MOVIE REVIEW
(Untitled) (2009)
Parker Film Company/Samuel Goldwyn Films
What is art? Can a thumbtack on an otherwise blank wall be a picture? Can someone kicking a bucket filled with chains be music? Most of us with great reason would say no. It takes more inherent talent to make art. Listen to “Trout Mask Replica” by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band — 58th on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums, published in 2003. You may think there’s lots of improvising going on, but these songs were notated and practiced in order to be played the exact same way every time. Crazy, huh? Go to any modern art gallery, and you will more often than not see an entire display of large white canvases with one red dot or some variation thereof. It can’t be art if every single painting looks the same, right? Now, listen to Chuck Berry’s “School Days” and “No Particular Place to Go.” Pretty similar, yes? And have you seen Monet’s haystack series — different times of the day and year, but the same ol’ haystack?
Continue reading “Siblings Rival in Tortured Artistry” »
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” »