Not Coming to a Theater Near You
There are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair.
There are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair.
Yongary, Monster from the Deep may be a self-conscious Godzilla knock-off, but it still finds room for such unexpected pleasures as Yongary, after being exposed to an itch-inducing ray, bursting into a dance routine set to surf music. Such scenes raise questions as to how much freedom does a genre have, and whether its conventions constrict the narrative or offer more avenues for exploration and experiment?
by Cullen Gallagher | Source: Sinister Cinema DVD
30 Nov 2009 1:24 AM | Submit Comment
While still short of the decade-old high water mark of Rushmore, Fantastic Mr. Fox is Wes Anderson’s first film since that one impossible to dismiss as “flawed” — a good thing, because when you’re as poised and elegant a filmmaker as Anderson, you can only have so many interesting failures under your belt before you start to tip over. Put simply, the movie works: if absolute control over his actors and the physical environment is what Anderson needs to deliver as pitch-perfect a comedy as this, then he should make only animated films from here on out. (OK, that’s a bit unfair: I did miss the human element a little, especially since Anderson seemed to be allowing it more breathing room on his last, underrated feature, The Darjeeling Limited.) From the gorgeous autumnal backgrounds to the clever, uncloying characterizations to the lively musical score (handled this time by Alexandre Desplat, who cooks up something one part Mothersbaugh, one part Morricone, and one part Wicker Man), Fantastic Mr. Fox is a highly crafted entertainment that embraces what Anderson does best while avoiding the arty longueurs that have bogged down his recent films.
But, true to the founding father of the talking fox genre (Jean de La Fontaine), Anderson’s expert whimsy also does service as allegory: Mr. Fox can be thought of as the leader of a terrorist cell, or a politician heading down the road of mutually assured destruction, or even as an avatar of the director himself, a desperate-to-impress neurotic disguised as a devil-may-care, daredevil aesthete. The result is a movie emotionally complex enough to give the children who (hopefully) will be awed by its visuals something to aspire to in their repeat viewings. I wish this had come out when I was a kid.
by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
27 Nov 2009 9:00 PM | Comments (5)
Watching The Transporter, I kept thinking about the connection between the Action movie and the Slapstick comedy. Both rely on the repeated manipulation of space and objects: the finding of secondary (and even tertiary) uses that transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In one scene, Jason Statham first tips over barrels of oil to make his opponents slip and fall, and then reuses the oil to make his own body slippery enough to glide along the floor and (literally) through his opponents’ fingers. He then snaps the pedals off of a bicycle and locks his feet into the clips, allowing him to stand in the oil spillage without falling down. (The bicycle, of course, is recycled as a weapon.) Oil is used one final time in the scene by Statham’s opponents, who throw it into the ocean and light it on fire in hopes of killing the submerged Statham. Three uses of a single object (oil) beyond its intended, utilitarian purpose. The frequency with which the characters fall on their asses in this scene can also be viewed as the Action equivalent of the “pratfall.”
by Cullen Gallagher | Source: 20th Century Fox DVD
25 Nov 2009 10:06 PM | Submit Comment
John Woo’s first film since the hilariously shitty Paycheck finds him back in Asia for the first time since 1992’s Hard Boiled’s grim vision on handover end-times. But Red Cliff finds Woo not navigating the intricate urban milieu of his hometown of Hong Kong, but rather swooping over the broad landscapes of the Mainland. Expurgated from a two-part saga into a rather overstuffed overseas single-parter, the film seems on the surface like a disappointingly impersonal take on the bloated martial-arts blockbuster of which Zhang Yimou is the reining king.
But I’d argue there’s more going on here, particularly in the way Woo pitches dashing HK and Taiwanese superstars like Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro against a Mainland mustache-twirler like Zhang Fengyi. As the unscrupulous Cao Cao, Zhang unleashes a Hero-sized army of 800,000 totally expendable CGI troops against the peaceful Southern and Western Kingdoms, cornering them in Red Cliff, Tony Leung’s pleasant little getaway across the Yangtze.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, though. Certainly, the film doesn’t demand much thought—just an appetite for massive-scale carnage, a taste for strategic meteorology, and a nagging curiosity about just how and where Woo is going to sneak a dove into the mix. Fans will be glad to know that the dove he uses here is commensurate with the film’s budget: it is the most epic goddamn dove sequence of all time.
My full review at Reverse Shot.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Magnet Pictures 35mm Print
24 Nov 2009 5:21 PM | Comments (5)
By the time we see a breakdancing gangster (this is the second episode of breakdancing I’ve seen in a Herzog film), Bad Lieutenant’s extraordinary bizarreness officially suppresses all the skepticism seasoned viewers of les films du cinéma will have going into this one. It remains, however, an experiment, a character study of auspicious ridiculousness. It’s not one for the canon, but even Herzog’s more commercial indulgences make for a worthwhile watch.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: 35mm print
24 Nov 2009 9:52 AM | Comments (2)
If this were about any other band I’d be using this space to express disdain for all the narcissism on display. But it’s not. And, beginning with the legendary opening chord, I’m immediately hoodwinked by its many charms.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Miramax Films 35mm print
24 Nov 2009 9:50 AM | Submit Comment
Swaggering about with a galvanizing mix of black metal and ambient electronic music, passages of no dialogue whatsoever, and a bowel movement, Tony Stone’s Viking home movie remains one of the most audacious films of the past few years.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: 35mm print
24 Nov 2009 9:47 AM | Submit Comment
Aleksandr Sokurov’s still, breathless film about Emperor Hirohito is a portrait in grey smoke and vague, delicate sounds. From inside the Emperor’s colorless laboratory of a palace, the distant cries of poverty and displacement and the low rumble of mechanized destruction cannot be heard above the tick and whirr of recording devices, preserving the movements and observations of the great men of history.
Of course, Sokurov plays this situation for its irony, casting a curious, antic Issey Ogata as the cloistered, loopy leader of Japan, who makes fishy faces and ponders scrapbook images of Marlene Dietrich like a teenager in love. Furtive and boyish, Ogata’s Hirohito becomes downright pitiable as the Emperor must concede his country’s defeat, his decorum and pageantry pitted against the red-meat practicality of MacArthur. But this is nothing compared to his final transition from Emperor to simple human: after a lifetime of deification as the rising sun of his land, this concession comes hardest of all.
The Sun plays at New York City’s Film Forum through Tuesday, December 1.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Lorber Films 35mm Print
18 Nov 2009 12:02 AM | Submit Comment
One of the forgotten aspects of the seventies is the prevalence of Christian eschatology in American pop culture. Events such as the oil crisis, Watergate and Three Mile Island caused people to lose their faith in economics, politics and science, respectively, and a large number of Americans began looking to religion to find a definitive source of meaning. Christian eschatologist Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth was highest selling non-fiction book of the 1970s, leading to a psuedo-documentary film version narrated by Orson Welles.
The Late Great Planet Earth begins with a sequence that has been made ironic by the passage of time. Angry villagers chase a prophet onto a cliff, pelting him with stones until he plunges to his death. His crime? His prophecies didn’t come true. In 2009 we are long overdue for many of the global catastrophes that Lindsey depicts in his film and advancing technology and changing global politics have rendered some of his predictions impossible.
The film is still greatly effective if not terrifying in parts. Most chilling is the prediction of a virus that sounds unmistakably like AIDS a full two years before the CDC would recognize the disease. Other topics discussed in the film are still plausible, some even more likely now than in the seventies. To his — and the filmmakers’ — credit, Lindsey obtained interviews with respected figures from the scientific and political worlds; a fact that separated his film from the legions of other “docsploitation” works that prophesied the end of the world in the 1970s.
In addition to the few nuggets of plausibility that exist in The Late Great Planet Earth, the film has obtained a new relevance in modern America. Eschatology and end-times prophecies have returned to our cinematic consciousness in a large way due to recent global events. Though speculative documentaries are now solely the domain of television, seven of the twenty-five highest grossing films of 2009 feature some type of massive global destruction or end time scenario. Still to come is the much-hyped 2012, which is based on an apocalypse scenario from Mayan eschatology.
It is likely that audiences find a sense of comfort by using eschatological cinema as an avenue to explore their anxiety about the world through the safety of entertainment. One would hope that the recent popularity of such themes would cause a revival of the last batch of eschatological films like The Late Great Planet Earth. Perhaps then audiences could take comfort in the fact that pronouncements of the end of the world have always been wrong. So far, at least.
by David Carter | Source: DVD
11 Nov 2009 11:15 PM | Submit Comment
This weekend, the Brattle’s screening some of the more notable episodes of The Twilight Zone on occasion of the program’s 50th anniversary. Refer to this page for remarks on other episodes as the weekend progresses.
Relatedly, entire episodes are available for free at CBS.com: cbs.com/classics/the_twilight_zone
Barbara Jean Trenton, a former Hollywood starlet, resorts her mornings, afternoons, and evenings to watching the films in which she starred, years before. She’s seated just beside the projector, a drink in hand, and the drapes are pulled shut. She’s only interested in her past career, and in reducing any acknowledgement of the present. She sits in the dark, laughing and drinking cocktails, until the next day occasions the same agenda.
“The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” like many great episodes of The Twilight Zone, is drawn from common neuroses. Barbara stubbornly resigns to the fear that the hallmarks of her youth will remain unparalleled for the rest of her life—she is socially debilitated by nostalgia. She receives a visit from an old friend, a former costar, and is at first enthralled, making herself up in a fashion that makes her look noticeably younger. When her guest arrives, Barbara’s shocked; he looks old, and it frightens her.
The episode concludes in a characteristic twist, but this twist doesn’t serve to recontextualize Barbara’s nostalgia in as much as it functions merely to conclude the proceedings. It’s something of a cop-out for a tragic, irresolvable condition.
This is one of those episodes you’re familiar with even if you haven’t seen it: our lowly, bookish protagonist, Henry Bemis, lives in a world of regular oppressions. His job is mindless, his home life dispassionate, and he’s a target of scrutiny for virtually everyone he knows, solely because he loves to read. I reiterate: Henry loves to read. Poetry, newspapers, magazines, classic literature, book spines, campaign buttons. A printed page of most any sort is to him as necessary as air. When he’s not permitted to read, which is the case at both home and work, his eyes dart about as if he can no longer hold his breath.
An H-bomb will find Henry to be its sole survivor in the episode’s second half, setting up what is without argument one of the most cruelly ironic twist endings in all of fiction.
The hitchhiker of the title is a ghoulishly omnipresent but otherwise unintimidating individual who Nan, the perky blond en route from New York to California, spots from town-to-town. She is bothered by this man, even though he says nothing more than “Going West?” He’s just plain creepy, one of a legion of anonymous, looming figures that is The Twilight Zone’s stock and trade.
Poor Nan senses something that we don’t initially, so her haste in speeding away from him – often veering blindly toward the shoulder – doesn’t seem justified. But like many characters in The Twilight Zone, she clearly senses her inevitable doom.
The bulk of “The Eye of the Beholder” pivots around a young woman, Janet, who’s entire head is curiously wrapped in bandages. She longs to look “normal,” to be able to partake in even the most mundane social interactions, to invisibly fit in. You’re immediately sympathetic to her. Her desperation is such that you’re equipped to accept her once those bandages are removed with suspenseful deliberation.
“The Eye of the Beholder” has one of those classic Twilight Zone twist endings, and it’s calibrated so well – relishing every single second leading up to the revelation of Janet’s unbandaged face – that you forgive its predictability.
The Mr. Dingle of the title is a belittled, stuttering vacuum salesman who seems to regularly find himself involved in petty barroom conflicts he had no part in stirring. He’s asked who he favors in a ball game, for example, and neither answer is satisfactory; he’ll get knocked out either way by one of his fellow barflies. Moments after Dingle’s reliable nonviolence is established two denizens of Mars enter, both enclosed in a single metal body, and bestow upon little Dingle the strength of five-hundred men. (The Martians’ entrance in this episode is among my favorite Twilight Zone moments. Conveniently, I’ve only located this clip in Spanish.)
Dingle takes to this newfound ability cautiously, and is kind to demonstrate it to any passerby. In short order, he’s making headlines, and interviewed on television. Naturally he’s ingratiated by the attention he hasn’t received before. It transforms him into an exhibitionist, culminating in his able reciprocation of his bully’s bullying, lifting him into the air and spinning him around with one arm. The alien visitors perceive this behavior skeptically, as Dingle fails to use his strengths for the good of mankind.
In an uncharacteristically long introduction, Rod Serling describes Peaksville, Ohio, the last town left in the entire world. Everything has been taken away – “the automobiles, the electricity, the machines” – by a monster, manifested in the form of a young boy. This monster can read minds, and he stares at the remaining denizens of Peaksville with quiet menace. They respond by contriving smiles and reassurances that all is well.
“It’s a Good Life” is as strong a parable of oppression as I’ve seen in The Twilight Zone, in which scenarios of oppression or doom are mainstays. This episode is particularly remarkable as it offers no resolution to Peaksville’s terror. Its inhabitants will continue to suppress their dissatisfactions because an attempt to correct them is a risk. The story includes one such risk, and the result of this mercurial resistance especially unnerving.
“Once Upon A Time” stars Buster Keaton, as a Woodrow Mulligan, in his only appearance in The Twilight Zone, and it’s replete with moments that exhibit the actor’s unique prowess. Roughly half of it is shot in the manner of a silent film, and these portions, however calibrated to Keaton’s performance, are fantastic: it opens in 1890, with Keaton – in his 60s, he’s at his grumpiest – reacting to the annoyances all around him. These reaction shots display his breadth in only a handful of frames, ranging from perturbance to frustration of the highest order.
Mulligan dons a time helmet and is transported to the 20th century – the bulk of this episode concerns Keaton’s plight to return to the 1800s – and this portion is told with live sound. Seeing Keaton speak, seeing him move within a frame rate that doesn’t noticeably flicker… it’s all peculiar, and this peculiarity compliments his endeavor to return home.
A woman named Wanda hides fearfully in her tenement apartment, peering out from the darkness – she apparently has neither electricity nor a telephone – to the street, careful to obscure her face from whoever may peer in. She hears a scuffle outside, and suddenly a voice right outside her door—a man has been shot, and he is in dire need of help.
Wanda’s superstitions are acute, which is atypical of other characters in The Twilight Zone, many of whom seem oblivious to any supernatural presence. She’s terrified of death, she never leaves her apartment, and she never lets anyone in. For her to live, theoretically, she must absolve herself from any single other person, for fear that that person is a manifestation of death.
Death will find his way in, inevitably, in the form of the wounded man outside her door (a very young and very dapper Robert Redford). The moment she realizes this is potently tragic: Wanda’s face, which is up to this moment strained in a permanent expression of distrust, loosens. Her gaze drops downward, and she frowns. She’s failed to preserve herself any longer—and it’s at this moment that she’s freed – for likely the first time in her life – from the oppressions she’s willingly imposed upon herself.
Earth has been visited by the Kanamits, a race of aliens who promise their intentions to serve man in an accordingly-titled tome they bring with them. At a summit of representatives from various countries a Kanamit is present. He speaks telepathically, involuntarily supporting the consensus that something about all this is discomfortingly amiss…
This Kanamit is portrayed by Richard Kiel (more famously known as the Bond villain Jaws), and he leers quietly over the suspicious earthlings. Despite this suspicion, he gains the trust of many people, and in short order many of them are boarding a spaceship to his home planet, oblivious to the dual meaning of the verb “serve.”
This episode is a now legendary work of fiction in my upbringing. Even if it now only retains a fraction of its potency as horror, it possesses a certain cachet that few other films do: at one point in time, this episode was without hesitation one of the scariest things I’d ever seen.
It’s now probably one of the most familiar episodes of The Twilight Zone, one whose revelations are no longer shocking, and also one that’s flawed by its datedness (the climax is enabled by William Shatner procuring a gun from another passenger on the bedeviled airplane). In watching this again, my appreciation is compelled as much by the truly suspenseful direction – courtesy Richard Donner – as it is by the nostalgia it ably resurrects.
Talky Tina is her name, a speaking doll who delivers threats to Erich, the stepfather of Tina’s owner. This is far less menacing than the ventriloquist segment in Dead of Night, which I saw for the first time only recently, but the outcome is less fantastical. “Living Doll” is as much a story about domestic conflict as it is about a supernatural doll, even though it’s more lauded for the latter. The doll manipulates Erich, exploiting his insensitivity as a surrogate father.
“Night Call,” however stalwart an entry in the Twilight Zone’s compendious library of ghost stories, is more aptly a story of a woman’s nostalgia. Her name is Elva, she’s a cripple, and spends her waking hours knitting or sipping tea with her nurse. This is until a requisite dark and stormy night produces increasingly frequent telephone calls. She answers them responsibly, even though the ghoulish voice on the other end can only muster a drawn out “h… eee… l… o…”
Elva’s naturally creeped the fuck out by this predatory murmuring, and insists that her nurse listen in on some of these calls. The voice never addresses the nurse in another of The Twilight Zone’s trademark conceits: that the wondrously bizarre things that happen in it are often only perceivable by individual people. Elva’s paranoia is of a more proactive sort, so instead of retreating from her fears she confronts them forthright. This entails a drive to the cemetery, coincidentally where the telephone lines were severed during the aforementioned storm, plopping one cord straight into the grave of her former fiancé.
“Night Call” is no longer a ghost story at this instant, when Elva begins describing her relationship with her fianc&eacue;, which concluded in a car accident that took his life and left her without the use of her legs. She returns home and immediately addresses her phone, desperate for the voice on the other end.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: projected DVD
09 Nov 2009 6:09 PM | Submit Comment
Movies have a hard time with drugs. Anyone who has seen “Wet Hot American Summer” knows that the descent-into-sweating-madness story arc of your typical “drug movie” is played out to the point of self-parody. Most writers end up closer to “Reefer Madness” than they do to anything like a realistic depiction of drugs and drug users. So the stubbornly (if self-consciously) dualistic and subdued writing and performances of “Half Nelson” are refreshing almost to the point of being startling. When you say “crackhead,” most movies give you some sort of hyperactive psychopath. “Half Nelson” gives us an earnest, confused, exhausted, fractured real person. Even without the sensitivity to race, character, and story, this realism alone deserves kudos.
by Katherine Follett | Source: ThinkFilm DVD
02 Nov 2009 11:35 AM | Submit Comment
