MOVIE REVIEW
Grace (2009)
Seattle International Film Festival
Not all short works of fiction need to be stretched into full-lengths. Imagine an entire movie based upon the plot of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” — 90 minutes of a depressed guy locked in his bedroom, succumbing to eerie sounds and claustrophobic paranoia. If handled properly, the set-up could make for the greatest Roman Polanski creepshow of all time; more than likely, though, it’d becomes the horror equivalent of a film based on a “Saturday Night Live” sketch — intentionally scary, that is.
Continue reading “Baby Got Bite” »
MOVIE REVIEW
My Führer (2007)
First Run Features
Perhaps no figure in history has been more endless psychoanalyzed than Adolf Hitler. The natural human drive to comprehend the incomprehensible has lead to a rash of theories and studied observations that struggle to explain how such a blindly devoted cult of personality emerged around the man.
Into that realm leaps “My Führer,” a work of speculative fiction from writer-director Dani Levy that posits Hitler as, above all, a softie. As played by Helge Schneider, he’s a cripplingly depressed figure with lots of unresolved parental issues. When, towards the end of the Third Reich, he appears headed for a total breakdown, Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) imports Jewish professor Adolf Israel Grünbaum (the late, great Ulrich Mühe) from a concentration camp to snap him out of it in time to make a big speech.
Continue reading “Show Time for Hitler and Germany” »
MOVIE REVIEW
It Might Get Loud (2009)
Eric Lee/Sony Pictures Classics
One could argue that in his latest film, Davis Guggenheim — the Academy Award-winning documentarian behind “An Inconvenient Truth” — has outdone the impressive accomplishment of imbuing an Al Gore slideshow with riveting dramatic heft. For “It Might Get Loud,” he’s assembled Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White, three musicians who have never been especially prone to talking about themselves or their craft, and gotten them to candidly face his cameras and do just that.
Continue reading “Got the World on Six Strings” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Taxidermia (2006)
Here Media/Regent Releasing
Based on short stories by Hungarian poet Lajos Parti Nagy, György Pálfi’s “Taxidermia” is a sweeping absurdist fantasy that spans three generations and half a century. Arriving in American theaters some three years after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the film itself has traversed a similarly long and winding road. After wowing Tribeca festgoers in 2007, its domestic release was suddenly in limbo when its original distributor filed for bankruptcy.
Continue reading “The Stuff Extremes Are Made Of” »
MOVIE REVIEW
District 9 (2009)
TriStar Pictures
“District 9” couldn’t have come at a better time. For a science-fiction genre that’s been noticeably stagnant in recent years, this feature-film debut from writer-director Neill Blomkamp feels like the start of something big, a seismic shift in both public attention and filmmaking creativity toward a once-potent landscape inhabited by aliens and flying saucers. Hyperbole is risky business of course, and thrusting such a weighty compliment upon “District 9” could end up being a premature miscalculation. It could earn placement within critics’ top-10 lists and nothing more. Better judgment, however, thinks not.
Continue reading “A Bug’s Strife” »
MOVIE REVIEW
A Perfect Getaway (2009)
Rogue Pictures
There’s a frustrating-beyond-words moment in George A. Romero’s “Diary of the Dead” that broadcasts the cinéma vérité film’s glaring lack of subtlety. In the film's final act, a zombie dressed as a mummy chases a blonde Southern belle through a wooded area — a direct reference to a scene from the cameraman's faux student film within the film. As if the viewer can't draw the parallel on his or her own, a lazy bit of dialogue sledgehammers the obvious over heads: “This is just like in your stupid mummy movie!” Cue the collective audience groans.
Writer-director David Twohy’s “A Perfect Getaway” is 90-plus minutes of that. An uneventful killers-in-beautiful-scenery “thriller” that, for no explicable reason, feels the need to telegraph the surprises through its own character dialogue. If the film was impactful as a whole, Mr. Twohy’s partiality to self-reference would soar past attention, ultimately landing as an inconsequential fault within an otherwise taut suspense show — which this is not. “A Perfect Getaway” is gorgeous looking but ultimately sloppy. It’s one of those films that has the potential to inspire audience laughter for all the wrong reasons (see last year’s “The Happening”). Or, the right reasons, perhaps? Mr. Twohy piles on the off-putting moments so high that it’s unclear whether head-shaking snickers are what he desires or not. Whichever the case, “A Perfect Getaway” is hardly worth the deliberation.
Continue reading “Bang, Zoom, Straight to the Lagoon” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Home (2008)
Soda Pictures
Some of you may feel that you live in a noisy neighborhood, but the family at the center of "Home" has really got problems. Its charmingly chaotic abode is located in the French countryside with no other buildings in sight. But sadly, it is also positioned slap bang on the side of a freeway which cuts an asphalt scar through the endless expanse of verdant field. This does not prove too much of an issue at first as the road is disused, work on it being inexplicably abandoned some 10 years before.
The brood – mother, father, two daughters and a son – has spilled out beyond the boundaries of its four walls onto the deserted highway, littering it with domestic debris including toys, white goods and even a satellite dish. This liberal-minded clan is very close. The members hold family meetings in the bathroom while their teenage daughter takes her ablutions. On hot summer evenings – which are plentiful – they sit together on a sofa in the garden watching television like an alfresco Simpsons.
Continue reading “Down That Long, Loathsome Highway” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Julie & Julia (2009)
Jonathan Wenk/Columbia Pictures
“Julie & Julia” has Meryl Streep, solid production values and a vision of New York so lovingly rendered that a rinky-dink apartment over a pizzeria in Queens is transformed into a cozy paradise. It is, in other words, firmly lodged in classic Nora Ephron territory, unfolding with a relentlessly vivid color palette and a decided chick-lit sensibility with wonderful husbands ceaselessly supporting their hardworking wives.
Continue reading “Sleepless in the Kitchen” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Collector (2009)
Liddell Entertainment
Any film that can turn a man’s death – at the claws of multiple bear traps, skull punctured and crushed while knee-caps are split in halves – into an endearing moment is worthy of applause. By that point in “The Collector,” a woman’s eyes and mouth have already been sewn shut, and her husband’s entrails previously emptied out onto a basement floor. The bear trap crushing the guy’s head like a grape, though, proves that “The Collector” has no intention to take the foot off the pedal. Besides, there’s still a hungry German shepherd lurking around, ready to chomp on the first human neck it gets within licking distance.
Continue reading “Breaking and Entering a Torture Chamber” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Fragments (2009)
Peace Arch Entertainment
As far as predictors of quality go, few could be more telling than this: A film stars Forest Whitaker, Kate Beckinsale, Dakota Fanning, Guy Pearce, Jackie Earle Haley and Jennifer Hudson that finds itself dumped into theaters with no advertising or fanfare just days before its DVD release. That’s the case with “Fragments,” one of those suffocating ensemble dramas set in Southern California that weave together a multipartite story in search of a grand societal statement. Australian director Rowan Woods indulges in some sub-subpar “Crash” territory here, with a laughably self-serious narrative that has less to do with reality than histrionics.
Continue reading “Six Degrees of Exasperation” »