Gal : I'm going to have to turn this opportunity down.
Logan : NO, You're going to have to turn this opportunity YES!

Though often more gloss than content as a rule, it seems, what makes Sexy Beast sing to the Gods with shock value is, as you've heard, Ben Kingsley's staggering anti-Mohatmas turn as a very different sort of bald guy pushing a pressing agenda. Instead of the freedom and honor of the oppressed masses, the aim of this shine head, a menacing British quasi automaton called Don Logan, is to persuade Gal (Winstone) into taking down a big, post retirement score. As you can imagine, Gal, living the good life in Spain on his ill-gotten dollars from a near past life of crime, isn't all that interested in putting his comfort at risk. At this point, though, my fingers have become a bit sloppy and I'll need to return to a word just north of this sentence: "persuade".  The real zinger in Sexy Beast is how Kingsley interprets the word persuade as written in the script. A friend of mine walked away impressed with the things Kingsley was able to do with his face while persuading Gal. Countless reviewers are praising the electricity of Logan's character, his appearance and his personality. Personally, I was rocked simply by how credible the rapid-fire dialogue comes through. Written as if sucked from a chiding playground refrain of "Am too!", "Are not!" and run through the Tarantino ringer of violent, offensive profanity and speed driven arguments, every line of Logan's has us hanging on his next one. That is half the genius. Kingsley's dark inversion of his former persona isn't merely inspired casting, it lets loose a performer who appears to have been waiting to play an abusive villain for eons. The rest of the cast, particularly Winstone (not playing a wife beater for once), is competent enough, but the film belongs to Kingsley. Glazer fills this world with nightmarish set pieces (a tumbling boulder that ruins a swimming pool, an underwater robbery, a dream sequence with giant rabbits) and a concise, if occasionally displeasing pace (at least half of the running time is more of an afterward than anything else).

But most of all, Kingsley is allowed to swear. Uncharacteristically. Loudly. Repeatedly. If that's not entertainment, I don't know what is.

(6/19)

I thoroughly disliked The Anniversary Party. It is as if Cumming and Leigh have, instead of writing an intelligent film about snotty famous people, wrote a film mocking themselves for writing The Anniversary Party. Amateur hour all around, scores of continuity errors and very little to say about the inner celebrity rubbing against the grain of movie stardom. Voyeurism, you say? Only if you like ragtag ridiculum (did I just invent yet another phrase...I'll need a new wing on my shabby apartment to keep them all) should you apply  - - - or to see Parker Posey topless, (hence how I justified my $6.50 flying through the open window, but we'll keep that between us, okay?). None of the characters have ought to say about diddly and when they're saying it, the film seems to be such a redundant mess: here we give the camera to celebrities who wrote and directed this script that's supposed to be "self mocking" and "satirical" and what they've come up with is a document that makes the filmmakers/writers look worse than any of the following: their characters, the actors, or any of that humdrum they came up with about Hollywood (and if you think I'm buying that this film as some ambiguous statement of irony, I full-on am not). The story of a shaky marriage with skeletons in the closet is a rabid exercise in deliberate, melodramatic tension that inevitably rubs off on the audience to the point of irritation. Performances all around smack of boring, drug heavy mediocrity.

(6/23)

The pace is immaculate, the filmmaking deftly ambitious and the whole affair simply breathtaking. Tykwer proves himself to be an auteur unafraid of the limitations of his palette. He mixes technique and storytelling like they were gin & tonic, ready for an audience to gulp it down. As if this were an answer to the speed obsessed beauty of Run Lola Run, The Princess and the Warrior is actually a lot less gimmicky than that film and whole lot more interested in the quirky, cinematic moments Tykwer finds in real life. It also takes a note from his first film, Winter Sleepers, in so much as both films have a destiny driven edge to the fate slathered journey of their characters. Here, Tykwer sidesteps the melodramatic, half realized touches which made Winter Sleepers such a failure. He replaces them with a kinetic energy buzzing through all the scenes, a magic realism feature that works so well it almost begs a second viewing to justify your astonished disbelief. Potente is gleefully likable as Sissi, the protagonist whose life is saved in an act of courage and compassion that turns out to be innate, but deeply repressed within Bodo, her knight in shining armor, played with a gruff attractiveness by Benno Furmann. And, in the end, what makes the film such an obvious and potent achievement is that it feels like progression from the territory Tykwer occupied in Run Lola Run. Whereas a permanent rewind gave that film a loopy, infinite quality, by comparison The Princess and the Warrior is a more traditional, conclusive epic. It is a long film where a great deal happens. Tykwer takes his time. In a number of ways, it is the complete opposite of his last film. A bizarro-Lola.

(6/24)

It looks like a solid entry to the action film market for a reason. It's making fun of other action films. Starts off with a scene wherein the smooth talking badass Gabriel (Travolta) proposes that, had Dog Day Afternoon taken place in present day, the bad guys would have almost certainly escaped the police.  From there, the film straddles the fine line between being a self referential spoof of modern, glossy action thrillers and being an artfully dark Bruckheimer mock-entry (minus the Jerry, of course). Plot points like premiere hacker Stanley's (Hugh Jackman) little girl (the only female character not an empty object), a goofy gunfight in traffic, the garish and unnecessary boob shot (Berry, a real sport for playing along) and a bus (?!) being lifted through a city, these things only play into my little theory that this is a closeted satire posing as summer thrill ride - - - the marketing alone seems a hard knock at how Bruckheimer goes about selling his films. Travolta plays a less honorable version of his hip, brilliant Chili Palmer (in Get Shorty), while Don Cheadle jumps into the fun as the dispensable African American cop. The film could not be a more intentional suggestion of how much action movies are the same. The kicker: the meaning of the title. This is a sly and off-beat film, clearly being misinterpreted as a straight entry to the genre. Don't take life so seriously. Really.

(6/26)

Imagine if you will, the entertaining guilty pleasure of Point Break transferred to the world of souped up Cally hot rods, the ones that intimidate the rest of us with their powerful acceleration, flashy colors and musclebound drivers. The Fast and the Furious isn't quite as much fun (although I haven't seen it repeatedly on cable in the middle of the night yet, so who am I to make such a judgment?), but it sure explodes onto the screen with a whole lot of popcorn thrills on its mind. An entertaining look into competitive gear heads and the women who love them it may appear to be, but The Fast and the Furious is essentially a movie, like Point Break, about the seduction of thrill sports and the people who live on the excess adrenaline spawned by such sports. Vin Diesel, who just radiates cool anyway, plays the Patrick Swayze big brother character with the kind of rare charisma that will undoubtedly make him a star one of these days. Paul Walker plays the flaky Keanu Reeves character as the perpetual unworthy schlep, eager to prove himself or die trying. Jordanna Brewster is Diesel's little sister (a whole lot less embarrassing than surf chick Lori Petty) and Michelle Rodriguez, whom its fair to say I loathed in Girlfight, turns out to be both cool and unbelievably attractive here as Diesel's childhood sweetheart. The film may be as short on brains as the aforementioned surf movie, but it matches the pure pleasure aspects almost as satisfyingly.

(6/26)

It was not only the sets of subtle, neo-IKEA future which excited me, but that which drives the film, namely: Osment's performance as the robot boy David (perhaps the most surprising thing about the piece). He's never cutesy or child-like. He seems to have been instructed on every aspect of his performance and has found himself able to perform up the standards of his director. Every scene unfolds in a measure of calculated mystery and importance to the point where I begin to look at them as separate entities (as I see the film as three short stories with a connecting character), building blocks incessantly driving the cold, powerful points about existentialism and technology. Act one is something of a quiet, futuristic drama wherein general attitudes towards life and family remain unscathed by the leap forward into the future. Act two presents a detached, lifeless look at robot demolition and a cityscape that feels too much like the one in Blade Runner. It is all exposition. Jude Law's character is absolutely pointless except as a narrative crutch. The film, which is something special, doesn't suffer too much from this drop-off, but it seems like a commercial move. Gadgetry was Kubrick's fetish and there is much gadgetry in the city, but little of it is interesting or pertinent. I'd have easily bought into the inclusion of such a place as a play on Pinocchio (which the film does quite a bit in its third act) had young David been corrupted during his stay there. As it is, the second act leads into an incredibly silly sequence wherein David asks a 3-D computer professor (voiced by a clownish, out-of-place Robin Williams) to point him towards the blue fairy. This brings him to New York where he meets up with his creator (William Hurt), who leaves the room and never returns. Awkward, to say the least. Act three unfolds as a bravura sci-fi journey, runs the gamut from pure eye candy to giddy, E.T.-ish wonderment. As far as Kubrick and Spielberg are concerned: the movie feels like a watered down version of both. Spielberg is clearly attempting to use many Kubrick camera tricks (consistent fly-on-the-wall master shots, keeping objects between the camera and the actors, mock-steadicam photography). He cuts too quickly and too often to evoke the actuality of Kubrick's haunting camera trance, but this film is, essentially, tailor-made for Spielberg's kid-inside-of-all-of-us quality. Though the film has such a weak link at center, it never stops being an admirable collaboration between two obsessive minds. Depending on preference, you'll see either too much Spielberg or not enough Kubrick. The film is by no means perfect, but it does cast a spell - - - and both filmmakers would be glad to receive that compliment.

(6/29)

The most dramatically arresting film I've seen all year has all the perfect conditions for a fictional film, but instead, it turns out to be one of those documentaries that grabs you from minute one and involves you as if it has been painstakingly written to do so. Watching Kaleil's and Tom's GovWorks.com internet business / friendship slowly rise and quickly (and sadly) crash feels like a wonderful summation to a time in history when dot-comers became a wave of nerdy cyberspace prospectors, hoping to strike it rich and yield the mother lode in internet bucks. Spanning over a year in their lives, the filmmakers have done a wonderful job of editing the film (also credited is Erez Laufer). We get the kind of character arcs most fiction films lack, the human drama only present in documentaries and, perhaps most crucial of all, nothing is held back - - - so we get the thick and thin, the good and the bad and the sweet and the sour. I've not seen a great documentary in a long time. With the current reality TV craze, I'm surprised there isn't a larger market for them. This is the best one I've seen in ages.

(6/31)