Theatrical Archives - Page 23 of 65

A Touch of Sin (2013)

October 18, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, China, Drama, Revenge, Theatrical

***/****
starring Jiang Wu, Zhao Tao, Wang Baoqiang, Luo Lanshan
written and directed by Jia Zhangke

by Angelo Muredda The blood doesn’t flow so much as it spurts in A Touch of Sin, Jia Zhangke’s invigorated if uneven return to straight fiction following an extended sojourn in hybridized documentaries about modern Chinese cities. More than the formal homecoming, however, it’s the nature of the storytelling that surprises in his newest–the leap from the elegiac tone of films like 24 City into the more primal stuff of pulp. A wuxia anthology with revenge-thriller overtones, A Touch of Sin is an unusually direct genre exercise for a master filmmaker, in the sense that, unlike Steven Spielberg’s Munich and other comparably shame-faced prestige films that dip a single toe in the waters of genre, it doesn’t condescend to the populist trappings of the material. Jia isn’t slumming so much as tapping into the righteous indignation of a popular tradition of stories about wronged knights and ruined innocents, sincerely transposed here to the working-class fringe of a nation-state in the throes of late capitalism. If Jia’s violence comes fast and leaves a mess, then, it’s a testament to his willingness to get his hands dirty where others might have kept a safer distance.

Carrie (2013)

October 17, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, Horror, Stephen King, Teen, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Judy Greer, Portia Doubleday, Julianne Moore
screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
directed by Kimberly Peirce

by Walter Chaw If you were to boil down Brian De Palma’s work, at least his earlier work, into a few ideas, you’d land on the way he took Hitchcock’s subterranean perversions and made them perversion perversions, transforming pieces and suggestions into themes and declarations. Looking at De Palma’s Carrie today, what’s there is a clear attempt–often successful–to elevate B-movie tropes to the status high art, or high pulp: What Godard did to gangster films, De Palma did to Hitchcock, turning the already formal into formalism. When De Palma was at his best, his movies evoked in daylight what Hitchcock inspired in shadow. Of its many technical innovations, his Carrie, an adaptation of Stephen King’s not-very-good but vibe-y debut novel, was aided immeasurably by pitch-perfect casting: Sissy Spacek, P.J. Soles, John Travolta, Amy Irving, and Nancy Allen. Hip then, it’s hip still–and sexy as hell, as befitting a story that’s ultimately about a girl’s sexual awakening and, let’s face it, really bangin’ first orgasm. On prom night, no less. What could be more American?

Bastards (2013)

October 11, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, France, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller

Les salauds
****/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille, Lola Creton
screenplay by Jean-Pol Fargeau and Claire Denis
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda A Claire Denis film through and through, Bastards is nevertheless a brilliant departure for one of the most distinctive artists in world cinema–an indignant revenge thriller with, of all things, a straightforward plot. Of course, the plot is scrambled, doled out in the runic fragments that have become Denis’s stock-in-trade. We open, for instance, in the rain, as a throbbing Tindersticks track underscores a series of beautiful but inscrutable nocturnal images: glimpses of a man forlornly staring out his window, languorous tracking shots of a nude young woman in heels roaming through a deserted street, and finally a tableau of a dead man’s body splayed out beneath a fire escape, surrounded by paramedics in the background as a woman, probably his wife, is draped in a tinfoil blanket in the fore. Although films like L’Intrus have primed us to accept such shards as part of an impressionistic array of visual information, adding up to a textured view of nighttime Paris as a hopelessly lonely place, in Bastards the pieces fit together in a precise way we’re simply not allowed to know until we’ve arrived through the movie’s own idiosyncratic channel, and at its own deliberate pace. That makes it one of the most elegantly constructed of Denis’s eleven features–a grim noir story broken into its component parts, then reassembled into a haunted funhouse image of itself.

Escape from Tomorrow (2013)

October 9, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, Katelynn Rodriguez, Alison Lees-Taylor
written and directed by Randy Moore

by Walter Chaw Randy Moore’s ridiculously-ballsy Escape from Tomorrow proves itself to be a good deal more than a gimmick–said gimmick being that it posits the Magic Kingdom as the locus, the key modern metaphor, for bourgeois discontent, with much of the picture shot surreptitiously on the grounds of Disneyland and Disney World. It’s very much the model of a Luis Buñuel film, not just for its expert surrealism, but also for its sharply-reasoned social satire. It does the impossible in our modern conversation by feeling urgent and fresh, presenting something that’s genuinely shocking to our jaded sensibilities. If there’s anything left that is perverse, one is this violation of such a famously litigious sacred cow. It isn’t even that the idea of using Disney as the eye of a capitalist/vaguely fascistic hurricane is particularly novel: consider that David Mamet took it on in his collection of essays Some Freaks–not to mention the gallons of ink spilled on its essentially corrupt nature by wanks following the long immolation of Disney products Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus. No, what’s novel about Escape from Tomorrow is that it does what it does through images; it is essentially this generation’s Superstar, in which Todd Haynes told the life and death of Karen Carpenter using Barbie and Ken dolls. A picture that understands its subject and its relationship to popular culture well enough to make everyone pretty uncomfortable with their own complicity in it all, it’s an indictment of a collective upbringing. The recognition you experience is of your own indoctrinated childhood.

Watermark (2013)

September 27, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Jennifer Baichwal & Edward Burtynsky

by Angelo Muredda Although it’s the first of her films to be co-directed (by Manufactured Landscapes subject and Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky), Watermark is less a departure for Jennifer Baichwal than it is the apotheosis of her style. Since 1988’s Let it Come Down, Baichwal has been the most formally adventurous documentarian of the artistic process, not just profiling the work of makers as disparate as Paul Bowles and Shelby Lee Adams, but attempting to recreate their singular visions as well. In her previous film, Payback, that meant converting Margaret Atwood’s lecture series of the same name into an evocative position paper about debt in all its global permutations, from blood feuds to legal restitution. In Manufactured Landscapes, it consisted of finding a way to translate Burtynsky’s large-scale images of factories and pock-marked terrains into cinematic tableaux, with collaborator Nick de Pencier’s cinematography of Burtynsky’s stomping grounds effectively adding a sense of duration and movement to the print-bound stasis of the originals. Watermark might be the most radical variation on this approach, an abstract consideration of the interaction between water and human-made structures, carried out largely through wordless aerial photography of streams bisecting grotesque landscapes rather than the usual talking-head exposition.

Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve (2013) + The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013)

September 26, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Theatrical

MONEY FOR NOTHING: INSIDE THE FEDERAL RESERVE
**½/****
directed by Jim Bruce

THE TRIALS OF MUHAMMAD ALI
***/****
directed by Bill Siegel

by Walter Chaw It’s difficult to review Jim Bruce’s incendiary, scholarly Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve (hereafter Money), because even as I was understanding the role of the Federal Reserve Bank for the first time in my adult life (how its adjustments of interest actually drive the economy of not merely this nation, but every industrialized nation in our rapidly-shrinking world), I found myself comparing the film to one of those informational videos that play on endless loops in Natural History museums. It’s immensely educational…and dry as a soda cracker. What I find to be problematic about it is the same thing I found problematic about Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth: it’s not really art, is it? Not to open that can of worms, but for me, as a personal demarcation, art inspires something like Kierkegaardian fear and loathing–existential trembling, yes: a mirror held to nature in all the myriad, alien, surprising, often terrifying forms that nature assumes. What Money does, and does admirably, is explain what the hell happened to the United States’ financial institutions right around 1998 or so and continuing on into now–explain what the bailout was and how/why it affects the average American. Most fascinatingly, it explains how far in estimation the once god-like Alan Greenspan has fallen in the eyes of those who worshipped him. But while these are noble achievements, they’re not enough.

Riddick (2013)

September 5, 20132013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Vin Diesel, Jordi Mollà, Matt Nable, Katee Sackhoff
written and directed by David Twohy

by Walter Chaw Maybe it was the anticipation, maybe it’s because it’s too much like the first film, Pitch Black, but David Twohy’s Riddick is merely fine for what it is, lacking the kind of loopy, operatic invention of the franchise’s middle course and contenting itself with being a bug hunt in the James Cameron sense of the word instead of exploring more of this universe. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that, but I wanted to love this movie with all my heart, having declared to everyone’s exhaustion that of all the prestige movies prepping down the pike, this was the one I was waiting for. Turns out, the best science-fiction film of the last quarter of this year is Jonathan Glazer’s unbelievably good Under the Skin–not Gravity and, alas, not Riddick, either. To be fair, of the three, Glazer’s is the only one to deal with science-fiction as existentialism rather than as background and circus. More’s the pity, because Chronicles of Riddick, with its elementals and fringe religions, its funky spiritualism and its sense of fairy-tale hyperbole, is one of the genuinely great cult films of the last decade. If not for an ending to Riddick that promises Twohy’s ready for another swing at the plate if another ball is lobbed at him, I wouldn’t be in a very good mood at all.

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.

Europa Report (2013)

August 13, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Pseudo-Documentary, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Christian Camargo, Anamaria Marinca, Michael Nyqvyst, Sharlto Copley
screenplay by Philip Gelatt
directed by Sebastián Cordero

by Walter Chaw Sebastián Cordero’s found-footage sci-fi flick Europa Report tells the tale of the first manned trip to the titular moon of Jupiter in search of some kind of lifeform lurking there beneath a thick layer of ice. Never mind that this is a premise Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two already explored to similar consequence, nor that Europa Report is essentially an intergalactic The Blair Witch Project: best to focus on an unfortunate framing story that dumbs down the proceedings, emotionally and intellectually, at the exact moment the picture appears to be gaining momentum. It’s all the more puzzling, given the existence of something so pandering and condescending, that the group apparently most enamoured with this movie is the scientific community, who I would have guessed would have taken more offense at being talked down to. Maybe they’re so beaten into submission by the idiotic things Damon Lindelof passes off as “science” that they’re willing to forgive Europa Report its more minor trespasses.

The Wolverine (2013)

August 8, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Will Yun Lee, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tao Okamoto
screenplay by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw James Mangold’s The Wolverine is lovely, unusual, novel enough that the moments it makes concessions to its genre and comic-book origins are the same moments that feel like a shame. It’s not that they don’t work, exactly–it’s that when a brooding character study offset by a few delightful action scenes introduces an adamantium samurai mecha and a Poison Ivy manqué to bring it all home, well…it’s that it works too well at being something the film is otherwise not. It’s two movies, really: a unique one about women in tension; and a more common one about a grief-stricken man taking on the responsibility of protecting a surrogate. Both are complex. It’s a pity that, by dint of license and expectation, The Wolverine had to be a literal superhero movie and not something more covert like The Caveman’s Valentine or The Brave One. At the end, the only place to put the blame is the impossibility of funding a picture like this without the license and expectation: no one would invest, it would seem, in an anonymous story about a man’s mute, impotent melancholy and the many females around him engaged in the maintenance of their separate, disintegrating orbits.

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013)

August 6, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Jake Abel
screenplay by Marc Guggenheim, based on the novel by Rick Riordan
directed by Thor Freudenthal

by Walter Chaw Say this about Thor Freudenthal and Marc Guggenheim’s Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (hereafter PJ2): you’re more than justified in questioning its existence, but at the end of the day it’s impossible to make something this bad by accident. No, it takes genuine inspiration to be this tone-deaf, to create something that requires intimate knowledge of the source novel or the first film in this benighted franchise yet will instantly piss off the teenies who love the Rick Riordan books and the far fewer souls who liked that first movie. For me, because I love my 9-year-old daughter with all my heart, I endured PJ2 and only thought about walking out a half-dozen times before resigning myself to the murky 3-D and even murkier execution. Yes, it’s awful, that much is to be expected, but that it’s significantly worse than a movie that was already terrible by nearly every objective standard is really some kind of accomplishment. At the end of the day, when a 9-year-old articulates that what’s wrong with the film is that they took out all the relationship stuff, cherry-picked crap from other novels to contrive a half-assed cliffhanger for a sequel that will likely never happen, and basically fumbled the promise of the title, well…at least PJ2 can claim the distinction of awakening the critical facility in a child who, before this, thought every movie was pretty good.

Elysium (2013)

August 5, 20132013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga
written and directed by Neill Blomkamp

by Walter Chaw Lost in the hue and cry for meaning in film is the truism that having a message does not necessarily denote meaning. Case in point, District 9 helmer Neill Blomkamp’s left-wing screed Elysium, which feels, unpleasantly, like having lunch with Sean Penn and all the filthy, proselytizing, self-martyring glory that implies. It’s also like that lunch Indy forces Willie Scott to eat in Temple of Doom: Mmmm, condescending! It’s unashamedly pushing an agenda, and while it does a better job of that than Star Trek Into Darkness, it’s arguably more frustrating because so much of it demonstrates a bracing nerd-topia of tech wonders and genre references. Indeed, Elysium is the closest we’ve come to seeing a big-screen adaptation of Ursula K. Leguin’s astonishing The Dispossessed. Which is to say, not very close at all, but there you have it. A pity, then, that armed with so able an action star as Matt Damon, the movie finds itself at the end more comfortable in a double-feature with Promised Land than with The Bourne Identity. Damon’s at his best as a hero in the act of discovering his own potential, see–and absolute bollocks as political philosopher and activist. Times like these, I think Team America: World Police was right about him all along.

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 Conjuring (2013)

July 19, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor
screenplay by Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw Based on a true story in the same way that a pineapple is an apple, James Wan’s latest exercise in jump-scare theatre is the workmanlike haunted house/demonic possession flick The Conjuring. In it, the paranormal investigation team of Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren, co-authors of several books and shown as the film begins lecturing a small auditorium of people on the finer points of ghost-hunting, confront their Greatest Challenge Ever when they’re called to the modest New England farmhouse of the Perron family. It seems this was the former home of a WITCH! Can you fucking believe the luck? An evil witch lived in this house. Fuck. A witch. Motherfucker, am I right? You buy a house and you think that…anyway, it really sucks that a witch lived there. It all starts out innocently enough with the largely indistinguishable Perron girls getting jerked out of bed by an invisible whatever, then evolves into a game of hide and clap (which sounds venereal but isn’t, unless you’re doing it really wrong) that leads to mommy Carolyn (Lili Taylor) getting thrown down a flight of stairs into a creepy, boarded-up cellar™. That’s when daddy Roger (Ron Livingston) calls the Warrens… Well, he doesn’t, because he’s away on a week-long business trip, and he’s a skeptic of the Warrens, we learn after the fact… Um… He’s not a well-developed character, seeing as how Wan seems distracted by all the loud noises and crap leaping out at the camera.

Computer Chess (2013)

July 18, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Patrick Riester, Myles Page, James Curry, Robin Schwartz
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

by Walter Chaw Sneakily, the best science-fiction film of the summer is Andrew “Godfather of Mumblecore” Bujalski’s decidedly lo-fi Computer Chess, shot with a late-’60s, made-for-home-video Sony AVC-3260 analog tube video camera that approximates the very look and feel of something you’d find in a box in someone’s garage. It endeavours to tell the story of a weekend tech convention where proto-hackers engage in mortal combat over who will be the first to create a computer chess program that can defeat a human master (Gerald Peary (!)) and, incidentally, collect a $75k booty. The money, though, is incidental to the glory of scientific discovery, of being the first to push the limits of artificial intelligence to the point of…what? Aggression? Sentience, perhaps? It’s telling that Bujalski, at the forefront of a specific DIY subgenre of independent cinema reliant on largely improvised performances with no budget nor, theoretically, affectation (it’s like the American version of the Dogme95 movement), has produced the most affectless, genuine artifact of the dogme philosophy through his greatest feat of affectation: he’s created a time capsule of an era in a film about the eternity of the human instinct to create simulacra first and deal with issues of functional equivalence later. In its way, Computer Chess works like a sprung, found-footage diary of the birth of Skynet. It’s Mary Shelley, and Blade Runner, and it gets to being about what it’s about without being an asshole about it.

The Attack (2013)

July 11, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, Egypt, France, Lebanon, Qatar, Theatrical

L’attentat
***/****
starring Ali Suliman, Remonde Amsellem, Evgenia Dodina, Karim Saleh
screenplay by Joelle Touma and Ziad Doueiri, based on the novel by Yasmina Khadra
directed by Ziad Doueiri

by Walter Chaw Lebanese-born Ziad Doueiri, an assistant cameraman on Quentin Tarantino’s first three features, demonstrates as a director the kind of elliptical reserve more commonly associated with Terrence Malick. Indeed, the most powerful stretches of his sophomore effort, The Attack, recall the fragments of The Thin Red Line that elucidate Pvt. Bell’s wife’s betrayal through a series of voiceovers, remembered conversations, and gauzy/idealized images of a bucolic existence that may or may not have ever existed. An adaptation of a novel by Yasmina Khadra, The Attack details the discovery by an Arab emergency-room surgeon based in Israel, Amin (Ali Suliman), that his wife Siham (Reymond Amsalem, who has the quality and pitch of Illeana Douglas–a wonderful thing) is the suicide bomber responsible for an attack in Tel Aviv, the casualties of which we watch Amin try to save. Amin has been “accepted” by the Jews, we understand, though there’s tension throughout the early scenes as his friends and colleagues awkwardly navigate around him in a way that reads initially as condescending, then increasingly hostile as events unfold. Hannah Arendt would have something to say about this; so would Paula Deen and her legion of insensate followers. When Amin receives an award for his work, his acceptance speech includes the platitude that all Arabs have a little Jew in them and vice versa; by the picture’s last words, “Every time you go away, a little piece of me dies,” one wonders if he means the little piece that has empathy for the opposition’s point of view.

Pacific Rim (2013)

July 10, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**/****
starring Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day
screenplay by Travis Beacham & Guillermo del Toro
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I have this theory that the reason the United States started remaking Japanese movies (particularly the J-Horror stuff) almost immediately post-9/11 is that it was after that pivotal event that the country assumed a distinctly Japanese worldview. Suddenly, it was possible for something unthinkable to happen to civilians; the universe was callous and arbitrary in its measuring out of lives, and the idea of a “civilian target” or, more to the point, of “innocence,” was hopelessly quaint. It’s as good an explanation as any as to why there are so many evil children in Japanese horror–the same explanation, as it happens, for why there were so many evil children in late-’60s/early-’70s American horror–the difference being that there was usually an explanation for why the children were bad in the United States (the Devil, mostly). In Japan? Not so much. In America’s post-9/11 evil-kid flicks, even the ones not remaking Japanese films, the kids are generally just born that way. Even the rise of “torture porn” is more or less a not-as-graphic reproduction of Japan’s “Guinea Pig” cinema–seven pictures from the ’80s (including the indescribable Mermaid in a Manhole and Flower of Flesh & Blood, which caused a credulous Charlie Sheen to call the FBI), culminating now in the United States with a pretty rough update of Maniac starring everybody’s favourite probably-murderer, Elijah Wood.