April 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

OCTOBER 07

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