of stars only makes the script seem all the more amateurish. He gets all these tops spinning and forgets about them, not just as all the subplots, but in single paragraphs of dialogue.
Signs (2002)
For perhaps some context for Knock at the Cabin, there's this earlier work of M. Night Shyamalan, where the matter of faith is mixed with alien invasion. As if an inset of some other family in War of the Worlds, as they're discovering what's happening, we're learning that Mel Gibson's character used to be an Episcopal priest, and the reasons he quit. There's a scene where Gibson presides over what he presumes to be the last supper with his family and vehemently refuses to have any prayer or acknowledgment of God. I'm thinking, I wonder how they got Gibson to do this part, unless -- and, sure enough, there is reclamation by the end, as a sort of epilogue. If you're worried about spoilers, you're likely on a whole other line. Shyamalan, who also wrote this (Knock at the Cabin he adapted from a book), gets better relief for the suspense, drawing things down to a more worldly scene for the reaction to other-worldly, and cuts back on the horror tactics. But apart from many questions of cosmology this may set off, when Gibson divides the world into two kinds of people for Joaquin Phoenix's character, it's pretty hard not to feel like this is what Shyamalan is putting to us. While he may be posing the question of faith, or perhaps more precisely the question of what faith can bear, an either/or scheme is precisely what rather limits the imagination than opening it up.
For perhaps some context for Knock at the Cabin, there's this earlier work of M. Night Shyamalan, where the matter of faith is mixed with alien invasion. As if an inset of some other family in War of the Worlds, as they're discovering what's happening, we're learning that Mel Gibson's character used to be an Episcopal priest, and the reasons he quit. There's a scene where Gibson presides over what he presumes to be the last supper with his family and vehemently refuses to have any prayer or acknowledgment of God. I'm thinking, I wonder how they got Gibson to do this part, unless -- and, sure enough, there is reclamation by the end, as a sort of epilogue. If you're worried about spoilers, you're likely on a whole other line. Shyamalan, who also wrote this (Knock at the Cabin he adapted from a book), gets better relief for the suspense, drawing things down to a more worldly scene for the reaction to other-worldly, and cuts back on the horror tactics. But apart from many questions of cosmology this may set off, when Gibson divides the world into two kinds of people for Joaquin Phoenix's character, it's pretty hard not to feel like this is what Shyamalan is putting to us. While he may be posing the question of faith, or perhaps more precisely the question of what faith can bear, an either/or scheme is precisely what rather limits the imagination than opening it up.
Casablanca (1943)
This may be a peak of the 1940s Hollywood, when it settled into the classic studio production efficiency, the crisp and fluid look and style, the assembly line of refinement or processing, and the movie is noble in a somewhat more worldly, or at least wily way -- Humphrey Bogart's Rick says he knows nothing about being noble, but that's only part of the noble act, professing not to be high-toned about it. But it lacks the tilt, the edge, the vision that makes art not just competence, like the way so many 30s movies are rougher, but more inspired. Movies like The Rules of the Game, M, or even closer, The Maltese Falcon. There are three cast members in common and the same cinematographer, Arthur Edeson, who also shot Frankenstein. It's not so much Michael Curtiz's direction, with nice attention to the scene and photography and even some noir effects, but the script. Despite the milieu and the mere statements to effect, it lacks the keenness for foible and conceit of Dashiell Hammett and John Huston. A la Seinfeld, where's the depravity? Besides the commonplace of a great American or Hollywood movie, something easier to digest for admiration, what also seems significant is the ideal of the club. It's a fantasy of being grown-up, where while you sit at a table for a drink, all the business of the world is going on right there: a cocktail of adventure, dalliance, international flavor, resistance fervor and good conscience. Even the fascists have manners.
This may be a peak of the 1940s Hollywood, when it settled into the classic studio production efficiency, the crisp and fluid look and style, the assembly line of refinement or processing, and the movie is noble in a somewhat more worldly, or at least wily way -- Humphrey Bogart's Rick says he knows nothing about being noble, but that's only part of the noble act, professing not to be high-toned about it. But it lacks the tilt, the edge, the vision that makes art not just competence, like the way so many 30s movies are rougher, but more inspired. Movies like The Rules of the Game, M, or even closer, The Maltese Falcon. There are three cast members in common and the same cinematographer, Arthur Edeson, who also shot Frankenstein. It's not so much Michael Curtiz's direction, with nice attention to the scene and photography and even some noir effects, but the script. Despite the milieu and the mere statements to effect, it lacks the keenness for foible and conceit of Dashiell Hammett and John Huston. A la Seinfeld, where's the depravity? Besides the commonplace of a great American or Hollywood movie, something easier to digest for admiration, what also seems significant is the ideal of the club. It's a fantasy of being grown-up, where while you sit at a table for a drink, all the business of the world is going on right there: a cocktail of adventure, dalliance, international flavor, resistance fervor and good conscience. Even the fascists have manners.
The Edge (1997)
From a distance, even after it, it seems pretty silly, and to describe it or outline the plot, you'd probably imagine something pretty lurid in pop movie terms. But David Mamet's script, and the treatment of it by director Lee Tamahori, deal in subtler stuff, and not just the sort of lines that are finer in implication of a fuller sense of background, but also in where it goes and what it does with the characters' reactions. Against the grain of revenge and pure machismo, here being a bigger man is about using your head, and even that is about error, recognizing it and learning from it, and also about altruism and forgiveness, both as more practical than sheer self-interest or reaction, but also beyond that. This results in something more interesting than just a thriller about a bear or the struggle between men in their own wilderness of envy, jealousy, class or resentment. The ordeal with the bear becomes just one act along the way in this progression, and that provides for much more interesting performances from Anthony Hopkins and especially Alec Baldwin. It's not the sort of frankness of real life that pokes through with disaster, when the daily order falls down and people are thrown off their usual fixations, but there is a fresh breeze of that tempering the construction and certainly countering typical revenge thrillers.
From a distance, even after it, it seems pretty silly, and to describe it or outline the plot, you'd probably imagine something pretty lurid in pop movie terms. But David Mamet's script, and the treatment of it by director Lee Tamahori, deal in subtler stuff, and not just the sort of lines that are finer in implication of a fuller sense of background, but also in where it goes and what it does with the characters' reactions. Against the grain of revenge and pure machismo, here being a bigger man is about using your head, and even that is about error, recognizing it and learning from it, and also about altruism and forgiveness, both as more practical than sheer self-interest or reaction, but also beyond that. This results in something more interesting than just a thriller about a bear or the struggle between men in their own wilderness of envy, jealousy, class or resentment. The ordeal with the bear becomes just one act along the way in this progression, and that provides for much more interesting performances from Anthony Hopkins and especially Alec Baldwin. It's not the sort of frankness of real life that pokes through with disaster, when the daily order falls down and people are thrown off their usual fixations, but there is a fresh breeze of that tempering the construction and certainly countering typical revenge thrillers.
Supergirl (1984)
The Salkinds did a spinoff from their Superman movies because laser eyes and super-cold breath and hovering on theater wires with a cape is not just for men. Apparently they didn't learn the lesson from Superman 3, but after this box office performance, decided to sell the movie rights to Superman (to The Cannon Group, see Superman 4). The clumsy jumble without quite being humor approach still didn't tip far enough to embrace the absurdity, and there's quite a remarkable cast thus stranded in that phantom zone: Faye Dunnaway, Peter O'Toole, Peter Cook (!), Mia Farrow (half of them in the terrible set of some inner space version of Krypton). But thank goodness for the villain's comic sidekick role to give jobs to more actors. Here it's Brenda Vaccaro in the distinguished line of Ned Beatty, Valerie Perrine, Vera Webster, Pamela Stephenson and Jon Cryer.
2/28/23
The Salkinds did a spinoff from their Superman movies because laser eyes and super-cold breath and hovering on theater wires with a cape is not just for men. Apparently they didn't learn the lesson from Superman 3, but after this box office performance, decided to sell the movie rights to Superman (to The Cannon Group, see Superman 4). The clumsy jumble without quite being humor approach still didn't tip far enough to embrace the absurdity, and there's quite a remarkable cast thus stranded in that phantom zone: Faye Dunnaway, Peter O'Toole, Peter Cook (!), Mia Farrow (half of them in the terrible set of some inner space version of Krypton). But thank goodness for the villain's comic sidekick role to give jobs to more actors. Here it's Brenda Vaccaro in the distinguished line of Ned Beatty, Valerie Perrine, Vera Webster, Pamela Stephenson and Jon Cryer.
Knock at the Cabin (2023)
M. Night Shyamalan certainly painted himself into a corner. If I describe the plot or even the premise enough to explain what that means, it's going to be giving it all away, but I don't know what sort of well-meaning can overcome this serving as a parable, fantasy or wet dream for the homophobes and bigots who call their moral authoritarian, vengeful, doomsday beliefs "fundamental."
M. Night Shyamalan certainly painted himself into a corner. If I describe the plot or even the premise enough to explain what that means, it's going to be giving it all away, but I don't know what sort of well-meaning can overcome this serving as a parable, fantasy or wet dream for the homophobes and bigots who call their moral authoritarian, vengeful, doomsday beliefs "fundamental."
The Driver (1978)
We're quickly thrown into a car chase from the getaway of a casino robbery, where driver Ryan O'Neal shows steely resolve through police pursuit that's not too hyperbolic to be plausibly imposing. It starts off in the French Connection line, taciturn, with minimal information -- we don't even get character names -- and fascinating in that way. But it soon turns into a pose, of dour looks from O'Neal and Isabelle Adjani, who are supposed to be tough and grim but come off as almost comically pouty, with Bruce Dern's sleazy leaning cop the most animated, hung on 70s TV series plotting from writer and director Walter Hill.
We're quickly thrown into a car chase from the getaway of a casino robbery, where driver Ryan O'Neal shows steely resolve through police pursuit that's not too hyperbolic to be plausibly imposing. It starts off in the French Connection line, taciturn, with minimal information -- we don't even get character names -- and fascinating in that way. But it soon turns into a pose, of dour looks from O'Neal and Isabelle Adjani, who are supposed to be tough and grim but come off as almost comically pouty, with Bruce Dern's sleazy leaning cop the most animated, hung on 70s TV series plotting from writer and director Walter Hill.
Stone (2010)
There's an interesting scheme about the crossing paths and trajectories of a convict (Edward Norton) and his parole officer (Robert De Niro) and some interesting stuff from it, but there's the feeling that a lot is missing, mainly in the leap of De Niro into the bed of the convict's wife (Milla Jovovich). Although the characters aren't supposed to be very articulate about the more profound uncertainties they're dealing with, what we get of Angus MacLachlan's script directed by John Curran isn't being quite expressive of that, either, playing all this up as the suspense of the confrontations rather than the character study.
There's an interesting scheme about the crossing paths and trajectories of a convict (Edward Norton) and his parole officer (Robert De Niro) and some interesting stuff from it, but there's the feeling that a lot is missing, mainly in the leap of De Niro into the bed of the convict's wife (Milla Jovovich). Although the characters aren't supposed to be very articulate about the more profound uncertainties they're dealing with, what we get of Angus MacLachlan's script directed by John Curran isn't being quite expressive of that, either, playing all this up as the suspense of the confrontations rather than the character study.
The Whale (2022)
For director Darren Aronofsky, this is actually toned down, which in itself is a good thing compared to his other work. It's based on a play, by Samuel D. Hunter (he also wrote the screenplay), and Aronofsky keeps more to that plan. The play has its own devices of compression, rising and falling cycles, and such a clear position about the good heart of the main character -- the uplift is built in from the beginning -- that there's no real, or certainly not overbearing, tension about the abject part of the experience. Again, this is also a relief in some ways, from wallowing or nose-rubbing anywhere, but certainly from Aronofsky's. And this is where Brendan Fraser's performance comes in, as a turn that is not just the typical Oscar sympathy grabber, although I think it's being taken that way. Fraser has a personable presence that shows through all that, even through the positive and good soul stuff of the character. He's more offhand than that, than wringing it. What it shows through also is what it's hard to resist thinking: come on, a fat suit? Even if it's respectful or practical, the whole line about dramatizing rather than simply telling presses the issue, in movies, of spectacle, the presumption that we don't want to just read or hear an account, a testimony of someone's experience, it has to be shown to be -- dramatic? And the difference between that and sensational? Even on a diminished scale, we're back to Aronofsky.
For director Darren Aronofsky, this is actually toned down, which in itself is a good thing compared to his other work. It's based on a play, by Samuel D. Hunter (he also wrote the screenplay), and Aronofsky keeps more to that plan. The play has its own devices of compression, rising and falling cycles, and such a clear position about the good heart of the main character -- the uplift is built in from the beginning -- that there's no real, or certainly not overbearing, tension about the abject part of the experience. Again, this is also a relief in some ways, from wallowing or nose-rubbing anywhere, but certainly from Aronofsky's. And this is where Brendan Fraser's performance comes in, as a turn that is not just the typical Oscar sympathy grabber, although I think it's being taken that way. Fraser has a personable presence that shows through all that, even through the positive and good soul stuff of the character. He's more offhand than that, than wringing it. What it shows through also is what it's hard to resist thinking: come on, a fat suit? Even if it's respectful or practical, the whole line about dramatizing rather than simply telling presses the issue, in movies, of spectacle, the presumption that we don't want to just read or hear an account, a testimony of someone's experience, it has to be shown to be -- dramatic? And the difference between that and sensational? Even on a diminished scale, we're back to Aronofsky.
Friends with Money (2006)
By the time we get to the ending, there's an interesting idea about people who don't particularly care about fitting in or being defined by their productivity or reproductivity, whether that's conscientious or a psychological complex, but it's as if this was pulled out of a hat at the last moment, at least as the theme or upshot. On the way, what would be the study of that in the contrast of Jennifer Aniston's character with her neurotically achieving friends glances around in romcom or quirky social comedy manner, and it's not so much that it's too glib or too glum as too slight, sketches, and the presentation style, with the actors and the dialogue, is like a shift up in adult comedy declamatory register.
2/24/23
By the time we get to the ending, there's an interesting idea about people who don't particularly care about fitting in or being defined by their productivity or reproductivity, whether that's conscientious or a psychological complex, but it's as if this was pulled out of a hat at the last moment, at least as the theme or upshot. On the way, what would be the study of that in the contrast of Jennifer Aniston's character with her neurotically achieving friends glances around in romcom or quirky social comedy manner, and it's not so much that it's too glib or too glum as too slight, sketches, and the presentation style, with the actors and the dialogue, is like a shift up in adult comedy declamatory register.
Lost Illusions (2021)
A gush of pertinence from the past for our time -- the explosion of the press business in Paris during the Bourbon restoration prefiguring the Internet age -- from one of the pioneer literary chroniclers, Honoré de Balzac, and in the fine French tradition of keenness and taste for nuance, twilight, sophistication and degradation, finery and merde. Xavier Giannoli has given a movie version that, as costume drama, is less glossy, softer and plainer in relief, and what's particularly great about his direction and his cast are reactions. As adept as these actors are at their lines, there's also a striking breadth to the effect of the words with how they're taken. It's not mugging or telegraphing, but it's also development. We see, for example, the way the central character, played by Benjamin Voisin, goes from naive, vulnerable, intimidated, to amused, feeling affinity and gaining confidence, from sinking to swimming, in one scene, in his reactions to the others.
A gush of pertinence from the past for our time -- the explosion of the press business in Paris during the Bourbon restoration prefiguring the Internet age -- from one of the pioneer literary chroniclers, Honoré de Balzac, and in the fine French tradition of keenness and taste for nuance, twilight, sophistication and degradation, finery and merde. Xavier Giannoli has given a movie version that, as costume drama, is less glossy, softer and plainer in relief, and what's particularly great about his direction and his cast are reactions. As adept as these actors are at their lines, there's also a striking breadth to the effect of the words with how they're taken. It's not mugging or telegraphing, but it's also development. We see, for example, the way the central character, played by Benjamin Voisin, goes from naive, vulnerable, intimidated, to amused, feeling affinity and gaining confidence, from sinking to swimming, in one scene, in his reactions to the others.
The Italian Job (2003)
Count on an American production to batten down everything to plot. Though it's not a strict remake, or even sequel, the flightier heights of the 1969 movie are replaced with a more gripping line of action, but it certainly sacrifices the panache of the original, however loopy. The Mini Coopers are given a practical reason in the story, but they're the main element of homage to the original, including tunnels, in this case the LA subway.
Count on an American production to batten down everything to plot. Though it's not a strict remake, or even sequel, the flightier heights of the 1969 movie are replaced with a more gripping line of action, but it certainly sacrifices the panache of the original, however loopy. The Mini Coopers are given a practical reason in the story, but they're the main element of homage to the original, including tunnels, in this case the LA subway.
The Italian Job (1969)
Strangely detached, as if turned out but not directly to the audience, like a parade or circus spectacle of movie elements. It skips through plot, more like stepping stones than working development, with a flighty manner, as if citation, and when it settles into its best cinematic passages, the chase with the Mini Coopers especially in the tunnels and the literal cliffhanger, the abstraction is most interesting, more like a theme in music than the content of a story. The play on cliffhanger is formal because it is literal. Otherwise it's a pop movie rendition of flag-waving, with the Union Jack colors of the three Mini Coopers, plenty of actual Union Jacks waving throughout, the assertion of Britannia against Europe and in another country, Italy (which is also Rome for more historical context, despite the specific location here, Turin, which has more current automotive partisanship context, Fiat, and besides the Coopers we see an Aston Martin and Jaguar in the parade, as well as a Lamborghini stolen and trashed), the triumphant swell of swinging London and Brit pop's rise in the 60s. Oceans Eleven of 2001 is really more a remake of this, in this spirit, rather than the original of that title, for the stylish pageant and convenience of all the plot elements.
Strangely detached, as if turned out but not directly to the audience, like a parade or circus spectacle of movie elements. It skips through plot, more like stepping stones than working development, with a flighty manner, as if citation, and when it settles into its best cinematic passages, the chase with the Mini Coopers especially in the tunnels and the literal cliffhanger, the abstraction is most interesting, more like a theme in music than the content of a story. The play on cliffhanger is formal because it is literal. Otherwise it's a pop movie rendition of flag-waving, with the Union Jack colors of the three Mini Coopers, plenty of actual Union Jacks waving throughout, the assertion of Britannia against Europe and in another country, Italy (which is also Rome for more historical context, despite the specific location here, Turin, which has more current automotive partisanship context, Fiat, and besides the Coopers we see an Aston Martin and Jaguar in the parade, as well as a Lamborghini stolen and trashed), the triumphant swell of swinging London and Brit pop's rise in the 60s. Oceans Eleven of 2001 is really more a remake of this, in this spirit, rather than the original of that title, for the stylish pageant and convenience of all the plot elements.
In the Line of Duty 2: The Super Cops [aka Yes, Madam!] (1986)
The title may be harder to figure out than the plot of this 80s Hong Kong martial arts movie with Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock. It also goes by Police Assassins 2 and Police Assassins. A comic relief duo tries to steal the plot from the female leads, there's a bad guy whose dubbed laughter rivals What's Up, Tiger Lily?, and if that's not enough, there's a RiffTrax treatment.
The title may be harder to figure out than the plot of this 80s Hong Kong martial arts movie with Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock. It also goes by Police Assassins 2 and Police Assassins. A comic relief duo tries to steal the plot from the female leads, there's a bad guy whose dubbed laughter rivals What's Up, Tiger Lily?, and if that's not enough, there's a RiffTrax treatment.
Plane (2023)
Not quite as minimalist as its title, though thankfully pared down -- perhaps they skipped the use of an article to avoid audiences shouting Herve Villechaize lines -- it really is about island, what happens after plane. More troubling than the premise of modern-day pirates, however, is the idea of an airline having its own action movie swank war room as well as a private army. The cast, headed by Gerard Butler and Mike Colter, does a good job of intense looks.
Not quite as minimalist as its title, though thankfully pared down -- perhaps they skipped the use of an article to avoid audiences shouting Herve Villechaize lines -- it really is about island, what happens after plane. More troubling than the premise of modern-day pirates, however, is the idea of an airline having its own action movie swank war room as well as a private army. The cast, headed by Gerard Butler and Mike Colter, does a good job of intense looks.
Hobgoblins 2 (2009)
This sequel was meant to be made two years after the original, but 20 years was not enough to discourage Rick Sloane from going ahead with the project, same script, different actors. That also means that in an attempt to look the same as the excruciatingly feeble 80s trendiness of Hobgoblins -- and see here for the special kind of badness this represents -- there is an even more feeble attempt at that derivative trendiness two decades later. And to add to the degenerative vortex of derivation, writer and director Sloane not only tries to inject horror movie self-consciousness into his Gremlins ripoff, but citation of the coverage it got from Mystery Science Theater 3000! So now we have onion layer double whammy: meta-stinky. Despite the sucking up as well as just sucking, RiffTrax took on the sequel, and their well-timed comment of untimeliness, after you've been scratching your head over when this was shot -- is this the 90s? -- and about the time you're looking it up on your phone: "this movie was made in 2009!"
This sequel was meant to be made two years after the original, but 20 years was not enough to discourage Rick Sloane from going ahead with the project, same script, different actors. That also means that in an attempt to look the same as the excruciatingly feeble 80s trendiness of Hobgoblins -- and see here for the special kind of badness this represents -- there is an even more feeble attempt at that derivative trendiness two decades later. And to add to the degenerative vortex of derivation, writer and director Sloane not only tries to inject horror movie self-consciousness into his Gremlins ripoff, but citation of the coverage it got from Mystery Science Theater 3000! So now we have onion layer double whammy: meta-stinky. Despite the sucking up as well as just sucking, RiffTrax took on the sequel, and their well-timed comment of untimeliness, after you've been scratching your head over when this was shot -- is this the 90s? -- and about the time you're looking it up on your phone: "this movie was made in 2009!"
Under Suspicion (2000)
Directed by Stephen Hopkins, screenplay by Tom Provost, W. Peter Iliff (from the 1981 French film Garde a vue, which is also from the book Brainwash by John Wainwright), the story is timely again in reminding us that reputation and circumstance are not the same as guilt or fact, and the twists to this as a procedural, interrogation and even a thriller work well against the preponderance in movies. Morgan Freeman and Gene Hackman helped bring about the project, wanting to play these roles, and their performances are the strong point, even setting up a foil of movie presentation with vulnerabilities about the characters in the story, especially with Hackman. The script here pushes the cat and mouse with the viewer more than necessary, so that often the shifts in tone of the interrogation seem incongruous, contrived for that effect rather than even candid fumbling, and Hopkins attempts to liven it up as if worried it will be too much like a play, but the effects seem more cosmetic, sometimes silly for that, e.g., the sort of investigator fading into the flashback that became part of the potboiling in Criminal Minds.
2/16/23
Directed by Stephen Hopkins, screenplay by Tom Provost, W. Peter Iliff (from the 1981 French film Garde a vue, which is also from the book Brainwash by John Wainwright), the story is timely again in reminding us that reputation and circumstance are not the same as guilt or fact, and the twists to this as a procedural, interrogation and even a thriller work well against the preponderance in movies. Morgan Freeman and Gene Hackman helped bring about the project, wanting to play these roles, and their performances are the strong point, even setting up a foil of movie presentation with vulnerabilities about the characters in the story, especially with Hackman. The script here pushes the cat and mouse with the viewer more than necessary, so that often the shifts in tone of the interrogation seem incongruous, contrived for that effect rather than even candid fumbling, and Hopkins attempts to liven it up as if worried it will be too much like a play, but the effects seem more cosmetic, sometimes silly for that, e.g., the sort of investigator fading into the flashback that became part of the potboiling in Criminal Minds.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
As nice a bank robbery as you'd ever want to see. Like it's contemporary Nashville, this is a social portrait, a cross-section of the people of the times, more particularly perhaps American, more specifically still, in Brooklyn. What's inverted from Nashville is nonetheless what makes it similar: Nashville is a pageant that turns into a crime, and this is a crime that becomes a pageant. It's based on real events, which it also honors. Scriptwriter Frank Pierson didn't map it out as that sort of spiraling social comedy, and it does have a central character, though that character is a catalyst, the drop in the pond that causes the ripples, further reactions and discoveries. Directer Sydney Lumet, while not as the scanning satire and orchestrated jumble of Robert Altman, approaches the charged situation in an offhand way, and everything that may come across now, in retrospect, as sensitive or ahead of its time, is really due to this dispassionate approach. The evenness with which we see good and bad, shrewd and clumsy, sympathetic and reactionary, cautious and coldly brutal, is the distance and the timing, this cutout of the events that doesn't push it as thriller or lurid or moral. It has the dispatch of documentary with the composure of drama.
As nice a bank robbery as you'd ever want to see. Like it's contemporary Nashville, this is a social portrait, a cross-section of the people of the times, more particularly perhaps American, more specifically still, in Brooklyn. What's inverted from Nashville is nonetheless what makes it similar: Nashville is a pageant that turns into a crime, and this is a crime that becomes a pageant. It's based on real events, which it also honors. Scriptwriter Frank Pierson didn't map it out as that sort of spiraling social comedy, and it does have a central character, though that character is a catalyst, the drop in the pond that causes the ripples, further reactions and discoveries. Directer Sydney Lumet, while not as the scanning satire and orchestrated jumble of Robert Altman, approaches the charged situation in an offhand way, and everything that may come across now, in retrospect, as sensitive or ahead of its time, is really due to this dispassionate approach. The evenness with which we see good and bad, shrewd and clumsy, sympathetic and reactionary, cautious and coldly brutal, is the distance and the timing, this cutout of the events that doesn't push it as thriller or lurid or moral. It has the dispatch of documentary with the composure of drama.
Street Smart (1987)
Part of Christopher Reeve's deal to do Superman IV was to get this funded as well. The story has more of a spine than typical 80s thrillers, based on the incident of a Washington Post writer fabricating a story about a child drug addict (and winning a Pulitzer Prize), but in more typical 80s fashion, it zigzags, the characters and focus, so that it seems like different movies or kinds of movie. Most interesting is the cast, off the beaten path, even Reeve from his, or Andre Gregory, but also less known at the time, like Kathy Baker and Mimi Rogers (and check out a young Erik King). The real attraction isn't Reeve, but Morgan Freeman playing a character that is various levels of trouble. I said before (see here) that it was more interesting to see him playing sort of an asshole, and here he goes further with the heavy. Freeman has said in interviews this is his favorite role.
Part of Christopher Reeve's deal to do Superman IV was to get this funded as well. The story has more of a spine than typical 80s thrillers, based on the incident of a Washington Post writer fabricating a story about a child drug addict (and winning a Pulitzer Prize), but in more typical 80s fashion, it zigzags, the characters and focus, so that it seems like different movies or kinds of movie. Most interesting is the cast, off the beaten path, even Reeve from his, or Andre Gregory, but also less known at the time, like Kathy Baker and Mimi Rogers (and check out a young Erik King). The real attraction isn't Reeve, but Morgan Freeman playing a character that is various levels of trouble. I said before (see here) that it was more interesting to see him playing sort of an asshole, and here he goes further with the heavy. Freeman has said in interviews this is his favorite role.
The Score (2001)
The ambition here was in getting Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando (dealing with the latter alone may have required more than anything else) -- the first time they've appeared on screen together (they were in The Godfather movies, but not the same ones and playing the same character at different times). The smart thing was in keeping things modest with the story, nothing trying to be too epic or grand (cf. Heat). A heist is good for that, too, relatively easy to keep attention, and the classic ones, like Rififi, know you don't have to amp it up, at least not that part. With the emphasis on process, you get to concentrate on the process of the acting. True to form for his last complete movie, Brando decided his interpretation of the character was more important than director Frank Oz's -- yes, from the Muppets fame, and reportedly Brando called Oz "Miss Piggy" during the shooting. And the antithesis of acting as getting in the way, De Niro (see comments here), helped mediate between Oz and Brando. The results of both styles work enough to keep attention, but it's also interesting to think about just how the scale of a work can seem different. Would this have seemed a smaller work without those two, as well as Edward Norton and Angela Bassett? Or would it have worked differently, without all that in the way?
The ambition here was in getting Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando (dealing with the latter alone may have required more than anything else) -- the first time they've appeared on screen together (they were in The Godfather movies, but not the same ones and playing the same character at different times). The smart thing was in keeping things modest with the story, nothing trying to be too epic or grand (cf. Heat). A heist is good for that, too, relatively easy to keep attention, and the classic ones, like Rififi, know you don't have to amp it up, at least not that part. With the emphasis on process, you get to concentrate on the process of the acting. True to form for his last complete movie, Brando decided his interpretation of the character was more important than director Frank Oz's -- yes, from the Muppets fame, and reportedly Brando called Oz "Miss Piggy" during the shooting. And the antithesis of acting as getting in the way, De Niro (see comments here), helped mediate between Oz and Brando. The results of both styles work enough to keep attention, but it's also interesting to think about just how the scale of a work can seem different. Would this have seemed a smaller work without those two, as well as Edward Norton and Angela Bassett? Or would it have worked differently, without all that in the way?
Kiss of Death (1947)
The action is sparse and the drama is mostly in dialogue -- the script is by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer -- but it's a bit more punchy and noirish in the movie way than purely theatrical, and characterization is emphasized with that and the acting, most memorably with Richard Widmark's sadistically giddy Tommy Udo (reportedly influenced by the comic book version of The Joker). Location shooting, in New York City and other places including Sing Sing, help with that characterization, too, but it's easy to see why the 1995 remake complicated the motives of the authorities. The straight-up cop's honor versus thieves' honor scheme here first makes the leverage more contradictory, but then all the noble self-sacrifice hard to believe.
2/10/23
The action is sparse and the drama is mostly in dialogue -- the script is by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer -- but it's a bit more punchy and noirish in the movie way than purely theatrical, and characterization is emphasized with that and the acting, most memorably with Richard Widmark's sadistically giddy Tommy Udo (reportedly influenced by the comic book version of The Joker). Location shooting, in New York City and other places including Sing Sing, help with that characterization, too, but it's easy to see why the 1995 remake complicated the motives of the authorities. The straight-up cop's honor versus thieves' honor scheme here first makes the leverage more contradictory, but then all the noble self-sacrifice hard to believe.
Superman III (1983)
They sent Superman chasing after box office into the phantom zone of sequels. With Richard Lester completely at the helm, and Richard Pryor as co-attraction, it was also full tilt into light comedy, the movie kind of the era that tried not to scare anyone away for their kids, and even Superman's fight with himself can't be taken seriously enough as reflexive metaphor.
They sent Superman chasing after box office into the phantom zone of sequels. With Richard Lester completely at the helm, and Richard Pryor as co-attraction, it was also full tilt into light comedy, the movie kind of the era that tried not to scare anyone away for their kids, and even Superman's fight with himself can't be taken seriously enough as reflexive metaphor.
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
The straight takedown of the salesman racket. Directed by James Foley (Reckless, After Dark, My Sweet, et al.), this is close, cramped up to the pushy intimacy and hooks-in dialogues, lush and swoozy even for a miserable office with night hours. Mamet tends to crank up the sing-song quality of his dialogue when he directs his own stuff, whereas Foley, like other directors, tends to give more space to the actors to work it out more in character, although a few times Foley does a rapid edit that does the opposite, pushes the quick relay instead of letting it play. Mamet's screenplay from his play is prolix and compact at once. A couple of times the salesman bullshit jags turn into playwright conceit jags, but it's a quick line of action, two acts giving a before and after. You don't have to have had a salesman father to know how utterly mercenary people can be, where everything they do with everyone is an angle, a deal, everyone's a mark, including family, and they're always on the make. But if you have known someone like this, it makes this representation more than just poetic. What Mamet does shrewdly here is show how they all work each other. It's the antithesis of teamwork, and any deft or sparkling moments of collaboration are only about playing someone else, a mark, or admiring the ability to do so. The cast is not just a star lineup, but neatly matched to the parts. Jack Lemon, who played a similar character about the same time in Short Cuts, puts the two sides of the jackal behavior together, simpering and pathetic when he's begging for his own livelihood, imperviously sleazy playing his "shot," the bullshit pitches he uses. The Ricky Roma character makes a delectable one for Al Pacino, especially for that shifty, bellowing thing he was doing a lot around this time. Roma has extended the pitch way out, beyond when the mark even knows it's an encounter, and into heady realms of "philosophy," meaning the sort of groping of the barest contact people do with strangers, in bars getting drunk, or parking lots getting high. He seems to be pulling at the biggest strings of all, but he never lands anywhere, teeters to make you try to follow him to the next provocation. He can't even keep up with what he's saying himself. He's just pure operation. And Jonathan Pryce plays painfully well the most pushover kind of target, all excruciating reaction swallowing himself back.
The straight takedown of the salesman racket. Directed by James Foley (Reckless, After Dark, My Sweet, et al.), this is close, cramped up to the pushy intimacy and hooks-in dialogues, lush and swoozy even for a miserable office with night hours. Mamet tends to crank up the sing-song quality of his dialogue when he directs his own stuff, whereas Foley, like other directors, tends to give more space to the actors to work it out more in character, although a few times Foley does a rapid edit that does the opposite, pushes the quick relay instead of letting it play. Mamet's screenplay from his play is prolix and compact at once. A couple of times the salesman bullshit jags turn into playwright conceit jags, but it's a quick line of action, two acts giving a before and after. You don't have to have had a salesman father to know how utterly mercenary people can be, where everything they do with everyone is an angle, a deal, everyone's a mark, including family, and they're always on the make. But if you have known someone like this, it makes this representation more than just poetic. What Mamet does shrewdly here is show how they all work each other. It's the antithesis of teamwork, and any deft or sparkling moments of collaboration are only about playing someone else, a mark, or admiring the ability to do so. The cast is not just a star lineup, but neatly matched to the parts. Jack Lemon, who played a similar character about the same time in Short Cuts, puts the two sides of the jackal behavior together, simpering and pathetic when he's begging for his own livelihood, imperviously sleazy playing his "shot," the bullshit pitches he uses. The Ricky Roma character makes a delectable one for Al Pacino, especially for that shifty, bellowing thing he was doing a lot around this time. Roma has extended the pitch way out, beyond when the mark even knows it's an encounter, and into heady realms of "philosophy," meaning the sort of groping of the barest contact people do with strangers, in bars getting drunk, or parking lots getting high. He seems to be pulling at the biggest strings of all, but he never lands anywhere, teeters to make you try to follow him to the next provocation. He can't even keep up with what he's saying himself. He's just pure operation. And Jonathan Pryce plays painfully well the most pushover kind of target, all excruciating reaction swallowing himself back.
Babylon (2022)
The Boogie Nights version of Singin in the Rain as if directed by Baz Luhrmann. It's like someone discovered not silent movies or early Hollywood but Hollywood Babylon, and the retro drag of it all is like the contemporary style of doing the 70s or 80s. Margot Robbie looks like an attempt at maybe a 60s Italian actress, and as an index of this for the whole movie, there's scant evocation of the 20s, nothing of the flavor of the era itself. Though technically Robbie's character is not Clara Bow, to read about Bow or see her is to see also a whole other body type and expressiveness and carriage and demeanor that now stand as diversity for the normalization, at least for major stars, that have set in with movies since, including more recent trends. By contrast, there's much more of a suggestion of Anna May Wong with Li Jun Li. At the beginning of the movie, there's a -- gag? -- where we get a closeup of an elephant's asshole opening up and letting fly. And it goes on and on, with the camera lens covered as it keeps pouring and pouring on one of the characters. This is what you're in for the rest of the movie, if not literally shit, then for having each segment laboriously drag out a point it's already made, or really no point at all. The difficulty of the first attempts at filming with sound is one point we get, though not exactly original, long before its sequence is over, but I'm not sure what the point of a rattlesnake in the neck is, other than some gossipy myth about wildness, some supposedly more risque version of wacky hijinks. While Clara Bow was famous for her irrepressible personality both onscreen and off, that is transposed to a scene here with the Margot Robbie character vomiting on William Randolph Hearst, and the shrillness of this, whether debunking or just petulant indignation, outbids the elephant shit. The first main segment at the party, with its sardonic twists and punches, looked like it would be more fun, though still laid on thick, and something more like a Robert Altman or Alan Rudolph drifting cross-section -- and the music is good and sometimes suggests Altman's Kansas City, even the way the music works in the story -- but the more biopic if not epic arc only makes a string of those pat and drawn-out scandals, until it then throws in moments of wistful significance mostly as close-ups, trying to tie together the paths of characters it has skimmed, including one character created as nothing but such a device. And then it wraps all of that up as an ode to cinema itself, which, despite the enthusiasm and the notes brought in from the works it cites, including some notable ones that are not Hollywood, comes off in this frame as even more smugly referential than L.A. in La La Land, as if its own Oscar memorial montage. Where did we go with Babylon?
The Boogie Nights version of Singin in the Rain as if directed by Baz Luhrmann. It's like someone discovered not silent movies or early Hollywood but Hollywood Babylon, and the retro drag of it all is like the contemporary style of doing the 70s or 80s. Margot Robbie looks like an attempt at maybe a 60s Italian actress, and as an index of this for the whole movie, there's scant evocation of the 20s, nothing of the flavor of the era itself. Though technically Robbie's character is not Clara Bow, to read about Bow or see her is to see also a whole other body type and expressiveness and carriage and demeanor that now stand as diversity for the normalization, at least for major stars, that have set in with movies since, including more recent trends. By contrast, there's much more of a suggestion of Anna May Wong with Li Jun Li. At the beginning of the movie, there's a -- gag? -- where we get a closeup of an elephant's asshole opening up and letting fly. And it goes on and on, with the camera lens covered as it keeps pouring and pouring on one of the characters. This is what you're in for the rest of the movie, if not literally shit, then for having each segment laboriously drag out a point it's already made, or really no point at all. The difficulty of the first attempts at filming with sound is one point we get, though not exactly original, long before its sequence is over, but I'm not sure what the point of a rattlesnake in the neck is, other than some gossipy myth about wildness, some supposedly more risque version of wacky hijinks. While Clara Bow was famous for her irrepressible personality both onscreen and off, that is transposed to a scene here with the Margot Robbie character vomiting on William Randolph Hearst, and the shrillness of this, whether debunking or just petulant indignation, outbids the elephant shit. The first main segment at the party, with its sardonic twists and punches, looked like it would be more fun, though still laid on thick, and something more like a Robert Altman or Alan Rudolph drifting cross-section -- and the music is good and sometimes suggests Altman's Kansas City, even the way the music works in the story -- but the more biopic if not epic arc only makes a string of those pat and drawn-out scandals, until it then throws in moments of wistful significance mostly as close-ups, trying to tie together the paths of characters it has skimmed, including one character created as nothing but such a device. And then it wraps all of that up as an ode to cinema itself, which, despite the enthusiasm and the notes brought in from the works it cites, including some notable ones that are not Hollywood, comes off in this frame as even more smugly referential than L.A. in La La Land, as if its own Oscar memorial montage. Where did we go with Babylon?
A Most Wanted Man (2014)
There's so much potboiling in movies that it's a nice break to see one that takes an opposite tack, doesn't try to fan the flames, or perhaps trusts that we'd be interested in the mundane stuff of investigations or even see the drama of the mundane. But there is no zero degree of affectation. This is based on a John le Carre novel, and director Anton Corbin (who also did Control) takes this into a sort of backroom simmering, it seems also trusting a cast with the likes of Robin Wright, Nina Hoss, Vicky Krieps, Rachel McAdams and Daniel Bruhl, sometimes to an oblique extreme in the manner of lead Philip Seymour Hoffman. There are moments, such as when Hoffman punches out a masher in a bar, that seem injected just to break this, but where it comes off strangest is at the end, where a series of meaningful look reactions tries to drag out the significance and by the time it gets to an outburst by Hoffman, already seems a parody.
There's so much potboiling in movies that it's a nice break to see one that takes an opposite tack, doesn't try to fan the flames, or perhaps trusts that we'd be interested in the mundane stuff of investigations or even see the drama of the mundane. But there is no zero degree of affectation. This is based on a John le Carre novel, and director Anton Corbin (who also did Control) takes this into a sort of backroom simmering, it seems also trusting a cast with the likes of Robin Wright, Nina Hoss, Vicky Krieps, Rachel McAdams and Daniel Bruhl, sometimes to an oblique extreme in the manner of lead Philip Seymour Hoffman. There are moments, such as when Hoffman punches out a masher in a bar, that seem injected just to break this, but where it comes off strangest is at the end, where a series of meaningful look reactions tries to drag out the significance and by the time it gets to an outburst by Hoffman, already seems a parody.
Downfall: The Case Against Boeing (2022)
In the annals of business as an intersection for public service, community, cooperation, safety, profit motive, financial speculation, corporate management principles, accountability and damage control, there may not be a more definitive case than that of Boeing. This documentary competently traces the 2018 and 2019 Boeing 737 MAX crashes, in the Java Sea and Ethiopia, through the company history, and as a matter of change in the culture of a business that was once a model of excellence and open communication, considered necessary for reliability and safety.
In the annals of business as an intersection for public service, community, cooperation, safety, profit motive, financial speculation, corporate management principles, accountability and damage control, there may not be a more definitive case than that of Boeing. This documentary competently traces the 2018 and 2019 Boeing 737 MAX crashes, in the Java Sea and Ethiopia, through the company history, and as a matter of change in the culture of a business that was once a model of excellence and open communication, considered necessary for reliability and safety.
The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened (2015)
A project that fails to be made doesn't have to fail after coming out. The result is left in that greatest theater of all, the imagination. Some great movies are there, and the movies about them give us more to imagine and are sometimes great movies for it: Que Viva Mexico, It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles, Burden of Dreams, Lost in La Mancha. Jon Schnepp's documentary about the Tim Burton Superman project with Nicolas Cage seems informal, catch as catch can (and even indulgent that way, like when Jon Peters gets a phone call), as far as the interviews, but it brings together a fine heap of material: designs, drawings, previously recorded interviews, tests of costumes, test footage (a great bit of Cage taking off and landing). As well as giving us the anatomy of a movie project, the good and bad of the development stages, it's a real teaser for a vision of Superman that we did not get in the line set off by the 78 Salkind and Donner movie, which Superman Returns only picked up from.
A project that fails to be made doesn't have to fail after coming out. The result is left in that greatest theater of all, the imagination. Some great movies are there, and the movies about them give us more to imagine and are sometimes great movies for it: Que Viva Mexico, It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles, Burden of Dreams, Lost in La Mancha. Jon Schnepp's documentary about the Tim Burton Superman project with Nicolas Cage seems informal, catch as catch can (and even indulgent that way, like when Jon Peters gets a phone call), as far as the interviews, but it brings together a fine heap of material: designs, drawings, previously recorded interviews, tests of costumes, test footage (a great bit of Cage taking off and landing). As well as giving us the anatomy of a movie project, the good and bad of the development stages, it's a real teaser for a vision of Superman that we did not get in the line set off by the 78 Salkind and Donner movie, which Superman Returns only picked up from.
Superman Returns (2006)
Superman is given the inevitable CG makeover, but it's the Superman movie line so treated. Warner Brothers acquired the rights in 1993 and after several failed projects (see The Death of Superman Lives), got Bryan Singer, who set off the CG superhero line with X-Men, to create the story and direct. It follows the story line of the first two Salkind and Spengler movies, with Lex Luthor as well, this time played by Kevin Spacey, Parker Posey as his eccentric accomplice, and a new newcomer, Brandon Routh as Superman. Backers were scared away from the various failed projects, so what they finally brought out also shows the timidity, returning to the plan of those movies rather than taking another approach, even from the comic books. It's a sort of mellower tone, soft serious, cutting out the highs and lows of the bumbling and broad farce of Richard Donner and Richard Lester, and despite what the more uniform look and richer colors bring, and the CF effects for flying and super feats, it's rather drab.
2/1/23
Superman is given the inevitable CG makeover, but it's the Superman movie line so treated. Warner Brothers acquired the rights in 1993 and after several failed projects (see The Death of Superman Lives), got Bryan Singer, who set off the CG superhero line with X-Men, to create the story and direct. It follows the story line of the first two Salkind and Spengler movies, with Lex Luthor as well, this time played by Kevin Spacey, Parker Posey as his eccentric accomplice, and a new newcomer, Brandon Routh as Superman. Backers were scared away from the various failed projects, so what they finally brought out also shows the timidity, returning to the plan of those movies rather than taking another approach, even from the comic books. It's a sort of mellower tone, soft serious, cutting out the highs and lows of the bumbling and broad farce of Richard Donner and Richard Lester, and despite what the more uniform look and richer colors bring, and the CF effects for flying and super feats, it's rather drab.
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)
Christopher Reeve is credited with the story, because he bargained for a nuclear disarmament theme (as well as nearly double Marlon Brando pay -- Superman is finally bigger than Brando) in exchange for starring in another installment. Fortunately he can't be blamed for the actual script, nor the direction. He also wanted to direct, but that was not acceptable, nor any of his other choices for director. With the budget-slashing measures dictated by Golan and Globus, who bought the rights from the Salkinds, this mess achieved the pop or kitsch message movie level of Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, except maybe not that good. With Jon Cryer as a New Wave clothes hamper replacing Ned Beatty as bumbling sidekick, Gene Hackman proving that not all lines can be overcome by good acting, Mariel Hemingway looking like linebacker Barbie and able to breathe in outer space, some of the worst interior design trends dragging into the late 80s, sequences that look like reels are missing, and a disco Frankenstein, you'll believe pigs can fly.
Christopher Reeve is credited with the story, because he bargained for a nuclear disarmament theme (as well as nearly double Marlon Brando pay -- Superman is finally bigger than Brando) in exchange for starring in another installment. Fortunately he can't be blamed for the actual script, nor the direction. He also wanted to direct, but that was not acceptable, nor any of his other choices for director. With the budget-slashing measures dictated by Golan and Globus, who bought the rights from the Salkinds, this mess achieved the pop or kitsch message movie level of Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, except maybe not that good. With Jon Cryer as a New Wave clothes hamper replacing Ned Beatty as bumbling sidekick, Gene Hackman proving that not all lines can be overcome by good acting, Mariel Hemingway looking like linebacker Barbie and able to breathe in outer space, some of the worst interior design trends dragging into the late 80s, sequences that look like reels are missing, and a disco Frankenstein, you'll believe pigs can fly.
Hunt (2022)
Some Korean history was the basis for some sensationalizing a la Infernal Affairs (from which The Departed was partly derived) about a North Korean mole in the South Korean CIA. Despite the action keeping to a fairly realistic scale, the jump cut structure and pace is so manic, it's hard to keep straight what city, country, year or organization anyone is in, let alone who might be a mole.
Some Korean history was the basis for some sensationalizing a la Infernal Affairs (from which The Departed was partly derived) about a North Korean mole in the South Korean CIA. Despite the action keeping to a fairly realistic scale, the jump cut structure and pace is so manic, it's hard to keep straight what city, country, year or organization anyone is in, let alone who might be a mole.
The Old Way (2023)
A good script can make up for lots of other things, but a pretty cheap way to make movies is by using outdoor locations and having mostly dialogue. Nicolas Cage's latest -- produced in part by Saturn Films, his own production company, and distributed by Saban Films among others, known for fast and furious projects with, e.g., Bruce Willis -- is an example of both. The best moment is when Cage has to endure a store customer's useless rambling and gives a reaction shot more menacing than in the outright hostile confrontations. There are other good moments mostly with dialogue situations, but the whole True Grit style story is pretty thin, some of the action is strained, and Noah Le Gros doesn't really carry the main heavy.
A good script can make up for lots of other things, but a pretty cheap way to make movies is by using outdoor locations and having mostly dialogue. Nicolas Cage's latest -- produced in part by Saturn Films, his own production company, and distributed by Saban Films among others, known for fast and furious projects with, e.g., Bruce Willis -- is an example of both. The best moment is when Cage has to endure a store customer's useless rambling and gives a reaction shot more menacing than in the outright hostile confrontations. There are other good moments mostly with dialogue situations, but the whole True Grit style story is pretty thin, some of the action is strained, and Noah Le Gros doesn't really carry the main heavy.
Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (1980/2006)
A sequel was being made at the same time as Superman, but director Richard Donner was removed from the project and Richard Lester put in charge of the sequel. Though he used lots of Donner's footage, Lester shot other scenes to change the story, and most significantly removed any footage with Marlon Brando. Superman II became somewhat famous as a sequel better than its original, and Lester's snappier pace and less misty tone were part of the reason. But long before the groundswell for the Zack Snyder cut, there was an online movement to see Donner's version. After the death of Marlon Brando, his family estate gave permission to use his footage, and this opened the door for the restoration. (All the Brando decisions involved the backend compensation included in his deal.) The Donner cut was released on DVD in 2006. Now we can see how the events of the two movies were more closely linked, with Superman's heroics at the end of the first setting off the trouble in the second (rather than the more ridiculous confection of the Eiffel Tower terrorist subplot), more Marlon Brando, and how turning back time was supposed to work here rather than in the first movie, and rather than the memory-erasing kiss. The Donner version is cut from the same cloth as the first movie in other respects, with that airy look and pace, less of the funny stuff Lester added to even action sequences despite the bumbling slapstick tack used with Clark Kent and Lex Luthor and his sidekicks, and Lois's scheme to force Clark's reveal manages to be a notch crazier.
A sequel was being made at the same time as Superman, but director Richard Donner was removed from the project and Richard Lester put in charge of the sequel. Though he used lots of Donner's footage, Lester shot other scenes to change the story, and most significantly removed any footage with Marlon Brando. Superman II became somewhat famous as a sequel better than its original, and Lester's snappier pace and less misty tone were part of the reason. But long before the groundswell for the Zack Snyder cut, there was an online movement to see Donner's version. After the death of Marlon Brando, his family estate gave permission to use his footage, and this opened the door for the restoration. (All the Brando decisions involved the backend compensation included in his deal.) The Donner cut was released on DVD in 2006. Now we can see how the events of the two movies were more closely linked, with Superman's heroics at the end of the first setting off the trouble in the second (rather than the more ridiculous confection of the Eiffel Tower terrorist subplot), more Marlon Brando, and how turning back time was supposed to work here rather than in the first movie, and rather than the memory-erasing kiss. The Donner version is cut from the same cloth as the first movie in other respects, with that airy look and pace, less of the funny stuff Lester added to even action sequences despite the bumbling slapstick tack used with Clark Kent and Lex Luthor and his sidekicks, and Lois's scheme to force Clark's reveal manages to be a notch crazier.
Superman: The Movie (1978)
The diaphanous epic vision of the 70s -- and I don't mean vision as exemplar but as the way this movie is looking at things at the time, the view of Geoffrey Unsworth and Richard Donner. It's like the fuzzy morning sunlight of Polaroids at the lake or on suburban sidewalks was cast over farmland vistas and model space cities and penthouse terraces. They made the prestige movie of the first breakout comic book superhero, as if that were the way to confer the right mythic grandeur, but it's in terms even before the blockbuster of the 70s. The whole thing was a project going back to at least 1973, which meant it was being concocted before the success of Jaws or Star Wars and barely on that of The Godfather (Mario Puzo was the original screenwriter). It had the largest movie budget up to that time, so if all the hands in the project, cooks in the soup weren't enough pomp and song and dance, there's that investment, and dressing up, too. The result of all this tugging and fluffing, even if it falls to Donner, is neither comic book, despite its own similar literary reaches if not strains (Marlon Brando and his lines) nor quite Disney, but something of a simulated atmosphere that's like kiddie movies for adults. There's a charm the engineering feats of the mechanical and optical special effects have after the CG era, but it's still like an amusement park bustle and din, of Krypton, New York City and its subway passing for Metropolis, a newsroom cosmetically overcrowded like movie cliche police departments. Even the rewind trick -- the absurdity of convenient powers was nothing new to the comics, Superman has really always been magic as far as imagining the freedom from limits -- emphasizes the effect of carnival ride mechanics, preset cracks and faults, characters running along their tracks.
The diaphanous epic vision of the 70s -- and I don't mean vision as exemplar but as the way this movie is looking at things at the time, the view of Geoffrey Unsworth and Richard Donner. It's like the fuzzy morning sunlight of Polaroids at the lake or on suburban sidewalks was cast over farmland vistas and model space cities and penthouse terraces. They made the prestige movie of the first breakout comic book superhero, as if that were the way to confer the right mythic grandeur, but it's in terms even before the blockbuster of the 70s. The whole thing was a project going back to at least 1973, which meant it was being concocted before the success of Jaws or Star Wars and barely on that of The Godfather (Mario Puzo was the original screenwriter). It had the largest movie budget up to that time, so if all the hands in the project, cooks in the soup weren't enough pomp and song and dance, there's that investment, and dressing up, too. The result of all this tugging and fluffing, even if it falls to Donner, is neither comic book, despite its own similar literary reaches if not strains (Marlon Brando and his lines) nor quite Disney, but something of a simulated atmosphere that's like kiddie movies for adults. There's a charm the engineering feats of the mechanical and optical special effects have after the CG era, but it's still like an amusement park bustle and din, of Krypton, New York City and its subway passing for Metropolis, a newsroom cosmetically overcrowded like movie cliche police departments. Even the rewind trick -- the absurdity of convenient powers was nothing new to the comics, Superman has really always been magic as far as imagining the freedom from limits -- emphasizes the effect of carnival ride mechanics, preset cracks and faults, characters running along their tracks.
Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010)
Turning the tables on the stock Spring Break party bums that are the usual victims in horror films is a good idea, where they're actually the monsters or at least the cause of evil. There's almost another sly turn a la Oliver and Hardy: the hillbilly who thinks he's smarter may prove not to be. But the movie may be too affable for all that, straying off on a romance thread that keeps interrupting the progression and even walking back from the extrapolation of the idea.
1/25/23
Turning the tables on the stock Spring Break party bums that are the usual victims in horror films is a good idea, where they're actually the monsters or at least the cause of evil. There's almost another sly turn a la Oliver and Hardy: the hillbilly who thinks he's smarter may prove not to be. But the movie may be too affable for all that, straying off on a romance thread that keeps interrupting the progression and even walking back from the extrapolation of the idea.
Kiss of Death (1995)
If this is a bit crisp and even flat, it has the advantage of clearing away some of the icing frills put on crime dramas especially after Goodfellas (imitating it not necessarily matching it) and creating some space for the actors. Director Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Fortune) thus provides more a precursor to Sexy Beast, a more simmering character setup, with Nicolas Cage's Little Junior even toning down the 1947 version, which made Richard Widmark famous for his Joker-inspired psychopath (and which in turn inspired Frank Gorshin's maniacal laugh for the Riddler). This was supposed to be David Caruso's lead breakout, but a look at the rest of the cast shows the difference in paths: Samuel L. Jackson, Helen Hunt, Stanley Tucci, Michael Rapaport, Ving Rhames, Philip Baker Hall.
If this is a bit crisp and even flat, it has the advantage of clearing away some of the icing frills put on crime dramas especially after Goodfellas (imitating it not necessarily matching it) and creating some space for the actors. Director Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Fortune) thus provides more a precursor to Sexy Beast, a more simmering character setup, with Nicolas Cage's Little Junior even toning down the 1947 version, which made Richard Widmark famous for his Joker-inspired psychopath (and which in turn inspired Frank Gorshin's maniacal laugh for the Riddler). This was supposed to be David Caruso's lead breakout, but a look at the rest of the cast shows the difference in paths: Samuel L. Jackson, Helen Hunt, Stanley Tucci, Michael Rapaport, Ving Rhames, Philip Baker Hall.
Breaking (2022)
This is competent, attentive, keeps close to the dimensions of the event without worrying too much about puffing it up, and has an especially good cast led by John Boyega and Michael K. Williams. But if it seems like a mini Dog Day Afternoon, that's not just because of the scale. I was thinking this was lacking something, some of that movie's range of interaction, some of the humor the participants showed there. Then I read the article this is based on, "'They didn't have to kill him': The death of Lance Corporal Brian Easley" by Aaron Gell. As with Nitram, where changes were made as if to tone down what might have seemed more sensational in the real story, this seems to have made things more solemn, as if the humor or banality might not be reverent enough or show enough concern.
This is competent, attentive, keeps close to the dimensions of the event without worrying too much about puffing it up, and has an especially good cast led by John Boyega and Michael K. Williams. But if it seems like a mini Dog Day Afternoon, that's not just because of the scale. I was thinking this was lacking something, some of that movie's range of interaction, some of the humor the participants showed there. Then I read the article this is based on, "'They didn't have to kill him': The death of Lance Corporal Brian Easley" by Aaron Gell. As with Nitram, where changes were made as if to tone down what might have seemed more sensational in the real story, this seems to have made things more solemn, as if the humor or banality might not be reverent enough or show enough concern.
Tar (2022)
You had me in the second third, got me back after putting me off in the first, but then you lost me at attacking the podium. In the first part, she talks like a position paper (using anecdotes about Schopenhauer as well as composers -- really?). The apartments, the boxing -- are we dealing with the complexity of this in the form of a lifestyle commercial? Middle section -- excellent stuff, the way the dreams are done, too, the water effect works really well, for the detachment that dream images have, too, and there's a great bit with the bed in a river. We get into the subtleties of a character study, the vicious cycle of control, dramatized and not just declaimed. But the last third, from that thunderclap moment on, through where she ends up, has the arc of recompense, poetic justice if not moral. And the offense here, to me -- following the greatest bit from Seinfeld about being offended as a comedian rather than a Jew -- would be not to women or the #metoo movement or lesbians, but to classical music artists, musicians, composers, even aficionados. The place she ends up has the ring of equating her power and arrogance with her ability, and expressing that only as hauteur, and the smell of reducing not just knowledge or talent, but classical to pedantic.
You had me in the second third, got me back after putting me off in the first, but then you lost me at attacking the podium. In the first part, she talks like a position paper (using anecdotes about Schopenhauer as well as composers -- really?). The apartments, the boxing -- are we dealing with the complexity of this in the form of a lifestyle commercial? Middle section -- excellent stuff, the way the dreams are done, too, the water effect works really well, for the detachment that dream images have, too, and there's a great bit with the bed in a river. We get into the subtleties of a character study, the vicious cycle of control, dramatized and not just declaimed. But the last third, from that thunderclap moment on, through where she ends up, has the arc of recompense, poetic justice if not moral. And the offense here, to me -- following the greatest bit from Seinfeld about being offended as a comedian rather than a Jew -- would be not to women or the #metoo movement or lesbians, but to classical music artists, musicians, composers, even aficionados. The place she ends up has the ring of equating her power and arrogance with her ability, and expressing that only as hauteur, and the smell of reducing not just knowledge or talent, but classical to pedantic.
How to Make a Monster (1958)
The American International Pictures m.o. was to sell an idea with as little cost as possible to actually execute it. As the first company to use focus groups, to find out the idea from their audience, they would create titles and posters first, see which got the best response from exhibitors, then come up with the movie. They acquired, imported, repurposed, pilfered, and bundled movies as the double feature, to increase profits by lowering costs. The movies they actually made had a bait-and-switch approach, like carnival attractions: the promise of horror or a monster on the poster would sell the ticket but the movie would have much more dialogue and minimal payoff of effects, meaning anything that would cost more money. So why not take two such movies, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, and have a plot where the makeup man kills members of the studio? Presto, you've got a collapsible cup: the studio as the set and reusing the masks. This has so many scenes in narrow studio sets with people talking shot from the hips up, it's like a puppet show. There's an Elvis knockoff and color is introduced for the climactic scene as if giving you a bonus rather than less. As a post-Aliens and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade bonus, Paul Maxwell is in it.
The American International Pictures m.o. was to sell an idea with as little cost as possible to actually execute it. As the first company to use focus groups, to find out the idea from their audience, they would create titles and posters first, see which got the best response from exhibitors, then come up with the movie. They acquired, imported, repurposed, pilfered, and bundled movies as the double feature, to increase profits by lowering costs. The movies they actually made had a bait-and-switch approach, like carnival attractions: the promise of horror or a monster on the poster would sell the ticket but the movie would have much more dialogue and minimal payoff of effects, meaning anything that would cost more money. So why not take two such movies, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, and have a plot where the makeup man kills members of the studio? Presto, you've got a collapsible cup: the studio as the set and reusing the masks. This has so many scenes in narrow studio sets with people talking shot from the hips up, it's like a puppet show. There's an Elvis knockoff and color is introduced for the climactic scene as if giving you a bonus rather than less. As a post-Aliens and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade bonus, Paul Maxwell is in it.
Party Girl (1995)
If an 80s coming of age or romantic comedy went and lived in New York City and got into the loft or club scene -- and considerably more street, underground and less straight -- it might look like this. Director Daisy von Scherler Mayer, with her co-writers Harry Birckmayer and Sheila Gaffney, and their cast nicely gleaned for it, and especially Parker Posey for whom the whole thing seems made, get the right glib touch, like Posey's smirky version of voguing. Sort of like a drag version of romantic comedy. I'm just not sure such a New York scene take would really bother with the moral uplift part of the story, the whole thing about being responsible -- would need to or want to. This was the first feature movie to have an Internet premiere.
If an 80s coming of age or romantic comedy went and lived in New York City and got into the loft or club scene -- and considerably more street, underground and less straight -- it might look like this. Director Daisy von Scherler Mayer, with her co-writers Harry Birckmayer and Sheila Gaffney, and their cast nicely gleaned for it, and especially Parker Posey for whom the whole thing seems made, get the right glib touch, like Posey's smirky version of voguing. Sort of like a drag version of romantic comedy. I'm just not sure such a New York scene take would really bother with the moral uplift part of the story, the whole thing about being responsible -- would need to or want to. This was the first feature movie to have an Internet premiere.
Rashomon (1950)
This is a case of a movie widely regarded as a masterpiece that just doesn't do it for me. Even among Akira Kurosawa's work, it strikes me as earnest in a naive or overwrought way, and not the sophistication of Seven Samurai or High and Low. The framing device of the three men who meet in the rain at the ruined city gate is what does it. If we'd had just the hearing before the judge and the flashbacks of the various conflicting accounts, the histrionics could be taken as the posturing of the parties, part of their perspectives. The reaction of the men at the gate is a more strident dichotomy of perspective between a moralist disillusionment and the cynically self-serving, really two sides of the same coin. They say it's the strangest story they've ever heard, more horrible than bandits, famine, plague, men being killed off like insects, so if they're not framing what's to come for us in that sense, setting it up, they're showing the frame of their reaction. The horror of this strangest story -- that causes the monk to say he may lose his faith in humanity -- but why did he become a monk? -- is that lesson, or demonstration, that each person at least portrays things differently and, more significantly, views them differently. For this to cause such a trembling in the foundation of one person's constitution is itself a symptom of holding one's own view as objectivity, general or absolute truth, the way things are for anyone. The ending with the baby and the note of hope plays out this disposition. Is difference, complexity, the multiplicity of meaning even beyond perspective, the end of the world, or the beginning? Kurosawa's direction is better than his script for all this, more subtle, with finer material detail, more attuned to nuance, such as the different angles of the rain or the sunlight through the trees, or even reversing perspective, in one great example showing the woman from behind each of the men on either side of her (he also breaks the 180-degree rule).
This is a case of a movie widely regarded as a masterpiece that just doesn't do it for me. Even among Akira Kurosawa's work, it strikes me as earnest in a naive or overwrought way, and not the sophistication of Seven Samurai or High and Low. The framing device of the three men who meet in the rain at the ruined city gate is what does it. If we'd had just the hearing before the judge and the flashbacks of the various conflicting accounts, the histrionics could be taken as the posturing of the parties, part of their perspectives. The reaction of the men at the gate is a more strident dichotomy of perspective between a moralist disillusionment and the cynically self-serving, really two sides of the same coin. They say it's the strangest story they've ever heard, more horrible than bandits, famine, plague, men being killed off like insects, so if they're not framing what's to come for us in that sense, setting it up, they're showing the frame of their reaction. The horror of this strangest story -- that causes the monk to say he may lose his faith in humanity -- but why did he become a monk? -- is that lesson, or demonstration, that each person at least portrays things differently and, more significantly, views them differently. For this to cause such a trembling in the foundation of one person's constitution is itself a symptom of holding one's own view as objectivity, general or absolute truth, the way things are for anyone. The ending with the baby and the note of hope plays out this disposition. Is difference, complexity, the multiplicity of meaning even beyond perspective, the end of the world, or the beginning? Kurosawa's direction is better than his script for all this, more subtle, with finer material detail, more attuned to nuance, such as the different angles of the rain or the sunlight through the trees, or even reversing perspective, in one great example showing the woman from behind each of the men on either side of her (he also breaks the 180-degree rule).
Pearl (2022)
This is from the writer, director and actress team that brought us X -- this time actress Mia Goth also wrote -- and like that, it has a strangely straight and fresh-faced way of trying to be puckish, as with the persona of Goth herself. Certainly an approach other than modern horror movie cliches is welcome, but I'm not sure that's Little House on the Prairie. Well, come to think of it, maybe that's a good idea, but somehow this isn't that either.
1/18/23
This is from the writer, director and actress team that brought us X -- this time actress Mia Goth also wrote -- and like that, it has a strangely straight and fresh-faced way of trying to be puckish, as with the persona of Goth herself. Certainly an approach other than modern horror movie cliches is welcome, but I'm not sure that's Little House on the Prairie. Well, come to think of it, maybe that's a good idea, but somehow this isn't that either.
Hulk (2003)
You may not get past the Chicago relish shade of green, or the still sometimes too cartoony looking CG, or the plodding script that stretches out flashback revelations and setup way beyond when you know what's coming for either, but Ang Lee still managed to make this interesting in a different way than just action graphics hyperbole. He used the comic panel and its own frame-breaking techniques as the model for split screen, wipes and dissolves, and a softer touch with the actors, mainly Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly and Nick Nolte, to give this a different feel, certainly than the direction the superhero movies went.
You may not get past the Chicago relish shade of green, or the still sometimes too cartoony looking CG, or the plodding script that stretches out flashback revelations and setup way beyond when you know what's coming for either, but Ang Lee still managed to make this interesting in a different way than just action graphics hyperbole. He used the comic panel and its own frame-breaking techniques as the model for split screen, wipes and dissolves, and a softer touch with the actors, mainly Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly and Nick Nolte, to give this a different feel, certainly than the direction the superhero movies went.
The Menu (2022)
A tempting idea, similar enough in premise and in pomposity-bursting to be a companion to Glass Onion, and it does have some fun, but it keeps to the pace of plot mechanics, having a tendency to reset, rather than letting go or building up for more surreal inspiration.
A tempting idea, similar enough in premise and in pomposity-bursting to be a companion to Glass Onion, and it does have some fun, but it keeps to the pace of plot mechanics, having a tendency to reset, rather than letting go or building up for more surreal inspiration.
Decision to Leave (2022)
There's enough of an idea here, but in a trend that's common to movies all over the world, they try to expand the story to include more rather than get more out of the main idea, or just trust it as enough. This makes them also compress and elide and jump. Get the turtles in. There is a style of cutting here that is taken for granted, but doesn't always come off that way. It's often assumed there is no other beat needed to something got down. For example, when the cop's wife reveals she's onto the woman suspect, there's an abrupt cut, without any further discussion or even an extra dramatic beat without talk. We go on to other things as if that thread is left off, so that it doesn't seem to matter, but then as unexpectedly, some time later, there is a cut to a scene with the wife moving out.
There's enough of an idea here, but in a trend that's common to movies all over the world, they try to expand the story to include more rather than get more out of the main idea, or just trust it as enough. This makes them also compress and elide and jump. Get the turtles in. There is a style of cutting here that is taken for granted, but doesn't always come off that way. It's often assumed there is no other beat needed to something got down. For example, when the cop's wife reveals she's onto the woman suspect, there's an abrupt cut, without any further discussion or even an extra dramatic beat without talk. We go on to other things as if that thread is left off, so that it doesn't seem to matter, but then as unexpectedly, some time later, there is a cut to a scene with the wife moving out.
White Noise (2022)
Like The Fabelmans this has a coda, in this case the closing credits, that suggests an approach that may be better than the rest of the movie, or at least that the rest of the movie didn't have. It's also an LCD Soundsystem song, created just for this, which happens to come together better than some of their famous ones and even makes for subtler references to the book or its lore. For Noah Baumbach to want to take on Don Delilo's novel was already folly, the sort of translation to movies that congeals literature into mere plot. With an Altman approach at the beginning, overlapping dialogue, Baumbach achieves a kind of sing-song literary affectation, and then elsewhere it's the sort of quaint quirky of The World According to Garp -- the movie. There are moments where this comes off as a kind of Joseph Heller-esque black comedy Outbreak or War of the Worlds, but even Delilo's prescient stuff, like the subjects of academia, are done like strange, whipped up musical number versions of citation. So why not go for that all out, like the closing credits bit? Delilo's book itself may have a more staid literary, moral critique position ultimately, but the writing has a sight and sound of its own.
Like The Fabelmans this has a coda, in this case the closing credits, that suggests an approach that may be better than the rest of the movie, or at least that the rest of the movie didn't have. It's also an LCD Soundsystem song, created just for this, which happens to come together better than some of their famous ones and even makes for subtler references to the book or its lore. For Noah Baumbach to want to take on Don Delilo's novel was already folly, the sort of translation to movies that congeals literature into mere plot. With an Altman approach at the beginning, overlapping dialogue, Baumbach achieves a kind of sing-song literary affectation, and then elsewhere it's the sort of quaint quirky of The World According to Garp -- the movie. There are moments where this comes off as a kind of Joseph Heller-esque black comedy Outbreak or War of the Worlds, but even Delilo's prescient stuff, like the subjects of academia, are done like strange, whipped up musical number versions of citation. So why not go for that all out, like the closing credits bit? Delilo's book itself may have a more staid literary, moral critique position ultimately, but the writing has a sight and sound of its own.
Lord of War (2005)
Based on various arms dealers such as Viktor Bout, the prisoner exchanged for American basketball player Brittney Griner, written and directed by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, Anon, script for The Truman Show), this uses first-person narration, to the camera and then in voiceover, by the character played by Nicolas Cage, like a personal success story, to demonstrate the spiraling rationale in arms production and distribution, in large part created by the Cold War, but which has only increased since. Cage's player presents his own ethical mire, which not surprisingly becomes a trap for himself, but in the process gives us a tour of the whole nasty, sordid worldwide predicament of arms. It's flashy and jukey, even sometimes acts like the Cage action or offbeat vehicle it looks like it might be from ads, but manages to get across the gist of the matter.
1/10/23
Based on various arms dealers such as Viktor Bout, the prisoner exchanged for American basketball player Brittney Griner, written and directed by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, Anon, script for The Truman Show), this uses first-person narration, to the camera and then in voiceover, by the character played by Nicolas Cage, like a personal success story, to demonstrate the spiraling rationale in arms production and distribution, in large part created by the Cold War, but which has only increased since. Cage's player presents his own ethical mire, which not surprisingly becomes a trap for himself, but in the process gives us a tour of the whole nasty, sordid worldwide predicament of arms. It's flashy and jukey, even sometimes acts like the Cage action or offbeat vehicle it looks like it might be from ads, but manages to get across the gist of the matter.
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983)
This is the 40th anniversary year of the movie. My original review from the year of release is in the print version of my comments, Film/Script.
This is the 40th anniversary year of the movie. My original review from the year of release is in the print version of my comments, Film/Script.
The Last Heist (2022)
Bull (2021)
Playing tough -- metaphysical. Brit mob movies have their own particular accent, predominately cockney, their own idioms, their own cliches. Get Carter, The Long Good Friday, Sexy Beast, Snatch, The Krays and Legend, Layer Cake are some of the more famous ones, but there's also an undercard of independent, lower budget and TV movies that may seem to keep all this going as hand-me-down. Two recent movies, that otherwise seem to cut whole from the same cloth, offer a similar twist to the gangster genre or line, and as such an interesting contrast for another reason. The Last Heist is the more modest of the two, its means evidently, but even in its conception more content with obvious derivation, of Reservoir Dogs and Scorsese as well as geezers with guns, and in its execution the blokes around a table are a notch or two towards the amateur side, missing their dramatic notes just enough for a pretendy feel that's amusing in a different way, like watching your kids' play rather than getting into the story. When they get to the surprise turn -- and I'm avoiding spoilers here -- it's a good idea, injects a different air and relieves it from the usual courses, but just as quickly it begins to sag, like they don't really know what to do with the idea, and besides it's not exactly original. Something similar had been done by Bull, which, on the other hand, has a much moodier, kitchen-sink approach, much more assured composure, photography, use of locations -- like writer, director Paul Andrew Williams' London to Brighton before -- but even with a keener eye to casting, better acting and tone, is overreaching. It's played too seriously, winds the pretending up too tight, dour, and particularly next to The Last Heist. I'm not sure if horror movie level is quite what it was going for, but it could be taken for a nearly religious solemnity. Something like High Plains Drifter offers an example of a more wry touch, devilish in demeanor as well.
1/7/23
Bull (2021)
Playing tough -- metaphysical. Brit mob movies have their own particular accent, predominately cockney, their own idioms, their own cliches. Get Carter, The Long Good Friday, Sexy Beast, Snatch, The Krays and Legend, Layer Cake are some of the more famous ones, but there's also an undercard of independent, lower budget and TV movies that may seem to keep all this going as hand-me-down. Two recent movies, that otherwise seem to cut whole from the same cloth, offer a similar twist to the gangster genre or line, and as such an interesting contrast for another reason. The Last Heist is the more modest of the two, its means evidently, but even in its conception more content with obvious derivation, of Reservoir Dogs and Scorsese as well as geezers with guns, and in its execution the blokes around a table are a notch or two towards the amateur side, missing their dramatic notes just enough for a pretendy feel that's amusing in a different way, like watching your kids' play rather than getting into the story. When they get to the surprise turn -- and I'm avoiding spoilers here -- it's a good idea, injects a different air and relieves it from the usual courses, but just as quickly it begins to sag, like they don't really know what to do with the idea, and besides it's not exactly original. Something similar had been done by Bull, which, on the other hand, has a much moodier, kitchen-sink approach, much more assured composure, photography, use of locations -- like writer, director Paul Andrew Williams' London to Brighton before -- but even with a keener eye to casting, better acting and tone, is overreaching. It's played too seriously, winds the pretending up too tight, dour, and particularly next to The Last Heist. I'm not sure if horror movie level is quite what it was going for, but it could be taken for a nearly religious solemnity. Something like High Plains Drifter offers an example of a more wry touch, devilish in demeanor as well.
High Heat (2022)
The folks who brought you Brucesploitation got Don Johnson and Olga Kurylenko to stand around in a restaurant kitchen a lot and play mafia and ex-KGB. (They'd already got Olga to do one of the Willis movies, see White Elephant.) The whole cast probably does a way better job than it should of keeping the flimsy script afloat.
The folks who brought you Brucesploitation got Don Johnson and Olga Kurylenko to stand around in a restaurant kitchen a lot and play mafia and ex-KGB. (They'd already got Olga to do one of the Willis movies, see White Elephant.) The whole cast probably does a way better job than it should of keeping the flimsy script afloat.
R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned (2022)
And add Back to the Future 3 to the mix. This prequel sequel looks and feels a few grades down in budget, but it settles into a somewhat more earnest version of the confusion over when ghosts can act like or affect solid matter and appear as whom to whom.
And add Back to the Future 3 to the mix. This prequel sequel looks and feels a few grades down in budget, but it settles into a somewhat more earnest version of the confusion over when ghosts can act like or affect solid matter and appear as whom to whom.
The Sound of 007 (2022)
Documentary about the music of the James Bond franchise, with emphasis on the main songs. As one of the subjects says, everyone wants an anecdote, but the creative process, in this case composing music, doesn't always lend itself to that. There are some morsels here, some fun peeks behind the scenes at the process, particularly with John Barry, a good dose of Shirley Bassey, and the serendipitous routes that don't always live up to teleological ideals, but are more interesting for it. But there's also a lot of waxing. Considering what the series did with the last installment, this may seem apt, but it's not like James Bond ever lacked promotion.
Documentary about the music of the James Bond franchise, with emphasis on the main songs. As one of the subjects says, everyone wants an anecdote, but the creative process, in this case composing music, doesn't always lend itself to that. There are some morsels here, some fun peeks behind the scenes at the process, particularly with John Barry, a good dose of Shirley Bassey, and the serendipitous routes that don't always live up to teleological ideals, but are more interesting for it. But there's also a lot of waxing. Considering what the series did with the last installment, this may seem apt, but it's not like James Bond ever lacked promotion.
Mutant Blast (2018)
Troma Portugal. What starts out like a straight-to-video action or zombie movie becomes something more surreal with mutation as an excuse. Rat for a hand (joke plot excuse for a ridiculous puppet), a lobster that speaks French, a dolphin with a katana, and bleeping of any use of the word "zombie" give this an absurdist flair, if in a wilfully low-grade, doofus humor way.
Troma Portugal. What starts out like a straight-to-video action or zombie movie becomes something more surreal with mutation as an excuse. Rat for a hand (joke plot excuse for a ridiculous puppet), a lobster that speaks French, a dolphin with a katana, and bleeping of any use of the word "zombie" give this an absurdist flair, if in a wilfully low-grade, doofus humor way.
City Girl (1930)
F.W. Murnau, director of Nosferatu, a pillar of German Expressionist film, and The Last Laugh, made Sunrise (#11 on the latest Sight and Sound poll) in the U.S. before this. A Chicago waitress falls for a Minnesota farmer and goes back to the farm with him. The city v. country theme was prevalent in the silent film era (it's in Sunrise, too), but to what extent it reflected the general circumstance of the transfer from agricultural to industrial society, the growth of cities as cultural centers and the change in lifestyle, depended on the interpretation or angle of the filmmakers. This script, based on a play, The Mud Turtle, is a fairly straightforward melodrama that stirs up all the ambivalence about the outsider, creates a hostile environment, and then redeems everyone in the end. Murnau's contribution is the sophistication of breaking of the proscenium, with his placement, angles, medium to close shots, and tracking shots in the fields making it all look sharper than the plot. Some have said this movie was an influence for Days of Heaven, though I've not found anywhere that Terrence Malick said or acknowledged this, but he did say about Badlands, "The critics talked about influences on the picture and in most cases referred to films I had never seen" (Sight and Sound interview with Beverly Walker, Spring 1975). You can call it a precursor when it comes to shots of wheatfields, harvests and storms.
F.W. Murnau, director of Nosferatu, a pillar of German Expressionist film, and The Last Laugh, made Sunrise (#11 on the latest Sight and Sound poll) in the U.S. before this. A Chicago waitress falls for a Minnesota farmer and goes back to the farm with him. The city v. country theme was prevalent in the silent film era (it's in Sunrise, too), but to what extent it reflected the general circumstance of the transfer from agricultural to industrial society, the growth of cities as cultural centers and the change in lifestyle, depended on the interpretation or angle of the filmmakers. This script, based on a play, The Mud Turtle, is a fairly straightforward melodrama that stirs up all the ambivalence about the outsider, creates a hostile environment, and then redeems everyone in the end. Murnau's contribution is the sophistication of breaking of the proscenium, with his placement, angles, medium to close shots, and tracking shots in the fields making it all look sharper than the plot. Some have said this movie was an influence for Days of Heaven, though I've not found anywhere that Terrence Malick said or acknowledged this, but he did say about Badlands, "The critics talked about influences on the picture and in most cases referred to films I had never seen" (Sight and Sound interview with Beverly Walker, Spring 1975). You can call it a precursor when it comes to shots of wheatfields, harvests and storms.
The Hand (1965)
Speaking of Mad God and its themes, this famous Czech stop motion short serves as another precursor in more than one way. Jiri Trnka became the major figure in Czech animation in the 1950s and the link to the tradition of puppetry, which he was also involved with, especially via stop motion. Most of his films were versions of fairy tales, folk tales or historical works like A Midsummer Night's Dream, but his last film was this more abstract one in which a Harlequinesque puppet makes flower pots and then a large white glove hand barges in and insists this be changed to hand statues. The puppet show and parable quality didn't disguise the comment on tyranny over art and representation -- this preceded the explicit political films of the Czech New Wave -- but there is even the further reflexive implication of the hand and the puppet, the artist and his creations.
Speaking of Mad God and its themes, this famous Czech stop motion short serves as another precursor in more than one way. Jiri Trnka became the major figure in Czech animation in the 1950s and the link to the tradition of puppetry, which he was also involved with, especially via stop motion. Most of his films were versions of fairy tales, folk tales or historical works like A Midsummer Night's Dream, but his last film was this more abstract one in which a Harlequinesque puppet makes flower pots and then a large white glove hand barges in and insists this be changed to hand statues. The puppet show and parable quality didn't disguise the comment on tyranny over art and representation -- this preceded the explicit political films of the Czech New Wave -- but there is even the further reflexive implication of the hand and the puppet, the artist and his creations.
Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus (2010)
You may want to see this for Jaleel White (Urkel), Robert Picardo and Gary Stretch with lots of intent looks, urgent imperatives and dumb joke insults switching off between makeshift ship bridges, a helicopter and Photoshop-level special effects, and if not for them, then because it boils everything down to such a pure formula of this indiscriminate alternation. Like Star Trek: Crock O' Shit.
You may want to see this for Jaleel White (Urkel), Robert Picardo and Gary Stretch with lots of intent looks, urgent imperatives and dumb joke insults switching off between makeshift ship bridges, a helicopter and Photoshop-level special effects, and if not for them, then because it boils everything down to such a pure formula of this indiscriminate alternation. Like Star Trek: Crock O' Shit.
Nitram (2021)
If you read about the real Martin Bryant and the Port Arthur massacre, it may seem more sensational than this movie, like buying 30 new cars instead of just one, or taking many trips where he had captive company on the flights, the rich woman's mother and Bryant's father's involvement with their house, or the altering of photos by the press. This movie seems to have drawn down rather than trumped up, but just as there are consequences for not showing as much as for showing (cf. Heavenly Creatures), the kind of dramatic closeness this achieves may be at the cost of the greater difficulty and implication for everyone.
If you read about the real Martin Bryant and the Port Arthur massacre, it may seem more sensational than this movie, like buying 30 new cars instead of just one, or taking many trips where he had captive company on the flights, the rich woman's mother and Bryant's father's involvement with their house, or the altering of photos by the press. This movie seems to have drawn down rather than trumped up, but just as there are consequences for not showing as much as for showing (cf. Heavenly Creatures), the kind of dramatic closeness this achieves may be at the cost of the greater difficulty and implication for everyone.
Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975)
More melodramatic than realism, but leaner than melodrama, Rainer Werner Fassbinder seems to be playing it here about as straight he gets. But the dirt is passed around on everyone, politely exploiting Mother Küsters's tragedy for their own ends.
More melodramatic than realism, but leaner than melodrama, Rainer Werner Fassbinder seems to be playing it here about as straight he gets. But the dirt is passed around on everyone, politely exploiting Mother Küsters's tragedy for their own ends.
The Worst Person in the World (2021)
The conversations in awkward and painful moments in relationships are done well, and are bound to touch nerves, but flourishes that come off as self-indulgence and provocation may make the title work worse than they wanted. Or is that better?
The conversations in awkward and painful moments in relationships are done well, and are bound to touch nerves, but flourishes that come off as self-indulgence and provocation may make the title work worse than they wanted. Or is that better?
Fragment of an Empire (1929)
This 1929 movie was not so much lost as perhaps its director was. Fridrikh Ermler is hardly known in the West, but in his day he was considered as highly as Sergei Eisenstein, by Eisenstein himself as well as Charlie Chaplin and G.W. Pabst. The restoration of this film in 2018, based on a 35mm print at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam by a team led by Robert Byrne of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and Peter Bagrov, former archivist of Russia's Gosfilmofond, may help with that of the director. While not the montage heights of Eisenstien or Dziga Vertov, there's still the rhetorical sophistication that makes Soviet films look ahead of their time in the silent era, including some striking imagery, such as the use of rays of light, from lanterns or trains, cutting the dark screen, making both an abstract pattern and story device, light hinting like sound, and Jesus on the cross with a gas mask. The story has its own rhetorical thrust, with a shellshocked soldier (Fyodor Nikitin, in a great performance, and who sometimes looks like a relative of Mark Hamill) returning to the post-revolution world and waking up to the changes like a Rip Van Winkle.
This 1929 movie was not so much lost as perhaps its director was. Fridrikh Ermler is hardly known in the West, but in his day he was considered as highly as Sergei Eisenstein, by Eisenstein himself as well as Charlie Chaplin and G.W. Pabst. The restoration of this film in 2018, based on a 35mm print at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam by a team led by Robert Byrne of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and Peter Bagrov, former archivist of Russia's Gosfilmofond, may help with that of the director. While not the montage heights of Eisenstien or Dziga Vertov, there's still the rhetorical sophistication that makes Soviet films look ahead of their time in the silent era, including some striking imagery, such as the use of rays of light, from lanterns or trains, cutting the dark screen, making both an abstract pattern and story device, light hinting like sound, and Jesus on the cross with a gas mask. The story has its own rhetorical thrust, with a shellshocked soldier (Fyodor Nikitin, in a great performance, and who sometimes looks like a relative of Mark Hamill) returning to the post-revolution world and waking up to the changes like a Rip Van Winkle.
Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963)
A collection of four short films by Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ugo Gregoretti (thus the title, abbreviations of their names). The loose theme is modern life, with, for example, Gregoretti's segment contrasting a lecture on marketing with a family incidentally dealing with TV, the car and highways, a supermarket and restaurant, and a real-estate development. What's notably similar about the different time is the pandering ploys of the marketing guru, and in Rosellini's segment, the use of 8mm film by characters prefiguring cell phones and digital video. Godard's segment is the most interesting, with the blunt cutaways to Paris streets that seem all the more intimate in their distance, and with the sci-fi theme that's thrown down like a joke or craziness as much as metaphor for jealousy or unexpected behavior, anticipating Alphaville. Pasolini's segment has Orson Welles playing a movie director.
A collection of four short films by Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ugo Gregoretti (thus the title, abbreviations of their names). The loose theme is modern life, with, for example, Gregoretti's segment contrasting a lecture on marketing with a family incidentally dealing with TV, the car and highways, a supermarket and restaurant, and a real-estate development. What's notably similar about the different time is the pandering ploys of the marketing guru, and in Rosellini's segment, the use of 8mm film by characters prefiguring cell phones and digital video. Godard's segment is the most interesting, with the blunt cutaways to Paris streets that seem all the more intimate in their distance, and with the sci-fi theme that's thrown down like a joke or craziness as much as metaphor for jealousy or unexpected behavior, anticipating Alphaville. Pasolini's segment has Orson Welles playing a movie director.
The War of the Gargantuas (1966)
Can't get enough kaiju. So Toho Studios speculated, and kept assigning Ishiro Honda, director of the original Godzilla, to more. After Mothra and Rodan and King Kong and Frankenstein and Ghidorah and more, how about a twin monster set of rivals, like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Cain and Abel, good and evil, but sort of monkey suit versions. Despite the complex relationship of the green one and the brown one -- and Russ Tamblyn is the American star front to the cadre of Japanese authorities on hand to comment this for us -- the highlight of the movie is Kipp Hamilton singing "The Words Get Stuck in My Throat." The song was covered by Devo.
Can't get enough kaiju. So Toho Studios speculated, and kept assigning Ishiro Honda, director of the original Godzilla, to more. After Mothra and Rodan and King Kong and Frankenstein and Ghidorah and more, how about a twin monster set of rivals, like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Cain and Abel, good and evil, but sort of monkey suit versions. Despite the complex relationship of the green one and the brown one -- and Russ Tamblyn is the American star front to the cadre of Japanese authorities on hand to comment this for us -- the highlight of the movie is Kipp Hamilton singing "The Words Get Stuck in My Throat." The song was covered by Devo.
Fay Grim (2006)
When Jeff Goldblum shows up as a CIA agent, it seems to be in the same ironic register of characters commenting almost as asides on their situation, already set down by Parker Posey in a more rumpled, exasperated way, though still at a mile a minute. The constant Dutch tilt seems to be hiding much of the locations, and gives that low-key, if not amateurish feel of Hal Hartley that sometimes the meandering rises above and often does not. Here, it all starts building up mostly in the dialogue as a literary conceit, where an offbeat poet and his even shabbier prodigy, Henry Fool -- this is a sequel of sorts to the movie of that name -- have connections to just about every political conflict U.S. intelligence is interested in and via that to greater history and culture, as the cryptic match of ancient texts. But about the time it turns into an illuminati shaggy dog story, it also takes on a serious political thriller tone, showing more of the European locations, leaving us neither laughing nor crying for the characters and the whole house of cards, however reflexive or waggish, like a theory sketched out with in-joke details.
When Jeff Goldblum shows up as a CIA agent, it seems to be in the same ironic register of characters commenting almost as asides on their situation, already set down by Parker Posey in a more rumpled, exasperated way, though still at a mile a minute. The constant Dutch tilt seems to be hiding much of the locations, and gives that low-key, if not amateurish feel of Hal Hartley that sometimes the meandering rises above and often does not. Here, it all starts building up mostly in the dialogue as a literary conceit, where an offbeat poet and his even shabbier prodigy, Henry Fool -- this is a sequel of sorts to the movie of that name -- have connections to just about every political conflict U.S. intelligence is interested in and via that to greater history and culture, as the cryptic match of ancient texts. But about the time it turns into an illuminati shaggy dog story, it also takes on a serious political thriller tone, showing more of the European locations, leaving us neither laughing nor crying for the characters and the whole house of cards, however reflexive or waggish, like a theory sketched out with in-joke details.
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Entries by Greg Macon for the Facebook group Movie Brains, related to film comments on this website, Fixion. Text for movie comments this page © 2023 Greg Macon. Banner image from By the Law by Lev Kuleshov.
Contact: mail@fixionsytes.net