MOVIE REVIEW
Heart of Fire (2009)
Senator Film Verleih
Making a kids’ movie about child soldiers should be impossible. The cruelty and horror of their daily existence seems like something it’s better not to discuss. On the other hand, to ignore something that awful can only serve to perpetuate it. “Heart of Fire” is based on a German bestselling memoir by Senait G. Mehari, who as a child was forced to fight in the Eritrean wars of independence. The film does an age-appropriate job of demonstrating how people always have choices, even in situations where they have no choice.
Continue reading “This Woman’s War” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Vincere (2009)
Festival de Cannes
Marco Bellocchio has tackled some of Italy’s most delicate historical and religious subjects with an inspired touch of surrealism. “Good Morning, Night,” Mr. Bellocchio’s treatment of the Red Brigade’s 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, took that singular event and expanded it into a broader allegory of a turbulent chapter in Italian history. Similarly, “Vincere” extrapolates Benito Mussolini’s ill-fated first marriage into a cautionary tale about the price of absolute power.
Continue reading “Internee With Mussolini” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Black Dynamite (2009)
2009 Los Angeles Film Festival
It’s a shame that the Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez exploitation duet, “Grindhouse,” derailed at the box office, because “Black Dynamite” could have been billed as that double feature’s de facto sequel. Shot with the grainy texture of aged reels, director Scott Sanders’s tongue-way-past-cheek spoof of 1970s blaxploitation cinema plays like an expanded riff on the faux trailers that broke “Grindhouse” in half. Unfortunately for that Tarantino-Rodriguez project, today’s mainstream audience proved to be resistant toward winking big-screen throwbacks, aloof to — not in on — the joke. Which doesn’t bode well for “Black Dynamite.” As a straightforward comedy, the film lays the humor on thicker than Shaft’s mustache with mixed success. There in lies its dilemma: “Black Dynamite” is so married to its high-concept that story is sacrificed for shtick. That’s surely the intention, and “Black Dynamite” ultimately lives and dies by its own agenda.
Continue reading “He’s Gonna Git You Sucka” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Jennifer's Body (2009)
Doane Gregory/Twentieth Century Fox
The moment when "Jennifer's Body" begins to go down in flames isn't tough to pinpoint. Jennifer, the sex-on-two-legs cheerleader played by Megan Fox, has dragged her quiet, socially-awkward B.F.F., Needy (Amanda Seyfried), to a local bar see a new indie rock band. During the band's set, an electrical fire quickly turns the venue into an inferno. The two girls manage to escape through a window; unlike its female leads, though, Academy Award-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody's sophomore effort is left to slowly dissolve. The film's first horror set piece, the sequence wants to evoke "Carrie"-at-the-prom nostalgia, but it's rushed and lifeless. Whereas Brian De Palma used split-screen and a palpable mean stream to his advantage back in 1976, "Jennifer's Body" director Karyn Kusama plays it safe, treating repeated shots of screaming people engulfed in flames as scary enough. It's undercooked barbecue with no dramatic meat, and an unfortunate sign of the dullness to come.
Continue reading “Watch Out, Boy, She’ll Chew You Up” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Informant! (2009)
Warner Bros. Pictures
Lest one be fooled by the presence of full-fledged movie star, Matt Damon. This should be clear: Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!” continues the auteur’s ongoing penchant for experimentation with film form and genre. When considered in a career that includes “sex, lies, and videotape,” “Bubble,” “Full Frontal,” the “Solaris” remake, “Che” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” it’s further proof of Mr. Soderbergh’s admirable conviction to make exactly the movie he wants every single time out.
Continue reading “The Inside Joke” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Burning Plain (2008)
Magnolia Pictures
Self-mutilation is now officially a cliché. It has become filmic shorthand to encapsulate within one scene years of psychological trauma visited on a person. It also seems quite redundant in the case of Sylvia, Charlize Theron’s character in “The Burning Plain,” who appears to be alarmingly promiscuous. If you also take into account the fact that it promises to be another one of those we-are-all-connected ensemble pieces, the film shapes up within the first 10 minutes to be a daunting task.
Continue reading “The Three Burials of Forbidden Love” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Paris (2008)
Mars Distribution
Cédric Klapisch offered the definitive view of the City of Lights in 1996 with “When the Cat’s Away.” Starring mostly unprofessional actors from a deteriorating but ethnically diverse neighborhood, the film charmingly depicted a spirit of community enduring amid the changing times. It was infinitely more authentic than the obviously touristy treatments of the city such as that in “Amélie,” which went as far as digitally erasing graffiti on walls in a desperate attempt to create a romantic ideal that in fact does not exist.
Continue reading “Paris When It Fizzles” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Chevolution (2009)
Fortissimo Films
Everyone knows the image this film is about. Everyone might not know who he is or when or where the photo was taken, but he or she knows what the image means. It’s cool, edgy and rebellious. It’s got that little frisson that moves it beyond just another photograph to one of the most reproduced images of all time. It’s so famous that blind items can run in the gossip press about starlets getting their tattoos of it removed. In a London restaurant restroom, a mash-up of the image and the Mona Lisa hangs on the wall. And from its first appearance, it took very little time to morph into shorthand for — well, whatever you want it to mean.
Continue reading “A Warholian Mosaic of an Iconoclast” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Crude (2009)
David Gilbert/First Run Features
Environmentally-themed documentaries have been all the rage since Davis Guggenheim offered the
previously unfathomable revelation that Al Gore giving a PowerPoint lecture could
be made dramatic. In fact, multifaceted movies about our brewing natural
crises — once the forte of activists and special-interest filmmakers — have
become such a norm, that there’s a definite threat of oversaturation. This year
alone has produced “Earth Days,” “No Impact Man” and “At the Edge of the World,”
among others.
Yet director Joe Berlinger keeps “Crude” — his crack at eco-themed issue oriented filmmaking — from seeming passé. That’s because he’s chosen a voluble, compelling subject: the ongoing law suit filed by Ecuadorean natives against oil giant Texaco (now Chevron), alleging years of unmitigated pollution of their waters and lands. Embedded in the story — which alternates between scenes of lawyerly machinations, the compiling of sad stories of the victims and a look at the media’s representations of the case — are enough intriguing characters and moments of high human drama for it to function more like a piece of effective fiction than a work of overwrought agitprop.
Continue reading “Chevron Drinks the Amazon’s Milkshake; Chevron Drinks It Up” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Sorority Row (2009)
Michael Desmond/Summit Entertainment
Within its first 15 minutes, “Sorority Row” is already batting with a two-strike count. Before the opening credits even begin, the knowledge that the film is yet another tired horror remake is present, although the original in this case is a mostly-unloved piece of 1983 trash, “The House on Sorority Row.” The void of creativity sets in from jump, and once the central set-up — six sorority sisters stage a prank that follies into murder and then an agreed-upon cover up — is established, director Stewart Hendler’s cue seems to come directly from 1997’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Let’s tally the offenses up, now: “Sorority Row” is a remake (first strike) that totally plunders from a horror film that today’s generation knows well (there’s the second). Ask any lawyer worth his graduate-school diploma about what happens to double offenders. And then tell Mr. M.B.A. to behold an exception, because, some how, some way, “Sorority Row” overcomes such obstacles and chalks up one of the year’s most successfully executed horror films.
Continue reading “Greek Tragedy” »