27 posts tagged “movies”
EASTERN PROMISES, David Cronenberg
Slick, deft, and efficient, but Eastern Promises lacks a heart to propel it through its grimy plot. The emotions are hollow, the motivations perfunctory, and the end product is surprisingly bloodless for such a gory film. Watch it for the gorgeous cinematography and Viggo Mortensen's messianic bone structure.
TRAFFIC (2000). Another Brilliant Lesson in the following. Do not watch The Wire before watching any other film about the war on drugs, the drug industry, or just a straight-up yeyo part-ay because it will make the film seem: (a) pre-chewed, (b) condescending, (c) wickedly and oafishly unsophisticated, (d) heavy-handed and maudlin, and (e) laughable. I watched The Wire.
FINAL JUDGMENT: Not truly terrible, but made all the more worse for the sad, deflated expectations. Catch it on USA and watch between episodes of America's Best Dance Crew.
CLUELESS (1995). THIS WAS FUCKING BRILLIANT. Seriously, why don't they make movies like this anymore? Shines supernovas brighter than Mean Girls (which was funny, but still somewhat sandy and bland) with its tart and sly humor. It's wonderful to find a script that scalds with love and a group of actresses that are totally in on the joke*.
* Trite MTV ending and slightly icky romance aside.
Fargo (1996). Oh, that was pitch-perfect. Absolutely sincere and patient and wonderfully made. In some ways, I prefer it to even No Country. No Country was weighed down by its grim spectres, but Fargo has complete free range and the purity of its plot, its characters, and its dialogue ring through each and every scene. And best of all, everything is so completely seamless, no rude announcements of the effort that went into the production, just the smooth, confident beauty of the finished product.
Also known as the day I realized that I AM ABSOLUTELY SPINELESS.
I Am Legend; Richard Matheson
I Am Legend is a short piece of clockwork terror. The protagonist, Robert Neville, is the last man on earth (or so it says on the back cover). And he is not having a good time of it. Neville is frustrated, crippled, and devastated by wild swings of mood and desperation; he is also our only guide into a terrifying apocalypse. Neville is neither reliable nor very sympathetic, but he is very effective and his foibles are very refreshing.
I Am Legend has none of the hallmarks of a classic horror story. There is no main hero, and there are no real solutions. Neville survives out of doggedness and tenacity but he is essentially a brute with no pretenses of sophistication. The other paltry characters are buffeted about by the whims of the plot. There are no real explanations. Patches of science and a few meager memories dart through the narrative, but more often than not, they're quick glimpses yielding little illumination. When they do appear, they're frequently clouded by frustration and terror. And finally, the terror is a different breed. Slow, strangling, and unrelenting, the tension builds, existential and unabated, through the end of the novel; there are few staccatos of action or gore.
There are a few faults: I suspect that my biology professor has donned a sack cloth and is now bombed out on Listerine, and Matheson's writing belies a sort of nervous, undisciplined energy, punctuated by descents into unrepentant pulp. However, in short, I Am Legend, is a strangely poetic and gimlet-eyed look into a real world with real people plagued by an ancient superstition. A final round of applause for its ending, which is very grim and completely (tragically) inevitable.
No Country for Old Men (2007). Locates your heartstrings with surgical precision, and takes its wicked, wicked time snipping them one by one. No Country is very, very quiet, very, very methodical, and very, very dangerous. It breathes with a terrifying, unstoppable confidence, and thrums with unhurried tension, unbridled by histrionics and glitz.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to buy myself a pacemaker off of eBay.
Resident Evil (2002) For all the jackboot critical snobbery eviscerating its reputation, Resident Evil is surprisingly grim, tense, and excellently executed. Granted, it uses flashbacks like a crutch, makes a mockery of science, and lacks any flights of scriptorial wit, but damn, it's completely effective and masterfully confident. I mean, I don't know about you but I flinched.
MINUTE 24:41: OK SO BASICALLY ALL I EVER WANTED TO SEE IN MY ENTIRE LIFE WAS MILLA JOVOVICH KICKING A DOG THROUGH A PLATE GLASS WINDOW.
CONCLUSIONS:
I. MILLA JOVOVICH IS A STUD.
II.Michelle Rodriguez is Vice Stud.
III. James Purefoy, I saw your wang once in Rome*! Call me!
IV. Eric Mabius, no worries, I think they've got a cream for what you have! Keep up the good work in Ugly Betty, but lay off the hair gel.
V. Red Queen, you're the finest bitch alive.
* Lie, I saw it many times. Nice.
AMERICAN GANGSTER (Ridley Scott)
Bled of its original mean, grimy charm and thoroughly pre-chewed, Ridley Scott's version of Frank Lucas' life is a candy-floss version of Gangster 101. Lucas's story is heavily bruised by its meat-handed Hollywood treatment - a ferocious gangster defanged by a motion-picture neatness, with all the schemes carefully mapped out for what Scott has to consider the most retarded audience in history.
Nevertheless, despite its sometimes unbearable shlock and its stingingly unsophisticated treatment of what could have been a gorgeous gangster epic, American Gangster manages to win and keep your attention with gratuitous acts of violence and Denzel Washington's perfect, Colgate teeth.
Watch The Wire instead.
NOTE: I've gotta say, I love the whole undersaturated, 70's slide-show look of the entire movie. What can I say, I LOVE THE PORNSTACHE. Also - the soundtrack is a wet dream of trumpets and soul.
Little Miss Sunshine (2006).
Sweet at its core, but flimsy. Mistakes dysfunction for plot and quirks for character.
Lucky for it, I'm a sucker for dance montages.
Solaris (1972).
Gorgeously and meticulously filmed, with careful attention to detail and bulging with a surprising number of petty but horrific visual details. However, fundamentally flawed in that it attempts to plumb the depth of the human soul with a cast of underdeveloped, borderline inhuman automatons of philosophy and metaphyics.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988):
THE PREMISE: A woman's lover leaves her with no explanation, and she steadily attempts to contact him with growing desperation.
THE CONTINUATION: Fuck the premise.
PROCEED TO: Diverge wildly with glamour and spirit.
Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown had all the hallmarks of a potentially unbearable and melodramatic film. Exotic foreign pedigree! Impeccable critical praise! The promise of mental instability! Baby mama drama! But Almodovar neatly bypasses all expectations to create a sort of super-glossy, candy-dipped, mega-telenova comprised of a revolving (and interesting!) cast and a mad-cap plot. Women on the Verge explodes with exuberance, but even the wildest moments are tempered by Almodovar's steady and sure direction. While Almodovar likes to play on the edges, the film never veers out of control, and the effect is more of a well-coordinated explosion. Furthermore, the movie has a finer grain than any old slapstick comedy; there is a well of bitterness and resignation, that gives some of the laughs a noticeably darker edge and Women on the Verge a richer overall tone.
Women on the Verge is far from a perfect film, but its flaws seem more like personal quibbles, and they're quickly overwhelmed by the sheer energy of the final product.
Oldboy (2003). After being locked away in a private prison for fifteen years, Oh Daesu seeks vengeance. There is a bacchanal of blood, gore, and sex.
Oldboy is a virulently purple melodrama, completely lacking in any breed of subtlety, and enamored with its own chop-shlocky violence and twisty, sordid plotline. It skimps on detail, oozes from genre to genre, and takes a Mike Tyson sized chomp out of feminism's ear*. Everything comes to a head near the last minutes of the movie where Daesu's impromptu skit as someone's "bitch" loses sight of its goals and the movie stops skirting the edge and completely devolves into a cheap and tawdry B-movie. However, all in all, Oldboy is deadly and effective, holding you by the collar and dragging you through a grim, seedy, and very visceral horror show.
*I'm still applying for my misogynist badge, but this movie even made me wince at some of the tin-eared, clammy dialogue that the female characters have to say.
