Gateway Cinephiles » 2008

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 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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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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Some Kind of Monster

August 25, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign No Comments

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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3-Minute Intro: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

August 25, 2008 Andrew 3-Minute Intros, Comedies No Comments

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, and 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.

Film Diary: Persepolis

August 23, 2008 Libby Film Diaries - Libby No Comments

2007 (USA / France)
Directors: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud
Viewed: August 21, 2008
Format: Blu-ray - Sony (2008)

This film still holds up as one of my top five of 2007. It is a breathtaking film, one that inspires and entertains. If you have not seen it yet, please do–and make sure it is this Blu-ray version. The format helps Persepolis to shine all that much brighter. And avoid the dubbed English version–it is sub-par compared to the French version. It’s a little more meaningful when you are seeing the film in the language it was written. The behind-the-scenes features are incredibly entertaining. Marjane Satrapi is a little crazy, but genius often comes from madness.

No Longer Your Film: The Shadow Hollywood of Mulholland Drive

August 22, 2008 Andrew Essays 1 Comment

This post is a part of the Movies About Movies Blog-a-Thon, hosted by goatdogblog.

[Note: This essay contains spoilers. It assumes a basic familiarity with interpretive approaches to Mulholland Drive, particularly the “Classical” reading. See the Lost on Mulholland Drive clearinghouse and the vital Salon piece, “Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About Mulholland Drive”.]

Although Inland Empire comprises the most direct examination of movie-making (and -watching) in David Lynch’s filmography, Mulholland Drive has always struck me as offering a slier, more cutting indictment of Hollywood and the mythology that clings to it. One of the most intriguing demonstrations of this impulse is MD’s depiction–via an actress’ guilty fever dreams–of the studio film-making apparatus as a rotten entity riddled with conspiratorial forces. Within Diane Selwyn’s schizophrenic fantasy, strange men move to quash the ambitions of promising actors and rebellious directors, their motives hazy but always sinister. Wracked with despair over her own professional and personal failings, Diane gives a dread life to our collective paranoia about the film industry. The shadow Hollywood she summons is by all appearances occupied not with high art or even vulgar entertainment, but with control over messages, money, and especially lives.