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Coosa Creek Times, 5-19-2008
By Rick | May 19, 2008
Fernando Meirelles’ Blindnes, a film I’ve been looking forward to, opened the Cannes film festival last week, and the reviews have been mixed. Dave McCoy of MSN movies doesn’t particularly care for it:
What could have been a creepy, intelligent horror/drama is essentially stripped of any humanity and humility because Meirelles chose to populate his meandering film with pretentious symbols instead of flesh-and-blood people (or, at least, fleshed-out characters). And what a cast to castrate.
Xan Brooks of the Guardian kind of likes it:
It’s a devastating bit of work - a cold-eyed portrait of social meltdown that nonetheless shows how catastrophe can bring out the best in people as well as the worst. I could have done without Danny Glover’s sage, hushed narration over every stray moment of quiet, but otherwise this was pretty much spot-on.
Topics: News | 1 Comment »
DVD Spotlight: The Killers
By Rick | May 18, 2008
This Criterion DVD represents a rare opportunity to compare multiple screen adaptations of the same story: Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers. There are three adaptations on this two-disc set: Robert Siodmak’s 1946 Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1958 student film entitled simply The Killers, and Don Siegel’s 1964 adaptation, originally slated to be the first TV movie ever.
To understand the films, you have to know a little about the Hemingway’s short story. He wrote The Killers in 1927, not long after World War I and just at the beginning of the Great Depression. It is a stark and simple tale, very much in line with Hemingway’s tendency to take a slice of life, write about it, and not resolve it, in any obvious way, at least. It begins as two hoods walk into a diner, looking for “the Swede,” who they’re going to kill for no specified reason. After terrifying the diner’s owner and cook and one customer (Hemingway’s Nick Adams in a walk-on), it becomes apparent that the Swede isn’t going to come in for an evening meal, and the hoods leave. While they are looking for him, Adams goes and warns the Swede, who rather than run, seems to calmly accept his fate, and quietly waits for his killers to arrive. And that’s it — we don’t see the Swede killed and we don’t find out what they want him for. The story simply ends.
Topics: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
Impressions of a Naked Army
By Rick | May 17, 2008
Over at Film of the Month Club, they take a movie a month and a bunch of film fans watch it, then they write about it. The idea is to get a little more in depth commentary and discussion going than might be usual in the blogosphere. For its debut, girish (of the blog of the same name) has chosen Kazuo Hara’s documentary The Emperors Naked Army Marches On for our group, ah, critique. It’s about a Japanese World War II veteran (Okuzaki, above) who made it his life’s work to protest Emperor Hirohito’s hegemony and expose atrocities from the war.
I’ve posted this rumination over at that site, which presupposes you’ ve seen the film. If you haven’t, here are some reviews that might help you out:
- Doug Cummings in the middle of the piece at Film Journey.
- Lindsay Nelson’s at Midnight Eye
- Walrus at The Film Walrus
Be sure and check out Film of the Month Club, and if you’re so inclined, participate in the discussion while you’re there.
Topics: Commentary | No Comments »
Review: I’m Not There
By Rick | May 16, 2008
Dig it — over the years, Bob Dylan has had more identities than Madonna. He’s remade himself time and again, first as a folkie, then a nihilistic rocker, then a cowboy-singer, then a Christian, and then back to his Jewish roots. So what we’ll do — this is cool — what we’ll do is make a movie about the man, with all of his personas intact and then — wait for it — we’ll cast it with different actors! And if that’s not innovative enough, one of them will be an eleven-year-old African American and one will be a woman. (Well, Cate Blanchett, anyway.)
That’s the impression I got when I first heard about Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. What an underwhelmingly original idea. And casting Blanchett (as Jude Quinn) and Marcus Carl Franklin (as the eleven year old kid who calls himself Woody Guthrie) seemed like the worst sort of stunt casting. And to tell the truth, it sometimes plays like that as well. Sometimes it feels as if a game of spot the star, or — better — spot the star playing a star. There’s Julianne Moore as Joan Baez (oops, I mean Alice Fabian) and Michelle Williams as an Edie Sedgewick clone. Blanchett’s Quinn is a virtual doppelgänger for Dylan, and her performance is not interpretation but outright imitation. Get it? The character most like Dylan is a woman! Sometimes, it all seems just a little too . . . precious.
Topics: Reviews | 2 Comments »
Boycott Blockbuster!
By Rick | May 13, 2008
So the other day, I walked into my local Movie Gallery, looking for I’m Not There and maybe even The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, both of which I missed because they didn’t play here in the wilds of West Alabama, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a pimply-faced clerk who told me that they were both “Blockbuster Exclusives.” And I said “Oh yeah? Well, I know for a fact that y’all can get the movies by just going out and buying them, or ordering them from friggin’ DVD Planet, for crissake, and thereby serving your valued customers.” And the kid just stared at me, offering no apology or anything, and I went and got Bomb Making 101 from the internet and started tinkering in the basement, and the only thing that kept me from blowing up the nearest Blockbuster — and that pimply-faced kid in the Movie Gallery for good measure — was the thought of prison food and sharing a cell with a guy named Big Bruce.
And you know, I thought I was helping the local economy or something by supporting local merchants and all (or local franchisees at any rate), but if you can’t even get the movies you want to see, what good are they? It’s my opinion that the moves by Blockbuster to corner the market, drive their competitors out of business and — above all — battle Netflix are not only anti-competitive but very bad for us movie fans. I won’t be patronizing Blockbuster any more and will be shifting more and more of my everyday rental of recent movies to Netflix, where both I’m Not There and The Assassination happily await.
And now, for an Onion video that expresses my hopes for the future of Blockbuster:
Topics: Commentary, News | 7 Comments »
Bad News (Maybe) for Indy Fans
By Rick | May 12, 2008
Well, it had to happen — several reviews of Indy’s newest outing have hit the fan, and they aren’t all that pretty. The worst one has been posted at Ain’t It Cool News by someone who calls himself (or herself) ShogunMaster:
. . . this is the Indiana Movie that you were dreading. During the whole of the movie, there was not a single moment that I thought our hero Mr. Jones (actually Colonel Jones as he was a hero in WWII now) was in any sort of peril or even significant inconvenience. In most cases, you were so many steps ahead of the characters that it was really just an arduous wait for them to get through it.
Topics: News | 12 Comments »
Wherefore Art Thou, Blu Ray?
By Rick | May 10, 2008
For cinephiles, the news last week from Criterion that they were coming out with thirteen Blu-ray titles was a mixed blessing at best. With four-hundred-some Criterion titles and counting, the question becomes how many titles will come out in the format and how fast? What will the announcement do for sales of their non-HD titles? Will fans who were contemplating a Criterion purchase now wait in hopes it’ll come out in Blu-ray? What about the titles scheduled for release in SD between now and October? When will they arrive in HD?
For the real fanatics, this move might mean a double dip of monumental proportions. If you talk to the folks at criterionforum.org or their arch-enemies at criterionforum.com, you’ll see that many of them take collecting Criterions seriously. So seriously, in fact, that some of them display the ones they own at the bottom of their posts.
The major problem with Blu-Ray is start-up cost. As of this writing, if you go over to amazon.com and check out their prices, the cheapest standalone player you’ll find is the Sony “Spiderman 3 Limited Edition” at $329. Considering you can get a good SD player for $50, and the number of people with HD TVs is still miniscule, the odds against Blu-Ray gaining a foothold would seem daunting.
Topics: Commentary, News | 7 Comments »
Environmentally Friendly Porn
By Rick | May 7, 2008
Just a quick pointer to some of the most innovative stuff I’ve seen in a while. It’s Green Porno, Isabella Rossellini’s series of eight one-minute spots on the Sundance channel. I especially like the earthworm, but it’s all good. And you can watch them all here. Enjoy!
(thanks to Ted Zee at Big Screen Little Screen)
Topics: News | 2 Comments »
Sometimes a Dance is Just a Dance
By Rick | May 6, 2008
Note: This is part of the Invitation to the Dance Blogathon at Ferdy on Films.
To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a dance is just a dance . . . but sometimes it’s not. And among the more entertaining celluloid examples of when it’s not are by Federico Fellini. Actually, Freud doesn’t quite fit — Fellini was a devotee of Jung, who proposed that our lives are structured by innate archetypes, and that these express themselves in dreams and through the arts. As Fellini’s films became more “Felliniesque,” as they came to derive more and more from his dreams, these archetypal images seemed to gain prominence.
Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in his use of dance, which encodes his versions of the archetypal images to various effect. Here’s a famous example, the dance of Saraghina from 8½:
By the way, you get no extra credit if you guess from which archetype Saraghina is derived. Just for yucks, here’s a send-up of Saraghina’s dance by Dawn French of the British comedy team French and Saunders:
Fellini used type (archetype?) scenes that were repeated in various forms throughout his filmography. In “the nightclub scene,” and it’s variations, he indulged his Janus-headed envy/contempt relationship with the Roman glitterati. Here’s an hilarious example–my favorite–from Nights of Cabiria. Note the total dissipation, the total boredom of the night-club denizens (including the guy who spends the whole time picking lent off his jacket). Compare it to the life-force embodied in the joyous dance of the prostitute Cabiria (Giulietta Masina). Fellini’s love and respect for the marginalized are nowhere more sharply delineated. [The nightclub scene is in the first two minutes or so of the clip, but by all means watch the entire thing -- you can never get enough Fellini.]
Finally, the nightclub scene from La Dolce Vita, featuring Anita Ekberg as the archetypal figure of woman and Fellini avatar Marcello Mastroianni. The dancing is highly stylized, and the Americans are appropriately gauche and over-the-top. Only Marcello is cool, at least on the surface, though we know he’s dying to bed Ekberg all the while. Enjoy!
Topics: Commentary, Federico Fellini | 3 Comments »
Invitation to the Dance Is Off and Dancin’
By Rick | May 4, 2008
The Invitation to the Dance Blogathon over at Ferdy on Films, etc. is off! All dance, all the time — or at least now through May 10th. This post of mine on Werckmeister Harmonies has been listed, and I’m working on something else for later in the week. Meantime, drop on over to Ferdy’s place and peruse all the offerings. Be there or be square (dance, that is).
Topics: News | No Comments »