Log it Stick it Work it

February 2012

2012-02-02T00:37:00.001-08:00

February 2012

Storytelling (Solondz, 2001)|||||6
* Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)|||||8
The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Rossellini, 1966)|||||7
* The Changeling (Medak, 1980)|||||5.5
A Dangerous Method (Cronenberg, 2011)|||||7.5
A film about flailing intellectuals and their circuitous intellectual think, and aware of their desire to change the world and the ironies of their alternating successes and failures to do so. The ending is quaintly sentimental, but it's a wonderful way to end the film after all the film's proper restraint and historical perspective (without forgoing those things, just melding them with the film's ultimate melancholy).
* Bigger Than Life (Ray, 1956)|||||7.5
The Ruling Class (Medak, 1972)|||||7.5
The Wicker Tree (Hardy, 2010)|||||6
This is delightful. If you like your film-making dirty and 70s - spontaneous, non-cookie-cutter, not afraid of honest-to-goodness personality and film-making euphoria - you might be able to forgive the film its numerous failures and embarrassments, and rejoice that Robin Hardy still has the gleeful vision he imbued into The Wicker Man, if now with more outwardly camp goals and compromised [digital age] execution.

January 2012

2012-01-02T11:14:00.000-08:00

January 2012

Psycho III (Perkins, 1986)|||||6.5
Excalibur (Boorman, 1981)|||||6
* Caché (Haneke, 2005)|||||7.5
To Sleep With Anger (Burnett, 1990)|||||7.5
Psycho II (Franklin, 1983)|||||5
Cold Fish (Sono, 2010)|||||6
Europa (Trier, 1991)|||||8
Germany Year Zero (Rossellini, 1948)|||||7.5
Albert Nobbs (Garcia, 2011)|||||4
War Horse (Spielberg, 2011)|||||5.5
The story is okay enough. Survey of war yadda yadda, which is fine and good, but always tilting towards retrograde in the hands of fuzzy, the-values-we-hold-dear, let's-keep-on-holding-them-dear Spielberg.
A Separation (Farhadi, 2011)|||||7.5
Blistering social observation, and an incredibly well-written dramatic tale of moral complexity.
Shame (McQueen, 2011)|||||5
Reverse Shot: "... that he’s gone further and weighed the already heavy film down with the most self-serious molasses-thick score in recent memory (even a habitual button-pusher like John Williams would cringe), is arrogance of the highest order."
Nanami: Inferno of First Love (Hani, 1968)|||||6
Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)|||||6.5
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Fincher, 2011)|||||5.5
* Zardoz (Boorman, 1974)|||||7
The Son (Dardennes, 2002)|||||7
That Obscure Object of Desire (Bunuel, 1977)|||||7.5
Bad Lieutenant (Ferrara, 1992)|||||7.5
S&Man (Petty, 2006)|||||5.5
Oh, Woe is Me (Godard, 1993)|||||6.5

December 2011

2011-12-01T19:52:00.000-08:00

December 2011

* The Muppets (Bobin, 2011)|||||5.5
It only took me sitting through it a second time, but I now like Jason Segel's Muppet movie. But I can't ignore how miserable that first viewing was. I think I could pinpoint my annoyance with the film to two major things: 1) The "faux-musical" schtick. Musical numbers filmed like ironic jokes, and the whole (500) Days of Summer, "half-assed-musical" aesthetic that needs to die slowly and painfully. This said, I now want to own "Life's a Happy Song." And 2), the scope of this thing is just so damn small. It is firmly of the age of the internet video, and the movie just feels like a long, Muppets spin-off Funny or Die video. Has the art of puppetry died, or is the never-ending stream of Muppet-high medium shots an aesthetic choice?
Now that I knew the film had nothing more to offer the Muppets universe in terms of scale other than hipster humor, I was able to sit back and process the jokes, the narrative arcs (that I felt were non-existent the first time around, although of course they're about a man-child, and "fitting in"), and the detail of Segel, Bobin and co.'s loving & comprehensive recreation of the Muppets and allusions to their most endearing bits.
But the scope thing really boils it down. There isn't a real movie around this thing. It's a lip service movie through and through, and you can analogize it to an SNL sketch spin-off movie that fails to make it movie-sized. It's all cute jokes and tribute, no narrative edge, and so it manages to have too much story and too little story at the same time. It's watching the 70s-originating Muppets in this somewhat-acceptable 2000s Muppet movie (with the lamest cameos ever) that really makes one miss the dirty, decrepit 70s.
Hugo (Scorsese, 2011)|||||6.5
The Last Laugh (Murnau, 1924)|||||8
The Adventures of Tintin (Spielberg, 2011)|||||5.5
Puss in Boots (Miller, 2011)|||||5
Attack the Block (Cornish, 2011)|||||6.5
Wings of Desire (Wenders, 1987)|||||8
Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 1972)|||||8
The Sitter (Green, 2011)|||||4.5
'The Sitter' is about the same level of inspirations and idiocies as 'Your Highness,' but while Your Highness at least had the conviction of its homage and production scope, The Sitter is a through-and-through lark and pretty throwaway of a project. Green's thing is throwing things at the screen and hoping it sticks, is funny, and perhaps is even resonant and interesting, and as per usual, it's hit, miss, and "Why are you making this movie? It's ultimately pretty lazy."
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (Bird, 2011)|||||7
Rubber (Dupieux, 2010)|||||6.5
Tentacles (Assonitis, 1977)|||||4
1/3 inept/occasionally risible (the movie has an hilariously negative-trajectory moral sense), 1/3 kinda delightful/"Whoa-surprise-graceful-camera-work," and then 1/3 pretty cool creature work. Which I guess makes it two-thirds "I am charmed." over one-third "This is mind-numbing and moronic."

Despite its reputation of simply being a turd (and with the occasional permission to check out of the film when it's being tedious), I'm solidly cataloging this in my "So bad it's good" file.

TrollHunter (Øvredal, 2010)|||||4
Hunger (McQueen, 2008)|||||7.5
Winter's Bone (Granik, 2010)|||||5.5
The Muppets (Bobin, 2011)|||||4.5
Recessive (Kibens, 2011) (short)|||||++ / 6.5
The Haircut (Choi, 2009) (short)|||||+ / 5.5
The Call to the Post (Higdon, 2009) (short)|||||+ / 5.5
Sundown (Rentis, 2009) (short)|||||+ / 5.5
The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Renoir, 1936)|||||8
A Day in the Country (Renoir, 1936) (short)|||||7.5
Thompson (Tippet, 2009) (short)|||||+ / 6
Finish Line (Chen, 2010) (short)|||||++ / 7
Andy (Ahn, 2010) (short)|||||+ / 5.5
Dos, Por Favor (Two Please) (Euresti, 2010) (short)|||||+ / 5.5
17 Meters (Schoenbaum, 2011) (short)|||||+ / 5.5
Light Escapes Through the Intervals (Tasaka, 2011) (short)|||||+ / 6
Nancy and the Dapper Toad (Samuels, 2010) (short)|||||++ / 7
Sully (Gupta, 2010) (short)|||||++ / 6.5
Forever's Gonna Start Tonight (Hittman, 2011) (short)|||||+ / 6.5
Storm Tiger Mountain (Cummings, 2009) (short)|||||+ / 5.5
Bygone Behemoth (Chaskin, 2010) (short)|||||+ / 5.5
A Serbian Film (Spasojevic, 2010)|||||5
Scarface (Hawks, 1930)|||||8
Bomb It (Reiss, 2007)|||||6.5
A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief (Reiss, 1988)|||||5

November 2011

2011-11-07T22:48:00.000-08:00

November 2011

Skhizein (Clapin, 2008) (short)|||||+++ / 7.5
Dog (Templeton, 2001) (short)|||||+++
Peter and the Wolf (Templeton, 2006) (short)|||||+++ / 7.5
Anna & Bella (Ring, 1984) (short)|||||++ / 7
The Cathedral (Baginsky, 2002) (short)|||||+
Dreams and Desires: Family Ties (Quinn, 2006) (short)|||||+++ / 7.5
Food (Svankmajer, 1993) (short)|||||+++ / 8
Tower Heist (Ratner, 2011)|||||4
* Kung Fu Panda (Osborne, 2009)|||||5.5
Monsters vs Aliens (Letterman & Vernon, 2009)|||||4.5
* Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand, 1937)|||||7
Melancholia (von Trier, 2011)|||||8
A welcome return by Trier to his Dogme vivacity (over Antichrist's aimless formalist portent). I've long held high-nosed, negative opinions about ceremonies, from graduations to weddings (told myself I had to see this in preparation for the holiday), so the film being prominently an evisceration of any and all worldly contrivances and trivial sentimentality makes von Trier's screenplay an incredibly satisfying work of deep snark. A movie about the Death of Bullshit (i.e. the world).
Gap-Toothed Women (Blank, et al., 1987) (short)|||||++
God's Angry Man (Herzog, 1980) (short)|||||++ / 7
Happy Feet Two (Miller, 2011)|||||8
Mimic: Sentinel (Petty, 2003)|||||5.5
Mimic: Sentinel, aka Mimic 3, is very low-budg and inadequate, with a script that hardly comes together (very little narrative pay-offs in the end), spurts of questionable performing, and some disappointing fumbled build-up, but ultimately, this J.T. Petty guy is a marvelous filmmaker. The first half of the film is fantastic, it's only when the horror sets in that he and the film begin missing marks.
L'Atalante (Vigo, 1934) (short)|||||7.5
Zero for Conduct (Vigo, 1933) (short)|||||++ / 7
Bullhead (Roskam, 2011)|||||5.5
Lola (Fassbinder, 1981)|||||8
Bush Mama (Gerima, 1979)|||||7.5
Snake Feed (Granik, 1997) (short)|||||+ / 5.5
Nocturne (Von Trier, 1980) (short)|||||++ / 6
Feelings (Solondz, 1984) (short)|||||+ / 5.5
Carmen (Payne, 1984) (short)|||||++ / 6.5
Doodlebug (Nolan, 1997) (short)|||||+ / 5.5
Barn (Mangold, 198?) (short)|||||+ / 6
Russian Ark (Sokurov, 2002)|||||8
The Fly II (Walas, 1989)|||||3
Martha (Fassbinder, 1976)|||||7.5
Sisters of the Gion (Mizoguchi, 1936)|||||7.5
I'm Here (Jonze, 2010) (short)|||||+ / 5.5
Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997)|||||7.5
* M (Lang, 1931)|||||8.5
Lucifer Rising (Anger, 1972) (short)|||||++
The Red Balloon (Lamorisse, 1956) (short)|||||+ / 6.5

October 2011

2011-10-06T00:17:00.000-07:00

October 2011

Lake Mungo (Anderson, 2008)|||||5.5
Soft for Digging (Petty, 2001)|||||7
Burn, Witch, Burn (Hayers, 1962)|||||6
Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli, 1946)|||||7.5
* Land Without Bread (Buñuel, 1933) (short)|||||++
Ménilmontant (Kirsanoff, 1926) (short)|||||++
The Smiling Madame Beudet (Dulac, 1923) (short)|||||++
At Land (Deren, 1944) (short)|||||++
* Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel, 1929) (short)|||||+
The Innkeepers (West, 2011)|||||6
A frustrating film. Ti West, one of the most promising young makers of horror films, has a crutch in his rather quaint love of horror, and it shows in his films that are alternately fascinating and self-realized, and complacent and middling. The best scene in this film is utterly fascinating, and involves a non-mutual ghost encounter seen through a dominant female, imposing both the ghost and herself on a passive male and passive audience (both male character and us never shown the ghost), and it acts as a brilliant culminating encapsulation of these characters and of emotional texture up to this point, now absolutely locked in the thick of this story about the vying attraction and dread of the extra-ordinary as manifested in two anti-extraordinary people. But this great height of symbolically evocative film-making is an oasis in a sorely temperate film - not a desert, as it is somewhat verdant with personality and cinematic life, but still mostly dry, as the film marches lockstep along stock-creepy painted lines, resisting any bold statements in favor of almost indulgent subtlety (problematic even in West's occasionally shining, abundant investment in buoyant character exploration, which is lovely but excessive and diluting), and the aforementioned quaint horror geekery that is lulling instead of demanding, asking for vague and non-committal familiarity with West's worlds of the creepy supernatural and the banal dead-end worker, but never pushing statements of milieu and emotion beyond lip service and drollery.
This is most clear and damning in an epilogue that should feel absolutely necessary - that should be inherently wrought with catharsis or, if limiting to ask of that, at least implication - yet somehow manages to force feed us pointlessness. It ends with a final shot that is maddening in its almost smug insistence on West's debilitating love of modesty.
The Skin I Live In (Almodovar, 2011)|||||7
Reverse Shot review
Coup d'etat (Yoshida, 1973)|||||8.5
Trigger Man (West, 2007)|||||5
The Baby of Mâcon (Greenaway, 1993)|||||8.5
Le Havre (Kaurismaki, 2011)|||||6.5
Husbands (Cassavetes, 1970)|||||7
I've seen and loved Cassavetes films, he always has a level of abstractness to his films, and in regards to basic plotline, this film seems the most straightforward - but it's weird (the drunken actions and ramblings of the characters), meandering, and avoided context constantly, almost to a point of borderline incoherence. Its commitment to presenting a stretch of time of complete drunkenness and emotional/perceptual chaos is surreal and disorienting enough it rivals Fellini's Satyricon. Admirable film, but it was way too wild for me.
* The General (Keaton, 1926)|||||6.5
* The Kid (Chaplin, 1921) (short)|||||6.5
The Wayward Cloud (Tsai, 2007)|||||7
* Cat's Cradle (Brakhage, 1959) (short)|||||~
* Window Water Baby Moving (Brakhage, 1962) (short)|||||+
Time Piece (Jim Henson, 1965) (short)|||||++
* A Movie (Bruce Connor, 1958) (short)|||||++
Grizzly (Girdler, 1976)|||||3.5
À nos amours (Pialat, 1983)|||||8
Bed and Sofa (Room, 1927) (short) (w/ live score)|||||7
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai, 2003)|||||7
The Palm Beach Story (Sturges, 1942)|||||7.5
Daughters of the Dust (Dash, 1991)|||||6
Possession (Zulawski, 1981)|||||8
The Woman (McKee, 2010)|||||6.5
Faust (Murnau, 1926) (w/ live score)|||||8
Revolutionary Road (Mendes, 2008)|||||5
* La Bete Humaine (Renoir, 1938)|||||8
The Amateurist (July, 1998) (short)|||||+++
Sissy Boy Slap Party (Maddin, 1995) (short)|||||+
Kitchen Sink (Maclean, 1989) (short)|||||+
Meek's Cutoff (Reichardt, 2010)|||||7.5

September 2011

2011-09-06T07:44:00.000-07:00

September 2011

Drive (Refn, 2011)|||||7
Valuable, artful meditation on the consequences of battle-filled, masculine lives. Unabashedly romantic and mythopoeic, with its avenging hand taking in vast criminality in a beautiful, neon LA purgatory. Very much the same strengths and weaknesses and attributes of Valhalla Rising.
Abduction (Singleton, 2011)|||||3
A Corner in Wheat (Griffith, 1909) (short)|||||++
Littlerock (Ott, 2010)|||||7.5
A pointed and unyielding tapestry of really useless people, who then go on to represent greater national frameworks and their dissolubility, their clashes, their inadequacy.
Eros Plus Massacre (Yoshida, 1969)|||||8
* Marie Antoinette (Coppola, 2006)|||||7
Afterschool (Campos, 2008)|||||6.5
Mouchette (Bresson, 1967)|||||8
The Heart of the World (Maddin, 2000) (short)|||||++
Road to Nowhere (Hellman, 2010)|||||6
Paisan (Rossellini, 1946)|||||7
* Seconds (Frankenheimer, 1966)|||||7
The Diary of a Chambermaid (Renoir, 1946)|||||8
Gigi (Minnelli, 1958)|||||6.5
My Darling Clementine (Ford, 1946)|||||7
* The Shooting (Hellman, 1966)|||||7.5
The Beaver Trilogy (Harris, 2000)|||||8
* Some Like It Hot (Wilder, 1959)|||||7
* The Lady Eve (Sturges, 1941)|||||8
Crawlspace (Schmoeller, 1986)|||||4.5
White Material (Denis, 2009)|||||7
Benny's Video (Haneke, 1992)|||||6.5
The Ward (Carpenter, 2010)|||||5

August 2011

2011-08-04T23:32:00.001-07:00

August 2011

Our Idiot Brother (Peretz, 2011)|||||5.5
Close-Up (Kiarostami, 1990)|||||7
* Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, 1966)|||||8
Nightjohn (Burnett, 1996) (TV)|||||7
* Fright Night (Gillespie, 2011)|||||6
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (Nixey, 2011)|||||4
Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr, Hranitzky, 2000)|||||8
* One, Two, Three (Wilder, 1961)|||||6
Kiss Me, Stupid (Wilder, 1964)|||||6.5
* All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950)|||||7
A Woman Is a Woman (Godard, 1961)|||||6
Valhalla Rising (Refn, 2009)|||||5.5
Ten (Kiarostami, 2000)|||||7
* Alphaville (Godard, 1965)|||||8
* The Servant (Losey, 1963)|||||8
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini, 1964)|||||7.5
* The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)|||||5.5
Network (Lumet, 1976)|||||6
Ossos (Costa, 1997)|||||5.5
The Phantom of the Opera (Argento, 1998)|||||4
Twin Peaks, Season 2 (Lynch, et al., 1990)|||||+
In a Year With 13 Moons (Fassbinder, 1978)|||||7.5
* The Prowler (Zito, 1981)|||||3.5
Performance (Cammell, Roeg, 1970)|||||7.5
Friends With Benefits (Gluck, 2011)|||||3.5
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Wyatt, 2011)|||||4.5
Muriel, or The Time of Return (Resnais, 1963)|||||8.5
Taken (Morel, 2009)|||||3.5

July 2011

2011-07-03T00:48:00.000-07:00

July 2011

Twin Peaks, Season 1 (Lynch, et al., 1990)|||||+++
La Ronde (Ophuls, 1950)|||||7.5
La Ronde is formally exquisite, but the film's conceit, while finely observed, is just barely interesting. Also, rather like a (500) Days of Summer of the day - too cleverly unequivocal about romance.
* The Woods (McKee, 2006)|||||6
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Weerasethakul, 2010)|||||7
Evening Primrose (ABC Stage 67 Episode) (Bogart, 1966)|||||+
The Tree of Life (Malick, 2011)|||||8
I prefer all other Malick films, with their sturdier narratives and bolder technique less dependent on fragmentary graphical saturation (nothing quite like Thin Red Line's battle scenes here), but this is certainly a wonderful creation. Talk about recapturing childhood textures. It's the film's biggest boon, how closely it recounts, almost methodically, encyclopedically, all the feelings of childhood.
New Year's Evil (Alston, 1980)|||||3.5
* 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)|||||9
Boarding Gate (Assayas, 2007)|||||7.5
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II (Yates, 2011)|||||5.5
Super 8 (Abrams, 2011)|||||6
Supreme entertainment. If anything, Abrams has guaranteed my butt in a seat for all his movies, just for his lightning-fast filmmaking instincts, creating absolutely dynamic, exciting, and dramatically strong movies and effectively becoming the (if undeniably regressed) heir to the Spielberg mantle by sheer extent of visual adeptness. In matters of substance, Super 8 manages to beguile in a number of ways, mostly fall-out from all the indulgences and personal emotional places Abrams readily throws into his admirably ambitious coming-of-age/family drama/action romp/sentimental tapestry/monster flick melange of a screenplay. Ambition does not mean audaciousness, and Abrams's script and directorial appetites prove first-class escapism and juvenilia and not much more (I'll readily concede, what pizazz it has, though!). Meanwhile, Abrams's sprawling concoction of a story flirts with richness, so that, even if the story kind of disintegrates in the weak final stretch, the soaringly emotional and suddenly the-utmost-ridiculous finale works as an absurdly beatific, beatifically absurd, and vaguely knowing encapsulation of the worth of high sentimentality in escapist cinema, fantastically merging a double-reconciliation of families with a judgmental monster's divinely-tinged magnetic swiping of humanity's petty articles (consumer items, a memento mori, and soldiers' guns - one soldier even clinging to it so desperately he gets served with a moment of small humiliation), all into the ultimate Spielbergian finale and a be-all, end-all of beautiful final fade-outs.
Window Water Baby Moving (Brakhage, 1962) (short)|||||+
Let Me In (Reeves, 2010)|||||5.5
* Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999)|||||7.5
35 Shots of Rum (Denis, 2008)|||||7
The Food of the Gods (Gordon, 1976)|||||4
The Earrings of Madame de... (Ophuls, 1953)|||||8
* 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963)|||||8
* Insidious (Wan, 2010)|||||4
Larry Crowne (Hanks, 2011)|||||2.5
Bridesmaids (Feig, 2011)|||||5.5

June 2011

2011-06-03T22:29:00.000-07:00

June 2011

* Antichrist (Von Trier, 2009)|||||7
Sita Sings the Blues (Paley, 2008)|||||7.5
Bad Teacher (Kasdan, 2011)|||||3.5
What a weird, pointless movie. Almost translucently thin in story and real-life-resembling connective tissue. (It's not unenjoyable, though.)
Green Lantern (Campbell, 2011)|||||3.5
Summer Hours (Assayas, 2008)|||||8.5
Source Code (Jones, 2011)|||||6
The Adjustment Bureau (Nolfi, 2011)|||||3
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928)|||||8
Kick Ass (Vaughn, 2010)|||||5
Silent Light (Reygadas, 2007)|||||5.5
1941 (Spielberg, 1979)|||||4.5
The Silence (Bergman, 1963)|||||7.5
Nick's Flick Picks review
Kung Fu Panda 2 (Yuh, 2011)|||||7
I think I liked this much better than the first (and I did like the first one). Do away with the conventional, plot-based action and replace it with whimsical, almost metaphorical action. Replace a funny and endearing good guy-vs.-bad guy plot with a not-quite-as-funny, rather dark tale that evokes historical tragedy and world-shaping ancient politics.
And the square-one, anti-any-and-all-technology, pro-inner-peace-and-simple-things message plain and simply trumps every other preaching I've seen in any recent movie in a long time.
* X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)|||||6
X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)|||||6.5

May 2011

2011-05-02T14:03:00.000-07:00

May 2011

* Schindler's List (Spielberg, 1993)|||||7
Mean Streets (Scorsese, 1973)|||||8
The Hangover Part II (Phillips, 2011)|||||4
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (Craig, 2010) (Incomplete Workprint)|||||4.5
* Dressed to Kill (De Palma, 1978)|||||7.5
* Phantom of the Paradise (De Palma, 1974)|||||7
The Rite (Håfström, 2011)|||||3
A Man Escaped (Bresson, 1956)|||||8
The Dark Night of the Scarecrow (De Filetta, 1981)|||||5
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)|||||8.5
Juliet of the Spirits (Fellini, 1965)|||||8
Thor (Branagh, 2011)|||||5.5
Energetic fun with a good sense of wit and irreverence, and also a well-gauged moral-political backbone.
Though I suspect I don't have proper comparison for superhero movies, as the only one I've seen in the last 3-4 years is The Dark Knight.
Love Unto Death (Resnais, 1984)|||||6.5
Ordet (Dreyer, 1955)|||||7.5
Sweet Home (Kurosawa, 1989)|||||6
* I Walked With a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943)|||||8

April 2011

2011-04-03T23:35:00.001-07:00

April 2011

Force of Evil (Polansky, 1948)|||||8
Fast Five (Lin, 2011)|||||4.5
Jane Eyre (Zeffirelli, 1997)|||||6
These Are the Damned (Losey, 1963)|||||6.5
Time of the Wolf (Haneke, 2003)|||||8
A Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami, 1997)|||||6
* Mortuary (Hooper, 2005)|||||5.5
Your Highness (Green, 2011)|||||5
I did not find this horribly odious (though isolated, minor scenes approach the "Not funny, not cool" spectrum) or unpleasant, and I'd say I enjoyed it about as much as Pineapple Express. I'd say Green and writer Danny McBride's spoof/gag film comedy benefits from having the structure of fantasy film's formula and action set-pieces, and provides a clearer path for [half-assed] satire and lampooning, over Pineapple Express's vague pot proselytizing and vague character-driven dramatizing.
As with Sucker Punch, if you hated the trailer, you'll hate the film. But even McBride's "profanity in a period setting" running joke is handled much better than the critics would lead you to believe, and Green, as in Pineapple Express, does not lack for interesting and idiosyncratic directorial decisions, even though these comedies of his have no interest in being good or of any higher purpose.
Stage Fright (Hitchcock, 1950)|||||7.5
Day of Wrath (Dreyer, 1943)|||||8
Day of Wrath, Church of Cinema by Sam Boone at The House Next Door
Fright Night (Gillespie, 2011) (Preview Cut)|||||5
Passion (Sondheim/Lapine musical, TV broadcast)|||||+++
Jane Eyre (Fukunaga, 2011)|||||5
Bless the Child (Russell, 2000)|||||3
The Lady from Shanghai (Welles, 1947)|||||8
Insidious (Wan, 2010)|||||4
Band of Outsiders (Godard, 1964)|||||7.5

March 2011

2011-03-12T23:13:00.000-08:00

March 2011

Fort Apache (Ford, 1948)|||||7
Sucker Punch (Snyder, 2011)|||||4.5
Interesting. Snyder trades in objectifying men and battle for objectifying women and victimhood, and suddenly I'm sympathetic to Snyder's moronic cinema. And he's a-okay with me as a moral person (vis-a-vis as a filmmaker), since, as his first originally written work, it's not a black hole of morals.
I have to admire Sucker Punch for one thing: it baits moviegoers pretending to be a kick-butt-female action-fantasy movie, and then it turns out to be the grimmest of women's pictures, with a surprising deal of compassion for the weakest of the female suffering and a surprise theme that promotes the story of the complex and internal girl over the merely female or kickass.
I can't recommend the film, though, and I mean that in the most non-pretentious, "Is it a good time out to the movies?" way. It's a real chore to sit through. The script itself is a complete misstep: the film's series of systematic action sequences are the definition of redundant and pointless to endure. You need to seriously beware if even the trailers had you rolling your eyes.
Scream 2 (Craven, 1997)|||||5
The Pillow Book (Greenaway, 1996)|||||8
Alamar (Gonzalez -Rubio, 2010)|||||7
Paul (Mottola, 2011)|||||4.5
The Big Store (Reisner, 1941)|||||4.5
Paranormal Activity 2 (Williams, 2010)|||||4
Battle: Los Angeles (Liebesman, 2011)|||||3.5
Queen Christina (Mamoulian, 1933)|||||7.5
Private Fears in Public Places (Resnais, 2006)|||||7
Life is a a Bed of Roses (Resnais, 1983)|||||8.5
Go West (Buzzell, 1940)|||||6
Stray Dog (Kurosawa, 1949)|||||8

February 2011

2011-02-08T21:57:00.001-08:00

February 2011

The Lair of the White Worm (Russell, 1988)||||||5.5
Autumn Sonata (Bergman, 1978)||||||8
True Grit (Coen Brothers, 2010)||||||7
This movie drags its feet a lot, with a middle section that seems grossly lackadaisical for the Coens, but it gains its footing again for a rousing - but also unusual - final twenty or so minutes. I also think it has more on its modernist plate than given credit for, as the revelation of the Josh Brolin character and that whirlwind, elegiac final night ride that leaves an ever-growing series of dead or tired out bodies behind it (never again seen in the film) are prime bits of Western deconstruction. Also thought the epilogue was of an exquisite wryness and absolutely integral to the film's gentle poignancy.
127 Hours (Boyle, 2010)||||||6
Has virtues similar to Sean Penn's Into the Wild, but this would be Into the Wild but dumber.
Buried (Cortes, 2010)||||||6
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman, 1975)||||||8
Greenberg (Baumbach, 2010)||||||6.5
Nick's Flick Picks on GREENBERG
Event Horizon (Anderson, 1997)||||||3.5
Vincere (Bellocchio, 2009)||||||7.5
Wild Grass (Resnais, 2009)||||||8
Hairspray (Waters, 1988)||||||7
A Prophet (Audiard, 2009)||||||7.5
Enter the Void (Noé, 2010)||||||5

January 2011

2011-01-03T01:57:00.000-08:00

January 2011

Witchboard (Tenney, 1986)||||||4
Despite the apparent rating, Witchboard is shockingly not bad, nor trying to be bad (which was refreshing), with shocking attention to logic and character intelligence. Ultimately stupid, though. Sucky finish.
The King's Speech (Hooper, 2010)||||||5
What Have You Done to Solange? (Dallamano, 1972)||||||6
The Ghost Writer (Polanski, 2010)||||||7.5
Dogtooth (Lanthimos, 2010)||||||7
The Oath (Poitras, 2010)||||||7.5
Mother (Bong, 2009)||||||7.5
Trash Humpers (Korine, 2009)||||||4.5
* Fiend Without a Face (Crabtree, 1958)||||||5
Raising Cain (De Palma, 1992)||||||7
The Crazies (Eisner, 2010)||||||4.5
Season of the Witch (Sena, 2011)||||||3.5
Tangled (Greno & Howard, 2010)||||||6
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I (Yates, 2010)||||||6.5
I'm Still Here (Affleck, 2010)||||||4.5
Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010)||||||6

December 2010

2010-12-06T13:10:00.001-08:00

December 2010

I Am Love (Guadagnino, 2010)||||||7.5
Precious (Daniels, 2009)||||||5
* Christmas Evil (Jackson, 1980)||||||5.5
Burnt Offerings (Curtis, 1976)||||||5.5
The Last Airbender (Shyamalan, 2010)||||||5
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (Wright, 2010)||||||7
Devil (Dowdle, 2010)||||||4
Kill Baby, Kill (Bava, 1966)||||||7.5
Everyone Else (Ade, 2010)||||||8
* Birth (Glazer, 2004)||||||8
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009)||||||4.5
The Forest from the Trees (Ade, 2002)||||||6.5
Cringe-inducing movie, but in the good way.
Femme Fatale (De Palma, 2002)||||||8
How to Train Your Dragon (Deblois & Sanders, 2010)||||||6
Altered States (Russell, 1980)||||||6
* The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957)||||||7.5

TOP 10 OF NOVEMBER

2010-12-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

1. Through a Glass Darkly
2. Stardust Memories
3. Dead of Night
4. The Black Cat
5. Murders in the Rue Morgue
6. The Girl Who Knew Too Much
7. The Limits of Control
8. Inception
9. Session 9
10. Watchmen

November 2010

2010-11-01T22:23:00.001-07:00

November 2010

* Inception (Nolan, 2010)|||||6
* Dead of Night (Cavalcanti et al., 1945)|||||8
Watchmen (Snyder, 2009)|||||5
* Session 9 (Anderson, 2001)|||||5.5
* Through A Glass Darkly (Bergman, 1961)|||||8.5
The Limits of Control (Jarmusch, 2009)|||||6
Stardust Memories (Allen, 1980)|||||8
Oklahoma! (Zinnemann, 1955)|||||4
The Raven (Friedlander, 1935)|||||5
Murder in the Rue Morgue (Foley, 1932)|||||7.5
The Black Cat (Ulmer, 1934)|||||7.5
Josh Vasquez (SLANT MAGAZINE) on The Black Cat
The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Bava, 1964)|||||7

TOP 10 OF OCTOBER

2010-11-01T17:47:00.000-07:00

1. Bigger Than Life
2. Martin
3. Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens
4. The Social Network
5. Planet of the Vampires
6. Night Tide
7. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
8. Masters of Horror: Dance of the Dead
9. The Plague of the Zombies
10. Tales from the Hood

October 2010

2010-10-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

October 2010

The Equinox: A Journey Into the Supernatural (Woods et al., 1970)|||||3.5
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Murnau, 1922)|||||8
New Nightmare (Craven, 1994)|||||5
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (Lord & Miller, 2009)|||||5.5
* Planet of the Vampires (Bava, 1965)|||||5.5
Rabid Dogs (Bava, 1974)|||||5
* Tales from the Hood (Cundieff, 1995)|||||5
* Night Tide (Harrington, 1961)|||||5.5
The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (Six, 2010)|||||4
Stupid and mostly shoddy, but it at least approaches fulfilling its provocative premise with the needed poignancy and sense of the ordeal.
The Plague of the Zombies (Gilling, 1966)|||||5.5
Bigger Than Life (Ray, 1956)|||||8.5
Joins The Prowler as a 50s film that slow-burns through a seemingly prosaic set-up but eventually blows up to mind-blowing allegorical proportions.
* "The Damned Thing" (Hooper, 2006) (Masters of Horror, Season 2) (TV Series)|||||2.5
* "Dance of the Dead" (Hooper, 2005) (Masters of Horror, Season 1) (TV Series)|||||5
Hellbound: Hellraiser (Randel, 1988)|||||4.5
Too bad director Tony Randel only went on to an Amityville sequel and Power Rangers episodes, because he does shockingly A-class work here.
* Martin (Romero, 1977)|||||8.5
The House That Dripped Blood (Duffell, 1971)|||||4
The Wizard of Gore (Lewis, 1970)|||||4
The Social Network (Fincher, 2010)|||||8

TOP 10 OF SEPTEMBER

2010-10-01T11:08:00.000-07:00

1. Johnny Guitar
2. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
3. The Thin Red Line
4. Cries and Whispers
5. Eyes Wide Shut
6. Empire of the Sun
7. Ponyo
8. We Own the Night
9. It's Alive III: Island of the Alive
10. Cowards Bend the Knee

September 2010

2010-09-03T17:01:00.000-07:00

September 2010

We Own the Night (Gray, 2007)|||||7.5
Ponyo (Miyazaki, 2009)|||||8
Trick or Treat (Smith, 1986)|||||4
Cowards Bend the Knee (Maddin, 2003)|||||7
Blood Feast (Lewis, 1963)|||||3
* It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (Cohen, 1987)|||||7
Machete (Rodriguez & Maniquis, 2010)|||||5
Fred: The Movie (Weiner, 2010) (TV)|||||2.5
A Perfect Couple (Altman, 1979)|||||7
The Town (Affleck, 2010)|||||7
* Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)|||||5
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (Talalay, 1991)|||||4
Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999)|||||8
* It Lives Again (Cohen, 1978)|||||6
Empire of the Sun (Spielberg, 1987)|||||8
* Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954)|||||9

Munich is erudite and well-informed and exquisitely political and all, but Johnny Guitar - now that's an anti-prejudice, anti-violence/retaliation film. Such a lovely film.

Tomb of Ligeia (Corman, 1964)|||||6
Village of the Damned (Carpenter, 1995)|||||4
Shutter Island (Scorsese, 2010)|||||5.5

*spoilers* Shutter Island equates the institutional man's (the "institutional man" being any man belonging to an institution... "America" for most and most generally) greatest nightmares - as law men, as psychologists, as ideologues and activists, as "men of violence" - with the world's grandest, most maniacal, human-devouring conspiracy, as if conspiracy is what has to exist for the world's greatest atrocities to occur. And as imperturbable as grand conspiracy and great atrocity is, the mind may only be able to cope with it through madness that is less intrinsic to a mind but contrived by both events and the manipulations of cunning minds who doctor and engineer sanity to their wishing. Shutter Island's use of genre tropes - the grizzled cop, the conspiracy games, the tormenting ghosts - is a sly acknowledgment of genre diversions - like cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, heroes and madmen - as indulgences of a temporary madness, one that is impotent to effect the "true fantasies" of genocide and high-level machinations. DiCaprio's reformed Uncle Sam's boy may wish to excavate truth and recover order, but ultimately his lofty desires are just smoke and mirrors, and relegated to role-play for a delusional mind. "In hopes to convince you how impossible it is!" one character exclaims to him late in the film. Perhaps, but how far off is any a disturbed mind's concoctions from the real world? Scorsese and the screenwriter stack it high the fact that DiCaprio's character is in fact a sufferer of true delusions, but the tableau of the film is clear: that all these terrible things - from political obfuscation to great wars to mad housewives - are all but possible, and they're all such mad fantasies (or should have stayed so), both the true and hallucinated. A welcome ambiguity in the final coda suggests some men (and women) - often the violent kind - simply do rule the world, and that, out of those who don't, the madmen have got the right idea.

That said, I didn't like the film very much. Having style does not a great film make, and Shutter Island's highly flamboyant style is often diverting, but often not much more than distraction and hollow playfulness (I will admit, though, Scorsese's bombastic use of an appropriated score is a pleasure, and reminds me how anemic film scoring can be nowadays). Scorsese's anti-continuity tricks and hallucinogenic optical illusions were less expressive as they were contrived. The performances are uniformly fine, with DiCaprio the weak link, not because he is bad, which he isn't, but because he's terribly miscast. He plays it either too big or too small, likely in the need to step up to a role he's not fit for, when everyone around him is fitted perfectly. (Michelle Williams again proves herself one of the most capable young actors in Hollywood.) The film is bloated and overlong, its primary narrative and tonal approach being rather condescending-to-genre-film B-movie silliness, an approach that failed entirely to engage me at much emotional level. Rather than letting any of its thick ruminations sink in, the film is contented fucking with audience's heads and to merely amuse; amuse and dazzle with lurid shocks and flashy cinematography. The traces of poignancy that Scorsese no doubt does sense in the material he ultimately fails to respect. The film feels coldly planned and plotted, and its convoluted approach becomes tiresome and uninspired, and stinks of a complacence with the insinuating notion of "genre film mediocrity."

The Thin Red Line (Malick, 1998)|||||8.5

The Thin Red Line is a superb and audacious mix of meander and tense extended battle sequences; certainly one of the most powerful depictions of the sheer meaningless of everything in combat. Jim Caviezel's Florence Nightingale of Kentucky boy WWII soldiers is a great character.

* McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Altman, 1971)|||||9

"Destroy all the myths of heroism," Altman claims was his goal with McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Business power and the way of the gun Altman successfully fixes to the top of the food chain.

Wolfen (Wadleigh, 1981)|||||6.5
Cries and Whispers (Bergman, 1972)|||||8.5

TOP 10 OF AUGUST

2010-09-03T16:49:00.000-07:00

1. The New World (Malick)
2. Baby Doll (Kazan)
3. A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan)
4. Nashville (Altman)
5. A Wedding (Altman)
6. The Funhouse (Hooper)
7. The Masque of the Red Death (Corman)
8. The White Ribbon (Haneke)
9. Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul)
10. Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (Altman)

HM: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper)

August 2010

2010-08-08T23:55:00.001-07:00

August 2010

* The Pianist (Polanski, 2002)|||||6.5
* Munich (Spielberg, 2005)|||||6
The White Ribbon (Haneke, 2009)|||||8
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Harlin, 1988)|||||4
Lottery Ticket (White, 2010)|||||3
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Russell, 1987)|||||4
Giant (Stevens, 1956)|||||7
* A Wedding (Altman, 1978)|||||8.5
The New World (Malick, 2005)|||||9
* Tropical Malady (Weerasathakul, 2004)|||||8

Certainly a wondrous, open-hearted movie whose spell over people is completely justified. I still find it uneven - it's not a very tight film, it prides itself in cinematographic imprecision too often (a sort of shapeless visual pretension that often dogs Claire Denis films), and it feels like a lot of shots are thrown in there without form or sustained impact. I think Weerasathakul definitely stepped it up in Syndromes and a Century with much more controlled and carefully orchestrated cinematography. But these really are all nitpicks for a quite magical film.

My favorite aspect of the film is how our point of identification remains the rough, experienced soldier character, yet how - in the second half explicitly, but even the first half - the unassuming boy he falls for is the teasing, unaccountably cunning and careful-footed figure of mystery (Ed Gonzalez perceptively calls out the boy's hand-licking as vaguely "condescending"). The soldier's earnest hunt for him in the 2nd half follows perfectly organically, and the moody 2nd half I didn't care for before (and still have my qualms with...) really effectively elevates their relationship to the mystic and all-natural.

* Nashville (Altman, 1975)|||||8.5
* Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (Altman, 1976)|||||7.5

Very likely to be considered one of Altman's less immediately impressive and affecting films, and for legitimate reasons, but it's still a strong and indelibly atmospheric work. Its commentary is a bit thudding and on-the-nose, its humor often broad, without the expected amount of Altman's off-kilter strangeness and seizing ambiguity to elevate the material.

Too many characters seemed uninvolved in the thematic fabric. Nashville has many caricatures, but it made each surprise us with extreme moments of pathos; this doesn't do that. Things were too clear cut, like making Annie Oakley the lonely humanist in the troupe. Also, this employs Nashville's flat, documentary-like directing, but Nashville had much more varied and malleable environments to cover, as opposed to the campground of this set.

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part II (Sholder, 1985)|||||3
* A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984)|||||5.5
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948)|||||8
* The Masque of the Red Death (Corman, 1964)|||||8
* The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)|||||7
* The Funhouse (Hooper, 1981)|||||8
A Town Called Panic (Aubier & Patar, 2009)|||||6.5
* Match Point (Allen, 2005)|||||7
Doubt (Shanley, 2008)|||||6.5

Uncanny. Who knew Doubt would turn out to be The X-Files: I Want to Believe without the genre trappings... and resultant, 2008 the year of contemplating the plight of the pedophile! Thematically, they're practically twins, with the Catholic Church the stuffy institution instead of the FBI. Doubt is of course the more implicating (the Roman Catholic Orthodoxy as topical as it is) and even-handed film, with no miracle of retribution allowed to either the deluded, rationalizing, ultimately culpable priest or the dying, oppressive, morally naive order.

I liked and respected Doubt very much, even though, especially after reading reviews, I can see how the austerity of the stage is far more appropriate for this than the theatrical, visual melodrama of film. What would be enticing ambiguity on stage is distracting fishing-for-clues in routine medium close-up. The film makes the material seem evasive and intent on tricking the viewer. I think it was Walter Chaw that aptly criticized it as devolving into a "whodunnit" by the end.

A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan, 1951)|||||8.5

Young filmmakers should just drop everything and adapt a Tennessee Williams play.

Baby Doll (Kazan, 1956)|||||8.5
Despicable Me (Coffin & Renaud, 2010)|||||5

What Punch-Drunk Love does for love, this does for parenthood, only, for this film, that isn't a compliment.

Don't Look Up (Chan, 2009)|||||4

July 2010

2010-07-04T02:12:00.000-07:00

July 2010

Parasomnia (Malone, 2008)|||||2.5
The Naked Kiss (Fuller, 1966)|||||8
Inception (Nolan, 2010)|||||6

Chicken Soup for the Corporate Spy's Soul. Slick, grandiose pablum.

The movie has heart, and if anything, soulless it is not. On the surface, it's a very competent, well-thought-out thriller/mind-bender; underneath, it has the virtue of Nolan's ambition and audaciousness, and he has succeeded in big blockbuster action movie-making that has genuine passion, soul, and a need to communicate an emotional story. The film reveals itself in the end to be filled with a refreshing anti-cynicism, where we get corporate shenanigans that can actually morph into personal, positive odysseys for all involved. Are anyone's nasty energy industry take-overs panning out or not? Is it all peachy because the goodness-of-life has been affirmed so mind-blowingly for even the entrepreneurs? The film effectively circumvents those quandaries. This is movie-fantasy, where the illusions and the romances of such are all that matters. If it lacks in practical considerations - such as the nitty-gritty of dream technology, the ethical history of such, or any relevant social or political worldviews held by itself or its A-team roster of vaguely self-involved dream frolickers and science mercenaries - it's because it's one of those metaphoric emotional-journey films first and foremost. If it is one ultimately devoted to a complete cipher of a main character, one without any apparent principles outside of a Love-of-My-Life complex, then that is the fable Nolan visions. If any social prerogative is evident, it is that it is the most privileged and most comfortable who get to dream for recreation (we just have to hope their dreams leave them happy enough that they don't fuck us little people over). There is little doubt DiCaprio's reunion with his children is a moment to warm the heart, but it is all in spite of the fact he and his wife had it all coming, shooting up on subsidized dream vacations and turning a blind eye (and still turning a blind eye...) to the unethical power this technology harnesses. Anyway, while Nolan's thesis is often simplistic, it is also often provocative: dreams and ideas implanted can both build prisons and "build nations." Its deeming "nation-building" at its most monumental when it sprouts from the mere personal catharsis of a lovelorn man or an anguished son is a combination of intriguing, beguiling, and naive - and the film would be perceptive if it actually had a sense of its naivete.

Thematic content aside, before the often thrilling last half (that is, the whole "Heist"), the movie plays out like a feature-length montage, which is no compliment considering my very low opinion of the all-too-common cinematic shorthand that is the montage sequence. I get it that sometimes that's what the film is going for - disjointed narrative for a film about dreams - but Nolan's anemic screenwriting seems to think the only way to create circulation is fragmentation - not of textures and narrative idiosyncrasy, but of banal exposition, thus serving only to make more and more incredulous a story already teetering on the cliff of credulity. The "planning" chunk exists off an unbearable over-dependence on exceedingly pithy discursive on dream logistics that would - in a different, less prosaic context - be tolerable, if it weren't exacerbated more so when mixed with the film's endless, endless non-scenes! Making it even worse, did Zimmer's violins have to be gnawing away underneath the entire film, like Eye of the Tiger during a Rocky training sequence? Is this the only way Nolan can weave together a movie?

Some final straws: Nolan's a heavy stylist and every beat of the film is built upon effects - thrills, cool tricks, and a host of obnoxiously clever ideas - that have little to do with intricacy or complexity; the script is the same way, with schmaltz and circumlocution poured liberally over the dialogue; the unadorned action movie antics are well compared to a James Bond flick and take away from the strong imagery often achieved (in its show-offy, dazzle-inclined way, anyway), and as a result we get a premise, which is more suited for the magical realism genre, burdened by literalism. Think along the lines of a bungled treatment of the premise to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Cotillard's character's psychology could've been fascinating and deeply unsettling but it's written away into accessibility. The ending is less ambiguous as it is revealing of the film's dependence on external, very impersonal symbols, as well as its commitment to the puzzle, instead of on its half-convincing attempts to conjure an emotional core or its half-baked attempts to apply a cogent real-world context to its dream spy story. Recommended Reviews: Big Other on Inception

* Inferno (Argento, 1980)|||||5.5
* Suspiria (Argento, 1977)|||||7.5

I've always been critical of Suspiria, agreeing with many detractors about that rubber stamp on its forehead proclaiming "STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE." Its fairy-tale simpleness, a children's tale nightmare, made it easy to condescend to, as it even lacks the knowingly loaded softcore-isms of giallo/Eurotrash tradition, which mix a knowingly fraudulent concoction of low culture titillation and damningly universal psycho-sexual mimicry-cum-analysis.

But Suspiria may have considerable credibility as the often-cited Argento masterpiece (although that mantel may, for myself, still go to Tenebre, after my most recent, somewhat disappointed viewing of Deep Red), undermining my long held dismissals. It stands strong as a spectacular and consistently stunning film, with, I'd say, just as equal a study on perception and experience as Deep Red, without that film's opportunistic distractions and shaky moral (non-)center. At least Suspiria, in spite of all the still-extant flaws, one can see as building a thin but at least concentrated and purified picture of petty little girls and fascistic, entitled, hypocritical administrators/witches, building it carefully instead of haphazardly, with an eye for awe-inspiring horror instead of mere uncontextualized masochism, which Deep Red suffers from.

* The Thing (Carpenter, 1982)|||||7
Small Soldiers (Dante, 1998)|||||6
Monster House (Kenan, 2006)|||||7.5
Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979)|||||8.5
* The Brave Little Toaster (Rees, 1987)|||||8
* Maniac (Lustig, 1980)|||||5

Maniac has got a handful of things going on for it, I'll give it that. Lustig's not the hack filmmaker - he's got a knack for powerful editing rhythms (the doomed foreplay of the first scene's hooker), lush and potent imagery (e.g. the modeling session, the female photographer's walls of imagery), and the film has a number of elegant (sometimes even stunning) tracking shots that jar with the seediness around them (like those patterned shots of Spinell returning to his apartment). But while it's a skilled (you get the feeling Lustig is schooled in horror and the masters, with one sequence a clear homage to the dark street stalking in Cat People) and atmospheric approximating of the mind of a maniac, it's an exploitation picture through and through, one that's ultimately unfailingly sensationalistic and morbid and high on victim-fear. The movie does a lot of interesting things, things that suggest the film as more darkly comic than just an abject exercise in fear-preying (Fernando Croce of Cinepassion calls the film's odd fog-filled climax a sly "trompe l'oeill"), but its ends do not live up to its very capable means.

Toy Story 3 (Unkrich, 2010)|||||7.5

June 2010

2010-06-06T14:05:00.000-07:00

June 2010

* Killer Klowns From Outer Space (Chiodo, 1988)|||||4
Make Way For Tomorrow (McCarey, 1937)|||||8.5
<--- Blubbering fool.
Southern Comfort (Hill, 1981)|||||7
Showgirls (Verhoeven, 1995)|||||8
Alice in Wonderland (Burton, 2010)|||||3.5
* The Beyond (Fulci, 1981)|||||5
* Deep Red (Argento, 1975)|||||7.5
* Lost in Translation (Coppola, 2003)|||||6
* Tobe Hooper's Night Terrors (Hooper, 1993)|||||6
* Tokyo Sonata (Kurosawa, 2009)|||||7.5
* Habit (Fessenden, 1997)|||||8.5
* Wendigo (Fessenden, 2000)|||||8.5
In the Cut (Campion, 2003)|||||7

The lurid serial killer story is really ho-hum, sub-mass market paperback material, and is dislodged from the character study working through it. The film is too soaked in imagery, and the hyper-dreaminess taken on for the climax only works to take us completely out of the mind and will of our protagonist. Nevertheless, if there's anything I uniformly love about Campion's films, it's that her female protagonists are meticulously written and thought out as to be so indistinguishable from men.

Tourist Trap (Schmoeller, 1979)|||||4.5
Quills (Kaufman, 2000)|||||5.5
* Day of the Dead (Romero, 1985)|||||8.5
* Monkey Shines (Romero, 1988)|||||5.5

Monkey Shines is an intriguing and risky film, with odd, perverse psychology being rooted at and a knowing cheekiness in support of that (Fernando Croce: it's a film "expressed in satirical Hitchcockisms"), but ultimately, I don't think it's too successful. It's a little stiff, a little dry, and that psychological study is a little simplistic sometimes.

* Land of the Dead (Romero, 2005)|||||5.5
* Battle Royale (Fukasaku, 2000)||||88.5
The Princess and the Frog (Clements & Musker, 2009)|||||5.5

May 2010

2010-05-12T14:51:00.000-07:00

May 2010

The Exterminating Angel (Bunuel, 1962)|||||7.5
Medea Goes to Jail (Perry, 2009)|||||3
Survival of the Dead (Romero, 2010)|||||5.5

Recommended Reviews: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Survival of the Dead

Satyricon (Fellini, 1969)|||||7.5
Poltergeist III (Sherman, 1988)|||||4
Moon (Jones, 2009)|||||7
Poltergeist II (Gibson, 1986)|||||3
The Science of Sleep (Gondry, 2006)|||||7

The Science of Sleep isn't as heart-achingly sentimental as 'Eternal Sunshine,' but they're very much sister films in that they both explore aspects of ephemeral relationships.

SPOILERS: Didn't expect 'Science' to be quite so bitter, though - I was thoroughly expecting a happy ending. I must have been blinded by the whimsy, though, because, thinking back, the signs all point to the ending we get. It's quite a rug-pulling film. In the first half, we think the match is made before it begins. But then the film's truth-telling comes out: if a match is too made, you can't just be friends. Friends aren't lovers. If you're dancing around each other like you're thinking it's too convenient to be adult or exciting, someone's gonna grow out of the other.

The final tantrum works too well, an uncomfortable summation of what can't exist in a fine-lined platonic relationship.

Very effective film. Shortcomings are there, gave it a 7, but won't go into those since critics already have had at it. They really didn't like this movie very much, and even my most insightful and sensitive pet online critics really hate on the self-indulgence. Perhaps it hits too close to home for too many people. Many reviews insist that Stephane is made "an intentionally unlikable" protagonist or whatnot, but in doing so they seem to ignore the bleak implications. There is concerted effort to dissociate with Stephane by focusing on all his craziness, but the final truths the film is telling in no way necessitate you being a Stephane man-child.

Memories of Murder (Bong, 2003)|||||7

Broadly played but still intelligent, a bit too "cop movie" but still nuanced with its characters. Very Zodiac - rich in cultural detail and implicit commentary, in this case dealing with political upheaval, small town complacence, and big establishmentarian impotence. Loved the small town cops and their banter. A careful mix of endearing qualities and [dumb] corruption, the bad cop's fate is a brilliant touch and a perfect encapsulation of the power and weakness wrestling within our appointed strong arms.

But, the film felt too ridden by style for style's sake, and a greater point doesn't quite come through all the bombast and conventional action movie antics. The ending proves quite haunting, though, and finally lands the punch deserved by the film's deft balance of farce and palpably dark emotions.

I got the feeling that it's a paen to the cop, in spite of the overt evidence otherwise. Even if they deserve their ridicule, the film is most beguiling when forced to tolerate their dumb humanity. It's an ode to grunts. Odd, but their dimwittedness provokes more sympathy than distaste, and their corruption is more symptom of that than the other way around. The smooth-handed suspect calls them out for their corruption, yet by that point we're as convinced as the detectives are that this guy is totally the killer and, in the finale, we understand what a frustrating, consistently demeaning and ball-busting job it is.

The House of Mirth (Davies, 2000)|||||9
Intolerable Cruelty (Coen Brothers, 2003)|||||5.5
Wise Blood (Huston, 1979)|||||6
Splice (Natali, 2010)|||||6

The first third or so threatens the same generic craft of the typical Hollywood genre flick, but as the film enters its increasingly demented, lonely-barn-set second half, Natali finally starts getting into it, enlivening the proceedings with some dripping family gothic. Natali, the up-and-coming master of the laboriously, naifly over-visualized concept film, at least isn't entirely vapid with his drama (although not that it's brilliant drama, either), and it shows in how knowingly he pushes buttons, then how willing he is to mute it all with wryness and tonal good sense, in follow-up moments that both ground and self-analyze, whether it is in the visuals or the riotous drama involved (example: the treatment of the aftermath of Brody's paternal transgression). The film is an energetic, not-at-all somber sci-fi-horror parable involving Polley and Brody playing science wunderkinds and power couple, a delightful Macbeth/Lady Macbeth variation (or Frankenstein/Lady Frankenstein, more accurately) that Natali thankfully gives much color and black dramedy.

* E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg, 1982)|||||6

April 2010

2010-04-03T16:38:00.000-07:00

April 2010

All That Jazz (Fosse, 1979)|||||8.5
* Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002)|||||4.5
Hausu (Obayashi, 1977)|||||6.5
The Color Purple (Spielberg, 1985)|||||5.5
The Prowler (Losey, 1951)|||||8
White Dog (Fuller, 1982)|||||7
Boom (Losey, 1968)|||||8
* The Man Who Wasn't There (Coen, 2001)|||||7
King & Country (Losey 64)|||||8
Modesty Blaise (Losey, 1966)|||||4.5

Has there ever been so unsuccessful a film as Modesty Blaise? It just keeps on failing and shooting itself in the foot. I think I'm a big Losey fan by this point - he's an artsy, pretentious guy with too many ideas in his head. In this film, though, it's like, ease the hell up with the cinematic pontification - this type of material needs some sense of commercial narrativity to work and indulging in incessant musical juxtoposition is not going to engage the viewer! And I can appreciate his playing Continental iconoclasm with another culture, but those were some of the worst Arabs ever put to film.

Blind Date (Losey, 1959)|||||7.5

Blind Date was a textured, thinking-human's crime-mystery film, Losey's class-oriented concerns and stormy visual intensity figuring heavily into the subtext, but if it didn't have one of the most ludicrous premises ever. Losey's on his A-game, but again, the film shows his way of occasionally veering into very overripe melodrama.

March 2010

2010-03-07T16:26:00.001-08:00

March 2010

Time Without Pity (Losey, 1957)|||||7.5
Eva (Losey, 1962)|||||8.5
* Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983)|||||7.5
The Sleeping Tiger (Losey, 1954)|||||8
* An American Werewolf in London (Landis, 1981)|||||8
M (Losey, 1951)|||||6.5

Febuary 2010

2010-02-03T03:22:00.000-08:00

February 2009

Laura (Preminger,1944)|||||6
The Fantastic Mr. Fox (Anderson, 2009)|||||7
* My Man Godfrey (LaCava, 1936)|||||7.5
The House of the Devil (West, 2009)|||||6
* The 39 Steps (Hitchcock, 1935)|||||8
* The Return of the Living Dead (O'Bannon, 1985)|||||7.5
* Lifeforce (Hooper, 1985) (US Cut)|||||inferior
Bright Star (Campion, 2009)|||||6
A Serious Man (Coens, 2009)|||||7.5
* Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940)|||||6.5
King of the Ants (Gordon, 2003)|||||7

King of the Ants is a hugely satisfying movie. It's entirely opposite to my preferred sensibility and requirements for filmmaking: you know, grace and beauty, visual eloquence, restraint, gentility... Even Re-Animator is saved by some finely-made dramatic scenes... this has all the gentility packed in it of an SNL Digital Short.

But there is something eloquent about Gordon's lowbrow filmmaking that I cannot pinpoint right now. King of the Ants is lucid, relatable, and soaked in very down-to-earth emotions. This is also due to a very amiable lead performance, and generally very acute acting jobs. It goes all the way with its premise, embracing and skipping along to its tune of a trashy portrait of humanity.

Very very Stuck. Feels, smells, emotionally impresses, morally punches in the same way. Well, Stuck is, thankfully, not as fugly. They'd make a great double bill, if too much sleaze isn't a problem.

Thirst (Park, 2009)|||||6
Small Deaths (short) (Ramsay, 1996)|||||8

January 2010

2010-01-01T18:34:00.000-08:00

January 2010

The Roost (West, 2005)|||||4.5

So The Roost, that was a very... "special" movie.

It's one of those "By-No-Means-Possible" movies. Which is a harder category to fall under than Oren Peli and Mother Hen Steven Spielberg think it is. When I tried to think of something, I came up with Wendy and Lucy, then I realized Larry Fessenden had his indie-producer mitts on that one too.

An Oh-so-clever and Oh-so-self-amused quasi-creature feature with a case of horror-hipster-itus. It's exactly as if snooty horror fans put up the time to make an especially arcane haunted house ride in order to laugh at the people not getting scared. And, of course, it's because they don't "get" that special type of "creep" sophisticated horror fans know and love.

Fancying myself one of those horror fans, I'm glad I watched this movie. It's not especially well-made, but it's inventive. Ti West, in this film at least, isn't particularly brilliant, but he's probably a really passionate [pretentious] guy. Many will very understandably think it's boring, and it's got some mildly retarded (intentionally??) moments where the film stops dead... WITH TENSION! Seriously, the movie tenses, and tenses some more, and makes you wait for it... then nothing happens. Haha, good joke, movie. You're weird and awkward.

Observe and Report (Hill, 2009)|||||5
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Fleming, 1941)|||||4.5

Far inferior to the Mamoulian film. If I had to stare at Spencer Tracy's face for another farcically prolonged minute just to see the 1940s' state-of-the-art make-up and dissolve FX, I'd have revolted.

Generally, Spencer Tracy cannot save himself from delivering a terribly neutered performance as Jekyll. All sense of consequence and the irreparable is seeped out of the story, resulting in some of the most bloodless torment you can imagine. Shouldn't really be a fault, but Ingrid Bergman is far too strong and distinctive a female presence to play Ivy. I took little productive affirmation being made from seeing Bergman being beaten around and controlled, as I did the irrepressibly common Ivy of Miriam Hopkins' portrayal.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian, 1931)|||||9

Revelatory-good. It was smart and funny, then it was resplendent and sparkling and lovely, then it was audacious, then it was despairing, frightening, tragic.

Even the Muriel character, the stable, wholesome love interest, is an uncharacteristically strong character (and even - to a lesser extent of course - in the '41 film). Seeing Rose Hobart, the socially upstanding female presence in the film, forcing kisses on Fredric March, telling him she'll do anything to be with him, whilst he (impotently, in stark contrast to a female) tries to break it off with and (full of shame) explain himself to her, was really something. Now that's spectacle.

To the Devil A Daughter (Sykes, 1976)|||||5
The Last House on the Left (Iliadis, 2009)|||||5

Last House on the Left for the 00s is exactly how you'd imagine a studio remake to turn out. Drain out to about 2% the perversity, and then fine tune its premise into a crackerjack thriller. Krug and co. are just kind of low-lives. Haute bourgeoisie Mom and Dad are terribly competent and resolve to just "do what we have to do."

But it's actually a pretty engaging and visually strong movie. If you liked the Craven film's premise but wanted it to be more exciting and more about the dignity of humanity than the opposite (or, less theologically preoccupied like the Bergman film...), this would probably be pretty satisfying entertainment for ya.

The Stooge (Taurog, 1952)|||||5.5
Brideless Groom (Bernds, 1947, "Three Stooges" short)|||||5
The Hangover (Phillips, 2009)|||||4

The Hangover was going pretty strong for me... that is, until the hangover part came in.

From then on, it was all just a mild tolerance with the occasional amusement. I thought it was all pretty uninspired. Even Baby Mama had some surprises and subversion... but I guess that just goes with actually having a premise, while this is just a f**k-all of inane, point-deprived, transparently cooked-up misadventures.

As for the film being noxious and hazardous on a moral level, I rather liked the in-between the film found in making the characters unabashed caricatures of un-PC male-ness - it properly justified this fantasy adventure in inconsequentiality. Bradley Cooper's character, particularly, was something of a revelation - a character I should hate, but who is consistently played with a sort of flair embodying both the whole bonhomie thing and the whole "Be an asshole, be kicked in the balls now and then, but forget about it later" thing that the film's pretty much all about, so that I actually enjoyed him.

Otherwise, the film is saved by the performances and awesome one-liners and kaputt, that's pretty much it.

* Gremlins (Dante, 1984)|||||6
* Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959)|||||8
* A Bucket of Blood (Corman, 1957)|||||7
* The Little Shop of Horrors (Corman, 1960)|||||6.5
* The Bubble (Oboler, 1966)|||||5.5
Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin, 1947)|||||7.5
A New Leaf (May, 1973)|||||6.5
Inside Man (Lee, 2006)|||||6.5

Lee's a thinking filmmaker, who has the technique of tableau and montage down for his bold visual gestures. But with Spike Lee and Inside Man - that is, when his film's not soaked in very meticulous art design, a very personal story, or extreme thematic fervor - his work is more stylish than expressive, which is not so much bad so much as me being nitpicky and elitist with my artistes... since a stylist w/ ideas can be equally worthwhile as the artsy aesthete director I'm always wantonly digging for.

The final scene serves as a welcome reminder to Lee's visual acumen, though: beginning with the montage of insert shots of Washington removing from himself the items of his profession and societal purpose - his badge, his commemoration, etc. - that are simultaneously symbols of his material, personal well-being (that is, simply, that he has the money and means to feed himself and his dependents), the film comes into focus as one about the eternalness of that latter commonality of living, and how ethics and principles are the continuously recurring other side of that coin of common living. This flipping coin is pushed in the very final shot: a tableau of Washington's personal life, one that appears no less dignified, empowered, and deserved by Washington and his girlfriend, even though we're being dared to call it phony because the luxe aesthetic is too sexy, and Washington's white hat too debonair - as if no working class man has the right to be debonair in "post-9/11 New York." Yet sadly, we don't similarly find ourselves ironically perceiving in the same way the image of rich white bankers in their also very luxe interiors.

The Black Dahlia (De Palma, 2006)|||||5.5
* Adaptation (Jonze, 2000)|||||7
Sherlock Holmes (Ritchie, 2009)|||||6
* Transformers (Bay, 2007)|||||3.5

December 2009

2009-12-20T13:20:00.000-08:00

December 2009

* Paranormal Activity|||||5
Two Lovers (Gray, 2009)|||||8.5

I felt like I was watching a film from the 70s a number of times. Pace and scene styling was superb. Then there's that club scene where we spend a few moments in the beginning watching a random breakdancer, and it felt like a first real revival of that venerable old movie tradition of getting to see a full nightclub act to preface scenes set in nightclubs.

Anyway, a perfectly molded look at adulthood, its predictability, and the errant factors that are romance and Leonard's weird psychology and biology.

And Isabella Rossellini's final shot = fucking killer!

* Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009)|||||9

I think I'll still take Death Proof, thick with trauma & tragedy, over Inglourious Basterds, lithe with scrutiny of history and war, but it's neck-and-neck.

The Ghost Ship (Robson, 1943)|||||7

Finely, finely drawn portrait of masculine self-image and the complex network of authority and obedience, empowerment and self-subordination it takes to withhold one's masculine place. Equal to Beau Travail in its evocation of a masculine order, with a wonderful treatment of Captain Stone as not just a crazy man, but a man slowly going crazy from the falsity that is his power over and separation from the social harum-scarum. In this way, this film communicated what There Will Be Blood should have, albeit without TWBB's speciously topical choices of institutional orders... and yet, it still manages to be more politically charged than that film even makes an effort for. But despite it excellence, The Ghost Ship is still a bit very stilted and unconvincing. It's good this film takes place in the specially neutered and cloistered social order of a ship, because I am much more convinced by the representation of men as a bunch of randy bulls instead of the complacent herded cows this film personifies the Marine employed. Mark Robson is capable of great mise en scene, but his camera and visualization of whole scenes is clunky. This film also has some awful transitions that fail to unite the mood and emotions that run through the film. Russell Wade is also kind of wooden. Richard Dix gets increasingly better as the film goes on. The good override the bad, though, and the plot developments that take place on land just goes to show the minute attention the Lewton co. gave to story and real-world logic.

Fool for Love (Altman, 1985)|||||9

A stunner. Every single bit of it, from the magnificent performances to Altman's counterintuitively liberated sense of visual possibility from working with a stage-bound play adaptation, is absolutely enchanting, in that dark and weird way of an Altman film. It never seems acknowledged enough: Altman may be an American studio filmmaker, albeit a "rogue" one, but he is totally into the wierd and the arcane, and Fool for Love is one of his weirdest (haven't read Sam Sheperd's play, but now I'll only be able to see it as existential theater of the absurd, even if it isn't). He even out-Lynches Lynch here, making images of small-town America and the West a place of repressed nightmares, with the same sort of prop-world fantasticalness but with Altman's style and sense of nuance and nebulous behavior placing it firmly in a strange but undeniably real world. Altman's flashbacks that continually flux between accurateness and inaccurateness, reality and fantasy (literally at one point) are one of the more genuinely novel things I've seen in a long time.

Avatar (Cameron, 2009)|||||5.5

There's been criticisms that the film is too cliched and derivative, and then defenses citing the aptness in using archetypal story and mythic history to retrofit for both post-Post-colonial times and state-of-the-art visual technology. This works well to characterize the film's odd, unsuccessful attempt to marry classical storytelling (for him, the blockbuster film) and its capably shamanic sway over popular culture with its pioneering cinematic vision, where the presence of a camera seems completely beside the point to the illimitability of the CGI medium. Keeping with the repertoire of the shaman, it practically seems to regard itself as oral history at work, making the film's alternatingly admirable and puerile revisionist social parable seem perfectly at home. But how really can the sweeping parabolic aggrandizements and moral romanticism of a lovingly fervent oral storyteller persevere when the storyteller - the camera - is so impossibly naturalistic?
Of course, this is a problem with any CGI-fest, from a CGI animated film to the camera-inoperable tricks of a Peter Jackson movie, but I guess what makes it so artistically detrimental here is Cameron's not-inelegant but more than a little repetitive, pre-patterned directing. It's either the variation of close-ups that make up an intimate dialogue scene, his admittedly sturdy handling of action sequences, or the overly, breathlessly omnipresent handling of his more fantastic CGI sequences. Between, there is little pauses and variegation. The film has a rushed pace, too invested in its traditional screenwriting to properly justify its overwhelming intentions of aesthetic immersion, as Children of Men does. Despite very impressive 3-D immersion and the incredible textures Cameron captures in order to make Avatar such an eye-popping and sumptuous work (and I do mean it, the shots utilizing the reflection off plexiglass shielding were especially impressive), the film would be more than a little flat. The moments of tragedy and awful destruction were the moments where the film's theoretical intentions of immersion-realism were the most fit to be used (to put it nauseatingly, "Genocidal imperialism = real life") and so were the best, most effective scenes.

To bag on Cameron for not being artsy enough isn't really new. But I am trying to find a more forgiving, novel way of looking at what every detractor pretty much has (and has rightly, IMO) been getting at: Cameron's directing and the film's shopworn screenplay are no where near as interesting or worthwhile as the FX and the visual textures it creates. Instead of just saying that, how about blame the very idea of taking a ~~shopworn~~ tried-and-true screenplay (complete with voice-overs and propulsive, discreditably cosmetic ellipses of time) and then rendering the "simple power" of its story ineffectual by ~~mundane directing~~ the sheer non-virtue of its technological preoccupation. It's downfall is in its groundbreaking virtual verisimilitude... despite that being the best thing about the movie. How does that sound? Pretentiously paradoxical? Eh, I try.
Thus, its visuals should have been more "theatrical" (i.e. wielded more a sense of cinema's artifice). As it is, sure we have the artifice found in its grandiose environment and those shots floating above and aside those seed-jellyfish spirits, but again, that's the camera - aka our, the audience's, surrogate eye and mental palette - being "too powerful to be true," too limitlessly "neutral" to actually be the minds of the audience being story-told - which is why the bits of tragedy are the best parts, because it finally asks us to mourn for the aliens, instead of just gawk at their world. 3-D ashes work much like Schindler's List's red coat - visual gimmickry and a drippy symbolic sentiment, but manipulative storytelling embracing its storytelling emotional pedantry. Avatar's "verite" immersion is hollow. It should've gone all-out formally rigid, Children of Men-style. Or better yet, Barry Lyndon-style. That film would've really gotten 3-D textures to linger. ... Also, it must be said, this movie was waaaay way to long.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death (Hancock, 1971)|||||6.5

A beautiful and often genuinely unnerving gothic horror film. Really rich filmmaking here. It doesn't amount to much beyond its horror trappings, which it gets too caught up in near the end, and its screenplay is the sort of pretentious that leads it into thinking having a character point at a family relic and say, "That's history," is fleshed out enough when, no, it's a little half-baked... but nonetheless, this film has almost the soul-stirring low-fi schlockiness of Carnival of Souls. But while that film was assured and charged by 60s modern-art gung-ho, this one is a bit logy with 70s bootstrap filmmaking and realism.

Mirrors (Aja, 2008)|||||3

I realized the problem with modern horror movies when I was watching Mirrors and came a scene set in a monastery, and this monastery had all the atmosphere and character of a movie set. I suppose if the movie was making a comment on stultifying moral hygienics and the sterility of Catholic nunnery in modern times, but I just made that up and it is clearly not the case.

Mirrors is pretty lame aside from some sturdy suspense set-ups and good old-fashioned dramatic kitsch, like separated parents coming together through a concerted effort to paint over cursed mirrors. Aja is amping the gore up to 11 as usual, but his story warrants none of it so that its gratuitousness feels extra cheap.

Eggshells (Hooper, 1969)|||||4.5

Although filled with numerous highly intricate set pieces and sequences of abstract artistic brio, its utter plotlessness, rambling puerile hippie dialogue that leads to no discernible arc in any regards, and, as a result of both of those things, the film's nigh incomprehensibility, render this frequently audacious film a merely narratively-challenged, often mindless, at times intolerable piece of avant-garde hogwash.

* Shutter (Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom, 2004)|||||3.5

It tries to tell a provocative story and speak to something or other theoretics about picture-taking... I guess. But Shutter has such a tin ear for so many aspects of good moviemaking and storytelling, it's hard to feel the film has any thoughts in its head at all. It hurts watching ineptitude at times. It has no sense of pacing, build-up, character development, etc. - it's just a string of slick scares that aren't scary. It's like Hollywood didn't even have to remake it because this movie already is exactly like a bad Hollywood supernatural horror flick.

Paranormal Activity (Pell, 2007)|||||5

Oh, well that was better than I expected it to be. It's more written and character-driven than I thought it would be (I knew nothing about the plot going in), and despite being gimmicky, it's not all that gimmicky.

I really liked the way the camera was used - a nosy and troublesome toy being constantly moved around by the insensitive Micah, that soon becomes a 2nd demon to the frazzled Katie. Also, there was something about the staging and framing of the between-bedroom scenes of plot development that suggested there was thought put into where the camera was placed and how it interacted with the characters. Nothing to go crazy about, but Pell doesn't seem like a talentless buffoon behind the camera, as is common with up-and-coming hopeful horror film directors. And he seems to work well with actors, because I thought the performances were excellent and naturalistic.

It's also a slim, nicely paced film, the rigid structure working very strategically to create its effect of a creeping disease and its portrayal of Katie as someone getting increasingly fed up with living in fear. Her protestations when she's outside on the bench - the subtle venom and resentment in her voice - was probably the scariest bit for me.

On the con side, it's a limited film, both stylistically and content-wise, the screenplay nothing to write home about (oh, it's either a GHOST or a DEMON - wow, that's some in-depth demonology right there) and the scares more than a bit labored.

November 2009

2009-11-06T22:52:00.000-08:00

November 2009

* Holiday (Cukor, 1938)|||||8.5

* A Tale of Two Sisters (Kim, 2003)|||||8

* Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn (Raimi, 1987)|||||7

* 3 Women (Altman, 1977)|||||8.5

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans (Herzog, 2009)|||||6.5

The film is pretty silly (albeit self-consciously so - that doesn't excuse it, though) and, despite a moment every now and then, is pretty flat by Herzog's standards. Not much consistent transcendence in the filmmaking, and the goofy amphibian trip sequences only distract from that occasional almost-there moment of oddball beauty. It's a clever piece of absurdity, intentionally light as a feather and tonally aimed to shoot some arrows through the criminal world and the police world. Cage is... hammy, but not disastrously so, as a bad lieutenant who accepts his weaknesses with pragmatism and a refreshing lack of principles, rather than with tormentedness or rage, ego or megalomania. The film makes a smart statement on how the "bad" and the "good" can get along, coexist, as long as the need to exploit and victimize is subverted by our realizing the simple advantages of just playing your cards right for the humble, pleasure-seeking comfort of all (and that includes stepping back and watching your own girlfriend prostitute herself when the time calls for it). It is a karmic, non-deluded amorality and principle of the Pleasure Dome (Pleasure is for all, and can be found communally) Herzog promotes as a possible alternative to conventional morality and conventional business, which are vindictive, self-aggrandizing, out-to-destroy, and out to make the more people sad rather than the most people happy - the most people happy being what Herzog's protagonist achieves in the film in his unthinking way, rolling with the punches and accepting of all possible circumstances. Herzog reenvisions a contemporary Sodom and Gomorrah as a place that can be a Good, that can worship the graven idols of money and drugs but still be generous to our fellows - that can in fact be giving as long as it is not built on the pure drive of the Alpha impulse, and instead built on the tearing down of that impulse, which causes such grievances as a family being massacred and an uptight police officer refusing to do our mild-mannered protagonist a solid and excuse some traffic tickets. The film oozes the mantra: just take it easy, give people who have one coming a break (meanwhile feel free to hang those who've been having their breaks out to dry), and things will turn out all right. The Pleasure & Good Mojo equilibrium will be found. If everyone willing to just leave happy, can leave happy, who cares what must be done or what concessions you might have to make? The protagonist's acceptance of his girlfriend's newfound sobriety (but, rest assured, not his own) is one of the more touching notes of the film. The daunting self-respect of morality and immorality are feasted upon by the hardassed and powered, and no one's content under the grip of hardasses.

* Dumplings (Chan, 2004)|||||8.5

Beautiful, subversive, and eccentric. There is much social/political/socio-economic textures there to sift through, which I'd love to see an extensive analysis of. My one problem, so to speak, with the film is: I feel as if I wanted more of a sense of where the film's opinions lay on certain things, considering how strongly cooked the subject matter is with the whiff of abortion, stem cell usage, and matters of women's rights. At the end, I felt like it was too much about the individual characters and their particular moralities/immoralities, with a heavy hand falling upon the wealthy Mrs. Li without the leniency I wanted. The film takes the leap into punchy moral fable that I did not entirely want as wholeheartedly as the film takes it... but thankfully the film also doesn't lose sight of its oddball social realism: the sight near the end of Auntie Mei (played to the tee by an outrageous tight-capris-clad Bai Ling) disappearing in a sort of time warp - in the streets of mainland China, dressed in anachronistic peasant-wear and carrying water pails - is one of my favorite things in the movie.

Dancer in the Dark (Von Trier, 2000)|||||8

Antichrist (Von Trier, 2009)|||||7

An unbelievably blunt and candid film, with complete divestment of all burdensome demons on its mind (no matter how graphically non-genitalia-friendly). It's much like Kurosawa's Pulse, in the sense it's an almost inconsiderately philosophical horror film that takes on vast, infinite matters with the matter-of-fact eye fit to their semi-ironic allegorical approach. But while Pulse is a gentle film made by a gentleman, Antichrist is pretty much the opposite... it is an angry, moody, fatalistic, and emotionally erratic asshole of a film, made by an angry, moody, fatalistic, and emotionally erratic filmmaker (who may or may not be an asshole... he probably is. In any case, this is a compliment to the film.)

Antichrist is a resigned, shit-hitting-the-fan look at how cruel nature wins out over all things, and it paints a relationship between the two character - the film's only characters - such that the actions taken in the notorious final act do not seem so much evidence pointing towards a narrow-minded [I'll say it: misogynistic] fact - "Men are this, women are SPOILERCRAZYSPOILER" - but instead communicate the idea that what we are seeing is roles being fallen into because - seemingly - of a rich, terrible historical tradition (and a belief in the demiurges we have conceived, to account for the poisoned conditions of humanity). In that sense, the film's use of the coined term "gynocide" is very apt, equating gendered persecution as pretty much the same cloth as every other "-cide," evil, or purity-made-grotesque.

The bluntness of the film is what I really admire, much in the same way Kurosawa's bluntness about his very different concerns in his film makes me admire that film. Antichrist should be required finger-wagging formative viewing for all carefree, growing boys AND girls (or just boys, might be the point). The ways and attitudes with which you hold yourself to and use to determine how to treat those around you - e.g. your women - is only a thin line away from becoming the bloody Crusades, genocidal regimes, the sadomasochism of witch-hunting, and the psychosexual domination of psychoanalysis, as is embodied by the Dafoe character, whose treatment of his wife seems as overbearing as age-old treatments of female hysteria.

On the con side, there were too many large chunks of Antichrist where it felt rote and shapeless, such that the film kind of drifts off at intervals into a quagmire of its not always pointed realms of allegorical mysticism and opaque metaphors, all while not being terribly stimulating in terms of craft. Whenever it did get itself into gear, the images were consistently hypnotizing and beautiful, but also kind of flat, instead of communicative and potent, like they are in Von Trier's more vibrant films. Part of it may be how the film pretty much works with two people, talking and walking around a forest, while other Von Trier's other films have a large cast of characters with which to create dynamic interactions and the choreography of blocking actors with camera movement. The latter is more impressive and engaging, while Antichrist comes off more than a bit as if on autopilot.

District 9 (Blomkamp, 2009) ||||| 4

* The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) |||||7.5
"The Black Cat" (Gordon, 2006) (Masters of Horror, Season 2) (TV Series)|||||**1/2

Rouge (Kwan, 1987) |||||6

* Sisters (De Palma, 1973)||||| 7.5

October 2009

2009-10-09T01:51:00.001-07:00

October 2009

* Retribution (Kurosawa, 2006) 7.5

* The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Hooper, 1986) 6.5

Repo! The Genetic Opera (Lynn Bousman, 2008) 4

Where the Wild Things Are (Jonze, 2009) 7

* Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Lee Wallace, 1982) 5

* The Fly (Cronenberg, 1986) 7

* Pulse (Kurosawa, 2001) 8

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Pittman, 1987) 5

Prom Night II is admirable in many ways - it treats assorted subject matter with a sobriety and respect for viewer's moral intelligence that is the opposite of what a cheesy slasher sequel is supposed to offer, it is thoroughly unpredictable in that it follows a subversive logic informed by a latent (unachieved) goal of really digging at skewed moral environments, it thus gives us some very intriguing perspectives on high school, family, and Christian perversions and weaknesses, and it has imagination and inspired audacity that elevates it over the normal 80s horror junk - but, unfortunately, junk it pretty much is... in the kindest sense possible. The film, despite everything, is just completely unsuccessful. Much more grim and serious than you expect it to be, which leads to some good stuff, but it's a matter of watching a film strive towards being provocative and heady and suggestive and unique, with so many small elements that are subtle and superb, only pretty much nothing comes together because it doesn't have that much of a sense of what it really wants to communicate. I felt many times like the movie wanted to make some subversive point with a number of scenes, but everything is so underdeveloped, with a fatal lack of cohesion, which makes the film just a long series of "WTF? Uh... okay..."s instead of "WTF, oh yeah!"s. The performances, special effects work, and occasional character work are surprisingly good, though, and there's a great girl's locker room scene in there (for a number of reasons). Director Pittman has some good ideas, but you can tell the film gets lazier when it gets campier.

Trick 'r Treat (Dougherty, 2008) 5

* Cure (Kurosawa, 1997) 9

The Stepfather (Ruben, 1987) 6

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman, 1978) 7.5

Mystics in Bali (Djalil, 1981) 2.5

Bad Timing (Roeg, 1981) 6.5

* I, Madman (Takacs, 1989) 4.5

* Evil Dead Trap (Ikeda, 1988) 5

* Deranged (Gillen & Ormsby, 1974) 4.5

September 2009

2009-09-02T19:33:00.000-07:00

September 2009

Blow Out (De Palma, 1981) 8

Sally is a great character.

One Missed Call (Valette, 2008) 2

Hot damn that was crappy.
It's almost awe-inspiring in its uselessness. Did I just watch an actual movie, really? Did they actually spend time, money, and physical and mental effort, to make this? Was this more like a paid vacation for the actors considering they're working with nothing? It's kind of fascinating, really.

* Audition (Miike, 1999) 8

W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism (Makavejev, 1971) 8

* Dead & Buried (Sherman, 1981) 5.5

* Pumpkinhead (Winston, 1988) 5

(500) Days of Summer (Webb, 2009) 5

(500) Days of Summer is a movie made entirely out of musings and good points. And it's a movie that thinks movies can be made out of musings and the cleverness of its points. That's why the film is told in bits and pieces, because of its strong belief in its vision of a film built entirely of its writer-director's probably-somewhere-out-there-in-list-form series of musings and good points, lucid observations, and clever cinematic renderings of love neurosis.

There's the scene in the film where Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a breakdown in a company meeting and gets on a soapbox about greeting cards. It's one of those in-your-face points the film has to make, and by god it makes sure to make it. But in making itself (or its character) so pedantically shout out this mildly revealing and I'd thought already pretty obvious epiphany, it just made me uncomfortable. I thought, "Everyone knows this. Everyone knows greeting cards are bullshit. So the fact that it has to make this point so pivotal must mean that this movie is yelling at someone who apparently doesn't get it enough..." Followed immediately by: "I hope it's not me. I get it, you're smarter than me, movie!"

The film, Webb, his screenplay and the film's whole slickly-packaged DNA as a quirky, edgy concept picture is driven by its unbearable omniscience. Not that it necessarily gives all the answers - the film pleasantly surprises with its down-to-earth subverting of clean-cut romantic conventions - but yet, when it comes to considering all the questions, the film seems to suggest all the answers are out there to be quickly figured out. The film becomes a bit po-faced and didactic when, in its query-response structure (its happy-time/sad-time, fantasy/reality, dialectical jumping in time), it's practically giving an answer a mere moment after any possibly challenging, and possibly challengingly upsetting, question is posed.

The ultimate message is admirable: a romance film all about the folly of romantics in a world that fosters and encourages the lighting of flames beneath asses and the will to get moving again -- then, the resultant growth and the cornucopias of opportunity. The film is mostly likable, slickly romantic, and, thankfully, often truly perceptive, with a good knack for melancholy to get you in the right mood. All much, much too slickly packaged, but if you have a great postmodern idea that you know'll be a hit with the audiences (plus with the way-too-appealing Joshua Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel in the leads), what can you do? Pump up the indie rock.

One Missed Call (Miike, 2003) 7

Silent Hill (Gans, 2006) 4

The Legend of Hell House (Hough, 1973) 5.5

Exte (Sono, 2007) 5

Exte has the usual Sono attributes going for it, despite it being the Japanese genre auteur's obligatory send-up of J-horror, a la what Miike was going for with One Missed Call. Sono has a knack for appealing cuteness (that is, idiosyncratic cuteness), his drama is genuine and candidly shot, and his vision - his commitment to genre and sensory thrills that address an eccentric and personality-filled, adult and abusive world - is intact here. But I just don't think Sono's my guy. This film is way scattershot, often obnoxious, and I enjoyed the film much more when it was being whimsical to when it was being a horror film with a plot. As a horror film, it's redundant; got tired of the cops and the main antagonist really quickly. Chiaki Kuriyama and her hip-hop roommate are very appealing here, though.

Portrait of Jason (Clarke, 1967) 5.5

An hour and forty-five minute interview with a 60s-living, black, gay man, one-time hustler, now aspiring nightclub owner and performer. It is lively subject matter, with a jovial subject who knows how to entertain with stories, and it's also a knowingly intrusive probe into the man's life, as we see his tales go from anecdotal to deeply personal, as he gets progressively drunker (and soon even breaks out a joint) as the evening progresses. The B&W camera captures Jason lounging, pacing, and generally inhabiting a rather neutral living-room-type space as he speaks to the camera and is given short, prodding directions from Clarke and co., behind the camera and never on screen, as they occasionally zoom in inscrutably on his face and then go to momentary blackness (but with the audio recording device still taping) as they switch the celluloid that Jason's vocal self-offering clearly surpasses in surely a number of ways, including both duration and honesty. The film is often engaging, due to the subject laying all his cards on the table with touching genuineness, but ultimately, the work is a monotonous exercise that, at some points, begins to smack of injudiciousness, not only in running time but in how freely and without guidance Clarke and her associates let this man bare his soul in service of their austere little exercise - although likely intentional, for the rather clinical regard towards Jason coming from behind the camera seems equal measure familiarity and acceptance, as it is cold analysis.

* Dark Water (Nakata, 2002) 5.5

Halloween II (Zombie, 2009) 5

Trouble Every Day (Denis, 2001) 8

I feel like Denis making a film here with a relatively chugging plot and narrative variety did her a great service. The separate plot threads that give her different locations and character behaviors to work with provoked nice and varied style from her, which keeps it from achieving the certain monotony of her two other films I've seen, Beau Travail and Friday Night - elliptical mood pieces that fling narrative drive wayside for the building of mood.

It's an ingeniously structured film, too. It weaves romantic-scientific waywardness not just with its two central couples but with close attention to a slew of supporting characters and even bit characters. It ends on a gentle and ambivalent note that, similar to Redacted, ends up being the perfect way to end the film and left me with a positive final impression. It's a very romantic film... even with the demented Cat People-like plot point involving Gallo's enforced onanistic lifestyle (which, looked at as concession made to having any relationship with his fresh-faced new wife, is still a bit romantic). I'm surprised no other vampire movie's had thought this element up sooner. And is there another horror film (per se) out there that makes zero attempt to scare or be horror-y like this one?

Redacted (De Palma, 2008) 5

Redacted gets off to a good start by not making any sense. The video diary suddenly segues into a glossy documentary. Thus we have a camera inside a car it has no reason to be in. Then it segues into an Iraqi news segment. It's a barrage of media without any throughline, and its level opaqueness makes it fascinating. But when the film starts to systematically construct the moments that lead to the film's central event, the film's proud indelicateness just becomes that: rote and indelicate. There's worth to be had from strong and unaffected characterizations, such as the two main offending soldiers, and likewise from a strong and unsoftened plot. But De Palma's staging just gets more and more uninteresting as it goes along, culminating in a scene of atrocity that comes off more contrived than upsetting. The film regains itself a bit towards the end with more interestingly associative use of mixed media, then a final scene - the one back in the US - that I found really worked and was a perfect, expertly ambivalent way to finish the film.

* Ju-on: The Grudge (Shimizu, 2003) 4.5

August 2009

2009-08-05T02:13:00.000-07:00

August 2009

* The Awful Truth (McCarey, 1937) 7.5

* The Leopard Man (Tourneur, 1943) 9

* Carnival of Souls (Harvey, 1962) 8.5

* I Walked With a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943) 9

Kill Bill Vol. 1 (Tarantino, 2003) 7

Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009) 8.5

Inglourious Basterds is a vibrant and sensitive resurrection of old-fashioned filmmaking. It recalls the day when films could move slowly, replete with full-blooded dialogue scenes, as long as they were taut with drama and emotions. Inglousious Basterds is actually Tarantino's most traditional film, classical Hollywood entertainment in all its theatrical and steadied beats. Mixed in, though, is Tarantino's meta concerns and, now, thankfully, a regard for history that is educated, strongly researched, and deals seriously with war, its mechanics (witness the Hans Landa character's playing of the field), and its repercussions (seen in the tragic failed romance-made-in-cinema-heaven of Shosanna and Fredrik Zoller) - critically, with a sense of distance, and with a straightforward and clearheaded refusal to exploit (even the big death of You-Who-Watched-the-Film-Know-Who is dark and burdened instead of a glorious ahistorical shenanigan).

Finally, Tarantino's Godard-channeling is finally clicking, since Tarantino and his staccato beats choreographed to human movement are now backgrounded by the most politically loaded and genuinely rarefied symbols he's utilized yet - period pomp, officers in full raiment, old foreign movie posters, etc.

* The Village (Shyamalan, 2004) 5

* Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1993) 8

Pulp Fiction is really good. It's not loud or over-the-top - it's quiet and atmospheric, and without being dry. Tarantino's directing is unobtrusive, observant. Very soulful, too, with his use of music. We can sit and listen to Marcellus methodically lay out instructions to Butch because he makes it so Rhames' voice seems to croon to the accompanying beat. I thought I'd have a sour reaction to his screenplay and dialogue here, but it's pretty consistently evocative and poetic.
Now does the film and its vignette nature and its evocations have much of a "thematic center"? I'm having problems pinpointing its ultimate moral and philosophical intentions. If Tarantino didn't write and direct human behavior and a textured world so well, Pulp Fiction would be too high concept for me to like very much or find much meaning in. "Deconstruction, yay!" of course, and, like I said, the dialogue never isn't flirting with social and emotional quandaries (the Mia-Vincent exchanges surprised me - the Somoan never put a finger on her feet, it seems!), but the film is undoubtedly set on "confection" mode.

* Opera (Argento, 1987) 6.5

Opera is a ridiculously awesome platter of Argento goods. Of course, it's no where nearing profound, it's dramatically non-existent and typically (of Argento) dry, the subtext or meta-commentary on high art and sadomasochism is pretty basic, etc. etcetera... but Argento sure knows how to make a freaky, exciting, sweeping, and most importantly visually witty film. And it doesn't disappoint with the funky opening credit sequence, surely one of Argento's funkiest in a career of groovy and funky opening credit sequences.

You Can Count On Me (Lonergan, 2000) 8

* "Cigarette Burns" (Carpenter, 2007) (Masters of Horror, Season 1) (TV Series) ****

* "Dance of the Dead" (Hooper, 2007) (Masters of Horror, Season 1) (TV Series) ***

* Lifeforce (Hooper, 1985) 5.5

Vampires (Carpenter, 1998) 4.5

Notre Musique (Godard, 2001) 6.5

Strange Circus (Sono, 2002) 6

* "Dreams in the Witch House" (Gordon, 2007) (Masters of Horror, Season 1) (TV Series) ***

* Assault on Precinct 13 (Carpenter, 1977) 8.5

"The Damned Thing" (Hooper, 2008) (Masters of Horror, Season 2) (TV Series) *1/2

"The Washingtonians" (Medak, 2008) (Masters of Horror, Season 2) (TV Series) ***

"Pro-Life" (Carpenter, 2008) (Masters of Horror, Season 2) (TV Series) * (out of 5)

Made in U.S.A. (Godard, 1966) 6

July 2009

2009-07-17T14:49:00.001-07:00

July 2009

[REC] (Balaguero/Plaza, 2007) 4.5

Not bad and better than I expected. It successfully becomes more intense as it goes along, and the climax is excellently atmospheric and despairing. The religious angle that is brought in all of sudden at the end is a bit too obligatory of Catholixploitation, and is ultimately rather simplistic oogie-boogie backstory, but the quasi-mysticism provides undeniable atmospherics and it offers the viewer a somewhat evocative little tale of religion's rose-colored exploitation of facts morphing into terrifying science, with the final menace being a specter of disconcerting biological, anatomical decay.

The Tenant (Polanski, 1976) 7.5

Not as visually eloquent and crisply dynamic in expressing visual ideas as Rosemary's Baby, but it is much more expansive thematically, with much to intimate about the selfsameness of experience - the experience here being alienation due to the pressures and hypocrisy of apartment-dwelling life. It reminded me a bit of Inland Empire, both being about psychotic emanations of shared emotional existences under specific circumstances (Inland Empire: method acting, The Tenant: apartment living, both: Polishness). Well, by "Polishness," I really mean "foreignness," which I suppose only The Tenant is particularly about.

Eaten Alive (Hooper, 1977) 6

* Spontaneous Combustion (Hooper, 1990) 5.5

Escape from L.A. (Carpenter, 1996) 5.5

Brüno (Clark, 2009) 4.5

Good for what it is: an outrageous stunt film with, just barely, the rhetorical purposes of making gayness prominent in a piece of mainstream entertainment, as well as a cornucopia of other topical stuff like [talking penises, and] absurdist mock peace talks... all of it surely weak and little-researched (it takes a while to realize these films, Borat and Brüno, are actually not trying to be like classical documentaries - their "mockumentary" status is weak in a way because they're more like mocku-"diary films"), but strengthened by the sheer novelty and daring-do of Baron Cohen's schtick.

* Scream (Craven, 1996) 4.5

* Death Proof (Tarantino, 2007) 9.5

* Tobe Hooper's Night Terrors (Hooper, 1993) 6

* Dead-Alive (Braindead) (Jackson, 1991) 8

The Sentinel (Winner, 1977) 3

The Sentinel is occasionally beguiling - Chris Sarandon's sturdy but two-sided, ultimately prosecutable lover; the moment where Cristina Raines insists a book is inscribed in Latin when it's not - but this is quite the woefully misguided film, that only deals with its rather implicative religious tale in the manner a cheesy horror movie would. And this is undoubtedly a cheesy horror movie. It's quite the representation of holy callings, and what exactly is it's correlation between its innerly troubled super model heroine and the gauntlet she's forced to take up? Sexual trauma as sure enough conditioning for the life of monastic diligence? SPOILER The final shot of this beauty Cristina Raines relegated to a habit and the suddenly weathered skin of the cloistered does ring with sort of tragedy.

* The Fog (Carpenter, 1980) 5.5

A beautiful-looking and strikingly photographed film, that boasts the creepiness desired by Carpenter who aimed to create simply an old-fashioned ghost story. But it's perhaps too modest for its own good, its small-scale, slasher film approach and prop-costume, smoke machine aesthetic being inadequate for its story about a town damned by its ancestors, and not matching up to the smarts it occasionally possesses. The film ultimately comes off feeling rinky-dink and frivolous, especially considering Carpenter's film in its original print ran so short, the opening campfire scene (a good scene, though) and the autopsy room walking-dead scare (a bad scene) were shot after initial wrap in order to pad out the running time.

* Escape from New York (Carpenter, 1981) 6.5

June 2009

2009-06-02T02:18:00.001-07:00

June 2009

Ghosts of Mars (Carpenter, 2001) 5

Oh, this wasn't so bad. I thought the material ranged from not bad to fantastic: the characters, the screenplay, plot developments, dialogue, etc. I found it, actually, very dense and intelligent in its comic-book sociology. I was struck by how comprehensively Carpenter both adopted old Hollywood Western story elements with implicit deconstructivist commentary, but simultaneously never disfavors or pacifies the survivalist pragmatism of its cop/criminal characters, nor makes them any less than likable, as is the practice in the old-fashioned Hollywood action films of yore.

Carpenter takes this pragmatism and satisfactorily splays it, so as not to just be about "brave vs. cowardly" or "good vs. bad" as is conventional in the classical Western of pre-progressivist era. Now, Carpenter mixes in the push of societal shifts (the film takes place in a mankind under a new matriarchal order), modern urban upbringing, and the nitty-gritty of what gets a pure survivalist through the day (which includes here, most interestingly, the good and bad of recreational drug use). It was great seeing faces like Jason Statham and Clea Duvall playing characters not glamorized or de-glamorized, instead ones that would usually be played by anonymous background actors. I was really struck by the Ice Cube-Henstridge interplay, too.

But, despite that, in the end, this is definitely not an improvement on Assault on Precinct 13, which also offers an open look at criminality and which this film is practically a remake. Carpenter's directing has always been characterized by its flat beats and mechanical, no-less-than (or, arguably, more-than) efficient style, but before it was in service of really careful sequencing and often lovely mise en scene. Here, his cinematic vocabulary seems to have disappeared and he's speaking like a thorough layman. The film has its formal idiosyncrasy, though. The rhythm of the film and its use of dissolves is particularly effective. It's too bad Carpenter was content with the film's cheap-looking production design and villain costuming, which go a long way in sinking the film. I think the film is very competent. It's just Carpenter sets his visual standards so freaking low here for some reason.

Friday Night (Denis, 2002) 8
Martyrs (Laugier, 2008) 6
* Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987) 9
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (Mungiu, 2007) 7
* Prince of Darkness (Carpenter, 1987) 5.5
The Ruins (Smith, 2008) 5.5
Brief Crossing (Breillat, 2001) 7
The Game (Fincher, 1997) 6
Beau travail (Denis, 1999) 8
Claire Denis' technique isn't quite as polished as I like to see in my films - in fact, I'd call it almost sloppy at times - but deliberateness and authorial command definitely come through, with stunning elegance at numerous times, even if Denis' style of impromptu visualization leads to too many moments utilizing the grace of a slowly crawling camera to little effect. I wasn't with the film beat by beat - as a story told with explicit fragmentation and a willful avoidance of continuity and clarity, I can't help but feel we don't understand the two central characters as much as we should. But it's a preferred trade-in for what the film does so elliptically evoke concerning the legionnaire life, environment, and what it nurtures. This thoroughly expressionistic but finely detailed sketching of masculine regimentation is even more impressive and daring knowing a woman is behind the camera.

About the last scene, while it's certainly very affecting, I can't help but wish there was some context given to it, which might lend it a certified reality. I find I need to think of it as a moment that actually happens and not just as a fantasy scene if I want to appreciate it fully. As something that happened, it means he could dance. As a fantasy scene, it's inexplicable and just something Denis would throw in mid-filming when she found out her lead actor could dance.

UP (Docter, 2009) 7

Bram Stoker's Dracula (Coppola, 1992) 6

Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell would have been an achievement much in the same way Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula is, if Raimi had made Drag Me To Hell, you know, better. The two films even have similar slam-bang openings and shock, tactile title cards (which never fail).

As Raimi wishes to throwback to certain old-school schlock, Dracula also takes a classical-type story burdened with lots of codings and de-codes them using overt artificial style, Coppola throwbacking majorly to silent film aesthetic and storytelling beats.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is an uneven film that gets increasingly tiresome once Helsing and the men start actively seeking out Dracula, leading to a very weak climactic act, but there's too many great moments here to completely dismiss, especially in the first half of the film. The number of gleefully bizarre moments only Coppola's capable of is unbeatable, such as the extravagant visual feast that is Harker's first entrance into Dracula's castle and the shot of the spectacularly made-up Giant Bat form of Dracula moping out of sight when Mira catches him in the garden with Lucy, complete with a practically slapstick iris out. The characterization of the Lucy character takes on a particular poignance, her chipper and giving personality seemingly irrepressible even as all her vitality is slowly being sucked from her - perhaps Coppola's way to undermine our expectations that the vapid sex kitten is always easily susceptible to the draining of inner character, as the whole film serves to re-evaluate the Victorian era and its gentrified sexual mores, drained of the true, potent, and certainly blasphemous passion that Dracula embodies.

Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) 8
Se7en (Fincher, 1995) 5.5
* The Funhouse (Hooper, 1981) 7
Beyond Therapy (Altman, 1987) 7

Yeah, Altman lyricism is just too irresistible for me, even if the film makes very little in the way of concluding, transcendent statements and this film probably shows off the worst of Altman's tendency for puerile caricature. There's too much silliness here to make the film work dramatically, but if that final scene (starting with the hilarious "shoot em up") doesn't tie things up nicer than I'd expected. Glenda Jackson is fantastic and hilarious.

May 2009

2009-05-20T17:10:00.000-07:00

May 2009

Star Trek (Abrams, 2009) 7

Drag Me To Hell (Raimi, 2009) 5

Orca (Anderson, 1977) 3.5

Recommended Reviews: Film Freak Central on Orca

Snatch (Ritchie, 2000) 4

Sleeper (Allen, 1973) 6.5

Love and Death (Allen, 1975) 6

Adventureland (Mottola, 2009) 6

Body Bags (Carpenter & Hooper, 1993) (TV) 4

Irreversible (Noé, 2002) 5.5

The Piano (Campion, 1993) 9

Best demystification of hoop skirts ever.

Shocker (Craven, 1989) 3.5

Wes Craven is the showman of the horror auteurs. He's modish and trendy and he shows it in his horror films. He's also a goofball, though, and a sucker for novelty, and that shows most explicitly in Shocker. Mitch Pileggi, a face known to any X-Files fan, tries valiantly to be the next Freddy Krueger, rolling of one-liners in mid-slaughter. It would all be just dull if the film didn't benefit from Craven's dream logic-inspired, sight gag-inclined knack at inanity. The otherworldly presence of the dead girlfriend, who seems to appear with the alternating and counter-productive purposes of either assisting, turning on, or fruitlessly freaking the hell out the film's hero, is one of the film's stranger plot elements, in a film full of strange plot elements. This includes the entire high school football team helping out foil the killer's plot, and a lecherous psychopath body-jumping into a six-year-old girl. Amusing, but pointless. This film just made me further appreciate the more abstract approach to horror of Tobe Hooper, who tackled technology fears much more artfully in his Spontaneous Combustion, released the year after.

Splinter (Wilkins, 2008) 5.5

JLG/JLG (Godard, 199 ) 6.5

Nouvelle Vague (Godard, 1990) 7.5

Passion (2nd) (Godard, 1985) 7

* War of the Worlds (Spielberg, 2005) 4.5

April 2009

2009-04-08T05:52:00.000-07:00

April 2009

The Midnight Meat Train (Kitamura, 2008) 4.5

Passion (Godard, 1982) 7

Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle, 2008) 3

* Images (Altman, 1972) 7.5

Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Godard, 1980) 7.5

The Apartment Complex (Hooper, 1999) 4

Tarnation (Caouette, 2003) 5.5

* Tobe Hooper's Night Terrors (Hooper, 1993) 5.5

March 2009

2009-03-03T15:09:00.001-08:00

March 2009

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (Argento, 1971) 6.5
* The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973) 8.5
Smiley Face (fullscreen) (Araki, 2007) 4
* Quantum of Solace (Forster, 2007) 3.5
Saw IV (Bousman, 2007) 1.5
Tobe Hooper's Night Terrors (Hooper, 1993) 5
Sexy Beast (Glazer, 2000) 8
Tokyo Sonata (Kurosawa, 2009) 7
License to Live (Kurosawa, 1998) 7.5
Eyes of the Spider (Kurosawa, 1998) n/a
Serpent's Path (Kurosawa, 1998) 7.5
A Scanner Darkly (Linklater, 2006) 5.5
Stuck (Gordon, 2008) 8
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (Parker & Stone, 1999) 5
Week End (Godard, 1967) 7.5

February 2009

2009-02-05T14:42:00.000-08:00

February 2009

Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Godard, 1967) 7
Coraline (Selick, 2009) 7
* Night of the Demon (Tourneur, 1957) 8.5
Milk (Van Sant, 2008) 7
Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009) 2.5
Oh my God so fucking dull.
If this remake is of any conceivable use, it'll be making non-fans realize what relative (or absolute, if they really come around...) joys the 80s Friday flicks were. The 80s Friday's were stupid slashers, but they were eccentric stupid slasher films, where part of the fun was their lampoon of an eclectic set of stereotypes and caricatures.
Gran Torino (Eastwood, 2008) 6.5
* Night and Fog (Resnais, 1955) 8.5
Marnie (Hitchcock, 1964) 8
Culloden (Watkins, 1964) (TV) 9
Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 2009) 7.5
Contempt (Godard, 1963) 7.5
Emma (McGrath, 1996) 5.5
Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Smith, 2008) 3.5
First Kevin Smith film, so I wasn't expecting anything nor was I expecting nothing. Banks is a babe and I still like Seth Rogen, and they were probably thinking they were going to be in a film that was actually subversive and insightful. Instead they ended up in a rather dullard film that's stale and bland. Likeable enough, I guess, but I did start feeling hostile towards the film once the ridiculous "Three months later..." card went up and the film completely gives in to irrepressible formula.
* Re-Animator (Gordon, 1986) 6
Vivre se vie (Godard, 1962) 8

January 2009

2009-01-05T15:47:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 2009

* Birth (Glazer, 2004) 8.5
The Uninvited (Guard Brothers, 2009) 2.5
spoilers
Bleergghh. Bleeeergghh. That's the sound of me feeling physically ill while I watched this endlessly irritating, endlessly imbecilic movie. I'm usually very forgiving towards remakes, but just thinking about the artistry of A Tale of Two Sisters compared to this laughably cliched and awkward and visionless remake did make me want to puke. Throughout, I squirmed in my seat, groaned audibly, slapped my palm against my forehead, and broke into a drool of imitated braindeadedness, without fear of disrupting the movie-goers around me, mocking the film left and right.

That said, it does offer its own interesting spin on the big twist of the original. Its version of events is much more mean-spirited and psychologically subversive than Two Sisters', and actually gives the film some thematic cause for being such a sexed-up, teeny-bopper, American make-over of the more sober, adult Korean film. While that film dealt with budding biology through the mind of a main protagonist struggling to achieve a sort of adulthood and maturity, this remake consistently peddles and presents sex and sexuality with the attitude of a giggling school girl, through the eyes of a main protagonist wanting to cling to a childhood purity threatened by a wanton and whorish new stepmother. When the remake's secret is let out of the bag and the film reveals its message as some sort of variation on the old covenant "Get some nookie or let's go kooky," then it just all makes sense the film sexifies teen-star Emily Browning to such an extent it seems only possible in her dreams. Might there be some implicit critique made by the film, that all the overwrought CW shows and grotesque tween celebrity scene and Emily Browning in two-pieces are nightmare manifestations of the repressed psyche of bourgeoisie American youth? That if all teeny-boppers are as vapid as what this film hawks to them, then all youths in question are as subject to delusion and possible psychosis as the flittery, ill-"educated" young woman of this picture? Nah. There's much too much audience-protagonist identification throughout, instead of much-needed meta-irony.

* Breathless (Godard, 1960) 8.5
The Killers (Siodmak, 1946) 6.5
The Dunwich Horror (Haller, 1970) 5
aka Gidget Goes Date-Rape... For, Like, a Whole Week Straight. The serious issue that is date-rape aside, Daniel Haller's Sandra Dee-starring early 70s psychedalia horror-flick The Dunwich Horror is weird and amusing enough to make me appreciate it on some level. Likely the level that can imagine going whole hog with a really strung-out chick one smoky Woodstock night on the dewy green as Canned Heat played in the background. Poor Sandra Dee. This film is not good to her, or any of its women characters in general.

The film is not good, persay, but I for one appreciated its stylistic pretention. It's an example of a director, Haller, who was previously an art designer and now taking a turn as director. It is readily apparent: he has a great eye, a very lofty sense of style, and generally a great "art designer" sense of directing - but he can't quite get us to take it all seriously when he has to put his artsiness in the context of a story, and when no restraint is shown in cinematography so conceptualized it just seems made for a trip-out instead of a serious film. If this movie were made with the intelligent design behind Flaming Creatures or a Guy Maddin film, Haller would've been a genius. But in reality, this is just a very silly horror movie.

Die, Monster, Die! (Haller, 1975) 4
Snow Angels (Gordon Green, 2008) 7
Young and Innocent (Hitchcock, 1937) 6.5
Kung Fu Panda (Osborne, 2008) 5
* Little Otik (Svankmajer, 2000) 7
* Happy Feet (Miller, 2006) 9
The Haunted Strangler (Day, 1948) 5.5
The Beast Must Die (Annett, 1974) 4
* Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 1951) 7.5
Strangers on a Train is the first Hitchcock in a long time that I've come away feeling a bit underwhelmed (although, of course, it's not as if I have been watching what I assume are his least interesting works). It is surely an excellent piece of filmmaking, but I feel Shadow of a Doubt is a much more poignant picture about deviant personality lashing out against certain uglinesses of pompous normalcy. Strangers certainly has a lot of visual wit and biting undercurrents, but I think it is finally a case of Hitchcock's rigorous constructions and narrative tightness piling too thickly and overcoming subtextual insight. Even the much-touted merry-go-round finale seemed less "evocative imagery" than just a plot device (even though it is, of course, to some degree, visual evocation - I'd be fooling myself if I thought "Let's set the climactic fight on a merry-go-round!" was completely arbitary or completely a thin gimmick).
* School of Rock (Linklater, 2003) 6
* Dead-Alive (aka Braindead) (Jackson, 1992) 8.5
Dust Devil (Stanley, 1992) 4
The Saddest Music in the World (Maddin, 2003) 7
My first Guy Maddin flick. Maddin uncannily recreates the "silent film" look, and it's not just for cute aesthetic experimentation. The use of the silent movie look mixed with his non-sanitized characters, sensibility, and really wacky and inspired story really works with its theme on the irresponsible mixing-and-matching of emotionality (sadness and nostalgia and sociological representations) with the petty, insensitive, bawdy drama and business the main characters take part in. But on the con side, I also found Maddin's filmmaking generally rather ostentatious and indelicate. While his images are often striking and delicate, his editing and conceptualization is a bit flashy and frenetic. The film should have milked the competition and musical sequences more. Instead it was too plot-driven and a bit overly jokey.
Valkyrie (Singer, 2008) 5
The Crazies (Romero, 1973) 6.5
Paranoid Park (Van Sant, 2007) 8
* Disturbia (Caruso, 2007) 4
* Enchanted (Lima, 2007) 4.5

December 2008

2008-12-18T04:36:00.000-08:00

December 2008

Pink Flamingos (Waters, 1972) 5.5
The story has a remarkable simplicity and Waters' screenplay is surprising in its expressiveness. The contrast made between the non-territorial, non-intrusive, convivial (to those who understand her way of life) and principled and self-respecting Divine and the imposing, fascistic, materialistic Marbles has an almost brilliant clarity. The sort of defensiveness implicit in Waters' all-in championing of the private agency of the extra-ordinary outsider (and the support of those of exclusive good nature) does have a poignancy and one that comes through in the vivaciousness of the film.
5.5, though, because it's a lot of juvenile antics and stunt repulsiveness to take, and, like, zero effort seems to have been made by Waters toward any formal directorial craft. Good set design. The film is complete trash filmmaking, so maybe it does deserve a lower score... but the meaning and sensibility behind the film's story is there, and it's damn funny sometimes. Divine's proceeding over the Marbles' trial and fielding of the press is expert comedy.
Southland Tales (Kelly, 2006) 4.5
The Fall (Tarsem Singh, 2006) 6
* The Mist (Darabont, 2007) 7.5
Le Petit Soldat (Godard, 1963) 8
Elephant (Van Sant, 2003) 7.5
Tropic Thunder (Stiller, 2008) 5
The Squid and the Whale (Baumbach, 2005) 7
Me and You and Everyone We Know (July, 2005) 6.5
Wings (Shepitko, 1966) 8.5
* Re-Animator (Gordon, 1985) 6
* The Long Goodbye (Altman, 1973) 8.5
* The Elephant Man (Lynch, 1980) 6
* Dogville (Von Trier, 2003) 9
* Heavenly Creatures (Jackson, 1994) 9
* Frenzy (Hitchcock, 1972) 6.5
Walkabout (Roeg, 1972) 8.5
* Red (Kieslowski, 1994) 7.5
* Blue (Kieslowski, 1993) 9

November 2008

2008-11-20T01:30:00.001-08:00

NOVEMBER 08

Quantum of Solace (Forster, 2008) 4
Rogue (McLean, 2008) 5.5
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (Darnell and McGrath, 2008) 4.5
* The Funhouse (Hooper, 1982) 6.5
Happy-Go-Lucky (Leigh, 2008) 8.5
* Sleepaway Camp (Hiltzik, 1983) 5.5
No Lies (short) (Block, 1974) 8
The Double Life of Veronique (Kieslowski, 1991) 7.5
Rachel Getting Married (Demme, 2008) 8.5
Suzanne's Career (Rohmer, 1963) 8
The Bakery Girl of Monceau (Rohmer, 1963) 7.5
Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959) 8.5
Decalogue: VIII (Bear False Witness) (Kieslowski, 1989) (TV) 8.5
* Christine (Carpenter, 1982) 7
Let the Right One In (Alfredson, 2008) 6
I don't think it's empty, and I'm glad this sort of emotionally lofty and patient horror film is being embraced by all sorts of people, but the film is a bit lethargic and dull around the edges, and when it does finally perk up, it's usually for some easy morbidity.
The Decalogue: IV (Remember the Sabbath Day) (Kieslowski, 1989) (TV) 7.5
The Decalogue: II (God's Name in Vain) (Kieslowski, 1989) (TV) 8
* Joshua (Ratliff, 2007) 7.5

October 2008

2008-10-30T23:20:00.001-07:00

OCTOBER 08

* Hostel (Roth, 2005) 6.5
Hostel still exhibits a sober sort of plangency with its cinematic decor - from an ambitiously layered script, to a sober eye for cinematography, to moments of earthy, depressive gravity that pepper the film - but this second viewing (after three years since seeing it on its opening weekend) revealed the flaws in the film lies in Roth's callow sense of dramatic pacing. The film has sparkling moments of sensitivity, but they often seem too short, too concise. Instead of being woven into the film, they are just glimmers of the dramatic sense Roth has as a director, scattered smack in between moments that are rote and expositional. He doesn't realize that a great film breathes even the most purely utilitarian scenes with some ascendant aesthetic/dramatic sensibility united with the thematic core of the film, and thus creating a unified "great" whole - which Hostel is not, unfortunately. And he doesn't know how to give a buffer to his attempts at grace to allow them to breathe and proliferate with meaning. This makes the film just sort of sloppy. Its going from restrained to loud-mouthed, or emotionally striking to emotionally mundane, in the split of a second, and it is often really frustrating. I am still a relative proponent of the film, though, despite the new evaluation.
* May (McKee, 2003) 8
Damn good filmmaking, really frickin' sophisticated sometimes.
Chloe in the Afternoon (Rohmer, 1979) 9
Claire's Knee (Rohmer, 1978) 7.5
* Cat People (Tourneur, 1942) 8.5
Cat People's dialogue is dynamite. Upon this re-watch, I was actually kind of underwhelmed by Tourneur's directing (still great, though, probably just the 'Re-visiting with too-high expectations' effect), but the dialogue really never lets up. Really political and sociological, and its play with psychoanalytics is really "with-the-times." The only thing that (still) bugs me is that I just can't fathom Oliver being that patient with Irena, half a year past their wedding. Thankfully, the screenplay comes to the rescue, giving Oliver a moment to express to Alice (who came off as utterly shameless this time around) his irrepressible attraction to Irena's "foreignness," despite their considerable lack of intimacy.
My Night At Maud's (Roher, 1974) 7.5
* The Curse of the Cat People (Von Fritsch and Wise, 1943) 8.5
I can understand why someone wouldn't like 'Curse.' Plot-wise it is kinda "blah," nothing really happens, and its point of conflict with the old woman and her daughter is just really vague in an off-the-wall sort of way... but the film's just too fucking magical. To wit, it's magical, touching, ethereal, and damn beautiful to look at. Plus, its elevating of imagination and fantasy (and the dark and sad kind, even) over a general sort of traditionalism is a major plus for horror film fans like myself. This idea is presented with livid and arch beauty in the Christmas scene, where the dark specter sings the French carol Il le ne, le divin Enfant - with her fey, foreign lilt - in counterpoint to the self-satisfied singing of Shepherds Shake Off Your Drowsy Sleep by a flocking group of comfortable Anglos inside.
* Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) 8.5
* Dawn of the Dead (Romero, 1974) 7.5
The Ascent (Sheptiko, 1977) 9
Synecdoche, New York (Kaufman, 2008) 6.5

September 2008

2008-09-30T23:20:00.000-07:00

SEPTEMBER 08

Il Deserto rosso (Red Desert) (Antonioni, 1964) 6.5
L'Urlo (The Howl) (Brass, 1970) 5.5
* L'Eclisse (Antonioni, 1962) 8.5
* La Notte (Antonioni, 1961) 9
* The Return of the Living Dead (O'Bannon, 1985) 7
Blithe Spirit (David Lean, 1945) 6.5
* Night of the Creeps (Dekker, 1986) 5
* L'Avventura (Antonioni, 1960) 8.5
Forces of Nature (Hughes, 1999) 4
"The Decalogue": Adultery (Kieslowski, 1989) (TV) 8.5
The Girl at the Monceau Bakery (Rohmer, 1963) 8
What Dreams May Come (Ward, 1998) 5
Brewster McCloud (Altman, 1973) 9

August 2008

2008-08-30T23:19:00.000-07:00

AUGUST 08

Office Space (Judge, 1999) 4
Cat People (Schreider, 1982) 4
River's Edge (Hunter, 1986) 7.5
* Hostel: Part II (Roth, 2007) 5.5
* Popeye (Altman, 1980) 7
* The X-Files: I Want to Believe (Carter, 2008) 7
* Carnival of Souls (Harvey, 1962) 7
The Stunt Man (Rush, 1980) 7.5
Pineapple Express (Gordon Green, 2008) 6.5
Spontaneous Combustion (Hooper, 1990) 6
Inside (Baustillo, 2007) 5
Straw Dogs (Peckinpah, 1971) 8.5

July 2008

2008-07-30T23:18:00.000-07:00

JULY 08

The X-Files: I Want to Believe (Carter, 2008)|||||6.5
Bruiser (Romero, 2000)|||||5
The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008)|||||6
Season of the Witch (Romero, 1978)|||||8.5
Immortal Beloved (Rose, 1995)|||||6.5
Belle de Jour (Bunuel, 1967)|||||7
Two Lane Blacktop (Hellman, 1971)|||||7.5
Wanted (Bembaktov, 2008)|||||3.5
Mission to Mars (de Palma, 2003)|||||5
Hard Labour (Leigh, 1976)|||||7
You Can't Take It With You (Capra, 1937)|||||4.5
Magic (Attenborough, 1976)|||||8
Noriko's Dinner Table (Sono, 2006)|||||7

June 2008

2008-06-30T23:18:00.000-07:00

JUNE 08

Wall-E (|||||7.5
All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, 1954)|||||8
* Diary of the Dead (Romero, 2007)|||||7
Winchester '73 (Mann, 1955)|||||7
* Charisma (Kurosawa, 2000)|||||8.5
O.C. and Stiggs (Altman, 1986)|||||8.5
30 Days of Night (Slade, 2007)|||||3
Lonely Are the Brave (|||||5.5
Retribution (Kurosawa, 2006)|||||7
The Man From Laramie (|||||8
Cleo From 5 to 7 (Varda, 1956)|||||8
After the Thin Man|||||6
Syndromes and a Century (Weerasethakul, 2007)|||||8.5
The Happening (Shyamalan, 2008)|||||5
Hannah Takes the Stairs (|||||6.5
The Third Mother (Argento, 2008)|||||4
Crocodile (Hooper, 2000)|||||2

May 2008

2008-05-30T23:17:00.000-07:00

MAY 08

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Spielberg, 2008)|||||5

There's something bubbling underneath the surface of this one... I'm not surprised at various writers' attempts to extract something out of its clever self-reflexivity. There are striking considerations of the new era the series takes place in now: the depictions of youth, the use of knowledge for intimidation, the very pettiness of the quest, the occasional sense of vulnerability allowed its Commie villains (i.e. the drag race in the awesome opening credits, Blanchett's admirably emotive performance). The film also seems to be striving to distill the very nature of the Indiana Jones films, what with its plot points concerning academia and adventure, and the revisions and referrals to history (the adventure seems to amount to little more than an opportunity for Spilko and Jones to horde knowledge and combat their principles towards discovery, at the expense of the remains of cruel conquistadors and humble natives).

But yeah, otherwise the movie just isn't very good. Silly, inane, too glossy, and the end is the definition of anti-climactic predictability. I hate to say it, but the movie could've used some... stronger violence? Ray Winstone's last scene is mind-bogglingly strange. And the whole movie is just another victim of the CGI age.

Turbulence 2: Fear of Flying (TV broadcast) (Philippines) (|||||2.5
Smiles of a Summer Night (Bergman, 1948)|||||8.5
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (Greenaway, 1986)|||||8.5
* Pride & Prejudice (Wright, 2005)|||||8
Speed Racer (Wachowski Brothers, 2008)|||||5
Invaders from Mars (Hooper, 1986)|||||6.5
The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers, 1999)|||||5.5
Lifeforce (Hooper, 1985)|||||8

April 2008

2008-04-30T23:17:00.000-07:00

APRIL 08

Standard Operating Procedure (Morris, 2008)|||||6.5

I got to see Errol Morris' new documentary Standard Operation Procedure at the SF International Film Festival with Morris in attendance and with Q&A. Morris' pedagogic approach is always a bit too lofty and post-modern chic, and this is no exception. Whether allegorizing his grand commentaries in character personalities, leaving his more barbed criticisms in the realm of semiotics (the film, when on the topic of his arrest, uses the act of slo-mo egg-frying to evoke the figure of Saddam Hussein), or restricting his film to the incessant blather of one particular perspective (here, those of the "bad apples" of Abu Ghraib, portrayed as clueless young'ns), Morris made his point about the irresponsibility of war-time systems much better in the Q&A than in the film itself. The film itself is rather droning and long-winded, spending too much time detailing in over-produced reenactments the crimes committed in the prison while his greater themes remain obfuscated by his love of creating irony through accessibility, but to the point of excess.
* Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1969)|||||8
* The Life Aquatic with Steven Zissou (Anderson, 2004)|||||7.5
* Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1977)|||||9
Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (Morris, 1994)|||||6.5
Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950)|||||8.5
The Thin Blue Line (Morris, 1987)|||||7.5
* Punch-Drunk Love (Anderson, 2001) |||||6.5
* L'Avventura (Antonioni, 1960)|||||8.5
Gates of Heaven (Morris, 1976)|||||6.5
The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1967)|||||8

March 2008

2008-03-30T23:16:00.000-07:00

MARCH 08

Into the Wild (Penn, 2007)|||||8.5
The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont, 1994)|||||5
* The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson, 2001)|||||6.5
The Ninth Configuration (Blatty, 1984)|||||7.5
Starship Troopers (Verhoeven, 1997)|||||8.5
Singin' in the Rain (|||||7.5
North By Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959)|||||9
The Convent (|||||4.5
* Cube (Natali, 1997)|||||6
Rescue Dawn (Herzog, 2006)|||||7
* Doppelganger (Kurosawa, 2003)|||||9

February 2008

2008-02-28T23:16:00.000-08:00

FEBRUARY 08

Severance (|||||4
Michael Clayton (Gilroy, 2007)|||||6.5
Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais, 1960)|||||9
Margot at the Wedding (Baumbach, 2007)|||||6.5
The Bicycle Thief (de Sica, 1946)|||||8.5
Remembrance of Things to Come (Marker, 1993)|||||7
* The Mangler (Hooper, 1995)|||||5
Berkeley (|||||2
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominick, 2007)|||||8.5
Citizen Kane (Welles, 1944)|||||9
Sans Soleil (Marker, 1978)|||||9
Faces (Cassavetes, 1968)|||||8.5
The Lives of Others (von Donnersmarck, 2006)|||||7

The film has artful delicacy seen in its consistent peppering of cohering visual cues, many times evoking the film's central focus of "surveillance." The character Christa's final moment is particularly well-handled, utilizing the "head-on" shot of Christa, one of the film's most often used visual cues, to a devastating - and ironic (rather indelicately emphasized in my previous scare quoted turn of phrase) - effect.
The film is too long, though, and it lacks a forcefulness to it, whether regarding its politics or its very construction I do not know. The film is overall a bit rudimentary in its storytelling and character-centric approach.
The Boss of it All (von Trier, 2006)|||||7
Black Book (Verhoeven, 2007)|||||8

*spoilers* Black Book is so close to being great, if it were not for its last minute plot twist, the very last double-cross heaped upon the previous doubles-crosses. It only served as overkill, forcing the film's incisive point - about war not being about good vs. evil, but a complex network of pricks screwing each other over - to a point more literalistic than, and less metaphoric as, it should have been. The Doctor had come in a hero, taken her away, allowed her finally the "Victory Jeep ride" we anticipated for her, yet he is all together unheedful of why she breaks down crying about the executed Mutze. That showed his soulless mechanization more than enough, but unfortunately the film had to go and make him a one-dimensional villain. If the film had ended with the moment where she breaks down crying, sobbing the phrase "Will it never end?", the film would have been superlative. That one moment so perfectly encapsulates the dashed expectations and irrevocable epiphanies and humiliations Ellis has had to endure as a wannabe Mata Hari.

Other than that, the film is exceptional and Verhoeven perfectly over-stylizes the film to fit Van Houten's romantic hopes of transgressing the Nazi regime. Throughout, he tinges the film with a very contemporary, matter-of-fact touch that puts various overly dour romanticizations of World War II Europe to shame. The best thing about the film is Ellis (or Carice Van Houten, no need to give-or-take distinctions between them). The vagueness of what exactly is the true fiber of her character, and Verhoeven's strange hints at an off-putting artificiality in the convictions she takes on, creates just the right balance to make her both involving and enigmatic: a surrogate heroine as well as a character to analyze and scrutinize.
Teeth (Lichtenstein, 2007)|||||5
The Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939)|||||9
Gone Baby Gone (Affleck, 2007)|||||8.5
Shadows (Cassavetes, 1959)|||||8
* Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, 1938)|||||8
Enchanted (Lima, 2007)|||||5
12:08 East of Bucharest (Porumboiu, 2006)|||||7
The Company (Altman, 2003)|||||9
* There Will Be Blood (Anderson, 2007)|||||6
Exiled (To, 2006)|||||7
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Cassavetes, 1976)|||||9

January 2008

2008-01-30T23:15:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 08

* Blackmail (Hitchcock, 1929)|||||6.5
Le Joli Mai (Marker & Lhomme, 1963)|||||8
* McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Altman, 1971)|||||8.5
Fat Girl (Breillat, 2001)|||||9
Los Olvidados (Buñuel, 1950)|||||7.5
The Koumiko Mystery (Marker, 1965)|||||9
La Jetee (Marker, 1962)|||||8
Night and Fog (Resnais, 1955)|||||8
Days of Heaven (Malick, 1978)|||||9
Across the Universe (Taymor, 2007)|||||5
Magnolia (Anderson, 1999)|||||6.5
Kids (Clark, 1995)|||||8
Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (Miike, 2006)|||||7
I'm Not There (Haynes, 2007)|||||7
Notorious (Hitchcock, 1946)|||||9
* Targets (Bogdanovich, 1968)|||||8.5
The Orphanage (Bayona, 2008)|||||5
This is England (Meadows, 2007)|||||8.5
The Taste of Tea (Ishii, 2004)|||||7.5
* May (McKee, 2003)|||||7.5
Cloverfield (Reeves, 2008)|||||5.5
Offside (Panahi, 2006)|||||8
Hot Fuzz (Wright, 2007)|||||7
Knocked Up (Apatow, 2007)|||||6.5
3:10 to Yuma (Mangold, 2007)|||||4
Red Road (Arnold, 2006)|||||7
Beloved (Demme, 1998)|||||7
* The Quiet Family (Kim, 1998)|||||7.5
* The Host (Bong, 2006)|||||7.5
The Lookout (Frank, 2006)|||||5.5
28 Weeks Later (Fresnadillo, 2007)|||||5
Thoroughly engaging, recurrently effective as an approximation of the demoralized atrocities of ill-defined militarism, fear, and warfare (whether in war, in the blood, or in the family)... but Jesus if that wasn't one of the more sloppy, slap-dash, and incohesively constructed big-budget mainstream films I have ever witnessed. The film is too frenetic in directing and editing, for the film maintains the same overbearing style throughout and thus loses dramatic coherence (which it does possess at some points) in the quagmire of stylistic excess and a deficient sense of the virtues of a varied pacing and also variance in stylistic composition. The director and editor seemed to only function on two modes: haphazard montage of beautiful imagery and incomprehensible action sequence.

Too sloppy and overdone to be truly good - and the film's really sloppily crafted - but it has a striking thematic heft that makes me see the film as a too somber, too serious UK equivalent to The Host.
Eaten Alive (Hooper, 1977)|||||6.5
The Servant (Losey, 1963)|||||9
Appropriately high strung and scary in its portrayal of the perils of lethargy. One really feels the vapid complacence and subsequent torpor that entails the main character's downfall. Guaranteed to make one want to give up drug-stupored orgies and take control of one's own life!
Love Affair (McCarey, 1939)|||||8
Time (Kim, 2006)|||||6.5
A nicely edgy and upfront appraisal of cruel emotional politics ingrained in serious relationships, but I'm not sure shaky dialogue and overwroughtness assist much Ki-duk's spare directing.
Juno (Reitman, 2007)|||||6
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theatres (Maiellaro & Willis, 2007)|||||5.5
From Beyond (Gordon, 1986)|||||6
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (Altman, 1976)|||||8.5
The Burning (Maylam, 1981)|||||5
Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix (Yates, 2007)|||||5.5
Black Snake Moan (Brewer, 2007)|||||6.5
The Simpsons Movie (Silverman, 2007)|||||5
Away from Her (Polley, 2006)|||||6.5
* God Told Me To (Cohen, 1976)|||||7
* Death Proof (Tarantino, 2007)|||||9
Who Can Kill a Child? (Serrador, 1976)|||||7
Beautifully filmed, sometimes-silly-sometimes-brilliant low-budget Euro horror.
Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1977)|||||8.5
Once (Carney, 2006)|||||6.5

Pleasant, with engaging music. Characters are downtrodden in an admirably subdued way, and it's refreshing how they weigh their options and convictions like real adults, all without losing the sweeping romance that the more typical movie love story would usually throw all its dignity to the wind to achieve. But otherwise... meh? Not sure I find much to take away from this one, especially formally. Have I mentioned I hate musical montage?
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbender, 1974)|||||8.5
Bless that turn of the screw a third into it. I should have seen it coming, but it pushed the movie up from good to great. Fassbinder's strange, ironical formal technique magically clicks when the film's relentless prejudice romance-drama is finally ambushed by realities like the nature of uppity old womanhood, rowdy and prideful young manhood, and stubborn cultural values and language-intelligence barriers. Then it is awesome how the film regresses back to melodrama, then does a back flip again at the last second to serve bummerific immigrant labor social realities.
Django (Corbucci, 1966) |||||6.5

December 2007

2007-12-31T23:09:00.000-08:00

DECEMBER 07

Scarecrows (Wesley, 1988)|||||6
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Burton, 2007)|||||8.5
Alligator (Teague, 1980)|||||5.5
I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (Dugan, 2007)|||||3.5
Adaptation (Jonze, 2000)|||||7
Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (Simpson, 1989)|||||5.5
Atonement (Wright, 2007)|||||6
Children of Men (Cauron, 2006)|||||6

November 2007

2007-11-30T04:04:00.000-08:00

NOVEMBER 07

The Mist (Darabont, 2007)|||||7.5
Don't Look Now (Roeg, 1973)|||||9.5
There Will Be Blood (Anderson, 2007)|||||7
Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (V) (Simpson, 1988)|||||4.5
Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)|||||9.5
Hairspray (Shankman, 2007)|||||4.5

October 2007

2007-10-31T04:03:00.000-07:00

OCTOBER 07

No Country For Old Men (Coen Brothers, 2007)|||||8
Boogie Nights (Anderson, 1997)|||||7

September 2007

2007-09-30T04:02:00.000-07:00

SEPTEMBER 07

Boudu Saved From Drowning (Renoir, 1932)|||||8.5
* Seance (Kurosawa, 2000)|||||9

August 2007

2007-08-31T04:01:00.000-07:00

AUGUST 07

Society (Yuzna, 1989)|||||5.5
Blue (Kieslowski, 1993)|||||9
The Booth (Nakamura, 2005)|||||6
The Piano Teacher (Haneke, 2001)|||||8.5
The Messengers (Pang Brothers, 2007)|||||1.5

July 2007

2007-07-31T04:00:00.000-07:00

JULY 07

Joshua (Ratliff, 2007)|||||7.5
1408 (Håfström, 2007)|||||4.5
Transformers (Bay, 2007)|||||3.5
Persona (Bergman, 1966)|||||9
Gridlock'd (Curtis-Hall, 1997)|||||7
Shutter (Pisanthanakun & Wongpoom, 2004)|||||4
* Wendigo (Fessenden, 2001)|||||9

June 2007

2007-06-30T03:59:00.000-07:00

JUNE 2007

To Live and Die in L.A. (Friedkin, 1985)|||||8.5
Dogville (Von Trier, 2003)|||||9.5
Q - The Winged Serpent (Cohen, 1982)3||||8.5
Stranger Than Fiction (Forster, 2006)|||||5.5
A Wedding (Altman, 1978)|||||8.5
Saw III (Lynn Bousman, 2006)|||||3.5