Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

  • 27 Sep

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    Review: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

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    The Perks of Being a Wallflowers Still

    Director: Stephen Chbosky
    Screenplay: Stephen Chbosky
    Producers: Lianne Halfon, John Malkovich, Russell Smith
    Starring: Logan Lerman, Ezra Miller, Emma Watson, Paul Rudd
    MPAA Rating: PG-13
    Running time: 103 min.

    Life has sucky moments. It’s just the nature of the beast. Good things happen and then bad things happen but when you’re in high school, it seems like the bad things are world shattering. It probably has something to do with science and hormones and growing up but there’s something inexplicably emotional about most high school movies, be they stoner comedies or hard hitting dramas, that always seem to dredge up some ounce of emotional reaction and if they don’t, and there are a few exceptions, they’re worthless garbage because let’s face it, regardless of whether you were one of the popular kids or one of the library nerds, we all experienced moments of happiness or sadness that have stuck with us over the year.

    Stephen Chbosky’s novel-turned-movie The Perks of Being A Wallflower is only the latest entry into the dramedy subgenre of high school movies and it has some good DNA. Chbosky’s novel was much celebrated when it was released in the late 90s and it was adopted by a generation as their book, the book that told their story. In reality, it’s a timeless book, one that ignores dates but somewhat dates itself with music and the now-dead art of the mixed tape.

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  • 25 Sep

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    Cinephilia Française: The Lower Depths (1936)

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    Early on in his filmmaking career, Jean Renoir struggled to find critical success and financial stability. Whether forced to sell the paintings passed down to him from his father, Impressionist master Pierre-Auguste Renoir, to cover his debts or subjected to mixed audience reactions and considerable cuts made to his films, he had to face many uncertain years before reaching the success and respect he would enjoy later in his life. His 1936 adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths gave him a helpful boost in that direction, earning him the very first Louis Delluc Prize and positive results from both critics and the box office. Additionally, it was his first collaboration with French star Jean Gabin, who would work with Renoir again in such notable films as La bête humaine, Grand Illusion, and French Cancan.
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  • 24 Sep

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    DVD Review: The Babymakers

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    The Babymakers

    Director: Jay Chandrasekhar (The Dukes of Hazzard, Beerfest)
    Screenplay: Peter Gaulke, Gerry Swallow
    Producers: Jason Blum, Jay Chandrasekhar, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones
    Starring: Paul Schneider, Olivia Munn
    MPAA Rating: R
    Running time: 98 min.

    The trailer for The Babymakers caught my attention and I thought that perhaps it would pay off with a ridiculously stupid but hilarious bit of entertainment. I was wrong. I should really have known that hoping for something even remotely entertaining from the guy who directed both The Dukes of Hazzard and Beerfest would be asking for too much but I’m not a hater, not much at least, and god knows my taste in comedies is far from main stream but I’m filing this one under “take one for the team” and warning you up front: don’t be fooled by the somewhat charming trailer because this is a classic example of good idea gone wrong.

    Paul Schneider and Olivia Munn are Tommy and Audrey, a happily married couple who decide, after three blissful years of marriage, that they want to have kids. They try, for 20 months, to conceive and when sex isn’t even fun anymore, they decide there’s a problem and, reluctantly, head to the doctor’s office to see what’s wrong. Turns out Tommy’s sperm is “confused” (their term, not mine) and the couple are unlikely to conceive. Audrey starts talking adoption until Tommy comes up with a better plan: steal his sperm. You see, it turns out that before he got married, he donated his swimmers for money to buy Audrey’s engagement ring. He’s discovered that one vile is still left but when he can’t buy it back, he and his buddies decide to steal it.

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  • 23 Sep

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    DVD Review: The Lodger

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    Director: Alfred Hitchcock
    Screenplay: Eliot Stannard & Alfred Hitchcock (uncredited)
    Based on the Novel by: Marie Belloc Lowndes
    Starring: June, Ivor Novello, Marie Ault, Malcolm Keen
    Producers: Michael Balcon, Carlyle Blackwell
    Country: UK
    Running Time: 88 min
    Year: 1927
    BBFC Certificate: PG

    (4/5)

    Although regarded as one of the greatest of all film directors, Alfred Hitchcock’s early British work is often pushed aside in favour of his later films, produced after he made the move over to Hollywood. There are a number of reasons for this – with the big studios behind him, his later films were always going to get better distribution. Also I guess silent and early black and white films are never going to be quite as popular with modern audiences. Overall though, the general consensus is that the films he made between the mid 40′s and early 60′s are far superior. I guess that consensus bled into my viewing choices too as even though I’m a great fan of the director, I hadn’t seen anything prior to 1934′s The Man Who Knew Too Much – Hitchcock’s 18th feature film. Well, with the BFI running an epic celebration of his work throughout the year, including the restoration of his early silent films and after Vertigo knocked Citizen Kane off the top spot of Sight and Sound’s highly regarded top 10 films of all time list, what better time to look back through the full extent of his career, starting with what Hitchcock calls his first true film, The Lodger (he’d directed two prior to this, but I guess he either wasn’t happy with the results or the studios hadn’t given him the control he wanted).

    The Lodger opens in true Hitchcock style with the scream of a murdered woman and subsequent discovery of her body. This is one of a series of grisly murders that has been plaguing London. Every Tuesday another body is found with the calling card of ‘The Avenger’. All of the victims are fair-haired and the young and beautiful Daisy (June) fears for her safety, being a blonde herself. Her boyfriend Joe (Malcolm Keen) is a dashing police detective though who is assigned the case, putting her mind at ease. During this time, a mysterious lodger (Ivor Novello) takes up residence in Daisy’s parents’ house. As the links between the killer and this lodger grow, Daisy’s mother (Marie Ault) suspects the worse and when Daisy and the unusual yet dashing stranger fall in love, all around her worry about his true intentions.

    The Lodger is an excellent case for reappraising Hitchcock’s early work. Even from this, his third film (or first if you asked him), there are multiple examples of his signature techniques and obsessions, and they work as effectively here as in his more popular 50′s work. As well as the usual cameo (which I missed to be honest – probably note-taking at the time) you have the blonde woman fixation, plenty of suspenseful and tense scenes, a case of mistaken identity and most noticeably, a rich vein of dark humour throughout. Right from the beginning we have people making light of the murders, with a mischievous man teasing a terrified onlooker at the scene of the first crime. It’s this humour and light handling of very dark subject matter that helps The Lodger remain a highly enjoyable experience 85 years later. Paced very well, without a wasted minute, the film breezes by. People praise Hitchcock’s handling of suspense and clever filmmaking techniques, but one of his key strengths is in making films that are a lot of fun to watch. I’ve certainly never seen a boring film from the director.

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  • 21 Sep

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    TIFF 2012 Review: Spring Breakers

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    Bikini clad Disney girls go off the rails in Spring Breakers, a candy-coloured sledgehammer satire from notorious provocateur Harmony Korine. The story of four sexy college girls who rob a fast food outlet to fund their Spring Break vacation, the presence of tween icons Selena Gomez (Wizards of Waverly Place) and Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical) belies the film’s seriously twisted approach, albeit one that’s made immediately evident once the movie begins via an extensive slow motion montage of drunken beachside revellers abandoning dignity along with their clothes. But although Spring Breakers is initially compelling – in Korine’s typically perverse and garish kind of way – its repetitious jabs at teenage hedonism and entitlement soon become grating, as the picture lags into a disappointing second half that, for all its explicit content, is actually kind of dull.

    Gomez, in a good indication of the level of subtly on which Spring Breakers is operating, plays a devout Christian youth group member named “Faith”, who’s roped into the schemes of her three reckless friends, played by Hudgens, Ashley Benson (Pretty Little Liars) and the directors young wife Rachel (Mister Lonely). After holding up a fried chicken shack the foursome hightail it down to Miami for a chaotic week of drinking, gyrating and drug abusing. But the paradise they seek soon collapses in on itself, as the girls turn to increasingly desperate and more disturbing means to make their Spring Break dreams last forever.

    After Korine shot his last film, the aptly named Trash Humpers, on worn VHS tape, Spring Breakers looks like the work of a completely different director. Glossy and gaudy, the film is a slick production lit up by neon pinks, yellows and turquoises that seem to pulsate along with the soundtrack (a skull thumping mix of Skrillex and Cliff Martinez). Even in the early sequences of the film, before things go south, scene changes and edits are accompanied by the sounds of guns being loaded, contributing to an intense, suffocating feeling that violence lurks just around the corner.

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  • 20 Sep

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    Blu-Ray Review: Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse

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    Director: Fritz Lang
    Screenplay: Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou
    Based on Characters by: Norbert Jacques
    Starring: Oscar Beregi, Otto Wernicke, Gustav Diessl, Rudolf Klein-Rogge
    Producers: Fritz Lang, Seymour Nebenzal
    Country: Germany
    Running Time: 116 min
    Year: 1933
    BBFC Certificate: 12

    (5/5)

    We whinge about sequels and remakes a lot these days, but they’ve been around since the beginning of cinema. The earliest films would be simple things like trains coming towards the screen, moving on to simple single-gag comedy shorts and back then these would be ‘recreated’ by various companies ad nauseam to show to punters desperate to see these moving pictures in action. People forget that even a handful of renowned classics were actually remakes of films or second adaptations of plays or books such as Ben Hur and His Girl Friday. Alfred Hitchcock even went as far to remake his own 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956. When it comes to sequels, most critics dismiss these as lazy cash-ins that came into proliferation after the late 70′s and 80′s with the critical and commercial success of films like The Godfather Part 2 and The Empire Strikes Back. Sequels and film series have of course been around a lot longer than that though and even the greatest of filmmakers weren’t immune to dabbling with the format.

    This brings us to Fritz Lang. In 1922, he made Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, an epic crime thriller about a criminal genius. It was very successful at the time, helping boost his already quite successful career even further forward. His upward trajectory was cemented by following this up (not directly) with two of cinema’s all time greats, Metropolis in 1927 and M in 1931. After all this success, he was approached by executives who made a request for him to make a follow up to Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler. As Lang puts in his own words:

    “For me that sonofabitch was dead, out of my life. In ’32, I guess someone came to me and said “Look, Mr. Lang, we have made so much money with Mabuse…” I said “Yes, much more than I did…” He said “Can’t you give us another Mabuse?” So I started thinking about it and I said “All right, what shall I do? This guy is insane and in an asylum – I cannot make him healthy again. It is impossible.”

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  • 19 Sep

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    Review: Trouble with the Curve

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    Trouble with the Curve Still

    Director: Robert Lorenz
    Screenplay: Randy Brown
    Producers: Clint Eastwood, Robert Lorenz, Michele Weisler
    Starring: Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake, Matthew Lillard, John Goodman
    MPAA Rating: PG-13
    Running time: 111 min.

    Early into Trouble with the Curve we meet “Peanut Boy” (Jay Galloway) a Latino youth that throws a bag of peanuts at Bo Gentry, a cocky hitter at the top of the draft list and who all the scouts are there to check out, including Clint Eastwood’s Gus. Problem is that Gus is losing his vision so he’s depending on his daughter Mickey (Amy Adams), named after the baseball legend, to help him figure out if the Gentry kid is as good as the computers say he is.

    It’s important to note this scene because from the moment it plays out, I expected the story to meander in his direction. It eventually goes the way you’d expect it to though that bit of plot doesn’t take centre stage until much later in the movie and the farther the plot meanders from that scene, the clearer it becomes that Trouble with the Curve isn’t really a movie about baseball. Sure, there’s a lot of baseball in it and it takes place in the heat of a baseball road trip (complete with tailgaters) but at its core this is a family drama and a romantic comedy brought together by baseball.

    Gus is a stubborn and independent guy, the best scout in the business. Bo Gentry is the up-and-comer everyone’s talking about so the Braves send Gentry out to make sure that the kid is solid. But Gus’ boss and good friend Pete (John Goodman) knows Gus isn’t doing so well so he calls up Gus’ daughter Mickey and essentially convinces her to help out dad by going with him on this scouting trip which could likely be his last. Reluctantly she agrees, a decision that will affect both her personal and professional life. While on the road she and her father finally come to terms with their broken relationship, Mickey falls for a former player turned scout (Justin Timberlake) and she eventually saves the day by discovering that Peanut Boy is an exceptionally gifted pitcher.

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  • 18 Sep

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    TIFF 2012 Review: Cloud Atlas

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    Where to begin with Cloud Atlas? The interminably long film is basically the Voltron of off-beat science fiction movies. This is what happens when you take five (or six) familiar genre-stories and juxtapose them (ok, put them in the blender and hit frappe!) in an effort say something profound about the human condition. That the end results is merely a structural confection, its ambition successful in making all the pieces fit more or less together into a grand puzzle but sacrificing the very reason why we like these tales. The sacrifice on the altar of science fiction grandiosity is empathy, character development and me ever giving a damn. The films basic ideas and premise agree with me: That social boundaries are made to be broken (as per director Larry Wachowski crossing genders to Lana); that we process the human condition through narrative; that we’ve not grown as much as we like to think as a species over the past few thousand years, and maybe, that we never will. These are all great things to tackle in your science fiction blockbuster, yet each and every one of them is treated here in the most facile (and banal) fashion. Remember all the flat, unnecessary shenanigans in The Matrix Reloaded around the Zion (The dreadlocked rave, Link’s domestic situation, et cetera)? So much of Cloud Atlas felt that way to me: Lifeless and tedious. In blockbuster adventure movie terms, it makes the handsome, turgid pile of good intentions that was John Carter seem as fresh and rollicking as The Empire Strikes Back.

    In all of its 2 hour 45 minute run time, the only real surprises, you know, those big ‘Ooooh!’ moments in any film (either pop art or art house) are during the closing credit sequence when you discover how the make-up department slapped on goop and facial prosthetics to disguise each member of its ensemble. This is a fundamental problem, one of Python-wannabe-ism and Cloud Atlas ends up an act of accidental and unfunny sketch comedy. Even if it has little in the way of intentions to be funny, outside of the thread where Jim Broadbent is imprisoned in an old age home by his brother, too much of the generic story telling in each of the individual stories comes across as half-sketched ideas where gimmicks and not actual humanity, are the glue that binds. One can only take so many cringe-worthy Tom Hanks accents in a film. The most egregious of these is his Tru-Tru speak as a middle aged man running around in rags with Halle Berry in a Ridley-Walker-lite post-apocalyptic world (which is not even Earth, but who cares at this point, right?) I’ve always wanted to see an attempt a film of that iconic yet ‘unfilmable novel,’ and it pains me here to see the form used just as a mere building block. The filmmakers reach very much exceeds their grasp and they are so swallowed by the breadth of their ambitions that they lose sight of the very humanity they are trying to encompass. The film decides that one trip with Jar-Jar-Hanks is not enough and so revisits the character as a goofy old codger. A storyteller that Hanks ‘matures’ into after ‘winning’ Cloud Atlas’s karmic video-game (Spoiler Alert – A typecast Hugo Weaving and a surprisingly versatile yet often unrecognizable Hugh Grant come out as the big karmic losers.) Hanks’ is the Ur-narrator, the everyman, even though his thread is end-story chronologically, it is also the most primitive. Get it? Get it? Any time in human history, we have the same problems and we strive onward and that the striving may seem futile but it is not. I like the idea, but this is kindergarten Buddhism in the telling.

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  • 17 Sep

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    Cinephilia Française: Children of Paradise (1945)

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    Within the immense gallery of great French films, Children of Paradise stands out like a grand mural painted with many colors, bold brush strokes, and precise attention to detail. Directed by the great Marcel Carné and written by his regular collaborator Jacques Prévert, it is an ambitious feat of cinema; a period piece set in Paris in the 1820s and ‘30s that seemed to have all the odds against its creation. Its production slowly progressed throughout the German occupation of France during World War II, which made film stock and construction material for the sets in short supply. The project served as a fortuitous hiding place for Resistance fighters who worked throughout the shoot as extras while two more central figures, production designer Alexandre Trauner and composer Joseph Kosma, had to made their contributions covertly due to their Jewish roots (in the cut presented on the Criterion Collection DVD, they share a special title card at the end of the opening credits). Following France’s liberation, the film was finally released in 1945, its three-hour running time split into two parts entitled The Boulevard of Crime and The Man in White due to a restriction on film duration at the time.
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  • 15 Sep

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    TIFF 2012 Review: Byzantium

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    Two sisters try to lay low in Dublin while being pursued by long-coated inspectors. Having committed a rather kinetic and conspicuous murder in the opening sequence of the film, the Webb sisters are actually a pair of highland blood suckers, a 200 year old mother and daughter pair of vampires. Possibly the last of their kind, moving from town to town and still working out some serious parent-child issues (not the least of which is their approach to handling their prey) Gemma Arterton literally vamps it up, putting on a prostitute pose to seduce lowlives and cops, while her daughter, plays more school girl, a more subtle and melancholic performance by Saoirse Ronan. The opposite disposition of these ladies (and the secrets they keep) are the engine for a plot that takes its sweet time to get going, but eventually, perhaps too late, pulls the narrative strings together.

    Neil Jordan is no stranger to either fairy tales or gothic drama having started his career with Red Ridinghood horror picture, In The Company of Wolves, peaked commercially with the romantic vampire studio picture, Interview With The Vampire, and recently brushed up with Irish folklore in Ondine. Even the directors indie dramas, The Crying Game and The Butcher Boy flirt with gothic and melodramatic stylings. If you want to do a more stately and classical take on the modern vampire (read: no sparkling emo treacle) it would appear that Jordan is your man. Which makes it a bit baffling how Byzantium never really soars, even as it pulls all of its narrative strings together in a somewhat satisfying conclusion. The film tries to establish the contrast between its bodice-ripper (Gemma Arterton’s cleavage upstages her somewhat histrionic performance) segments and stylized urban melancholy. Neither Anne Rice nor Mike Leigh, the film offers some compelling images in an attempt to marry the two, but it is an uncomfortable union.

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  • 15 Sep

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    TIFF 2012 Review: Gangs of Wasseypur

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    Pulling back, deliberately and slowly, from a soap-opera on the TV which is all song and dance and character introductions, the 315 minute long Gangs of Wasseypur kicks off with a single shot Johnnie To style unbroken assault on the stronghold of Faizal Khan with automatic weapons, grenades and narrow alleyways. It’s the bright hearald of a major film career just leaping onto the international stage. Let us get this out of the way first: Anurag Kashyap’s generation spanning story set in the coal capital of India and spanning almost 70 years comfortably, nay confidently, belongs alongside the great crime sagas of the cinema: The Godfather Trilogy, City of God, Bertolucci’s 1900, Heimat and Election. The perfect nexus of history, craft, thematic heft, and balls-to-the-wall entertainment, it why cinema was invented in the first place. It is HBOs “Deadwoo”d rogues gallery of character actors as much as it is the legacy scheming driven plot mechanics as “I, Claudius.” Rare is the opportunity of novel-style story telling and mighty cinematic craft to come together in such a marvelous package. It’s a gift to film lovers. Shown into two parts, each one well past the 2.5 hour mark, but conceived as a single film it, in the director’s words, shows “frogs in a well,” 200,000 people spread across three streets. The rough and impoverished criminals are unwilling to leave or even look beyond the small neighborhood and spray as much blood as possible for ownership of its organized crime opportunities which are equally transient.

    Wasseypur may change hands geographically (India to Bengal), ethnically, even religious borders are mobile, but the Khans and the Singh’s have been at each others throats since the dawn of the coal era where two patriarch’s fought over the rights to hijack coal trains. When Ramadhir Singh kills Shiva Khan in this conflict, the Kahn’s young child Sadar shaves his head and vows to destroy Singh, not by murder, but my unravelling his empire piece by piece. As Singh enters politics to cement his empire, Sadar collects a growing number of wives, fathers several sons and kills a lot of folks with a machete. The law stays out of Wasseypur for fear of escalating slaughter, and a fair bit of carrot-stick mechanics from Singh. Part one of the diptych has an almost documentary feel, it even weaves a hefty of documentary footage to establish the context of the era spanning the 1940s up until the 1980s. Popular music from the cinema and TV act as a greek chorus to the proceedings, but begin to establish a theme that will pay off in the second part. Namely that the second generation of gangsters are so influenced by what is thrown up on screen, it leads an elder Singh to offer, “Everyon has his own movie playing inside his head, it it were not for the damn movie’s there would be no fools in this country.” This as the film slowly moves out of history lesson mode and into Scorcese mode. One advisor Nasir (think Robert Duvall or Derek Jacobi) narrates the film Goodfellas style as the crime moves from the coal industry to owning the fisheries, to unabashed extortion, to eventually the burgeoning Iron business. If it is hard to keep track of the characters in the first 90 minutes of the film, they’ve all been immortalized after that point with impeccable attention in narrative craft establishing relationships and motivations and territory.

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  • 15 Sep

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    DVD Review: Ghost Stories – Classic Adaptions from the BBC Vol. 3 & 4

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    In the 1970′s between ’71 and ’78, the BBC produced an annual ghost story each Christmas to further chill the bones in the winter period. These were short 30-minute or so films largely based on classic literature, chiefly the work of M.R. James, but original scripts were written once these dried up.

    The BFI have been gradually releasing collections of these films on DVD, along with a couple of ‘unofficial’ additions to the series (according to Wikipedia that is). I foolishly missed out on the first two volumes, but caught up with volumes 3 and 4 which contain the films Lost Hearts, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas and The Ash Tree on vol. 3 and The Signalman, Stigma and The Ice House on vol. 4.

    Volume 3

    Directors: Lawrence Gordon Clark
    Screenplays: Robin Chapman, John Bowen, David Rudkin
    Based on stories by: M.R. James
    Starring: Joseph O’Conor, Michael Bryant, Edward Petherbridge, Barbara Ewing
    Country: UK
    Running Time: Approximately 35 min per film
    Years: 1973-1975
    BBFC Certificate: 12

    (4/5)

    1973′s Ghost Story for Christmas was Lost Hearts, an M.R. James story adapted by Robin Chapman and directed by Ghost Story mainstay Lawrence Gordon Clark (the only film he didn’t direct was The Ice House). It’s a fairly straightforward horror affair following recently orphaned Stephen (Simon Gipps-Kent), who goes to live with his uncle, only to find the house is haunted by the ghosts of two children his own age. As his uncle begins to act more and more peculiar it seems that the spirits may be warning Stephen about something.

    It’s an unremarkable, but entertaining little horror story. The imagery of the ghost children gets spookier as it goes on, but some shaky child-acting and basic TV makeup and lighting spoil things a little. The locations look great though and it’s a fun old fashioned yarn.

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