Sometimes we watch stuff that we want to talk just a little bit about, not a full review worth. These are those films. If any of the films reviewed are available on Netflix Instant Watch (US or Canada) or HuluPlus (US only), we’ll note that by putting a direct link below the capsule.

The Graduate

(3/5)

1967 USA. Director: Mike Nichols. Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross.

When it comes to classics of American cinema, I usually find myself as something of a sheep – I tend to adore the majority of the classics, oftentimes chalking my opinions up to the consensus existing for a reason. That is not to say that I have not disliked any classic, but rather that I am more willing to overlook the faults and embrace the sense and mood of the halcyon days. With The Graduate, however, I was decidedly underwhelmed, and mostly disappointed. It is essentially a two-part film, half brilliant, half pathetic. The relationship between Ben (Hoffman) and Mrs. Robinson (Bancroft) is wonderfully executed, with their almost palpable shared desire and intimacy. Their interactions – in particular, their reactions to each other’s ebbs and flows within the scope of the affair – are not only believable, but almost voyeuristically so. And, in general, the filmmaking is quite good. However, as the story ventures into the relationship between Ben and Elaine (Ross), the film loses itself in a haze of poor pacing and inexplicable character actions. The crux of the film, at least for me, is this unexpected romance between Ben and Elaine … a romance that is never really explained or explored, finding itself out of place. As a result, I am left with a wholly unsatisfactory climax and conclusion, left wanting for the promise birthed by what came before.
- DOMENIC

The Turin Horse

(4.5/5)

2011 Hungary. Director: Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky. Starring: János Derzsi, Erika Bók, Mihály Kormos.

Over a blank screen we’re told the famous tale of Nietzsche seeing a horse being beaten in the streets of Turin, running to the horse, and throwing his arms around its neck, weeping – the beginning of a mental breakdown from which he never fully recovered. But what of the horse, asks Béla Tarr, and of its owners? Instead of the heady philosophy or dramatic psychosis you’d expect from a story that begins with Nietzsche, Tarr gives us a mundane, human, and deeply moving glimpse into a very difficult and despairing existence. The man and his daughter depend on the horse for their lives, such as they are – and we see them throughout a week as the horse, stubborn because of illness, gets weaker and weaker and their own hold on existence gets more and more tenuous. You don’t (or shouldn’t) sit down to a Tarr film without knowing what you’re getting into, and this one is nearly two and a half hours long of basically watching these two people do mundane chores over and over in very long takes. When things are so much the same, the differences become enormous, and Tarr maximizes that by varying camera placements, or by using slight changes in demeanor or action to telegraph the changing states of mind and being of these extremely taciturn people. Settling into the film’s rhythm yields an experience that makes mundanity into something transcendent, and by the end, seeing these two simply sitting at their roughhewn table was enough to bring me to the brink of tears. Tarr has said this will be his final film, and if that’s true, it’s a pretty masterful work to go out on.
-JANDY

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With no fanfare, we’re dumped straight into the story in media res, panning over a city, then zooming in to see a man and woman embracing in a parking lot, then breathlessly discussing some plot they have to get away from someone. Not much is clear, except that there’s some backstory here that we’re not privy to, a situation that continues for a while, as the couple returns, separately, to a club were we discover that the woman is married to another, much smarmier man who she doesn’t like much. The beginning of this film doles out information like a morphine drip…just enough to keep you going, but never too much. It’s succinct and matter of fact, setting up characters and relationships with a beautiful economy, but keeping you grasping to know the backstory, how these characters got to where they are.

Thankfully, there’s soon a flashback that fills in the blanks, but only after you’ve managed to do most of it yourself. It’s a rather satisfying technique, managing to give the audience a feeling of investment and agency as well as the necessary exposition. Even the flashback is economical by noir standards, with the requisite defeatist voiceover kept minimal, for the most part letting the action play out without comment, content to just add a bit more to the backstory that was left so tantalizingly slender in the first few sequences.

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We skipped the ‘trailer for the trailer’ earlier this week and waited for the goods on The Expendables 2. If this franchise continues to bring on new and old cast members, I cannot imagine what the 3rd or 4th entries are going to look like. As it stands, this trailer shows you want you want to see: A shot or two of each of the principle cast members, most of them either looking badass or shooting off one liners (or in the case of Jason Statham, both). Also, it seems by bringing in Con Air and Tomb Raider director Simon West, it looks like there is a bigger flair for set-pieces and vehicular carnage.

Do we know what the movie is about? Hell no. Do we want to see Chuck Norris, JCVD, Sly, Arnie and Bruce Willis (and Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Scott Adkins, Nan Yu, etc. etc!) all in the same movie. Yessum.

Director: Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (Life After Love, The Rocket)
Screenplay: Pen-Ek Ratanaruang
Novel: Win Lyovarin
Producers: Raymond Phathanavirangoon, Pawas Sawatchaiyamet
Starring: Nopachai Chaiyanam, Sirin Horwang, Chanokporn Sayoungkul, Apisit Opasaimlikit, Kiat Punpiputt
MPAA Rating: NR
Running time: 105 min.
Country of Origin: Thailand

(2.5/5)

 
An interesting premise with engaging character quickly goes sour and strays dangerously close to flat out boring in the second half of Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s ninth feature film, Headshot. A talented under cover cop/detective is framed for a murder he didn’t commit. In order to leave prison early, he agrees to work as a hitman for a mafia-like political faction. In an assassination gone wrong, our hero takes a bullet to the head,wakes up from a coma three months later to find that his vision is now upside-down. From there it’s a non-linear story about revenge, corruption and finding solace.

Using mostly flashbacks, we’re told the back story of our hero and how he came to be the man he is today. Watching this slowly evolve is a treat and rather quite exciting and engaging… for the first thirty minutes or so. As the story unfolds, bringing us closer to the present, the more and more contrived and convenient things start to become. And likewise, more and more tedious.

Things get pretty boring from about the halfway point to the end; with even the action sequence(s) being not of any particular interest – though I can appreciate the heartful attempts in at least trying to make things interesting with locales and style. In the end, the plot is obvious and contrived; feeling a bit like bad 90s film making. On top of that, the craft is not all that stylistically interesting.

A good premise that goes uphill really fast, then the bottom falls out from beneath us and I really just wanted to get the hell out of the theater to get some munchies and make the early bus home.

Apparently our friends over in the criminal justice department are also big movie dorks as well. And what kind of movie would they like the best? The kind with corrupt officials of course! So I stumbled upon this list the other day about movie cops gone bad. Seems like an easy topic to list off, but there were several on here I almost forgot about. There are probably hundreds more, but here are ten good ones. Beware that there may be some *SPOILERS* in the text that follows. And I need to rewatch L.A. Confidential someday soon.

10. Dudley Smith, L.A. Confidential
You may want to think of James Cromwell as the sweet farmer who gave a pig a chance in Babe, but he shows another side of himself in L.A. Confidential. He basically controls the organized crime in L.A., blackmails city officials to get his way, and murders (or has someone else murder) everyone that gets in the way of his quest for drugs and power. It’s hard to even keep track of all the people he kills during the movie and before it even starts. This may have just been the unedited Babe sequel, Babe: Pig in the City.

9. Norman Stansfield, Leon the Professional
If you haven’t seen this film, you should if only to see a bad-ass 12-year-old Natalie Portman. She plays Mathilda, a girl whose whole family has been murdered by corrupt DEA agents headed up by Norman “Stan” Stansfield. Mathilda’s father had been keeping cocaine for the agents, but they found out he’d been keeping some for himself, and Stansfield, who’s addicted to drugs himself, decided to take out the whole family. Mathilda was out shopping when the murders happened, so now Stansfield wants to find her and kill her. She’s not totally helpless since she finds a father figure in the hitman down the hall, but it’s still not very nice of this officer to be trying to gun down a little girl.

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The full title of Stacy Peralta’s latest film is both inaccurate and spot on. Many people had the impression – especially if you know anything about the fact that the director also formed the mid-80s skateboard team that is the subject here – that perhaps Peralta was going to centre the documentary around himself and what he did for the sport. From my perspective though – and this was amplified by Peralta’s own comments after Tuesday night’s International premiere (complete with a packed house filled with “skater dudes”) – the title implies that it is the entire team that is telling the story of their rise through the 80s into role models for a distinct set of kids. Peralta was the guiding force behind the team, a part of the company that backed them (Powell-Peralta) and undoubtedly has the reins of the film, but the story is very much driven by the individual members. Each of the core 6 skaters of Peralta’s original team were recruited when they were quite young (10-13 years old) and showed promise. They also showed tendencies to be outcasts with a desperate need to belong. Not long after joining the team (by the time most were 15-16), they had become world class athletes.

Though it is the story of the whole team, Peralta’s influence is everywhere. Most of the film happens in the 80s after his own professional riding career was over (with several older clips of Peralta in his prime skating era as seen in his earlier film Dogtown And Z-Boys), but he’s still in a great deal of the archive footage encouraging, coaching and managing the kids. He gets talking head time as well to discuss not only the team, but his business partnership in Powell-Peralta. And of course, he brings his sense of style to his directing duties by adding many cinematic touches to the look of the movie: the talking heads are rarely framed in consistent ways, on screen titles resemble those from old 80s VCR tapes playing in machines that had lost the ability to properly track the image, the music selection always fits the tone and pace of the story, and the content never lags. Like Dogtown and Riding Giants (his surfing movie), you do not have to have a single reference point in the history of events or have any nostalgic reverence for the people involved. The film provides an entertaining, oddly emotional and well laid out story with surprisingly interesting central characters.

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New Release Pick of the Week

Haywire
So far, Haywire is still sitting at the top of my Best of 2012 list; granted, I’ve only seen five or six 2012 films so far, but still. Steven Soderbergh’s old-school take on the action genre doesn’t waste any time getting to the point, and lets Gina Carano loose to do her thing, and her thing is pretty awesome.
2012 USA. Director: Steven Soderbergh. Starring: Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Bill Paxton, Antonio Banderas.

Other New Releases

Suits Season 1 (2011 USA, creator Aaron Korsh, stars Gabriel Macht)
W.E. (2011 UK, dir Madonna, stars Abbie Cornish, James D’Arcy)

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Equal parts Terrence Malick and (early) David Gordon Green, this very buzzed about Sundance hit, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a stunner on the visual and emotional level it seems to be aiming for. I cannot wait to see this on the big screen on late June.

“Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl, lives with her father, Wink, in “the Bathtub,” a southern Louisiana Delta community at the edge of the world. Wink’s tough love prepares her for the unraveling of the universe; for a time when he’s no longer there to protect her. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness, nature flies out of whack-temperatures rise, and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. With the waters rising, the aurochs coming, and Wink’s health fading, Hushpuppy goes in search of her lost mother.”

Because I do not want to spend one more minute thinking about it, and I will only use 60 second of your valuable time. Here is yours truly, courtesy of TheSubstream, speaking of failed meta-film experiment constructed with behind-the-scenes footage of James Franco at General Hospital and goofy voice-over to do…something. The result is a steaming pile of meta-mush.

With Avengers set to clean up at the Box Office this weekend, trotting out and agenda of colourful, mindless fun and popcorn, it is no surprise that Christopher Nolan and company put out the grimmest, moodiest, downer of a trailer possible for The Dark Knight Rises. *Spoilers Ahoy* in this trailer below. Enjoy the silence. Enjoy the mayhem of the last few seconds.

Directed By: Jack Hill
Starring: Lon Chaney Jr., Carol Ohmart, Quinn K. Redeker

Tag line: “Spider Baby will give you nightmares forever!”
Trivia: The film was shot in seven days, between Aug. and Sept. of 1964

For more Cinematic oddities and reviews, head over to dvdinfatuation.com

The moment the animated credits kick in, which play over a bizarre theme sung by Lon Chaney Jr., you know Jack Hill’s Spider Baby is going to be one strange motion picture. And it only gets stranger from there on out.

The three Merrye children: Virginia (Jill Banner), Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn) and Ralph (Sid Haig), suffer from a most unusual malady: as their bodies grow older, their minds get younger, regressing to a child-like state which will eventually result in total madness. Since the death of their father, the three have been living in the family’s decrepit old mansion under the watchful eye of Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.), the chauffeur, who’s gone to great lengths to hide the children, knowing full well they’d be placed in a psychiatric hospital if their true “nature” were ever revealed. This well-guarded secret is in danger of being uncovered, however, when cousins Emily (Carol Ohmart) and Peter (Quinn Redeker) pay them a surprise visit. Joined by their lawyer (Karl Schanzer), these two distant relatives have set their sights on the vast Merrye fortune, and, to strengthen their claim to it, are determined to prove the children should be locked away. But as they’ll soon learn, the Merrye siblings aren’t about to go down without a fight.

I really like Spider Baby; it has a unique energy to it, a sort of sitcom mentality (think The Addams Family, only weirder) that I found very appealing. Lon Chaney Jr. was fast approaching the end of his career when he made Spider Baby, but does a fine job as the kindly, if slightly misguided, Bruno. On the flip-side, a very young Sid Haig, in one of his first film roles, plays Ralph, the most peculiar of the Merrye children. Acting as if he were about three years old, Haig wanders through the picture without uttering a single word. Of Ralph’s two sisters, Virginia is clearly the most disturbed, believing herself a spider and attacking anyone she catches in her “web” (a messenger, played by Mantan Moreland, is an early victim of Virginia’s, meeting his end in the film’s opening sequence). Throughout the movie, we learn there are other members of the Merrye clan also residing in the huge mansion, including a pair of Aunts and an Uncle in the final stages of the illness, who’ve been locked away in the basement, as well as the rotting corpse of dear old dad, still lying in his bed.

Spider Baby is, without a doubt, one of the oddest films I’ve ever seen, yet every eccentric character, every outlandish moment director Hill crams into its 81 minutes only adds to the movie’s unusual charms.

Director: Frédéric Jardin
Writers: Frédéric Jardin, Nicolas Saada, Olivier Douyère
Producers: Marco Cherqui, David Grumbach, Jean-Jacques Neira
Starring: Tomer Sisley, Serge Riaboukine, Julien Boisselier, Joey Starr, Laurent Stocker
Country of Origin: France
MPAA Rating: NR
Running time: 89 min.

During an early morning drug robbery, the culprits make off with a dozens of kilograms of cocaine, but one unlucky fellow, Vincent, gets tagged with a stab wound, and even worse, has his face spotted by the dealers he is stealing from. But wait a minute. Vincent and his partner are cops who have plotted a rogue, and quite illegal heist for some much needed cash. Vincent, all ready at odds with ex-wife gets in trouble when the owner of the drugs, Jose – a snappily dressed middle-man who operates out of a Paris night club the size of a small airport – kidnaps his son Thomas in exchange for Vincent returning the drugs. During a packed night, the hand-off at the club gets royally messed up as two more branches of the police, Vincent’s partner, the Turks who are trying to buy the drugs from Jose and at probably a couple of other interested parties join the chase as Vincent’s changes of getting his son back dwindle and his changes of getting beaten, shot, stabbed, busted, or simply bleeding death on the floor increase – exponentially. As far as I can tell, the entire film takes place within 24 hours, but the pacing is so relentless, that at times, it feels like a single whirlwind take.

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