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Dead to Rights: Retribution confirms that there's minor value in setting the bar low. Simply performing basic gameplay mechanisms via a conventional controller remains one of console gaming's chief pleasures, and that's certainly the focus of Namco's reboot of its critically reviled Xbox franchise, comprised of 2002's dreadful original and its even lamer 2005 sequel. Striving to be nothing more than a competent third-person actioner with a signature novelty (your hero K9 cop is paired with a vicious husky), the game takes baby steps toward rehabilitating its ancestors' wretched reputation by just focusing on its core elements. Hardly groundbreaking or even all that memorable, Volatile Games's latest is, in light of its predecessors' awfulness, nonetheless a decent reclamation project, proving that muted aspirations don't have to be fatal.
In Retribution, you play as Jack Slate, a Grant City super cop with steroidal biceps, a gruff voice, and a generic desire to do good and exact vengeance against those who murdered his father. Slate is a bore, but of a non-aggravating sort, and while his canine sidekick Shadow is also short on personality, the two are a functional pair of proxies. Beginning with a sequence in which, as Shadow, you protect an injured Jack from assaulting forces, and then flashing back to elucidate the preceding events, the game has a rather mundane story to tell about Jack's efforts to avenge his father's death, a quest that leads him to uncover a plot by a titan of industry and a traitorous fellow officer to seize control of the city. A conspiracy-tinted saga full of faux twists, the narrative is a perfunctory bit of nonsense, though if it never engages, at least it's handled via passable cutscenes that maintain adequate forward-progress momentum. Continue Reading »
Tags: Dead to Rights: Retribution, Namco, Volatile Games, Xbox 360
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Feathered Cocaine operates from a starting point similar to that of last year's Oscar-winning The Cove, concentrating on a man striving to halt the animal-cruelty wrongs perpetrated by an industry to which his life's work was related. In this instance, that individual is Alan Parrot, who, after a childhood in Maine spent obsessing over falcons, snuck away at 18 to Iran and almost immediately thereafter became the head falcon trainer of the Shah. His subsequent career led him to legally export falcons for the president of the U.A.E., a practice he suspended because of the lucrative black market for smuggling the birds in the Middle East (falcons command as much as $1 million in some quarters) that today threatens many falcon populations with extinction. Utilizing numerous one-on-one interviews, Thorkell Hardarson and Öm Marino Arnarson's documentary spends its early portions on Parrot's endeavors to outlaw this profitable illegal bird commerce, which he vehemently opposes on a combination of moral and political grounds. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alan Parrot, Feathered Cocaine, Öm Marino Arnarson, Osama bin Laden, Thorkell Hardarson, Tribeca Film Festival
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Mohammad Rasoulof's recent arrest in his native Iran alongside collaborator Jafar Panahi (Rasoulof was released; Panahi remains behind bars) raises issues cannily reflected by the Iron Island director's latest, The White Meadows. A gorgeously wrought fable trading in subtle, if nonetheless unmistakable, social commentary, Rasoulof's film employs indigenous folklore for a poignant critique of oppression and the sorrow it spawns, following middle-aged Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi) as he travels to remote islands collecting the tears of the grief-stricken. Each of Rahmat's destinations are inhospitable places intrinsically related to the misery of their inhabitants, as the waterworks collected by Rahmat in a small glass pitcher bear the same brand of pungent saline found in these landscapes' expansive white salt flats. Rasoulof presents a world awash in briny sadness, save for Rahmat, whose duty is carried out with a quiet, nonjudgmental dignity. Yet no mere silent witness to unhappiness, Rahmat—who, during the course of his odyssey, is joined by a young boy and a blind man—seemingly views his task as a therapeutic calling, amassing his countrymen's tears in a glass bottle as a means of providing absolution for the dead, as well as a small measure of healing for the mournful. Continue Reading »
Tags: Hasan Pourshirazi, Mohammad Rabbani, Mohammad Rasoulof, Mohammad Shirvani, The White Meadows, Tribeca Film Festival, Younes Ghazali
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A turgid experiment in elliptical lyricism, William Vincent plays like a hybrid of Pickpocket, In the City of Sylvia, and The Passenger, except far more pretentious than even that description suggests. Jay Anania's film follows a man who goes by the name of William Vincent (James Franco) as he strolls Manhattan's sidewalks, his starting point murky—having cheated death by skipping a doomed flight home from Japan, he assumed a new identity and residence in Chinatown—and his destination unknown. Splintered into fragments, and told largely in retrospect as a mysterious woman named Ann (Julianne Nicholson) reads a letter written by William, Anania's story slowly reveals a basic plot involving amateur thief William's recruitment by a crime boss (Josh Lucas) and his subsequent, frowned-upon relationship with Ann, employed by said kingpin as both a lover and a whore. Such a conventional narrative recap, however, implies a lucidity and momentum that doesn't exist. Every scene is an exercise in drawn-out affectation, with the characters' silent stares at each other, gazes off into nothing, and pauses between dialogue exchanges—all set to meaningful piano twinkles and drum beats—so distended as to intimate parody, an impression exacerbated by William twice telling enforcer Vincent (Martin Donovan) that his comments sound like something from a movie. Continue Reading »
Tags: James Franco, Jay Anania, Josh Lucas, Julianne Nicholson, Martin Donovan, Tribeca Film Festival, William Vincent
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A real-life counterpart to HBO's Big Love, Sons of Perdition details the efforts of three teenagers to craft new lives after leaving the "Crick," a Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) community lorded over by Warren Jeffs on the Utah-Arizona border. The boys in question, Joe, Bruce, and Sam, choose to leave the Crick to escape tyrannical polygamist fathers and a repressive, isolationist culture that demands blind obedience under threat of physical abuse and eternal damnation in the afterlife. Directors Tyler Measom and Jennilyn Merten follow them for three years after their departure, and in doing so capture a piercing, humanistic portrait of individuality struggling to be born, and to survive, amid not only present-day difficulties but inescapable past traumas. Despite working with subject matter prone to be treated with freak-show melodramatics (as somewhat confirmed by HBO's serialized drama), the documentarians never resort to cheap theatrics and tsk-tsk moralizing, instead allowing the boys to articulate—both verbally and through their actions—the arduousness of the path upon which they've embarked, all while conveying the terrifying ethos of Jeffs's compound existence via voiceover sermons from the "prophet" that position him as an ominous, ever-present brainwashing specter in Crick exiles' lives. Continue Reading »
Tags: Big Love, Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints, Jennilyn Merten, Jon Krakauer, Sons of Perdition, Tyler Measom, Under the Banner of Heaven
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Based on the poetry of Gerald Stern, Lucky Life reflects on issues of remembrance, life, and death with a heartfelt lyricism bordering on affectation. Though on the surface a significant departure from his stunning Munyurangabo, Lee Isaac Chung's sophomore effort is in many respects a kindred spirit to that Rwanda-set drama, sharing with it similar aesthetic assuredness (and specific flourishes) as well as an interest in human responses to present and past calamity. Continue Reading »
Tags: Daniel O'Keefe, Kenyon Adams, Lee Isaac Chung, Lucky Life, Megan McKenna, Munyurangabo, Richard Harvell, Tribeca Film Festival
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Little more than an ethnographic sketch, American Mystic supplies slender snapshots of three Americans practicing alternative religions. Kublai is studying to be a healer and medium in New York, Morpheus is a witch who lives on a California estate with her husband and stepdaughter, and Chuck is a husband and father living on a South Dakota reservation who performs the traditional Native American ritual of sundancing. All three willingly exist on society's margins, and director Alex Mar shoots them with a patience and attentiveness to their natural environments that—coupled with her decision to largely rely on her subjects' voiceover narration for dialogue—attunes the film to their shared belief in, and desire for profound communion with, a higher spiritual power. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alex Mar, American Mystic, Tribeca Film Festival
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Produced after his most indelible noirs (Night and the City, Rififi), 1959's The Law—previously released in the U.S. in 1963 under the title Where the Hot Wind Blows!—finds Jules Dassin still in sharp form, even if his material doesn't quite live up to his direction's high standards. Dassin's 15th feature sets an all-star cast in the Italian fishing town of Porto Manacore, which is ruled from on high by a stern criminal named Don Cesar (Pierre Brasseur) who surrounds himself with women and Greek antiquities. Don Cesar looms over the citizenry like a menacing father figure, his dominance so pervasive that the local men's favorite pastime is a game predicated on hegemony called "The Law." In this diversion, individuals selected as the "boss" and the "deputy" are given free reign to lord over others in whatever nasty or nice way they choose, thereby encapsulating the film's belief that, in all relationships, there is a leader and a follower. Questions of authority stand at the root of the population's every deed and word, as power and romantic struggles abound, be they related to the many illicit affairs carried out behind the backs of cuckolded spouses, the pressures of gender politics placed on women and men to conform to traditional roles, or the efforts of the police to thwart a raft of thieves and swindlers. Continue Reading »
Tags: Gina Lollobrigida, Jules Dassin, Pierre Brasseur, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Roger Vailland, The Law, Yves Montand
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A French variation of The Station Agent which substitutes that film's off-putting renaissance-of-the-spirit finale for an ineffective air of despondence, Welcome details what happens after former gold medal-winning swimmer Simon (Vincent Lindon) befriends Bilal (Firat Ayverdi), an illegal immigrant from Iraq. After failing to sneak into England by truck, Bilal decides that the best route to the U.K. (where his girlfriend lives) is by swimming the English Channel, a foolhardy endeavor that nonetheless brings him to the pool where Simon gives lessons. Despite strict French laws outlawing citizens from harboring or assisting illegals, Simon slowly develops a humanitarian streak toward Bilal, his work on the boy's behalf—and the reciprocated affection the boy feels for him—filling an emotional void created by his divorce from wife Marion (Audrey Dana), who now works with her new beau at a soup kitchen for illegals. Continue Reading »
Tags: Audrey Dana, Firat Ayverdi, Philippe Lioret, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Vincent Lindon, Welcome
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Based on a true story whose underlying themes prove too obvious and one-note in translation, In the Beginning creates tension not only from its saga of an unlikely con, but from the nagging sense that more urgency and surprise should be forthcoming from such an amazing tale. After robbing his fence colleague (Gérard Depardieu), two-bit swindler Paul (François Cluzet) continues roaming the northern French countryside perpetrating a profitable scam in which he poses as a construction conglomerate employee. It's a reasonably profitable ruse that leads to unexpected, lucrative opportunities when he winds up in a small community where said conglomerate abandoned a highway construction project two years prior, in the process leaving the area in economic ruin. The arrival of Paul, now going by the alias Philippe, is immediately viewed by the locales as a sign that their asphalt-laying endeavor will resume, an assumption that Paul doesn't immediately refute—in part because of the contractors eager to dole out cash bribes for work—and soon gets swept up in, leading to the commencement of a major enterprise all predicated on a big fat lie. Continue Reading »
Tags: Emmanuelle Devos, François Cluzet, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Soko, The Singer, Vincent Rottiers, Xavier Giannoli
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Apocalyptic amour fou corrupts the earth in Happy End, Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu's adaptation of Dominique Noguez's 1991 novel about love, loss, and nuclear bombs over Moscow. As newspapers and TVs blare reports of lethal virus outbreaks in Italy and impending missile bombardments in Paris, and as ash rain falls over his coastal vacation home paradise of Biarritz, Robinson (Mathieu Amalric) wanders about in a fugue, scribbling in a cookbook (paper shortages are at a peak) about the summer before, when he deliberately detonated his marriage to government official Chloé (Karin Viard) for a mad affair with tall, slender, tattooed sex club employee Lae (Omahyra). It was a carnal relationship of an irrational, consuming order, one that led Robinson from Biarritz to Taiwan to Canada, where he was abandoned for the final time by Lae and, alone in the snowy mountains, lost his hand to frostbite. A year later, Robinson still can't get Lae out of his head, an infatuation that the Larrieu brothers posit as so consuming as to supersede concern for Doomsday, as well as one ignited by a tryst that the filmmakers even more drolly, and subtly, posit as the potential cause of the burgeoning global catastrophe. Continue Reading »
Tags: Arnaud Larrieu, Catherine Frot, Clotilde Hesme, Film Comment Selects, Happy End, Jean-Marie Larrieu, Karin Viard, Mathieu Amalric, Omahyra, Sergi López
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The disappointment educed by Like You Know It All is of a qualified sort. It's not that Korean director Hong Sang-soo's latest bifurcated drama about a film director who drinks too much and is short on insight into women, life, and himself is a failure. In fact, in many respects, it's one of his looser, messier, funnier efforts. The problem, rather, is one of familiarity: a repetition of motifs, structure, and thematic concerns that increasingly makes the director's self-conscious inquiries into his own hang-ups and shortcomings (and confused masculinity as a whole) feel like a pony's one trick. Whereas his prior Night and Day's rawness made his perennial examination into screwed-up male behavior invigorating, here the more laidback, reserved, wryly comical tone heightens the nagging feeling that Hong has run out of novel things to say and is thus now content to lackadaisically repeat himself. And, furthermore, all while having his on-screen surrogate—director Ku (Kim Tae-woo), an art-house hit whose films are impenetrable, disturbing, and generally not profitable—deflect those very criticisms by stating that he doesn't know how to make films about anyone but himself. Continue Reading »
Tags: Film Comment Selects, Hong Sang-soo, Kim Tae-woo, Like You Know It All, Night and Day
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A compilation of deadpan vignettes about Romanian life under Ceausescu's authoritarian '80s rule, Tales from the Golden Age (its title dripping with irony) boasts tonal cohesiveness but also a dispiriting lack of bite. So dry that the humor seems to have evaporated from its various scenarios, this portmanteau—written by 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days's Cristian Mungiu, and helmed by Mungiu, Ioana Maria Uricaru, Hanno Hoefer, Razvan Marculescu, and Constantin Popescu—doesn't delineate which director handled which episode, an ambiguousness in keeping with the absence of authorial grandstanding. Bookended by the sound of rousing communist anthems (with the closing credits also featuring clips of Communist Party pomp and circumstance), these tales, all based on "urban legends" from the era, exhibit few distinguishing signature flourishes as they recount everyday men and women's efforts to confront a regime, and in particular the fearsome bureaucracy that ran the country, whose illogical corruptness compelled many to behave in similarly atypical, and ultimately resourceful, ways. Continue Reading »
Tags: 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Constantin Popescu, Cristian Mungiu, Film Comment Selects, Hanno Hoefer, Ioana Uricaru, Razvan Marculescu, Tales from the Golden Age
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Fitting that Nozomi (The Host's Bae Du-na), a life-size inflatable erotic doll come to life, learns about the world while working at a video store, as Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll cares not for gritty reality but merely the stuff of fairy-tale movies, of which Mannequin, Lars and the Real Girl, Pinocchio, and Amélie make up its mushy flesh and bones. Think of it as Sex Toy Story, an insufferably precious saga of humping and magic in which Nozomi awakens one morning to realize, "I found myself with a heart I was not supposed to have," admires water droplets as "beautiful," and then secretly abandons the home of her middle-aged owner Hideo (Itsuji Itao), who recounts his workday to his companion doll at night before screwing (and then cleaning) her, to discover everything there is to know about everything. Continue Reading »
Tags: Air Doll, Amélie, Arata, Bae Du-na, Film Comment Selects, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Itsuji Itao, Lars and the Real Girl, Mannequin, Pinocchio
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The bodies corporeal and politic are one and the same in Morphia, Aleksei Balabanov's loose adaptation of writer Mikhail Bulgakov's autobiographical Notes of a Young Doctor, about a young medic who relocates to the 1917 Russian countryside and quickly finds his health crumbling as fast as the country's tsarist political foundation. Scripted by the late Sergei Bodrov Jr. (star of Balabanov's Brother), the film, like the director's prior Cargo 200, is a grim vision of deterioration, as Dr. Polyakov (Leonid Bichevin) is initially met with open arms by the village's desperate locals but soon finds himself succumbing to a soul-corrupting addiction to morphine that Balabanov parallels to the little-seen but intermittently referenced revolution sweeping the nation. Continue Reading »
Tags: Aleksei Balabanov, Brother, Cargo 200, Film Comment Selects, Mikhail Bulgakov, Morphia, Notes of a Young Doctor
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Film Comment Selects 2010: Happy End
by Nick Schager on March 4th, 2010 at 12:00 pm in Festivals, Film
Apocalyptic amour fou corrupts the earth in Happy End, Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu's adaptation of Dominique Noguez's 1991 novel about love, loss, and nuclear bombs over Moscow. As newspapers and TVs blare reports of lethal virus outbreaks in Italy and impending missile bombardments in Paris, and as ash rain falls over his coastal vacation home paradise of Biarritz, Robinson (Mathieu Amalric) wanders about in a fugue, scribbling in a cookbook (paper shortages are at a peak) about the summer before, when he deliberately detonated his marriage to government official Chloé (Karin Viard) for a mad affair with tall, slender, tattooed sex club employee Lae (Omahyra). It was a carnal relationship of an irrational, consuming order, one that led Robinson from Biarritz to Taiwan to Canada, where he was abandoned for the final time by Lae and, alone in the snowy mountains, lost his hand to frostbite. A year later, Robinson still can't get Lae out of his head, an infatuation that the Larrieu brothers posit as so consuming as to supersede concern for Doomsday, as well as one ignited by a tryst that the filmmakers even more drolly, and subtly, posit as the potential cause of the burgeoning global catastrophe. Continue Reading »
Tags: Arnaud Larrieu, Catherine Frot, Clotilde Hesme, Film Comment Selects, Happy End, Jean-Marie Larrieu, Karin Viard, Mathieu Amalric, Omahyra, Sergi López
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