Cinecultist's reviews that have been appearing over on Kaboose.com:
Slapstick, female empowerment and dreamy Gerard Butler in Nim's Island.
Springy, bright and elastic Whos in Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who.
Raven-Symoné's star wattage and pet pigs in College Road Trip.
Reese Witherspoon's producing debut and Christina Ricci's plastic snout in Penelope.
Michel Gondry's visual styling and the advent of "Swede" as a verb in Be Kind Rewind.
P.S. We've also been doing a little tumblring and are in search of more folks to follow, so let us know if you've also joined. It's 2.0-tastic!
Innovative Swedish director Lukas Moodysson continues to challenge the devotion of your Cinecultist. Last night, we went to see his most recent work Container at Lincoln Center, where it was playing as a part of the annual Film Comment Selects series and we walked out of the hushed theater perplexed. On the way home, we even contemplated accosting Film Comment's pithy editor Gavin Smith on the platform of the downtown 1 train for some further explanation, but then thought better of it. Sometimes it's better to struggle with the thoughts evoked by a Moodysson movie alone.
Moodysson has said cryptically that Container is his silent film with sound, which makes sense in a way because the diegetic characters, a cross-dressing fat man and his tiny female Asian alter-ego, don't speak. Instead we hear a continuous train-of-thought voice over from American actress Jena Malone who narrates what seems to be the man's twisted and self-hating inner life. Obsessed with religious iconography, celebrity culture, consumer detritus and cross-dressing, the voice-over is both fascinating and maddening. It leap frogs from topic to topic, musing over Paris Hilton's ubiquitous fame one minute, then gender confusion and the desire to lick everything the next. The droning buzz of Malone's whispers even began to make Cinecultist feel a little ill, which isn't surprising after sitting through the graphic surgery footage in Moodysson's last movie A Hole In My Heart.
Surely anyone paying for a ticket to see this film at this series would expect a challenging movie, but apparently a bunch of the audience members weren't digging Moodysson's avant-garde experimentation because at the 20 minute mark about 15 or so people boldly got up and exited the theater. Cinecultist though wasn't tempted to flee, we still wanted to see where Container was going. As the final pixelated gray image cut to black, we didn't have a concrete conclusion on Moodysson's purpose, though it seems clear that the movie is interested in false exteriors masking true interiors. We're all containers for something, etc. Interestingly, of all the oddities that flashed past in the 72 minutes, that shot of the beige cooked ravioli swirling around the bathtub was perhaps one of the most oddly unsettling images from the whole proceeding. Don't ask us why. It was just too weird for words.
Thank goodness, Cinecultist found out that our man Lukas doesn't intend to stay on this provocative avant-garde track for ever. As he says in a Channel 4 article on Moodysson and an exhibit of his work at London's Institute of Contemporary Art:
"I'm thinking of going back to making a film that's not about broken or ruined things but whole things," he says surveying the jumbled chaos of his installation. "I had all these things in the room where I write. But when I started working on the exhibition I had to clear everything out. My room is empty and clean and that's inspiring me. My next film is mainstream and totally linear. I need to tell simple stories again."
Screw the much anticipated Indiana Jones trailer—Cinecultist is super duper psyched to get a taste of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2! No official site yet but it's supposed to hit theaters on August 8. Yay.
Speaking of sappy chick movies you think you will be embarrassed to buy a ticket for, Cinecultist heartily agrees with A.O. Scott's assessment that in the sea of horrendous dreck passing for romance in Hollywood Definitely, Maybe is one of the most interesting romantic comedies we've seen in a long time. Page Lindsay: it actually has smart, interesting, culturally literate women characters! Isla Fisher's character April is introduced in a The Smiths t-shirt, travels the world on a lark and can express an opinion, while Rachel Weisz's character Summer unapologetically sleeps with her brilliant advisor, has a kid on her own but also knows the lyrics to a standard like Gershwin's "I've Got a Crush On You." The general adorableness of Ryan Reynolds plays a worthy foil to these rockin' chicks. Plus, the movie includes some choice New York locations like Cafe Gitane in Nolita and Odeon in Tribeca. The premise may be cribbing HIMYM (btwm new episodes Mar. 17), but all in all a cute little movie that's worth seeing over the long holiday weekend.
On Saturday, Cinecultist and Matty attended an afternoon screening of Cloverfield at Kip's Bay. Obviously it was the activity for your group of bros, about 10 dudes were all in a line in the row next to us and smatterings of other groups dotted the theater. But that's not surprising since producer J.J. Abrams and his crack marketing team have been working overtime the last few months to get as many bodies into the theater as possible for their star-free, DV monster movie.
However this chick wasn't as enamored with the mayhem we saw on screen as other movie geeks have been. The "found video tape" structure of the movie and its lack of compelling characters hobbles it unnecessarily. Cinecultist doesn't want to watch YouTube videos for more than a few minutes, so we certainly don't want to spend 84 minutes with an action movie indebted to a shaky cam, amateurish YouTube aesthetic. Any visceral thrill just gets completely overtaken by annoyance.
Unlike other entries in the city stomping monster genre, such as Godzilla or The Host, Cloverfield gives us characters without any agency. Rob and his party-going friends can't do anything to fight back against the monster that's invaded their city, they can only run around midtown scared. But, because the camera (toted by Rob's buddy Hud) is showing the story entirely from their point of view, the viewers spend the duration of the film forced to either align ourselves emotionally with these clueless, freaked out morons or distance ourselves, declare it "just a movie" and revel in the "coolness" of seeing New York City decimated without reason. As a person who moved here in the fall of 2001, that's a tough place to choose to be in, even six plus years later. Ultimately, neither of these reactions to the movie were satisfying and the whole mess turned us off. In fact, we could hardly wait for the unidentified monster to eat the stupid 20 something characters. Hopefully that chatty one, Hud, didn't give him indigestion.
We'd also like to mention that we've been pleased to discover Grady Hendrix's contributions to The Sun's movie coverage. As one of the programmers for Subway Cinema, he's a voracious movie watcher and a good writer to boot. Case in point, a selection from his excellent review of Cloverfield:
"At a brisk 90 minutes, Cloverfield is too fast-paced and well-produced to completely exhaust our enthusiasm for major monster mayhem, but it doesn't take long for the lack of story to become tiring. Like some tourist from the Midwest, once the creature stumbles into Manhattan and visits Central Park and the Empire State Building, there's nothing left for it to do but knock around aimlessly, getting in trouble and making a mess on the sidewalks."
What movies are appropriate for children? is the subject of A.O. Scott's well-written essay in today's New York Times. This very topic has been on the Cinecultist brain lately too, between hanging out with our 11-year-old brother and 14-year-old sister over the holidays and writing reviews for Kaboose.com, a parenting website. "If it's PG-13, should we write a review about it?" is often a discussion between CC and our editor.
When Cinecultist thinks back to the movies we loved as a child, a huge chunk of them were not children's movies per se. As Scott writes, it's great for kids to feel challenged by their entertainment. Why does everything have to be so sanitized and stripped of all points controversial? Surely there are bloody, disturbing movies like No Country For Old Men out in theaters now that should be avoided with a kid in tow, but something like Persopolis would be perfect for my politics-minded little sister.
When CC, our 27-year-old sister and her boyfriend wanted to take our little brother to the movies over the vacation, we all went to see National Treasure: Book of Secrets. It seemed safe for him and entertaining enough for us. During a few of the more suspenseful moments, CC turned to look at Mark and noticed he had pulled his feet up onto his seat and had his fingers in his ears. Smart strategy: he didn't want to hear the explosion that was about to happen but he wanted to know the outcome. Despite a few of those anxious moments, Mark totally dug the movie and all the way home was asking us if he could become a treasure hunter. When we all encouraged him to let his imagination fly, he seemed a little skeptical but still excited about learning more about his own ancestors just like Nic Cage's character does. Movies do have the power to thrill and inspire, especially for children. They don't always have to fluffy and G rated.
And speaking of CC's Kaboose reviews, you can read our opinions of Water Horse: Legend of the Deep and The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie on their site. Regarding the Veggies, it was perhaps one of the more boring flicks we've reviewed but at least the angry Cheetos were cute.
Someone we know said Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood was going to be the best movie of the year, and Cinecultist scoffed. But turns out we kind of have to eat our words, because PTA has made an incredibly tense and powerful film filled with gorgeous cinematography and spectacular performances, particularly the one by Mr. Method Daniel Day-Lewis. We also absolutely loved Johnny Greenwood's score, it creates the most intensely palpable tone of dread. The title tells you oh yeah, there will be blood, but Greenwood's score has you on the edge of your seat waiting for it. The only thing that made CC put it on our top 10 list in the number two spot was the lack of female characters. Weren't there any ladies of interest in independent oilman Daniel Plainview's life? This bleak story could've used an infusion of estrogen, in our opinion. But regardless of the gender imbalance, get thee to a theater to see this movie. It's going to be considered a classic and start sweeping the awards season.
You can read more about the film and a press conference Cinecultist attended at the Waldorf Astoria with PTA, DDL and the like a few weeks ago on Metromix.
This week the Cinecultist weighed in on Alvin and the Chipmunks over at Kaboose.com. The filmmakers are pretty much pandering to the lowest common denominator when it comes children's entertainment, but we still think the fat, sentimental chipmunk Theodore is awfully cute.
Focus Films has launched a new website with tons of original content called FilminFocus. Check it out, there's lots to enjoy from features on Focus films like Atonement, a look back at film history from that corresponding week and interviews with smart movie bloggers like our friend Andrew Grant.
Have you gotten a $1 promotional movie ticket from Fandango yet? It's a sweet deal, you just send a text on Wednesdays and they text you a code. Could be good for some cheap seats during the holiday vacation.
The Cinecultist has been slightly under the weather lately, so while trying to take it easy this weekend we constructed our top 10 list for 2007. Now granted, CC still have two weeks worth of screenings we could (and probably will) try to cram in, so bear that in mind when you analyze our choices. Looking back it's been a strong year for drama, full of dysfunctional families, cultural malaise and senseless violence at the movies. But, CC still managed to toss a musical comedy, a Western and a summer action blockbuster on the pile. Because basically that's how we roll, viewing taste-wise.
After the jump, we also listed the rest of the movies we saw this year divided into the categories stuff we liked, stuff that we are now indifferent to and stuff that is just painful to recall. When you watch this many movies in a year (nearly two a week, on average! and that's not counting dvds or repertory), sometimes you have to sit through utter garbage. But if Cinecultist didn't suffer a little, we know we'd never discover the hidden gems, those little features that make this delightful obsession all worth while.
1. No Country for Old Men
2. There Will Be Blood
3. The Savages $ @
4. Michael Clayton @
5. The Bourne Ultimatum @
6. The Wind that Shakes the Barley
7. Enchanted $ @
8. I’m Not There
9. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford $
10. Zodiac $
(special award) 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (saw this year, but comes out in January and it’s amazing.) @
$ = paid money to see
@ = didn’t watch alone
Saw and Enjoyed
Catch and Release. Jennifer Garner at a grieving granola chick in the Pacific Northwest kind of hit a cord for us.
The Lives of Others. East Berlin was not a happy place but this is a great movie.
The Namesake. Kal Penn rewards us for our long term support of Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. $ @
Blades of Glory. Funnier than you’d expect a one-note comedy about ice skating should be.
Black Book. Only Paul Verhoeven would dare make Nazis sexy.
The TV Set. If you’re lovin’ Juno, give Reitman’s other fellow second generation director Jake Kasdan's feature from this year a go.
Year of the Dog. How much do you love Peter Sarsgaard’s asexual vegetarian dog rescuer?
Hot Fuzz. Simon Pegg makes darn funny movies.
Waitress. $ The affection for Kerry Russell is not unfounded.
Fay Grim. Hal Hartley still makes movies that make us think.
Once. Bringing back the musical, one busking Irishman at a time.
Knocked Up. CC laughed until it hurt during our screening but we got tired of the over-enthusiasm and subsequent backlash against this movie.
La Vie en Rose. Marion Cottilard is a revelation in this one.
A Mighty Heart. @ Just pretend this isn’t an Angelina Jolie movie.
Broken English. This is how neurotic real New York single women are.
Ratatouille. $ Paris, this is my town baby.
Rescue Dawn. Christian Bale, you are the man. Steve Zahn isn’t too shabby either.
Sunshine. Like Solaris and 2001 but with Michelle Yeoh in it.
Exiled. Bad ass Asian gangsters but with a Western twist.
3:10 to Yuma. @ Better than we expected for a nouveau Western with Russell Crowe.
Into the Wild. Sean Penn brings out lots of great quiet performances and some gorgeous scenery.
My Kid Could Paint That. Quite well edited, and we’re not just saying that because we’re friends with the editor.
Lars and the Real Girl. $ @ Ryan Gosling does it again.
Gone Baby Gone. @ Amy Ryan is our favorite new discovery of the year.
Persopolis. A good, woman-centric story about life in a part of the world we want to know more about.
Juno. $ Ellen Page is great though the script has some overly cutesy moments to it.
Sat Through
The Water Horse
The Kite Runner
Alvin and the Chipmunks
The Golden Compass
Southland Tales $ @
Margot at the Wedding @
Redacted
Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium
Lions for Lambs
Bee Movie
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
The Darjeeling Limited
Nanking
Transformers (saw on an airplane, okay?)
Sydney White
The Jane Austen Book Club $
The Brave One
December Boys
I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
The Nanny Diaries
Mr. Bean’s Holiday
Super Bad @
The Invasion
The Last Legion $
Becoming Jane
El Cantante $
No Reservations
Goya’s Ghosts $ @
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix $ @
Joshua
License to Wed
Sicko
Vitus
You Kill Me
Ocean’s Thirteen $ @
Mr. Brooks @
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End $
The Wendell Baker Story
Home of the Brave
The Ex
Paris, je t’aime
Private Fears in Public Places
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters
Grindhouse
The Host
300 @
Avenue Montaigne
Music and Lyrics
Blood and Chocolate @
God Grew Tired of Us
Delirious
Run, Fat Boy, Run (comes out next year)
The 11th Hour
Hannah Takes the Stairs
Great World of Sound $ @
Dans Paris
Day Night Day Night @
Election
East of Havana
The Wayward Cloud @
Tears of the Black Tiger
Want/Need to See Before the Oscars
Sweeney Todd
Charlie Wilson’s War
Atonement
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Eastern Promises
Away From Her
Painful. Utterly Painful. That’s 2 Hours of Our Life We’ll Never Get Back
Because I Said So. Worst Mandy Moore movie ever. And that’s saying something. $ @
Exterminating Angels. This was an art house French film that was actually porn, but not in a good way.
Evening. Dear god, the cheesy flash back-induced pain. It still hurts.
Last week in the brisk fall morning air, Cinecultist chatted with Stu Van Airsdale in Washington Square Park about two new releases this week, Margot at the Wedding and Redacted. You can see CC gushing about Noah Baumbach's use of natural light and trying diplomatically not to call Brian de Palma a hack over on the Reeler. That's right, see! Video blogging, it's the wave of the future, people. While CC does admit we need to hone our on screen persona a touch, don't you think we look and sound pretty good on the tape? Remember it was cold out there and we were talking totally off the cuff. Hopefully this is just the first foray into our on air movie punditry career.
CC saw both of these movies during our coverage of the New York Film Festival and another NYFF vet which we highly recommend, and is now out in theaters, is No Country For Old Men. This is a real return to form for the Coen brothers, sort of like if Blood Simple went on a road trip with Fargo to West Texas and was listening to a Cormac McCarthy book on the cassette deck. All the performances are pitch perfect, particularly the brusque Josh Brolin (who CC found oddly alluring during the post-screening Q&A) and the utterly freaky Javier Bardem. Be forewarned, his character Chigurh (pronounced "Sugar," if you can believe it) will haunt your nightmares. Go to see it, CC thinks its the best movie of the year.
After a long week of work, Cinecultist needs to get our movie on. But we're a bit overwhelmed by the wealth of options at our fingertips. Here's our list of possibilities. Feel free to leave us pros or cons in the comments.
Fitzcarraldo (at the IFC Center) - Lately we've had Herzog on the brain and we've always been curious about Klaus Kinski's supposedly bonkers performance in this one.
The Jane Austen Book Club (new release) - We're hearing the siren call of the chick lit and the beloved Jane Austen, plus CC read this book so long ago the reasons why we didn't really love it are now fuzzy. Seeing the movie should fill those back in.
Great World of Sound (new release) - We've heard good things, plus a friend suggested going to see it together. Cinecultist is a sucker for movie outings.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (new release) - In the elevator this afternoon at the Day Job, one of those handy dandy trivia screens told us EW gave it an A and the NYT gave it a pretty strong endorsement too. Plus, we have a thing for Brad Pitt on the open range that's left over from seeing Legends of the Fall in the theaters at an impressionable age.
Plus, we have DVDs of Taste of Cherry and Cranes Are Flying at home from Netflix. Oh, and we're going to see Rilo Kiley at Webster Hall on Saturday night and we have to find time in there to eat, sleep and clean the bathroom. Yes, it's going to be a busy few days of rest.
It just goes to show that sometime the Cinecultist doesn't know what she's talking about. Case in point, last Thursday night CC and Josh attended a preview screening of 3:10 to Yuma at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.* While we found the straightforward, genre faithful cowboy story from James Mangold to be quite entertaining, we predicted that it wouldn't do too well at the box office. Despite the Oscar win for Unforgiven a few years ago in '92 (jeez, that long ago? when did we get so old?), CC just didn't think audiences today would choose to see their action on horses and accessorized with ten gallon hats. Especially since Clive Owen was releasing a modern gangster flick this weekend as well, and it has the very self-explanatory title of Shoot 'Em Up.
However, Cinecultist was wrong about 3:10's potential for popularity and as Variety reports this morning it was the top grossing film of the weekend. Was it the good reviews that sent people to the theaters? Or maybe the star power of Russell Crowe, and to a lesser extent, Christian Bale? (Both of whom turn in really strong performances, by the way.) To CC's pop culture barometer, a Western doesn't feel "current" (or relevant) but maybe that's not actually what moviegoers wanted this weekend. A little throwback nostalgia at the cineplex can be more alluring than we thought.
It's a mystery frankly, and all the more reason why Cinecultist should stick to watching movies for their quality, not for their box office potential.
*It'd been a while since we'd taken the trek out to MI and from our day job in midtown it was only about 25 minutes on the subway. The museum is such a lovely screening space and they have such great programming, we always kick ourselves for not going more often. That is until it took CC an hour to get back to the Eee Vee after some post-movie drinks. Ugh.
The Damon man talks with director Paul Greengrass on set.
The third installment of the Bourne series, The Bourne Ultimatum, was one of Cinecultist's most eagerly anticipated summer release and as you can tell from our rave on Gothamist yesterday, it didn't disappoint. Our girl Manohla loved it too, and in her review she touched upon what we found so exciting about the movie, that it is popular entertainment with smarts and a point of view.
She writes,
"As Bourne has inched closer to solving the rebus of his identity, he hasn’t always liked what he’s found. He isn’t alone. Movies mostly like to play spy games pretty much for kicks, stoking us with easy brutality and cool gadgets that get us high and get us going, whether our gentlemen callers dress in tuxes or track suits.What’s different about the Bourne movies is the degree to which they have been able to replace the pleasures of cinematic violence with those of movie-made kinetics — action, not just blood. Mr. Greengrass and his superb team do all their dazzling with technique. They take us inside an enormous train station and a cramped room and then, with whipping cameras and shuddering edits, break that space into bits as another bullet finds its mark, another body hits the ground, and the world falls apart just a little bit more. Without fail, Mr. Greengrass always picks up those pieces, reshaping them so that Bourne can move to the next location, the next kill, as he gets closer and closer to the mystery of his terrible existence."
As the movie thunders towards its climactic showdown, Cinecultist realized that this is one of the most politically minded current Hollywood movies we've seen. Almost as a counterpoint to director Paul Greengrass's brutal September 11 movie from last year United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum looks into the face of our government's policy decisions and demands to know what we've become. It's not enough to say we were just following protocol or making the best decisions we could with the information we had. Like Jason Bourne, our country has to face ourselves in the mirror every morning knowing what we've done. And this coming from a filmmaker who's a Brit.
The Cinecultist is reporting to you today via free wifi from the second floor food court of the Whole Foods on Houston Street and thus it is fitting that we want to discuss No Reservations, a movie we saw last weekend. Foodies and cinephiles seem to be cut from the same bolt of cloth, and CC likes to think of ourselves as both a food and film fan. It's really all about Taste, a commodity that's important in our ever increasingly homogenized culture. However unlike the excellent Ratatouille, No Reservations is not about the quest for good taste. Rather, it's about how uptight, career driven girls should loosen up, listen to some opera and learn to Feel.
CC has some friends who are quite devoted to Catherine Zeta-Jones, or CZJ as they lovingly refer to the Welsh actress. While we've never been an unabashed fan, we did find her performance as Kate, a superstar perfectionist chef at a West Village boîte who has to care for her orphaned niece, to be quite charming. She really is lovely to look at, and her chemistry with her costars the square-jawed Aaron Eckhart and the cutie pie Abigail Breslin is believable.
So what's the problem?
No Reservations is yet another merely serviceable Hollywood romantic comedy. Two hours of mildly diverting entertainment floats by, but are we changed or moved? Hardly. It seems overly cranky to really get worked up about a movie like this. Sure, it's not as cute as the European original and its depiction of Kate's New York single life is wholly unrealistic but are either of these gripes those new arguments about mainstream cinema? Watching movies like No Reservations is probably why Janet Maslin went back to review books for the NYT—if yet another movie is neither really bad nor particularly good, what can you even say about it?
In other movie news, CC was saddened to hear we also lost Michelangelo Antonioni so shortly after Bergman. A film artist who brought us coal-eyed Monica Vitti on screen is someone to be sorely missed. Also, if you're curious about our opinion of Milos Foreman's Goya's Ghosts we wrote about it for the Movie Binge.
Heh. The Gothamist commenters are having spirited fun regarding our post on Sicko today. The headline is a quote from one of the incendiary statements.
Here's a reprint of the review part of Cinecultist's post.
As for the quality of this new bit of agit-prop from the pudgy Michigander (which Gothamist caught last night at an advance press screening), it's a persuasive and disturbing two hours. Moore introduces us not only to a number of Americans screwed over by their lack of health care, but also interviews numerous health care industry employees disgusted by the business's practices. These stories from ordinary Americans are heart-wrenching, as is the footage Moore shot of very sick 9/11 volunteers finally getting the health care they desperately needed from the socialized medicine system in Cuba. Unfortunately like most Moore movies, the shocking state of America's relationship to its more disenfranchised residents is tempered by the ridiculousness of his on screen antics. Moore filming himself on a boat outside of Guantanamo Bay using a megaphone to try to get entrée into the holding center's medical facility is unnecessarily over the top, no matter how you feel about the issue of privatized heath care.
After the screening, CC walked out and took the subway with three of our esteemed friends/movie writing colleagues Nicolas Rapold (The Sun, Stop Smiling), Michael Joshua Rowin (L magazine) and Michael Koresky (Reverse Shot, Criterion Collection). (These dudes know about movies; they'd give CC a complex if we hadn't already survived the intellectual smack down of cinema studies grad school.) Rowin ranted, Koresky seemed bemused by the whole thing and Rapold looked positively ill. Cinecultist heartily looks forward to reading their fully formed opinions of the movie shortly.
Before the Cinecultist moved to New York for graduate school, we were kind of obsessed with Keri Russell and Felicity. Okay, not kind of, totally obsessed. Bear in mind that this was 2001 and also, we have the taste of a 14-year-old schoolgirl sometimes but Felicity represented all that was good and pure about our fantasy of moving to beautiful NYC. Now that Russell has moved on and Felicity finished, we're ready to let our curly haired actress mature from teenie bopper sensation to fully formed actress and her movie Waitress is just the ticket. Funny, melancholy and a little bit wise, Waitress isn't a far reaching movie. It makes a comfortable home in the details.
About a young Southern wife who discovers she's pregnant by her snake of a husband and who finds joy in baking elaborate pies, Waitress could be over-the-top folksy without barely trying. It's the sort of character driven small indie that littered the decaying art house movie palaces of the '90s. In fact, you may recall the writer and director Adrienne Shelly from that era acting in Hal Hartley's movies. However, Shelly's product is so insidiously charming that to do some jaded "been there, done that" number on it would be utterly heartless. This movie sweet talks you, and that's in no small part due to Russell's lovely performance. In particular her exchanges with Andy Griffith, who plays the cantankerous pie shop owner Joe, as well as her easy girlfriend-report with her fellow waitresses Cheryl Hines and Shelly, are very winning. Stylized and yet real, everything from the dialogue to the scenario and the pie baking in this movie walks that fine line.
Obviously it was a terrible thing to hear of Shelly's murder shortly before the movie's acceptance into the Sundance Film Festival and its warm reception there, but when you go to see Waitress—as you should—let that extra-textual tragedy go. Try to enjoy the quiet charms of this movie and its star on their own terms. Trust us when we say, they will be enough to win you over.
This week in the New Yorker, Anthony Lane ripped Paul Verhoeven's Black Book a new one and Cinecultist finds ourselves in the unenviable position of feeling the need to defend Verhoeven. If you feel that chilly breeze wafting out of Hades don't be alarmed, that is indeed the feeling of Hell being frozen over with CC standing up for the Dutch schlockmeister auteur but frankly, it must be done. Black Book doesn't deserve the Lane treatment.
Here's the bullet point version of what problems Lane finds in Verhoeven's movie about a Dutch Jewish girl working for the Resistance in occupied Holland.
However, this is where CC has to depart from Lane's caustic, but otherwise accurate, observations of Verhoeven's prettified version of Nazi Holland. Verhoeven's main purpose is to create melodrama. Even when he uses the tropes of a thriller, like in Basic Instinct, he wants to draw larger than life characters existing in the realm of grand scale storytelling. Except that his favorite kinds of characters also have a whiff of crass humanism to them--they like sex a little dirty or their drinks extra strong. There must be bawdiness in Verhoeven's movies, but it's all for the sake of fun, entertainment and hyperbole (see Showgirls's exuberant pole dancing or Starship Troopers's shower scenes as examples).
The totally brilliant thing about Black Book in Cinecultist's mind is that Verhoeven actually had the balls to bring his brand of melodrama to a Holocaust story, the ultimate sacred cow in Hollywood. Of course he had to publicly leave Hollywood behind to make that kind of movie, but as the production still above shows, Verhoeven isn't afraid to put some tasty gams on a Jewish girl and let her use them to taunt a few Third Reich soldiers. It's so salacious it can't help but make us think differently about this great tragedy. There were real people involved, who had sex drives and double crossed each other. The Resistance fighters could be as despicable as the Gestapo middle men were noble. Revolutionary, right?
Anthony Lane get off of your fucking snarky high horse. Black Book is an entertaining, sexy thriller that giggles as it snubs its nose in the face of taboo. Now, with that out of the way, Cinecultist is going to go put on a sweater. It's cold here in the Hell of our own making.
Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) knows that something wicked this way comes in the new Korean movie The Host.
Cinecultist likes monster movies with bite, the kind where you get goosed by something jumping out from the screen right after you've laughed uproariously at some witty, ironic aside. The two parts "goosing" and "laughing" have to go together, one without the other just devolves into Children of the Corn or the like. If you also appreciate smart scariness on screen, might we suggest checking out The Host, a newish movie by Korean director Bong Joon-Ho which CC saw at NYFF last year and is finally getting a theatrical release. The IFC Center here in New York is also hosting a mini-fest of his movies starting next Monday and culminating in a screening of The Host with Bong conducting a post-film Q&A on Tuesday.
Two things we heartily enjoyed about this movie, though there's a lot in it to endear:
1) It's a Godzilla for the 21st century, a seemingly innocent action movie that's actually fraught with intriguing paranoia about mankind's callousness towards nature coming back to bite us in the ass. The Japanese in '54 were freaked out by the prospect of nuclear disaster, while the Koreans seem to be more afraid of the mutations from pollution by chemicals. Either way, in both movies they know they've been co-opted by American expansionist greed and they sorta know they're screwed (ie. expecting a huge beast to emerge from the water and eat their people). It ain't gonna be pretty, but it makes for a darn entertaining movie.
2) In the face of scary nature rebelling against stupid mankind, you'd expect the movie's heroes to actually be heroic but Bong says, Pshaw that kind of simplistic characterization is for chumps. In every instance where various members of this one family could save the day with their unique abilities, they don't. It's failure and well-meaning fuck up all around, which as a movie's strategy takes some serious balls. Without giving too much away, Cinecultist really admires any film that can be both decidedly genre picture yet flout that genre's structures to the audience's face. Bong achieves this with grace and good humor, while keeping the suspense level high.
Blech, Valentine's Day. If Cinecultist has to watch one more idiotic Zales commercial, we may crawl under the duvet and not come out until March. It's not romance that CC objects to so much as the consumerist co-opting of it by the card manufacturers and the candy sellers. We're big on affection and love on all days except for Feb. 14, just like we're big on great romantic comedies. Sadly the new Drew Barrymore/Hugh Grant movie, Music & Lyrics which is out today isn't one of our new favorites. A sort of cute premise* and usually winning stars though don't add up to anything that's worth your $10.75, no matter how die-hard you might be about the genre.
Grant plays a watered down version of his character from About A Boy, a washed up musician instead of lay-about pop song heir, who doesn't feel all that motivated to make more of his singing career than some appearances at Knott's Berry Farm. Barrymore enters his life as the temporary plant waterer for his apartment and her ability to spout insightful yet catchy rhyming lyrics on a dime improbably pairs her up with Grant to write a new song. Barrymore is doing an odd Diane Keaton On Crack impression here, she's all skittish neurosis in skinny jeans. But these tics don't make the character more likable, she just seems like the kind of person you'd scooch away from on the subway.
In addition to the wearisome characters, every last joke lies lamely on screen like 3 day old fish. The plot twists which are supposed to show the couple bonding (she has an ex-lover played by Campbell Scott that she wants to tell off, he needs to learn to enjoy performing in front of aging boomer ladies) are equally as weak. In the end, CC found ourselves completely tuning out on the dialogue to focus instead on Drew's costume choices. Her very Lucky magazine look was hardly enough to distract us though. We'd rather be forced to watch a Home Fries and Two Weeks Notice double feature than revisit this painfully bad movie. Do yourself a favor and stay away. It's barely worth an accidental viewing on TNT in two year's time.
*The premise reminded CC a lot of this musical we loved as a kid, They're Playing Our Song about the real life singer/songwriter couple Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager. If only we'd kept that faded original cast album, it was really great.
On Sunday afternoon, Cinecultist went to see a screening of Factory Girl and based on the crowds in the lobby you would've thought Edie Sedgwick herself had descended on the Angelika. The Angelika has such an odd set up with their over-priced cafe on the ground floor and then the concession stands, restrooms and theaters on the floor below. When it's not too crowded these two areas don't matter too much, and actually the cafe is nice to sit in if you're early to your movie like CC was on Wednesday. We'd gotten coffee up at Think with just this plan in mind and sat reading, observing the packed lobby scene for about an hour.
Angelika has a pretty good line up right now, some Oscar nominated movies like The Queen or Notes on a Scandal that people perhaps haven't seen yet, plus some newer, much buzzed about movies like Factory Girl and The Lives of Others. Consequently, the Angelika staff had the moviegoers lining up, either to the left of the entrance or to the right, in these velvet roped areas. However, they held the lines there until about 5 minutes before the movies started and with all the people, plus the proximity of the start times to each other, there got to be quite a bottleneck. Also, certain people get antsy/cranky when they're not in their movie seats a good 15 minutes or so before the movie starts. It's confusing to be still waiting upstairs as the start time nears, they want to be on time and situated. The woman in line in front of CC even turned around to ask if she was in the right place because of it. This is after the staff has been announcing over the PA system where everyone should be every 10 minutes or so. Perhaps she thought the movie might start without her? Poor lady, she should've pretended she was an Edie Sedgwick, confident that the party couldn't start until she had arrived.
It's a popular New York movie obsessive past time to complain about the Angelika, and CC does it too, mostly because that subway rumbling from the 6 train is seriously distracting during the movies. The Angelika has a tricky situation on their hands; they're showing movies worth seeing right now and they're trying to handle the crowds but it doesn't seem to be working all that well. People cut in the line, there's a general sense of crankiness and it seemed to CC like a lot less people were going to the concession stand downstairs as they rushed into their designated theater. This can't be good for Angelika business cutting down on those popcorn sales.
By the way, how was Factory Girl, you may be wondering? Pretty good actually, considering that Weinstein Co. intended to release it before the end of 2006 but held it for legal reasons. Sienna Miller is just as lovely as you'd imagine she would be, and does come across as a compelling artist's muse. Though we were surprised that Bob Dylan's people objected to the "folk singer" character played by Hayden Christensen which is an obvious homage to Dylan. If anyone is culpable for Edie's demise in the movie, it's not Dylan but Andy. He basically turns his back on her because she deigns to fall in love with the heterosexual hunk played by Hayden. The film depicts Andy as rejecting anyone who doesn't remain in his orbit, treating him as the most important person in the world. For someone seemingly so self-hating, he's awfully narcissistic.
After seeing this movie, CC still thinks the most interesting woman at the factory was Brigid Berlin. She wasn't a waify lovely inspiring fashion trends like Edie, but at least she kept making art even after sublimating herself to Andy's creative dominance. Rent Pie In The Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story and you'll see what we mean.
Over the weekend, Cinecultist finally got around to seeing the Oscar-nominated Martin Scorsese movie, The Departed. It'd been on the list for quite awhile now, especially because we enjoyed the source material Infernal Affairs, but just hadn't made the time for a screening. Now with the end of the year nominations out, CC was certain it would end up a front runner, particularly for best director, and then we'd be unable to really weigh in confidently on its merits. Will this be Marty's year? That's the question on everyone's mind, or at least everyone who has such obsessive Oscar conversations as the Cinecultist or Dave Karger.
While eating dinner at a totally old school "red sauce" Italian joint afterwards (in other words the perfect food to digest Scorsese with), CC came to the following conclusions. The Departed is not a great Scorsese picture, like Goodfellas or Raging Bull, but it's good. More importantly, it's better than some of the very sub-par product he's been giving us in the last few years (yes, Gangs of New York, we're looking at you). Since Oscar likes to reward whole careers rather than a single film (except for in the best supporting actress category, that is), 2006 could be a respectable and reasonable year to reward Scorsese for services rendered. He's made an entertaining thriller which touches upon his signature themes of class and ethnicity, as well as elicited some excellent performances from a rich band of actors. It may not be a truly lasting movie that will be considered cinema art, but CC is fine with that. Good but not great is okay for someone like Marty.
Further side notes: Is there anything Alec Baldwin can do lately that isn't completely wonderful? Okay, maybe Mini's First Time, but that movie was just plain BAD. Most everything is better when he's on screen. Also, the costume designer who could put Vera Farmiga in both those amazing little panties for her make-out with Leo scene and the worst three piece suit ever in two other sequences is both brilliant and a fool.
In this week's Time Out New York film section, David Fear interviewed Thai director Wisit Sansanatieng about his movie, Tears of the Black Tiger which finally makes it to New York theaters this weekend after languishing in that black hole for good Asian cinema, the Miramax vault.
"Honestly, it’s been so long that I’d almost forgotten I’d made the movie,” Sasanatieng, admits via e-mail. “My worry was always that Americans would only think of the film as a parody, when my goal was to pay tribute to the history of popular Thai cinema. I purposefully wanted to blend old and new styles. The look, the editing and the way the camera moves are all very modern, yet the acting is intentionally theatrical in a way that evokes older movies. I wanted actors who looked like contemporary versions of classic stars. We even scratched up the film so it resembles a beat-up print that’s been sitting around for a while."
Watching this movie last week, Cinecultist couldn't help but think how perfect it would've been to discuss it with one of our former cinema studies professors, Richard Dyer. This is partly because Dyer is a witty and slightly caustic little British man who always has something slightly catty but spot on to say about movies, and also because Dyer's most recent scholarship has centered around the concept of "pastiche," a term he calls "knowing imitation." This is the idea that artists in their new work are drawing purposefully from previous art and in the process of pastiching one on top of the other, create something unique.
Of course what's interesting about the above quotes from Sasanatieng is how deliberate his pastiche choices--genre, color, the actors' looks and camera movement--yet how sincere the movie seems. There's not anything ironic or winking in Tears, it could more easily be an actual '60s Thai Western than what it is, a new movie made to look old. Watching most current post modern movies, like this week's utterly stupid looking parody comedy Epic Movie, you'd think that in order for current directors to elude to or reference cinema history in their films it has to be with an overtly knowing tone. Tears suggests otherwise.
Unfortunately then, you end up with a straight-forward technocolor-on-crack Western set near Bangkok, which CC is a bit sheepish to admit we found a little boring to sit through. Intriguing concept and excellent follow through, we just don't really like Westerns. However you might and if you do, please go see this movie if only so that innovative directors like Sasanatieng will continue to get their work rescued from the American distribution black hole.
Invariably cocktail conversation for the Cinecultist turns to movies and what we've seen in the theaters, particularly during this end of the year top 10 season. Everyone seems to like to talk about film and you can imagine it only takes a little bit of egging on to get CC going. Disappointment in Zhang Yimou's newest Curse of the Golden Flower seems to be a favorite topic in these conversations, especially if our fellow revelers know about CC's penchant for Asian cinema. Sadly though when you think about Curse for very long you realize poor, deluded Zhang is only giving his audiences what he thinks they want to see on screen--lavish spectacle, gorgeous actors, a few gravity defying sword fighting scenes and some decadent sexual intrigue. However, the combination of these elements which may have given him big box office successes in the past have only delivered an empty shell of a movie. Curse is all surface, a gorgeous shiny color riot of a surface, but really no substance.
Set during the Tang Dynasty in China, this royal family is beyond dysfunctional. The king and his second wife's marriage has dissolved in the most chilly of public displays. Every day he commands she drink a tea he has prepared specially for her, predicated upon the assumption that she has severe health issues. Though she'd probably be healthier if the King wasn't secretly poisoning her with said tea. Of their three sons, the eldest (and from a mysterious first marriage), is set to be the next king, if only Dad doesn't find out Step Mom and son have been having an illicit affair. First son is also dallying with a girl from the court, the daughter of the King's physician. Meanwhile, the second son has returned from battles on the borders and discovers how rotten things have gotten at home. He wants to help his mother, but will he be able to act out against his all powerful father?
With such an operatic and convoluted plot, you'd think ordinarily strong actors like Gong Li and Chow Yun Fat could make this material compelling. Instead, it all becomes so muddled that you can hardly tell which end is up. As the forces of intrigue barrel towards a final showdown during the festival of the Chrysanthemum (the gold colored flower from the title), it should seem all the more momentous but instead the action becomes disposable. Like the hordes of soldiers dispatched and then swept away during the bloody coup the Queen organizes, nothing in this story seems to have any permanence. It should all be so awe inspiring what with the incest, the killings, and the royals but you can't help but suspect that they're just the vaguest pretexts for Zhang to put his actors in yet another costume change. Each set dressing is more over the top than the next that it makes your eyes swim in color overload. But so what, CC wanted to yell at the screen. What is this movie saying about anything, beyond trying to be beautiful? We honestly had no clue as the credits began to roll. So much excess on screen can be surprisingly infuriating.
Over the weekend, the National Society of Film Critics continued the trend of lavishing praise on Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth by naming the Spanish-language horror/fantasy/fairy tale the best picture of the year. Cinecultist has had Pan's on the brain too because we finally got to a screening on Saturday night. This is actually our third attempt to see the movie, first we missed the two press screenings at this year's NYFF because of work commitments, then our friend Josh and I tried to see a showing on New Year's Day but it was sold out. This time we planned ahead, picking a screening time a few days before and purchasing tickets online (btw, it's now $25 sodding bucks to buy two tickets online, between service charges and whatnot, which is getting a tad ridiculous). We mention this protracted process to seeing the movie because Cinecultist suspects it may have affected our enjoyment of the movie, turning our response from heightened anticipation into one of "ehh."
Why else should we be so halfhearted about what is ostensibly a gorgeous, well-made movie? Everything the critics say is true, Del Toro has created a deeply personal and creepy fantasy, peppered with moments of in-your-face violence. CC went back to read some of the rave reviews to see if we agree with what the critics said in praise. Jonathan Rosenbaum in The Chicago Reader writes, "Del Toro's exquisite, integrated digital effects, like [Alfonso] Cuaron's imagined future landscapes [in Children of Men], combine the familiar with the uncanny in ways that leave us uncertain which is which." Yes, that's true -- part of what's interesting about Pan's is that the young girl Ofelia's imaginings are in a real sense disproved by the bleak ending. Glenn Kenney in Premiere says about that end that "its devastating conclusion is far more layered than typical Hollywood "fantasy will set you free" bromides, and the film's stout-hearted contempt for cruelty of all kinds is uncanny, and inspiring." This is also an accurate description, as the real villian, Ofelia's evil step father the Fascist captain is much scarier than anything Ofelia sees in her magical universe.
The only conclusion CC can come to then to explain our less than stellar regard for this movie would be the fact that we saw it so late in the hype cycle. Surely if we'd gotten in on either of those previous two occasions, particularly at the Film Festival, we'd also be raving about the movie. Sometimes the biggest enjoyment in movies for the professional moviegoer comes from that experience of discovery. Too many Magellans planting their flags upon this surface leaves CC feeling uninspired. Granted, that's a totally petulant and stupid response to work of strong artistic merit, but there you are.
And hey, while we're bitching, we'd point out that it's just not fun to see such a packed movie at the Loews 19th Street theater. Between huge lines outside and then a very tall dude sitting in front of CC making it nearly impossible to read each subtitle without getting a serious neck cramp is enough to make even the biggest movie fan cranky.
Consider this your official "little white string around the finger" reminder for all of Cinecultist's fellow Woody Allen fans in New York: the "Essentially Woody" series at Film Forum is going on only until next Thursday, January 11th and this weekend is Manhattan. Our Jewish movie guilt reflex kicked in this afternoon while we enjoyed yet another David Rakoff post on the festival, and have already bought our ticket online. Don't be kicking yourself for letting this great selection pass you by because you're too busy or still suffering from holiday fatigue.
BTW, Cinecultist interviewed an Allen expert, professor Bob Kapsis for Gothamist just before we left for vacation. People who can talk for hours and hours about their love for Woody Allen filmography are CC's kind of people.
Walking up to the 2nd Avenue Cinema Village East theater last week and seeing the line of people going half way down the block, Cinecultist wondered if something was going on. Could this many people be desperate to see Children of Men on a Friday afternoon? One frantic ticket seller behind the counter was trying to move people into the theater, but for some reason there wasn't a single person waiting to use the credit card kiosk inside. Even though it had been awhile since we'd been to a screening we had to pay for, it's still obviously good to be up on our local theaters' layouts.
Inside the theater it was full, though we still snagged a seat that wasn't in the very first row. Sometimes the movie gods are just aligned that way, and as Alfonso Cuarón's movie began to unspool, CC couldn't help but feel blessed. Sure, that sounds like a totally silly reaction to a dystopian sci-fi fantasy about a near future world dissolved into mass riots and lawlessness because women can no longer conceive, but it's true. Children is such an exhilarating viewing experience that we couldn't help but simultaneously thrilled by its deftness and then acutely aware that we were being thrilled. It's a very well done movie that makes the Cinema Studies student in us think, "Damn, look at that point of view camera" before plunging head-long back into the story. And it's not just that dogged pov, seeing this crazy world through the eyes of main character Theo (Clive Owen) as the camera runs along side him through refuge camp battlefields and terrorist attacks, that makes the movie so visceral. The acting is also superb, from Michael Caine's tough-in-check irreverence to Danny Huston's tossed off bonhomie.
The movie also reminded CC why we love Mr. Owen so much, despite appearing in such dreadfully over-hyped and then disappointing films as Derailed or Closer. His rugged, manly man magnetism is on par with some of the great screen legends and yet even when he looks worn down to the nub, as he does towards the end of this movie, he's still completely lovely. Like Cuarón's big American break out, Y Tu Mamá También, it's tough to put your finger precisely on why Children is such a wonderful movie other than it just feels so good.
Wow, Cinecultist didn't realize we were intending to take such a long hiatus from regular posting when the business of last month whipped into a fever pitch. However, it was a enjoyable holiday season, one filled with festivities, visits with family and of course, lots of year end movies. We'll try to get to recounting all the great films we've seen (including a year end top 10) but for now, a mention of one.
CC spent a week around Christmas on the West Coast visiting family and friends, and even rented a car -- which was way too much fun than is entirely healthy for this New Yorker who never gets to drive. On the 25th, CC and our Mom did the traditional Jewish celebration of a movie matinee and then Chinese food for dinner. CC's Mom lives in the Marina district of San Francisco, a lovely little enclave of adorable row houses near the water and 30-somethings with just so handbags and Internet money to burn. At the Presidio on Chestnut Street, the locals were out in droves though the streets themselves were pretty quiet since most things were closed. Mom had reserved Dreamgirls weeks ago as our official Christmas Day movie selection, ever since she'd seen the cast interviewed on Oprah.
A movie musical with all of the pageantry and diva posturing is really perfect for the holiday season. Dreamgirls in particular has gotten that tone right, the artificiality of characters singing their feelings to each other fit in perfectly with the bouffant '60s wigs and lavish stage shows in the story. Of the musicals released in the last few years during this revival of the genre, Dreamgirls also seemed to best capture the energy of seeing a great show on Broadway. Walking out of the theater, we hummed the songs all the way to car in between exclamations over Jennifer Hudson's performance as Effie. The buzz is all true, she's just wonderful. The Academy seems to love giving out best supporting Oscars to untested ingenues like Hudson, so we won't be at all surprised if her diva-licious belting isn't handsomely rewarded.
Of course the unspoken oddity about all of the nominee buzz and the casting of this movie is that while Beyoncé Knowles' character, Deena Jones, becomes the lead singer of the Dreams and is loosely based on Diana Ross, she's actually not the center of the movie's story. Instead it's Effie that we really root for when her jerk boyfriend and the band's manager, Curtis (Jamie Foxx) boot her out of the girl group because she's not as photogenic as Deena. Beyoncé gets the best outfits in the movie (oh to channel Ms. Ross with the enormous mane of wavy hair and glittery eyelids) but Jennifer gets the most likable character and best songs. "Listen" is a good song, but "I'm Telling You I'm Not Going" gives you chills.
For those used to seeing Beyoncé in the limelight with Destiny's Child and the like, it might seem surprising that she'd take this less-than-plum role. However, for our part it seems like a brilliant career move for Beyoncé. As a member of this ensemble in this kind of movie, she's transformed herself from pop singer or fashion maven to serious actress. All that time spent hanging out with the image conscious Jay-Z was not for nothing, that B is one smart girl.
While Cinecultist would never pretend to be a James Bond fan of the caliber of Anthony Lane, we do appreciate the finesse with which Ian Fleming's creation continues to draw audiences to the theaters. People understand, almost instinctually, what makes for a good Bond movie and 40 plus years on, the formula still works as evidenced by Casino Royale which CC saw last weekend. A rollicking, action-packed, sexy as hell installment, this 007 tale stars a new Bond played by Daniel Craig, and with the new lead actor seems to be an updated way of telling a Bond story.
For some reason, even though we know it's a terrible soap opera cliché, we love a romance where the couple initially hate each others guts. The disdain and then the heat! It's like cinematic candy corn for the Cinecultist. When Craig tells the brittle but lovely Eva Green, "you're not my type. Why? Because I'm smart? No, single" we knew we loved this flick. And of course that's ages after Bond has raced through a construction yard, leaping up scaffolding and hurling himself pell mell through walls. See, we're also a sucker for an elaborate chase scene as well as for barbed, sexually-charged wit.
Fortunately, this 007 also never dissolves into the easy catch-phrases of sub-par action films. Casino Royale is the first story in the Bond catalogue but this film still feels fresh. In the final sequence (which granted comes about 20 minutes later than our short attention span would prefer), as Bond and the bad dudes destroy a palazzo on the Grand Canal, we feared for a quip about Venice sinking. But, it never comes. Bravo Bondies, this jaded but hopeful moviegoer is completely reinvested in your franchise.
Even though Cinecultist has already recommended Iraq in Fragments to our Gothamist readers, it has become our default response lately to "What's good in theaters right now" and so we mention it here. You have until next Tuesday, Nov. 21 to catch this heart-felt and beautifully shot documentary at Film Forum. Consisting of three stories from around the war-torn country, this documentary stands out to CC because of its lack of experts and talking heads. Instead it consists of lushly, complexly told lives from the mouths of those living them. Particularly the young Kurdish boy at the end who wants to become a doctor but his father wants him to go into the clergy broke our heart. His expressive face has really stuck with us. For our money, this film gave us the most interesting picture of the effect of American foreign policy, and that's with all of our efforts to stay up on our Jon Lee Anderson and the New York Times coverage.
Also of note, Iraq in Fragments is on the 15 doc short list for the best documentary award at this year's Oscars. So it's not just CC who thinks it's worth a watch.
One of Cinecultist's favorite movies from this year's New York Film Festival was definitely Pedro Almodóvar's newest, Volver, which hits theaters this weekend for limited release. It's a real Almodóvar movie in all of its melodramatic, stylized, lush glory. Also, Penélope Cruz gives an amazing performance as Raimunda, the daughter and mother at the center of this story. Almodóvar lovingly and fetishistically photographs Cruz in the film, particularly her lush décolletage. There's one straight down from the ceiling shot that'd be almost pornographic, if it wasn't so hilariously stylized.
It's no surprise then that Almodóvar admits in the press notes for the film that he's totally obsessed with his muse's form. [Please note, all of those exclamation points in the following quote are Pedro's.]
"The Strength and Fragility of Penélope Cruz. And her beauty. Penélope is at the height of her beauty. It's a cliché but in her case it's true. (Those eyes, her neck, her shoulders, her breasts!! Penélope has got one of the most spectacular cleavages in world cinema). Look at her has been one of the great pleasures of this shoot....Penélope Cruz is a strong minded actress, but it is the mixture with that sudden, devastating emotion which makes her indispensable in Volver."
CC would second that Pedro, she really rocks and deserves all the recent Oscar buzz about her work. However, someone should clue Cruz into the fact that she should just stick to Spanish language projects. For some reason in English, she comes off not as well as she does in all of the films from Spain we've seen her in.
Padding around and trying to get some work done this afternoon, Cinecultist noticed we were having this weird tinge in our left shoulder. It's not yoga strain and it's not the shoulder we use to carry around the handbag, so we weren't sure quite what was up. Until we had this odd thought: maybe it's phantom clavicle pain from watching Babel earlier this week.
All of the world-spanning characters in Babel undergo some pretty painful experiences, but CC found Cate Blanchett's circumstances (estranged marriage, cleanliness phobias, then being caught by a stray bullet while riding in a tour bus, and having her shoulder sewn up by a needle and thread) particularly affecting. It's not often that a movie will give you a physical reaction, and frankly we're not sure if we should be recommending it if it does. Babel is a film that kicks you in the gut. The characters are disconnected and not just for the obvious reasons of language barriers. While it could be argued that the ending is primarily hopeful, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's path to that conclusion isn't an easy one. Like the women's melodramas of the '50s, Babel wants you to feel the characters' pain viscerally and to have a good cry on their dime.
In the bathroom line after our screening, a few girls in front of CC had some heated things to say about the movie. A flick that inspires debate always makes us happy, so if argument and weeping are moviegoing reactions you crave, then Babel could be right up your alley. Blanchett certainly gives a good performance, as does the rest of the strong cast which includes Brad Pitt, Gael Garcia Bernal and Koji Yakusho. Actually, CC wouldn't be surprised if we hear Oscar buzz for Pitt, this is one of his best roles in ages.
If you're curious for a differing opinion, our friend The Reeler wasn't as impressed with Inarritu's attempts to emotionally affect/manipulate his audience and really ripped Babel a new one. Stu writes, "...The stultifying Babel is where cosmopolitan auteurs go to die." Ye-ouch. A harsh, but as always, a well-argued rebuttal from The Reeler.
Forest Whitaker is one bad mofo. He's the ghost dog. He's the Maddog. He's the Bulldozer. Maybe it's the lazy eye, maybe it's the brilliant instincts as a thespian but he kinda scares the Cinecultist and we like it. Now, he's back on screen in The Last King of Scotland as one really freaky dictator, Uganda's Idi Amin and it's a performance that can only be called a tour de force.
James McAvoy plays Nicholas, a young Scottish doctor who escapes his uptight family for adventure in Africa. This is a guy who doesn't think twice about stopping his journey to bed a cute girl he meets on the bus, so from the start we know he has poor impulse control. A few months into his village gig, Nicholas attends a rally for the new president with a coworker (a lovely, under-utilized Gillian Anderson) and finds himself in thrall of the massive leader. A chance meeting with Amin leads to Nicholas becoming his personal doctor and quickly becomes embroiled in Amin's administration.
If you know even a little bit about history, you can probably figure out that things get much, much worse for Nicholas at this point. Amin's crazy yo and it doesn't take long to figure it out. But Whitaker does an amazing job of making him oddly sympathetic, or at least charming and intriguing. Though, that meat hook scene at the airport (don't ask) is not something we want to ever have to watch again. Actually, we didn't really watch it the first time, as Cinecultist had to scooch down in our chair and cover our eyes. Icky.
This movie though is more than just Whitaker's amazing performance. Director Kevin MacDonald and screenwriter Jeremy Brock bring up complex themes about race and colonialism, shading our supposed protagonist with suspect behavior. No one in this film gets to come off entirely as a hero or a villain and it makes for a bracingly realistic movie. In a season where the movie theaters are just starting to fill up with must see movies (wait until CC starts raving full force on the NYFF Friday), don't let The Last King of Scotland pass you by.
We also wrote a review for Radar, if you find such things of note.
During the summer of 2001, Cinecultist flew to Italy to join our family for a vacation and on the plane, we saw this really bizarre and horrible movie. Completely soap opera-y with a bunch of young, attractive actors all trying to screw each other, yet whining about the pains of fidelity the entire time. We couldn't understand why so many Italians loved this movie. Of course this was the Italian blockbuster, L' Ultimo bacio which Paul Haggis has now adapted into the script for The Last Kiss starring Zach Braff. Apparently, bad source material does not guarantee a good movie any more than a good source does.
When Garden State came out, Cinecultist is not embarrassed to admit we were drawn in by Braff's mopey, indie boy shtick. A good soundtrack and puppy dog eyes are surprisingly effective, even on the jaded CC. But in The Last Kiss, il Braffino has worn out his voice over laden welcome. Hit a certain point in your life and all of this a do about fear of commitment becomes incredibly tired. Especially when Braff's only dramatic acting technique seems to be to get a completely petrified look in Michael's eyes when faced with any complex decisions.
For the American version, Haggis has jettisoned much of the emphasis on Michael's childhood buddies and their romantic hang ups for Braff's performance, hence the harping on our annoyance with him. It's too bad since Blythe Danner and Tom Wilkinson, who as Michael's girlfriend Jacinda Barrett's parents also have a relationship on the rocks, are each such deft performers. Casey Affleck also isn't half bad, but his lack of screen time, as Michael's married buddy with a kid and also contemplating divorce, seriously cuts into his ability to shine.
Perhaps the biggest problem with The Last Kiss is the naiveté attributed to the two main women characters, Barrett's pregnant girlfriend Jenna and Rachel Bilson's lithe, flirty college student Kim. Just the implication that Michael may have lied and been out for the evening not with a guy friend but with a real live girl sends Jenna completely round the bend. Granted, Michael seems incapable of having a girl as cute as Kim as just a friends but still, how is Jenna to know this? And why doesn't Michael know any girls who aren't his buddies' wives or girlfriends? This seems like a pretty limited circle of influence to have at 30. Then when Michael does admit to straying, you'd think he committed atrocities against humanity in the way Jenna shuts him out of her life. Sure, being betrayed, especially if you're pregnant and unwed, isn't going to feel great but are women in Wisconsin really that unsophisticated to think the possibility isn't there?
Then Kim, who seems to be a girl who knows no boundaries when it comes to flirting with a dude at a wedding who obviously has a girlfriend, gets the idea that one late night hook up is for forever? She's in college for god's sake, how can it take this little to break her heart? It's not as though she and Michael seem to have much of anything in common, as their interaction is limited to brief car rides and noisy house parties.
It really is ironic that the final desperate straw for Michael to ditch Kim is when she shows up at his office with a mix CD. Seeing the Braff turn down a compilation made by a girl, and one who carries the additional meta significance of having made her fame by starring on TV show infamous for choice mixes, is quite biting. Sadly, CC seriously doubts director Tony Goldwyn would consciously concoct anything quite that Entertainment Weekly-caliber silly. His characters after all make jokes about hybrid cars and think their puny little lives carry the significance of Tolstoy.
Doesn't Braff have the weirdest chin in the above production still with Barrett? This is not the chin of a forceful man.
This may seem like an odd request, but Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson should give up his career in showbiz. With his sensitivity, strength and palpable kindness on screen, we could really use him in other arenas—a hostage negotiator maybe or a therapist at Guantánamo Bay. On screen, there doesn’t seem to be any male ego he can’t soften, win over or tame. Yes, that’s right. After watching his performance in Gridiron Gang, Cinecultist can indeed smell what the Rock is cooking and it’s called inspiration. Unlike revenge, it is not a dish best served cold.
The big conversion happened about a third of the way into this redemption through sports picture. Corrections officer Sean Porter at Camp Kilpatrick in Los Angeles is trying his damnedest to turn this rag tag bunch of delinquent gang bangers and drug dealers into a football team. But a visitor's day shakes up some of the potentially best players, as reminders of their messed up home lives start to intercede on their rehabilitation. One kid is visibly upset by a fight with his mom and Porter begins to build him back up with a offer that they should go over some new plays in the playbook. Just that smallest token of support is all most of these kids need. Maybe that sounds naive, but in that moment CC thought, The UN Peacekeeprs could really use a good man like the Rock on their side.
CC often finds it difficult to really analyze sports movies for their merits of realism. To us, it's a lot of running, throwing and catching. But Gridiron communicates a nice sense of urgency in all of this sweating, especially as the drama leads to that final important game. The plot, the characters and their collective struggles really do have you on your feet rooting for their victory, a feeling more essential to this lay viewer than any realistic calls or plays. In a few moments, the turn around of many of these excellent teen actors seems too effortless. But a third act moment of real seeming brutality on the field quickly dissuades that jaded assumption. The film is tagged as based on true events, and that moment made CC believe the reality of its East L.A. milieu.
Robin Williams' John Keating, Edward James Olmos's Jaime Escalante and Morgan Freeman's Joe Clark all have a new fellow educator in Johnson's performance as Sean Porter. We tip our hat to you, sir.
Radar made CC do it: we attended a screening of The Covenant last week and only barely survived to tell the tale. The opening credits nearly put us into epileptic shock from the jarring cuts and hardcore soundtrack. The plot is convoluted and incomprehensible. And the actors in it aren't even very cute, and have all the charisma of an A&F catalogue without the homosocial subtext fun.
We beg of you, from the bottom of our Cinecultist heart: Do. Not. See. This. Movie. If only for the reason that the scriptwriters included the term "witchy" as an insult from one teen warlock to another mid death match. That's just completely unacceptable as far as we're concerned.
A few weeks ago Cinecultist caught an advance screening of Sherrybaby at Makor, and we've been mulling over Maggie Gyllenhaal's performance ever since.
As the former drug addict and struggling single mother, Sherry, Gyllenhaal does amazing work fully inhabiting a complex and not very likable character. Sherry's like a little child herself, she wants everything to happen right now and she constantly feels persecuted. She longs to turn her life around, attending AA meetings, getting a job at a day care and reconnecting with her family who's been caring for her daughter while she was in jail. Except that every move she makes towards being a straight citizen, Gyllenhaal makes seem like its most painful act in the world.
Writer and director Laura Collyer does that thing which seems so elusive to the rest of mainstream Hollywood—she crafts a believable female character. You wouldn't think that'd be such an amazing feat, what with many women producers, directors and writers hard at work in the biz. But Gyllenhaal and Collyer are surprisingly brave to construct such an unlikable, yet intensely compelling young woman. Not to give too much away but Sherry never met a bad decision she didn't like and there are moments as the film wears on where you want to slink down in the seat and cover your eyes as she stumbles yet again. But this after all, is what good character driven drama is about and Sherrybaby is a real delight to see after the string of summer's cookie-cutter plots.
Cinecultist is happy to say, here's a smaller flick worth checking out and it's a sweet vindication for all of us who've loved Gyllenhaal, despite being not just a little bit overexposed after Secretary.
Cinecultist should probably just go ahead and name today officially Factotum day, since we have a couple of linky links to point out regarding the Charles Bukowski movie. CC interview the flick's director, Bent Hamer while he was in town a few weeks ago for the movie's premiere and our chat is now available on Papermag.com.
Also, we reviewed the movie for the Movie Binge crew yesterday, in addition to Material Girls. This may not be a huge surprise to our many bright readers, but of the two subjects, Factotum is the superior movie. It may be glum in its naturalistic portrayals of life on the edge as only Bukowski can tell it, but it didn't make CC want to do bodily harm to ourselves while it was playing. Oh no, only the new Hilary Duff movie could do that. It was so bad we stopped watching and started contemplaing what way would be best make to gouge out our eyes with a blunt object. Maybe a spoon.
Reading this post's headline, one might think Cinecultist is referring to John C. Reilly, Will Ferrell's cast mate from Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Or maybe the ever brilliant, and increasingly Peter Sellers-esque, Sacha Baron Cohen. Sorry, no it's a more minor cast member that we totally dug. Cinecultist hearts the cougar because she's named Karen! Isn't that the silliest coincidence? The cougar represents Ricky Bobby's fear of the road and it is personified by a man-eating big cat with our name. During CC's screening of the movie, we thought maybe we were just projecting, but confirmation from friends who saw it later and various fanboy message pages agree.
It seems though that the promotional people for Talladega had a bit of a crystal ball, anticipating that fans of the film would want to project themselves into the movie just like Cinecultist. With that in mind, they put a weird little feature on the official website which allows you to create a poster of yourself and Will Ferrell all decked out in the race car driver gear. After the jump, the version featuring our mug.
Not too realistic, right? Guess we'll just stick to writing about movies rather than imagining that we're in them.
For a really long time Cinecultist has been a vocal opponent of horror films. We don't see them. We refuse. We're a huge 'fraidy cat. However, in the last few years our stronger credo of "see whatever is put in front of us" has exposed CC to more horror, and we think we've developed a tougher skin. We probably won't seek out Texas Chainsaw Massacre say, a movie recently our friend Eric told us about seeing for the first time, but when an editor asks CC to review a movie like Calvaire (The Ordeal), we'll start saying okay more quickly.
Calvaire is a Belgian movie made in 2004 by Fabrice du Welz and is finally getting a limited theatrical release here in the States, before it comes out on DVD in the fall. It stars Laurent Lucas as Marc Stevens, a cabaret-style singer who travels around the countryside performing for small groups. At the start of the film, we see how incredibly attractive Marc can be to his audiences, inspiring stalker-like devotion from two female fans, one quite old who smooches him in the dressing room and another much younger who gives him nudie pictures of herself. Like in Hitchcock's Psycho, these opening scenes which establish our protagonist's sexual appeal will later prove to be his serious liability.
On a country road to the next gig, Marc's van breaks down in the fog (classic horror movie mistake) and he enlists the help of a nice seeming young man searching for his doggie (also a mistake) to lead him to a nearby inn (don't do it, Marc!). At the Bartel Inn, the proprietor Bartel offers him a dank room and promises Marc the next day they'll easily fix his van. However at day break, this creepy, remote locale gets creepier and creepier as Bartel becomes less and less helpful. Also those town folk, all seriously scruffy dudes with a deep fascination for their livestock, don't seem to be too normal either. And then things start to get REALLY bad for Marc.
Perhaps what we liked most about this movie is that nothing pops out to goose you. To Cinecultist, that's cheap horror. Besides, we don't like leaping out of our seats, and trust us when we say, Cinecultist can really leap. Rather, Du Welz keeps his dread slow moving, lumbering and the more bizarre the better. Many times we peered closer to the screen muttering, "Wha? Did he really just do that? That's messed!" Jackie Berroyer, the grandfatherly looking actor who plays Bartel, gives a seriously disturbed performance; it's quite fucked up and menacing. But this movie doesn't try to offer any psychological explanations at the end, ala Hitch. It just leaves you with the lingering weird feeling that all isn't right, and it's not going to get any better. A pretty horrific conclusion actually, if you ask us.
Production still of Jackie Berroyer as Bartel in Calvaire (The Ordeal). The movie plays starting this weekend at the Cinema Village.
The dance school musical is a much maligned genre. With cheese-tastic plot lines, fancy footwork and a little teen smooching, they can be some of the most purely entertaining movies. When Cinecultist was a young girl we lived on them, despite our own less than stellar abilities on the dance floor. Fame, Flashdance, The Red Shoes, and we'd argue Save the Last Dance and Center Stage, all deserve a rental if you've not seen them recently.
Sadly, the newest addition to the pack Step Up, isn't worth canonization. CC caught an advance screening with our dance movie connoisseur friend Lisa and we both agreed it was less than slammin', in the poetic words of STLD. The dancing isn't as memorable as you'd expect from Anne Fletcher, the choreographer of Bring It On, and CC wasn't swept up in the implausible spectacle the way you'd hope. Maybe if Fletcher had been a bit more blatantly po-mo the movie would've been better.
In an interview in this week's Time Out New York, she plays dumb to any kind of dance movie references in her film.
TONY: Could you talk about the references to dance movies in Step Up? AF: What do you mean, honey? I’m sorry.TONY: It’s just that I saw moments from Flashdance, Dirty Dancing, Fame…
AF: It’s interesting because that was never in my thinking, ever. I can’t respond! [Laughs] I never, on any level, tried to do any sort of tribute or hat tip to any of those movies. I’m dead serious: I’m not that clever.
Last Saturday, Cinecultist perused the lists of films playing at our local theaters in search of an afternoon movie. However, we'd already seen about 85 percent of the releases. This is the good and bad thing about seeing movies for work -- many times we get to see them for free, but then what the heck are we to do for leisure? (Besides try to eat at all 101 New York mag cheap eats?) Fortunately, we'd not gotten around to catching Wordplay, the crossword puzzle documentary, so after a pleasant walk across town, we found ourselves at the IFC Center.
Wordplay is one of those difficult movies to write about because it's so sort of middling. It's perfectly entertaining while it's playing, and it's not really doing anything horribly awful or particularly groundbreaking. This seems to be a surprisingly prevalent trend amongst documentaries these days. They follow a familiar story arc, usually involving a competition and a rag tag bunch of quirky real life characters. But while these folks are cute and mildly engaging, they're not captured in a substantive way. Unlike a fictional character in a narrative film, it's not really possible to argue that they're not believable, because they're already actual human beings. Instead they remain a sum of their quirky attributes, cobbled together with a few anecdotes or odd pronouncements to the camera. We don't see anything on screen that we haven't seen a version of, in some form or another, a zillion times before.
With some help from our friends Adriane and John, two very fine documentary filmmakers that Cinecultist happened to have dinner with later on Saturday, we decided the problem is Quirk. Quirk becomes an easy short-hand for moviemakers which provides likable characters. However, these figures have no substance, their odd characteristics become a convenient checklist. One crossword puzzler is interviewed in front of an oil portrait of an ancestor. Another one lives near Columbia University and juggles batons. Yet another hangs out with his frat buddies between bouts of competitive crosswording. Blah, blah, blah. Rather than constructing unusual stories which happen to have odd characters in them who could potentially be unsympathetic, these movies seem to start from the checklist and grow from there.
That may sound overly harsh on a flick that we did enjoy well enough while we were watching it, but it's not something we'd honestly feel we should recommend. Especially when we know it could be so much more than merely quirky.
Cinecultist is all about The Puffy Chair these days, a small indie film made by the Duplass brothers on a shoestring budget, which is finally coming to New York for a run at the Angelicka starting this weekend. CC had a great chat with director Jay Duplass which is up on Gothamist now. For space considerations, we had to edit our interview down to the most pithy parts of Jay's responses and so didn't include this part where we discussed the great cluster of movie theaters in downtown New York. We were delighted learn though that Jay, like CC, is partial to the Cinema Village East from his salad days living here in the Eee Vee.
The one thing I’m the most excited about with the Puffy Chair which doesn’t really mean that much is that when you open at the Angelicka, you most surely get a move over to the Cinema Village East, which isn’t a premier theater by any means. Everyone always asks me, What does it mean to have your movie showing up at movie theaters? How surreal is that? It doesn’t feel surreal at all, because three hours before every screening we’re running around the neighborhood. We’re putting flyers up and we’re making sure that the colors look right and that it’s not