2005 (USA)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Viewed: January 13, 2008
Format: DVD - Dreamworks (2005)
Archive for January, 2009
Film Diary: War of the Worlds
Friday, January 16th, 2009Film Diary: The Third Man
Friday, January 16th, 20091949 (UK)
Director: Carol Reed
Viewed: January 13, 2008
Format: Blu-ray - Criterion (2008)
Film Diary: Brand Upon the Brain!
Sunday, January 11th, 20092006 (USA / Canada)
Director: Guy Maddin
Viewed: January 11, 2008
Format: DVD - Criterion (2008)
My introduction to Maddin was The Saddest Music in the World, and Brand Upon the Brain! confirms my initial assessment of him as a director who doesn’t really touch me emotionally, but whose distinctive stylings are probably engaging enough to lure me to his latest works. Music may be the better film, but there’s something in Brand’s silent-horror-film tone and grainy eroticism that is much more compelling to this viewer. Also, can we get Katherine E. Scharhon, who plays Wendy / Chance, in some more goddamn movies, please? Yummy.
Film Diary: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Sunday, January 11th, 20092008 (UK / France / USA)
Director: Ethan and Joel Coen
Viewed: January 4, 2008
Format: DVD - Touchstone (2001)
Scenes From a Marriage
Sunday, January 11th, 2009
Revolutionary Road
2008 (USA / UK)
Director: Sam Mendes
Viewed: January 10, 2008
Format: Theatrical Theater
With Revolutionary Road, director Sam Mendes once again takes up the spiritual stultification of the middle class. However, where his American Beauty was thematically preoccupied with suburban banality, here Mendes employs it as a plot element and motif in a far more pointed work, one that is part character study and part time capsule of toxic gender dynamics. The script–here adapted by novice Justin Haythe from David Yates’ novel–features some teeth-grittingly awful dialog, and yet Mendes’ direction is so forceful, and the lead performances from Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are so enthralling, that it doesn’t much matter. Striking in its awareness of emotional details and its eye for potent visual poetry, Revolutionary Road is a fine example of the sort of film whose heady highs linger longer than its clunkier features. In creating a portrait of a love gone gangrenous and insidious misogyny in full flower, Mendes offers a cinematic drug distilled from pure human venom. Damn if it doesn’t hurt so good.
Local Boy Made Good
Friday, January 9th, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire
UK / USA (2008)
Directors: Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan
Viewed: November 15, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print
[This is one of several full reviews I am posting on some of the films that were featured at this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival and which have now opened in wide or limited release.]
Best approached as a morsel of spun sugar and spice that’s easy on both eyes and mind, Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan’s Slumdog Millionaire is a contemporary fairy tale pitched at a music video tempo. Unfortunately, it’s also a work so preoccupied with the sizzle of motion and the cleverness of its structure that it flits heedlessly into the worst offenses of the form. Slumdog’s characters never scan as anything but wobbly archetypes, their motivations hastily drawn where the film-makers bother with motivation at all. Boyle and Tandan substitutes ghetto grubbiness and gloss for the shading that would lend the film volume. Consequently, Slumdog is sustained on manic energy and little else. While its shallowness and slipshod nature distract, the film still proves to be a pleasurable tale. In its most engaging moments, it permits the viewer to forget its threadbare credibility, urging us to giggle in delight as it crackles like a string of candy-colored firecrackers.
Once Again, I Don’t Recall
Sunday, January 4th, 2009
Waltz with Bashir (Vals Im Bashir)
2008 (Israel)
Director: Ari Folman
Viewed: November 23, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print
[This is one of several full reviews I am posting on some of the films that were featured at this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival and which have now opened in wide or limited release.]
Waltz with Bashir’s curious species–an animated documentary–serves to lure the viewer by means of sheer novelty, but it also emerges as a brilliant mating of form and function. Director Ari Folman adeptly employs the elements of a bold, compelling visual style to delve the rank sinkholes of memory and culpability, surfacing with artifacts that run from bizarre to disturbing to appalling. Via color, contrast, and motion, Waltz with Bashir tackles the sheer uncanniness of warfare, the slippery character of recollection, and the sway that remorse holds over our personal narratives. Never mind that such matters have been taken up by numerous film-makers before. Folman brings both a bruised and jittery aura of the personal–the film is, after all, partly the tale of his own experiences from the 1982 Israeli-Lebanon war–and a stunning instinct for the pairing of image and mood. The veterans Folman interviews are haunted by their wartime memories, which are blazing in their intensity but usually bereft of soaring wisdom. In the same way, the film burns vivid moments into the viewer’s mind, all while striking a slightly bemused, off-handed tone of hollow-eyed cynicism. Folman rejects the notion of war as a noble construct, plunging with grim familiarity into its surreal, monstrous facility for tangling morality and crystallizing animal instincts.
Quick Review: Valkyrie
Sunday, January 4th, 2009
2008 (USA / Germany)
Director: Bryan Singer
Viewed: January 2, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print
With Valkyrie, Bryan Singer delivers his most artistically unambitious film to date, which isn’t to say that this tale of a German plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler is a failure. It vaults neatly over the primary obstacle that confronts all historical dramas about well-known figures and events, in that it summons tension despite the fact that we know how the story ends. Sticking close to the field manual employed by countless WWII dramas–crisp production values, a stable of familiar faces, and a cavalier disregard for linguistic incongruities–Valkyrie tricks the viewer into sweating the outcome with a polished but unremarkable technique. Singer neglects to plumb the thornier moral aspects of his mutinous protagonist, Claus von Stauffenberg, and with Tom Cruise filling his boots, who can blame the director? That said, Cruise’s affinity for both rattled desperation and starched poker-faces suits the film’s perilous intrigues. The remainder of Valkyrie’s cast of heavyweights and recognizable character actors serve primarily as set dressing, putting the viewer at ease amid the swastikas. If the film dodges a bit on the German Resistance’s character, it also avoids burnishing its conspirators too much, focusing instead on conjuring a pure mood of subsumed panic.
Film Diary: Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
Friday, January 2nd, 20092007 (Ireland / UK)
Director: Julien Temple
Viewed: January 1, 2008
Format: DVD - Sony Legacy (2008)