Monday, February 26, 2007

Man of The Year - 2006 - DVD

Thursday, February 22, 2007



I made sure to reduce the size of the poster art so as not to draw too much attention to the fact that I actually saw this movie, truly a disaster of epic proportions. Yet one that delights with streams of non-sequiturs from Chris Walken. Lewis Black also stars, and looks so restrained that he might pop. If you're getting wasted next weekend at home and need a junk movie to help the hours along, check it out, absolutely. Otherwise, ssshh! Keep hush about it!--and keep the cover art minimized, dadgummit! We don't want to encourage Barry Levinson any more than we already have.

Nonetheless, read my review over at Cinema Blend.

Contemporary Short Work Animation, Univeristy of Chicago Animation Series

Friday, February 16, 2007



This was a night of animated shorts from the years spanning 1999-2006. But don't quote me on that because the U of Chi. coordinators ran out of programs before I could get one. My memory hasn't retained the titles of the films, let alone their release dates. Such is life, and I'm over it if you are. Actually, I'm over it anyway.

There were about 5 films that ran for about an hour, all of them works left undistributed (at least to my knowledge), so it was, in other words, a great opportunity to see some underground stuff. The picture above is from a film that consisted of single copies of painted portraits, which were then smeared with different layers of paint. Each shot revealed the layers of brushstrokes, but in reverse order until the face in the frame morphed back to its original form. The best way to describe it is as a cross between Stan Brakhage and Richard Linklater. Imagine physical lines of color that move ala Waking Life (2001), and have the same hypnotic effect as something like Mothlight (1963).

Little Miss Sunshine - 2006 - DVD

Thursday, February 15, 2007



I struggled to figure out why Little Miss Sunshine was lauded by so many and consequently nominated for awards left and right (and finally winning Best Screenplay at the Oscar's on Sunday). For me, it was a bit too much calculated quirkiness. I like the idea of a parody road-trip movie, that's funny in itself, and intriguing with the dark twist Little Miss was advertised to have. But the idea alone isn't enough to sustain a feature-length film. Depth to characters, for one, needs to be there. The people in Little Miss Sunshine are more like ornaments. Alan Arkin as Grandpa is hooked on heroin; mom and dad (Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear) fight incessantly; big brother is mute (and reads Frederick Nietzsche); and his uncle Frank (Steve Carell) is a suicidal Proust scholar. Besides the fact that I, too, would be suicidal were I a career Proust authority, his is the character that made the least sense to me. It sounded like literary name-dropping rather than real dimension. It's very easy to reference high-art, but to match it is difficult without looking like an imitation.

Out of that murk came the little sister, Olive (Abigail Breslin), who was a genuine beam of light when she was happy, the inverse when she was sad. Breslin's character (and Breslin herself) was inspired; the rest were cardboard facsimiles of an archetype. Individually there were fun moments. Steve Carell can deliver a joke with panache, even if it's just okay material. The same can be said for Greg Kinnear, who recurs more and more as a dramatic actor (But how I loved him from the Talk Soup days!) Toni Collette is enthralling in anything she does, always transcending her real persona (I particularly like her in About A Boy (2002)). Alan Arkin is an undeniable force.

Yet with all of that, and to my utter dismay, I was bored.

Maxed Out - 2007 - Film

Thursday, February 15, 2007



New review! Read it now in Four Magazine!

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Mister Roberts - 1955 - DVD

Sunday, February 11, 2007



Mister Roberts is set on a WWII supply ship, headed by a brass Captain Morton (James Cagney) who hasn't let his crew off ship for nearly a year. His booming voice (though we don't yet know it is his) thunders above the ship deck instructing the crew; it's a eerie, monotonous sound that feels disconnected from the ship, God-like, as if it encompasses the sea and surrounding sky. It's a weird opening scene with the ship separated from anything else on the horizon. As far as we know from the first few minutes it very well could be abandoned; the voice an imagined sound from the grave. A glimps of the shore appears a few moments later and it's clear the ship is set just off the mainland, and from here the absurdity of the ship's positioning begins.

Naturally charming, and alternately quiet and witty, William Powell plays Lt. "Doc," who is Lt. Roberts' (Henry Fonda) confidant and friend on their lonely, droning time in the service. Most of the time there is literally nothing for the soldiers to do but wait until the warring soldiers at sea need supplies. They sit idle, desperate for a diversion, even a fight. Things are so laid back that Lt. Roberts is addressed as "Mister Roberts," the crew's father figure. He keeps them sane; they peep through their binoculars at the nurses' station on land, and he lets them to peel their shirts off in the hot sun--all against Navy protocol, and of course much to the dismay and anger of Captain Morton. Harry Carey, Jr. plays Stefanowski, one of the many seemingly pubescent soldiers on ship--you can't miss him with his glistening white waves of hair.

Ward Bond is "Chief Petty Officer Dowdy," as usual a gruff but tenderhearted authority figure who seems more dimensional against the foil of Cagney, Powell, and Fonda. Jack Lemmon plays funny-man and slacker Ensign Pulver, who talks a lot of smack but rarely has the gaul to live up to his words. Once Lemmon enters the mood naturally lightens—particularly in the scene where he, Doc, and Roberts concoct their own brand of whiskey, made of none other than water and a few liquids from the medicine cabinet.

John Wayne's second son Patrick also has a part as a soldier, though it is small so pay attention whenever the larger group of soldiers is on screen. Working with Ford really is like being a part of a family; he's screened generations of his best actors, Harry Carey and Harry Carey, Jr; the Duke and his son Patrick, not to mention his own brother Frank in earlier films (who also used John when he was a director himself in the silent days). Beside these players are his unofficial family, the recurring actors like Fonda, Cagney, and Ward Bond, all smack into the Closterphobic space of this ship stuck at sea. They even bicker like family.

Mister Roberts has the same apathetic and frustrated tone as some recent war movies, like Jarhead (2005), for example, where Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) is bored to numbness in Iraq. It's full of pent-up anxiety that longs to be unleashed against an enemy that for them doesn't exist.

Also, if you were an AMC junkie in the past, you might be familiar with the movie Ensign Pulver (1964)--they played this movie almost as regularly as Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969). Ensign is a remake of Mister Roberts with Walter Matthau as "Doc," and a slender Jack Nicholson as a shipmate.

Mister Roberts was co-directed with Mervyn Leroy, and uncredited as director is Joshua Logan, the film's screenwriter and later director of its remake, Ensign Pulver.

Yojimbo - 1961 - Film

Saturday, February 10, 2007



This was my first glimps of this much-talked-about Akira Kurosawa flick, and served as the perfect companion piece to the Western overload I've been having in my John Ford movie marathon. It's a Western in its own right, but one that deviates from the classic Stagecoach style, and looks a lot more like something from Sergio Leone or Clint Eastwood (and I am told was remade as Leone's A Fistfull of Dollars in 1964). I saw it on a sparkling print with a big bunch of film geeks at Doc Films (at the U of Chi.) and had a marvellous time--even when it came to the gory scenes, like this one:









Also, here's a fantastic still:

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Letters from Iwo Jima - 2006 - Film

Friday, February 09, 2007



There were two films I anticipated more than any other last year, and both were from Clint Eastwood. Flags of Our Fathers made my top ten of 2006, and the second installment of the Iwo Jima battle films, should I be allowed to revise my 2006 list 2 months into 2007, ranks even higher.

Flags has been criticized for being too patriotic, while Letters is less so. But I have a feeling the "patriotism" of the second is shadowed by the fact that it's a whole other national brand. Letters is done almost entirely in Japanese with subtitles. From an American standpoint I don't know enough about Japanese history and culture to label it patriotic, though it won't surprise me if someone from Japan thought it was. For me, Flags is easy to label as a salute to our soldiers, to our military past. Eastwood's not apologetic about that, nor should he be; he's from a generation that came of age in the War and post-War years, so you bet he's got an emotional attachment to the story, but I still don't think it's an empty patriotic nod. If it was such a flag-waving American myth that's come back to give us context for the war in Iraq, why the hell would he waste his time creating the same story from the Japanese perspective?

It's clear Eastwood is more interested in the all-around perils of this story, after all, taken together the two movies make either side out to be the enemy. I'd have to flip through my mental Rolodex of war movies to know for sure, but I believe Letters was the first time I was rooting against the Americans on the battlefield.



War movies are a tough sell to a lot of people because they're turned off by the violence, whether it's stylized or realistic. My big sister, for one, won't go near a movie where she might see blood. Surely this limits one's options, particularly nowadays when violence isn't violent unless we see the full motion of a limb being torn off, or blood spurting from the jugular. I for one prefer war movies and Westerns from the 30s, 40s, and 50s where if a character was shot up or stabbed, it was staged in a way that excluded a picture of their guts spilled across the sidewalk. What happens in many John Ford movies, for instance, is a shot of a character's face as he (or she—but usually he) looks at the massacre. The horror expressed on those characters' faces tells us a lot more than if we were to see the mangled body with our own eyes; gore takes on a deeper meaning when we see how characters react when they're looking at it. It means there's consequence to the imagery, rather than blood for the sake of blood.

Some of my favorite films happen to be some of the bloodiest: Taxi Driver is practically a gore flick as it climaxes, and continuing with Scorsese, The Departed was one of my highest ranked films of 2006. These are films, though, where the violence is not gratuitous; its characters are emotionally involved with the violence they see, or even participate in.

Likewise, Letters from Iwo Jima is violent enough to make your stomach turn, but it's not a hack 'em and slash 'em flick, it's an historical tale. War, by nature, is violent, bloody, putrid; in between the scenes of bombings, missile attacks, and soldiers set afire by flame throwers there is a very personal story that can't be told without it. Both Letters and Flags are personal memoirs as much as they are battle films. The flashback sequences in Flags to me, means just as much as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi's (Ken Wantanabe) words scrawled on paper in the letters he writes to his family during battle.

In Flags, the flashback is used for its characters to contextualize the victory at home against the nightmarish battlefield memories they can't shake. In Letters, the General writes letters home to help him walk though the hours of impending death. Neither side of this war story is emotionally victorious. Everyone's fucked up from the war. That's Eastwood's point, and it sure as hell transcends the real flag waving bullshit of post-9/11.

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Puccini For Beginners - 2007 - Film

Tuesday, January 30, 2007



Check out my review of Puccini For Beginners over at Four Magazine now!

Tears of the Black Tiger - 2007 - Film

Tuesday, January 30, 2007



My review of Tears of the Black Tiger (in theaters March 9th)is up now in Four Magazine! Check yourself before you wreck yourself, Cineastes!

LinkWithin