Certainly Tony Scott’s best movie since Enemy of the State, and probably since the Tarantino-scripted True Romance (or maybe Crimson Tide?), Deja Vu is a surprisingly engaging story of voyeurism, obsession, and a very odd complication in an unusual romantic relationship. Denzel Washington stars as an ATF agent investigating the aftermath of a bombed ferry in post-Katrina New Orleans. The job becomes personal after the body of a beautiful woman, badly burned and coated with explosive residue, washes ashore, and as Washington becomes consumed with her case.
January 2007 Archives
The brutally violent 1986 B-movie The Hitcher starred Rutger Hauer as a murderous roadside psychopath and C. Thomas Howell as the young motorist who gets caught up in a bloody cat-and-mouse game leading him to increasingly dark places. It earned an overnight reputation for its screenwriter, a Pittsburgh-born 25-year-old named Eric Red, whose story was blunt but fiendishly disturbing.
Patrick Marber shovels pages of voiceover into Judi Dench's lap and somehow she makes them sound brilliant and scabrous. Trouble sets in when the schoolmarmish Barbara (Dench) first goes to dine with the free-spirited Sheba (Cate Blanchett), as director Richard Eyre (Stage Beauty) aligns the performances in such an awkward clash of personalities that it's hard to imagine any kind of friendship would bloom, even the twisted, one-sided one seen here. The reliable ice queen Blanchett can't come up with a schoolboy-shagging character that makes any sense and the cascading score by Philip Glass ratchets up the sense of lurid melodrama far beyond what's supported in the story. (I actually thought to myself, “Somebody better get a knife in the back before this thing is over.”) Eyre doesn't contribute a lot in the way of cinematic style beyond putting Chris Menges behind the camera and letting him do his thing, and the character relationships generally feel arbitrary. The climax arrives so quickly that I was still waiting for the final act to begin when the film’s obvious coda hit the screen. And yet there is something compelling about the proceedings -- judging from the gales of tittering laughter originating from the last few rows of my press screening, this could have an exceptionally long shelf life as a camp classic, something I don't think the filmmakers were striving for. C+
Tom Tykwer is not a favorite -- I liked Run Lola Run well enough on a single viewing, but watching it a second time was an exercise in diminishing returns, and I had little use for The Princess and the Warrior. So I had written this project off long ago, despite the fact that the novel by Patrick Süskind is among my very favorite books. What a surprise, then, in the opening reel. The Dogville flashbacks inspired by the (re)use of John Hurt as a sardonic narrator were a little disorienting, but what was up on screen was a rich and putrid vision of 18th Century France, resplendent in colorful detail and redolent with the kind of grunge you'd expect to see slathered across the set dressing in a Monty Python movie. You could almost — yes — smell it.
If you find yourself walking through midtown Manhattan after dark during the next month, I'd encourage you to take a detour into the sculpture garden behind the Museum of Modern Art (enter from 54th Street), where a number of short films made by Doug Aitken are being projected simultaneously onto various glass facades of the building from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. every night through February 12. (There's also a projection on the front wall of the museum, on 53rd Street, and another on the wall of the nearby American Museum of Folk Art.) The project is known as Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers.
Well, I'll be damned. It looks like Kirby Dick's little movie on the ratings system may have done some good.
Thai director Wisit Sasanatieng revisited the cinema of his youth in Tears of the Black Tiger, a dizzy mash-up of postmodern genre picture and detached melodrama. The genre in this case is the western, which he tackles in full-on Sergio Leone style, including iconic shoot-outs, flamboyant stylization and a faux-Morricone score. There are signals throughout that we’re not meant to take much of this seriously. One of the villains has a pencil-thin mustache that appears to have been cut from construction paper and glued crookedly onto his face. (I felt like the filmmaker was sitting in the chair next to me, gently nudging me in my gut with his elbow every so often to make sure I knew he was making fun.)
I don’t know where you live, but the weather here in New York is "unseasonably mild." (Temperatures in the 50s, no snow as of January 4 for the first time in freaking recorded history — a real climate-change scenario.) Coincidentally, “unseasonably mild” also describes moviegoing over the last couple of months, as the Oscar bombs dropped by the studios in the year-end run up to awards season have detonated with a series of wet thuds. Your mileage may vary, but I’ve been decidedly underwhelmed by the likes of Letters From Iwo Jima, Notes on a Scandal, and even the seeming sure thing that was Pan’s Labyrinth (to be fair, I’ve never really been on Guillermo del Toro’s wavelength). Among studio Oscar contenders, the only satisfactory hype machines seem to be The Departed, which lived up to advance billing and is only now crawling into the awards spotlight and sniffing the air, and Dreamgirls, which I simply don’t feel like dragging ass out to see. (I wasn’t invited to an advance screening, and the ridiculous $25 ticket price for the film’s limited engagement at the Ziegfeld ensured that I wasn’t going to catch it in time to have an opinion before the wide release anyway — by the time Christmas Day rolled around, I figured anything I might have to say was likely already superfluous beneath the thunderous volume of the Hudson rocks/Beyoncé sux consensus.)
The best Oscar bait I saw was Peter O’Toole’s performance in Venus — I was very glad to have caught that at a press screening, because I’m doubtful I would have had the inclination to catch up with the one about the old man wooing the very young woman in the year-end rush of prestige pics. (Also, did anyone at all end up seeing The Good Shepherd, which was partially shot in my neighborhood?) Bilge Ebiri recently opined that this sudden flood of wannabe “quality” pictures at the end of the year has the unfortunate effect of reinforcing the status quo, since some folks end up so busy that it’s easier to take cues from (and therefore reinforce) the building groupthink rather than apply one’s self to a thoughtful study of the year that was.
I'll confess that I was a bit annoyed when the film I had decided was the closest thing to perfect I saw all year suddenly became the critics' darling in highbrow end-of-the-year polls. I knew the reviews were good, but I hadn't realized they were quite that good. Anyway, there it is — uncompromised and uncompromising, and never less than absorbing over a two-and-a-half-hour running time, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is officially The Best Thing I Saw All Year. And there were some other good ones, too.
From the opening scenes, it’s clear that Venus intends a bracing unsentimentality in its depiction of aging geezers on the London thespian scene. Peter O’Toole’s Maurice isn’t one of those stock characters, like the Lovable Codger or the Misanthropic Coot, that we know from sweet Britflicks about aging gracefully in a life begun at 70. He’s elegant and feeble and inappropriately randy. He speaks and smiles with a long-practiced elegance of performance. He navigates his surroundings with confidence, but also with the sense that the world has started to move a little out of focus. And he walks like it hurts. This film even smells like old people.
Easy to watch and hard to shake, Children of Men is an action-adventure film/socio-political nightmare. The fuel that makes the engine run is a dystopian conceit about human infertility on a sudden, species-wide scale — and the violence and despair that ensues. The opening sequence depicts a terrorist bombing of a coffee shop, followed by a woman wandering out of the smoking rubble carrying her severed arm, just before the title card appears on screen.
• The Orphanage (Bayona, 2007) B
• Juno (Reitman, 2007) B
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Burton, 2007) B+
• Enchanted (Lima, 2007) B-
• Atonement (Wright, 2007) B-
• There Will Be Blood (P.T. Anderson, 2007) A-
• Margot at the Wedding (Baumbach, 2007) B+
• The Golden Compass (Weitz, 2007)
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Schnabel, 2007) B
• Revolver (Ritchie, 2007) D
• No Country for Old Men (Coen and Coen, 2007) B+
• Beowulf (Zemeckis, 2007) C+
• P2 (Khalfoun, 2007) C+
• Lions For Lambs (Redford, 2007) C-
• Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Lumet, 2007) C+
• American Gangster (Scott, 2007) B+
• Redacted (De Palma, 2007) C
• Lynch (blackANDwhite, 2007) D
• Lars and the Real Girl (Gillespie, 2007) C+
• Dan in Real Life (Hedges, 2007) B-
• The Darjeeling Limited (Anderson, 2007) B
• Gone Baby Gone (Affleck, 2007) A-
• Michael Clayton (Gilroy, 2007) B+
• The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominik, 2007) A-
• Day Night Day Night (Loktev, 2006) B+
• Spider Baby (Hill, 1964; rel. 1968) A-
• In the Valley of Elah (Cronenberg, 2007) C+
• The Brave One (Jordan, 2007) C+
• The Kingdom (Berg, 2007) C
• Shoot 'Em Up (Davis, 2007) C+
• The Feast of Love (Benton, 2007) B-
• Into the Wild (Penn, 2007) A-
• Halloween (Zombie, 2007) C-
• The Last Winter (Fessenden, 2006)
• Run, Fatboy, Run (Schwimmer, 2007) C+
• 3:10 to Yuma (Mangold, 2007) B
• The Invasion (Hirschbiegel, 2007) D
• Exiled (To, 2006) B
• Rush Hour 3 (Ratner, 2007) C-
• Stardust (Vaughn, 2007) B+
• El Cantante (Ichaso, 2006) C-
• The Bourne Ultimatum (Greengrass, 2007) A-
• The Bourne Supremacy (Greengrass, 2004) B+
• The Simpsons Movie (Boyle, 2007) B-
• Sunshine (Boyle, 2007) B
• Hairspray (Shankman, 2007) B+
• Army of Shadows (Melville, 1969) A
• Rescue Dawn (Herzog, 2006) B-
• Factory Girl (Hickenlooper, 2006) D
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007) B-
• Sicko (Moore, 2007) B+
• Transformers (Bay, 2007) B-
• Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983) A+
• "La Jetée" (Marker, 1962) A+
• Live Free or Die Hard (Wiseman, 2007) C
• 1408 (Hafstrom, 2007) B-
• la Vie en Rose (Dahan, 2007) C+
• Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Story, 2007) C-
• Ratatouille (Bird, 2007) A
• The Boss of It All (von Trier, 2006) B-
• Ocean's Thirteen (Soderbergh, 2007) B
• Hostel Part II (Roth, 2007) D
• Once (Carney, 2007(6?)) B+
• Knocked Up (Apatow, 2007) B
• Manufactured Landscapes (Baichwal, 2006) B+
• Ghosts of Cité Soleil (Leth, 2006) B
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Verbinski, 2007)
• Shrek the Third (Miller, 2007) C-
• Waitress (Shelly, 2007) B
• Georgia Rule (Marshall, 2007) C+
05/08: 28 Weeks Later (Fresnadillo, 2007) A-
03/24: Lucky You (Hanson, 2007) C-
03/24: Spider-Man 3 (Raimi, 2007) C+
03/24: Next (Tamahori, 2007) C-
03/24: Fracture (Hoblit, 2007) B
04/22: Vacancy (Antol, 2007) C+
04/14: Disturbia (Caruso, 2007) B-
04/07: The Reaping (Hopkins, 2007) D
04/06: Grindhouse (Rodriguez, Tarantino, et al, 2007) B+
04/04: Hot Fuzz (Wright, 2007) B
03/31: The Lookout (Frank, 2007) C+
03/24: Shooter (Fuqua, 2007) B
03/18: Premonition (Yapo, 2007) C-
03/18: I Think I Love My Wife (Rock, 2007) B-
03/11: Breach (Ray, 2007) C+
03/08: The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Loach, 2006) B
03/05: 300 (Snyder, 2007) C-
03/04: Black Snake Moan (Brewer, 2007) B+
03/02: Zodiac (Fincher, 2007) A-
02/24: Shut Up & Sing (Kopple and Peck, 2006) B
02/24: The Number 23 (Schumacher, 2007) D
02/23: Flushed Away (Bowers and Fell, 2006) B
02/23: Reno 911: Miami! (Garant, 2007) C+
02/22: Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1977) A
02/18: Severance (C. Smith, 2006)
02/18: Ghost Rider (Johnson, 2007) C-
02/18: Music and Lyrics (Lawrence, 2007) C+
02/11: The Lives of Others (von Donnersmarck, 2006) B+
02/10: The Host (Bong, 2006) B+
02/10: Hannibal Rising (Webber, 2007) D
02/09: Exterminating Angels (Brisseau, 2006) C+
02/07: Black Book (Verhoeven, 2006) B
02/04: Smokin' Aces (Carnahan, 2007) C+
02/03: Open Season (Allers and Culton, 2007) C
02/03: The Messengers (Pang and Pang, 2007) F
01/29: What Love Is (Callahan, 2007) F
01/28: Deja Vu (T. Scott, 2006) B
01/27: Jesus Camp (Ewing and Grady, 2006) B-
01/21: The Protector (Pinkaew, 2005) B-
01/20: The Hitcher (Meyers, 2007) D
01/07: Mouchette (Bresson, 1967) A-
01/07: Alpha Dog (Cassavetes, 2006) C+
01/06: The Illusionist (Burger, 2006) B-
01/06: Cars (Lasseter, 2006)
01/04: Sherrybaby (Collyer, 2006) C-
01/02: Tears of the Black Tiger (Sasanatieng, 2000) C+