August 2012

August 2012

* Twitch of the Death Nerve (Bava, 1971)|||||5.5
The Turin Horse (Tarr, Hranitzky, 2011)|||||5.5
Torture Garden (Francis, 1967)|||||5.5
ParaNorman (Fell & Butler, 2012)|||||5.5
In Praise of Love (Godard, 2001)|||||8
The Apparition (Lincoln, 2012)|||||1.5
Eventually painful.
Dracula 2000 (Lussier, 1999)|||||3.5
* Raising Cain (De Palma, 1992)|||||6
The entire film is never quite as good as the often sublime last fifteen minutes, but still supreme style and audacious entertainment. The fan re-cut of the film is a fascinating attempt, but it doesn't work at all, IMO, and so I greatly suggest all to stick to the studio cut. Like Touch of Evil and Halloween 2, another case of sometimes, the suits do know best.
Blood for Dracula (Morrissey, 1974)|||||6
Salem's Lot (Salomon, 2004) (TV miniseries)|||||2.5
The Awakening (Murphy, 2011)|||||5
It is no work of singularity, but judged simply as a dramatic work - part generic ghost flick, part character-driven BBC drama - this one is extremely well done.
Murphy has a solid sense of his story and some rich themes of survival-guilt and corporeal self-worth (as manifested in subject matter of wartime, school boy life, and nascent feminism, with a dash of sexual healing and colonialism), and it shows in some very apt mise en scene and striking directorial details - such as early scenes of deathly pale school boys running in packs, or a tit flash that is too good in its aplomb and its succinctness (there's also a penis flash, which makes me think Murphy really thought this through...).
It's pretty derivative of a certain film, but while the convolutions and final twists will annoy many, I don't regret them as they lead to the film's best sequence (of a complex, operatic nature) and a rich emotional ending.
Mill of the Stone Women (Ferroni, 1960)|||||6
* Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932)|||||8.5
The Burrowers (Petty, 2008)|||||5
Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi, 1954)|||||7.5
* Santa Sangre (Jodorowsky, 1989)|||||6.5
Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin, 2012)|||||4.5
J. Edgar (Eastwood, 2011)|||||7
Eastwood's thought of as a pretty dry filmmaker, and his films generally are, but his camera is actually always quite fanciful. No exception here, where his flighty camera movements and unpretentious dramatic intuitiveness surprisingly fits Dustin Lance Black's screenplay of Todd Haynesian camp poeticism. And he really can pound the conceptual motifs (aka lots and lots of match-cuts) of history in cycle/progression, and institutions in growth/stagnation.
More existential reverie couched in history than plodding biopic, thanks to Black's achronological structuring and concerns of the more personal, emotional, and philosophical nature. Not too political, then, but it's clearly critical of the man and wary of the systems he helped create, if not in the scathing and comprehensive way the historical figure may have deserved.
Noami Watts somewhat steals the film with a subtly affecting performance in a very minimal role.
Bend of the River (Mann, 1952)|||||7
La Belle Captive (Robbe-Grillet, 1983)|||||6.5
The Perfume of the Lady in Black (Barilli, 1974)|||||4.5