While I heard the alarming reports coming from the Fukushima I nuclear power plant, an unforgettably intense sequence from “The China Syndrome” (1979) immediately came to my mind. An earthquake occurs without warning. The power plant is automatically shut down. They get a problem with the level of the coolant. The plant is on the verge of nuclear meltdown. The catastrophe of epic proportions may happen as a consequence.
Recent years have seen the world’s two most successful film directors in history do the unthinkable by tinkering with some of their most classic work.
First up George Lucas decided to update his original “Star Wars” trilogy, I imagine with the purpose of standardizing its look with the new three films he was working on at the time.
He wants to forget about it, but it is impossible for him to get away from it, because that has driven him to be who he is now. As the opening narration suggests, even if it is buried below and everyone including him is silent about that as if nothing ever had happened, it never goes away. It remains beneath the surface, and it is bound to be brought up again in one way or another, and there is no way of release possible for him.
Hello, I’m Omar Moore. I was born and raised in London, where I grew up before moving to New York City with my parents. After branching out in the Big Apple on my own for a number of years, I moved west to San Francisco. I love America and its promise. We all need to do our small part to make this great country even better for all. Where a film is concerned, it is never “only a movie.” Images mean something. They have unyielding power and influence, whether in “Birth of A Nation”, “Un Chien Andalou”, “Night Of The Hunter”, “Killer Of Sheep”, “Persona”, “Psycho”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “Blazing Saddles”, “Straw Dogs”, “Soul Man”, “Chameleon Street”, “Do The Right Thing”, “Bamboozled” or “Irreversible”. A filmmaker generally doesn’t put images in a film if they are meaningless.
In the wake of the disappointing “Shutter Island”, it’s especially gratifying to look back at Christopher Nolan’s feature film “Memento” (2001), an indie mystery starring Guy Pearce as a San Francisco man in Los Angeles suffering from anterograde amnesia, or short-term memory loss.
I told Roger it would take me 48 hours to review “Sin Nombre” and yet hours turned to days and days to months, and I still had not reviewed it. Scratch that. I did write four reviews, but not a satisfactory one. The first review was too much about my views on immigration and didn’t elaborate much on the film. The second was the other way around. The third was about how the film was great based on the way it was shot. That one was too technical. The fourth review was too personal; a review should be about the
Some horror movies have mercy on uninformed audiences who have no idea about what they will get. The opening sequence of New Zealand horror film “Dead Alive” (1992), which is also known as “Braindead”, is a good example because it kindly gives the audiences a very clear idea of what it about and how it is about. As the hero escapes from the natives of Skull Island (Southwest of Sumatra) with a mysterious creature dreaded by the natives, he accidentally gets bitten by the animal, hidden in a wooden crate. He says he’s all right, but his local employees are suddenly frightened about that.
Sometimes people learn a hard life lesson about their world when they are young and innocent. Molly, a young white South African girl in “A World Apart” (1988), learns it in a way far more hurtful than usual. She wants her normal comfortable life to resume again, but her world is Johannesburg in the 1960s. She begins to grasp lots of injustices in her world, even while confused and hurt a lot by her parents as well as what happens to her and her family.
“‘Will you walk into my parlor?’ said the Spider to the Fly.” – from the poem “The Spider and the Fly” by Mary Howitt.
The crucial moment in George Sluizer’s chilling psychological thriller “The Vanishing”(1988) can be summarized with that quote. The Fly cannot resist the offer, simply because of his intense desire to know. The Spider cannot resist making an offer, only because of his cold curiosity about the result. He has a solid prediction based on his careful calculation, but he wants to know the result in his cruel experiment, like he previously tested himself before.
It begins on the last day of the semester at a classroom of some Japanese junior high school. Though they will return to their school after a month, most of the students are very excited while waiting for the time to leave their classroom and enjoy spring break. They are mostly occupied with talking with or texting to their colleagues in the noisy classroom. They do not give a damn about what their teacher tries tell to them, while never imagining the terror she will soon unleash upon them.
It’s always difficult to put a play on the stage. Actors and crews work hard amid many setbacks that can happen on and behind the stage. If they are lucky, they will survive today’s performance with descending curtain and some fulfillment. Then they will have to struggle for another performance tomorrow with today’s performance faded into yesterday.
It sounds gloomy, but people in “The Dresser”(1983) stick together and try to go on while believing they are accomplishing something in spite of their mundane reality in and out of theater. At one moment, one character confides to the other about her life spent on theater business: “No, I haven’t been happy. Yes, it’s been worth it.” Norman, played by Tom Courtenay, can say the same thing if asked.
When it comes to “Making of” documentaries, I put one above all others. It is “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” (1991), a full-length feature about the filming of Francis Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”. Nothing quite illustrates its impact like Francois Truffaut’s statement: “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not interested in anything in between.” That the pain it captures eventually translated into cinematic greatness only serves to make it more compelling.
Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry” (1971) may not be the greatest film of Clint Eastwood’s career but its title character is certainly the one that best defines it. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine it took five years for such an acclaimed picture to arrive here in Mexico. Censorship wasn’t common in those days but there was something about “Harry.” The only other feature that I can recall getting a similar treatment was “Two Minute Warning” with Charlton Heston. Both dealt with mad snipers on the loose so my guess is that someone decided it was better not to give anyone ideas.
It may seem an odd choice for a personal classic, but you need to bear in mind under what circumstances this writer had first encountered Joe Johnston’s less-than-pint-sized family adventure flick, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.” The year was 1990, the Berlin Wall has just fallen, and the eight-year-old me was eager to lay his mitts onto any chunk of Hollywood fun that wandered into the emaciated landscape of post-Communist Poland. At the time, me and my friends would inhale anything that smacked of American affluence and unbridled pop energy. Most of us didn’t own a pair of jeans, but we still craved movies showing people casually sipping Coke and having pizza slices when they pleased. (Hence the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” craze, among others.)
A few years ago, while sitting in the mosque during a Friday sermon, I noticed a man in the center of the second row. This is an octagonal mosque with bare white walls. On the outside, its bluish brick and yellow dome consciously invoke the Dome of the Rock, which itself, incidentally is not a mosque. This man was sitting on the blue carpet with the rest of us, about six feet away from the preaching Imam, yet interestingly, he was not looking at him. The Imam was dressed in a white thobe, white skull cap, and that contrasted his thick jet-black beard. Instead, the man of salt-and-pepper beard was staring at the giant projection of this Imam on a screen above. I don’t remember what the Imam was speaking about that day, which might explain why I was probably staring curiously at this man as he stared at the live video projection of the preacher standing right in front of him. But, for reasons I will explain below, that moment comes to mind when I think of Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” (2012).
Revenge is served raw and simple in “Bedevilled”(2010). The movie delivers exactly what it promises to us, but that is not for free. There are barbarous scenes that make you wince, and then there are bloody scenes that make you cringe, but this South Korean revenge thriller has gallons of emotions to spurt on the screen in its sad, wretched character. It carefully prepares its ground while seemingly following the typical formula of revenge movies featuring abused heroines. It continuously accumulates explosives beneath its surface as the plot progresses. And then, when the time comes, it explodes its anger magnificently like a harrowing bloody aria.
As the quiet, fragrant hickory quality of the American Small Town fades into disposable plastic franchises, we find ourselves longing. For some, the American small town is the home they have been handed, being the home that they have chosen to keep. For some, it is the refuge away from the complications of city into a new simple life of inconspicuous rebirth. For many of us, however, the small town is an idealized yesterday that we mourn, nostalgic for a return to a black and white television show with Opie and Andy. The strange thing about Victor Nunez’s “Ulee’s Gold,” is that it made me long to return to a hometown, an American small town, that I never lived in.
There exists a stationary phase in wars unless they end quickly. The soldiers on both sides doubt whether they can survive; they are more exhausted day by day and it seems their hardship will last forever until they are killed in the battlefield. Even so, when the time to battle against the enemy comes again, they have no choice; they always do whatever their survival instinct drives them to do, and there come more scars and pains to be stored in their hurt lockers.
Legendary movie critic Pauline Kael formally recognized Morgan Freeman’s talents in her review: “Morgan Freeman may be the greatest American actor.” It’s hard to argue with that title now, but it was in 1987 when she wrote her review for “Street Smart.”
From the perspective of more than 20 years after its theatrical release in the US, it’s rather surprising to think that this small, flawed movie boosted the career of one of the great American actors of our time. It garnered him his first Oscar nomination (he lost to Sean Connery in “The Untouchables”) and that was just the start. He has been nominated for an Oscar five times in total and received the Oscar for best supporting actor for “Million Dollar Baby”. He is now one of the most formidable actors in Hollywood and is consistently watchable on the screen.
One of the best things that can happen to a moviegoer is showing up expecting a standard genre film and ending up seeing something better. This was my experience with Roger Donaldson’s “The Bank Job” which at first sight seemed like just another Hollywood caper movie in which the inevitable elements could be timed with a stopwatch.
