Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Friday, December 13, 2013
Thursday, December 12, 2013
This is very upsetting (but see my note below): "Stanley Kubrick Filmed Fake Moon Footage"
Note: None of the interviewees in this video mention Kubrick directly (although it's implicit that his wife, Christiane, would be referring to him, though the footage). They all say "he", which tells me there's a possibility that the footage was culled from numerous sources, after which such implications could be made.
However, I am way more convinced now than I was after watching the doc Room 237 that this is indeed a possibility.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Monday, December 9, 2013
Friday, December 6, 2013
Film Review - Grabbers
The monster movie is a raped genre. It’s been pillaged to death ever since filmmaking became a technologically cheaper and hence more accessible undertaking. But we’ve seen some interesting films nonetheless. Finland’s yuletide horror Rare Exports, and Dead Snow and Trollhunter from Norway exhibit a DIY hipness while not skimping on well-executed CGI, giving even Hollywood a run for its money. Ireland now joins the ranks of the island-bound, indie monster movie elite with Grabbers, a hilarious title for any movie ever named, but justified given the fact that director Jon Wright makes it cleverly comedic as well.
Grabbers opens with a speeding meteorite crashing into the waters off Aran Island, a small Irish fishing town. In no time at all, some unsuspecting fishermen are gobbled up by a giant, gummy, cephalopod-looking thing. Something like an alien octopus, this organism can survive in liquids and air most likely elementally different than its home planet's. Although there appears to be no causal explanation for it's origin or it's miraculous survival, this slimy creature - which seems to roll on land using it's many spear-ended tentacles - moves it's attention to the island. This is when people start getting, you know, grabbed.
Lisa, played by the wonderfully astute Ruth Bradley, is a newly transferred policewoman - conservative, plucky, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and despite being Irish and all, wouldn't touch a drop of alcohol with a ten foot tentacle. To her dismay, she defaults into partnering with cynical Garda Ciaran O’Shea (Richard Coyle), who spends nearly all of his off-duty hours in a pub. Their patrol kicks off with a call to a beach where a ghastly sight has been reported - some very large fish have been mangled and then thrown ashore by some...thing. Well, numerous locals, some large, creepy translucent eggs and logical explanations by a snarky scientist later, we are confronted with the film’s creative yet somehow inevitable hook: this gross monster is anatomically incapable of ingesting humans which have been inebriated.
Naturally, this makes way for a romance to kindle twixt the two Gardas - and for the libations to flow, of course, all while trying to run the beast aground for once and for all.
There is no shortage of Irish tropes in this bucolic monster flick. A winsome irish sheep herder, complete with cane and golfing cap; a quibblesome, Hobbit-looking couple are the bartenders at the local pub. Much of this is done with a winking Irish eye of course, and that’s what makes this such an enjoyable romp. What are the Irish if not hearty self-reflexive jokesters?
While Grabbers is no monsterpiece, it’s funny, smart, surprisingly beautiful to look at and, like it’s smaller budget ilk, shows some skillful CGI. We can't forget why we watch movies. Watching Grabbers will remind you.
Monday, December 2, 2013
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Thursday, November 28, 2013
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Will the old Oldboy be surpassed?
No, that's impossible (besides, Spike Lee calls his version a "reinterpretation")
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Monday, November 18, 2013
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Friday, November 15, 2013
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Revisiting Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)
When I first saw Harold and Maude - somewhere during the middle of college - I was struck by the bittersweet sexual shock of it all. Harold’s morbid play at suicide at the opening of the film (with many more to follow), and the sour look on his face when his mother, indifferent as stone, shrugs it off and then reminds him of another dinner and another dinner guest that night; then, of course, the ensuing highly unorthodox relationship which Harold becomes uncharacteristically passionate about. Passion is something that has been unknown to him until now. Living in sprawling opulence with cars given to him like candy to a baby, if Harold must bear his mother’s constant demeaning flabbergasting, why not embark on the ultimate reign of terror on her - a girlfriend 6 decades his senior.
Our two main characters' common link and first intersection is at a funeral because, oddly enough, they both happen to be funeral crashers. This is a dark yet quaint coincidence, given Harold's fascination with death and Maude's indiscriminate embrace of all natural things and occurrences. But Maude is especially full of life, and that's how their relationship flowers.
Bud Cort’s Harold does an effective near-depressive fatherless 20 year old (the lacking father is not explained), lurking and brooding in some scenes but captivatingly alive in others. But Maude, played by Ruth Gordon (Rosemary’s Baby), is a breath of fresh air in every scene, especially considering the post-countercultural climate of the film’s 1971 release, while predecessors like Medium Cool and Easy Rider more overtly resembled societal and political change. Maude’s character generates a very non-conformist and free-spirited way of life here, liberating the movie beyond the idea of a platform or a method of finger-pointing, and elevates it into something altogether unseen and refreshingly non-hippiedelic. Harold and Maude make Harold and Maude a flower of another color.
Maude is a fearless pip, emboldened by what seems to be an infinite love of life and the living. At times she brings the movie even more off it's rocker, to a near absurdist level of comedy, such as in the great chase scene with a much younger Tom Skerritt as a flummoxed motorcycle cop. She also owns a comically large sculpture of a vagina, which in one scene makes for an apt bit of foreshadowing in this transcendent fable-like story.
I can’t say for sure what I noticed about the film 11 years ago, but now so much more is clear. The film deals with self identity and acceptance in the face of social norms. Harold is at one end of the spectrum while his mother (played by Vivian Pickles) - who at that same dinner speaks of his absent father in a story about about the French river “Sane”, as she pronounces it - is at the other, and farther still is Maude. Harold’s mother thinks like many conservative and practical mothers of the time and her idea is to sack him with the military uncle (a one-armed caricature straight out of Clockwork Orange, although both films were released the same year), whom Harold scares the hell out of in perhaps the film's most brilliant scene, in which Harold runs off Maude's pretend peace-loving solo picketer into a hole that goes into the ocean below.
Harold and Maude ambles along to the wistful strains of Cat Stevens’ jangles, which collectively amount to a great score. The standout track however, “If you want to be free, be free, if you want to sing out sing out”, has a humorous and motherly matter-of-factness that is nearly over the top, but it tenderizes the emotional gravity and delicacy of the bond formed between these two oddballs.
Ashby handles this movie and the characters generously - much as he did with The Landlord, another film tackling misfit-vs-the-world ideas, letting his actors inhabit their characters in a way that only a person as in touch with their milieu as this director could. There is a comfortable looseness in the way the characters meet and then daringly take on adventures and get to know each other in all ways.
Maude shows Harold the world. She shows him how to live, which he admits he hasn’t done ("I've died a few times") and in the tragic end, who would know that Maude would set Harold up for the biggest, most ironic disappointment of his life. And by his first love, no less. Harold and Maude is a love story about finding one’s sense of self. It’s a story about the soul, and furthermore a story with a soul. I’d like to call it a spirit film, because it has to be seen to be believed.
Monday, November 11, 2013
From newish movie The Iceman
Even though he is unintended comic relief, neither Schwimmer nor his ridic wardrobe cut it. 
Saturday, November 9, 2013
Friday, November 8, 2013
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
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Monday, November 4, 2013
Sunday, November 3, 2013
film review - The Son (Dardenne Brothers, 2002)
At the beginning of The Son - which played the 2002 New York Film Fest - the viewer helplessly collides into the life of Olivier, via the Dardennes' oft used over the shoulder point of view shot which weaves through emotionally airtight situations as he relentlessly plods forth as a proponent of the progress of troubled male youths.
Olivier is a divorced carpenter who teaches his trade to young boys without homes, an occupation he finds more satisfying than working in his brother's sawmill. One day he comes across an application for another boy, Francis. He tells the secretary he has no room for this boy, but we soon find out through interactions with his melodramatic ex-wife, that there's more to it than that.
Soon after, while home and listening to voicemails of older boys who were once under his wing, Olivier is paid a visit by his ex-wife who tells him she's getting remarried and is pregnant, a bit of info which can be confusing when one doesn't know how long they've been apart, but which also may reveal Olivier’s real motive in looking out for these boys.
Olivier decides to take on Francis and later will be asked for much more from the boy himself. Olivier seems to take a special interest in Francis, keeping a close eye on his progress through the rudimentary stages of carpentry, a trade more biblical than Francis’ past trespass, which looms in the near future as the topic of conversation between the two.
One touching scene near the middle of the film shows Olivier on his way out of a deli running into Francis. Olivier waits a bit near his car eating, as if to see if the boy needs a ride. Francis comes over and remarks on how earlier that day Olivier knew exactly Francis’ height when prepping him for his work ahead. Francis is amazed at this uncanny talent and challenges his teacher with further spatial queries. Olivier, proceeding with his usual wooden and stern demeanor, guesstimates with x-acto precision the distance of Francis’ foot from his own. It’s a bit of touching male bonding. However, his ability to measure quantifiable things seems useless in this world fraught with the emotionally fragile and unpredictable.
Olivier's concern for the boy is baffling but, over time, one can make the observation that Olivier is simply a moral man, giving care as he believes people should, if not a father with some guilt from his past, and wanting to resume where he once left off.
The Dardenne brothers bother not with lavish production design, ceremonial camera moves or even the requisite device of music, but are interested only in what makes the story function most effectively. Their use of cinéma vérité is perhaps the method’s most profound, yet most fearlessly tortuous. Being throttled behind Olivier’s shoulder for the duration of The Son is like riding a hurtling rollercoaster through most fathers’ worst fears. One could call it the ascetic aesthetic. It’s a style that doesn’t come across as style, but instead as a lack of pleasantries with which much of the Dardennes’ contemporaries adorn their own films. There are abrupt moments when the camera, shakily suspended over Olivier's shoulder, bolts into another direction to capture an incoming dramatic element.
This in your face mise-en-scene can be ominous, heady and at times unsettling, but the conclusion of this story - which is the showdown we could see coming but didn’t want to actually witness - is disarming and revelatory.
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