August 2006 Archives

Silent Hill

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Snakes on a Plane may be a mediocre, lowbrow fright film, but Silent Hill is something much worse — a laughably pretentious one. Radha Mitchell, an actress who deserves better parts than this, plays Rose, who finds herself stranded in the abandoned town of Silent Hill, West Virginia, searching for her lost daughter.

The Naked Spur

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The_Naked_SpurOf the half-dozen westerns Jimmy Stewart made with ace genre director Anthony Mann in the 1950s, this is widely considered the best. Stewart plays a bounty hunter whose situation gets stickier than expected when he crosses paths with an old prospector (Millard Mitchell) and a shady lieutenant (Ralph Meeker) who's been booted from the cavalry, and his crafty prey (Robert Ryan) tries setting the three men against one another. (Janet Leigh is the tomboy love interest.)

Half Nelson

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Ryan Gosling anchors Half Nelson with a sturdy, utterly credible performance as a crack-addicted Brooklyn schoolteacher struggling to keep his life together. Strung out and depressed, he’s befriended by a student, Shareeka Epps, who’s fighting her own private battle in an environment that offers up drug-dealing as an easy way to exploit your neighbors for easy profits.

Bill Chambers was kind enough to send me word earlier in the summer of an impending exhaustive, four-disc (!) version of Dust Devil coming from Subversive Cinema. (I wrote about this and its predecessor, Hardware, at Cinemarati in December.) You might think the last thing the world needs is a fuggin' four-DVD version of what amounts to a solid B horror movie, cult following or no. But it looks definitive -- sure, it's got the two versions of the film, with audio commentary and a "featurette." But it's also got several unrelated documentaries by director Richard Stanley, on the subjects of Afghanistan, Haitian voodoo, and the search for the Holy Grail. Of course it's possible they all suck. But maybe not. And it can't help but be a big upgrade from the German DVD I picked up at Mondo Kim's on St. Mark's last year. For $29.95, I think I'll take the chance. Scarecrow Video has it listed as a 9/26 release and is taking pre-orders.

Tonight, Friday, August 25, I'll be introducing a showing of Clash of the Titans at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. (No, I don't know what they were thinking, either.)

The museum is on West 17th Street in Chelsea, and is dedicated to art of the Himalayas and surrounding regions. Cool, huh? Clash of the Titans is screening as part of a film series called The Icarus Syndrome, which is tied in to a current exhibition: Take to the Sky: FLYING MYSTICS in Himalayan Art. I don't know a lot about flying mystics, but I'll be talking up Ray Harryhausen for sure, since he's some kind of mystic on his own.

Admission is free with, hey, a $7 bar minimum. I'm not sure whether it's screening on film or video (I suspect the latter) so be warned. Stop by and say hello if you're in the mood. Details at the museum's Web page, linked above.

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Imagine the Japanese unquiet-ghost anthology Kwaidan cross-bred with The Neverending Story and directed by Terry Gilliam. That's the gist of The Great Yokai War, an honest-to-god children's movie from the chameleonic Japanese genre director Takashi Miike. In a little more than two hours, Miike runs roughshod over centuries of Japanese folk tales, spinning a yarn that has a young boy, Tadashi, chosen as the rider of the Kirin -- sort of a cross between a dragon and a unicorn, but also, as the film eventually reminds us, a tasty Japanese brew. He finds himself drawn into the titular war of the Yokai, Japanese spirits that take many radically different forms.

Snakes on a Plane

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OK, nobody was expecting this near-disaster area of a movie to actually be any good -- but at least it doesn't even pretend to be any good. Snakes on a Plane is cheerfully shitty, from the barely-diegetic sex scene that shoves some tits onto the screen to the cheap frights when phony-looking CG snakes explode toward the camera lens. (Why didn't New Line shell out for an Imax 3D version of this one?) The biggest liability may be the tension you can sense between the humble B-movie that was made when New Line wanted a PG-13 trifle, and the significantly cockier picture that was patched together in reshoots after the unprecedented Internet buzz encouraged the studio to forge ahead with an old-fashioned R-rated creature feature. Since most of the really gruesome material takes place in the digital realm, it's easy to imagine how the bulk of the film's graphic violence could be dialed up in the post process. But the film has the feel of a disjointed mix-and-match mess. Because that won't matter to anyone but pointy-headed critics, New Line was quite right to refuse screenings of this to the press. Besides, it's fun to see a more-or-less completely unknown quantity with a noisy crowd on opening night.

Cinematographer Style

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I saw a screening of a new talking-heads documentary called Cinematographer Style last week. I can't offer a general recommendation, since it really is a talking-heads documentary — no movie clips at all — and I know that makes lots of people itch. But it's a very good-looking talking-heads documentary, and it does offer the pleasure of seeing cinematographers (call them "directors of photography" at your own risk) in their native habitat (that is, up on a movie screen) and listening to them go on about their lives and art. It's especially fun in the moments when several of them take control of the shoot, swapping out lenses or lights to make a point. Interviews with something like 110 different cinematographers are compressed into about 96 minutes, so if you do the math you'll see how quickly this thing actually moves. (Vittorio Storaro and Gordon Willis are the real stars of the show.) But if you have a more-than-cursory interest in the art and craft of cinematography, it's worth a look if you get the chance.

359_box_348x490.jpgBecause I'm a big ol' geek, the best news I got all week is that The Double Life of Véronique — the first Krzysztof Kieslowski movie I ever saw (and, probably not coincidentally, my favorite) — is coming to DVD through the auspices of The Criterion Collection. It will have a boatload of extras. My heart leaped into my throat when I saw that someone at Criterionforum.org (second post on this page) had posted a frame grab from an existing (European) Véronique DVD put out by MK2 that had the color all wrong. (I saw it three times on its original theatrical release, and at no point was the image out-and-out green as it seems to be on the MK2 disc.) But I trust Criterion has got it right. (Thanks, Criterion! Usually, I have to break down and buy an import version of a favorite movie before you'll announce its domestic release.)

The Passenger

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Antonioni's Amazing Grace

I can’t remember ever being as bored in a movie theater as I was at an Antonioni film, Red Desert. It was my first week living on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder. I had no friends in town and not a lot of money, and just about the only thing doing for friendless paupers was the International Film Series, admission to which was probably three or four bucks at the time. And the movie was Red Desert.

Whew.

World Trade Center

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Or, Buried Alive on the Fourth of July

wtc_198.jpgIf you're buried alive under a pile of smoldering rubble in an Oliver Stone movie, it seems your salvation may come from one of two places. First, there's Jesus. If he shows up, he may offer to deliver you from suffering, but it will likely mean punching your ticket. Hang on, buddy, because your second saviour is the U.S. Marines. And if the Marines show up, boy howdy are you in good hands. That's the non-ironic gist of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, a conservative yarn of life in these times rife with sentiment and earnestness. I'll go so far as to say the bit with the Marines is a well-timed moment of catharsis in a movie that needs it. It made me smile and laugh out loud in spite of myself. Sometimes, hokum works pretty beautifully. The film's opening is just lovely — a sober collection of shots of New York City, skyline still intact, coming to life in the morning. It reminded me a little of the majestic opening montage of Woody Allen's Manhattan, set to "Rhapsody in Blue," but this version is laced unavoidably with overwhelming sadness.

Miami Vice (2006)

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There’s a scene somewhere in the middle of Miami Vice where Crockett, feeling some oats, sensibly decides to sow them in the direction of Gong Li. They get on a speedboat and whiz off into the ocean blue. You can tell she’s sweet on him, and when she announces she’s taking him to her hang-outs in Havana — Havana! — for mojitos and dancing and maybe something more, suddenly this hard-boiled cop movie inflates with a sense of romantic wonder and possibility. To get on a boat in Miami, tear away from the shore and bounce across the waves, setting a course for Havana?