Bryant Frazer: March 2007 Archives
Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett's legendary low-budget 1977 feature shot on the streets and in the houses and apartments of Watts in Los Angeles, has that marvelous capacity among motion pictures: it sneaks up on you. Much of it is deliberately understated, just-folks filmmaking (it was shot over the course of a year, for less than $10,000), but the frames often hold deep significance, especially in combination with the film's soulful song score.
Premonition belongs to that reliable supernatural Hollywood subgenre: narcissistic wish-fulfillment. This film's premise is that one family tragedy -- the highway death of a husband and father of two -- is of such cosmic import that the fabric of space and time will fold in itself so that the grieving widow (actually, she doesn't do much grieving at all) may have a more psychologically complete experience. Premonition is a misleading title, because what's happening (as far as I can tell) is more of a cross between Groundhog Day and Slaughterhouse Five. For reasons that go mostly unexplained, Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) lives the days of the week surrounding her husband's untimely death out of chronological order — she learns that he's been killed, but in her suddenly unordered life, the date of his actual death hasn't yet arrived. That gives her a few days of moving forward and backward in time, trying to figure out how she might save his life. The screenplay suffers from all the logical problems that bedevil time-travel movies, which are compounded by the dopey conventions of supernatural movies — this one has a freak electrical storm, a dead crow, an accident involving plate glass, and one of those cynical you-can’t-cheat-death flourishes that’s in fashion these days.
Chris Rock and comedian Louis C.K. team up as screenwriters on this modest situation comedy, which Rock directed, about investment banker Richard Cooper (Rock), who lives in Pelham with his wife, Brenda (Gina Torres), and children but still has an eye for the ladies. Temptation is no threat to fidelity until his old, ridiculously hot friend Nikki (Kerry Washington) insinuates herself back into his life.
Believe it or not, this is adapted from Chloe in the Afternoon, one of French director Eric Rohmer’s famous moral tales. It’s not especially sophisticated but, like C.K.’s short-lived HBO series Lucky Louie, it is uncommonly realistic about love, sex and marriage and even takes a stab at saying something about race, with Brenda complaining that their children don’t have enough B-L-A-C-K friends and joining a Mocha Moms club. Unfortunately, it’s also a bit misogynous, posing a false Madonna/whore dichotomy that’s overly flattering to the men involved.
On the evidence here, Rock is a compelling comedian who has no real business directing movies — the film is a mess, but it’s an entertaining mess, with just enough funny and/or sexy scenes and one-liners to propel it through 90 slender minutes. (The elaborate joke about Viagra is a show-stopper.) B-
This review was originally published in the White Plains Times.
ELVIS MITCHELL: I Think I Love My Wife is very political. It's a movie about the black middle class.
CHRIS ROCK: There's an isolation that the black middle class goes through. I remember watching Lost in Translation and going, "That's how I feel in America." Nothing captures the black experience more than Lost in Translation. It's one of the blackest movies I've ever seen, flat out.
Excerpted from "Chris Rock," by Elvis Mitchell, Interview, April, 2007
Here, director Ken Loach takes a stab at exploring the long-simmering tensions in Ireland that exploded in 1920, as guerilla columns fought against the British military forces that had been deployed to block the movement for Irish independence. The result of the violent struggle was a truce and a treaty — which only splintered the country into a state of civil war between those who were happy to see the feared “black and tan” squads leave and those who felt that the Irish deserved a more decisive break from the British government. Loach works with a screenplay by Paul Laverty that essentially compresses the passions of the struggle into the story of two brothers who fight together but end up taking opposite sides after the treaty is signed. Though the brother-versus-brother clichés are pretty hoary, Loach has a no-nonsense approach to this style of filmmaking, and though the film is perhaps overlong and a mite formulaic, it’s gripping.
It's time for some shameless self-promotion aimed at my day job. I didn't write Film & Video's new story on the obsessive visual-effects work that went into Zodiac, but I did build the Flash presentation that presents video clips and before-and-after slides showing some of the results. Crack VFX guru Barbara Robertson actually wrote the story, which goes into great detail on the digital imagery that saturates the first third of the film. I did write the new F&V; story on creature effects for The Host, which isn't as detailed but has some tidbits about how San Francisco VFX shop The Orphanage communicated with Bong Joon-ho back in South Korea. (Also, if you've ever muttered to yourself, "Hrmm, possibly there is some connection between Tod Browning's Freaks and Bong Joon-ho's The Host, but I can't put my finger on it", well, wonder no more.)
Zodiac is a film to lose yourself in. Directed by David Fincher with a perfectionist's eye for performance and an obsessive's attention to detail, it's also the director's first film that's primarily about people, instead of its own impressive ideas. That's not to diminish the impressive accomplishments he's made to date, especially in the modern classics Se7en and Fight Club, but to underscore how Zodiac intensifies and deepens the connection between technical facility and sublime impact.
300, the ancient-Greek military adventure adapted from the graphic novel by Frank Miller, is drenched in sex and violence and boasts a repetitive, forward-reeling momentum that makes it feel like the longest videogame cut scene in history. (I kept thinking the bald dude from God of War would totally kick the Spartans’ asses.) If it were only brutish spectacle, executed with the inescapable élan that Miller’s stark and exciting combinations of word and image always brings to the printed page, it could be an invigorating diversion from the more nuanced, and infinitely more taxing, struggles of the real world. But with its fetishistic depiction of the nearly naked male body as nothing more or less than a merciless instrument of warfare, it fills a much-needed gap between gay porn and recruitment film.