Swamp Water (1941) – Blu-ray Disc

August 29, 2012Posted in1940s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Jean Renoir, Drama

Swampwatercap2

***/**** Image A Sound B- Extras C
starring Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews
screenplay by Dudley Nichols, based on the novel by Vereen Bell
directed by Jean Renoir

by Walter Chaw Jean Renoir’s Swamp Water stands out as an example of how an artist’s genius can assert itself even when his product has been taken away from him, re-edited and in some places reshot. Renoir’s insistence on actually shooting on location in Georgia’s Okefenokee, declared a Federal Wildlife Refuge by FDR in 1937, resulted in a grassroots movement lobbying Darryl Zanuck to hold the premiere locally. It was an artistic choice Godard would later say “revolutionized Hollywood.” I’m not sure what Okefenokee residents must have thought of the picture, one that is equal parts offensive cornpone melodrama and haunted, gravid Romanticism. There’s an indelible, hard-to-quantify melancholy to the film that’s at odds with its boilerplate narrative; it feels like a Joseph Conrad, even if it reads like a Vereen Bell. It’s an interesting case study, too, because it might never have happened were Renoir’s masterpiece The Rules of the Game not savaged by critics and audiences in his native France, where it would go on to be radically recut, twice-banned, and destroyed in a bombing raid. I like this story, because I think Americans get a bad rap for not recognizing the fruit of their creativity. I like it even more because the French get a lot of credit for being the ones who do.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

August 28, 2012Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2012, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, FFC Must-Own, UK, War

Fullmetaljacket1

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D’Onofrio, Lee Ermey
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, based on Hasford’s novel The Short Timers
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson One of the most noticed Stanley Kubrick trademarks is a scene in a bathroom. I haven’t read too much about why there is always a scene in a bathroom, but rarer still are comments related to what goes on in the bathroom. Different activities have different meanings. Urination (A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut) is a sexually arrogant act. It’s the one bathroom activity in Kubrick’s films that is done with the door open. Bathing (Spartacus, Lolita, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange again, The Shining) is a hedonistic, bourgeois indulgence and an escape to a safe place. Kubrick is not beyond exploiting the bath’s mythological, symbolic connotations as the unexplored subconscious (the subversion of Aphrodite iconology in The Shining) or the womb (Star Child Alex in A Clockwork Orange); bathing is largely a private activity, you see. It is sometimes interrupted, but when that happens the invasion of privacy has significance. (James Mason’s interrupted bath in Lolita, for example, had purely narrative- and character-based implications. He regarded it as just another humiliation to add to the pile.) Defecation is even more private, so private that a Kubrick character has never interrupted it. To defecate (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey) is human, you see. Everybody has to take a shit, but to shit is shameful. The perfect human being would not shit, would indeed be beyond shitting. The HAL computer doesn’t shit, does it? Does the Star Child shit? I sincerely doubt it!

Identification of a Woman (1982) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 20, 2012Posted in1980s, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, France, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Identificationcap1

Identificazione di una donna
***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras D
starring Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, Christine Boisson, Lara Wendel
screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni & Gérard Brach
directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Angelo Muredda When SIGHT & SOUND announced the long-awaited results of their 2012 critics poll earlier this month, the Internet was abuzz with the shifting fortunes of Citizen Kane and Vertigo–the flip-flop heard ’round the world. Less noted was the latest demotion of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, which debuted at a startling second place in 1962’s poll (the film was only two years old at that point), then steadily declined with each decade before landing at number 21 on the most recent survey. What to make of this seemingly calamitous downward shift? Probably not much. Like fellow countryman Federico Fellini, who’s also been increasingly received as a curio despite the continued respect for 8½ (particularly among directors), Antonioni’s canonical films are stamped by their era; L’Avventura‘s downgraded fortune likely says as much about the limited shelf life of European modernism–which its cool classicism and intellectual rigor so fully embodies–as it does about the film itself.

Dexter: The Sixth Season (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

August 15, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Horror, Television, Thriller

Dexters6cap1

Image A Sound A+ Extras D+
“Those Kinds of Things,” “Once Upon a Time…,” “Smokey and the Bandit,” “A Horse of a Different Color,” “The Angel of Death,” “Just Let Go,” “Nebraska,” “Sin of Omission,” “Get Gellar,” “Ricochet Rabbit,” “Talk to the Hand,” “This Is the Way the World Ends”

by Bill Chambers LIGHT SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. My favourite episode of “The Incredible Hulk” is the two-hour premiere of the second season, “Married.” One of the unfortunately-few instalments written and directed by series creator Kenneth Johnson (a genuine pulp talent), it sees David Banner falling in love with the terminally-ill shrink (Mariette Hartley won an Emmy for the role) helping him contain the Hulk, a hypnotic process that involves David visualizing the Hulk trapped in a giant birdcage in the middle of a pristine desert–a tableau that clearly inspired the dream vistas at the outset of Tarsem’s The Cell. Kindred spirits, they eventually marry, but although unleashing the Hulk protects her from harm when external forces threaten her life, it can’t save her from the Grim Reaper. “Married” ends on an unusually hopeless note as a young boy who befriended the doctor informs David he’s going to devise a cure for her disease when he grows up and David more or less tells the boy he’s deluded. One of the most devastating pieces of genre television ever produced, it really could’ve been the series finale. Unfortunately, the show continued long enough to lapse into self-parody and longer still. Much like “Dexter”–though come to think of it, that happened about halfway through the pilot.

Celeste & Jesse Forever (2012)

August 2, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Celesteandjesse

**/****
starring Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg, Chris Messina, Elijah Wood
screenplay by Rashida Jones & Will McCormack
directed by Lee Toland Krieger

by Angelo Muredda A long-overdue showcase for “Parks and Recreation” star Rashida Jones, Celeste & Jesse Forever never makes it out of the generic romcom woods it wants so badly to escape, and the strain leaves everyone involved looking exhausted. That’s especially disappointing, because Jones is a comic talent, burdened by a script–her own, co-written with fellow TV vet Will McCormack–that insists on lifting beyond its weight class to subvert the story it’s telling. Bridesmaids seems to be the model here (and not just because the star is her own screenwriter), although director Lee Toland Krieger has little of Paul Feig’s ease in modulating tone. You could think of Judd Apatow’s protagonists as one man with many faces and varying accessories, and while Apatow is AWOL here, his presence is felt in the way that Jones’s Celeste, a professional trend-watcher for a PR startup, suggests a more financially secure version of Kristen Wiig’s pastry chef in Bridesmaids. From the start, we get the impression that she’s happily married to unemployed graphic designer Jesse (Andy Samberg, in his second marriage-themed movie this summer), with whom she shares an easy rapport too-obviously signalled by their obnoxious habit of making restaurant orders in the voice of Dieter from “Sprockets.” It turns out they’re separated, though still best friends–at least until romantic complications wedge them farther and farther apart for the remaining 90 minutes or so.

Mean Streets (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

July 31, 2012Posted in1970s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Gangster, Robert De Niro

Meanstreets1

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, David Proval, Amy Robinson
screenplay by Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers I had my suspicion that there is no archetypal Martin Scorsese fan perhaps confirmed for me after doing an oral presentation on him in my “American Cinema” class: A football jock taking the course as an elective sauntered up to me asking to borrow my tape of Mean Streets. He couldn’t believe there existed anything like the scene I had just shown–the one where Harvey Keitel’s Charlie takes Robert De Niro’s Johnny Boy into the back room of their hangout to get to the bottom of Johnny Boy’s unpaid dues–despite the strong scent of Abbott & Costello in its staccato rhythm. (For what it’s worth, this is also the passage that convinced Warner execs to acquire the film.1) I immediately recognized the look in his eye, the Scorsese itch, and began to long for that first high, as they say; and I probably hope to become a mass enabler in reviewing Scorsese’s work. Fitting that Mean Streets should be the catalyst for such nostalgia, marinated as it is in a mnemonic broth that makes the picture more explicitly autobiographical than Who’s That Knocking At My Door, with Scorsese going so far as to use his own voice interchangeably with Keitel’s when Charlie’s narrating the piece (or, more precisely, when Charlie’s talking to God).

Summer with Monika (1953) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Summer with Monika (1953) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 22, 2012Posted in1950s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Directors: Ingmar Bergman, Drama, Sweden, The Criterion Collection

Sommaren med Monika
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Harriet Andersson, Lars Ekborg, Dagmar Ebbesen, Åke Fridell
screenplay by Per Anders Fogelström
directed by Ingmar Bergman

by Bryant Frazer In the annals of Early Bergman, Summer with Monika is The Big One–the international hit that established the striving Swede’s cred as a major filmmaker. The irony is that it’s among the slightest of his works. Its notoriety is mainly the result of a promotional campaign selling it as a sex film, using imagery that suggested a nudie pic rather than a melancholy (and cautionary) rumination on life, love, and gender relations. Of course, it wasn’t just the trenchcoat brigade that turned out in force for a movie that was at one point evocatively retitled Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl(!). In fact, Monika was the one that made Woody Allen a lifelong Bergman fan. And it left a huge impression on Jean-Luc Godard, who, in 1958, wrote that Monika is “the most original film by the most original of directors,” arguing that Bergman’s loving photography of Harriet Andersson predated (and thus eclipsed) Fellini’s widely lauded use of Guiletta Masina in a neo-realist mode in Nights of Cabiria, and that it surpassed in craft (mais oui!) Roger Vadim’s employment of Bardot in And God Created Woman.

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

July 12, 2012Posted in2012, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, Family, Theatrical

Beastsofthesouthernwild

**/****
starring Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry
screenplay by Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin, based on Alibar’s play “Juicy and Delicious”
directed by Benh Zeitlin

by Angelo Muredda The trailer for Beasts of the Southern Wild promises a harmless experience, but woe to anyone who goes in expecting a triumphal horn concert only to find Benh Zeitlin’s accomplished yet exasperating debut, a libertarian wolf in a fuzzy Aurochs suit. That the film is far trickier than its marketing hook suggests is at once refreshing and troubling, given what it actually has up its sleeve. An oyster banquet pitched on a burial site, it’s the sort of ethnographic celebration of a disenfranchised people that ends with the unspoken maxim, “And then they all died like men, and faded into legend.”

Our long-overdue review of Margaret (2011)

July 12, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD

Margaretcap

***½/****
starring Anna Paquin, J. Smith-Cameron, Jean Reno, Matt Damon
written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan

by Angelo Muredda The early word on Margaret was that it was a promising three-hour-plus city symphony wrested away in the editing room from writer-director Kenneth Lonergan. Still mired in legal troubles from the production over the course of its quiet release and critical resurgence last fall, Lonergan briefly spoke up to deny that what a coterie of critics and audience members had seen up to that point was damaged goods, admitting the 150-minute theatrical version is more or less his Director’s Cut. While the Blu-ray release includes the famed longer version*, then, it bears mentioning that if the theatrical cut is a thwarted masterpiece, uneven but conceptually daring and powerful, it’s very much Lonergan’s thwarted masterpiece.

Summer Interlude (1951) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Summer Interlude (1951) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 11, 2012Posted in1950s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Directors: Ingmar Bergman, Drama, Sweden, The Criterion Collection

Sommarlek
***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras D
starring Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjelin, Annalisa Ericson
screenplay by Herbert Grevenius and Ingmar Bergman
directed by Ingmar Bergman

by Bryant Frazer 1951’s Summer Interlude offers a glimpse of Ingmar Bergman’s later career in embryonic form. Maj-Britt Nilsson plays a sexy, precocious teenager in love, and if that doesn’t sound very Bergman-esque to you, know that she also plays a wary, regretful dancer approaching the functional end of her career at the Stockholm Royal Opera. The story darts forwards and backwards in time as the dancer, Marie, recalls an ill-fated love affair on the Stockholm archipelago while considering the status of her current relationship, a tentative affair with a newspaper hack who doesn’t deserve her.

Camelot (1967) (DigiBook) – Blu-ray Disc

July 9, 2012Posted in1960s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Musical, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero, David Hemmings
screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, based on his play and The Once and Future King by T.H. White
directed by Joshua Logan

by Jefferson Robbins Joshua Logan’s Camelot sucker-punched audiences, I suspect, and did so in slow-motion. Maybe the source musical, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, did as well. Mention the legend of King Arthur and our first notions are of magic and righteous triumph; we forget the betrayal and Fall. The overall air of the film is stabs of paradise framed by battle and tears, with most of the misery encroaching from offstage. Yet when the King’s dream finally dies, it dies viscerally. Find late in Camelot Arthur (Richard Harris) hiding from the collapse of his new social order in the wooded bower where he once studied with his vanished tutor Merlyn. He imagines soaring as a bird, as he did while Merlyn’s pupil, but his spirit-animal is interrupted by a hunter. It’s Mordred (David Hemmings), the fruit of Arthur’s forgotten sins, and his entry with bow and arrow reasserts the brutality that will pull down the kingdom.

Blood Work (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 2012Posted in2000s, 2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
starring Clint Eastwood, Wanda De Jesús, Jeff Daniels, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Michael Connelly
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw You can figure out the pivotal clue in Blood Work if not by the title alone–which gives altogether too much away–then surely come the thirty-minute mark. You can deduce the identity of the murderer as soon as he saunters on screen, and you can predict the love story almost before it happens just by dint of the kind of movie that Blood Work is. The only thing you can’t figure out is why Clint Eastwood, who sometimes makes interesting movies like Bird, A Perfect World, White Hunter, Black Heart, and Unforgiven, almost as often makes boring, predictable, prosaic movies like The Rookie (1990), Absolute Power, True Crime, and now Blood Work.

To Rome with Love (2012)

July 5, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Italy, Music, Romance, Spain, Theatrical

Toromewithlove

**/****
starring Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penélope Cruz
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There’s an odd moment early in To Rome with Love that makes you sit up and wonder if Woody Allen has made good on the promise shown by his surprisingly warm Midnight in Paris. Stumbling out of a movie theatre with his wife and another couple, regular schmo Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) mounts a rousing defense of Saverio Costanzo’s The Solitude of Prime Numbers, offering that its openness to human mystery makes it far superior to The King’s Speech. I can’t say I agree with him, but how nice to see such an idiosyncratic opinion voiced in earnest. That’s a good sign, coming from a director whose characters often sound like variations on one another in his lesser works–but it’s also a false one, when much of what follows plays out like a flat homage to omnibus city movies.

Savages (2012)

July 5, 2012Posted in2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Savages

*/****
starring Blake Lively, Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson, John Travolta
screenplay by Shane Salerno & Don Winslow & Oliver Stone, based on the novel by Winslow
directed by Oliver Stone 

by Walter Chaw Another disgusting piece of crap that Oliver Stone makes watchable and even fitfully interesting, Savages sees Stone returning to ground he already plowed in Salvador, his screenplay for Scarface, and arguably his best film in hindsight, the filthy U-Turn. One possible excuse for its foulness, in an ocean of possible excuses, is a cast headlined by Taylor Kitsch, the new Paul Walker; Aaron Johnson, the new Skeet Ulrich; and Blake Lively, the new…I don’t know, Bridget Fonda? Another possible explanation is a godawful script by Don Winslow (author of the novel upon which the film is based), Shane Salerno, and Stone hissownself that opens with a ridiculously bad voiceover tease and ends with same, sandwiching in between a tale of blissed-out California marijuana kingpins Chon (Kitsch) and Ben (Johnson) vs. the Mexican cartel, led by Lado (the always amazing Benicio Del Toro) and Elena (Salma Hayek). Sound awful? It’s awful. And it would have been even without an embarrassing John Travolta, wheedling and whinging through an entire performance as a corrupt DEA agent. With him, however, Savages at least has the benefit of occasionally elevating from entirely-useless to sometimes-whimsical camp artifact.

The Sweet Hereafter (1997) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD

July 1, 2012Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, DVD

Sweethereaftercap

****/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Ian Holm, Maury Chaykin, Peter Donaldson, Bruce Greenwood
screenplay by Atom Egoyan, based on the novel by Russell Banks
directed by Atom Egoyan

by Bryant Frazer For anyone left reeling by Atom Egoyan’s Exotica, with its sexualized miasma of grief and longing lingering in the mind, the very first shot of The Sweet Hereafter is vertigo-inducing. Once again, the camera tracks very slowly from left to right as the titles appear on screen–a signal, perhaps, that more human misery awaits. Egoyan eventually alights on a scene of tranquility, as a family of three–mother, father, child–sleeps on a bare wooden floor. Beyond the stylistic link to the opening of Egoyan’s previous film, I’m not sure what it is about this tableau that should be so disquieting. Partly it’s the slow, deliberate camera move that brought us here. Partly it’s the voyeuristic viewing opportunity. (Sleeping families are, of course, vulnerable, and the casual exposure of most of the woman’s breast puts the audience in the place of intruders spying on a private moment.) And partly it’s that the God’s-eye P.O.V. suggests the omnipotence and indifference of the universe at large when tragedy is the subject.

Deliverance (1972) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD/(DigiBook) – Blu-ray Disc

June 27, 2012Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Thriller

****/****
DVD – Image B Sound C Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox
screenplay by James Dickey, based on his novel
directed by John Boorman

by Walter Chaw Deliverance is mesmerizing. Emerging fully formed from the rich, black loam of the best period of filmmaking definitely in the United States and possibly in the history of cinema, it pistons its roots unerringly into the darkest corners of our species’ memory. In the second-most memorable moment of the film (the one where kind-hearted city-slicker Drew (Ronny Cox) eases into a guitar/banjo duel with a local kid (Billy Redden)), Boorman dangles the possibility that there could be civility between the spoilers and the spoiled before retracting it for the remainder of the picture’s running time. If Boorman is our pre-eminent keeper of the Arthurian legend, it’s useful to wonder in this particular quest undertaken what are the dark spirits of the wood, and what is the grail? The final image of the piece, after all, suggests a corruption of the Excalibur iconography offered from some fathomless underneath. The essential Western phallus is perverted in Deliverance into the promise that the primal will never be repressed for long.

Being John Malkovich (1999) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 25, 2012Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

Beingjohnmalkovichcap1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw The moment you realize that Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich is more than just another ultra-high-concept indie calling-card is right at the end, when all that quirk reveals itself as bleak, desperate, lonesome. It’s the first time most of us conceptualized the idea of Charlie Kaufman, in fact–the moment that any follow-up became a cause célèbre. It’s silly, really, to bother trying to synopsize the film, but for the uninitiated, it’s about a failed puppeteer’s discovery of a portal behind a file cabinet on the low-ceilinged floor of an office designed for the dwarf wife of a sea captain. (“Curs-ed t’ing,” he calls her.) The portal leads, of course, to the inside of John Malkovich’s skull for around fifteen minutes before expelling the interloper to the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Looking here, it’s possible to begin to trace Kaufman’s auteur obsessions with interiors, with language (in a job interview hinged on malaproprisms and miscommunications), with doubling, identity, surrealism, systems of belief, and, sneakily, science-fiction. What’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, after all, but a fairly extraordinary SF piece that just happens to be one of the best movies about love ever made?

Exotica (1994) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD

June 24, 2012Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery

Exoticacap

****/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Bruce Greenwood, Mia Kirshner, Don McKellar, Elias Koteas
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Bryant Frazer When Exotica debuted at Cannes in 1994, Atom Egoyan had already earned a reputation for curious, low-key explorations of memory and alienation. His Family Viewing, Speaking Parts, and The Adjuster leaned on video as a kind of metaphor showing how relationships become dependent on individual frames of reference that each move in only one direction–how one person’s blank tape is another’s cherished memory, or how one person’s pornographic display is another’s lifeline. Exotica represented Egoyan’s commercial breakthrough in part because he found an enticing venue for those observations. It’s one of the most fundamentally despairing movies that I know, and yet there is in the precision of its craft, the bravery of its conception, and the depth of its empathy something fundamentally uplifting.

The Woman in the Fifth (2012)

June 13, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Mystery, Poland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Womaninthefifth

La femme du Vème
*½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Kristin Scott Thomas, Joanna Kulig, Samir Guesmi
screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski, based on Douglas Kennedy’s novel
directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

by Angelo Muredda Midway through Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Woman in the Fifth, Romanian femme fatale Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas) tells glum American writer Tom (Ethan Hawke) not to worry about his writer’s block. “You have the makings of a serious work now,” she reassures him: “A broken life, down-and-out in Paris.” Intended as a key to the film, a hint that we aren’t watching real events at all but rather their translation into an American’s grim European masterwork, this exchange does nothing so much as outline the limits of Pawlikowski’s imagination. His first feature since 2004’s unsettling My Summer of Love, this is an odd misstep, the kind of bad movie that can only be made with the purest of intentions. I don’t doubt that Pawlikowski, working from a thriller by American writer Douglas Kennedy, believes in this idea that good novels are born of wretched experiences–that being a disgraced literature professor and stalled artist shaking down phantoms in run-down Paris gives you a direct line to authenticity. But it’s the sort of half-baked conceit that defines countless shallow genre texts shooting for arthouse credibility, the hallmark of a Secret Window knockoff that begs to be taken as seriously as a good Paul Auster novel.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

May 29, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Moonrisekingdom

***½/****
starring Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola
directed by Wes Anderson

by Angelo Muredda In his post-mortem of the 65th Cannes Film Festival, over which he presided as jury president, Nanni Moretti complained that a number of Competition filmmakers seemed “more in love with their style than with their characters.” Whether Moretti had festival opener and Competition entry Moonrise Kingdom in mind is debatable, but this is the kind of criticism Wes Anderson has faced throughout his career. Moonrise Kingdom won’t win many holdouts over to Anderson’s corner: Those who think he’s spent the last 16 years building dollhouses may snicker from the first sequence, where the camera laterally tracks through an actual dollhouse of a set to find a mid-1960s family sequestered in tiny rooms, parsing their magazines and adventure novels. Those baffled by The Darjeeling Limited‘s juxtaposition of Kinks songs with snippets of Merchant-Ivory and Satyajit Ray scores may also scoff as the camera tracks past a battery-operated record player pushing out Benjamin Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” an educational piece narrated by a disembodied voice that neatly introduces “all the separate parts of the orchestra.” As if to facilitate a no-hard-feelings exit for the unenthused, Anderson telegraphs his aesthetic from the overture.