SIN CITY
've been a fan of Frank Miller's ever since he did the best Batman comic ever, The Dark Knight Returns. His style of drawing is dense and economical at the same time, and the Sin City series reduced it all down to black and white line art. Writing has never been Miller's strong point, though, and the Sin City stories are sort of mindlessly violent and serve as a simplistic framework for kinetic comic book action. Robert Rodriguez has adapted that high contrast black and white style to the big screen, and the result is one of the best looking neo-noir films ever. All of the actors were filmed separately from the backgrounds, which allowed for careful and precise lighting of their faces and figures in every shot, achieving the cinematic equivalent of extreme dark and light contrasts usually reserved for graphic artists. For all that, some of the poetry of Miller's artwork is still lost in translation. The woman who reviewed the film in the Chronicle complained that the female characters are stereotypical hookers and floozies and all look like strippers, which is sort of to be expected, since it's based on a comic book aimed primarily at adolescent boys, but it is true that as good as Jessica Alba looks, it ain't as cool as this
MILLION DOLLAR BABY
organ Freeman and Hilary Swank deserved Oscars, I guess, but the film certainly didn't merit Academy Awards for best picture and director. Outside of good acting by the three leads, the movie was simplistic, overly sentimental, and poorly written. The fight sequences were some of the most ridiculous boxing scenes since the Rocky movies, the portrayal of Swank's redneck relatives was embarrassingly clichéd and trite, and even the main characters were two dimensional and motivated by formulaic Hollywood melodramatic convention. Unbelievable plot points pile up—the evil boxing champ (Ms. T, anyone?) is never disqualified for her outrageous dirty fighting antics; Swank never learns the meaning of her Gaelic nickname from any of her screaming fans or the magazine articles about her; and the nurses tending to Swank after she becomes a paraplegic seem to have never heard of turning a patient over in bed in order to avoid skin ulcers and gangrene. The whole thing is calculated to tug on the audience's heartstrings, but left me pretty cold.
etween 2003 and 2008 I wrote movie reviews of many of the films I saw. After I started using Twitter I got lazy and started posting short movies blurbs there instead, so this selection of reviews is sort of frozen in time, but I think some of the writing is pretty good.
his years' Star Trek reboot was relatively mindless by comparison, rushing along at a modern CGI-heavy action flick pace but with a storyline that ditched many of the sci-fi conventions that evolved in the Star Trek universe over the years to give the viewer a certain sense of internal consistency. Like when the Enterprise approachs Vulcan it apparently can't just scan ahead and see the wreckage of all the destroyed Federation starships until it comes out of warp drive and finds itself dodging debris. Or the idea of Spock existing in two different bodies at the same time in the same place, not to mention meeting each other and having a conversion, is so boneheaded that Harlan Ellison would be rolling in his grave if he were dead. Or when Spock shoots Kirk into space and he lands on a planet where he gets chased by an alien creature into a cave where he randomly encounters—surprise!—Old Spock, who's just hanging out around the fire even though he knows there'a a Federation outpost a few miles away. Best moment of the film: when Spock teleports the Vulcan survivors to the Enterprise and realizes his mother didn't make it. The actor playing young Spock was pretty good, although I'm not sure having his character indulge his human emotions more is such a great idea, but the dude playing Kirk completely lacked the required gravitas, and that guy is obviously not going to grow into the role. 
ou couldn't make a movie that looks more like my day to day life in San Francisco than this. Telling the story of two black twenty-somethings who meet and have a one night stand, they start off the morning after in Bernal Heights, walk over to Noe Valley for breakfast, hop a cab to the Marina to drop her off, then he heads back to his studio on Geary at Hyde, two blocks from where I once rented a nearly identical apartment, down to the rotating walk-in closet door that once sported a Murphy bed. The couple meet again and head to the Museum of the African Diaspora on Mission and then over to Yerba Buena Gardens to ride the merry-go-round, both a block away from where I work. Later that night they buy stuff for dinner at Rainbow Grocery then head down to the Knockout to dance while my pal DJ Paul Paul spins 45s although his oldies singles are overdubbed on the film's soundtrack with obscure but cool indie rock. But aside from the pleasure of seeing all my usual haunts captured on on film, or digital video rather, Medicine For Melancholy is a smart movie that captures not only the vibe of life in downtown San Francisco, but also the subtleties of the changing ethnic and economic demographics of the second most expensive city in the country. The guy—played by Wyatt Cenac, an occasional correspondent on John Stewart's Daily Show—has a deadpan quarrelsomeness that is occasionally hilarious, because not only is he concerned about the ongoing disenfranchisement of the black community in the city, he's also bugged about the pending disenfranchisement of himself from the girl's pants once her live-in boyfriend returns to town. Her boyfriend, by the way, is white, which Cenac's character tries to elevate to a political issue because of his looming romantic frustration, but she's not having it, which leads to one of the film's best exchanges as they argue about the role race plays in forming their sense of self-identity. Lots of clever relationship stuff, like surreptitiously scoping out each other's MySpace profiles and sharp naturalistic dialogue as they continually negotiate and renegotiate the emotional boundaries and ending point of their one day affair. And maybe the scene with the housing activists meeting was a digression, but you know what, if you live here that stuff is very important shit and on everybody's mind, so if you didn't like it, fuck you, it fits nicely given the context of the film whether you know it or not. Highly recommended.
ome crazy French tightrope walker had a lifelong dream to perform on a line stretched between the World Trade Towers and in 1974 actually did it. An amazing documentary, helped immeasureably by the fact that throughout his career, the guy and his pals made home movies of his exploits, including preparations for the illegal World Trade Towers stunt, piecing together the narrative of the heist job-esque mechanics of the caper—sneaking into the buildings, avoiding the guards, stringing the cables with getting caught, wondering if the guy is going to fall off the rope and die . . . very suspenseful and entertaining stuff. Too bad they didn't get to film him during the actual tightrope walk. Too bad also there's such an annoying amateurish music score.
eminded me of Batman Begins without the angst, a smartly scripted superhero origin tale with top notch acting, but played for laughs instead of dramatic effect. Robert Downey Jr. always rules and the director wisely put him in almost every scene of the movie. And for once there's some genuine romantic superhero chemistry courtesy of Gwyneth Paltrow, probably why most girls I know liked Iron Man much more than The Dark Knight.
ine French fluff. Audrey Tautou—never sexier as a trashy gold digger bilking affluent gentlemen in the south of France—mistakes hotel bartender Gad Elmale—the hapless dude from The Valet—for a rich guest, seduces him, then finds he's no financial prize. But penniless Gad generates dough to keep things going with her after stumbling into a rich older woman in need of a gigilo. If this were an American flick Audrey's character would have a heart of gold e.g. Julia "Pretty Woman" Roberts, but she's fairly despicable, although of course it's Audrey Tautou and you can't resist forever. Thiings take off in the second act, when she takes her erstwhile suitor under her wing and instructs him on the art of fleecing a mark, at which he excels while her fortunes take a turn for the worse. Oh you know what happens in the end, but it's good fun and great eye candy.
ver their careers Martin Scorsese and the Rolling Stones have been responsible for so many brilliant pop culture explosions that I'm happy to allow them fluffy vanity projects in their autumn years. This film has like a bazillion edits, Scorsese rarely holds one shot for more than two or three seconds, very few wide shots, lots of tight close-ups on the faces of the band, mostly close-ups of Mick, because Scorsese is trying to create a sense of kinetic energy with all the quick edits and Mick runs around the most. And of course the cinematography and lighting is top-notch, and the Stones still play okay, so that stuff is all good. My big problem with it is that as a musician I like to watch the instrumentalists play, and this film is 90% shots of Mick jumping about and singing while Charlie Watts is almost never seen. And the music sounds muddy, the guitars are way down in the mix except when there's a close up of Keith or Ronnie playing a riff, then the volume on that instrument shoots up to emphasize that shot, and suddenly the guitar sounds bright the way it should, but then drops back down in the mix three seconds later. Scorsese is shooting for personality, and watching Mick run the band and cue the musicians is fun, but I would always rather be watching Keith instead, and while my favorite moment was when Keith walked out in his black vampire coat and stood there without a guitar and sang "You Got The Silver," I was bugged at Scorsese for running over Keith doing "Connection" by inserting interview clips in the middle of the song. Buddy Guy stole the show on "Champagne and Reefer" with the coolest guitar lick of the evening. Jack White sang badly and was annoying, and I'd never seen Christina Aguilera sing live before but she kind of rocked, doing her best Tina Turner, singing loud in a deep register and keeping a growl in her voice the whole way. Watching Bill and Hillary enjoying their celebrity status by bringing scores of friends and family to shake hands with the band was ironically entertaining (especially given their recent temper tantrums during the Democratic primaries), but Scorsese enjoying his celebrity status in the bits at the beginning and end a little less so.
hen I read the New York magazine article on which this movie was based—in which the gangster in question, Frank Lucas, recounted his flamboyant drug dealing escapades to a journalist who faithfully transcribed and published the account without apparently bothering to fact check much of it—I thought, wow, they smuggled heroin onto Henry Kissinger's plane? Why wasn't that in the movie? Raging gun battles in the jungles of Southeast Asia? That would've been more interesting to watch than Russell Crowe's divorce proceedings. At first I thought it was because they had to beef up the rather uninteresting character of the cop to justify the parallel police/drug dealer storylines, not to mention Crowe's costarring status with Denzel Washington. As it turns out, not only were most of Lucas' claims bogus, the character of the cop was a composite of a bunch of different investigators as well. In any case, the film was an entertaining, well directed mob thriller, but would it have been as effective and plausible if it had been billed as entirely fictional? Probably not.
ow here's a film based on a true story that lives up to its billing. A gritty police procedural that remains gripping and suspenseful throughout while staying scrupulously faithful to the facts of the case. The film grimily recreates the feel of late 60s/early 70s San Francisco and is especially atmospheric in its depiction of the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom. The performances are all terrific, especially Robert Downey as the eccentric Chronicle reporter. The attention paid to the investigation, the fragmentary evidence and the mechanics of the predigital era CSI work add to the movie's sense of verisimilitude, as does the suggestive but inconclusive true life ending. The murders are shown for the creepy and brutal acts they were, but without oversensational embellishment. Walking out of the theater I heard a woman behind me say the ending was kind of boring, a complaint echoed by of all people the moronic film critic for the Chronicle, but if you want to see Gwyneth Paltrow's severed head in a box, go watch one of the director's other films. In fact, Se7en was the film where I got fed up with sadistic psycho killer flicks, but for my money Zodiac is the model of how to do one right.
ntil Kurt Cobain came and went, Ian Curtis was rock and roll's most celebrated and cult-inspiring suicide (as opposed to all those rock stars who, self-destructively or not, died from drug overdoses, car wrecks and whatnot). A better movie than I expected given the dismal spate of superficial music biopics lately, well acted by an unknown named Sam Riley as Curtis and especially Samantha Morton as his wife. Shot appropriately in black and white, the film shows Curtis' working class roots, the emotional turmoil he went through after Joy Division became famous and his life began to be torn in two different directions, and most interestingly the onset of his epilepsy which threatened his ability to continue as a performer as his condition worsened. Given that Curtis' widow Debbie was one of the film's producers and the script was based on her memoir, the portrayal of Curtis' mistress Annik is remarkably sympathetic. The director is a photographer and music video director who took pictures of Joy Division when they were together, and the real life closeness to Curtis of the people who made the film shows in its empathetic attention to the emotional details of Curtis' life, as well as the avoidance of sensationalism that mars so many cinematic rock biographies. The recreations of the band performing come off much better than such things usually do, but overall don't capture the intensity and power of Joy Division at its best live, and the band's originality within the context of the music industry at the time isn't fully fleshed out, and a viewer unfamiliar with Joy Division might not understand what the big deal was, but for them there's
oor Ang Lee, sometimes his films are so understated they go right over people's heads, like this Chinese language film that didn't seem to connect with American audiences. The plot concerns a young Chinese girl who becomes involved in the resistance movement during World War II, and is sent to seduce a Chinese collaborator who is the head of security for the Japanese occupation forces in Shanghai. But this isn't your usual Hollywood espionage thriller, as alluded to by the scene where the girl goes to the movies and weeps watching Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo—in Ang Lee's take on this world, all is not romance and melodrama. He instead focuses on the emotional damage such double agent intrigue would exact on an inexperienced girl thrown into that situation. Much has been made of the semi-explicit sex scenes in the movie, but they are central to showing how her feelings for such a sadistic monster become confused and convoluted, making this a perceptive examination of sexual politics from a realistic feminine perspective. In the film, her character's background as an amateur actress prepares her for the role playing demanded by her deception of Tony Leung and his wife, Joan Chen, but it's her lack of romantic experience that proves her undoing as she slowly loses her ability to separate her hatred for Tony Leung from the newfound passion that their sexual liaison arouses in her. The film's contrast of this explosive carnality against a leisurely Asian charade of manners and social pretense might have been too foreign for American viewers, but I saw it with a mostly Chinese audience in a theater in San Francisco and they dug it. Leung contributes his usual smoldering presence, but newcomer Wei Tang as the girl carries the film with a very nuanced and very accomplished performance.
dmittedly a minor Wes Anderson effort, but I still liked it. A trio of wealthy, self-involved brothers encounter spiritual enlightenment on a trip to India in search of their mother who's run off to become a nun in Buddhist monastery. The premise is so obvious that's there no subtext to be found, the movie is all surfaces, its heart worn on its sleeve, and its entertainment value lies not in being surprising or deep but in spending time with some engaging actors—Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Anjelica Huston—and watching it play out. There was a one scene prologue with Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman the point of which seemed to be getting her nude, and mind you I don't object at all to seeing Natalie Portman naked but artistically it was rather gratuitous.
ike Forest Whitaker in Bird and Jamie Foxx in Ray, Marion Cotillard is an accomplished actor giving an outstanding performance in an otherwise boneheaded biopic about a drug-addicted music legend. My theory is that actors can't pull off playing characters that are smarter than they are, and likewise hack directors don't have the talent and vision to distill the artistic accomplishments and musical genius of an Edith Piaf or a Johnny Cash onto film, and instead focus so myopically on drugs and dysfunction that the audience has to go home afterward and put on a record to remind themselves why the musician was so brilliant in the first place. La Vie En Rose fits firmly in this movie-of-the-week rut, jumping back and forth almost exclusively between Edith Piaf's difficult childhood and the last morphine-addicted years of her life. I didn't mind the non-chronological script, I did mind that the film rather pointedly skips over a decade or two when Piaf's career was at its height. As near as I could tell, there's not one scene set between the mid-30s and the mid-40s. Maurice Chevalier? Charles Aznevour? World War II? Not here. Lots of scenes of Piaf in decline at the end of her life, though. Lots of them. Cotillard bears up well and delivers a great turn as Piaf, but she's about all the film has going for it.
arnest working-class young French girl, nice looking of course, gets a job working in cafe in an upscale section of Paris. Meets lots of local neighborhood types—millionaires, theater people, concert pianists, you know, just plain folks. Slick mainstream French comedy/melodrama, appealing, well-written, smarter than your average American film but not too edgy. Oh, and she falls in love with a wealthy guy at the end. But you knew that already, didn't you?
itto for the third Pirates movie, which I thought was a major disappointment. Granted, the second one wasn’t as light on its feet as the first, but I liked its dense effects-laden art direction and new characters. But At The World’s End adds nothing interesting to the mix except for about two minutes of Keith Richards and ten minutes of Chow Yun-Fat. We had enough interminably long cannon-blasting ship battles the last time, even without the video-game-friendly whirlpool. At least Johnny Depp has more screentime, but his mugging seems increasingly less swashbuckling and more buffoonish with each picture. When he informed everyone in the first film "I'm Jack Sparrow, savvy?" there was bravura and a bit of menace behind it; by now Jack Sparrow is a pretty much a cartoon.
ontrary to the hype, this is not the best monster movie since Jaws. This South Korean movie is loads of fun when the reptilian creature (created by a group of San Francisco Industrial Light And Magic alumni called The Orphanage) comes up out of the Han River in Seoul and goes on a rampage, but the bumbling Park family—who spend the entire film trying to find their daughter after the monster snatches her and stashes her in a sewer—wear out their welcome fast. They're not nearly as humorous or entertaining as the director thinks they are. Maybe it helps if you're Korean. The heavy handed digs at the American military are mildly amusing, though. Rent the DVD, watch the monster scenes, fast forward through the rest.
e was a counterculture revolutionary, and the government takes that kind of shit really seriously historically. [My father] was dangerous to the government. If he had said, 'Bomb the White House tomorrow,' there would have been 10,000 people who would have done it. These pacifist revolutionaries are historically killed by the government. Anybody who thinks that Mark Chapman was just some crazy guy who killed my dad for his personal interests is insane, I think, or very naive."
urt Cobain once called Daniel Johnston the greatest songwriter on earth, but forgive me if I don't take Kurt's word for it. A lot of people interested in promoting Daniel Johnston's career (music writers, other bands, MTV) have spent a lot of time and effort trying to convince music fans that he's not an outsider artist—a naive folk artist who is also pretty much insane—but that's exactly the case. His music is not good in the conventional sense of informed, controlled, intentional and masterful. It is involving because Daniel Johnston is out of his fucking mind and extremely idiosyncratic, but frankly, compared to an authentically talented songwriter like Townes Van Zandt, he's just an impressively motivated whack job with a small cult of dedicated fans and PR folks. And perhaps the most revealing aspect of this documentary is how so many people, back in the up for grabs era of the burgeoning underground/independent music scene in Austin, were cluelessly searching without a map for the next big thing and latched onto Johnston's delusional self-grandiosity, buying into it at face value. Musical pretensions aside, this film is actually an absorbing portrait of Johnston and his family and the tribulations they have endured going through life taking care of him. At one point his father was piloting himself and Daniel home in a private passenger plane when his son pulled the keys out of the ignition and threw them out the window and the plane plunged to the ground and crashed, and they both actually survived. Those types of incidents—like the time Daniel broke into an elderly woman's apartment and frightened her so badly that she jumped out a window to escape and broke both her legs—certainly makes for an arresting documentary, just don't feel obliged to buy into the film's endlessly laudatory view of Johnston's musical acumen.
ermaine Greer's comments focused mostly on how societally dictated attitudes toward women and the traditional roles assigned to them serve to repress women and keep them from achieving their full potential, especially artistically, as the male artistic ego and consumerism hold them back. The most reasoned rhetoric of the evening came from critic Diana Trilling who, while lauding the goals and intent of the women's movement, reserved the right to ignore any dogma imposed upon her, sexually or otherwise, by any movement, feminist or chauvinist, that doesn't coincide with her beliefs and needs as an individual. Speaking about the political baggage being assigned to female orgasm at the time, Trilling said, dryly, "I could hope we would also be free to have such orgasms as, in our individual complexities, we happen to be capable of." Her remarks foreshadowed the corrective reaction of many feminists in subsequent years to the absolutism of much 70s era women's lib rhetoric, typified by the opposition of pro-porn activists like Annie Sprinkle to anti-porn crusaders like Andrea Dworkin.
oan Allen is one of the best actresses working today. She's one of a handful of women—Meryl Streep, Judy Dench, Helen Mirren, Judy Davis—whose performances are always sharp, intelligent , and perfectly realized. In these two simultaneously released films, she plays two very different characters that are almost diametrically opposite. In The Upside Of Anger she plays an upscale housewife whose husband abandons her and their four daughters, and who retreats into drinking, bitterness and self-pity. Allen's forte is playing strong-willed, intelligent, forceful women, and this is one of her best roles. The scenes where she unleashes her acid-tongued temper, combined with her very naturalistic take on the slightly slurred speech of an alcoholic, make for an acting tour-de-force. The script devolves into movie of the week melodrama whenever she's off-screen and the daughters take over, but Kevin Costner is actually pretty good as her dumb ex-jock drinking buddy and lover.