Film

CHECK.   PLEASE. Katie Dellamaggiore’s first feature, Brooklyn Castle, is an engaging, feel-good, get-angry documentary of the sort you can see just about everywhere these days.   It’s better made than many, and has fairly engaging subjects under its lens.   It encourages outrage against a status quo while celebrating the human spirit that can overcome it.   It…

WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE ARGO Sixty years ago, at a time of worldwide turmoil, a script that had bounced around finally made it into production. It involved the tangled lives of desperate political refugees trying to escape political danger to America. It ended at an airport, where a handful of classic movie characters decided their problems…

YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH Whatever happened to misbegotten youth in American cinema? Don’t you long for the old days, when young misfits stole things? And ran everywhere? And were French? What happened to the old days, when a well-crafted American movie character could look forward to a life of crime on screen? Nowadays they take medication….

THE AMERICAN PAST TIME Driving to a screening of Trouble with the Curve last week, I was struck by how different my childhood must be from that of today’s children. It was a cool late summer evening. Children should be running through the front yards of the neighborhood. Where were the children playing ball? There…

INFAMOUS, SOLITARY, DIFFERENT From White Pine Pictures comes a dense, detailed portrayal of one of the most profoundly singular musicians of all time: the tremendously gifted, relentlessly driven Glenn Gould. Gould, known as much for his eccentricity as his remarkable musical ability, played his first concert at thirteen.   Over the two decades that followed, his…

HOW TO CREATE A GREAT DOCUMENTARY There’s a great line in the Bette Midler musical For the Boys, when, as an old woman, she is looking back on her years doing U.S.O. tours for the troops, and she quips, “Yeah, World War Two: Everybody’s big break.” I thought of that when I was watching David…

A GOOD LIFE You could do worse than be Wayne White.   Wayne White could certainly do worse: he could be anybody else. A designer and puppeteer on TV shows (most notably Pee-Wee’s Playhouse), a “one-man animation department” on iconic MTV videos, a fair banjo picker, and the guy responsible for those instant kitsch paintings at…

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN Even a cinema neophyte is no doubt aware of the term “French New Wave” (La Nouvelle Vague), which describes a period when French filmmakers, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classic Hollywood cinema, created unprecedented documentary-style movies that veered toward existentialism, individualism, and absurdism. This decade, roughly 1959-1969, also saw the…

COSMOPOLIS: FILMING THE UNFILMABLE To properly critique David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, the relationship between film and literature should be addressed in both a general and historical sense.   The challenge that cinema placed upon the primacy of literature in the last century has resulted in marketplace rivalry.   As with any respectable products, the two began to differentiate:…

GOOD TIMING AND A GOOD TIME Mike Birbiglia’s one-man show, Sleepwalk With Me, has been turned into a movie so well-edited that even if its excellent writing, acting, and direction make it into this sentence, they’ll be sandwiched between gushes about Geoffrey Richman’s editing.   Here, Mr. Richman does for comic timing what he did for…

SUMMER LOVE, SUMMER LOSS IN AUGUST Love is a messy business and August, the new DVD release from Wolfe Video, proves it. Jonathan (Daniel Dugan) meets Troy (Murray Bartlett) on Memorial Day and falls in love big time. For Troy, lust may be on the table but love is out of the picture so what…

ALMOST PRETTY AS A PICTURE In the tradition of metaphysical stoner movies like Mondo Cane, Koyaanisquatsi   (which he photographed), and Microcosmos, Ron Fricke makes films that show you what’s going on in the places you don’t usually go.   Some call what he does “pure cinema,” and the label works inasmuch as he doesn’t use dialogue…

CELESTE IS A HOLLYWOOD STUDIO FILM IN DISGUISE Is Celeste and Jesse Forever really an indie movie? Or is it a Hollywood rom-com with impoverished financial backing, all dressed in crusty jammies and without its makeup in the morning? If you even ask that question, then you know the movie leaves its evidence like a…

ALTHOUGH NO MORE THAN A DATE MOVIE, THERE ARE SPARKS IN RUBY We’ve been struck by an invasion of Zoes: Owl-eyed ingénues with perky, quirky, life-embracing formulas for living, whose purpose is to brighten the lives of pasty young men needing sunshine in both body and soul. The Zoe in question in Ruby Sparks is…

REAL FROGS MOVE AT LEAST ONCE IN NINETY MINUTES The story of a 14 year old Asperger’s patient, Nick (BooBoo Stewart), dealing with the death and posthumous coming-out of his idolized older brother Chaz (Harry Shum, Jr), White Frog is an awkward little movie that means well.   Crisply shot by Yasu Tanida and sprinkled with…

AN ACTIVIST UNLEASHES HIS POWER The new documentary Vito, premiering this week on HBO, tells the story of film historian, author and activist Vito Russo, who lived from 1946 to 1991. On the surface, Russo’s fascinating story may appear to be about gay rights, but his fiery and all-too-brief existence was bookended by the conclusion…

VICTIM AS NARCISSIST AS ICON It makes sense to someone who doesn’t like reality television that a person who makes it for a living (The Osbournes, The Simple Life, others) could feel that she has wasted her life, and that such a person could become a drug addict to escape such feelings.   Add that on…

WES ANDERSON AND THE BOX OFFICE VS YOU HATE A WISE-ASS People who like to hate really like to hate Wes Anderson.   Even those whose taste is impeccable in most arenas often fail the Anderson test: “Too quirky,” they’ll say.   Or “Too precious.”   Or “He’s in love with his shots” or “His camera fetishizes objects.”  …

ARCHER GLAD ABOUT THE REDHEAD HEROINE? If you were a Scottish princess, wouldn’t using a spell to turn your mother the queen into a bear be considered an act of insurrection? It’s hard to imagine that in real life Merida – the red-headstrong princess in Disney Pixar’s Brave – would avoid the tower for very…

NOWHERE TO FLY TO On a trip to the city of Ahmedabad several years ago, Chicagoan Prashant Bhargava found his parents’ native India as strange as it would be to any other tourist.   The specifically sub-continental mélange of Hindu and Muslim, the chaotic streets and promiscuous human intercourse, spurred Bhargava to invent and tell a…