Gateway Cinephiles

Film Diary: Terror’s Advocate

September 6, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew Comments Off

2007 (France)
Director: Barbet Schroeder
Viewed: September 6, 2008
Format: DVD - Magnolia Home Entertainment (2008)

Northeast Passage

September 4, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas No Comments

Frozen River
2008 (USA)
Director: Courtney Hunt
Screened: September 2, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Frozen River is a tale of dreams, or at least what passes for dreams in the bitter winters of far-upstate New York. The film presents us with two women, each a quintessential American survivor in their way. Ray (Melissa Leo) is a white, middle-aged single mom, scraping together a life for her two boys in a cramped manufactured home. Lila (Misty Upham) is a younger Mohawk woman, and also a mother, although her infant son has been wrested from her with the tacit consent of her tribe. When fate brings these two women together, their antagonism seethes, but eventually they embark on a perilous criminal collaboration. First-time director Courtney Hunt’s naturalistic story of slush-and-mud desperation on the margins of the American dream is an affecting and uncommonly sensitive depiction of foolish risks taken for all the right reasons.

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Film Diary: [•Rec]

September 4, 2008 Teresa Film Diaries - Libby, Film Diaries - Teresa No Comments

2007 (Spain)
Director: Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plazavan
Viewed: September 3, 2008
Format: DVD - Filmax (Spanish Import)

I’ll never feel the same about roaming around filthy, Catholic-saint-plastered, infected-test-tube-littered attic apartments with night-vision…

They Caught a Bad, Bad Train

September 2, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign, Action No Comments

Transsiberian
2008 (UK / Germany / Spain / Lithuania)
Director: Brad Anderson
Viewed: August 31, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Allow me to clear up one thing that the marketing of Transsiberian has unforgivably muddled: Woody Harrelson might have first billing, but Emily Mortimer is the clear protagonist and the star of this serviceable–albeit raw-nerved–thriller. Director Brad Anderson begins with a meaty premise: two guileless Americans find themselves enmeshed in a heroin trafficking plot during their journey aboard the titular train. This is not a Locked Room mystery in the tradition of Murder of the Orient Express. Jessie (Mortimer) and Roy (Harrelson) spend as much time off the train as on it, and the film clearly owes a debt to Hitchcock’s more harried, dashing thrillers in its action set pieces and its fascination with Jessie’s responses to desperate, often uncanny, circumstances. Unfortunately, Anderson lends barely any thematic heft to the tale. While Jessie’s plight often has us sweating bullets in the moment, Transsiberian’s themes are confused, when the film-makers bother to articulate them at all. The result is a film that offers excitement and opportunities for “What Would You Do?” speculation, but little else.

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3-Minute Intro: The Cannonball Run

September 2, 2008 Andrew 3-Minute Intros, Comedies, Action No Comments

Screened: September 1, 2008
Format: DVD - HBO (2001)
Selected By: Grant

When Korean War veteran Hal Needham came to Hollywood in the 1950s to work as a stuntman, he had no intention of transforming action filmmaking. Needham quickly developed a strong reputation for his stunt work in television Westerns, parlaying his success into film. Eventually progressing to stunt coordination and second unit direction, Needham was regarded as one of the industry’s chief innovators by 1976, when he approached friend Burt Reynolds with a script called Smokey and the Bandit. The film was an enormous hit for both the director and star, a feat they replicated in 1981 with The Cannonball Run, a camp ensemble comedy celebration of auto racing and Hollywood excess.

Back in 1976, there had been two films—the action feature Cannonball! and the comedy The Gumball Rally—based on a real-life outlaw cross-country auto race, the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. Run five times between 1971 and 1979, the Dash was legendary in Needham’s racing and stunt circles for having no rules save the specified starting and end point. With The Cannonball Run, the director undeniably created the race’s most widespread cultural legacy, going so far as to integrate notorious events from past Dashes into the film’s plot.

Cannonball was a part of Reynolds’ unparalleled 1978-1982 domination of the American box office, although his collaborations with Needham and other B-movie fare had by 1981 somewhat diminished his reputation in the eyes of audiences and directors. However, dismissing Cannonball, or any Needham film, as shallow misses the point. The director always intended his films to be joyful tributes to his heroes and the things he loved, particularly fast cars. Despite its broad, engaging cast of comedy fixtures, rising stars, and Hollywood has-beens—including Roger Moore parodying his contemporary James Bond role—Needham’s focus is on the vehicles, which he films with the devoted attention that only an enthusiast can bring. Ultimately, the film’s frisky character ensures The Cannonball Run’s status, not merely as a 1981 cultural artifact, but also one of the great Hollywood chase films. It’s a character embodied in its roguish disdain for law enforcement and its enthusiasm for a competition where nothing is at stake but bragging rights.

3-Minute Intro: Deliverance

September 2, 2008 Andrew 3-Minute Intros, Dramas No Comments

Screened: September 1, 2008
Format: DVD - Warner Brothers (2004)
Selected By: Grant

Burt Reynolds began his acting career on the stage and in television, but in the 1960s he transitioned to film, where he would eventually establish his role as a leading man sex symbol and Hollywood institution. Reynolds’ early renown as a reliable and popular performer, often in Spaghetti Westerns, gradually grew until he was offered his breakout starring role in John Boorman’s landmark 1972 drama, Deliverance. The film was also a pivotal success for its three other principals: John Voight, following his acclaimed debut in 1969’s Midnight Cowboy; relatively unknown actor and guitarist Ronny Cox; and newcomer Ned Beatty in his own acting debut.

Based on the lauded 1970 work by American poet and novelist James Dickey, whose popularity exploded following the film, Deliverance is arguably the most revered work from Boorman. The English director began his career as a documentary filmmaker for the BBC, before breaking out in 1967 with the brutal Lee Marvin crime drama Point Blank, now regarded as a neo-noir classic. Boorman’s modest success with feature films eventually paved the way for Deliverance, his first box-office triumph and most enduring feature, alongside his 1981 fantasy epic, Excalibur. Despite his British background, the director brought an unexpected sensitivity to the film’s disturbing, notorious depiction of American folly and endurance.

Dickey’s novel and the film address these themes with a relatively simple story: four Atlanta businessmen set off into the Georgian wilderness for a weekend canoe adventure that becomes a terrifying nightmare. The film’s renowned, eerie banjo sequence and the actors’ grueling stunt work provide a visceral edge to its commentary. Unremittingly dark in tone, the film features a now archetypal depiction of Appalachian hillbillies as monstrous, violent deviants. The protagonists, however, are also shown to be ultimately foolish, arrogant, and morally bankrupt. The film is ambiguous as to whether the brutality of the wilderness and their ordeal bestows the four suburbanites with these qualities, or merely brings them to the surface. In crafting this harrowing depiction of middle class hubris and the fragility of decency, Boorman and the performers created what might be regarded as one of the great American horror films of the late twentieth century.

Film Diary: Ghostbusters

September 2, 2008 Teresa Film Diaries - Teresa No Comments

1984 (USA)
Director: Ivan Reitman
Viewed: August 31, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Film Diary: Tropic Thunder

September 2, 2008 Teresa Film Diaries - Teresa No Comments

2008 (USA / Germany)
Director: Ben Stiller
Viewed: August 30, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

The Greatest of These Is Love

August 31, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign No Comments

The Edge of Heaven (Auf der Anderen Seite)
2007 (Germany / Turkey / Italy)
Director: Fatih Akin
Viewed: August 30, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

With The Edge of Heaven, Turkish-German director Fatih Akin offers a mournful, penetrating exhale of affecting cinema, a Shakespearean tragedy for a modern, multi-cultural Europe. Two violent deaths haunt this film, looming calamities that Akin bluntly telegraphs with title cards. (There Will Be Blood, indeed.) Catastrophe awaits us, not to mention the poor souls that populate Akin’s Bremen and Istanbul, gritty landscapes of crumbling buildings and fragile love. In more ways than the survivors will comprehend, these deaths will emerge as transforming phenomena, their bright and black ripples reaching far-flung shores and lives. With six gently compelling characters and an exultant soundtrack, Akin has crafted a meditation on human connection more profound and emotionally persuasive than any recent convoluted ensemble behemoth. Despite its grim–at times bitterly bemused–sensibility, The Edge of Heaven is far from a morbid work. This is awestruck human spectacle at its most unexpected and redemptive, and one of the best films of 2008.

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Spanish Fly

August 28, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Comedies, Romance No Comments

Vicky Cristina Barcelona
2008 (USA / Spain)
Director: Woody Allen
Viewed: August 26, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

I’ve kept my distance from Woody Allen’s output since Mighty Aphrodite, never successfully seduced by the rare acclaimed feature (Match Point), nor by the notorious belly-flops (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion). Therefore I can’t comment from an informed place on the praise that Vicky Cristina Barcelona seems to have reaped as some kind of return to form for the venerable Manhattanite. Certainly, VCB is steeped in wistful adoration for the Spanish locale of its title, echoing the lovestruck regard Allen’s earlier films evidence for New York City. The new film is self-consciously a Spanish travelogue, stuffed to the gills with breathtaking sights, rarefied culture, and delectable food and drink. If the Condé Nast slideshow feels a touch ludicrous, it also seems a natural fit for the film’s amorous story. VCB is unabashedly sexy, in a way that few American films ever manage, and without so much as a glimpse of Scarlett Johannson’s assets, or Javier Bardem’s for that matter. Allen employs the appeal of sun-dappled locales and the arousal of gorgeous people in the throes of temptation to tug VCB towards a destination that proves oddly ambiguous. The film underlines its themes with relentless desperation in places, favors contemplative melancholy in others, and far too often clunks along on contrivance and wincing dialog. At its most successful, it’s a kind of cinematic holiday: an exotic getaway for pleasure and perspective, ephemeral in essence and bittersweet in its conclusion.

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