Film

BIGELOW  STAYS AT WAR The better part of the last decade saw Iraq War movie after Iraq War movie bite the dust. Something was off. Those war films continued to miss their mark until The Hurt Locker,   the first Middle Eastern war film from screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow. What was the difference? The…

MECHANICAL BUT EFFECTIVE Any review of Michael Haneke’s Amour should start by noting what a moving story it tells. Did I cry during Amour? Two-ply tissues. Amour gives a gentle but chilling view into the final months of a woman’s life, and the frustration of a husband who must care for his loved one as…

WEIGHED DOWN BY GLITTERING JEWELS Over-conceived and under-emoted, Joe Wright’s experimental Anna Karenina is art-directed to within both an inch of brilliance and an inch of death. This version of the Tolstoy novel indulges the British in three of their favorite pastimes: Stage, adapting novels, and pretending they’re Russian without actually performing Russian accents (how…

DISHONET ABE Historical movies are often made as historical parallel. They comment on our time as much as their time. On some level this is the inevitable nature of history – taking from the past what is necessary to explain the present. Historical parallel clearly seems to be the intention of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, which…

BOND TO THE PAST And as the fog rolls in across the Scottish moors, the old woman turns to the young friend she had recently ordered to his death. He grew up an orphan, now wrinkled. She asks how his parents died. There is a moment of hesitation, then a slant in his voice. “You…

THE JOKE’S ON WHO? As a story, The Comedy is as blunt as its title, devoting 94 unrelenting minutes of character development to a man-boy whose development and character are equally questionable. Tasked with bringing some sense of soul to the dead-eyed, over-privileged slacker Swanson, Tim Heidecker (the Tim half of Adult Swim’s Tim and…

LIFE OF GRAHAM IS NOT A DOCUMENTARY; NOR IS IT A GOOD FILM The appropriately but un-succinctly titled A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman in 3D (or any D for that matter) is dead on arrival. Its inventive approach to employ seventeen distinctive animation styles sounds promising but soon grows…

MAP OF THE AGES Cloud Atlas, the latest effort from the Wachowskis, wraps a half-dozen stories, settings, and groups of characters into one film. But it doesn’t matter how many stories they do, their song remains the same. The Matrix helmers have hit the same point for a while now: Liberty is the freedom from…

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:…