When David Fincher’s “Zodiac” (2007) was released in South Korean theaters, it was immediately compared to a famous South Korean film. That movie was also based on the infamous serial killing case still remaining unsolved to this day, and it is also about the desperation, frustration, and obsession of the people who wanted to find the man behind the horrific killings.
For the first time in a long time, she has breakfast with her husband. But now, nobody in her house will talk to her. She is Arati, wife of Subrata, and to help pay expenses she starts her first job outside of the home. In Satyajit Ray’s tender “Mahanagar” (1963) aka: “Big City”, we follow a quiet Indian family’s struggles against the nearing claws of modernity.
A foggy morning on the last day of the festival. One more week of movie-going, as Egypt totters and my native Midwest suffers another snowstorm, has caused both guilt and gratitude.
But before I describe what I’ve been experiencing in balmy Santa Barbara, an upfront mea culpa, as earlier I mangled the name of a delightful film and want to correct it here. “Good for Nothing” comes from New Zealand, a spaghetti western with a bit of “Unforgiven” tossed in. Well acted and very scenic, the story centers on an Eastwood-like lone cowboy, who says little, thinks guns are meant for killing and women for — When he kidnaps a young English traveler, rather than dominating her as he evidently intends, she gains control, ultimately humanizing the guy and helping him unfold his hidden heart. A man at the festival suggested that, “as a woman,” I wouldn’t like this film at all – but he was wrong.
Can any subject matter end up making a great movie?. That’s the question that Siskel & Ebert’s old review of “North” left me with many years ago. While Roger blasted the film’s overall, twisted theme (if you don’t like your parents, dump them and go get new ones), Gene dismissed this as the main problem by saying: “any subject can be done well”.
Looking back at the Hollywood blockbuster action films of 2011 when the year was about to end, I found none of them could top the raw realism of the ambitious South Korean thriller “The Yellow Sea” (2010). When I endured “Transformers 3” last summer, I had no excitement at all with its pointless loud action scenes decorated with weightless CGI. In the case of “The Yellow Sea,” real people and real vehicles are put into the action on the screen, and they are far more visceral than those big, humongous CGI robots fighting on the streets of Chicago.
If we are to believe some of his many fans, then Tupac Shakur was never murdered. Rather, he is today living a quiet life, perhaps playing chess under quiet New Zealand clouds with Jim Morrison and Elvis Presley. And while Lauren Lazin bookends her documentary, “Tupac: Resurrection,” with his murder, the movie takes us through the turbulent world that formed and informed his biography. The movie convinces us that we have entered not only his mind, but his heart.
Had the unflagging perseverance of Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings not shown them through their trying development prior to “Cloud Atlas,” its existing pitch materials and visionary test footage likely would have elevated the project into cinema’s tragic archive of could’ve beens. Like Samuel Fuller’s haphazard, ash-covered collection of unproduced scripts, the absence of product, sitting idly by the raw materials required to construct one, can coat an enigmatic gloss over the entire endeavor.
Streaming on Netflix Instant.
Do we teach our young people to dream in the way we used to dream? I feel a sadness as I look at the long faces of so many undergrads. In their expressions, there is a resignation towards, rather, a skepticism of, rather, a fear of the murky future. Have we lost the motivation, passion and, yes, romance of our counterparts from the 1960s, believing that with enough determination we could change the world into a better place?
Watching Mark Kitchell’s “Berkeley in the Sixties,” (1990) I’m thinking the contrary, that maybe things have not changed. We might look at the activism of the 1960s with nostalgia, thinking that the activists knew exactly what they were doing, but we see that the participants were discovering the process as it unfolded before them. In any case, this is one of the great documentaries of American dissent.
I have a friend who walked out of THERE WILL BE BLOOD during that baptism scene, when Daniel Day-Lewis exclaimed, “I’ve abandoned my child!” My friend was just divorced, lost custody of his children, and was tormented with the remorse that follows these things. As Daniel Day-Lewis shouted, my friend almost needed to cover his ears. He returned to his seat shortly afterwards, but needed that moment to collect himself.
I have another friend who was molested by a family friend. She refuses therapy, but she attributes multiple aspects of her personality, that she herself identifies as disorders – social ineptitude, sexual dysfunction and confusion, chronic despair – to that period of molestation. When she watched MYSTIC RIVER, a movie speaking of the physical and psychological abuse of children and the long term consequences on their hearts and minds, she found herself painfully revisiting those experiences, but not where we might expect.
In contemporary Hollywood, when a young actor becomes successful, he immediately tries to convert fame into power and money, investing his time in formulaic projects that guarantee great results at the box office and, thus, his ascension in the industry. It was not always like this – and we just need to observe Al Pacino’s career to confirm that: after he became a hit with The Godfather, dozens of screenplays fell onto his lap, but he still focused on challenging and complex works in which he struggled against Hollywood’s attempts to turn him into a heartthrob – projects such as A Dog Day Afternoon (in which he robbed a bank to pay for the sex reassignment surgery of his boyfriend, played by Chris Sarandon) and, of course, Serpico.
A quiet story of incestuous desire told with deadpan precision and a fair share of subliminal humor, “The Unspeakable Act” marks its writer-director’s long-awaited cinematic breakthrough. Even though New York-based Dan Sallitt (born 1955) has been making movies from the mid-1980s on (he had three under his belt before this one), his media presence has been unduly under-the-radar throughout that period. With the new movie scooping The Independent Visions Prize at the 2012 Sarasota Film Festival, and then being picked up by Edinburgh, Karlovy Vary and – most notably – BAMcinemaFest (where it plays 24 June at 9:30 PM), it’s high time to put Sallitt on the map of highly original independent American filmmakers, which is where he’d belonged right from the start.
There must be many ardent admirers who know far more than me about Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”(1927), one of the great movies in the 20th Century. They will provide you more detailed and accurate knowledges about this unforgettable masterpiece after watching, no, experiencing it. So, I think I have to talk about my experience during the evening of May 4th and my several thoughts, instead of making a fool of myself by talking about what I do not know well.
Matt Singer wrote a thoughtful piece against piracy a few days ago here on Criticwire. I read it with great interest. And I believe that he is correct, provided that Piracy fits a certain context. Let me try and provide some background.When I started writing movie reviews, I was living in the Philippines, a third-world country. Movie-going is deeply tied into our entertainment habits. The masses, most of whom are not able to afford most forms of entertainment, at least have theaters we can go to to escape the hardships of reality.
I’ve seen scenes in this movie multiple times in multiple movies, yet I’ve never seen this movie before. Andrew Niccol’s “Lord of War,” is the story of the rise and decline of an arms trafficker (Nicholas Cage) and takes many predictable narrative steps. It is a list of cinematic clichés, from the personalities (even the names) of the characters, to the moments of suspense and surprise, to the preposterous ethnic stereotypes. It contains everything short of a protagonist dangling from a cliff or a racing bus driving through a fruit stand. Further, there is very little character development, very little revelation, and most of the characters are caricatures. Nevertheless, the final product is a thoroughly original, provocative satire that explores a violent decade of global peace and haunts you with an almost silent sinister laugh.
“From where did it go wrong?”, he asks to his friend in agony, but he will not get the answer for that question, and neither will others, because 1) it is already too late to ask that question due to their shattered relationships beyond repair and 2) everyone, including him, is not so willing to give the parts of the answer while not completely understanding their problems much. What they have here is the failure to communicate, and that ultimately results in the irreversible tragedy at the center of melancholic South Korean movie “Bleak Night”(2010).
This prickly film haunts me. I am now older than James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, and Malcolm X. I am at that age where the infinite world of my childhood bedroom is now replaced by a complicated mass of interwoven needs, wants, and concerns. The soundtrack of my youth is a summer of wind blowing through fragile leaves, with katydids buzzing along. The rattling taps of rain on our roof has now given way to the plastic clicking of this keyboard and various other mechanical monsters. Under it all is an ongoing hiss of noise. I also sometimes fall into that trap of looking at today through the telescope of an idealized yesterday; that outlook is a slick valley that is difficult to climb out of and easy to slide back into. Jack Nicholson in Sean Penn‘s”The Pledge” (2001) is likewise watching the world change. More than that, he is watching his world slip away from him.
On a personal level, the most surprising aspect of Rashid Ghazi’s new documentary, “Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football,” is that he managed to keep it a secret and even managed the time to make it. An old friend, he personally funded and directed this portrait of a week in the life of a tightly-knit Detroit community at the beginning of their 2009 school year. A husband, a father, and tireless executive, he kept quiet about the film, even keeping his name off the original publicity. Simply: he did not want to get attacked by rampaging anti-Muslim zealots who seek to fake scandal where there is none.
The key strength of David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012) is that the acting is so strong that we forget we are watching the movie. In those moments that the plot guides us, it takes us in some directions familiar, some directions frightening, and some directions fun. In a year that has given us a compassionate story about addiction in “Flight,” we also have this equally tender film about mental illness. I want to see this movie again, if at least because it is so happy, even though it did not have to be.
Streaming free on Amazon Prime.
When I watch Roger Donaldson’s “The World’s Fastest Indian,” (2005) it makes my day. Burt Munro (Anthony Hopkins) is a contented New Zealand eccentric tinkering with a motorcycle that he dreams of racing in the Bonneville Salt Flats. It’s the story of a man trying to be the fastest motorcyclist in history. He has had the fortitude to fiddle with his bike for over 40 years until it is finally ready. Forty years. More than that, it’s a true story about a square peg poking his way through a world of circles and triangles, discovering all the different Americas. It’s a romantic comedy, for monks. Like me.
I will do most anything to avoid thinking. At the hint of strenuous thought I flee. I run like the dickens. I do not want my world to be disrupted. Seventy five percent of my energy is spent repairing a glorious cocoon of comfort.
Inside this shelter there is no overhead lighting, only lamps. There are no cold mornings or metaphysical crises. Everything is as it should be. Every question is easily answered. There you will find me licking my wounds, secretly enjoying the tang of blood and pus. Thankfully, for the health of body and soul, this cocoon is under constant siege. The valiant twenty five percent of life force that remains does all in its power to destroy a sheltering that in reality is more prison than sanctuary. This twenty five percent is Saint George. The cocoon is the terrible dragon. It is death.
As Cocteau said, “comfort kills creativity.” You will find me angrily hissing this to myself all day every day. On good days I heed the wisdom of the French man. On bad ones I refuse.
