July 29, 2008
I Wanted to Believe Too But I Was Left with Little Choice
Word up. I reviewed the new X-Files movie for Beatroute. Long story short: just go see Batman again.
July 1, 2008
Wet Hot Canadian Summer
I've been meaning to update more, I really have... but the problem is that most of the movies immediately following awards season are utter dross. (Well, that and my profound, pathological laziness. I think I might have an iron deficiency.)
But seriously. A movie about an adorable robot, a movie about a guy in a robot suit, and a movie prominently featuring Sylvester Stallone are the three best things I've seen this year. That is discouraging. When I see shit like Speed Racer, I don't want to go home and write about it. I want to pour myself a stiff drink and play with a loaded gun.
WALL*E was phenomenal, though, and it reminded me that I like writing about movies as well as watching them. So I'll have a review of that one up soon. I'm also going to be writing about older films for an unnamed magazine (if our mutual lack of communication hasn't already rendered me persona non grata there - in which case I'll just post those pieces here).
MOURN YA 'TIL I JOIN YA,
John.
But seriously. A movie about an adorable robot, a movie about a guy in a robot suit, and a movie prominently featuring Sylvester Stallone are the three best things I've seen this year. That is discouraging. When I see shit like Speed Racer, I don't want to go home and write about it. I want to pour myself a stiff drink and play with a loaded gun.
WALL*E was phenomenal, though, and it reminded me that I like writing about movies as well as watching them. So I'll have a review of that one up soon. I'm also going to be writing about older films for an unnamed magazine (if our mutual lack of communication hasn't already rendered me persona non grata there - in which case I'll just post those pieces here).
MOURN YA 'TIL I JOIN YA,
John.
January 29, 2008
Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot!
RAMBO (dir. Sylvester Stallone, scrs. Stallone & Art Monterastelli)
I've been putting off doing any kind of 2007 year-end roundup until I've caught up with the 3 or 4 films still on my to-see list. If they would stop trying to cram everything worthwhile into the last six weeks of the year, I wouldn't be having this problem.
As far as the cinema of 2008 goes, however, a new high watermark has already been set, and its name is... RAMBO. John Rambo.
Seriously. It's impossible for me to rate Sly's new magnum opus according to any highfalutin' metric of quality, but man, it was kind of awesome. He devotes the first ten or so minutes of the film to establishing a flimsy pretext for killing everybody, and then spends the remainder of the film killing everybody. Apart from the rather perfunctory newsreel of Burmese atrocities that opens the film, Rambo doesn't even pretend to be a social justice picture like its First Blood predecessors did. It's about an incredibly weathered and bitter-looking Stallone blasting roughly half the population of Burma into tiny meat chunks. I am not exaggerating when I say this is one of the most violent movies I have ever seen: throats are torn out, heads are cut off, bodies are blown apart by grenades, arrows pierce brains, etc. What's more, unlike some middlebrow Saving Private Ryan type flicks which abruptly cut away from such grotesquerie, Stallone is adamant that the audience sees every single bit of viscera in loving, prolonged detail. If it were any further over the top it would be a Troma film. The carnage is such that anyone tempted to take Rambo seriously will have abandoned that idea long before the credits roll (and judging by the snickering, gleeful applause with which the opening credits were greeted in my theatre, the film's target demographic knows exactly what it is getting itself into.)
SPOILER-ISH: The best part is that after roughly an hour of non-stop murder, the film just tacks on a 15-seconds-long coda of J. Ram returning to America and walking up some Mellencamp-esque country road, and then has the good sense to end. Roll credits. I mean, he basically killed everyone in the country - what else does Stallone need to show you? It ain't The Seventh Seal, but I had fun. B+
I've been putting off doing any kind of 2007 year-end roundup until I've caught up with the 3 or 4 films still on my to-see list. If they would stop trying to cram everything worthwhile into the last six weeks of the year, I wouldn't be having this problem.
As far as the cinema of 2008 goes, however, a new high watermark has already been set, and its name is... RAMBO. John Rambo.
Seriously. It's impossible for me to rate Sly's new magnum opus according to any highfalutin' metric of quality, but man, it was kind of awesome. He devotes the first ten or so minutes of the film to establishing a flimsy pretext for killing everybody, and then spends the remainder of the film killing everybody. Apart from the rather perfunctory newsreel of Burmese atrocities that opens the film, Rambo doesn't even pretend to be a social justice picture like its First Blood predecessors did. It's about an incredibly weathered and bitter-looking Stallone blasting roughly half the population of Burma into tiny meat chunks. I am not exaggerating when I say this is one of the most violent movies I have ever seen: throats are torn out, heads are cut off, bodies are blown apart by grenades, arrows pierce brains, etc. What's more, unlike some middlebrow Saving Private Ryan type flicks which abruptly cut away from such grotesquerie, Stallone is adamant that the audience sees every single bit of viscera in loving, prolonged detail. If it were any further over the top it would be a Troma film. The carnage is such that anyone tempted to take Rambo seriously will have abandoned that idea long before the credits roll (and judging by the snickering, gleeful applause with which the opening credits were greeted in my theatre, the film's target demographic knows exactly what it is getting itself into.)SPOILER-ISH: The best part is that after roughly an hour of non-stop murder, the film just tacks on a 15-seconds-long coda of J. Ram returning to America and walking up some Mellencamp-esque country road, and then has the good sense to end. Roll credits. I mean, he basically killed everyone in the country - what else does Stallone need to show you? It ain't The Seventh Seal, but I had fun. B+
December 27, 2007
Oy Gevalt
Thank God Christmas is over. I have enough time to think now.
Coming up, my best and worst of the year, and a solemn New Year's promise to update at least once a week.
Coming up, my best and worst of the year, and a solemn New Year's promise to update at least once a week.
November 25, 2007
Call It, Friendo
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (dirs. & scrs. Joel & Ethan Coen)
The Coen Bros. have suffered a drop in credibility over the past few years, helming projects that seemed more like paycheques than logical entries in their ouevre, such as the somewhat unfairly-maligned screwball comedy Intolerable Cruelty and the totally fairly-maligned Ladykillers remake (blech!). So the near-universal hosannas bestowed upon No Country for Old Men, their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's nihilist Western, have inevitably featured variations on the phrase 'return to form'.
Now, I've seen every film by the Coens (if you don't count their script for Sam Raimi's Crimewave) and I can safely say that their 'form' has never looked like this. What immediately distinguishes No Country from the rest of their work is its refusal to temper the bleak cynicism of McCarthy's prose with excessive affectation or comic asides; this is the first film by the Bros. in which nothing is surrounded by quotation marks. For better or for worse, even their prior 'dramas' - The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, Miller's Crossing, Blood Simple - were leavened with distancing touches like goofy Minnesotan accents, Frankie Yankovic posters, overcooked Tracer Bullet dialogue and John Getz acting like an unbelievable dolt. There is precious little of that to be found in No Country; the local yokels are, for the most part, underplayed, and even a brief supporting turn by Stephen Root manages dramatic credibility. In essence, the Coens' most recognizable fingerprint (condescension or stylization, depending on your temperament) is absent here. And it seems to have defibrillated their black little hearts.
Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), an unprincipled but generally decent rancher, stumbles across the bloody remnants of a bad drug deal while hunting, and unwisely relieves one corpse of a briefcase containing a million bajillion dollars (as much a MacGuffin here as it was in Fargo and The Big Lebowski). Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is the pneumatic-cattle-gun-toting psycho pursuing him. Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is the wearily noble sheriff pursuing both of them.
There, I just told you 95 percent of the plot. The chases and gunfights and whatnot, although riveting in their own right, are peripheral to the warring ideals these three men represent. Moss is a kind of everyman, flawed but sympathetic, courageous but fallible, caring but selfish. Chigurh is untroubled by such dualities; he is Evil embodied, dealing death not with glee or remorse or grandeur but a chilling matter-of-factness. Bell is the idealist, the holdover from some sort of mythical past in which justice was always served and the good guys won. The last twenty or so minutes of the film have been misinterpreted by many as anticlimactic and arbitrary, but they are in fact an illumination of the film's philosophy, previously only seen in miniature. It's the kind of coda that makes your heart sink, in that good sort of way. The entire film seems to center around the question of the value of principles in an arbitrary world - not a new idea, but neither is it often explored with such grace and fluidity.
From what I've read on the Interwebs, McCarthy's narrative and dialogue are more or less unchanged onscreen. This frees the Coens to do what they do best, which is make movies that look cool and contain idiosyncratic performances; Roger Deakins' cinematography, as always, is remarkable, suffusing the barren Texas landscape with painterly dread, and the acting is uniformly stellar. The role of Chigurh demands that he essentially be unknowable, and after America's long-standing love affair with impossibly eloquent and charming serial killers (Lecter, Doe et al), it's a relief that Bardem is able to resist burdening his character with tics or witticisms. He kills people because killing people is what he does, and it'll give you the heebie-jeebies if you're looking for them. Brolin acquits himself nicely as well; he is destined to become a mainstay in what Vern calls Badass Cinema. The real surprise, though, is that Tommy Lee Jones is able to imbue a pretty stock Tommy Lee Jones role with legitimate pathos. He looks like he's lived for a hundred years; when he speaks, it sounds like a thousand.
I have no idea how to end this review. But that's okay because, with apologies to Robert Altman, death is the only ending. A
The Coen Bros. have suffered a drop in credibility over the past few years, helming projects that seemed more like paycheques than logical entries in their ouevre, such as the somewhat unfairly-maligned screwball comedy Intolerable Cruelty and the totally fairly-maligned Ladykillers remake (blech!). So the near-universal hosannas bestowed upon No Country for Old Men, their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's nihilist Western, have inevitably featured variations on the phrase 'return to form'.Now, I've seen every film by the Coens (if you don't count their script for Sam Raimi's Crimewave) and I can safely say that their 'form' has never looked like this. What immediately distinguishes No Country from the rest of their work is its refusal to temper the bleak cynicism of McCarthy's prose with excessive affectation or comic asides; this is the first film by the Bros. in which nothing is surrounded by quotation marks. For better or for worse, even their prior 'dramas' - The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, Miller's Crossing, Blood Simple - were leavened with distancing touches like goofy Minnesotan accents, Frankie Yankovic posters, overcooked Tracer Bullet dialogue and John Getz acting like an unbelievable dolt. There is precious little of that to be found in No Country; the local yokels are, for the most part, underplayed, and even a brief supporting turn by Stephen Root manages dramatic credibility. In essence, the Coens' most recognizable fingerprint (condescension or stylization, depending on your temperament) is absent here. And it seems to have defibrillated their black little hearts.
Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), an unprincipled but generally decent rancher, stumbles across the bloody remnants of a bad drug deal while hunting, and unwisely relieves one corpse of a briefcase containing a million bajillion dollars (as much a MacGuffin here as it was in Fargo and The Big Lebowski). Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is the pneumatic-cattle-gun-toting psycho pursuing him. Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is the wearily noble sheriff pursuing both of them.
There, I just told you 95 percent of the plot. The chases and gunfights and whatnot, although riveting in their own right, are peripheral to the warring ideals these three men represent. Moss is a kind of everyman, flawed but sympathetic, courageous but fallible, caring but selfish. Chigurh is untroubled by such dualities; he is Evil embodied, dealing death not with glee or remorse or grandeur but a chilling matter-of-factness. Bell is the idealist, the holdover from some sort of mythical past in which justice was always served and the good guys won. The last twenty or so minutes of the film have been misinterpreted by many as anticlimactic and arbitrary, but they are in fact an illumination of the film's philosophy, previously only seen in miniature. It's the kind of coda that makes your heart sink, in that good sort of way. The entire film seems to center around the question of the value of principles in an arbitrary world - not a new idea, but neither is it often explored with such grace and fluidity.
From what I've read on the Interwebs, McCarthy's narrative and dialogue are more or less unchanged onscreen. This frees the Coens to do what they do best, which is make movies that look cool and contain idiosyncratic performances; Roger Deakins' cinematography, as always, is remarkable, suffusing the barren Texas landscape with painterly dread, and the acting is uniformly stellar. The role of Chigurh demands that he essentially be unknowable, and after America's long-standing love affair with impossibly eloquent and charming serial killers (Lecter, Doe et al), it's a relief that Bardem is able to resist burdening his character with tics or witticisms. He kills people because killing people is what he does, and it'll give you the heebie-jeebies if you're looking for them. Brolin acquits himself nicely as well; he is destined to become a mainstay in what Vern calls Badass Cinema. The real surprise, though, is that Tommy Lee Jones is able to imbue a pretty stock Tommy Lee Jones role with legitimate pathos. He looks like he's lived for a hundred years; when he speaks, it sounds like a thousand.
I have no idea how to end this review. But that's okay because, with apologies to Robert Altman, death is the only ending. A
November 14, 2007
Mo' Money, Less Problems
Man, am I broke. I should apply to write reviews for some local papers, cos at least then there's an outside chance I could get into press screenings. Affluent ≠ me.
Anywho, two more reviews on the way this weekend. GET READY, no one.
Anywho, two more reviews on the way this weekend. GET READY, no one.
November 1, 2007
Я люблю наблюдать кино.
Yeah, so those reviews I promised to write kind of took a backseat to doing Russian homework and sleeping for days on end. Whoops.
Anyway, the basic gist:
Michael Clayton: one of those rarest things, a genre picture for adults. Solid acting across the board, especially Tilda Swinton, whose work in the penultimate scene is maybe the best few minutes of acting I've seen all year. What could have easily been a one-man-takes-on-the-evil-empire yawner is instead an incredibly nuanced film with real people doing believable things. And it's a "legal thriller"! Talk about pleasant surprises.
Paranoid Park: awesome. Gus Van Sant's post-Finding Forrester attempts at buying back his soul have been variable in quality, but this is easily his best since Gerry. His formal choices suit the narrative perfectly, since the entire thing is the half-remembered nightmare of a sleepy-eyed teenager; individual scenes are chronologically disordered and often repeat themselves as he attempts to piece together what has happened to him. Christopher Doyle makes a case for himself as the most inventive DP currently working, especially in the shower scene. No, it's not that kind of shower scene.
The Darjeeling Limited: Wes Anderson-by-numbers: very nice to look at, and completely dispensable. Everything - the bandages, the shades, the Indians who essentially function as props - is an apparent attempt at signifying a pathos that is never earned. It doesn't help that the three brothers are virtually indistinguishable in terms of personality, which for the most part is plaintive glumness - it's like Luke Wilson's character in The Royal Tenenbaums wearing three different costumes and talking to himself in split-screen. Bonus demerits for a scene in which the brothers shed their metaphorical baggage by, no seriously, shedding their actual baggage. DUDE. NEXT TIME WRITE A SCRIPT AND NOT JUST A STORYBOARD. I SAW RUSHMORE. YOU ARE BETTER THAN THIS.
Adrien Brody was pretty good, though.
Anyway, the basic gist:
Michael Clayton: one of those rarest things, a genre picture for adults. Solid acting across the board, especially Tilda Swinton, whose work in the penultimate scene is maybe the best few minutes of acting I've seen all year. What could have easily been a one-man-takes-on-the-evil-empire yawner is instead an incredibly nuanced film with real people doing believable things. And it's a "legal thriller"! Talk about pleasant surprises.
Paranoid Park: awesome. Gus Van Sant's post-Finding Forrester attempts at buying back his soul have been variable in quality, but this is easily his best since Gerry. His formal choices suit the narrative perfectly, since the entire thing is the half-remembered nightmare of a sleepy-eyed teenager; individual scenes are chronologically disordered and often repeat themselves as he attempts to piece together what has happened to him. Christopher Doyle makes a case for himself as the most inventive DP currently working, especially in the shower scene. No, it's not that kind of shower scene.
The Darjeeling Limited: Wes Anderson-by-numbers: very nice to look at, and completely dispensable. Everything - the bandages, the shades, the Indians who essentially function as props - is an apparent attempt at signifying a pathos that is never earned. It doesn't help that the three brothers are virtually indistinguishable in terms of personality, which for the most part is plaintive glumness - it's like Luke Wilson's character in The Royal Tenenbaums wearing three different costumes and talking to himself in split-screen. Bonus demerits for a scene in which the brothers shed their metaphorical baggage by, no seriously, shedding their actual baggage. DUDE. NEXT TIME WRITE A SCRIPT AND NOT JUST A STORYBOARD. I SAW RUSHMORE. YOU ARE BETTER THAN THIS.
Adrien Brody was pretty good, though.
October 20, 2007
VIFF V
Ch-check it out, the rest of my VIFF reviews are now up at Schema:
Forbidden Lie$
Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
Taxi to the Dark Side
Night Train
Antônia
Go Go Tales
Forbidden Lie$
Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
Taxi to the Dark Side
Night Train
Antônia
Go Go Tales
October 18, 2007
VIFF IV
Two new reviews are up at Schema: They Wait and 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.
At some point over the weekend: longer thoughts on Paranoid Park and Michael Clayton.
At some point over the weekend: longer thoughts on Paranoid Park and Michael Clayton.
16 Tons And Whaddaya Get
Yo dudes. I have been pretty busy, and there's been a bit of a backlog at Schema, but those two things will magically disappear over the next few days and a veritable geyser of reviews will take their place.
Shout outs to both of my readers!
Shout outs to both of my readers!
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