MOVIE REVIEW
Friends With Benefits (2011)
David Giesbrecht/Screen Gems
Gawker declared “Friends With Benefits” its favorite movie throughout July and August 2010 during its filming in New York. Although one’s never sure if such a distinction comes with a side of sarcasm, it’s not difficult to figure why the finished product would cease to be on Gawker’s good side. At the beginning of the film, Justin Timberlake works at a TMZ-esque blog in Los Angeles as its art director. The fact that his job entails responsibilities generally dumped on some unpaid intern proficient in Photoshop notwithstanding, Mr. Timberlake uses a giant iPad-esque touch-screen content-management system that’s a thing of the future. What’s more, a recruiter played by Mila Kunis has spent some six months persuading him to interview in New York for the art director position at GQ. Not only does he get an offer despite wearing an off-the-rack outfit to the interview, but along with it a plush, spacious luxury apartment that rents for at least $5,000 a month to ease the sting of Condé Nast’s reputedly paltry wages.
Continue reading “Know the Strings Attached” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Double Hour (2009)
Samuel Goldwyn Films
A patron found himself rained in at New York’s Quad Cinema without an umbrella amid the unexpected showers on June 9, so he saw three films in a row that afternoon. Upon exiting “The Double Hour,” he asked if the usher had seen it. Much as he enjoyed the film, the patron said he didn’t get it. The usher concurred and referred him to photocopies of a write-up, saying he liked it but wasn’t much into reading (i.e. the subtitles) at the movies. If you feel the way they did, you’re in luck! Here’s a very service-y review complete with spoilers, so you can discuss the film in an educated way with your very cultured friends and feel infinitely superior.
In spite of its Italian origin, “The Double Hour” actually hails from the M. Night Shyamalan/Alejandro Amenábar school of unreliable narrators and if-you-blink-you-miss plots circa the 1990s. Thus, this review will divulge privileged information withheld from viewers during the first two-thirds of the movie and disseminate it in chronological order. If you haven’t seen the film, please consider yourself warned.
Continue reading “Add Head Injury to Insult Intelligence” »
MOVIE REVIEW
A Serbian Film (2010)
Invincible Pictures
Caveat: This review assumes your awareness of “A Serbian Film” and its notoriety. Readers casually browsing through this site who’ve never heard of the title before should stop right here and move on to something else. The sole raison d’être for this review is to advance — rather than initiate — the discussion on the film, as all other write-ups so far have been polarizing yet uniformly prudish. In order to fully engage, this review will spare no graphic detail. So before going forward, please consider yourself warned.
Continue reading “Breaking Eastern Promises” »
MOVIE REVIEW
United Red Army (2008)
Masayuki Kakegawa/Wakamatsu Production
“United Red Army” is a colossal recounting of how the 1960s student movement disintegrated from radical to extremist, with comrades in arms in the midst of a period of prolonged inaction at a remote training camp eventually giving up on daily drills to figuratively reenact “Lord of the Flies” — but with a much higher body count. The film is noteworthy because director-co-writer Koji Wakamatsu self-financed and distributed the $2.4-million production, defying a system and a culture that would rather forget uglier episodes in the nation’s history such as the Nanking Massacre.
Continue reading “Clipping the Ultra-Left Wing” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Tree of Life (2011)
Merie Wallace/
Fox Searchlight Pictures
It’s the new Terrence Malick! It’s the Palme d’or winner! It’s Harmony Korine-meets-Stanley Kubrick! It’s the entire “Lost” series pared down to two hours and 18 minutes! Or — as some loudmouth overheard at another press screening put it — it’s two hours and 18 minutes of computer screen saver! Granted, the said loudmouth also believed Dominique Strauss-Kahn was set up. All joking aside, it’s interesting to see that even after his heirs apparent — namely, Mr. Korine and David Gordon Green — have respectively moved on to experimental video and Hollywood trash in the time span between two Malick projects, the old maestro continues to bear his own torch.
Continue reading “As the New World Turns” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Beginners (2011)
Focus Features
Sober and unsentimental, “Beginners” matter-of-factly dissects the life traps of a commitment phobe through his fuzzy recollections of childhood trauma and his late father’s coming out. But precisely because of its earnestness, the film is easily one of the most moving moviegoing experiences this year alongside the equally fascinating “The Arbor.” Coincidentally, both involve unloving families leaving their members scarred for life. But these films aren’t as bitter and cathartic as one might expect. In fact, they reach the kind of epiphanous wisdom that generally seems only attainable through years of therapy.
Continue reading “After a False Start, a Second Chance at Love” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Tuesday, After Christmas (2010)
Lorber Films
The latest entry in the Romanian New Wave canon, “Tuesday, After Christmas” is curiously devoid of Romanian characteristics. In fact, if you know nothing about it from the outset, the film won’t even strike you as Romanian until actor Dragoş Bucur appears in a minor role and makes a self-referential in-joke about “Police, Adjective,” a film he starred in.
Continue reading “I’ll Be a Home Wrecker for Christmas” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Midnight in Paris (2011)
Roger Arpajou/Sony Pictures Classics
Critics must have desperately yearned for Woody Allen’s return to form, or else they wouldn’t have been reflexively hailing his every offering in the last decade as a return to form regardless of merit. Occasionally Mr. Allen has seemed happy to oblige, such as finally revisiting his fabled Manhattan with “Whatever Works” after a self-imposed four-year European exile. Although he has crossed the Atlantic yet again for his latest, “Midnight in Paris” deliberately channels the same deep-rooted fascination with the storied 1920s as did “Zelig,” “Bullets Over Broadway” and “Sweet and Lowdown.”
Continue reading “In an Ivory Eiffel Tower” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011)
Peter Mountain/Disney Enterprises
The “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise returns with its fourth installment “On Stranger Tides” without director Gore Verbinski or stars Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley onboard. In their place we have Rob Marshall at the helm and Penélope Cruz and Ian McShane joining veterans Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush and Kevin McNally. Although screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio — who scripted the first three installments — are also back, “On Stranger Tides” is a bit of a, well, shipwreck.
Continue reading “Spoiling the Ship for a Ha’p’orth of Tar” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Guard (2011)
Sony Pictures Classics
“The Guard” is that rare breed of crime story that involves a passive protagonist, à la “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” It’s not that the protagonist in “The Guard,” Brendan Gleeson’s Sgt. Boyle, apathetically takes a backseat as events unfold. He is simply more occupied with cracking wise, cavorting with prostitutes and tending to his dying mother than actually solving the case at hand. It is quite an achievement, then, that writer-director John Michael McDonagh manages to calculatingly frustrate and engage viewers simultaneously through the duration of the film.
Continue reading “The Crime-Fighting Irish” »