Yelling to the Sky (Mahoney, 2011)|||||4.5
The Masseurs and a Woman (Shimizu, 1938)|||||6.5
Mr. Thank You (Shimizu, 1936)|||||6.5
The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978)|||||6.5
Bewitched (Gu) (Kuei, 1981)|||||4
Tabu (Gomes, 2012)|||||7.5
Interesting and ponderous. An experimental epic, infusing blood to history, contrasting it with our contemporary malaise of disconnection from the conditions and events around us.
Two Seconds (LeRoy, 1932)|||||6.5
Safe in Hell (Wellman, 1931)|||||8.5
The Manitou (Girdler, 1978)|||||3
Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, 2012)|||||7.5
"Her compulsively watchable film brings a global exchange of unthinkable pain down to earth while still retaining the essence of its ineffability. Zero Dark Thirty is ultimately about unknowable cost... Joseph Jon Lanthier" - Slant's Top 25 of 2012 List
The film's an apology all right. Not for torture, but for recklessness and institutionalized power that is just how the political, operative world works, and seems to have self-realized itself - been compacted into a purest density, a brilliant, malignant diamond - in modern times, as in this decade of drones, air operations, air surveillance, remote detainee camps, and remoteness in general, all to contestable "results." This film has worth as a document - if not in accuracy, in capturing the reality of reality's drab moral chaos. Bigelow's product is perhaps the closest the US has gotten to Assayas.
Dragnet Girl (Ozu, 1933)||||8
Rendez-vous (Techine, 1985)|||||7.5
Five Deadly Venoms (Chang, 1978)|||||6
Demonlover (Assayas, 2002)||||7.5
The Odd Life of Timothy Green (Hedges, 2012)|||||4
Les Miserables (Hooper, 2012)|||||5.5
This will be absolutely excruciating to some, while others - I'd call them those who aren't averse to, or even can appreciate, unashamed sentimentalism - will be moved by the film's earnest aesthetic search for extreme emotion and embrace of melodrama. I am in the latter group, while admitting this film is a nightmare of hollow slavishness to beloved but questionably valuable source material.
But color me surprised by how much I sort of love Hooper's "innovative" stylistic approach to the movie musical. His messy framing, brazen "gritty" mise en scene, handheld camera, proliferate close-ups and insert shots, and rambunctious montage editing of all these things make it seem at times like a musical made by a renegade rock n' roll filmmaker of the 60's/70's, while the "verité" filming doesn't bleed out the theatricality but actually supports the idea of our watching - and being addressed - their emotional appeals on high. This film has a sense of burlesque and theatricality that makes it feel a real honoring of theater traditions, which I'll admit makes Hooper a much more daring and honorary reviver of the ideal of the movie musical than Tim Burton. Unfortunately this project was largely ridiculous from the word "Go."
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