30 June 2010

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

Directed by: David Slade
Written by: Melissa Rosenberg
Full credits at IMDb

If I had to guess, I’d say Stephanie Meyer wasn’t a day over 14 when she wrote this installment in her quite profitable tetrology (soon to be a cinematic pentology). And even that’s a little generous. This movie doesn’t just feel like it’s for tweens—it feels like it’s by tweens!

Seriously, Twilight is some bizarre, little girl princess-fantasy, and might be the most sexually regressive shit mainstream America has seen since, I don’t know, before passage of the 19th Amendment? You can picture a bunch of little (white) girls sitting around in a circle, outlining the story...

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer:

29 June 2010

Grown Ups

Directed by: Denis Dugan
Written by: Adam Sandler & Fred Wolf
Full credits at IMDb

...Grown Ups wants nothing more than wrap itself in the stars-and-stripes, down a beer and belch. But if this is The Real America, I want to burn my American flag boxer shorts! That’s what really bugged me about this movie. I mean, sure, I was pissed off about a lot of things: the horrible writing (Adam Sandler’s first line was, literally, “I’m the biggest agent in Hollywood”), the laziest plotting I think I’ve ever seen in a movie (“what do you want to do today?” “go to a water park?” and then they’re at the water park), the relegation of great actresses and comediennes (Maria Bello, Salma Hayek, Maya Rudolph) to shrewy scenery, and the smug self-amusement of five of Hollywood’s unfunniest men (Adam Sandler, Kevin James, David Spade, Rob Schneider and Chris Rock), each of whom spend the movie trying to find different ways of making fun of each other based on their race and physical appearance...Isn’t that funny? Mentioning identifying characteristics about other people that we’re usually encouraged not to mention?

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer:

23 June 2010

Restrepo

Directed by: Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger
Full credits at IMDb

The moment of battle demands of the soldier a simplified moral outlook, an us-vs.-them narrative that denies the enemy his humanity. But that doesn't mean a wannabe-visceral documentary about an American platoon stationed in The Most Dangerous Region Of Afghanistan needs to celebrate that regrettably necessary worldview. Directed by a pair of Vanity Fair contributors, Restrepo offers a soldier's-eye view of the quagmire in Korengal, a portrait of fraternity whose production notes brag, "we did not interview Afghans, we did not explore geopolitical debates". This, of course, was to avoid Politicization—but why should willful ignorance be a source of pride? Since when is "context" synonymous with "subjectivity"?

Keep reading at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer:

18 June 2010

Toy Story 3

Directed by: Lee Unkrich
Written by: Michael Arndt
Full credits at IMDb

There’s always a way to make more money...And I don’t mean by churning out sequels; ain’t nothing (inherently) wrong with that. You could easily argue that Toy Story 2 was better than the original, though you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that this wasn’t the weakest of the trilogy. Anyway, what I mean...is that Pixar seems to have started branching out, as far as disposable-incomers they’re trying to reach. Its core audience, since 1995’s Toy Story, has always been kids and their parents. But there are other groups with money, too, right? Like, grandparents? So Pixar made Up, which could attract three whole generations to the theater to pay premium 3D ticket prices! Cha-ching!

Well, now that you’ve snagged gramps, who’s left? Um, how about young adults? They don’t (usually) accompany small children to animated movies, right? That demographic, anyway, is to whom Toy Story 3 seems pegged, after the usual kids-n’-parents. As such, we see a lot more of Andy in this franchise entry, the owner of our band of toys, who’s now roughly the age of Toy Story’s original fans: if you were 3 when part one came out, you’re, like Andy, 18 now, and getting ready for college. (Even if, say, you’re 10 years older, it’s close enough.)

Keep reading my discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer:

16 June 2010

Cyrus

Written & Directed by: Mark & Jay Duplass
Full credits at IMDb

So many contemporary comedies are undone by a case of The Plots—you know, when the laughs grind to a halt so the filmmakers can wrap up a story that nobody cares about? Mumblecore alums Mark and Jay Duplass (Puffy Chair, Baghead) tackle the problem in their latest, Cyrus, not by chucking the story but by trying to dissolve the jokes into it. Produced by Tony and Ridley Scott, the movie feels like a Will Ferrell vehicle shot with a handheld, like Step Brothers by way of John Cassavetes. The actors turn caricatures into complex characters; broad situations are filmed tightly (even if they're still conspicuously contrived), squeezing the usual comic-absurdities into a "quirky realism" context.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer:

I Am Love

Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Written by: Luca Guadagnino, Barbara Alberti, Ivan Cotroneo & Walter Fasano
Full credits at IMDb

Though a thematically dull tale of a woman's sexual- and self-awakening, I Am Love (Io Sono L'Amore) is thrilling in its sumptuous execution. It revels in a comprehensively elegant aesthetic: painterly compositions, lush lighting, graceful camera movements, fluid transitions, palatial settings, classical typefaces and brash scoring (by John Adams, no less!). Every luxurious frame is steeped in awesome Old World, and Old Cinema, magnificence...Strange dreams and sometimes-sinister lighting suggest that some melodramatic Reckless Moment is just around the corner, but an accidental and allegorical murder doesn't arrive until long after you've stopped expecting it. In the meantime, Guadagnino engrosses the viewer not with salacity, soap-operatics or the splendid Swinton, but with majestic visuals...

Read the full review at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer:

11 June 2010

The A-Team

Directed by: Joe Carnahan
Written by: Joe Carnahan, Brian Bloom & Skip Woods
Full credits at IMDb

I kept thinking it was like some arthouse snob’s parodic idea of an action movie: like, everybody is always screaming, as a cheap way to add urgency to an action sequence. Those action sequences, by the way, are totally incoherent, and the only way I could follow along was the expert sound design: oh, that deafening thud means he punched somebody! Seriously, it made Christopher Nolan look like Gene Fucking Kelly. And yet, for a movie so gratingly loud, there were several moments when I couldn’t even understand what the characters were saying; shows what Carnahan thinks of dialogue! (For Pete's sake, even Mr. T thinks the movie is too violent!)

Keep reading my discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer:

09 June 2010

Winter's Bone

Directed by: Debra Granik
Written by: Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini
Full credits at IMDb

Winter's Bone is what source-novelist Daniel Woodrell calls "country noir": it follows a tortuous missing-person investigation, but instead of rainy city streets, its characters trod Missouri mud; crank-cookers in jeans replace gangsters in suits; and a steely 17-year-old girl stands in for the wisecracking gumshoe. But director Granik, with DP Michael McDonough, shoots sans shtick in a shaky, washed-out style, fostering a naturalism that's both Bone's forte and failing.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer:

04 June 2010

Get Him to the Greek

Written & Directed by: Nicholas Stoller
Full credits at IMDb

...This bromantic, road-tripping pub-crawl [a spin-off of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, by the same director] winds down to a major buzzkill. I mean, here I am, vicariously enjoying an escapist, recession-era celebration of champagne guzzling, hotel trashing, and chauffeured living when suddenly the “dark side of rock and roll (a.k.a London/NYC/LA)” is “exposed” and heteronormativity, celebrated. Movies have to apologize for having fun now? The problem is that Greek never apologizes for what it should...It’s a load of laughs, but it’s a lot like Bruno in that regard: it requires us to ignore, a little bit, its ideological darkside—namely, its treatment of women.

Keep reading my discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine

OR, read a separate essay, "It's Funny Being Black," about the film's treatment of race, also at The L Magazine.


Watch the trailer:

02 June 2010

Splice

Directed by: Vincenzo Natali
Written by: Vincenzo Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant & Doug Taylor
Full credits at IMDb

"Was this ever about science?" one renegade researcher asks another in the middle of Splice. And, while looking back over this genetics-gone-mad-gone-cute-gone-mad-again movie, it's a fair question. In fairness, the film's first third is about science…sorta. But then it slips into an allegorical parenting dramedy, before ending as a Jeepers Creepers-like cast-attrition slasher. Along the way, it shoulders its way past the boundaries of Good Taste, bodaciously unafraid to pursue its reactionary allegory into the sorts of weird and disturbing places most studios fear to tread, including fathers fucking daughters and sons raping mothers.

But first, that biochemistry.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer:

Cropsey

Directed by: Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman
Written by: Joshua Zeman
Full credits at IMDb

Conspicuously made on the cheap, Cropsey looks ugly. But, unlike too many other DV docs, this one compensates for its aesthetic shortcomings—here, with lurid setting and subject matter. It investigates the disappearances of a handful of developmentally disabled children in the 1980s, thinking the answer lies in the backwoods of a backwoods: if it's hard enough to believe you're within New York City limits even when standing in Staten Island's busiest commercial districts, it's near impossible from within the strip of forest that cuts through the outermost outerborough's middle. There lie the crumbling, graffito'd wards of an abandoned mental hospital, which the filmmakers believe hold the key, evidentially but also spiritually, to solving the movie's mysteries.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer:

Double Take

Written & Directed by: Johan Grimonprez
Full credits at IMDb

Experimental films rarely get mainstream play. But Johan Grimonprez's Double Take, a found footage/new footage docuessay about paranoia, media, sinister mirror images and the Master of Suspense, places Alfred Hitchcock at its center and so it gets two weeks at Film Forum. A bona fide avant-gardist busting out of the Anthology ghetto, Grimonprez blends archival footage of Hitch's comic television introductions with scenes from his films (especially The Birds), vintage Folger's spots, Nixon debating Kruschev, newsreels, and bits of Walter Cronkite; this assemblage is then weaved through a dreamily shot short, narrated by a Hitchcock soundalike, about the director in 1962, meeting a time-hopping version of himself from the year he would die, 1980. (Grimonprez also employs a Hitchcock lookalike, evoking his previous short, "Looking for Alfred".)

Keep reading at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer:

01 June 2010

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Directed by: Mike Newell
Written by: Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard
Full credits at IMDb

Prince of Persia is the kind of movie you suffer through, eh? But before considering its reactionary sensibilities, I’d like to...point out that, before the movie shifts earnestly into its Ridley Scott-ness, it opens by cribbing the studio’s own Aladdin: Dastan, like that Disney hero, is a street urchin who becomes a prince and relies on magic—there, a genie; here, a sand-filled dagger. That early origins-sequence here, in which Dastan’s younger self defends an apple-stealing child, played out almost as a shot-for-shot remake of the cartoon’s "One Jump" sequence, just stripped of all its music and energy. Hey, that was a common motif of this movie: it reminded you of something else, just without all those things that made the original memorable. (Straight from my notes, regarding that middle section: “like a screwball comedy stripped of all wit or chemistry, just complaining.”) Like, it was an Iraq War allegory, up until it wasn’t: when the overemphasis on mysticism and franchise self-mythology shoved any clever present-day parallel off the rails.

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine
(Blockbluster is back!)


Watch the trailer: