August 24, 2009
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Film Diaries - Roland, Film Diaries - Lara, Film Diaries - Chris, Dramas, Action
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Inglourious Basterds
2009 (USA / Germany / France)
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Viewed: August 21, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print
I really should know better at this point. My reaction upon hearing of an upcoming Quentin Tarantino film is reliably a mixture of excitement and trepidation. When I think about it for more than a moment, however, this response seems disgracefully childish, if completely understandable. I was one of countless thirty-somethings whose early appreciation of independent American film was driven primarily by Tarantino’s first two films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Consequently, my responses to his subsequent films are tinted by an unfortunate reactionary urge, whispering at me to contrast his latest feature with the Real Tarantino on bombastic display in Dogs and Fiction. Of course, this is monstrously unfair. Tarantino has grown significantly as a director in the past fifteen years, parlaying his success as the American wunderkind of thrilling, densely referential cinema into ever more ambitious works. Even as he refined the familiar stylistic trappings that are comfortable for him (the “how,” if you will), he has tackled increasingly challenging stories and themes (the “what”). With a little effort, I’ve shaken off my blinkered way of looking at Tarantino’s post-Fiction output. What’s more, I’ve come to regard Kill Bill Volume II and Death Proof as among most vital works of American cinema in the past five years. And so here we are with Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s answer to the World War II film. And damn if it doesn’t exhibit every sign of continuing the director’s recent arc of daring, socially aware films that triumph as both giddy entertainments and bracing studies of desperately held cultural values.
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August 21, 2009
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Comedies
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In the Loop
2009 (UK)
Director: Armando Iannucci
Viewed: August 18, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print
The Hurt Locker seems to be getting some significant accolades as the first truly commendable film about the Iraq War, but as my review from earlier this week contends, this misstates the film’s strengths. Kathryn Bigelow’s film uses its setting to cannily, viscerally evoke its plainly stated themes. The Hurt Locker is interested in war as an irresistible personal force; the Iraq War itself is a merely a convenient vessel for that exploration. Like Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir, The Hurt Locker is as much “about” its milieu as The Iliad is “about” the Trojan War.
It is Armando Iannucci’s bracing, sublimely profane farce In the Loop that strikes me as the best film to date to wrestle with the Iraq War as a phenomenon of a specific time and place. Granted, the film’s “action” takes place in the corridors of British and American power, rather than on the battlefield. In the Loop operates foremost as a deliriously hideous farce in the squirming comedic form of The Office. (The film, incidentally, is a spin-off of Iannucci’s British television series, The Thick of It, which is shot in a vérité style that has become a hallmark of such humor.) However, as magnificent as In the Loop is as a story about horrible people doing horrible things, it is also a devastating snapshot of the utterly dispiriting nature of politics in the twenty-first century. Not to put too fine a point on it, Iannucci has given us a treatise on bullshit, as philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt has succinctly characterized the defining feature of modern society. And what is the Iraq War—never actually name-checked in Iannucci’s film—but the blood-soaked progeny of a truly epic accretion of bullshit?
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August 18, 2009
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Dramas, Action
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The Hurt Locker
2008 (USA)
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Viewed: August 11, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print
The Hurt Locker telegraphs its thematic thrust with its opening epigraph, a quotation from Chris Hedges’ (somewhat overrated) War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning: “War is a drug.” The essential cunning of Kathryn Bigelow’s gripping Iraq war feature—an “anti-action” action film in the vein of Munich—is its choice of protagonist. In order to establish the fundamentally addictive character of danger in a theater of war, Bigelow chooses not a Working Joe soldier or a Special Forces superman, but an unusual stripe of cowboy: a bomb disposal specialist, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner). James is a technician first and foremost, but a damn good one. He dodges when an officer asks how many bombs he has disarmed, but under pressure he confidently replies “873.” James is not a straight-arrow professional, however. He is fearless, reckless, and utterly addicted to the thrill of stopping explosions before they happen, the sort of soldier who elicits awe, but not confidence. The man who is supposed to have James’ back, Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) lays out his dilemma bluntly: he won’t stand by while a hot-shit redneck with a death wish gets him and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) killed.
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August 12, 2009
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Roland, Comedies
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Humpday
2009 (USA)
Director: Lynn Shelton
Viewed: July 29, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print
The aesthetic markers of the mumblecore current in independent film—handheld digital video, scruffy lighting and sound, improvised dialog, nonprofessional actors—have always seemed less essential than its scorched earth approach to the fertile comedy ground of socially awkward interpersonal situations. Mumblecore’s acolytes seem to accept, as an uncontroversial given, that everything will not turn out for the best, contra Hollywood’s usual comedic offerings. There’s no gleefulness or operatic lustiness to this claim, as in the Coens. Rather, what emerges is a kind of woeful acquiescence to the fact that human beings will screw up everything good in their lives, usually out of narcissism. It’s a bleak sentiment to be sure, but the better filmmakers can hew to this worldview while rendering the painful amusing and the amusing painful. Lynn Shelton’s deliciously discomfiting Humpday, the latest offering that might reasonably be tagged with the mumblecore descriptor, is a fine example of a comedy that follows every jot of human unpleasantness while maintaining the spirited tone of an outrageous, notorious anecdote. Its Motel 6 production values are a perfect fit, but Humpday’s comedy is genuine, and not dependent on indie scuzziness for its street cred.
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August 2, 2009
Chris
Film Diaries - Chris
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2009 (UK / USA)
Directors: David Yates
Viewed: August 2, 2009
Format: IMAX 3D Theatrical Print
