2002 (USA)
Director: Alexander Payne
Viewed: August 2, 2010
Format: DVD - New Line (2003)
2010 (USA)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Viewed: June 11, 2010
Format: Blu-ray - Paramount (2010)
[SPOILERS] Grading on a curve is a tricky and sometimes ill-advised endeavor, but now that I find myself at the halfway point in an apparently dismal year for cinema, Martin Scorsese’s relentlessly moody labyrinth seems to merit a bit more affection than I afforded it back in February. Granted, the flaws that were in evidence on a first viewing are still present: the dearth of gratifying horror rhythms; the relative aimlessness of the middle act; the fragility of Dr. Crawley’s outlandish scheme. However, the whiff of disposability that emanates from any film reliant on a concluding twist proves to be phantasmal here, for a second visit to Shutter Island provides bountiful avenues for engagement. Foreknowledge of “Teddy’s” situation reveals a marvelously scrupulous aspect to the film’s assembly, especially vis-à-vis its performances. One could dedicate a screening solely to observing Mark Ruffalo or Ben Kingsley, each of whom delivers a stunningly modulated portrayal that operates on two planes simultaneously. Even the reaction shots from the bit players offer a peculiar kind of amusement, with each actor discovering their own way to convey, “I can’t believe we’re going along with this…” In the end, however, the film succeeds on the strength of DiCaprio’s throbbing performance, unquestionably his best in years, which arrives brimming with sweaty, anxious hostility and descends to place where oblivion seems a sweet release. What might have been a garish carnival hoax is synthesized into a searing portrait of a man hollowed-out by unsettled guilt and rage. While the film’s ruminations on aggression are of a piece with Scorsese’s absorption with “men of violence,” as Dr. Naehring describes Andrew, the film is far more compelling (and vigorous) when it is occupied with memory’s double-edged sword. In this, Andrew shares with Lost Highway’s Fred Madison a preference for “remembering things in his own way,” as opposed to confronting the horrors that he has witnessed and wrought.
Iron Man 2
2010 (USA)
Director: John Favreau
Viewed: May 16, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)
If one regards it primarily as the second chapter in a presumable trilogy of films about billionaire industrialist Tony Stark’s super-weapon persona, Iron Man 2 is a slick slice of cinematic entertainment. Director Jon Favreau and leading man Robert Downey, Jr. deliver heaping helpings of the essential vibrancy and wit that rendered the first entry in Marvel’s technophilic franchise such a giddy revelation. However, while it functions well enough as a sequel, or as a mere episode in a broader saga, Iron Man 2 is bit soggy when approached on its own merits. Favreau and scripter Justin Theroux—the actor/writer who penned the deliciously acidic Tropic Thunder—are aiming for too many targets in some scenes, while in others they seem to be spinning their wheels in anticipation of the next action set-piece. Accordingly, the film has trouble conveying the sense of nitro-fueled urgency necessary for the Iron Man myth, which is at bottom a Popular Science wet dream with a dash of guilt and ambivalence. The sequel just doesn’t hum along so effortlessly as its predecessor, which in retrospect, seems much leaner and more focused, as origin stories often are. Favreau gives us a middle chapter that is preoccupied with mortality, legacies, and thinly veiled allegories about geopolitical blowback and loose nukes. These elements are tackled with aplomb, but cobbled together in such a manner that Iron Man 2 feels a bit haphazard. Eh, no matter. We’re all just here for Downey’s quips, right?
How to Train Your Dragon
2010 (USA)
Directors: Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders
Viewed: April 18, 2010
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies Cine)
For over a decade now, Dreamworks Animation has been churning out Shreks, Madagascars, and various other talking animal mediocrities (anyone remember Shark Tale?), jousting with Blue Sky Studios for a distant second-place slot behind American animation’s reigning champion, Pixar. In 2008, Dreamworks managed its first genuinely good film, Kung-Fu Panda, a charming, marvelously designed bit of fluff in the underdog sports movie mold. Lacking contemporary kiddie animation’s characteristic risible pop culture references and cheap scatological humor, Panda hinted at better things to come from the studio in terms of feature animation. And, lo and behold, here we are, two years later, and Dreamworks has delivered the exhilarating, dazzling How to Train Your Dragon, a film that should by all rights be nothing more than disposable entertainment, but attains something much finer. No doubt this is at least partly due to the men at the helm, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, who were the minds behind that oddball late Disney Renaissance marvel Lilo & Sitch. However, it’s undeniable that Dragon feels like the progeny of a studio that has finally found its stride and resolved to aim high. The story is simple, the design breathtaking, the action rousing, and the humor mostly warm and sweet. While Dragon lacks the grace and thematic sophistication of a Pixar film, it is by any measure a damn splendid animated feature.
1993 (USA)
Director: Brian De Palma
Viewed: April 9, 2010
Format: Laserdisc – MCA / Universal
While Carlito’s Way bears that telltale De Palma touch of the Grand Guignol, it’s positively staid compared to the excesses of the director’s earlier Latino crime epic, Scarface. And therein lies the root of the former film’s most conspicuous faults, for in tossing out the operatic lunacy while clinging to the shameless melodrama, De Palma neuters Carlito, rendering it essentially indistinguishable from any other gangster flick. That said, there’s plenty to admire here. Presenting only the final chapter of an underworld titan’s fall is an admittedly novel approach, and it’s fairly remarkable how De Palma sketches in so much back-story with so little exposition. While the film’s violence often seems dispiritingly obligatory, it’s also presented as a nasty, messy business. Tellingly, Carlito often bests his enemies through bravado and trickery rather than brute force, and the film privileges the competing criminal virtues of preparation and adaptability. Pacino, with a laughably protean Puerto Rican accent, is fully in his post-Sea of Love self-parody phase here, but Sean Penn, behind child-molester glasses and beneath a Larry Fine ‘fro, is deliciously loathsome as criminal defense attorney David Kleinfeld. Unfortunately, Carlito feels like a middling gangster drama from an aging stylist who is capable of much more. (see: Ridley Scott.) Most exasperating is De Palma’s affinity for torpedoing the film’s most appealing moments. This unfortunate tendency is epitomized in a scene where Carlito’s ex-flame Gail (Penelope Ann Miller) enticingly suggests that he could break down her chained apartment door if he really wanted to ravage her. What song does De Palma use to cap this searingly erotic sequence? Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful.” Yeesh.
2008 (UK / USA)
Director: Andrew Adamson
Viewed: March 30, 2010
Format: Netflix Instant Queue (via Playstation 3)
It was probably a foregone conclusion that the dreariest of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books would make for a much more schematic, lifeless film than director Adamson’s reverential but suitably vigorous The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This tale of a royal youth deprived of his rightful throne by a scheming nobleman is pure fantasy paint-by-numbers. Without the series’ talking animals—who remain its most charming trait, especially when placed alongside the dour mythological critters—and the parallel-world plot wrinkles, there wouldn’t be much to distinguish Prince Caspian from countless other epic sword-and-destiny outings. Adamson is doing his level best to give Disney their own Lord of the Rings, but neither he nor the source material is up to the task. The Pevensie kids, who seemed so perfectly actualized in the previous film, now feel static and far less compelling. The most conspicuous problem is that neither the medium nor Adamson’s crude Jackson-cribbing approach provide much room for Lewis’ curious cosmology to unspool, and so we’re left a mildly entertaining and largely anonymous adventure… and not much else.
1973 (USA / Philippines)
Director: Eddie Romero
Viewed: February 19, 2010
Format: DVD - MGM (2001)
The hallmarks of a sexy, scuzzy Women-in-Prison feature–including a gratuitous shower scene complete with frolicking, and hard-assed lesbian guards in ridiculously short shorts–are pretty much dispensed with in the first fifteen minutes of Black Mama, White Mama. What remains is an exploitation The Defiant Ones, as Pam Grier and Margaret Makov (the former a working girl, the latter a freedom fighter of some sort) scurry from one ludicrous set piece to another. This is a straight-up Z-movie guilty pleasure, just the sort thing one can imagine a teenage Quentin Tarantino devouring. It’s a shame director Romero was so enamored with tedious gunfights, as it gives him less time to indulge in the loathsome weirdness that is the film’s real appeal. The torch-bearer of BMWM’s oddities is undoubtedly genre fixture Sig Haig, as a creepy, strangely high-spirited bounty hunter in a Jim Croce ’stache, whose choice of wardrobe and automobile are best described as “Roy Rogers on LSD.” That’s him above. Just take a moment to savor that shirt. Truth be told, I spent the better part of this film trying to puzzle out where the hell it’s supposed to take place. The vague “island” setting seems, at different times, to be somewhere in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Vietnam. Between the Spanish-speaking Asian gangsters and the stray police uniform patch with the word “Manila” stitched onto it, I eventually tumbled to the fact that we are, indeed, in the Philippines. Such is the way of cheap, sleazy films bound for grindhouses the world over.
1973 (USA)
Director: Larry Cohen
Viewed: February 19, 2010
Format: DVD - MGM (2001)
Perhaps the most valuable lesson to be learned from Black Caesar is this: Do Not Fuck With Fred Williamson. Not only can the man take a bullet in the gut and keep on coming for your traitorous ass, he will, as the above screenshot demonstrates, beat you within an inch of your life with a shoe-shine kit. I had been aware of ex-football star Williamson primarily from Italian dreck like Warrior of the Lost World and his campy performance in From Dusk Till Dawn. Little did I know that he had a significant career as a blaxploitation leading man, a career that this film kicked off. Intriguingly, many of Black Caesar’s elements crop up in Scarface, and especially in Goodfellas (including that aforementioned shine-box, which a corrupt cop uses to humiliate Williamson before it is turned on him as a weapon). Do you think that DePalma or Scorsese would ever cop to cribbing slightly from the fellow who directed Q, It’s Alive, and The Stuff? And by the by, that James Brown soundtrack? Pure gold.
1971 (USA / UK)
Director: Richard C. Sarafian
Viewed: January 31, 2009
Format: Netflix Instant Queue (via Playstation 3)
Vanishing Point definitely plays like a work from another era, in the worst and best sense. The “Can’t Drive 55″ spirit that the film seizes upon–which it shares with the much zanier The Cannonball Run–unfortunately dates the film as an artifact from an era when a national speed limit was a hot political button. That said, what’s most appealing about Vanishing Point is how eagerly and even joyously it strives to present a generous, oddball-ridden slice of early 1970s America. The on-location shooting lends it a documentary look and texture, but the characters are so deliberately out-there, it never feels remotely like realism. I mean, c’mon: the naked biker girl; the faith healers; the blind, black DJ in a shitheel desert town; the old rattlesnake catcher who turns up out of nowhere? Delicious stuff, if you can stand it. And for all the hurtling cars, this strangely-placed, slow-motion shot of a basket of snakes flying through the air is what most caught my eye.
I took a bit of a breather on the posting during January, but more reviews and other items will be coming soon.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
2009 (UK / Canada / France)
Director: Terry Gilliam
Viewed: January 17, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)
When it comes to Terry Gilliam films, I wouldn’t say that the only attraction is their design, but I’d be kidding myself if I denied that the essential allure of a new Gilliam feature is the look of the thing. Those occasions when Gilliam has mated his distinctive mode of fantasy—part Victorian / Edwardian stagecraft, part comic strip zaniness—to a compelling set of characters, the result is tongue-in-cheek gold, as in Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. (His two dystopian science-fiction films, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, are equally great, but vibrate to an entirely different frequency.) Gilliam’s new feature, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is a weird bauble that fits snugly into oeuvre, yet like all of the director’s weaker efforts, it’s also a mess from a storytelling perspective. It’s debatable how much of that can be blamed on the regrettable death of his leading man, Heath Ledger, and how much on Gilliam’s own hand, but it’s also telling that Imaginarium is disjointed tonally and narratively. At its worst, Imaginarium plays out less like a film and more like a book of concept art that has been inelegantly cobbled together into a film. There’s something more than a little perverse about a film-maker with such palpable thematic interest in myth-making but who nonetheless has a hard time finding a foothold in his own tale.
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