I really have to work at not reading enough to spoil the movies I'm interested in before I've seen them. It's worth the effort: I don't want someone else's opinion to color my first reaction, and I hate knowing what's coming next because some reviewer outlined too much of the plot. But I feel like I'm constantly battling the barrage of publicity filmmakers and distributors want you to see, and I don't always win. Sometimes I don't get to be surprised enough by a film because I know too much about what's in it. And sometimes a clever publicity hook reels me into a movie that's not really for me.
That happened yesterday with Sophie's Revenge, a self-consciously Hollywood-style romantic comedy from China that's part of this year's New York Asian Film Festival. Whoever wrote the blurb for the festival's website got me with this: "You need to know: the conspiracy is real. 20 years ago, American film distributors secretly met with the CIA and were told that it was their patriotic duty to convince audiences that China was hell on earth. To that end they agreed to only import Chinese movies about unwashed orphans riding in the backs of rusty trucks through industrial hellscapes populated by unwed mothers sitting in the dirt and crying over their abortions." Continue Reading »
[Author's Note:Razzle Dazzle is a six-part video essay that looks at how movies have examined the many facets of fame (heroism, infamy, and everything in between) and how they have shaped the audience's perception of what fame offers. See the videos in their original context at Moving Image Sourcehere and here.]
Part One:
Part Two:
Aaron Aradillas is a San Antonio-based critic and the host of Back By Midnight.
Matt Zoller Seitz is the founder of The House Next Door.
The idea that you can watch as many DVDs as you want for one monthly price and keep them as long as you want with no late fees, which drew me to Netflix a decade or so ago, already feels too restrictive. The discs I order one day are rarely what I'm in the mood for when they arrive, so they tend to sit by the TV for weeks while I download others from the Watch Instantly list. Sure enough, when I got home from a live performance too late to go to a movie theater last night, I skimmed through the instant downloads and found The Return, a Russian movie from 2003. I'd missed that when it came out, and it sounded like just the thing.
I used to think it would bother me to watch movies on my laptop, but the sound and image quality are usually just fine, and I sit so close that the image takes up about as much of my field of vision as the screen in a movie theater does even when I sit near the front, as I usually do. Watching a movie like The Return does make me wish for a bigger screen, though, since so much of its power comes from its visuals. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, copresented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United!.]
One part '70s rogue male action movie, another part innovative Hollywood blockbuster pushed all the way to "11", and totally responsible for changing action movie grammar—big silly war flicks were never the same after its May 1985 release—Rambo: First Blood Part II sits in between filmic worlds. Despite it being one of those movies everybody knows, it's a tough one to parse. Nevertheless, Brandon Soderberg and comics artist and illustrator Benjamin Marra chopped it up about Rambo: First Blood Part II, and tried to get to the center of its wizened, gummy politics but also talk about why it's just, well, awesome. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, copresented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United!.]
As I was heading off to my first day of elementary school, my father said, "If they ask you your religion, tell them you're a member of the Church of the Holy Gun."
It was a joke, of course. But not entirely.
I grew up in a gun shop in New Hampshire. Or, more accurately, I grew up in a house with a gun shop attached to it. I was never baptized, but I was given a life membership in the National Rifle Association when I was born. My first substantial birthday present was a .22 rifle my father built for me when I was three. Other kids always wanted to come over to my house to play Cowboys & Indians because we got to use real guns from my father's box of broken pistols and revolvers. By the summer of 1985, I was nine years old and my father had just gotten a license to sell machine guns.
Rambo: First Blood Part II (which I've always just called Rambo II) was one of the first R-rated movies I ever got to watch. I don't remember if my father took me to see it at our local movie theater or if I watched it when he rented the videotape later. I expect it was the latter, but it feels in my memory more like the former—going out to see a movie was a big event in my family, much like the sequence in The 400 Blows where Antoine and his parents go to see a movie and for the time they're under the spell of the celluloid dreamworld, it takes no effort to smile. Continue Reading »
I came out of Grown Ups yesterday feeling as if Hollywood had given me a giant wedgie. Here's my review for TimeOFF.
Elise Nakhnikian has been writing about movies since the best way to learn about them was through alternative weeklies. She is currently the movie reviewer for TimeOFF. She also has her own blog, Girls Can Play, and a Twitter account.
Coming up in this column:I Am Love; Winter's Bone; Video Slut: How I Shoved Madonna off an Olympic High Dive, Got Prince into a Pair of Tiny Purple Woolen Underpants, Ran Away from Michael Jackson's Dad, and Got a Waterfall to Flow Backwards so I Could Bring Rock Videos to the Masses (book); This is Korea!; The Desert Rats; Hot in Cleveland; Some Summer 2010 Television, but first…
Fan mail: If you read #48 right after its posting, you may have missed an interesting comment on it from Ed Sikov. He's the author of On Sunset Boulevard, the great Billy Wilder biography I mentioned in the item on Stalag 17. I said in the column that Sikov had not told us what Wilder thought of the TV series Hogan's Heroes, which bore a more than passing resemblance to Wilder's film. Sikov commented that he did not include that because he never got to interview Wilder for the book. His description in his comments of meeting Wilder later is worth going back and looking at.
I suppose I picked up while reading his book that he had not interviewed Wilder (he mentions it in the Preface), but I had forgotten it in the twelve years since his book came out. His book is so good and so thoroughly researched that it does not make any difference. This goes to a point I have made about this column before: there are a lot of ways to understand screenwriting. You will notice sometimes I have quotes from the writers. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I discuss producers' contributions, both good and bad, to screenplays. Sometimes I will discuss studios and networks and their part in the collaborative process. What I try to do in the column, and what Sikov does brilliantly in his book, is gather as great a variety of information as we can and organize it in ways that will educate and entertain readers. If you have any interest in Wilder, you probably have already read Sikov's book. If you haven't read it, it really is required reading. Continue Reading »
Just about everything I've written about so far in this Movie a Day series is pretty easy to find no matter where you live: If it's not in a theater near you, it's on DVD or due out soon. But not Crime Wave, the 1985 film I saw last night. It was selected for a one-night screening by Not Coming to a Theater Near You, which should give you an idea of its status. According to the film's director, John Paizs, who was at the screening for a Q&A afterward, Crime Wave was released on VHS (as The Big Crime Wave, since Sam Raimi released Crimewave that year), but it's not on DVD or Blu-ray.
That's a shame. Crime Wave is a gas, and it's probably the most inventive movie I've ever seen about the agony of trying to fill an empty page. Paizs plays the tormented screenwriter, Steven, who's a whiz at beginnings and endings, but can't figure out what to put in between. During the Q&A, Paizs said he knew he wasn't a good enough actor to read lines for the part, but he figured he could pull off a silent role. He was right: His speechless schmo's stunned-fish affect gives him a primal, Harpo Marxish innocence that's both comic and endearing. Continue Reading »
"Vincent and the Doctor" is one of the episodes this season that I was particularly looking forward to. It's not often that a writer as prominent as Richard Curtis gets involved with the show, and having the man behind Blackadder (as well as several highly successful feature films) contributing an episode was a prospect to savor. And I wasn't disappointed—the result is a complete success. While a bare plot summary—the Doctor meets Vincent Van Gogh and helps him defeat a giant chicken from outer space—might suggest a less than serious episode, "Vincent and the Doctor" is in fact a deeply felt piece of work, with a wonderfully complex portrayal of its central character and plenty to say about topics that Doctor Who doesn't normally touch. Continue Reading »
I have a confession to make: I outed a celebrity last night. I felt mortified the moment I'd spoken the words, so I blame Buster Keaton. I had just seen The General and was out of my head with Buster-induced bliss, and so, when a comic actor I love gestured me onto the escalator, I blurted, "Steve! It's Jeff Garlin!" My husband had the presence of mind to ask Garlin if he'd just seen the movie too, and wasn't it great? "Yes, just about as great as anything can be," Garlin said. "It made me so happy."
Exactly. It's always an enormous pleasure to see this Buster Keaton classic, which may be my favorite of his feature-length films (though The Cameraman also delights me from start to finish). But to see it on a big screen, in a print recently restored by the Museum of Modern Art, preceded by two reels of brave and brilliant physical comedy from Steamboat Bill Jr. and accompanied by Ben Model? Heaven, I'm in heaven… Continue Reading »
In my attempt to try to understand Christina Aguilera's single/non-single "Woohoo," I stumbled across this article from Bitch Magazine assessing the pleasures of various oral sex pop songs.
VH1 has resurrected its Behind the Music series. In case you didn't catch the Courtney Love episode, which premiered on Monday, here's some of what you missed, uncensored:
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.
A title card at the end of Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders announces that Doctors Without Borders (or MSF, the acronym for its original French name) treats 10 million people a year. Just as you're absorbing that impressive figure, another card announces that two billion people live outside the reach of any kind of medical assistance. That one-two punch distills the impact of this thoughtful documentary, which conveys both the satisfaction of saving one life at a time and the difficulty of turning your back on countless others in need—or, as Chiara Lepora puts it, "the nonsense of not doing something once you know something needs to be done." Continue Reading »
The Grassroots Podcast (voted "Best Podcast to Never Be Nominated for a Podcast Award" by Variety, but the paywall means we can't link to it) returns!
Of course we'll get into all sorts of things like Sex and the City 2, Cannes being the prime reason for shooting sawdust out of our metaphorical critical phalluses and the single greatest trainwreck of a video interview ever shot. But we've got bigger fish to fry today. In fact, you could say we're going to…nah, I was going to make a yakitori joke. But that would've been lame.
So to help us fight lame, we've got Grady Hendrix, he of the multi-headed New York Asian Film Festival hydra, to bring us his thoughts on festival concepts and what's playing at this year's series, which runs from June 25 through July 8, as well as its sister program, Japan Cuts at the Japan Society. Continue Reading »
The softer they come, the softer they fall in Wah Do Dem, a micro-budget indie (it was shot for approximately $75,000) about a blinkered Brooklynite. Max, played by a mouth-breathing, deadpan Sean Bones as a hipster Napoleon Dynamite, is the kind of plaid-shirted, knit-capped, self-satisfied lad you can't picture much more than five miles from Williamsburg. Or, as a fellow passenger on the cruise he won in a contest puts it: "Surprise, surprise. You don't fit in everywhere in the world." Of course, in real life, Max would have sold the cruise on Craigslist, or used it as a launching pad for some arty project, the way co-directors Ben Chace and Sam Fleischner decided to make the cruise Chace won into a setting for their first feature. But I'm glad he didn't, since his story turns out to be an entertaining culture-clash fable.
Wah Do Dem (the title, which is never explained, apparently translates roughly to "What's wrong with them?") starts slow, with too much footage from the cruise (hey, did you know people eat and drink a lot and dance really badly on those things?). But then we land in Jamaica and things start to get interesting. Max's provincialism and narcissistic faith in his own coolness make him an easy mark for hustlers, and the dumb decisions he keeps making leave him more and more stranded, but it's all irie in the end. Literally losing his shirt sets him off on a journey—by car, bus, motorcycle, and ultimately on foot—that gives him the taste of "the real Jamaica" that he was looking for. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, copresented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United!.]
It's an age-old story: boy meets girl; boy sleazes on girl, then steals girl's brother's scooter and wrecks it; girl's brother reclaims the scooter and gets beaten up in the process; girl confronts boy with repair bill, which he refuses to pay; boy's father will pay, but only if girl lets him have sex with her, repeatedly; girl's brother accidentally shoots boy's father in the arm; girl, brother, and their friends go into hiding at an abandoned miniature-golf palace while Peter Coyote makes bewildered faces. You know…that age-old story.
Digging further into The Legend of Billie Jean raises many more questions than it answers, because as contrived and frail as the main "plot" sounds, it's got nothing on the various B plots. Everyone remembers that Billie Jean chops her long blonde hair off à la Joan of Arc—a tortured parallel the film refuses to drop—and becomes a folk hero. Nobody remembers the rest, but along the way, the eponymous Billie Jean (Helen Slater) and her scooter-crossed brother, Binx (Christian Slater, in his film debut), acquire a hostage in Lloyd (Keith Gordon), a bored rich boy who's eager to test his district-attorney father's love by not only letting the Billie Jean Kids kidnap him but in fact suggesting it himself—this, after they've broken into his house and eaten all the food in the fridge and Billie Jean has hit him in the nuts with a guitar. Continue Reading »
Just about everything I've written about so far in this Movie a Day series is pretty easy to find no matter where you live: If it's not in a theater near you, it's on DVD or due out soon. But not Crime Wave, the 1985 film I saw last night. It was selected for a one-night screening by 
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