MOVIE REVIEW
7 Days in Havana (2012)
Rezo Films
Portmanteau anthology films — not exactly fashionable, but never quite extinct either — enjoy a shot in the arm every few years from producer Emmanuel Benbihy's Cities of Love franchise, the cycle that has so far produced "Paris, je t'aime" and "New York, I Love You." But Mr. Benbihy's all-star bite-size format feels like a shallower option than the approach tried in "7 Days in Havana," which lets seven diverse directors get their teeth into longer-form stories all penned by the same Cuban screenwriter, Leonardo Padura. The aim is to get under the skin of a city with enough juice in its veins to power any seven stories and another 70 to boot.
Continue reading “Viva la vida” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Killer Joe (2012)
Skip Bolen/
2012 Seattle International Film Festival
William Friedkin's broiling film version of "Killer Joe" is uncompromising, uncompromised and alluringly grubby, catching all the black comedy laid out for the taking in Tracy Letts's play while mining a few new seams of Southern-fried dysfunction to boot. Collaborating again after "Bug" — which stared unswervingly into two unhappy people coming unglued in a closed room — they turn "Killer Joe" into a broader farce: a film prepared to admit that whole families can go so far off the rails that the only fair response is to laugh at the poor tortured bastards and learn.
Continue reading “Malice, Texas” »
Stone Angels
David Cronenberg's skills as an adapter of existing stories (eight of his movies have originated in other works, says a back-of-the-envelope calculation, even without counting "The Fly") are seeming more robust than ever, as he moves away from body horror and dives deeper into the life of the mind. And it's appropriate that, after "A Dangerous Method" dramatized debates about human sexual drives in the form of two erudite talking heads, he should tackle Don DeLillo's "Cosmopolis," in which a deeply disturbed young man wanders off the edge of sanity under his own steam, talking constantly while articulating hardly anything definable at all.
Continue reading “The Value of Nothing” »
Kerry Brown/20th Century Fox
Fan fiction can be fun, but even the good stuff usually crumbles when faced with the simple question "Why bother?" The urge to revisit the "Alien" universe and shine $130 million worth of 3-D clarity into one of its perfectly satisfying corners of ambiguity isn't inherently a bad idea, although anyone hoping for "Prometheus" to show the actual Space Jockey from the first film or how he ended up on LV-426 is going to be disappointed when none of that happens. Instead the film shoots for the moon, declaring from the off that his mysterious species is responsible for life on earth and has been beckoning us to the stars ever since; a plot whose stab at religiosity shares more DNA with "The X-Files" than anything else, right down to the mutating black oil that the Space Jockeys use to create their monsters. "Prometheus" is fan fiction writ very, very large.
Continue reading “Spaceballs” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Edge (2012)
Dogwoof
Surfacing briefly in theaters two years after it was filmed, on the way to what looks like a much more natural berth on a smaller screen, Carol Morley's intimate feature film, "Edge," proves again that the director of "Dreams of a Life" is drawn to looking mortality right in the eye. Its eight seemingly unconnected characters turn out to be very much intertwined — first by parallel threads of loss, regret and unhappiness; and then by a set of coincidences brazenly assembled for the purpose of allowing them all some closure. Marooned in a hotel on a particularly bleak portion of the English south coast in midwinter, they collectively ponder the damage done by an uncaring universe before discovering that their creator isn't as vindictive as all that. Having declared that they can't go on, they go on.
Continue reading “Half in Love With Easeful Death” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Battleship (2012)
ILM/Universal Pictures
The most interesting aspect of Peter Berg's last couple of features was always the involvement of Michael Mann; and Mr. Berg's inclination to take his producer's blue-collar urban-myth-making and process it into something less buttoned-down. But "Battleship" swings in other directions, borrowing instead from the Tony Scott book of naval ballistics and immediately summoning up instead the spirit of Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer circa 1986. It also has the gall, the nerve, the stainless-steel balls required to include a version of the Hasbro pastime's actual gameplay into its plot as a military strategy — for which, frankly, hats off.
Continue reading “Yes, You Can Put Your Mind at Ease” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Bel Ami (2012)
Studiocanal
Social climbing never goes out of fashion; and dubious press practices, Western countries bogged down in desert conflicts and unhappy war veterans are all about as current as it gets. So despite the outward signs of a musty costume drama, "Bel Ami" is never stale. In fact, it takes pains to stay sprightly throughout the tale of Georges Duroy (Robert Pattinson), skilled lothario and serial seducer — a man able to keep three mistresses warm at once and still find the energy to be rude to the servants. You could almost call it jaunty, as long as you ignore the lingering urge to kick the big Gallic jerk in the knee.
Continue reading “Love in the Afternoon, Every Afternoon” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Raven (2012)
Larry Horricks/Universal Pictures
Once upon a meeting dreary, full of pitches weak and weary,
Comes some bright spark speaking vaguely and invoking Alan Moore.
"Dusty books can still be thrilling, old ghost stories still be chilling,
Studio can make a killing with that story in the drawer,
If we ginger up that poem which we read at school before
Where the bird says "Nevermore."
Continue reading “Merely This and Nothing More” »
Music Box Films
I have written rude things about Kenneth Branagh, but I never wished him a term in the Marvel salt mines. His name attached to "Thor" wasn't the year's biggest directorial surprise — that was Michel Gondry's credit on "The Green Hornet," which really did seem like crossed wires — but it proved that hiring a left-field director for the current wave of fantasy films is a bit pointless, since the chances of getting a left-field film out of it are about zero. The differences between the year's comic-book movies were well worth arguing about, as long as you didn't miss that it was their similarities which were actually the point, and that the same diminishing returns as any other drug hit was part of the equation. Since 2012 brings to the screen a comic for which my 12-year-old self would have mugged my own grandmother, the next whimper you hear may be mine.
Continue reading “Mondo Apocalypto” »
Courtesy photo
John Kricfalusi has staked out some idiosyncratic ground in his three decades as a working animator; and it doesn't take long to recognize his work when you see it. “The Ren & Stimpy Show” caused visible distress to Nickelodeon in the 1990s, and lingers in the memory of anyone who caught its U.K. airings on BBC Two. Before then, Mr. Kricfalusi had already worked uncomfortably for Filmation and Hanna-Barbera, and found a much more agreeable niche alongside legendary animator Ralph Bakshi. More recently, the man usually known just as John K. has directed music videos, animated the opening couch gag for an episode of “The Simpsons,” and continued to get into occasional trouble with broadcasters.
Mr. Kricfalusi came to the Encounters International Film Festival in Bristol to talk about some of his favorite animated films. We took the opportunity to ask him about the joys of old animation, why the Internet is frustratingly slow and his very dim view of motion-capture.
Continue reading “Good Old-Fashioned Happy and Joy” »