Authors: Angelo Muredda Archives - Page 9 of 14

Side Effects (2013)

February 7, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Channing Tatum
screenplay by Scott Z. Burns
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Whatever you may think of the distinctive yellow patina that creeps across his filmography, Steven Soderbergh is something of a chameleon artist, prone to the compulsive shape-shifting that’s led some to mischaracterize commercial work like the Ocean’s series as mere Hollywood capital to be cashed in on ambitious curios like Bubble. If anything, it’s the Ocean’s movies that most bear his signature in their attention to complex systems run amok and their indulgence of postmodern genre pastiche, which recur in projects as disparate as Haywire and Magic Mike. Both tendencies are in full force in psycho-thriller Side Effects, ostensibly the last of Soderbergh’s theatrical releases and in many ways the most quintessentially Soderberghian despite its impersonal subject. It’s an unusual swan song, but perhaps the ideal one for a director who’s always revealed himself in his formalist rigour, the conspicuous act of emptying out his idiosyncrasies into preexisting generic containers–in this case, half a dozen of them.

Tha Makioka Sisters (1983)

January 25, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Japan, Theatrical

***/****
starring Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yuko Kotegawa
screenplay by Kon Ichikawa, based on the novel by Junichiro Tanizaki
directed by Kon Ichikawa

by Angelo Muredda “So many things have happened in this house,” middle child Sachiko (Yoshiko Sakuma) tells her older sister Tsuruko (Keiko Kishi) near the end of The Makioka Sisters, an expansive period piece in miniature that could be churlishly described as a film about the sorts of mundane things that happen in houses. In settling down to adapt Junichiro Tanizaki’s 500-page tome about prewar Japan in a state of profound social and economic transition, glimpsed only through the intersecting marital and financial crises of the titular siblings, writer-director Kon Ichikawa inherited a difficult task, best appreciated by pausing to consider that there’s no English equivalent of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (though Sam Mendes keeps trying). If historical epics are hard to translate to a medium that doesn’t allow for marginal notes and flow charts to keep track of the minor players, the cloistered setting of domestic ones is doubly tricky. Consider that Joe Wright’s recent and thoroughly rotten stab at Anna Karenina adapts the first part of the novel as a self-reflexive essay about how difficult it is to dramatize tragedies that take place in drawing rooms, and the rest as an utterly banal dramatization of a tragedy set in drawing rooms. Ichikawa’s solution, after his own flirtation with hyper-theatricality in the first reel (which unveils the ensemble in a series of spatially disconcerting close-ups, then medium shots establishing the siblings’ relatives ages), is largely to mine the charismatic reserves of his all-star cast.

Krivina (2013)

January 24, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical

***/****
starring Goran Slavković, Jasmin Geljo
written and directed by Igor Drljaca

by Angelo Muredda 2012 was an unusually rich year for Canadian cinema, from the strangely fruitful pairing of David Cronenberg and Don DeLillo in Cosmopolis–though it comes from DeLillo, is there a more Cronenbergian line about deformity than the doctor’s insistence that Robert Pattinson let his mole “express itself”?–to the near perfect genre vehicle of Michael Dowse’s Goon. Both films are legibly Canadian in terms of content, despite Cosmopolis‘s faux-Manhattan setting, but one of the most heartening developments in last year’s crop was a turn to formalism that might confound expectations about what our movies are supposed to look and sound like. Weird Sex and Snowshoes, both Katherine Monk’s book and Jill Sharpe’s documentary adaptation of it, sketched a history of Canadian cinema through its dourness of tone and harsh thematic machinations–necrophilia, the malevolent north, and so on–so successfully as to canonize that image. Yet films like Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond the Black Rainbow and now Igor Drljaca’s Krivina (which debuted at last year’s TIFF) are a nice reminder that there’s also a sharp formalist strain, à la Michael Snow, for which such thematic surveys can’t quite account.

A Man and a Woman: Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva – TIFF Cinematheque Retrospective

January 15, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blog, Film Festivals, France

by Angelo Muredda When Michael Haneke’s Amour met its first wave
of hosannas at Cannes, the press seemed eerily unanimous with respect to all
but the film’s place within the German-Austrian taskmaster’s oeuvre. Although
some were quick to call it the warmest of his many portraits of couples in
crisis (it would be hard not to be), others saw it as of a piece with his
austere horror films about complacent bourgeois hoarders reduced to ashes by
external invaders–in this case, not the home intruders of Funny Games or Time
of the Wolf (though there is a break-in, for those keeping
score), but the more insidious threat of age-related illnesses. The truth is
probably somewhere between those poles. It’s no surprise that the key
players in this two-hander are named, as they always seem to be in Haneke’s
pictures, Anne and Georges Laurent–sturdy middle-class monikers for tasteful
piano teachers. But it’s difficult to wholly ascribe the universal quality we often
associate with Haneke’s Laurents to the familiar, if weathered, faces of
Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, who–far more than the chameleonic
Juliette Binoche or Isabelle Huppert, other Haneke collaborators–recall a
bygone era of French cinema.

Gangster Squad (2013)

January 10, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Gangster, Theatrical

*/****
starring Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn
screenplay by Will Beall
directed by Ruben Fleischer

by Angelo Muredda In his recent chat with David Poland, Ruben Fleischer bristled at the suggestion that Gangster Squad shares any DNA with Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy. That’s the sort of aesthetic family resemblance a lightweight like Fleischer ought to milk for all it’s worth, but hear him out: Sean Penn’s enterprising mob boss Mickey Cohen, he insists, isn’t a cartoon bruiser in the tradition of Al Pacino’s Big Boy Caprice, but a real guy whose face only looks a little off because it’s been molded by other men’s fists. He isn’t a comic-strip grotesque, then, but a seasoned boxer-turned-kingpin reanimated by a grand old actor and his team of historically-faithful makeup artists. What more could one ask of a Warner Bros. crime movie than such attention to detail? A lot, apparently–especially if the finished product looks more like Elmer Fudd than any retired amateur boxer. Verisimilitude is a nice goal, but it doesn’t suit Gangster Squad, at once a lumbering history lesson and a squib of a gangster picture–a zit on the ass of Mulholland Falls, Lee Tamahori’s somehow more accomplished stab at L.A. noir.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2012

January 1, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Directors: Steven Soderbergh

Top102012

by Walter Chaw I wish To the Wonder had been released this year–Take Shelter, too. The one because I love Terrence Malick and I’m excited that he’s working so much, the other because I fear that Take Shelter is the last time Michael Shannon will anchor a picture without being instantly Christopher Walken-ized. It’s his The Dead Zone, and he’s amazing in a movie that takes big risks and pays off in a meaningful way; if he were to star in it now, I think it would be mistaken for camp. I also wish I’d seen Margaret in time for my 2011 list. Alas, local publicity has never been terribly interested in my participation. Nevertheless, thanks mostly to Netflix and FYC screeners, I saw a great many great films this year.

Trouble with the Curve (2012) [Combo Pack] – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

December 16, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, Sports

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman
screenplay by Randy Brown
directed by Robert Lorenz

by Angelo Muredda Trouble with the Curve is an unfortunate title for a film beset with problems on every side. Helmed by longtime Clint Eastwood producer/assistant director/close friend Robert Lorenz, making his equally unfortunate feature debut, it isn’t directed so much as stiffly pushed in the direction of new events once every ten minutes or so. A father-daughter family drama, a sports movie, and a portrait of a career woman swimming with the sharks, first-timer Randy Brown’s screenplay is a mess beyond even an experienced director’s fixing.

Greatest Hits (2012)

November 22, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Mexico, Theatrical

Los mejores temas
***½/****
starring Gabino Rodríguez, Teresa Sánchez, José Rodriguez López, Luis Rodriguez
written and directed by Nicolás Pereda

by Angelo Muredda Odd as it might seem for a 30-year-old director to get a retrospective, you can see the logic
behind TIFF Bell Lightbox's series on Nicolás Pereda, whose six features
demonstrate a remarkably consistent vision stemming from Pereda's interest in gently
setting an audience's narrative expectations on their side. Pereda, who's been
relatively unheralded in his adoptive home of Toronto (despite his sturdy
international reputation and his 2011 feting at New York's Anthology Film
Archives, to name just one laurel), brings the sophistication and focus of an
old hand to each of his formally rigorous but unassuming projects. Although
it's his most recent work, there's perhaps no better starting point for the
uninitiated than the aptly titled Greatest Hits, which sees Pereda
gathering his cast of players for a twist on the family reunion.

Take This Waltz (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

November 12, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance

Takethiswaltz1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby, Sarah Silverman
written and directed by Sarah Polley

by Angelo Muredda As both literary adaptations and first features go, Sarah Polley’s Away from Her was an astonishing exercise in restraint. Working from Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” about a seventysomething married couple whose longstanding private games turn into something else when Fiona (Julie Christie) is diagnosed with dementia, Polley forewent the ostentatious route of many first-time directors by telling the story straight. It’s become customary, in speaking of that film, to chalk up this directness to the source material–Munro is, after all, known for her frankness, and apart from the expansion of Olympia Dukakis’s character and a Hockey Night in Canada gag, Polley ported her narrative beats over more or less wholesale. But Munro has a certain nastiness, not least in her omniscient narrators’ cutting observations, that’s largely absent from Polley’s adaptation, which has particular sympathy for Gordon Pinsent’s reformed husband, who’s more of a forgetful cad in the short story. It’s a standard line to say that Munro reserves judgment, particularly towards her adulterers, but what of the ghoulishness of her characterization, in Lives of Girls and Women, of small-town scolds who say things like, “The law-yer, didn’t he think he was somebody?” Polley doesn’t get sufficient credit for translating what she can of that prickliness–which also runs through “Bear”–and molding the rest into something unabashedly romantic.

The War Room (1993) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 6, 20121990s, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
directed by Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker

by Angelo Muredda "When I think of an old calendar, I see George Bush's face on it." How things have changed since lead Democratic strategist James Carville made that case against then-incumbent President George H.W. Bush in the winter of 1992, long before the rise of Dubya necessitated the use of such cumbersome initials. The War Room, a fly-on-the-wall account of the wildly successful but not always charmed Bill Clinton campaign from the POV of his key operatives, now feels like a time-capsule itself, an old calendar from an era before the internet and Super PACs radically changed the way presidential campaigns were run from moment to moment. Far from feeling hopelessly outdated, though, Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker's unofficial sequel to Pennebaker's work on Primary, which followed JFK's vanquishing of opponent Hubert Humphrey, is an illuminating look at how one of the most successful national campaigns in modern electoral history was waged from an unassuming office in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Your Sister’s Sister (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

November 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mark Duplass, Mike Birbiglia
written and directed by Lynn Shelton

by Angelo Muredda Lynn Shelton tends to swim in the deep end of the mumblecore pool. More improvisatory than the scripted films of the Duplass brothers (despite their overlap in casting), her work, in an odd sort of way, is probably closer in spirit to Joe Swanberg's. Swanberg's shabbier DIY aesthetic masks the heady nature of his projects, which explore the same three or four ideas about modern relationships in forms as disparate as the anthology film (Autoerotic) and the meta-slasher (Silver Bullets). In Humpday, Shelton nicely marries her own high concept–to make a movie about hetero male insecurity writ large–with a pair of naturalistic performances that elude Swanberg's scratchier efforts. Her M.O. appears to be to let her actors fumble through a convoluted situation that, on the strength of their characterizations, never feels as unnatural as it probably should.

Midnight’s Children (2012)

November 1, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Fantasy, India, Theatrical

**/****
starring Satya Bhabha, Shahana Goswami, Rajat Kapoor, Darsheel Safary
screenplay by Salman Rushdie, based on his novel
directed by Deepa Mehta

by Angelo Muredda It's a nice bit of synergy, good for at least one heavily-latexed Tom
Hanks reincarnation, that Deepa Mehta's adaptation of Midnight's Children should come out so soon after the Wachowskis'
and Tom Tykwer's ill-fated stab at Cloud
Atlas, perhaps the only contemporary novel more labyrinthine than Salman
Rushdie's magic-realist opus. So earnest are both efforts that one is tempted
to ignore their fundamental failures as either cinema or adaptation and bow to
the good intentions of the faithful stewards. Yet one wonders about the value
of such graceful gestures when, combined, the two films take up a staggering
five hours–indefensible, given the limpid mysticism they have to show for
themselves at their muted conclusions. Read together, they're proof that in the
absence of a real necessity for adaptation, big novels make for small movies.

Magic Mike (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

October 22, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD, Theatrical

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, Cody Horn, Matthew McConaughey
screenplay by Reid Carolin
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Magic Mike opens with Saul Bass’s red-and-black Warner Bros. logo, retired in 1984. That gesture is meant, I think, to pitch what follows as a throwback to smarter studio fare along the lines of Hal Ashby’s Being There, but it also courts less flattering comparisons to the likes of the Police Academy movies. Steven Soderbergh’s latest pop exercise falls somewhere between those two poles–a little too close for comfort to the Guttenberg side. Conceived as a loose riff on star Channing Tatum’s time as a male stripper, it has a solid run as a cheerful smut delivery mechanism before hanging up its thong to become a rote ‘80s melodrama about good kids corrupted by bad drugs. If the howl of “Yes!” that greeted the first bared ass at my screening is any indication, that transformation won’t hurt the bottom line (a figure these strippers always seem to have on their minds), though it does make Magic Mike another promising yet half-baked Soderbergh project instead of a good movie, sans asterisks.

Keep the Lights On (2012)

October 11, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Thure Lindhardt, Zachary Booth, Julianne Nicholson, Paprika Steen
written and directed by Ira Sachs

by Angelo Muredda Life imitated art when Ira Sachs's Keep
the Lights On won the Teddy for best feature at the 2012 Berlinale.
In the film, the same honour–albeit in the documentary category–goes to Erik
(Thure Lindhardt) for his long-gestating profile of queer photographer and
filmmaker Avery Willard, a project Sachs himself realized this year,
concurrently with his fictional surrogate. Despite the intimate overlaps
between Sachs's life and his most affecting movie to date, knowing the writer-director's background going in is hardly a prerequisite to falling for Keep the Lights On's
honest charms. Sachs lets his biography seep into the material, effectively
colouring it blue.

Dark Shadows (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

September 23, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, DVD, Horror, Vampire, Werewolf

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green
screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith, based on the television series “Dark Shadows” by Dan Curtis
directed by Tim Burton

by Angelo Muredda Like so many of his recent dioramas, Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows starts off looking suspiciously like a real movie. The director’s tendency to Burtonize cherished texts into gauche self-portraits is suppressed in an economical opening that tells with a straight face the dolorous tale of Barnabas Collins, once-imprisoned and newly-freed vampire star of Dan Curtis’s late-afternoon soap. The mood is sombre–a nice hat-tip to Curtis’s morose series, which, if you’ll pardon the wonky chronology, played out like a Smiths song drained of irony. Alas, before long Barnabas awakens in 1972 to meet his distant relatives and dissipated hangers-on, and the mere presence of pasty-white, pink-shaded, ginger-wigged Helena Bonham Carter as family psychiatrist Julia Hoffman is enough to break the spell. Carter’s mannered and carefully sculpted weirdness alerts us that this is yet another wax museum standing in for a film no one had the heart to finish.

TIFF ’12: Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story

September 21, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
directed by Brad Bernstein

by Angelo Muredda "If you want to give them an identity, children should be traumatized," illustrator Tomi Ungerer says in Far Out Isn't Far Enough, speaking about his life as much as his career obsession with drawing the macabre. Brad Bernstein's feature debut has the benefit of an articulate subject with a captivating life story, from his confused wartime upbringing in Strasbourg–"the sphincter of France," as he calls it–to his early American days as a freelancer, to his later erotic drawings (of "bondage and so on," he explains) and role as a sort of artist-in-residence for the civil rights movement. What it lacks is assurance, frequently getting in the way of its powerful material with hammy stylistic flourishes and a treacly score better suited to a Disney-channel docudrama.

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

September 19, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Esoterica, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras F
starring Michael Rogers, Eva Allan, Scott Hylands
screenplay by Panos Cosmatos, inspired by the book Be Your Self by Mercurio Arboria
directed by Panos Cosmatos

click any image to enlarge

by Angelo Muredda Panos Cosmatos claims he wasn't allowed to watch R-rated movies as a kid and had to make do with the lurid box covers he saw on video store shelves. Rising above those less-than-ideal conditions, the first-time helmer and son of famed Cobra and Rambo: First Blood Part II director George P. Cosmatos makes an auspicious debut with Beyond the Black Rainbow. As befits its retro title, this is a bravura pulp homage that recreates the feeling of a preteen creeping down the hall to catch a sidelong glance of the bygone genre cinema pulsing out of the living-room TV and painting the walls orange. Still, it's best approached not as a found object from that time, but as a mood piece–a sustained exercise in atmospheric nostalgia for what LCD Soundsystem eloquently called the "unremembered '80s."

TIFF ’12: Silver Linings Playbook

September 18, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Robert De Niro, Romance, TIFF

***/****
directed by David O. Russell

by Angelo Muredda Awards season does strange things to American filmmakers in search of gold hardware. Last year, Alexander Payne delivered his James L. Brooks movie in The Descendants, toning down his tartness for a family drama both more palatable and significantly shoddier than usual. There's a comparable transformation in the cards this year for David O. Russell, who showed signs of mellowing with 2010's The Fighter but was still miles from the Cameron Crowe job he's now pulled off, to surprisingly strong effect, with Silver Linings Playbook, a Jerry Maguire for manic depressives.

TIFF ’12: Something in the Air

September 16, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, France, TIFF

Après mai
**½/****
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Angelo Muredda Those who see Olivier Assayas’s new film
stateside will be met with an ambivalent gesture right from the title card,
which juxtaposes the Godardian red and blue of the French title, “APRES
MAI” (“After May”), with the mousy English translation,
“Something in the Air.” The French is the more precise, referring to
the dispirited state of radicals following the events of May, 1968, while
Thunderclap Newman’s yearning anthem about armed insurrection evokes only a
roughly simpatico version of late-’60s American idealism falling into ’70s
cynicism. Vague as the English title reads by comparison, though, it turns out
to be the more fitting of the two. Indeed, for all of Assayas’s personal
attachment to this material, Something in the Air isn’t significantly more illuminating
about the period than something like Almost
Famous, which uses the titular song to roughly the same effect, evincing
the same impossible nostalgia for a time when everyone was supposedly moving
together on one big bus, so to speak.

TIFF ’12: Leviathan

September 15, 2012****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, TIFF, UK

****/****
directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

by Angelo Muredda What is there to say about Leviathan, a nearly-wordless maelstrom of ravenous seagulls, blood-red waves, and severed fish-heads piled to the horizon? Colleagues at Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel take the sensory as seriously as the ethnography here, producing a truly singular documentary account of a commercial fishing vessel off the New Bedford coast that puts the so-called immersive quality of 3-D baubles like Avatar to shame. Their work more than lives up to the biblical title, delivering what might be described as a fish-eye view of the Apocalypse.