October 2011

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

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

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

July 2011

Twin Peaks, Season 1 (Lynch, et al., 1990)|||||+++
La Ronde (Ophuls, 1950)|||||7.5La 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)|||||7.5
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

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

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
It's a nifty Japanese horrorfest, a Poltergeist/Evil Dead/House on Haunted Hill-remake mash-up. The material is weak, but Kurosawa's brilliance is still noticeable, both as a horror film director and as a director of beatific emotion. Unfortunately, a solid first half ultimately gives way to the ho-hum climactic act, trafficking in standard (and boring) maternal angst themes, and mostly saved by slam-bang FX.
* I Walked With a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943)|||||8

April 2011

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