Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in craigjclark's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, May 19th, 2012
6:59 pm	People are just crazy in this world, I think. Next stop on the Cannes 2002 Tour is Punch-Drunk Love, which netted Paul Thomas Anderson the Best Director award at the festival. I occasionally wonder how many people have rented this over the years expecting the usual Adam Sandler yuck-fest and been confronted with a film that is, at its heart, the ultimate deconstruction of the Adam Sandler volatile man-child persona. Could be kind of a slap in the face if you're not prepared for it. One thing that helps it rise above the star's usual fare is the fact that it has a heart as well as a brain thanks to Anderson's perceptive screenplay and Sandler's unforced performance. For once, it doesn't feel like he's putting on a wacky character, he is the emotionally stunted Barry Egan, who's pushed way out of his comfort zone and thrashes about until he figures out how to swim as opposed to the alternative. The owner of a novelty plunger company which operates out of a cavernous warehouse (with Anderson regular Luis Guzmán as one of his employees), Sandler is an inwardly directed man who's driven to act out by his sisters, who have clearly been ganging up on him all his life (well, they do outnumber him seven to one). For this and numerous other reasons, it's something of a miracle when he finds his soul mate in only child Emily Watson, who's lonely for the exact opposite reason he is. There are complications on the road to happiness, though, beyond the fact that one of Sandler's nosier sisters (Mary Lynn Rajskub) is the one who tries to set them up. In fact, most of his woes can be traced to an ill-advised call to a phone-sex operator who attempts to shake him down. This leads to confrontations both physical and verbal (the latter with a most irate Philip Seymour Hoffman), but it's pleasurable to see how Sandler learns to properly harness his previously unfocused anger simply because he's in love. It's just the sort of thing that gives hope to even the most hopeless romantic. I haven't touched on just how strange this film is, so I'll rectify that at once. Things are noticeably off right from the start, when Sandler eerily anticipates and witnesses a car accident right out in front of his business (which no one else ever acknowledges). To top it off, the non-event is immediately followed by the abandonment of a broken harmonium, which he subsequently claims and goes about repairing. Then there's his scheme to take advantage of a loophole that gives him a ludicrous amount of frequent flyer miles in exchange for buying an enormous quantity of pudding. This, despite the fact that he has never flown anywhere in his life. It's just something he sets in motion when he realizes it's possible, which, now that I come to think of it, is kind of the way he goes about courting Watson. Once he realizes she's a keeper, he does everything in his power to try to keep her. (Comment on this)
1:59 pm	No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don't understand. It's that time again. The Cannes Film Festival is upon us, so I'm going to be spending the next seven days revisiting (and, in a couple cases, visiting for the first time) a number of films that debuted there ten years ago. (Watching Bowling for Columbine on Wednesday was just a warm-up.) And the first one out of the gate is Olivier Assayas's Demonlover, which I've been meaning to check out ever since the A.V. Club added it to the New Cult Canon a couple years back. It's a rather convoluted tale about corporate espionage in the modern age and the ever-changing power dynamics surrounding the bidding war for a Japanese adult animation studio's product. It's the kind of film where everybody's working for everybody else and nobody's loyalties can be taken for granted. In other words, it's the perfect analogue for the paranoid times in which we live. Connie Nielsen heads the cast as an ambitious underling who uses underhanded means to leapfrog over a colleague (Dominique Reymond), securing her place at the right hand of the boss (Jean-Baptiste Malartre), much to the dismay of Reymond's assistant (Chloë Sevigny). As a reward, Malartre places her in charge of the negotiations with TokyoAnimé, which requires an influx of capital to make the move into 3-D animation, which we get to see a sample of (along with the hand-drawn variety). Joining Nielsen is fellow executive Charles Berling, who makes a clumsy pass at her which we know will fail because when she gets a few moments alone in her hotel room she orders up lesbian porn. Also part of the deal is an American company (represented by Gina Gershon) which seeks to shut out one of its competitors. As Nielsen discovers, though, one of their side businesses is an online torture site called Hellfireclub, which is essentially the Videodrome of the 21st century. The question is, is she the Max Renn of the story or the Nikki Brand? As one might expect, Demonlover raises a lot more questions than it has the time (or the inclination) to answer. And even if the ending is something of a foregone conclusion once Nielsen catches wind of the Hellfireclub, the journey is much more important than the destination. Still, it's pretty amusing to consider that the entire conspiracy is wrapped up in the fight over who gets to distribute the next generation of tentacle porn. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 18th, 2012
9:15 pm	That's all this boat needs -- another piece of rotten luck. After Pi made a splash, I was suitably intrigued when it was announced that Darren Aronofsky's next project was going to be Below, a horror movie set on a World War II submarine. (Hey, if it was good enough for Das Boot...) As it turned out, though, the next one that came down the pipeline was Requiem for a Dream, and Below was taken up by David Twohy, the director of Pitch Black and The Arrival. Even though Aronofsky retained a co-writing credit (along with Lucas Sussman and Twohy) and stayed on as one of the producers, it just didn't seem as pressing at that point, so I passed on it when it came out in the fall of 2002. (In retrospect, me being out of work and having to cut down on frivolous expenses probably also had something to do with my decision.) At any rate, the film is set aboard the USS Tiger Shark, which is patrolling the Atlantic under the command of lieutenant Bruce Greenwood when it receives orders to pick up the survivors of a torpedoed British hospital ship. There are three: a nurse (Olivia Williams), a sailor (Dexter Fletcher), and a severely injured man who doesn't stick around long enough for me to look him up. Greenwood's officers include ensign Matt Davis, who's only on his second patrol, and lieutenant Holt McCallany, who rides him and the rest of the crew hard, and the rest of the crew includes a sea of interchangeable twenty-somethings, plus Jason Flemyng and Zach Galifianakis (playing a character named "Weird Wally"). Sure enough, as they're carrying out their rescue mission they're sighted by the enemy, which is very dogged in its pursuit, and the situation isn't helped by the strange things that begin happening on board the vessel. Suffice it to say, it would be a lot easier to dismiss it as a bunch of hoodoo (as some of the men do) if it weren't also endangering their lives. As it turns out, I wasn't the only one who shunned Below when it was in theaters. Despite garnering decent (if not exactly glowing) reviews, it barely made a dent at the box office. And to add insult to injury, the odious Ghost Ship came along just two weeks later and blew it out of the water, which goes to show that it doesn't pay to be subtle. As much as I'd like to see it tank this weekend, I sincerely doubt Battleship will have that problem. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
8:58 pm	We don't know what we saw. The point is, it's still here. I passed on Cloverfield when it arrived in theaters in 2008, largely because A) I had grown weary of all the hype surrounding it (and there's no denying that there was quite a lot of that leading up to its release), and B) I honestly didn't think I needed to see another found-footage horror film after The Blair Witch Project, even if it had been close to a decade. Now, four years later, I have gone back for it because the film's screenwriter, Drew Goddard, went on to co-write and direct The Cabin in the Woods, which I feel duty-bound to talk up at every opportunity. (Prior to this, he had written for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel for Joss Whedon and Alias and Lost for J.J. Abrams, who also produced this film, but I don't particularly feel the need to dig into those shows. Not enough time in the day and all that.) There have been so many found-footage films in recent years that they practically make up their own genre at this point, but Goddard and director Matt Reeves actually use the format in a creative way to give us a ground-level view of a familiar story -- that of a giant monster destroying a major city. The protagonists are a half-dozen twenty-somethings gathered at the surprise going-away party for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is bound for Japan and a new job. In short order we're introduced to Beth, the girl he loves (Odette Yustman), his brother Jason (Mike Vogel), Jason's girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas), their mutual friend Hud (T.J. Miller), and Marlena, the girl Hud is sweet on (Lizzy Caplan). Initially, Hud is pressed into service running the camcorder to take testimonials from people at the party, but when the shit hits the fan he keeps taping because, as he says, "People are gonna wanna know how it all went down." As these things go, that's a reasonable enough rationale for not turning off or discarding the camera when things turn south, but there are still several points where an equally reasonably person would have been completely justified in saying, "Hey, you know what? I think I've got enough here for people to go on. I'd like to be able to see where I'm running now." Or maybe that's just me. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012
10:45 pm	A public that's this out of control with fear should not have a lot of guns or ammo laying around. These days it's a lot harder to be a Michael Moore fan than it used to be. For every Sicko (which I consider to be his second-best film after Roger & Me), there's a Slacker Uprising (a film I have yet to be able to bring myself to watch). And when he isn't being his own worst enemy, there are plenty of other muckrakers out there ready to step up to the plate and try to take him down with hatchet jobs like Michael Moore Hates America, Fahrenhype 9/11 and Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die (all of which came out in 2004). Even the user-created lists on the IMDb make plain just how divisive a figure he is. Sure, one user has him as one of "The world's Best Directors currently active," but he heads another's list of the "Biggest most fat people of all time who are still alive." Moore even merits a spot on the list of "Celebs Who I Wish Would Just GO AWAY!!!!!!!" (which, naturally enough, is topped by President Obama). With Michael Moore the media personality increasingly dominating the discussion, it's unfortunate the way Michael Moore the guy who makes entertaining documentaries keeps getting relegated to the back seat. It wasn't always that way, though. Ten years ago, Moore debuted Bowling for Columbine -- his film about America's love affair with guns and the culture of violence and fear that leads to tragedies like the Columbine Massacre -- at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received the 55th Anniversary Prize (because the jury clearly wanted to give it something, just not the Palme d'Or). From there, the film went on to win dozens of awards from other festivals and critic's groups and cleaned up at the box office, culminating in Moore's triumph at the Academy Awards. And all that was well-deserved since it's a well-constructed film about a highly charged issue. No matter how much the gun lobby tried to pick it apart at the time, it continues to hold up under scrutiny today, packing a wallop when it needs to and inspiring copious amounts of laughter as well. This is not to say it's a perfect film -- I always thought the infamous Dick Clark ambush was off-point, and the Charlton Heston interview would have come off better if Moore hadn't strained so hard for a "gotcha" moment -- but it's one that makes solid points about who we are and why our country is as fouled up as it is. As one expert says, "If more guns made people safer, then America would be one of the safest countries in the world. It isn't. It's the opposite." The fact that that's still the case today makes Bowling for Columbine as relevant as it ever was. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 14th, 2012
8:24 pm	As of right now, these are the most dangerous men in America. When MTV's Beavis and Butt-head returned to the airwaves last fall after an absence of 14 years, it came as a great surprise to me just how funny it still was -- and how trenchant the show's cultural satire could be. (The fact that in addition to music videos, they also took potshots at such dubious programs as Jersey Shore, 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom definitely helped on that score.) While we're between seasons, there seems to be no time like the present for me to take in their big-screen outing, 1996's Beavis and Butt-head Do America, which arrived at the tail end of the show's original run. Co-written and directed by Mike Judge, who not only voices the titular duo, but also a few of the supporting characters, the film opens with the two of them discovering that their TV -- their window to the world, as it were -- has been stolen, leading Butt-head to declare that the situation "sucks more than anything that has sucked before." This launches them on an odyssey to recover it or -- failing that -- find a chick to score with, which is no easy feat considering their lack of social graces. Still, their unique ability to misread situations and cause havoc wherever they go finds its proper outlet in a cross-country odyssey from Las Vegas to Washington, D.C., and many points in between. (Their stopover at Hoover Dam is especially memorable.) They also mix it up with a range of characters voiced by the likes of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore (as a couple of feuding smugglers who use the boys to transport a deadly bioweapon), Cloris Leachman (as a kindly old lady who unwisely shares her meds with Beavis), Robert Stack (as an ATF agent who has an unseemly obsession with cavity searches), an uncredited Greg Kinnear (as Stack's long-suffering partner), and David Letterman (appearing incognito as an ex-Mötley Crüe roadie who, along with his buddy, provides a clue as to the boys' parentage). Even if the end result doesn't fully transcend the story's episodic nature, it still gives Judge the leeway to include a dream sequence (with the boys as rampaging giants) and a drug-induced freakout unlike anything he was able to get onto television. Plus, he managed to get two thumbs up out of Siskel and Ebert, which is no small feat. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 13th, 2012
1:35 pm	You must be a ghost to be wandering alone so late at night. For a director who's made 45 films in a career spanning seven decades (and written over a hundred more on top of that, including Seijun Suzuki's Fighting Elegy), Kaneto Shindô is sorely underrepresented on video here in the States. In fact, for the longest time the only ones that could be found on DVD were the atmospheric horror tale Onibaba from 1964 and his 1975 documentary Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director, which was included as a bonus feature on the Criterion release of Mizoguchi's Ugetsu. Since that's a drama about (among other things) a samurai who becomes bewitched by a beautiful ghost, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that it was very much at the forefront of Shindô's mind when he wrote and directed Kuroneko in 1968. Put out by Criterion last October, Kuroneko opens with a pastoral scene of seeming tranquility that is violated by a ragged band of samurai emerging from the woods surrounding a house and taking full advantage of its two occupants -- widow Nobuko Otowa and her daughter-in-law Kiwako Taichi -- before drifting away again, setting fire to the house to cover their tracks. This goes a long way toward explaining why the two women, now ghosts, begin taking in passing samurai, getting them drunk, and slaughtering them one after another. Naturally, this doesn't sit well with local official Kei Satô, who gives the task of exterminating the responsible parties to returning hero Kichiemon Nakamura, who has distinguished himself in battle. As it turns out, this is a most troubling assignment for Nakamura since he's the long-absent son and husband of the slain women, whose own resolve to kill and drink the blood of every samurai in the world is sorely tested by the revelation that he is one of them. Considering Onibaba is one of the most chilling films of its -- or any -- era, it's instructive to note that Shindô's approach to the more overtly supernatural Kuroneko isn't terribly different. Both films are in black and white, with an emphasis on the shadowy blacks. And both are centered on the predations of a mother and daughter-in-law who have been left to fend for themselves in wartime. In this case, however, they seemed to be getting along just fine until they were brutally raped and murdered by a pack of beastly samurai. Can't really blame them for being a little bitter about that. (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 12th, 2012
3:33 pm	If you're not careful, you'll lose your life for nothing. It's been a few years since I made my way through Criterion's "Rebel Samurai" collection, but ever since then I've been meaning to check out more films by Hideo Gosha, who made one of my favorites in the set, 1965's Sword of the Beast. Well, one year before that he made his directorial debut with Three Outlaw Samurai, which Criterion was kind enough to release a few months back (and which my library acquired not long after). Based on the television show of the same name, it starts where The Cry Baby Killer ends -- with a tense hostage situation -- but that's where the similarities end. As the story opens, roving samurai Tetsurô Tanba (who also produced the film) stumbles into a kidnapping plot centered on the local magistrate's spoiled daughter (Miyuki Kuwano) and decides to stick around to see how it turns out. Eager to get his daughter back (and ignore the demands of the peasants who merely want less onerous taxes), the magistrate dispatches the pragmatic Mikijiro Hira (star of Sword of the Beast), who's on his payroll, and the opportunistic Isamu Nagato, who's pressed into service but switches sides as soon as he's apprised of the situation. This leads to some excellent fight scenes as the magistrate throws more -- and more desperate -- samurai at the problem, but Tanba and Nagato are quite adept at keeping them bay. As for Hira, it takes a while for him to come around, but once he does the three of them prove to be a formidable team. (Comment on this)
11:51 am	You're in bad enough trouble as it is. There's no sense making more for yourself. While watching the documentary Corman's World a couple weeks back, I was reminded that there are still a number of his early films that I still have yet to see. One of them, highlighted because it marked Jack Nicholson's big-screen debut, was The Cry Baby Killer, which Roger Corman executive produced for Allied Artists in 1958. Even though Nicholson plays the title character -- a high school student who grabs a gun during an altercation over a girl and winds up sending two of his playmates to the hospital -- he had to cede top billing to Harry Lauter, who plays the police lieutenant who takes charge when the mixed-up kid takes a few hostages. As for Corman, he handed the reins over to another director -- in this case, television veteran Joe Addis -- something he only did sporadically before the formation of New World Pictures in 1970. At the outset, the film falls in line with the many other tales of juvenile delinquency that flooded the drive-in market in the late '50s (Corman's own Teenage Doll included). Nicholson is introduced getting a pummeling from his older rival (Brett Halsey), who feels the need to add injury to insult after stealing away his girlfriend (Carolyn Mitchell). What sets it apart is the hostage situation that ensues when Nicholson turns the tables on Halsey and his goons, after which he's forced to hole up in the storage room of a greasy spoon with a black kitchen man (Smoki Whitfield) and a baby and its mother (Barbara Knudson), all of whom would like to avoid a shootout if possible. The situation is exacerbated, however, when local television station KQQQ sets up outside, attracting a crowd of onlookers including co-writer Leo Gordon and the incomparable Bruno VeSota, who gets the most quotable line in the whole film when he says, "Teenagers. Never had 'em when I was a kid." That's as may be, but Corman was canny enough to cater to them when they made themselves and their disposable incomes known. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 11th, 2012
9:24 pm	So many locked doors, and they all have to be opened. A new Guy Maddin film is always cause for celebration, and his latest, Keyhole, is no exception, especially as it's his first feature since 2007's highly idiosyncratic documentary My Winnepeg (which may very well be my favorite film of his). A return to genre filmmaking of a sort after a run of semi-autobiographical work, Keyhole defies easy categorization, but if it could be easily categorized, it wouldn't be a Guy Maddin film. At the start it has the trappings of a gangster film -- guys in sharp suits blasting away with Tommy guns at anonymous coppers -- but once the shooting subsides it's revealed that the men have blasted their way into a house that's surrounded and the man calling the shots is nowhere to be seen. Simultaneously, we're informed that the joint is haunted by some very weary ghosts, one of which helpfully narrates for us, although we can't always take him at his word since it soon comes out that he has a definite agenda. Like The Saddest Music in the World before it, Keyhole's cast includes a number of name actors, including one wayward Kid in the Hall. (Saddest Music co-starred Mark McKinney; this film features Kevin McDonald in a brief but hysterically funny role.) The main star is Jason Patric, who plays Ulysses Pick (a name Maddin and his co-writer George Toles did not choose by accident), a gangster returning home after a long absence. His object is to reclaim his wife (Saddest Music alumnus Isabella Rossellini), but in order to get to her he has to navigate the labyrinthine corridors of his house with the help of a waterlogged seer (Brooke Palsson), all the while dragging around a chair occupied by a young man who has been bound and gagged (David Wontner). Maddin regular Louis Negin plays Rossellini's ghostly father, who's unabashedly naked and perversely chained to her bed in the attic, but that doesn't prevent him from getting up to mischief in the rest of the house. Udo Kier also puts in an appearance as a grieving doctor pressed into service by Patric, with McDonald and Daniel Enright as two of his underlings. (Enright sticks around a bit longer, but his attempted takeover of the gang while his boss is attending to personal matters doesn't exactly go over like gangbusters.) Looking over what I've written so far, I notice I haven't gone into just how weird this film is, but that's largely because it's the kind of weird that can't -- or shouldn't -- be put into words. It's one thing to mention that a bicycle-powered electric chair figures into the plot, but it would be criminal to go into exactly how. And while it's fair game to note that McDonald's character meets his demise when he ignores Patric's warning to leave the ghosts alone because "they don't like to be touched," I wouldn't dream of revealing how he violates that edict. Should Keyhole come to your town, you'll just have to peek through it yourself. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 10th, 2012
9:03 pm	Why in God's name do we elect a man president and then try to see how fast we can kill him? Immediately after completing The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer returned to the well with the political thriller Seven Days in May, the second part of his '60s paranoid conspiracy trilogy (with the third part, of course, being Seconds). Even though it was released in 1964, it's still very much a timely story since it's about a liberal president whose approval ratings plummet after a controversial decision leaves him vulnerable to attacks from more conservative quarters. In this case, the point of contention is a nuclear disarmament pact with the Soviets, but it could have been just about anything, really. (It's highly unlikely that the subject of gay marriage would have come up back then, though.) Also different: the president's policies inspire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (played with steely determination by Burt Lancaster) to plan a coup which his aide (Kirk Douglas) catches wind of in time to warn the president (Fredric March) and his advisers (whose ranks include Edmond O'Brien, Martin Balsam and George Macready). Then it becomes a matter of digging up enough proof of the conspiracy to shut it down before the clock runs out. On the other side of the aisle, as it were, are Frankenheimer fixture Whit Bissell as a senator and Hugh Marlowe as a television commentator who are both In on It, and Ava Gardner as a Washington socialite whose extinguished love affair with Lancaster puts her in the unique position of being able to bring him down if it comes to that. The ace up Frankenheimer's sleeve, though, is Rod Serling's probing screenplay, which goes in for a few big speeches about patriotism and the American way of life, but that's what you hire Serling for. Pity they didn't work together again after this. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
9:18 pm	In the last resort, every man has to act according to his own conscience. Did a little housekeeping tonight by watching 1950's Seven Days to Noon, which was produced, directed and edited by John and Roy Boulting (with Roy sharing screenplay credit with their frequent collaborator Frank Harvey). The Boulting Brothers are better known for their classic British comedies -- many of which starred Peter Sellers -- but this is for the most part a deadly serious affair as it's about a rogue physicist (Barry Jones) who steals an atomic bomb and threatens to blow up London with it if the government doesn't agree to shut down its weapons program. His ultimatum is delivered by post to the Prime Minister (Ronald Adam), who wastes no time in getting Scotland Yard (represented by superintendent André Morell) on the case. Soon enough, Morell has made contact with Jones's assistant (Hugh Cross) and daughter (Sheila Manahan), both of whom are eager to help bring him in -- if only they could find him. As the manhunt gets in gear, the film switches over to Jones's perspective as he seeks out accommodations while he waits patiently for the government's acquiescence (which he is slow to realize will not be forthcoming). At first he takes a room with nosy landlady Joan Hickson, who has quite the collection of cats, but she is disturbed by his constant pacing and he is compelled to move on. He then becomes acquainted with aging actress Olive Sloane, who dotes on her dog and unwittingly gives him a place to hole up while the city is evacuated around them. Some grumbling aside, that happens in a rather orderly fashion (this is postwar Britain, after all), but the demands of the suspense plot mean Jones can't be located until just before the bomb is due to go off. No points for guessing ahead of time whether it does or not. (Comment on this)
Monday, May 7th, 2012
11:23 pm	A plain divorce causes enough attention. This will be meat for a nine days' wonder. Slowly but surely, I am ticking off the non-horror films that James Whale directed in the brief time he was active in Hollywood. Tonight's selection, which TCM premiered back in January, was 1934's One More River, based on the novel by John Galsworthy. Made right before Whale embarked upon Bride of Frankenstein, it boasted a screenplay by R.C. Sheriff, author of Journey's End, the play that brought Whale to Hollywood in the first place, and the previous year's adaptation of The Invisible Man. This was a different kettle of fish entirely, though, since it's a story about a woman from a good family (Diana Wynyard) who leaves her abusive lout of a husband (Colin Clive) and has a dickens of a time extricating herself from the marriage. Complicating matters is the nice young chap Wynyard meets on the voyage home from Ceylon who becomes quite smitten with her (Frank Lawton). She's quite content to let him hang around like a lost puppy, but when Clive arrives on the next boat and presses his suit (somehow he imagines he still has a chance of winning her back) things get ugly in a hurry. Eventually Clive hires a detective to follow the relatively indiscreet couple around and, once he has enough dirt on them, initiates divorce proceedings (during which his case is argued by barrister Lionel Atwill). What comes out on the witness stand (and even what Wynyard chooses to keep to herself) may not seem very revealing to us, but it's scandalous enough to attract an eager crowd of onlookers. As Wynyard moans, "You can always find an audience to watch suffering." (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 6th, 2012
8:28 pm	People are pretty calm, at least for now. Abel Ferrara must have been in an apocalyptic frame of mind when he conceived 4:44 Last Day on Earth, in which Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh play a couple trying to get through their last few hours together without cracking up. As in Don McKellar's superior Last Night, the exact time the world will be coming to an end is known in advance, but Ferrara goes one step further by pinning it to the depletion of the ozone layer and even having an expert come right out and say, "Al Gore was right." (There is, however, no word on how much time Gore has spent calling up right-wingers and saying, "I told you so.") As they await the end, Dafoe and Leigh engage in lovemaking, dancing, meditating and saying goodbye to their friends and loved ones over Skype. (Leigh, in particularly, gets very emotional while talking to her mother, who's played by Anita Pallenberg.) Meanwhile, life outside their apartment goes on in a fairly orderly fashion -- Dafoe even spies someone working out at the gym -- which makes it seem like pretty much everyone has reached the acceptance stage. Either that, or Ferrara didn't have the budget to shoot a lot of mayhem going on in the streets, which is just as well. I've already seen that movie. (Comment on this)
2:48 pm	Even great men can be corrupted, can't they? I skipped it when it was released back in the fall, so I had to catch up with Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar at home. Now that I've seen it, I'm confident that I made the right call. (I don't know what it is about Eastwood's recent output, but the last time I wanted to see one of his films in theaters was Gran Torino, and there are a couple that I don't feel the need to see at all.) Written by Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, the film covers a little over half a century in the life and career of J. Edgar Hoover, who's played much more convincingly by Leonardo DiCaprio when he's a young man than when the old-age makeup starts getting slathered all over him. (Armie Hammer, as his unspoken man-crush at the FBI, runs into even more of a problem on that front, although I never thought his performance suffered because of it.) The film opens near the end of his life, when Hoover begins writing what he considers the definitive history of the Bureau, which he dictates to a succession of agents over the course of several years. This allows the story to play out in two parallel tracks. In the present, Hoover has his dealings with the Kennedys, his obsession with nailing Martin Luther King, and his contentious relationship with Nixon (tellingly, the only president who puts in an appearance on camera). In the past, we see the roots of his rabid anti-communist views and how he started keeping files on everybody after being named acting director of the Bureau of Investigation, which installed him in his seat of power for the next 48 years. We're also introduced to the two most important women in his life -- his domineering mother (Judi Dench) and his personal secretary (Naomi Watts), who might have changed history if only she had accepted his poorly timed marriage proposal. Between the two of them, is there any wonder why he fell head over heels in love at first sight with Hammer? If there's one part of Hoover's life that should have been left on the cutting room floor, though, it is the scene where, in deep mourning after his mother's passing, he dons her necklace and dress. It's a moment that verges on pure camp in a film that didn't have much of a sense of humor leading up to it. Probably would have been better for all concerned just to leave that out. (If you're wondering what happened to your Academy Award nomination, Leo, look no further.) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 5th, 2012
7:57 pm	A pity your moment of triumph is being spoiled over a little thing like grave robbery. When it was announced this week that Van Helsing of all films was getting the reboot treatment, I must admit I was a bit bewildered by the news. The original isn't even a decade old, and from what I can tell it isn't all that beloved, which I thought was something of a prerequisite for that kind of thing. About the only thing it has going for it is name recognition and even that was lifted wholesale from Bram Stoker's Dracula. For a film that came by nearly all of its characters and story elements second-hand -- a Frankenstein's monster-movie, if you will -- the idea that it's going to be revived and revamped itself is just too ironic for words. At any rate, it may be a few years before Van Helsing, Mark II sees the light of day, so until then Stephen Sommers's 2004 model will have to stand alone, much like its hero, played by Hugh Jackman with a maximum amount of alpha-male bravado. In Sommers's conception, Van Helsing has been transformed into an all-purpose monster hunter working for the Vatican who rather conveniently can't remember his past. Introduced in the process of cornering Dr. Jekyll's brutish alter ego Mr. Hyde in Paris, 1888, he's dispatched to Transylvania with a great deal of firepower and a Q-like friar (David Wenham) in tow. There he hooks up with gypsy princess Kate Beckinsale, whose family has vowed to destroy Count Dracula (Richard Roxburgh), but hasn't had a whole lot of luck with that so far. Also thrown into the mix are Frankenstein's monster (Shuler Hensley), who's actually quite articulate, Beckinsale's brother (Will Kemp), who's bitten by a werewolf early on, which puts a crimp in his own monster-hunting activities, a trio of tedious vampire brides, and an Igor (Kevin J. O'Connor) for good measure. What are they all in service of, you might ask? Why, it's a story about Dracula's scientific quest to give life to his vampire progeny, which have a way of exploding like popcorn after they've hatched out of their cocoons. Didn't know baby vampires did that? Well, neither did Sommers until he made it up. He's also not above making up his own rules, like how the sun and moon have no effect on their respective monsters when they're hidden behind the clouds. (Call me crazy, but when the moon is full, I'd say a werewolf should be able to keep its fur on even if it is overcast out.) And just in case anybody has any doubts about how silly this movie is, I have two words for you: exploding carriages. I rest my case. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
12:10 pm	You got a suit? Then suit up. As it's Free Comic Book Day, I made a beeline for the first showing of The Avengers in town -- that would be the one at 9:30 -- after which I paid a visit my local comic book shop. Both stops, I have to say, were very rewarding. Considering all the big-budget spectacles that will be coming our way over the next few months (many of which I will be studiously avoiding -- that's right, I'm looking at you, Battleship), I'm glad the season kicked off with a winner. The culmination of the momentum that has been building ever since Iron Man entered the superhero sweepstakes four years ago (has it really only been four years?), The Avengers is a fanboy's wet dream come true, and much of its success has to do with the input of writer/director Joss Whedon, who struck the perfect balance between servicing the fans and casual moviegoers alike. Working with the cast he inherited from the five franchise-builders that preceded him (save for Mark Ruffalo, who is now the third actor to play Bruce Banner on the big screen in the space of a decade), Whedon finds clever ways to have their personalities bounce off each other, and even gives a few of them the chance to square off, just like they occasionally do in the comics. His two secret weapons, though, are the relentlessly quippy Robert Downey, Jr. (okay, maybe he's not so secret, but he is awesome) and Clark Gregg's enthusiastic S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, who shoulders much of the comic relief. I'd rather not get into the plot, other than to say that it's well-constructed (some of the credit for that goes to original screenwriter Zak Penn, whose screenplay was rewritten by Whedon when he came on board), builds to several exciting action sequences, and even allows for a few quiet moments of character development. On top of that, it's funny without resorting to camp (I'm looking at you, Dark Shadows), and has a few surprises tucked away inside for safe keeping. What more could anyone want? (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 4th, 2012
8:56 pm	I don't know if any of my friends are his type. Most of the girls I know are fairly normal. By the time Woody Allen's Broadway smash Play It Again, Sam was turned into a film in 1972, he and his co-stars -- Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts and Jerry Lacy -- had performed it hundreds of times on stage, so they didn't have to worry about figuring out how to play their characters, they were their characters. And with the help of director Herbert Ross (no stranger to theatrical adaptations having made the screen version of The Owl and the Pussycat), they were able to translate their chemistry to the silver screen, thus preserving one of Allen's biggest stage successes for all time. And it is a timeless story, about a neurotic film buff (Allen) who needs all the help he can get with women, even if he has to take his advice from Humphrey Bogart (Lacy). Newly divorced and out of sorts, Allen is taken under the wing of married friends Keaton and Roberts, who attempt to build up his confidence and fix him up with women, but have little luck on either front. (His first blind date, with a very down-to-earth Jennifer Salt, goes about as well as you would imagine.) And as much as Bogart tries to turn him into a tough guy, his ex-wife (Susan Anspach) invades his fantasies and throws him off his game. It's all very fast-paced, effortlessly slipping in and out of Allen's reveries, and chock full of physical comedy, which neatly balances out the improbable romance that grows between him and Keaton since Roberts is so busy with work all the time. (One of the best running gags, which will probably make little sense to future generations, is the way Roberts keeps calling in to his office to let them know which phone number he can be reached at and for how long.) About the only thing keeping it from being quintessential Allen is the change in setting to San Francisco, which was necessitated by an East Coast film technicians strike. But that's a minor quibble. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
8:32 pm	Don't ever be ashamed of who you are. In olden days, it used to be that Memorial Day weekend marked the unofficial start of summer. Over the past decade or so, though, that designation has been moved up to the first weekend in May, at least as far as the movie industry is concerned. (Witness all the hoopla surrounding blockbuster-to-be The Avengers, which is all set to roll out at midnight.) Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, which came ten years ago today, may not have started that trend, but it definitely capitalized on it in a way that no film had done before, netting well over $100 million in its opening weekend alone. Anybody wondering why multiplex-goers will be thrilling to the improbable team-up of a ham in a metal flying suit, an out-of-time super-soldier, a green giant with anger issues, a living god with a big hammer and a few other, somewhat less impressive individuals need look no further than their friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Of course, why should audiences look to the past when this summer will be getting its very own Amazing Spider-Man? (Now there's a reboot that fails the "Is this strictly necessary?" test for me.) Not that I'm saying Tobey Maguire is the only actor capable of putting on the form-fitting red-and-blue suit, but he was pitch-perfect as the perpetually put-upon Peter Parker. He also plays the scenes where he's discovering his powers (and figuring out how to use them on the fly) very well. Frankly, I don't know why we need to see all that again, but that's why I'm not the head of a major motion picture studio. As for the rest of cast, I think they all do an impeccable job (yes, even Kirsten Dunst). And J.K. Simmons is J. Jonas Jameson, full stop. If The Amazing Spider-Man does well enough that it gets a sequel, and Peter Parker winds up working at the Daily Bugle, they might as well just bring Simmons back. There is no way they're going to improve upon him. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012
9:36 pm	When you're hurting someone, don't think of the pain that he feels. I've seen a fair number of Takashi Miike films over the years -- not nearly enough to make a quorum, but enough to know what to expect whenever he steps behind the camera (which, it has to be said, is quite often) -- and there are a few that I've avoided simply because I thought they would be too much for me. One of those was 2001's Ichi the Killer (one of seven films he directed that year), which pits a scar-faced sadist (Tadanobu Asano) who loves pain and takes it as well as he dishes it out against a normally mild-mannered man (Nao Ohmori) who's very good at killing but does so extremely reluctantly. Of course, when I say Ohmori is good, I don't mean he's tidy. As one of the members of the cleanup crew that follows in his wake says upon finding the scene of the crime awash in blood and internal organs, "He did it again. As gross as ever." The gory murder that opens the film leaves one yakuza gang without a boss, although the sadistic Asano prefers to believe that he has merely been kidnapped and, on the advice of an informant (Shinya Tsukamoto), detains and tortures a rival gangster in one of the scenes that may have been too painful for me a decade back. It's still probably the strongest scene in the whole film, which means if you can stomach it you can handle all that comes after. (It helps that the subsequent scenes of violence lean heavily on unrealistic digital effects, although Miike is quite fond of arterial sprays of blood as well.) I find it telling that when Asano is describing Ohmori to his underlings, he says, "Ichi is even more depraved than you could ever imagine." Actually, no. I imagined a lot worse than this. And I don't want to speculate about what that says about me as a person. (2 Comments |Comment on this)