August 31, 2008
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign
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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 humanity. 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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August 28, 2008
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Comedies, Romance
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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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August 25, 2008
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign
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Boy A
2007 (UK)
Director: John Crowley
Viewed: August 23, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print
Equipped with a disarming candor and despairing gaze, Boy A poses a daunting question: Is it just when society prolongs a criminal’s punishment beyond his legal sentence? It gives animation to this thorny dilemma in the person of “Jack,” a parolee who committed a horrific crime as a boy, a deed barely reconcilable with his shy, eager-to-please manner. With his sheepish, adolescent grin and wounded brown eyes, Jack (Andrew Garfield) initially seems prepackaged to tug at viewer sympathies and highlight the cruel manner in which ex-convicts are shunned and harassed by free society. However, director John Crowley takes a nervy approach with Boy A, gradually revealing contradictions and unsettling currents in Jack’s personality and his past, even as he squeezes him between the dooms of public exposure and a violent death. An artistic and thematic inversion of Gus Van Sant’s more daring, heady Paranoid Park, Crowley’s feature traces a path trod by numerous socially conscious dramas about evil deeds and redemption, but it does so with a persuasive, moving tone of anguish and entropy.
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August 25, 2008
Andrew
3-Minute Intros, Comedies
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Screened: August 22, 2008
Format: Laserdisc (Special Edition)
Selected By: Stephanie
It would be difficult to imagine a more unlikely director of the archetype madcap ensemble comedy than Stanley Kramer. Coming out of Hell’s Kitchen with family roots deep in the film industry trenches, Kramer became a respected and award-showered producer capable of working within the studio system and on his own. Beginning in 1955, he moved on to directing his own features. He made a spate of acclaimed social issue dramas that reflected his own political sensibilities, including The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind, and Judgment at Nuremberg. Then, in 1963 Kramer set out to create a sprawling, zany comedy epic, the 70 mm, three-hour behemoth It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Fulfilling Hollywood’s contemporary taste for spectacle (the better to lure away television viewers), Mad World was assembled with a More Is More philosophy. This is evident in its enormous cast, its stunts, its plot, and its wild comedy blend of slapstick, puns, gentle satire, and outrageous sight gags. The film’s story is relatively simple—a dying confession leads to a greed-fueled race for buried treasure—but Mad World is really about grandiose wackiness, a vehicle to cram every recognizable 1960s comedic celebrity into the frame. Who cares that some of the cameos amount to Where’s Waldo reaction shots? The fact that the whole ridiculous enterprise still manages to be infectiously funny testifies to Kramer’s previously concealed talent for the genre.
Mad World’s marathon running time is a tale unto itself. The fabled 210-minute Cinerama premiere, complete with overture, intermission, exit music, and fictional police radio chatter to be piped into the theater restrooms, has unfortunately been lost. The film was such a hit that United Artists sliced it for the roadshow release to increase the number of times it could be screened in a day, then sliced it again for the general release, all without Kramer’s involvement. Decades later, the director was able to assist with the reconstruction of a 182-minute version for the Special Edition Laserdisc. Although some of the restored scenes are of poor quality, this remains the most complete version of the film ever produced, and is regarded as a cinematic treasure among film fans.
August 19, 2008
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas
1 Comment
2008 (USA)
Director: Isabel Coixet
Viewed: August 19, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print
For approximately its first half, Elegy at least succeeds in being an engaging portrait of a relationship, banal in its details but oddly seductive in its execution. Forget that Ben Kingsley often seems to be acting in his own movie, or that his chemistry with Penélope Cruz is middling at best. It’s hard not to thrill as the veteran works his witchcraft when he actually seems to be enjoying himself. With a creased Dennis Hopper lurking around to provide masculine wisdom, Elegy seems to arrive at a comfortable place, where skillful performers luxuriate in giving us a simple human story done well. The problem arrives when the admittedly juicy melodrama of an asshole libertine sabotaging his own happiness becomes insufficient grist for novelist Philip Roth and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer. At the point when the film started layering on the (sigh) terminal illnesses, I started to check my watch. Coixet’s unconventional editing and genuinely inspired bits of sound design don’t elevate Elegy above such movie-of-the-week turns, or alleviate the tedium of its lingering conclusion. The literate May-December romance was more heartfelt last year, when it was called Starting Out in the Evening.
August 19, 2008
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign
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2007 (France / Italy)
Director: Catherine Breillat
Viewed: August 18, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print
If the mannered dullness of The Duchess of Langeais was a wincing blow to the fortunes of period erotic drama this year, The Last Mistress just might be its salvation, or at least a pleasurable redemption. Director Catherine Breillat meticulously assembles this tragedy of curdled love and molten lust with the obligatory production design opulence, but also with a clear command of the bitter-sour notes lurking within the material. Although The Last Mistress works within familiar genre conventions, it upends expectations with smoldering shocks and quiet gestures. Its most conspicuous flaw is the thin characterization that afflicts the French aristocrats populating its salons, opera boxes, and seaside castles. Thankfully, Asia Argento lends The Last Mistress the forbidden heat, wicked bite, and mysterious allure that it longs for. Breillat understands her star’s centrality, and wields her like an assassin’s dagger.
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August 19, 2008
Libby
Film Diaries - Libby
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2005 (USA)
Director: Nora Ephron
Viewed: August 18, 2008
Format: Television - ABC
