JB’s review: 7/10
“Very Cute movie!!! Entertaining. 👍”
Total nostalgia trip. I’ve seen this maybe 100 times and waited patiently for it to pop up somewhere on streaming.
Channing Tatum’s Abercrombie jeans, All-American Rejects, Amanda Bynes and her flip phone. Who could resist the flood of girl positivity?
This script is so smart and sharp I think it may work even better if it were a novella or short story…which I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about a movie before.
That’d definitely be the case if not for Oliver Reed’s magnetically grimy acting, precisely tweaking his un/likeability moment to moment. Or, if Nicholas Roeg’s photography was not so strikingly self-assured, informed by European new waves.
The “system” is basically an aimless game of chasing skirt, but also…
This is something else, even for Cronenberg. Meditative and melancholy with a dark dose of kitsch, story takes a backseat to a weird array of characters discussing Cronenberg’s typical obsessions.
But even with a danger of coming across too directly, beneath the skin Cronenberg examines himself through Tenser; afraid of the evolution of modern horror, the film regresses, mixing devolving technology with new bodies. (The title is the same as one of his earliest films after all.)
Crimes of the…
The Piano Teacher, above its obscenity and violence and sexual taboos, is a bitter film. Haneke refuses to answer who has hurt whom more by the cold end credits, and to what degree they enjoyed the pain.
For all the movie's disgust and discomfort, Berger's static photography and long takes are absolutely hypnotizing. The camera is just as impassive and restrained as Erika, who, thanks to Isabelle Huppert, is the most disturbing (and disturbed) character I've ever encountered, so desperate…
