I love the way it seems to hover in multiple moments over its disjointed chronology, freely, always appearing grounded enough that it could be taking place now or whenever. This could easily fit into Van Sant's death trilogy with its genuinely probing scratch at adolescent erosion and its many irritants.
Tight as a snare drum. This completely restores my faith in cinema: This is practically a shot-for-shot remake of the original film and it's being unleashed in multiplexes. The smidge in downgrade is on account of surprise: When you are going in fresh - it cuts much deeper.
Though not quite as effortlessly absorbing - and marginally flashier, to boot - as Spider-Man, this has got to be the most succintly cast of the tidal wave of comic hero films since Sam Raimi's run. The film operates around Robert Downey Jr.'s performance in the same way American Psycho runs around Christian Bale's or There Will Be Blood runs around Daniel Day-Lewis's: Nothing ever seems quite as satisfying as just listening to them talk. Even before seeing the film, the genre is assumed to be a stretch for Favreau, who actually seems more deft here than on either Elf or Made (or Zathura, which I didn't see), most likely because he's finally made a film with more than one word in the title. Its still hokum, still racked with staleness in spots (and the ending is nigh ridiculoso), but Iron Man lays out its creed pretty early on when, instead of accepting an award, Tony Stark is rolling dice at the craps table. He is Iron Man.
All that trepidation was still building when I saw it - the grade could reflect a wild reaction based purely on whim or mood - but at this moment, things have settled. When you love a brand, you know if you can picture yourself gobbling it up in multiple viewings (as with the other three films) or whether its never going to quite feel enamorable. Here, with slick technology (literally, the state of the art, as in the other films), Indiana Jones and the KotCS doesn't seem aware of itself enough to know that its supposed to be a 30s serial and comes off - very pungently, in spots - as most effects-driven films tend to: With all the blank starin' lack of humanity one might find in a video game. (Which is not to say that there aren't some doozies floating around in there: The stunt-driven action scenes are still pretty exciting.) The family dynamics are bittersweet at best, with old Harrison Ford less charming than his younger self, Shia LeBouf obviously not grasping that his character's stereotypical rudeboy greaser bit only really works if he's consistently cartoonish (which he isn't) and Karen Allen's entire role comprised of the same spat with Indiana Jones over and over again. (I'm not huge on their wedding, either. Tying Jones down seems to say: THE END.) With all my gripes, however, I found myself ensconced in the tale itself; Spielberg may not have been hugely confident, but he still seems to tap into the pulp of the material without compromise. I look forward to seeing it again sans reservations.
The specifics barely seem like the thing to echo a Loachian social comment - the drum circles and the stiff professor routine, I mean - but The Visitor works just the same. Much as he did for self-pity in The Station Agent, McCarthy's sobering compassion lends a nurturing admiration, treating the complacency of mourning with an almost parental approach. Richard Jenkins carries the film aptly, with Haaz Sleiman nearly stealing the film from him as the djembe-loving illegal alien who restores Jenkins' vitality (he has an assist from his visiting mother, played by Hiam Abbass).
Pefectly enjoyable, if quite often consistently favoring an emotional heft it can't lift to save its life. I had the same thought D'Angelo did while watching it: The style of the dream sequence in the opening scene would have made for a far more visually exciting film. I enjoy the flat splays of color, but not as much as I enjoy the frentic wildfire in the title character's dream.
The first seventeen minutes are like watching the equivalent of a comedic implosion, with Jack Black in more annoying mode than usual. The film breaks free, ultimately tapping the same bliss-in-ignorance vein as Gondry's The Science of Sleep and ending on much the same I Heart My Neighborhood verve that made Dave Chappelle's 'Block Party' so winning. The premise is dazzlingly sincere and, in spots, downright moving. It doesn't hurt that it's ultimate worship of artistic expression as true, personal expression also recalls After Life.
Impressive-looking as much as it is old fashioned. Though Stanton's vision is, at times, significantly less joyous (or, quoth Randy, "flat-out cynical") than Finding Nemo or A Bug's Life, it more than delivers on its main character, who is a consistent pleasure to watch.
You could injure your neck trying to keep up with the tonal shifts in In Bruges, a film about people cursing in thick accents over a tale of quickly shifting loyalties among the world of the very stale British Gangster set. Having been one of two scripts I've read in the past year or so, In Bruges is especially remarkable given that I'd already sort of judged it. In truth, it only works because it is flawlessly cast, with Ferrell in dopey jitter mode and Gleeson following suit as The Most Level-Headed Contract Killer Ever. And Ralph Fiennes. Swearing a whole lot.
Like Bender's Big Score, its fun to watch new episodes of Futurama, but as a film, the whole thing seems to collapse about ten or fifteen minutes before it ends; This show was never about tidiness at the finish - much like The Simpsons - and feels constricted as it tries to tie everything up all pretty-like. The generous heaping of David Cross was like a grease dispenser for the wheels of my favor.
The slog of a set-up for the still less-than-credible reason a camera is always running involves a party where conversations are cribbed from 90s primetime soaps. What follows it quite impressively melds hauntingly plausible imagery with a genuine sense of dread that never leaves once it arrives. Reminded me most of The Descent, another film that's flat and airless while laying its long, annoying narrative groundwork. And it scared Victoria half to death. Again, pointing towards its target audience without batting an eye.
Its not at all vague or hidden that The Bigger Picture, as it were, is the way The Dark Knight is constructed and a somewhat lesser place is reserved for execution - the perfect example being the too-long clusterfuck at the warehouse that false closes the film - but there's a mist of a very haunted wworld that is far more in line with the grandiose imagination of comic books. Unraveling unceremoniously and passably, the first hour and change is precursor to what follows: A moral muddle going on in the mourning Batman and a firestorm of anger in Harvey Dent. The film's pitch black milieau is further complicated by the film's befuddling topical parallels, themselves a sour parlor trick. But nevermind all that: The dominating force of Ledger's Joker is so genuinely compelling, we're actively awaiting his presence onscreen with impatience and trepidation. What it lacks in narrative brevity - its fucking huge, by the way - it more than makes up for in tone; Where Batman Begins was nearly straightforward compared to the epic-ness of this film, what's special here is the attempt at a multiple perspective and, therefore, a sincerely more informed worldview. This man can do no wrong.
Oh, Bank Job, you're just too square and too modern to lift the period recreation or the heist itself to any sort of new ground. Limey villains and bracingly embellished plot twists make the True Story tag sort of a curiousity: These events that actually happened were interesting, but the film feels more stale than it ought to, with a break-in that's far less thrilling than it ought to be (in a film entitled The Bank Job, at any rate); Saffron Burrows steals what's left of the show.
Remarkable in its sobriety, Mungiu's film feels genuinely, achingly observational. Shot in long takes, which capture the removed headspace of Otilia (stunningly played by Anamaria Marinca), the film echoes its inferior counterpart, last year's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. While that film felt like a pushy, topical rant, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days seems content merely turning its eye towards the emotional breadth of a tale with much more than a distinct, period flavor; Never - not once - does the film knowingly look directly at the audience and beg our acknowledgement of the predicament at hand. We're too wrapped up in the Otilia's desperate loyalty and the subtleties of her weighted conscience. I was completely engrossed in the unspooling details of etiquette in 1987 communist Romania.
Harmless, but way too tonally confused to be anything of great uniquity. It never approximates a pure level of the stoner genre, nor does it fully succeed in recreating the 80s action genre, although it does do some great things within the boundaries of both genres' tenets. The film is best when its merely observing the extraordinarily funny banter of Rogen and Franco or, in their best scene (the one in the woods), recalling the whimsy and unclouded magic of youths portrayed in french new wave films. David Gordon Green appears to have taken this project merely to dissolve the seemingly functional - if not enjoyably argumentative - concept of auteur theory. His presence is scarcely felt outside the willingness to listen to his characters and the hiring of cinematographer Tim Orr, who delivers the best-looking film Judd Apatow ever remotely attached his name to.
This is an enormously entertaining concert film; Scorsese's images, his terrific editing choices and his carefully selected archival clips recall the energy and intimacy of The Last Waltz (this is a very high compliment - pause to let sink in). The Stones, defying all logic, still rock with the pep and vigor of their youth. It is their sustaining passion for the music, though, that serves their impeccable delivery. The clarity of The Rolling Stones' stage performance may stand to - for better or worse - spotlight their age, but the real revelation is in the focus on their showmanship: The tightness of their act, grounded in acting talent and outstanding musical camaraderie. I was surprised to enjoy them in such a latter-day state, and to enjoy the film as much as I did. Way to go, preconceptions.
Filmed in prestige, grandiose Martial Arts Epic Widescreen, Redbelt eeks just north of my good graces - all the Mamet dialogue still flows and there are some terrific scenes, but the thing also has the Crossing Paths of Strangers verve that keeps appearing and reappearing nowadays every time we want to emphasize the We Are All The Same point. If its anyone's show, it's definitely The Chiwetel Ejiofor Show; True to the genre, he could easily keep reoccuring in subsequent films about the same character (He's that goddman good). Most of it is generally easily to swallow, with nearly every Mamet regular in a bit part; It provides the experience, is soft on the satisfaction and tugs at you to maybe watch it again next month. Then regularly after that.
Told broadly, with cliches and contrivances, all of the compromises it posits seem to back up to a soft worldview, a kind of Holocaust of Convenience; Buried somewhere within is an interesting story not about master counterfeiter/garden variety self-hating jew/holocaust survivor Salomon Sorowitsch (whose expressive toughness Karl Markovics' makes the clear highlight of the film), but about Wartime Economies. That the film treats us as a filmgoing audience that needs to be coddled on the subject of brutality and genocide, its little wonder that it scarcely touches on precisely how Germany was planning to topple both the British and American economies. The Oscar is further proof that any film can win - - provided it is about the Shoah.
More precisely constructed and too carefully stocked with symbols, but endlessly giving; I thought I'd get tired of Poppy pretty early on, but she sidesteps an urgency to need tolerating with her tirelessly energetic patience and positivity. Sally Hawkins is a long way from her token work in Cassandra's Dream or her small-ish roles in All or Nothing and Vera Drake, and its flat-out exhilirating in spots to see her parading around with the film on her shoulders. And while the thing is far too often the blunt instrument, the message (a la Bill Hicks) is loud and clear: "Try waking up and enjoying the life you've chosen".
Riffing itself tired, Burn After Reading presents a world of goobers, each more outrageously quirky than the last, prancing about in the great, unending circle of cynical topicality. Broaching the Coen tradition, this feels like what's tantamount to tampering: A whole world that's bracingly conscious of itself. Although I chuckled through the whole thing, spent the week after seeing it busting off quotations and even tried to read it as a "serious comment". Place next to Intolerable Cruelty, which I also enjoyed in spite of, well, it.
The hazy, affected misadventures of the most prominent of its protags - a recently home-broken high school student in love - are top shelf DGG; The aborted kiss, the casually filthy verbage and the flirty flirt are all staged with the delicate, otherworldly impromptu one might associate with All the Real Girls or Undertow. Stuck relentlessly in front of this reasonably pleasing tale of growing pains is the story of the teen's former babysitter, who has separated from her drunken, dangerous, born-again husband and can't seem to put her child in the foreground of her world. The whole thing is heavy without being transcendent, constantly tainting greatness with morosely literary (and, frankly, overplotted) scenes of disaffection and tragedy. There isn't even an outside chance that Kate Beckinsale might somehow have even accidentally visited a place like this.
The montage is aggressive, pretty much to a fault; It winds up resembling the longest movie trailer ever constructed. The tongue-in-cheek bits come and go (so much so that I began to wonder if they really were meant to be that way) and the acting is terrifically over-the-top, but the sensory overload still reeks of a multimedia show as a film. At a hyper indulgent, seat-squirming one hundred thirty-five minutes, it's an interesting failure.
Leatherheads plays it moment-to-moment, never achieving anything remotely resembling character development or narrative focus. There's a great handful of really charming scenes between Zelwegger and Clooney, but Krasinski - so winning on "The Office" - is utterly wasted here. As a phony war hero rising to fame alongside the budding stage of professional football, he's always either too goofy or too sour to earn the big smile he slops around in nearly every scene (it doesn't help that he's mixed up with the never-more-autopilot Jonathan Pryce). Clooney has the same dumbass brand on his forehead as Krasinski does, but the film seems to crave the nobility in his passion and, as such, he feels like a character who wandered in from a Coen Bros. film. NTS' goldencrisp, sepia-tastic cinematography is bangin' to say the least.