I hadn't planned to write about this one, since just about everyone else who covers movies has already weighed in on it, but it was the only new movie playing in Central Jersey that I wanted to write about this week, so I wound up seeing it yesterday and writing it up for TimeOFF. Anyhow, I have a longstanding love-hate relationship with SATC, so I wouldn't have wanted to miss this one. Here's my review of it for TimeOFF.
In the entertainment medium, the word "classic" is often interchangeable with "timeless." After all, is the Beatles's Sgt. Pepper any less amazing to listen to or is Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather any less poignant then when originally released? Mediums like cinema, music, and literature tend to be unaffected by the thoughtless constraints of time. Video games, on the other hand, have never been that lucky.
While cinema, music, and literature have the luxury of having their fundamentals well established, videogames are stuck with having to reinvent the wheel every six years or so. Going back to an arcade game from the early 1980s or an early 3-D action/adventure game from the Playstation One era can be jarring for most modern gaming enthusiasts. While the medium has come a long way since the primitive monochromatic glares of the simple sprite based games like Pong and Space Invaders, many still worry about the roots of gaming being crushed by the weight of its own accelerated evolution. So storied companies like Capcom and Sega must ask a difficult question: How do you pay homage to your back catalog of software while making it relevant to the modern gaming public? Surprisingly enough, the answer to this came from a very modern gaming trope. Continue Reading »
Coming up in this column: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Please Give; Date Night; Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (play); Poets, Screenwriters and Classical Musicians; Johnny Eager, The Sound Barrier, Finishing the 2009/2010 TV Season, but first…
Fan mail: "Agor" took me to task for not appreciating David Simon and Treme, and he makes a very good defense of what Simon is up to, comparing it to an intricately structured novel. My problem was that I did not find the characters and the situations compelling enough to put in the time the show was going to require, just as I have occasionally started a novel that I just cannot get into. Many viewers will stick with Treme and I hope they enjoy the show.
Agor also points out that I am not really writing about Simon as much as HBO in the item on Treme. He's right. I have liked some of Simon's stuff before, especially Homicide: Life on the Street and the second season of The Wire. However, what I was getting at in the piece was the overall tone of HBO insisting it is superior to anything else on television. Sometimes it is, sometimes it is not. But as you may have noticed in this column I deal not only with the screenwriters and their work, but many other aspects of screenwriting. I have discussed on several occasions the screenwriting styles of major studios like MGM and Warner Brothers in their heyday. Simon is working for HBO because its approach fits his. In the column below, I spend some time on a stage adaptation of a film and a collaboration involving a screenwriter and a lot of other artists. After all, screenwriters do not work in a vacuum. Continue Reading »
I couldn't get to my aunt and uncle's place on Long Island and to a movie theater yesterday, so my husband and I checked out the movies on demand on TV. There were lots of good options, including The Father of My Children, which I'd just added to my wanna-see list (it opened here on Friday). At just $6 for the two of us, seeing this one on TV wasn't just convenient, it was a welcome break from the $12.50 or $13 apiece that you have to pay these days at most New York theaters.
What we saw was an elegantly made French film that pulled me in with deceptive ease. Like Things We Lost in the Fire, The Father of My Children is about a beautiful, happy family that seems unusually blessed until they lose their father and husband and have to learn to cope without him. But where Things We Lost in the Fire was off-puttingly histrionic, The Father of My Children is deeply affecting without ever being showy about its emotions.
It's also the movie equivalent of a roman à clef for indie film lovers, a behind-the-scenes look at the difficulties of making and marketing arty movies studded with thinly disguised versions of real filmmakers. Even the father of the title, Grégoire Canvell (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), is based on a real person, a producer who was about to make writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve's first movie when he died unexpectedly. Being able to play the inside-baseball game of guessing who's who may add another layer of enjoyment for people who are into that kind of thing, but it's hardly the main attraction. The Father of My Children is about everyday truths: the comfort and joy a happy family bestows on its members, the pain of losing a cherished parent or mate, how people cope with the death of a loved one, and the importance of accepting the worst and enjoying the best that life brings you. Continue Reading »
Dennis Hopper lost his battle with cancer today at the age of 74.
Because, we're told, Sex and the City 2 is still in theaters, here are some more choice words about the movie, this time about its portrayal of the gays.
And while Slant's review of the film didn't make Movieline's Top 9 (perhaps because S.T. Vanairsdale has an aversion to Top 10s?), it's worth noting for bringing our attention to Lindy West's amazing takedown of the film.
A repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell passed the House this week. Watch Republicans use phrases like "tickle the fancy" and "shoving this down your throat" in protest:
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.
I've always had a weak spot for zombie movies, which give me permission to wallow in guilt-free survival fantasies. I mean, how bad can it be to kill somebody who's already dead, especially when their whole purpose in un-life is to snack on your brains?
Like a lot of people, I'm particularly fond of George Romero's zombie movies. I like their lightly scruffy, homemade feel. I like how they're always set in or near the blue-collar town of Pittsburgh, Romero's home base for most of his adult life, and how their heroes are generally can-do types, working-class or middle-class people used to relying on themselves—just the kind of folks you want to hang out with during a zombie invasion. But most of all, I like the way Romero uses his zombie movies to say something about the cultural soup we're all simmering in.
Romero has always made his zombie movies more for money than for love, so they're a little hit and miss. Diary of the Dead felt dashed off and didactic, one good idea stretched way too thin. Three years before that, Romero came up with what may have been his best zombie movie of all, the ferocious Bush-era satire Land of the Dead. Continue Reading »
I played Lost Planet 2 wrong. That is, I put the disc in my console, picked up my controller, pressed start, and tried to play the game. But that's not what Lost Planet 2 wants you to do at all. What it wants is for you to convince four friends to buy the game, so you can all play it via online co-op. I can certainly understand why Capcom thinks making you buy four copies of a game in order to play it is a good idea, but it's harder to see why you should bother.
Lost Planet 2 is so desperate to be regarded as a kind of action MMO that even when you play in single-player, your AI allies get phony online handles, complete with gangsta "a"s for "er"s. There isn't even a "Start Game" option, just "Open Session," and you have to specify that you want to be offline if you want to play without online intervention. That would merely be cute/annoying, but what makes it truly obnoxious is that mission after mission doesn't just encourage teamwork, it absolutely depends on it—many chapters require coordinating players at far-distant points on the map. And of course, brain-dead ally AI can't do that, and you don't have the control over your allies that other squad shooters offer, much less the ability to hop between characters provided by smarter team games like the original Xbox's Brute Force. So in single-player, you have a game that's flatly unplayable. Continue Reading »
The newly restored print of Metropolis, Fritz Lang's gorgeous, disturbing, and sometimes absurd silent masterpiece is a revelation. (It's due out on DVD and Blu-ray later this year.) Part Romeo-and-Juliet love story and part science fiction, it's also about class warfare, alienation, and exploitation in the capitalist Machine Age—but that's the muddled part of the story.
It's not one of my favorite movies, yet its iconic, beautifully composed images, and almost laughably intense expressionistic acting suck me in every time I come across it on late-night TV. The plot and message strike me as incoherent and fascistic, but some people find it profound. Maybe its lack of clarity is part of its power, since it leaves the movie open to interpretation.
Metropolis is a huge city created and ruled by one man, Joh Fredersen (played by Alfred Abel, whose restrained, naturalistic performance sits like a rock in the middle of a fast-flowing river of emoting). Fredersen is a grim control freak, but his son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), is a softie, an idealist who wants to befriend the workers who live and toil in a whole separate underground city beneath the glamorous one where the ruling class lives. When Freder catches a glimpse of Maria (Brigitte Helm), a demure blond goddess from the workers' world who has emerged for a moment into his, he's a goner. Like Theseus and his friend in pursuit of Persephone, he runs after Maria and gets all tangled up, trying to protect Maria as she's threatened by personal vendettas and political upheaval. Continue Reading »
In these confessional, porn-saturated days, it's getting harder for fictional characters to do something so outrageous that we can't empathize with them. One of the biggest risks left for a filmmaker to take is to focus on a main character who is so narcissistic he hurts everyone he gets close to—particularly the women who love him. Both of the movies I saw yesterday, Greenberg and Solitary Man, take on that challenge, and I wanted to see if they could win my sympathy for their Hurricane Harry main characters.
It's always been tough for women to get by with that sort of thing in the movies. From the evil daughter in Mildred Pierce to the bad mom in White Oleander, selfish women tend to get their comeuppance on screen. Even in film noir, where bad girls behave very badly and get away with it, we don't usually like the femmes fatales, though it's obvious why the hapless heroes fall for them. Continue Reading »
Ed Gonzalez's review of Sex and the City 2 was mentioned in the New York Post on Monday (though they incorrectly claimed that we posted our review early—slander!).
Ed's review was also quoted in a Telegraph piece about the film's "anti-Muslim" tone.
Salon.com published a similar article on SATC2's "stunning Muslim clichés" yesterday.
And check out another scathing assessment of the film by Matt Zoller Seitz at IFC.
On a lighter note, with Christina Aguilera's new album, Bionic, due in a couple of weeks (and her feature film debut, Burlesque, out later this year), we figured it was the perfect time to revisit SNL's pun-tastic spoof of the TV show's finale:
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.
Is Jessica Oreck, the writer-director of Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, trying to make a point about how modern life has alienated us from nature? Or did she and her editor just choose the wrong images to document her story? Either way, I've never seen a documentary with a bigger disconnect between voiceover and visuals.
Oreck's poetry-laced voiceover copy (it's read in Japanese and translated in subtitles) outlines traditional Japanese beliefs regarding the sanctity of all living things. The narrator reads with girlish glee, undercutting the seriousness of Oreck's attempt to equate those traditions with a longstanding Japanese craze for capturing and keeping insects. The laugh in the narrator's voice is about the only hint of humor in this movie other than the incongruous title, which feels like a leftover from a very different early cut. Continue Reading »
Director Jafar Panahi was reportedly released from prison in Iran yesterday.
House contributor Ed Copeland's John Williams Blog-a-Thon has begun, and Ali Arikan and Matt Zoller Seitz have contributed a conversation about William's postmodern Mickey Mousing.
An insightful op-ed by Ross Douthat in The New York Times about Rand Paul's foot-in-mouth disease.
Finally, Eric Henderson's nomination for the best viral clip of the month:
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.
Vincente Minnelli disowned his last movie, A Matter of Time (1976), when it was taken away from him by its producers, American International Pictures, and after its initial release it pretty much disappeared from view. Tonight, BAM is showing this nearly lost film as part of Elliott Stein's Cinechat series, and at the 6:50pm screening Stein will be joined by Minnelli scholar Joe McElhaney for a discussion about what happened to this troubled picture. I recorded it off late-night television when I was in high school, and my faded, jerky copy runs 87 minutes, as does the copy showing at BAM, though IMDB lists the running time as 97 minutes. Big bursts of primary colors periodically slash the film's pale, golden images, and in the best sequences there's a rich, sophisticated air of fantasy being pursued and then captured, like a fluttering yellow and brown butterfly restrained by a pin. It's a very flawed movie, mainly due to producer interference, but it cries out for restoration of some kind, if only so that we can see Minnelli's last dreams more clearly.
A Matter of Time starts with some wordy titles about coming to the big city and fairy tales and how some fairy tales come true. In a framing story, we see chambermaid-turned-movie-star Nina (Vincente's daughter Liza, at the height of her stardom) riding in a glam 70s-style limo and watch footage of Nina's latest film, where Liza is decked out in Cecil Beaton-style finery, a la Streisand in Minnelli's On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970). There seems to be some confusion over who shot this awkward, choppy framing story. When I asked McElhaney, he said that some of it was shot by Liza's second husband Jack Haley, Jr., but Mark Griffin writes in his new Minnelli biography that the director himself shot most of it but wasn't planning on using it; whoever shot it, it's a mistake, and it takes a while to get your bearings after it's over. We flash back to Nina's stint as a maid in a rundown Roman hotel (she seems to be wearing a horse's tail down her back), and there are some elegant camera movements and compositions before Ingrid Bergman makes her big entrance, playing a faded Contessa. Bergman and Minnelli have worked out a striking look for this woman: marcelled white hair, a hooded, animal print coat redolent of the 1940s, and the sort of raccoon/kohl eyes usually sported by silent screen vamps. Near penniless, the Contessa goes to sell a necklace; when the buyer says he'll take anything else she has, she growls, "Finished, there's nothing more." There's a gravity to everything Bergman says in this movie, and she has a grandeur that seems to come naturally, a statuesque hauteur.
"I'm one of many boys, and I'm ready to explode!" sings young Pete (Al Calderon) in the new musical The Burnt Part Boys, and the sentiment is one many teenagers can relate to. However, this lad means it metaphorically, and the antihero at the center of Elizabeth Meriwether's Oliver Parker! means it quite literally. There's an ocean separating the intents of these two works, but the wants of young boys that are not quite men is quite popular these days (e.g. American Idiot), it merely depends on whether you like your theater salty or sweet.
The Burnt Part Boys, certainly in the latter camp, has been kicking around for a bit, and it's all too apparent that some things have been shorn since its earliest development. Telling the story of a group of guys (and one girl) who travel to a distant mine to soul-search their way back to losing their fathers there 10 years prior, it seems to have an everlasting build-up only to arrive at a too-rushed wrap-up. The country-flavored score by Chris Miller and Nathan Tysen is of the unhummable variety that confounds many crowds but has some flavorful tunes, though the music doesn't conjoin harmoniously with Mariana Elder's book, which even throws out some decidedly un-'60s lingo ("nut sac"?). Director Joe Calarco attempts to outdo Susan Stroman's recent, brilliant staging of The Scottsboro Boys with its spare set of chairs and ladders to create natural surroundings. But this work, creaky as the floorboards on which the cast steps, never reaches that kind of apex. Despite strong work from its wide-eyed young performers (the adults get much shorter shrift here), it rarely takes the viewer out of familiar woods. Continue Reading »
If Terry Gilliam and Charlie Chaplin had had a love child in France, he might have grown up to be Jean-Pierre Jeunet. The director's latest film, Micmacs, is another Gilliamesque mishmash of complicated but retro gadgets, stylized environments, sight gags, and fey little stories-within-stories, all acted in an exaggerated style that hasn't been seen—or missed—much since the silent era. I liked that combination in Amélie, a piquant little piece about making the most of your life, and I loved it in A Very Long Engagement, where the antic tone was leavened by the gravity of the war scenes and the emotional heft of the love story. But it doesn't do it for me in Micmacs, a clunkily connected series of whimsical set pieces intended to convey a serious anti-warmongering message.
It starts well. A beautifully executed montage introduces our hero, Bazil (Dany Boon), without a word. Here and throughout the film, artfully orchestrated sounds do a lot to establish context and convey meaning, as Jeunet and his crew play with the full box of tools available to them like an overgrown Talented and Gifted class. After an accident loses him his job and leaves him homeless, Bazil befriends a cheerily communal band of losers and loners who live under an overpass, in a cave-like dwelling made of scrap metal. As soon as they learn that Bazil is out to take revenge on a pair of arms dealers (one of the dealers manufactured a landmine that killed his father, and the other made a bullet that almost killed him), they're in. And we're off, heading for a series of elaborate set pieces as the motley misfits outsmart the bad guys. Continue Reading »
Recent Comments:
2012 Grammy Awards: Winner Predictions
by Gabe
Lana Del Rey's Feminist Problem
by felonious punk
Oscar 2007 Nomination Predictions
by monkeypox6
Oscar 2007 Nomination Predictions
by monkeypox6
2012 Grammy Awards: Winner Predictions
by LovelyDay