MOVIE REVIEW
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)
Keith Hamshere/Sony Pictures Classics
Once per year, similar to clockwork, Woody Allen puts down the clarinet, gives away the New York Knicks tickets and comes out with a movie that resumes his career long rendering of the intelligentsia’s foibles.
While the New York icon has found renewed inspiration in western Europe, few of his recent movies that have taken place there boast the literate, angst-inflected writing and smart populist considerations of broad philosophical notions that highlight his best Manhattan-set work. Put another way, things have gotten stale.
Continue reading “More Husbands and Wives” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Never Let Me Go (2010)
Alex Bailey/Fox Searchlight Pictures
Fervent accolades greeted the publication of the 2005 Kazuo Ishiguro novel “Never Let Me Go.” Time magazine declared it the best novel of that year and went so far as to deem it one of the 100 top English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005.
In the realm of big-screen adaptations of beloved works, though, the cinematic version of Mr. Ishiguro’s story hews closer to the tragic “The Bonfire of the Vanities” than the transcendent “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Director Mark Romanek and screenwriter Alex Garland bring a collective heavy hand to this overwhelmingly morose rendering of Mr. Ishiguro’s dystopian allegory.
Continue reading “A Task of the Clones” »
Kino International
One of the primary functions of the British Film Institute is the preservation of the BFI National Archive, the world's largest collection of film and television. Acting upon this remit, the BFI recently identified a body of work from one of Britain's most respected directors, Alfred Hitchcock, which is in desperate need of restoration and preservation. Rescue the Hitchcock 9 is designed to raise funding to support the preservation of Hitchcock's surviving silent films, including his debut feature "The Pleasure Garden" (1925), "The Manxman" (1929) and "Blackmail" (1929), a landmark feature that ran as a silent film but also as one of Europe's first talkies. In the digital age, film has a medium that can guarantee the survival of such cinematic gems for all time, and as such the importance of such preservation projects cannot be understated. The success of such initiatives, while a boon for the film industry, will inevitably put paid to the romance of rediscovering lost films, such as the remarkable story of the recent discovery of a definitive copy of Fritz Lang's dystopian classic "Metropolis" in the archives of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires in 2008.
Continue reading “‘Metropolis,’ Lost and Found” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Metropolis (1927)
Kino International
"Metropolis," a German film made in 1927, was as groundbreaking in its time with its special effects as "Titanic" was in 1998. Although originally a flop at the box office, through the years "Metropolis" has grown in stature until it is now considered one of the most important and influential movies ever made, as much of a game-changer as "The Godfather" or "The Matrix." In fact, it's now impossible to see the movie with fresh eyes, as its imagery and ideas have been adapted, borrowed or outright stolen for countless films since then. For instance, there is the layered neon city of "Blade Runner," C-3PO, "Star Trek's" transporter beams, Nicole Kidman's first sequence in "Moulin Rouge!" – on second thought most 1920s nightclub sequences, the creation scenes in "The Fifth Element" and "Young Frankenstein," and any factories where nameless workers scurry underneath steaming behemoth machines. Another audience member even said of the lead actress, Brigitte Helm, “She looked just like Kate Bush” – which rather wonderfully missed the point.
"Metropolis" was edited down for length after its disastrous premiere, and the missing footage was long thought irredeemably lost. Its undeniable power meant it achieved its influence despite being a bit of a mess. Then in 2008 someone went through old film reels in an Argentinean museum. Nearly 30 minutes of missing footage, key to understanding some of the intricacies of the plot, have been restored and the re-release is to celebrate this fact. For the first time, we are able to see the movie almost as director Fritz Lang intended, and this is as close as we are ever likely to get to the film as it originally premiered.
Continue reading “A Future Rediscovered” »
MOVIE REVIEW
127 Hours (2010)
Chuck Zlotnick/Fox Searchlight Pictures
With “Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle finally broke his streak of hyperkinetic movies that ultimately left the audiences cold. But following his Oscar triumph, that nagging problem threatens to rear its ugly head once more in the big-screen adaptation of rock-climber Aron Ralston’s memoir “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” Starring James Franco, “127 Hours” retells Mr. Ralston’s harrowing ordeal of having his right arm pinned between a fallen boulder and a canyon wall at the Blue John Canyon in Utah, an experience that would end in self-amputation.
Continue reading “Going Out on a Limb” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Machete (2010)
Joaquin Avellán/20th Century Fox
As a two-minute “fake” trailer accompanying the Robert Rodriguez-Quentin Tarantino opus “Grindhouse,” “Machete” had its charms. But just as many such high concepts, it suffers from “Saturday Night Live” syndrome, petering out when elongated to feature length. Mr. Rodriguez’s love for Mexploitation reverberates throughout the picture, but the sense of spontaneous, over-the-top joy that abounds in the better recent B-movie “Piranha 3D” is conspicuously absent.
Continue reading “Yo Quiero Taco Hell” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Mesrine: Killer Instinct (2008)
Music Box Films
Part one of a bifurcated, four-hour magnum opus, “Mesrine: Killer Instinct” offers a close, nostalgic approximation of classical Hollywood gangster cinema. As a French picture about famed mid-century Robin Hood-type Jacques Mesrine (played by Vincent Cassel), the film benefits from an added dose of fond memories, as director Jean-François Richet’s New Wave predecessors so ably reshaped and deepened the early Warner Bros. aesthetic.
It is, in the best sense, a throwback, even if the presentation of Mesrine’s story also offers an unintended reminder of modern audiences’ decaying attention spans. To offer the film — made during one gargantuan nine-month shoot — in a palatable fashion, the producers have siphoned the second half into “Public Enemy #1” (out in the United States on Sept. 3), requiring a separate admission.
Continue reading “By Crook and Off the Hook” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Maid (2009)
Elephant Eye Films
Not every movie needs has-beens preening in front of great whacking explosions. It’s so refreshing to see a movie that knows the biggest changes in anyone’s life come in quiet moments, and that grants the inner life of a maid as much respect as anyone else’s.
Continue reading “Housekeeper Makes Herself at Home” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Tillman Story (2010)
Donald Lee/The Weinstein Company
Pat Tillman was a hero. The U.S. government got that right. Yet the bungling of the story of that heroism, the misshaping of the late soldier’s legacy to fit a classical propaganda narrative stands as one of the shameful episodes of the past decade.
In covering-up the ex-football player’s friendly-fire death, transforming it into a story of demise amid enemy fire, the military hierarchy did more than simply embellish a tragic mistake with a feel-good spin. It transformed a unique, three-dimensional man — a person with thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams — into a caricature of martyrdom.
Continue reading “The Expendable” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Piranha 3D (2010)
Gene Page/Dimension Films
The 3-D craze currently sweeping Hollywood is, at its worst, little more than a sorry excuse for price gouging. Beware movies, such as “Clash of the Titans” and “The Last Airbender,” that are converted to the third dimension in post-production. They are the cinematic equivalent of those annoying, ubiquitous airline fees.
Yet, after months of dreck, a picture such as “Piranha 3D” arrives and reminds your sorry, skeptical self exactly why that extra dimension exists. Boobs, gore and gratuitous close-ups abound in Alexandre Aja’s loose remake of Roger Corman’s original “Jaws” rip-off, which more closely evokes the B-movie spirit that gave birth to stereoscopic cinema than any of its contemporaries.
Continue reading “Death Fish” »