Film

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…

IN THE GROOVE Novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler said of the detective in any private-eye story, “He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.”   This goes a long way toward saying nothing, and in fact, all the detective “must be” is a cypher, a blank slate with a…

THE UNEXPECTED JOYS OF CHILDREN AT PLAY It would be easy to say, given his new film, I Wish, and his other classic film about children, Nobody Knows, that Hirokazu Kore-Eda has a way with children; but given the small body of authentic masterpieces he has directed – Maborosi, After Life, Still Walking – it…

THE FUTURE AS PAST The Hunger Games will sap up comparisons to science fiction – that’s what happens with stories about futuristic dystopias and freaky hovercraft – but the better comparison is to Roman or Biblical epics of the fifties. Its story – of the teenagers of 12 outlying provinces exploited for the bloodsport of…

LOSING A BIKE AND A FATHER AT THE SAME TIME Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are always burrowing deep into the dirty soil from which we all presumably come. Life, to these extraordinary Belgian filmmakers, is hard and mean and filled with consequences that are not merely challenging but driven through with pain and despair. And,…

DON’T HATE ME BECAUSE I’M PRETTY MUCH RECOMMENDING THIS GUILTY PLEASURE I’m allowed one disastrous recommendation per year, right? And here it is already December, and I don’t think I’ve used it yet. So just like those dental insurance benefits that you’re eager to max out before the calendar changes :. consider yourself warned. So…

THE CONVERSATION BELATEDLY BEGINS We Need to Talk About Kevin isn’t the first film this year to outlast its immediacy. A novel written by Lionel Shriver in the wake of the Columbine school killings, director Lynne Ramsay has been trying to make the film since her last feature, Morvern Callar, in 2002. The unusually long…

LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF SEX A man. A woman. An underground train. Traded looks. Traded fantasies. No one looking. No one aware.   The train stops. The lick of her lips. The ring on her finger. Will they? Won’t they? The crowd in the station. The man is Brandon. We soon meet the rest…