-
Fast & Furious 6 2013
Has more going for it than its eye-gougingly boring predecessor, most notably a snappier pace and one very good chase scene involving a tank on a freeway. (That sequence has a certain SPEED-like logic and rhythm that indicates that Lin might actually have learned something after four movies on the job.) But the fact that something this aggressively dumb and empty and charmless gets a pass because it's flashy and disregards the laws of physics is still pretty galling. More to come on the site.
-
What Maisie Knew 2013
I wish this didn't eventually turn into a horror show followed by fanciful wish fulfillment, but there's a lot of good stuff here, including a great performance by Alexander Skarsgard and wonderfully precise work by Steve Coogan and Julianne Moore as two hideously irresponsible parents who are awful in opposite ways. More to come on the site.
-
What Richard Did 2012
Opens itself up somewhat to allegations of Steubenville-ism, being an almost wholly sympathetic portrayal* of a privileged high school killer that ignores the victim and his family almost entirely. You have to give a film its premise, but alas it's no great shakes anyhow, spending half its running time setting up a pretty banal platform and ending on an ambiguous note that, I suspect, is meant to reconcile the film's ambitions vis-a-vis its protagonist and the facts of the true…
-
Star Trek Into Darkness 2013
It seems to me that we're in the midst of a quiet revolution where CGI is starting, at long last, to be used to create spaces that feel *there* -- places where human characters can actually exist and seamlessly move around. Everyone goes on and on about the lens flares, but they're very much part of that: more than in any effects extravaganza I've ever seen, the camera here feels like a *participant*, physically *there* with the characters, unrestricted in…
-
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul 1974
My first Fassbinder film, I'm ashamed to say, and based on what I'd heard I was expecting some sort of cynical provocation, not this tender, simple story, almost like something told around a campfire -- tonally it reminded me, more than anything else, of Leo McCarey's MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW.
-
The Reluctant Fundamentalist 2013
Seems at first glance to be a bit chickenshit: like, if you want to make a movie about a western-friendly Muslim man becoming radicalized, why not actually radicalize him, instead of jerry-rigging his transformation for maximum audience sympathy? But I suppose that's part of the point: studious, simmering resentment is as problematic as revolutionary fervor, and we've stoked plenty of both. So I guess I'll just say that I found the film mildly compelling, but clumsy (with a truly wretched framing device) and not very credible in its details (e.g., Wall Street).
-
Something in the Air 2013
Bertolucci's THE DREAMERS except wistfully nostalgic instead of grimly foreboding; a film about growing up where "growing up" means getting disillusioned, reaching a sort of detente with your convictions (like, yes, I believe X, but if if the logical conclusion of believing X is needing to firebomb something, then maybe I should grapple with whether I believe X *that much*), and carving out your own identity. Assayas clearly thinks he's making a film about cinema (the story is autobiographical) but…
-
Blazing Saddles 1974
Not my favorite Brooks film, because while it's remarkable what he's able to get away with, even today, he's not really at his funniest when getting away with stuff. Unlike HISTORY OF THE WORLD, PART 1 (which is just non-stop spoof) and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (which works on every imaginable level), the centerpiece material in SADDLES (i.e., Brooks' attempt to push the racial envelope as far as he can) ranges from mildly amusing to kind of flat, and it's the unrelated…
-
In the House 2013
A gleeful contradiction -- a meticulously assembled story about the problem with meticulously assembled storytelling. Ozon suggests that the allure of fiction is in the voyeurism of glimpsing the lives of others, messy and impulsive and human, not in intellectualized deconstruction; but of course the film itself is nothing more or less than a tidy little deconstruction, arranged just so with its jaunty violin score, ultra-precise editing, and constant self-revision. When his head isn't lodged firmly in his ass (e.g. with HIDEAWAY), Ozon can be wonderfully playful and entertaining.
-
Byzantium 2013
Really like these occasional minor genre efforts from Jordan (see also IN DREAMS, ONDINE), which inevitably put a thoughtful spin on something tried and true. Here, a TWILIGHT-like romance becomes a meditation on identity, reminding me of films as disparate as the little-seen vampire flick MIDNIGHT SON (the corrosive curse of keeping secrets) and A.I. (eternity and humanity implacably opposed to each other). Lush and beautiful, climaxing with a burst of gory mayhem that has real emotional stakes, and ending with one of my favorite images of the year.
-
Crystal Fairy 2013
Michael Cera plays a legendary self-absorbed asshole, but the biggest accomplishment of his performance – and of the movie – is the way that his character transforms, without moving a muscle, from almost unwatchably insufferable to uncomfortably recognizable. The key is the dawning realization of how genuinely important the hunt for the hallucinogenic cactus is to this guy – not as some sort of brass ring or poseurish hipster status symbol, but as an experience that he truly wants to…
-
Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978
Certain ways of teaching improv entail the notion of a “platform” – establishing the world of the characters and the normal relationship between them so that we feel the effect of the “tilt” when some weird or unexpected element is later introduced. I submit that this notion is crucial to Body Snatchers, and that Kaufman whiffed it. There’s no sense of San Francisco before it becomes an urban nightmare; Brooke Adams shows up at Sutherland’s house to deliver the classic…
