DW Studios
Steven Spielberg is back! After the disappointing “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (which, while containing fragments of Spielbergian magic, often felt flat and labored), “The Adventures of Tintin” sees the master director back on form. Mr. Spielberg’s new collaboration with fellow fantasy filmmaker Peter Jackson is more fruitful than the last one with his old friend George Lucas. Mr. Spielberg seemed to have participated in “Crystal Skull” out of sense of (understandable) loyalty to his old filmmaking friend, with the director appearing to go through the through the motions rather than being inspired to create a new Indy movie for the 21st century. The motion-capture in this new film seems to have liberated Mr. Spielberg though, freeing him up to try new things while recapturing his old magic.
Continue reading “Around the World in Motion Capture” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
DW Studios
It has taken nearly 30 years for Steven Spielberg to bring Tintin to the big screen, having optioned the rights to a film adaptation way back in 1983. Whether he was sitting on the project until technology caught up with his vision or he was simply undecided as how to realize a film that comes with an enormity of expectation from a salivating fan base is uncertain. Regardless, by co-opting in his Kiwi buddy Peter Jackson — who brings all his Weta magic to the party — Mr. Spielberg has managed to deliver a film that captures all the joyful frivolity of Hergé’s works with a typically Spielbergian sprinkle of unabashed rambunctious action.
Continue reading “Billions of Bilious Blue Blistering Barnacles” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (2011)
IFC Midnight
Tom Six promised that “The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)” would make the first installment “look like My Little Pony.” By shunning the implied grotesqueness of the mad-scientist-gone-mental farce of the first “Human Centipede” in favor of in-your-face graphic violence, streams of blood, feces and gore, Mr. Six has done just that. Yet, whereas the original verged on the fantastical and as a result was laughable at times, Mr. Six seems determined to push the boundaries of taste further than ever before and as such there is very little of that lightness of touch here.
Continue reading “Crying in the Night So Many Tears” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Coriolanus (2011)
Larry D. Horricks/The Weinstein Company
You can tell a lot about an actor by the vanity projects he or she undertakes, by which we mean the films an actor self-finances once he or she has made it big in Hollywood. Some actors choose to take small parts in defiant anti-blockbusters, such as when Ewan McGregor followed “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” with “Young Adam,” about a raping, stealing, murdering canal-boat worker in 1950s Glasgow. Other times an actor will take his money to direct something, such as when Samantha Morton used the clout of her Oscar nominations to direct “The Unloved,” about a girl abandoned to the British foster-care system.
So whatever Ralph Fiennes decided to use his Voldemort paychecks for would be interesting. He’s brought one of Shakespeare’s earliest and weakest plays to the screen, set it in a modern, unnamed Eastern bloc country (filmed in Serbia with a mainly Serbian crew) and showed someone shot in the head within the first five minutes. “Coriolanus” does not feel like the work of a first-time director. Mr. Fiennes pulls it off triumphantly. He’s made a historical curiosity relevant now, when our cities are in uproar and the citizens have taken to the streets.
Continue reading “A Very Top Dog to the Commonalty” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Chicken With Plums (2011)
Le Pacte
Marjane Satrapi has carved herself a very particular niche, firstly as a cartoonist with an extremely distinctive black-and-white drawing style shown off her in her graphic novels, which are based on her life growing up in Iran. Now living in France, Ms. Satrapi has further branched out into making films based on her graphic novels; the first was 2007’s “Persepolis,” an animated, autobiographical film drawn in her style co-written and co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud. And now they have reteamed for the live-action — though stylized — “Chicken With Plums.”
Continue reading “Fiddle While Home Burns” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Beijing Besieged by Waste (2011)
DGenerate Films
Part documentary, part photographic survey, part exposé, "Beijing Besieged by Waste" is artist Wang Jiuliang's highly personal look at the urban Chinese landscape in the face of extreme growth and general disregard for the environment.
Spurred by an interest in the destination of his own trash, Mr. Wang embarks on a journey to the outer rings of Beijing — home to dozens of poorly regulated, hazardous landfills. At each site he is faced with an endless ocean of trash, yet wisely stays away from imbuing the scene with any sort of grotesque beauty. Aside from the occasional landfill sunset, his palette is dull: all grays, browns and blacks.
Continue reading “Peking Duck and Cover” »
Weta Digital/Paramount Pictures
Watching “The Adventures of Tintin” reminds you that modern entertainment is increasingly driven by each move forward in technology. Images of Steven Spielberg directing scenes from his latest all-action adventure with what appears to be an oversize PlayStation controller only go to emphasize the point.
The shark may have almost driven him mad, but Mr. Spielberg’s career is littered with each leap forward in cinematic wizardry. Not to accuse such a visionary of standing on the shoulders of giants, but where would “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” be without the work of John Dykstra on “Star Wars” and “Battlestar Galactica”? Where would “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” have been without animatronics? What would “Jurassic Park” have looked like without the generational leaps in C.G.I.? And “Tintin” — well, if that doesn't owe a massive debt of thanks to Robert Zemeckis and James Cameron, then I don't know what does.
Continue reading “Boys and Their Toys” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Anonymous (2011)
Reiner Bajo/Columbia Pictures
Roland Emmerich has never been one to let history get in the way of a good story. His 2000 film, “The Patriot,” took untold liberties with the facts of the American Revolution, idolizing Mel Gibson’s Benjamin Martin while utterly damning the actions of the British. It should come as no real surprise, then, that Mr. Emmerich luxuriates in creating a wildly and wholly inaccurate world of Elizabethan-era London for his latest picture, “Anonymous.”
Utilizing a discredited niche conspiracy theory that William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) was a bumbling fraud and a mere front for the refined Earl of Oxford (a brooding and camp Rhys Ifans) as the basis for this alternative history, Mr. Emmerich and scribe John Orloff make the critical mistake of promoting this faction as in any way credible.
Continue reading “The Most Unkindest Cut of All” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Rampart (2011)
55th BFI London Film Festival
“Rampart” is a symphony of bad decisions and their consequences. For example, early in the film Los Angeles cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) chats up a woman (Audra McDonald) in a bar, who persists in wanting to converse despite Dave’s dramatic insults. Evidently, she has a serious cop fetish. When she cheerfully presses for his nickname around the station, he shrugs: “It’s Date Rape.” She flinches; and he explains that many years ago he was involved in a shooting in which a serial rapist was killed. Dear reader, she sleeps with him anyway.
Continue reading “Weasel Weapon” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Artist (2011)
The Weinstein Company
“The Artist” is a movie made out of love. There is no other way to describe it. It is a love letter to cinema, to style and to the art of making movies; and anyone who loves movies needs to see it — now.
It is about the relationship between George Valentin (Jean Dujardin of the “OSS 117” movies) and young Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo, who was the maid in “A Knight’s Tale”). George is the biggest movie star in 1927 Hollywood; and he meets Peppy when she accidentally drops her handbag at a red-carpet event. Photographs of them together make the front page, to the annoyance of studio head Zimmer (John Goodman, who you can tell enjoyed himself). But the fuss gets Peppy — and her legs — work as an extra; and her career takes off from there. But as sound comes into movies, George doesn’t realize his star status might change along with the movies.
Continue reading “Silence Is Golden” »