-
Short Term 12 2013
A film more calculatedly soft/loud than a Pixies song, with every single happy moment timed to be followed by a come-down, and vice-versa. Every revelation of character exists solely to be echoed in another person later or to be brought clumsily full-circle by the close. No one seems to live in their part, with every bit of dialogue filled with anticipation of the other shoe dropping, and with every half-naturalistic exchange of dialogue quickly sown back into the tidy mechanics.…
-
Man of Steel 2013
Nightmarishly ponderous in its development of thin themes and sense of identity, which it promptly ignores as Superman causes as much damage as he averts. The death toll of this film, even leaving out the Kryptonian extinction, must rate in the millions, and something snapped in me right around the time Kal-El has an intimate kiss in a Ground Zero partially of his own making. I don't know what's worse: Marvel's glib mass destruction, papered over with light sarcasm, or…
-
Dirty Wars 2013
A bit too focused on Scahill himself, especially with all the reaction shots of him looking concerned or sympathetic (surely this multi-year project had enough footage for 80 minutes without seeing his face so much?), but it's still a tightly focused account of how war, by virtue of being raged against an unkillable idea instead of a specific foe, has become a self-perpetuating machine. Especially relevant to see the underhanded, unchecked reach of the government and military in light of recent NSA news.
-
Behind the Candelabra 2013
The sickly yellow color of Soderbergh's digital work turns to pure gold to chart a world of colossal (or palatial, as Liberace calls it) kitsch, wherein its maker's lament that he never knows whether people love him for him or what he can get people but does not realize that his shows of affection and wealth are PRECISELY what makes him Liberace. By using his mononymous stage name even in private, there is no distinction between the two, and friends/lovers…
-
Fast & Furious 6 2013
Despite my fondness for many films and filmmakers placed under the vulgar auteurism umbrella, I'm reluctant to use the term to describe a decided workman like Lin, whose giveaway tics I've yet to discover (if they exist at all) and whose films at best show an unremarkable but solid grasp of form. But "solid" seems appropriate for a film populated by the calcified rock of the middle-age muscles on display. A gaggle of not especially strong actors have been together…
-
Augustine 2013
Too modern and self-aware by half, but I like how it points out the unethical, exploitative treatment that often goes along with science, especially in past breakthroughs. A film from Jean-Martin Charcot's perspective would be awash in quasi-feminism as he strove to make women's mental illness a legitimized condition and not a subject for a witch hunt. From his patient's POV, though, his academic demonstrations are tribunals of their own, and he is willing to use her to advance his own research and to get funding.
-
Star Trek Into Darkness 2013
I've only just gotten into TNG and sporadically watched TOS, so I'm not a die-hard at all, but this is so far from what Star Trek is it is truly repulsive. "I thought we were explorers," Scotty protests right around the time I thought the same thing, but the idealism of Gene Roddenberry is unfashionable, so instead we get slick cynicism and an utter lack of consequences. To begin the film with a casual violation of the Prime Directive that…
-
Iron Man 3 2013
Runtime said 2hr15, but from start to the beginning of the credits seemed to take less than two hours. A nice cut down from some of the bloat lately, and Black makes every second count with a trilogy's worth of arc crammed into one movie. The dialogue regains some of the spryness of the original's improv after IM2 tried to replicate RDJ's natural fit with off-puttingly artificial results, but the real pleasure lies simply in watching Stark solve problems. The…
-
Kiss of the Damned 2013
Occasionally winsome in its Eurohorror throwback, but its actual vampire bits are shot like shoestring indies made by those who've never operated a camera. Rushes through its basic plot to give more time to the atmospherics, yet it never lingers unsettlingly as it should.
-
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty 2013
A film set to the music of the grandnephew of John and Alice Coltrane aims for a similar effect as the jazz great: to break the rules of structure with dense sheets of sound in order to capture the simplest but most profound truths. A standing-up provides the base theme around which improvisations spin out fast and abrasive, flowing to and from self-pity as newly concocted context and other perspectives until a split-second of anguish magnifies out into the agony…
