Review: The Big Wedding (2013)

* 1/2
Director: Justin Zackham
Starring: Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon, Amanda Seyfried

Don’t RSVP. That joke probably seems easy, but I assure you that it’s funnier than about half the supposed laugh lines in The Big Wedding, a largely hollow enterprise with gender, sexual, and racial politics that would have seemed quaintly out of date when Stanley Kramer was still at his well-meaning best, and seem utterly alien today. I’m guessing that the cast is the only reason this thing wasn’t relegated to straight-to-DVD purgatory, but agreeing to appear in this clunker doesn’t exactly bode well for the state of any of their careers.

Review: Gangster Squad (2013)

*
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Starring: Josh Brolin, Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone

Lurid. That’s Gangster Squad in one word. Full of violence as stylized as it is gratuitous, characters so undercooked that even a cast full of fine actors can’t breach their inherent artificiality, and dialogue that sounds like a twelve-year-old’s idea of classic Hollywood sophistication, the film has shockingly little to recommend it. Sure, it contains some cool looking shots, but that can hardly make up for the fact that it’s a failure on pretty much every level.

21st Century Essentials: The Lives of Others (2006)

All eras have works of art that are fundamental to our understanding of not only the craft itself, but the culture from which it was created. The 21st century is still nascent, but it isn't too early to start creating a canon that demonstrates the heights to which film as an artform has reached since the year 2000. These are the essential films:


Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Starring: Ulrich Muhe, Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck
Country: Germany

In a totalitarian society which, by its very nature, encourages corruption through its emphasis on placing the good of the system over the good of individual human beings, decency is something which is quickly stamped out or broken, replaced by an everyone-for-themselves outlook. In Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, however, decency is borne in the very heart of corruption – East Berlin’s Stasi. This is a film about a good man who realizes that he is a cog in a bad machine, and who sets out to make at least one thing right. Whether he succeeds or not is beside the point; what matters is that just by trying, he saves his soul.

Review: The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)

* * 1/2
Director: Derek Cianfrance
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes

The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Cianfrance’s follow up to 2010’s masterpiece of domestic anguish Blue Valentine, cannot be said to lack in ambition. It wants to tell a story that is at once epic, echoing through multiple generations, and intimate, a tale grounded in the relationships between fathers and sons. What it lacks, at least to a small degree, is the focus necessary to successfully tell a story of that breadth. Split into three distinct phases, each one ultimately suffers from diminishing returns, so that while it begins very strong, it sort of falls apart at the end.

Review: Trance (2013)

* * *
Director: Danny Boyle
Starring: James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, Vincent Cassel

Take a pen and a piece of paper to Danny Boyle’s latest film, Trance, because when it’s over you’re going to want to try to sort out its tangled web of plot twists. I can’t promise that that will actually help, and I’m actually pretty certain that if you sort out all the threads you’ll discover that Rosario Dawson’s character is a little bit of an idiot, and if you hold one plot twist up to scrutiny you may discover that it exists solely for the purpose of a full-frontal nude scene by Dawson, but you may at least start to feel like the narrative ground has solidified beneath your feet. That all might sound like criticism, but it’s actually not. While I think that Trance probably falls apart if you think about it too much, it’s an exhilarating ride while you’re watching it.

21st Century Essentials: Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001)

All eras have works of art that are fundamental to our understanding of not only the craft itself, but the culture from which it was created. The 21st century is still nascent, but it isn't too early to start creating a canon that demonstrates the heights to which film as an artform has reached since the year 2000. These are the essential films:


Director: Zacharias Kunuk
Starring: Natar Ungalaaq
Country: Canada

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a story about evil and triumph over it, about the necessity of community and the danger of community coming apart. Based on Inuit legend, the film is truly a unique piece of work that is at once a dreamy piece of romanticism and a story of intense realism and intimacy. Although it is set during an unspecified time long in the past, the story of Atanarjuat is ultimately timeless, one whose message can be applied to just about any period in history.

Friday's Top 5... Baseball Movies

#5: The Sandlot
There’s no shortage of movies about kids playing baseball, but The Sandlot is one of the best. Nostalgic but never saccharine, The Sandlot is a sweet little movie about how everything seems bigger/scarier/more important when you’re a kid.

Review: Dogtooth (2009)

* * * *
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring: Christos Stergioglou, Michelle Valley, Aggeliki Papoulia, Christos Passalis, Mary Tstoni

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth is, without question, one of the strangest and most disturbing films I’ve ever seen. While I don’t think I’ve ever seen another film quite like it, the themes that it explores are not uncommon to film or literature. It’s a story about authority, blind adherence to it and rebellion against it, and about how the institution protects itself from being undermined and destroyed. It is a tale at once universal and incredibly specific, pushed past just about every conceivable boundary and into the realm of the absurd and bizarre. It isn’t a movie you “like,” exactly, but it’s definitely one that leaves its mark.

Review: The Comedy (2012)

* * * 1/2
Director: Rick Alverson
Starring: Tim Heidecker

In a film full of irony, nothing about The Comedy is more ironic than its title. This is not a funny movie; it’s really not even a comedy, even by the standards of “dark comedy.” Some scenes contain the pretence of joy and happiness, but it’s never real and always underscored by emptiness. This is a sad movie about a sad man for whom nothing is genuine... and it’s kind of brilliant. It’s a difficult film to watch because its characters are so unbearably unpleasant, but the film works because it understands that, because it understands that they’re abhorrent and manages to depict them without celebrating them. For a film that is largely about boredom, The Comedy is absolutely fascinating.

21st Century Essentials: City of God (2002)

All eras have works of art that are fundamental to our understanding of not only the craft itself, but the culture from which it was created. The 21st century is still nascent, but it isn't too early to start creating a canon that demonstrates the heights to which film as an artform has reached since the year 2000. These are the essential films:


Director: Fernando Meirelles & Katia Lund
Starring: Alexandre Rodrigues, Phellipe Haagensen, Alice Braga, Leandro Firmino de Hora, Seu Jorge
Country: Brazil

Violence is a cycle. One person acts and then another must retaliate, and on and on. In Fernando Meirelles’ brilliant City of God that cycle continues to spiral downwards until, finally, all that is left is children playing at being grown up gangsters. The ending of this film remains one of the most haunting I’ve ever seen because it is such a thorough indictment of how we, as a society, deal with violence and poverty. There is no resolution here, just human lives that have been accelerated, with childhood ending the moment a boy is old enough to walk out into the street, and adulthood a distant dream because no one lives that long – and then there is one life that successfully escapes to something better.

Friday's Top 5... The Things I'll Miss Most About Roger Ebert

#5: He was a “people’s critic”
One of the best qualities about Roger Ebert as a film critic is that he knew how to judge a film on its own merits. He was as willing to give 4 stars to a great action movie as he was to an art house movie, and he wasn’t at all snobby or pretentious about film as a medium. He was a very intelligent man with a very sophisticated understanding of film as an art form, but his writing was very direct and very accessible without ever talking down to the audience.

Review: Killing Them Softly (2012)

* *
Director: Andrew Dominik
Starring: Brad Pitt

Last year, when making my list of “must see” films, Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly was right near the top, due in no small part to my love for his 2007 masterpiece The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which I think is one of the best movies of the last 10 years. By the time Killing Them Softly actually rolled into theaters, however, my enthusiasm had dimmed and I no longer felt any sense of urgency about seeing it. I knew that I would see it eventually but, going by its tepid critical reception, I decided it could wait. I’m glad that I did because even with my expectations thoroughly checked, I still found the film disappointing. All the pieces for greatness are here, but the work never matches the ambition, and the pieces never really come together in harmony.

Hollywood Book Club: The Making of the African Queen

Katherine Hepburn’s The Making of the African Queen, or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind is sparing when it comes to the technical details of filmmaking, but it is nevertheless one of the most entertaining “making of” books ever written. Put to pen in 1987, some 36 years after the events it relates, the story is told with a mixture of nostalgia and wonder, as if Hepburn herself can’t quite believe that it happened, but remains eminently fond of the memories. It’s an absolutely delightful read from beginning to end.