Authors: Angelo Muredda Archives - Page 8 of 14

The Oxbow Cure (2013)

August 23, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Claudia Dey
screenplay by Yonah Lewis, Calvin Thomas, Lev Lewis
directed by Yonah Lewis & Calvin Thomas

by Angelo Muredda The latest in a wave of immersive, formally-sophisticated works from young Toronto filmmakers that includes Kazik Radwanski’s Tower and Igor Drljaca’s Krivina, Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas’s The Oxbow Cure expresses a bold new vision even as it fits itself snugly within established Canadian cultural traditions. As a film about a woman who heads off to an isolated cabin to treat a mystery illness, you could say it’s indebted to David Cronenberg’s ’70s output, and its unhysterical depiction of a body in the throes of a profound, if still mostly imperceptible, transformation make it a more worthy heir to the queasy body horror of Shivers and Rabid than the baroque flourishes of Antiviral. Cronenberg echoes aside, for students of Canadian literature, the minimalist plot might also recall Margaret Atwood’s seminal novel Surfacing, which similarly sends a young woman in crisis off into the woods on a sort of vision quest, exposing her to the elements of her home country and to the uncivilized mirror image of herself it offers up.

Prince Avalanche (2013)

August 22, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch
screenplay by David Gordon Green, based on the film Either Way by Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson
directed by David Gordon Green

by Angelo Muredda The standard line out of Sundance on Prince Avalanche, David Gordon Green’s tragicomic stop between the puerility of The Sitter and the Southern Gothic of his upcoming Joe, was that it was a return to form after some time spent in the wilderness. That’s true enough insofar as its dashed-off buddy travelogue, a loose adaptation of the Icelandic movie Either Way, is sweet where The Sitter is cynical, but one has to wonder at this point whether any of Green’s studio trifles can be considered outliers when their worldview is so consistent with the ostensible real deals. Even the least of his films shares a thematic interest with the others in redeeming wayward losers; by that token, Prince Avalanche isn’t a triumphant comeback so much as a familiar motif recapitulated in a more pleasant, minor key.

A Hijacking (2012)

August 16, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Kapringen
***/****
starring Søren Malling, Pilou Asbæk, Dar Salim, Roland Møller
written and directed by Tobias Lindholm

by Angelo Muredda Finely-tuned but incurious about most of what falls outside its blinkered gaze, A Hijacking is about as good as this sort of stripped-down procedural filmmaking gets–Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low reconfigured for a telephonic showdown between Somali pirates and Danish shareholders. Only the second feature from Tobias Lindholm (who proves much more capable as a director than as the author of The Hunt‘s lazy allegorical punts about the concern-trolling parents of small-town Denmark), the film feels like the work of a yeoman who’s in no hurry to be recognized as a visual stylist unless the material should merit such flourishes. Annoying as that no-frills approach can be in countless austere imitations of the Dardennes and Michael Haneke, it’s more than welcome here in a film whose title might otherwise have ended with a gaudy exclamation mark.

In a World… (2013)

August 15, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Theatrical

***/****
starring Lake Bell, Demetri Martin, Fred Melamed, Rob Corddry
written and directed by Lake Bell

by Angelo Muredda If In a World… seems a bit busy, it’s because it has a lot on its plate. The feature debut from “Children’s Hospital” star, narrator, and sometimes-director Lake Bell, the film displays all the classic calling cards of an under-appreciated multi-hyphenate talent’s break for the mainstream: a plum starring role, punchy dialogue, and a high concept. That conceit, of a female voiceover artist moving up within the ranks of a tetchy, male-dominated industry, comes with its own baggage, instantly reminding us of the relative scarcity of high-profile American comedies shepherded by women. It’s a lot for a first feature to take on, and what most impresses about In a World…, which manages the neat trick of being both funny and thoughtful without tipping into melodrama, is its apparent effortlessness–the impression that Bell is casually navigating complicated territory.

On the Road (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

August 12, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Drama, Road Movie

Ontheroad1

*½/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen
screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on the novel by Jack Kerouac
directed by Walter Salles

by Angelo Muredda “You goin’ some place, or just goin’?” a fellow traveller asks Sam Riley’s Sal Paradise in the long-gestating, still-undigested On the Road, Walter Salles’s handsomely-mounted but stiff adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s hipster Bible. While that’s a dangerous line to adapt in such an aimless movie, it isn’t even the most unfortunate moment of meta-commentary within the first ten minutes. Consider Sal’s panicked voiceover about the text he’s spinning out, ostensibly the same one we’re trudging through: “And what is there to talk about exactly? The book I’m not writing? The inspiration I don’t feel? Even the beer’s flat.” What, indeed? What’s left to say about a project that insists on reviewing itself at regular checkpoints and keeps finding its inspiration wanting?

Blue Jasmine (2013)

August 1, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, Louis C.K., Bobby Cannavale
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda Woody Allen’s forty-third directorial effort begins with a one-sided conversation on a plane that will seem familiar to anyone who’s seen any of the previous forty-two. Jasmine (Cate Blanchett, on a brief hiatus from her Galadriel duties) spouts anecdote after anecdote to a placidly-smiling elderly woman, cycling from the banal origin of her name to the story of how “Blue Moon”–“You know the song”–was playing when she met her husband. Our poor audience surrogate is held captive by this narcissist, with whom we’re fated to spend the rest of the picture, until she meets her husband at the baggage claim and instantly spills about the stranger who “couldn’t stop babbling about her life.” It’s a curious start, not so much for the arch reveal that the women are strangers, via a rack-focus shift at the airport from this interloper to our real protagonist, as for the faintest hint of auto-critique.

The Act of Killing (2012)

July 18, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Denmark, Documentary, Norway, UK

***½/****
directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

by Angelo Muredda Like Claude Lanzmann’s otherwise incomparable Shoah, Joshua Oppenheimer’s bracing documentary The Act of Killing reanimates a historical catastrophe without leaning on archival footage. In relying primarily on testimonials grounded at the site of violence, both films argue for a more radical than usual method of bearing witness to unspeakable genocides–in this case, the murder of nearly a million communists, intellectuals, and ethnic Chinese in mid-1960s Indonesia by a cadre of paramilitaries and gangsters who were backed by an American-funded military and subsequently never brought to trial. Yet as much as each project seeks to drag a monstrous past into the light by shooting at the present scene of the crime, Oppenheimer’s work is given an even more surreal kick by virtue of the incredible status still afforded to members of the killing squads, politically-connected goons who openly boast of their murders to anyone within earshot, including the film crew.

Museum Hours (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Mary Margaret O’Hara, Bobby Sommer, Ela Piplits
directed by Jem Cohen

by Angelo Muredda The closing credits of Jem Cohen’s warm and wonderful Museum Hours give equal thanks to John Berger and Patti Smith, and it’s not hard to see why. Further to being Cohen’s friend and occasional collaborator, Smith occupies a rare place at the intersection of art stardom and punk history, while Berger might be the only figurehead total newcomers to art criticism can name, his TV series “Ways of Seeing” having turned innumerable undergraduates onto ideologically-inflected readings of popular images. Whatever their personal contributions to the film may have been, Berger’s knack for providing the novice critic with the armature to see intelligently and ethically is as instructive here as Smith’s mercurial punk ethos. Museum Hours–which, like Berger’s BBC miniseries and book, is destined to have a long afterlife in college art courses–is an absorbing and richly humanist synthesis of those seemingly contradictory impulses, a puckish walking tour through an art gallery that doubles as a manifesto for seeing deeply into the rubbish beyond the walls of the museum.

White House Down (2013)

June 27, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Maggie Gyllenhaal, James Woods
screenplay by James Vanderbilt
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Angelo Muredda Leading up to the release of Anonymous in late 2011, Roland Emmerich joined screenwriter and professional blowhard John Orloff in a series of quasi-academic debates about the supposed true origin of the works of William Shakespeare–which they attributed, as is the fashion among a school of cranks that includes Derek Jacobi and John Hurt, to the Earl of Oxford. Let us only say of that turgid, classist bore, the most distressing of his disaster movies, that petty conspiracy theorizing does not suit Emmerich, at heart a good old liberal pussycat who likes to blow things up, then shoot the shit about the horrors of global warming. Despite its vague interest in U.S. foreign policy (i.e., its firm belief that it sucks), White House Down is a more modest affair, and all the better for it. Stupid is easy but stupid fun is trickier to pull off, and more than anything Emmerich has made since Independence Day (a decent ham sandwich), this Die Hard clone, complete with Channing Tatum in a sleeveless shirt, at least delivers a pretty good time.

This Is the End (2013)

June 12, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Horror, Theatrical, Zombie

**½/****
starring James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel
written and directed by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg

by Angelo Muredda Whatever its dramatic hiccups, This is the End can at least boast that it’s one of the better full-length adaptations of a trailer. In 2007, Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel starred in a 90-second sizzle reel–co-scripted by Rogen and Superbad collaborator Evan Goldberg–about their efforts to stay alive amidst an unspecified global catastrophe. As scrappy comedy skits go, “Jay and Seth versus the Apocalypse” was pretty good, a charming riff on the actors’ schlubby personas as well as a pitch for more time and a bigger budget to drive home their unlikely survival story. The trouble with This Is the End, a funny but belaboured riff on that premise, is that it’s still trying to close the sale long after the project’s been greenlit, ingratiating itself to an audience already on board. In their joint directorial debut, Rogen and Goldberg show a knack for characterization but seem anxious about where to go from there, squandering a gifted ensemble in a procession of spotty “what if” scenarios that don’t resemble a movie so much as a glimpse into a celebrity edition of charades in Judd Apatow’s basement.

Before Midnight (2013)

June 7, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

****/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
screenplay by Richard Linklater & Ethan Hawke & Julie Delpy
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Before Midnight opens with a bit of misdirection, a tracking shot of two pairs of shoes ambling towards the camera that we instinctively ascribe to Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) before the second pair is shown to belong instead to Jesse’s teenaged son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), about to board a flight back to the States. Somewhere in the slow pan up to the actors’ faces, and in the deferral of series MVP Celine, is a playful acknowledgement that Richard Linklater’s Before movies have grown into a franchise with a coherent visual language that’s dependable enough to riff on. Much has changed since Jesse and Celine’s inaugural philosophical walking tour through Vienna 18 years ago, and the prologue is an economical demonstration of how arbitrary our encounters with the couple to date have been, shaped by our inability to listen in after Nina Simone drowns out the end of Before Sunset. But the presence of Jesse’s son (from the unseen wife alluded to throughout the previous film) in place of Celine, who’s finally revealed in another tracking shot in the next scene, also alerts us to something new: a conflict that runs deeper than the pair’s usual anxious negotiations with a ticking clock.

After Earth (2013)

May 30, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Will Smith, Jaden Smith, Sophie Okenedo, Zoë Kravitz
screenplay by Gary Whitia and M. Night Shyamalan
directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Angelo Muredda Give M. Night Shyamalan this much: he is not a timid filmmaker. Where some might have responded to the critical drubbing of The Village with a shrug, Shyamalan turned his follow-up, ostensibly a children’s story, into a vicious riposte. Lady in the Water isn’t just an off-kilter fairytale about an endangered waif who falls out of the sky and into Paul Giamatti’s swimming pool: it’s also a deranged manifesto for protecting the imaginative freedom of artists like Shyamalan–playing a writer who will one day be martyred for his ideas, collected in a volume modestly titled “The Cookbook”–against critics and nonbelievers, who meet deservedly bad ends. That would be a gutsy move if the artist had something to die for himself, yet the best you could say for Lady in the Water is that at least Bob Balaban’s beast-ravaged movie reviewer is spared the finale with a saviour eagle that Shyamalan has the gall to christen “Eaglet.” Though nominally a star vehicle for Will Smith and his son Jaden, After Earth covers much the same ground, down to its repetition of both the aquila ex machina trope and half-assed nomenclature. (A double-sided spear is a “cutlass” in the future, while walking stealthily is now “ghosting.” No word on what we call spoons or actual cutlasses.) Lady in the Water‘s world-building by crayon doodles can be explained away easily enough by its bedtime-story mechanics, but there’s no excuse for After Earth, a thinly-sketched, unbearably haughty survival story that cites Moby-Dick as it steals from Suzanne Collins.

Youth Is Heavy: FFC Interviews Olivier Assayas

May 24, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, France, Interviews

May 23, 2013|”We didn’t really know where we were heading,” Olivier Assayas writes of his generation’s amorphousness following the civil unrest of the late-1960s, “but the journey was exciting, charging time with meaning and offering a horizon all the more desired for our having had foretaste in May that had left a nasty feeling of unfulfillment.” An anarchist preteen during the general strikes and student occupations that rocked Paris in May of 1968, Assayas came of age in the countercultural afterglow of the early 1970s, as part of a splintered youth culture struggling to realize the intellectual and political work of their predecessors in radically different ways. Surely owing to that belatedness, Assayas’s reworkings of this historical moment, both in his memoir A Post-May Adolescence and in his films set during the same formative years (1994’s Cold Water and 2010’s Carlos), are shot through with ambivalence: They’re as interested in that nasty feeling of unfulfillment as they are excited about the freedom of travelling without a map.

The Hangover Part III (2013)

May 23, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Road Movie, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, John Goodman
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Craig Mazin
directed by Todd Phillips

by Angelo Muredda When Project X spilled forth from its amniotic septic tank last spring, I read it as a prime example of a producer-driven form of auteurism pioneered by Judd Apatow. That found-footage chronicle of a house party-turned-apocalypse, I suggested, was a monument to producer Todd Phillips’s equally noxious Hangover series, where the same Dionysian impulses and deep-seated hatred of the different–whether female, trans, queer, or disabled–were championed by a trio of middle-aged men. What a difference a year makes. If Project X was a brand consolidator and The Hangover Part II was a morbidly curious recalibration of its predecessor, displacing Phillips’s demonic impulses and scarcely controlled misogynist rage from Bradley Cooper’s Phil to Ed Helms’s Stu, Part III is an actors’ contract negotiation sputtered to life. Since the previous instalment, Cooper has become a respectable leading man and Oscar nominee and Helms has been savaged for the degeneration of his irritating Andy Bernard character on “The Office”, while co-star Ken Jeong’s fortunes have inexplicably risen. Consequently, gone now are the days of Phil’s “Paging Doctor Faggot,” along with Stu’s loveable dude-rage and the Wolfpack’s infinite jokes about Mr. Chow’s shrunken Asian manhood. In their place is a surprisingly neutered, if inarguably more ethical, product with very few laughs and no reason for being.

The We and the I (2013)

May 17, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Teen, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Michael Brodie, Teresa Lynn, Raymond Delgado, Jonathan Ortiz
screenplay by Michel Gondry, Paul Proch, Jeff Grimshaw
directed by Michel Gondry

by Angelo Muredda The We and the I opens with a throwback, an image that wouldn’t be out of place in Michel Gondry’s distinctive music videos from the late-1990s, which were themselves full of backward glances to the more rough-hewn early days of MTV and old-school hip hop. Over the credits, a boombox modified into a miniature bus rolls along the streets of the Bronx pulsing out Young MC’s “Bust A Move,” until it’s crushed by what’s ostensibly the real thing, a city bus packed with urban teens who make up Gondry’s boisterous, gossiping, and privately wounded nonprofessional cast. That’s an interesting start, insofar as it suggests that Gondry’s obsession with whimsical props tinged with nostalgia are about to be traded in for something more authentic, even as it implies a bit cheekily that the “real” bus, taking a bunch of high-schoolers home on the last day of school, is itself a roaming set on which to stage semi-scripted exchanges between proper teens doubling as actors and artistic partners.

Hot Docs ’13: When I Walk

May 6, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Jason DaSilva

by Angelo Muredda Midway through When I Walk, Jason DaSilva’s seven-year record of his experience since an early diagnosis of multiple sclerosis at age 25, the filmmaker wonders what his future will be, his life an ever-moving series of targets since illness and disability became a part of it. It’s to DaSilva’s great credit that that curiosity about what will become of him is developed in more than prurient ways with an unexpected but welcome detour into what it means to struggle through the normal checkpoints of a committed relationship–babies and all–when one also has a degenerative illness with an uncertain endgame. That isn’t to say we should celebrate the film simply for being something other than a depressive’s video diary of his body gone awry, but that DaSilva’s hook is honestly come by and cannily placed. What’s more, it pays off to the extent that DaSilva is a mordantly funny subject, candid about his bodily quirks, his vanities, and his anxieties.

Hot Docs ’13: Fuck for Forest

May 6, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***½/****
directed by Michael Marczak

by Angelo Muredda “Don’t you think we’re already fucked anyway?” a twentysomething European reveller bathed in neon light asks an environmentalist recruiter early on in Fuck for Forest, Michael Marczak’s gorgeously-lensed and strangely resonant nature documentary about a very strange pack of wild animals, the titular porn collective-cum-NGO. It’s a decent question, but you don’t get the sense that the sweet young Berliners to whom it’s directed have much of a clue about how to answer. Their approach to saving the world, which Marczak never openly laughs at but never quite endorses either, is to turn the surprisingly good coin they make from their vaguely nature-themed amateur pornography into angel investments towards causes they believe in. A gently detached observer who drops in on the audio track only for occasional Jules and Jim-inspired backgrounders on our daffy leads, Marczak is an ideal mock-tour guide for the group’s journey to Peru, where they scope out a group of locals who want to preserve the Amazon.

Hot Docs ’13: Remote Area Medical

May 3, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***½/****
directed by Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman

by Angelo Muredda When he was seriously injured in the jungle thirty years ago, broadcaster and philanthropist Stan Brock tells an interviewer in Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman’s powerful Remote Area Medical, the nearest doctor was over 26 days’ worth of travel away–23 more than if he’d been on the moon, as an astronaut once told him. You can tell that Brock has massaged that anecdote into a homily with repetition, but rather than seeming slick, his pitch for greater medical care for those stuck in remote areas and extreme conditions has an air of earned righteousness about it, the sound of human decency filtered through experience. That same spirit of professionalism and earnestness pervades Reichert and Zaman’s film, which profiles not the volunteer pop-up clinics Brock initially founded in faraway parts of the world but one right in his adoptive home of Tennessee, where hundreds of uninsured working-poor citizens line up days in advance for a fighting shot at care.

Hot Docs ’13: NCR: Not Criminally Responsible

May 2, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by John Kastner

by Angelo Muredda The ending of Taxi Driver could well be the start of John Kastner’s NCR: Not Criminally Responsible. Where Scorsese’s paranoiac dream closes with Travis Bickle returning to his cab after his bloodbath as either an undeserving hero or a delusional phantom, Kastner’s film opens with an admirably complex consideration of what it means–for everyone from victim to convict to society at large–to reintegrate into Canadian culture a violent criminal who’s been found not culpable for his actions. Kastner begins with the conditional release of Sean Clifton, a previously undiagnosed and ostensibly nonviolent Cornwall man who one day stabbed a young woman in a Walmart parking lot. Despite their spiritual belief in the power of rehabilitation and the doctors’ assurances that Clifton is now medicated, the victim’s family is understandably vexed. And, despite our own best liberal intentions, so are we.

Hot Docs ’13: Shooting Bigfoot

May 2, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Mystery, UK

***/****
directed by Morgan Matthews

by Angelo Muredda There's a Weakerthans song called "Bigfoot!" about a Manitoba ferry operator who was harassed by local media for disclosing his alleged encounter with the furry legend. It's an oddly affecting little thing, especially around the chorus, where the man insists–likely just to himself–that he won't go through it all again "when the visions that I've seen will believe me." If nothing else, Morgan Matthews's genre-crossing Shooting Bigfoot confirms that the loneliness and hermeticism of the poor Manitoban's life after Bigfoot–defined by a vision he can't possibly share, for obvious reasons–is pretty standard stuff in the cult of sightings. Mixing Werner Herzog's eccentric profiles with both Christopher Guest's institutional satire and an unexpected but not unwelcome helping of The Blair Witch Project, the film starts as an arm's-length survey of Bigfoot culture before fully immersing itself in its manic compilation of signs and wonders.