Reviews

So, the history is there, in a sort of hazy blotch of spurtches (those are real words, look them up), but of course it's told to us by one person, Tony Wilson, who everyone in the film repeatedly says is a c*nt, and potentially the worst kind, a charming c*nt that appears to know everything, is married multiple times to women he constantly cheats on, and appears to fail at everything except failure (he's apparently married to a former Miss UK as of the film's making). His specialty is talking out of his ass and spotting the next big thing in music. So, we're treated to the Sex Pistols, we're treated to Joy Division and New Order, the Happy Mondays, bands the kids don't know they know unless they know they need to. It's told tongue-and-cheek, and you know it must embrace the spirit of it because there are multiple cameos by the people who were a part of it. It also comes with a light of mockumentary about it, as though it needs to make fun of itself to keep you off about whether this or that happened that way or if it happened at all (and sometimes they will straight up tell you it didn't). A little too self-aware to be a masterpiece, but it's revetting and loads of fun to watch, all the same.

This is one of those variety of stories Hitchcock would've worked with. Ewan McGregor's "ghost" (I didn't pick up his name, did you?) is picked for one reason and one reason only: he's quick and he's self-indulgent enough not to meaninglessly put himself in harm's way. Pierce Brosnan's Adam Lang is a former British Prime Minister writing his memoirs and the previous ghostwriter just mysteriously kicked the bucket. Yes, there's a secret that the ghost's predecessor was beginning, or perhaps was in the middle of..., or perhaps had already unraveled. When a crisis puts him square in the middle of his client's life, he starts breaking his own rules, and his predecessor's work reaches out to him. He's too proud to rubber stamp what's given to him, and while everyone's distracted, he sets out to write a sincere, honest appraisal of his client. And of course, he's in way over his head... a fun movie, and clever, but ultimately too easy to pick through, too vague in its terror, and too eager to plow through a reveal everyone will see coming.

The first 10-20 minutes of this left me feeling sleepy. A filmmaker, unable to film because of his politics, films anyway, out of boredom. He has a script that was rejected by the government and he decides to act it out for his friend. However, he can't. It feels banal to him. It feels forced. He wants truth and it takes a long time to shirk your sense of self-consciousness when there's a camera in front of you.

He puts in movies and shows his friend his favorite scenes, all the why standing by the phone, hoping to hear word on his appeal. It could take months before he knows something, although he is almost certainly going to jail. On the television, Japan is being crushed by a tsunami. On the streets, it is Fireworks Wednesday, a day the leadership in Iran has already said must end because it's not a religious holiday. A friend on the phone wants him to join him out on the street to watch the fireworks, but has to get off the phone because he's hit a checkpoint. He calls back a few minute later. It's okay, he said. They just looked at my camera. Anyway, this is Iran. At the moment, it feels we're in far greater danger of becoming like Iran than Iran is of becoming anything like us.

There's a lot of people out there that are so afraid of being alone, or feel so pressured to aspire to certain merits, or just feel the most comfortable meeting someone, marrying them, and making a family. Then there are other people out there who prefer isolating themselves, keeping their emotional connections tenuous and living in the perfectly controlled world of zero social responsibility. They work, they love their job, and they fulfill vaguely relationshipy things that eventually fade out. George Clooney (who is either terribly unhappy or just really enjoys acting sad in his movies) is Ryan Bingham, and Ryan Bingham has a backpack he wants to burn and a pink slip he wants to give you. He has women in his life: those he avoids because they represent too many emotional connections, and those he sees casually they come and go with the wind. It's a certain one in particular, a new coworker played by Anna Kendrick, who knocks him off his rhythm and inadvertently forces him to ask questions he's been avoiding all his life. She's an idealist: young, brilliant, and horribly naive. For all intents and purposes, she essentially ruins his life. It's by pure accident and we essentially watch him give birth to himself. It's beautiful and messy and it's rather unfortunate that the film ends with the baby in a basket, so to speak. But a sequel to this film would end up being a Hallmark Movie of the Week, and those are too gushy for this cynical, bittersweet piece. Vera Farmiga is delicious in this movie up until a random point that, while well told, I don't agree with. Anna Kendrick is adorable as always and Clooney manages to once again skirt that line between godlike and everyman that just leaves you in tatters. He's like Cary Grant with just the perfect pinch of Gary Cooper.

I remember seeing this in theatres as a Republican back in 2004. I voted for Bush that year. Four years later, I voted for McCain. This past election, I voted Libertarian, having come to the conclusion that the major parties were too corrupt to trusted. It's been so long, we keep forgetting the tenuous rationalizing, the weapons that were never there, the freedom that nobody in the Middle East (except the elite, I assume), ever got to benefit from. I've always been under the impression that the world would be better if democracy spread throughout it. But, you have to respect the ideals of that democracy, or it's a democracy in name only. "We don't have time to read the laws." 1 out of 535 representatives had a child fighting the war (and probably against his parent's wishes). There was a time in America's past (1870s-1900s) called the Gilded Age, where the government was vastly corrupt and we fought wars for corporations (the Spanish-American War of 1898, the annexation of the Philippines, etc). The difference between now and then? Information. The internet. The truth finds a way to get to you. I wouldn't presume to tell you how to vote in any future elections, but I hope you stick your ideals when doing so, and I hope you do not compromise those ideals in the name of safety and I hope you do not withhold rights from other people because their traditions and way of life is different from yours. That is all.

It's a crying shame Scorsese didn't wait another ten years to make Gangs of New York, which was subject to money issues and constrictions that kept it from being the fully realized masterpiece that it could have been. Instead, it's a bit rushed, and the necessary violence feels bludgeoning. Some of these characters are rather important thematically to the story, and it takes multiple viewings (a la Godfather) before you can really 'read between the lines' and understand why "this guy got hammered" and "this person hates this person." The why, essentially, is off the table, because there's no real time for it, and what we're left with is quick and nasty tableau of nightmares, much in the way you'd feel if you woke up from a coma and suddenly found yourself in Egypt post-Mubarak. You have to understand something before you can no longer fear it, and the America we're presented with in this film is dark, dirty, bloody, and all together terrifying, owing more to a post-apocalyptic Mad Max than a genuine American epic. Holding a narrative together is a simple revenge fantasy that pits an Irish-Catholic immigrant's son (and who's to say the boy wasn't born in America- irony of ironies, he's only ten or so in the film's prologue) against a Know-Nothing Nativist (Bill the Butcher, played with stunning ferocity by Daniel Day-Lewis). Bookending this garish chronicle is the off-putting music of Irish-band U2, fittingly picked but somewhat surprisingly allowed to plug in, giving the prologue a rather silly MTV vibe.

Does all this make it a bad movie? Actually, no, I feel it's one of Scorsese's better and worthwhile films (just certainly not his best). There's definitely a personal touch to it and it's historical accuracy is fairly on-the-spot. However, when you have to highlight a load of bloodshed and massacre for 168 minutes in order for the narrative to make sense, you're left with something like Howard Zinn's "A People's History"... a very cynical look at something that needs room to breathe and angles to examine. You need the why? Unlike Zinn's history, this film isn't meant to outrage and isn't trying to exploit, and you can tell this is the case. But the violence is numbing. Imagine if Scorsese had directed Game of Thrones and stuffed a bunch of George R R Martin books into one 168 minute massacre.... Well, the history here is just as complicated, if not more so. Gang needed a Boardwalk Empire style presentation, it needed to be a series. But I don't blame Scorsese for making it when he did. He had been trying for 20 years to get it made, and Band of Brothers, that great WW2 series that turned epic storytelling on premium channels into something that could be conceivably accomplished, was just out of the starting gate as Gangs went to print.

Erich von Stroheim would've killed to have that kind of unrestricted license. For this piece, Martin Scorsese would've been better served by it.

... especially if you were raised in Alabama! I didn't know who Harvey Milk was until this movie came out and even then all the publicity I saw had nothing to do with the film itself and everything to do with Sean Penn and Josh Brolin putting in stellar jobs. (I personally think Emile Hirsch was brilliant, but he's not really in it quite enough). To be honest, how Gus Van Sant didn't win for Best Director is beyond me, especially considering what DID win (Slumdog Millionaire? I mean, it's good, don't get me wrong). If you don't know the story, good. Watch this movie, then go onto wikipedia or go to your local library. It's history, and Van Sant stays pretty true to form, at least as far as factually relevant information is concerned. Did Harvey have boyfriends like the ones mentioned? I dunno. Does it matter? I dunno.

If you were an utter nihilist, you'd find this film to be too sentimental. And it does have the lightest touches of sentimentality, but this a debut feature from the little blonde girl from 'Avonlea', Sarah Polley, who I will probably always have an undying crush on. It's a debut, and it's not really sentimental, nor does it have more than the faintest glimmer of hope, because with Alzheimer's, there isn't any. There's simply bittersweet moments of clarity, followed by a shadow leading into an abyss. If you were an optimist, you might walk away feeling that glimmer. Yes, sometimes you get a glimmer. But it's like the mating call of a lightning bug. It's beautiful and it makes you feel at home, but it doesn't light the way. And sometimes moving on is merely that. Here, have some whiskey. And good luck to you.

This movie is clever, funny, and disturbing, which is a set of adjectives usually reserved for really good horror movies. And let's face it: this is, in many ways, horror film. How many scenes within it manage to make your stomach churn? It's indignation at close-minded people is almost satirical. Everyone in this film has some sort of problem. The literary allusions are spot on, if you consider 'Crime and Punishment' or 'Madame Bovary', and its willingness to leave a few subplots open is something of a ham-fisted brilliance. Hard to look past its more disturbing moments, though. I'm surprised there's not a suicide somewhere in a dark corner of this film's vaguely promising yet contemplatively messy ending.

There is something nostalgic about a Nick Park Wallace and Gromit piece. There's never any indication of a specific time span in the films, though there does seem to be slight indications of a narrative flow and an overall sense of travel, but nowhere do we find the sort of thing that one sees with the Simpsons (nobody in the Simpsons ages, though they do seem to move through time periods; but Bart in the early 90s was a kid and 20 years later, he's still a kid, while the family can look back and remember when he wasn't born). Wallace and Gromit can look back too, and perhaps if there was more to their story, we'd also notice they never age... however, their world is placed in a timeless place that echoes the 50s and 60s. Nobody has a computer. Wallace builds a rocket in the short 'A Grand Day Out', but either he missed Neil Armstrong proving once and for all that the moon isn't made of cheese, or that grand worldwide event has yet to happen in his world. Animation has the ability to be timeless, yet it has to relate to us in a way that makes us comfortable. Wallace and Gromit inhabit that rare place of nostalgia. Their adventures are new, but there's a quaintness to them, like sipping hot chocolate and hearing wild yet tamed down stories of the adventures your grandparents used to have. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is exemplary for providing us just such a tale. It's cheeky in places if you're old enough to get the jokes, but never offensive. It presents modern ideas (vegetarianism, humane treatment of animals), that doesn't share much of a place with the time period it hearkens back to, but is subtle enough that many years from now, we won't feel off put by it. It's a safe, pleasant, quite-often-hilarious tale that we'll want to return to... watching this movie is basically like hugging your favorite pet dog. Of course, your dog is probably less inclined to wake you up in the morning the same way Gromit is.

Collateral is Stuart Beattie's ticket into Hollywood. Originally called 'The Last Domino' and heavily rewritten by both Frank Darabont and Michael Mann, it asks the questions: "So what happens if you're a cab driver and a sociopath gets into the car?" So it goes. The sociopath is played by Tom Cruise and it's a part that he's essentially made for. The guy has the capacity to be both utterly charming and utterly cold at the same time and I think he's probably managed to frighten quite a few people in his life. Jamie Foxx is the cabdriver, and what makes his performance so riveting is his capacity to be down on himself while aspiring higher, to be humbled and humbling, and essentially be a lot like probably you and me. It's the dichotomy between these two convergent personalities that make this film work. The actual storyline, while interesting, is at a loss towards the final third of the film, when it devolves into shoot-em-up bang-bang and the cab driver becomes something other than what his character's been the entire film. Also, the coincidences needed to make this script hum might make you wish you watched less movies. Don't think too much and just enjoy the bits of this film that work, because there are a few of them and they are quite enjoyable.

The Barbarians in this film are many things: you hear the phrase from a man describing 9/11 in the context of a larger world view, as though it were the first time the Roman Empire had been invaded on its home soil by Barbarians, and it is akin to that (a lesser power connecting on a punch against a greater power, killing it through sheer will and patience) that steers the narrative in this work by French-Canadien Denys Arcand, a sequel to "Decline of the American Empire." An intellectual, who spent his life basically doing whatever he wanted, is dying of cancer. He's an idealist, a socialist, who despises what his son does for a living (his son is a capitalist). As a socialist, he should die in a bed in a public hospital surrounded by people he doesn't know... no, of course not, he should die at his home surrounded by people he loves, but he never cultivated those relationships to the extent that anyone feels a great need to be there for him in his dying hours. His son, persuaded by the one woman who loves him enough to do something for him (his estranged wife), pays them to be there for him, pays an old family friend with connections to narcotics to feed him heroine, pays former students to come pay him a visit and validate his lectures. In each case, this ironic twist (all these socialists are such whores... they don't want to be there for each other, but they all have a price)... this ironic twist feeds into the film, until the money fades into shadow and you don't even consider it anymore. All of the great ideas these intellectuals have, these 'isms'... his son's fiancée explains how ridiculous 'love' is as a reason for being with someone (her own parents divorced when she was three)... yet, she feels jealousy when the family friend is around, a stunningly beautiful woman you could never really be with due to her drug problems. Everyone in this movie is afraid of their feelings... and by the end of the movie they've essentially been paid to feel... well, everyone except the man with the money, the son, the "prince of the barbarians"... who is doing everything out of love for his mother... in the beginning...

This film is like paint being mixed, then applied to a dry canvas, then transformed into a beautiful twilight shot of a lake, and dear friends, and a life well lived... somehow, in spite of itself.

For a three hour documentary about a town that houses 10 million and looks dusty and dirty even when it's at its pristine and pretentious best, this is some compelling stuff. The droll voice of the narrator (Encke King- please tell me that's a pseudonym for the documentary's creator, Thom Anderson) expounds the essay like a cynical alcoholic history professor might talk about the Arapahoe during a Friday night session in which you were hoping to deal with no more important topics than whose breasts look best on GoT or what's up with Jets QB situation. And you'll listen to him because what he says makes sense. Yes, Hollywood is full of overprivileged white guys who pretend the city they live in doesn't exist outside of their fortress-like movie studios and bougie Bel-Air penthouses. I myself lived in Los Angeles for a year, and Hollywood is more of an odor than a thing. You get a faint whiff of it from time to time, but for the most part, Los Angeles is a place where underprivileged multi-ethnic people scrape out a living and pay too much for it. Every single Asian country is represented there (China, Japan, Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, the Phillipines, all of 'em), and of course a good 1/3 of it is Mexican (and you can't forget how many black people live there...). It's a melting pot.

Anderson includes a history of Los Angeles by showing how the filmed history got everything wrong and he expounds on the cops and how they're portrayed. His essay sounds like what it is: a tenured film professor being overly critical and at times pseudo-intelligent about an industry borne of immigrants when at its best... which is hilarious given how kind he is to anyone obviously not born in America, as though their portrayal of Los Angeles is more honest because they don't pretend to know anything about it (or probably care all that much-- I lived there, and I never found a reason to care about it. It was a just a place with a lot of people and not a particularly inviting one). This would probably be labeled communist propaganda if it came out during the 50s with how much it seems to disdain anyone who isn't working class or below. Which would be more admirable if the filmmaker was just some guy who watched a lot of movies while he scraped out a living repairing motorcycles in Simi Valley and not some coddled condescending liberal who's been sucking at the film school teat since the 60s.

And yet, I give it an 8. The guy does know his stuff.

I'm not gonna lie. This movie doesn't really get on its feet until Brendan Gleeson makes in appearance. Before this moment, there's an unnecessary expository prologue and then Cillian Murphy wakes up in a hospital (apparently zombies are like T-Rexes: they can't see you if you don't move)... and once he's up and walking the streets of London, he acts mostly like an idiot, guzzling a Pepsi in one clean gulp, and reading the most awesome Headline ever before tossing the paper away without bothering to read the story (in a similar situation, I would have read every piece of news I could get my hands on).

Zombie movies are never scary and since Romero seemed to set in stone the idea that they must be allegories of our baser natures, every one has managed to try to say something about us through this motif (well, every GOOD zombie movie). I sound cynical about this one, but only the first quarter of it disappointed. Once it becomes interested in the characters and stops trying so hard to be a "post-apocalyptic zombie film" it really begins upping the game. People stop taking turns acting like idiotic pricks and start caring about each other and suddenly we have a movie worth watching on our hands. Does that make it less stupid in places? Nawp. Does it make it any less entertaining? Oh, absolutely not. There's enough action porn, suspense, and semi-plausible developments to keep most everyone tossing their popcorn; and isn't that the main reason horror movies exist?

This is a lovely film that is thankfully careful not to try and exploit its location, but instead allows itself the use of actual whole characters to guide its story forward (which NEVER happens in Hollywood anymore). Though the film is populated with people of differing opinion and some are waaaaaay more stubborn than others, you can still see that they have a mutual respect for one another and try to work around each other's foibles as best as humanly possible. Keisha-Castle Hughes is wonderful, though I always fall short of saying anybody still in high school in necessarily a great actor. She does a great job and may very well become a great actor, but let's be realistic: has Anna Paquin grown any since 'Piano'? Has Kirsten Dunst really knocked us for a loop since 'Interview with a Vampire'? Just because they don't suck at a young age doesn't mean they're automatically amazing, it just means they're "directable." A lot of credit should go to Niki Caro for her amazing work in bringing out these characters (I really thought this was a true ensemble piece, acting wise)... is she a great FILM director. The movie itself largely begs to differ and minus the locations, would've been a great stage play. But a lovely film from an actor's director, in the vein of Daldry or Mike Nichols, a work from someone who might have one or two great FILMS in the repertoire, but for the most part is amazing with actors and just a pinch shy of visionary. Fun trivia: KCH was a teen mom. Whodathunkit? Thanks, wikipedia!

A dark comedy. I think that's one way to put it. A man gets naively involved in a crime that leads to another more serious crime and everything around him goes down the toilet, one thing after another. Yet, the entire time, he keeps a cool, introspective, somewhat philosophical mindset, as though he's remembering all of this and what could possibly be the implications of it all. Beethoven wrote music despite the fact that he couldn't hear any of it and this guy, Ed (wonderfully played by Billy Bob Thornton), speaks to us throughout this movie despite being mostly silent throughout the film. The plot is overcomplicated due to every character in it being more simple than they pretend to be. Nobody thinks things through at all. Everybody takes everything at face value, then discards it when it's essentially the truth. Aliens appear to appear. To someone, they provide all the answers when they don't. To someone else, they provide no answers when they clearly have provided a way out. I like the idea that the aliens are a metaphor for the Coen Brothers, writers and filmmakers coming in to look on their work. Again, though, it's brilliant, but it may not be, and the answers are not there, and the film is too postmodern for its simplicity to be anything other than simple and its deeper meanings to be anything other than window dressing. At the end of the day, a simple man was writing a story to a pulp magazine. His story may have more in it than he knows, but he's too simple to really know. Also: when Scarlet Johannson says she just wants to make you happy... let her make you happy.

It seems pretty apt that Kidman would replace Kerr in this subtly lifted inspiration from Henry James to the mind and talents of Alejandro Amenabar. Never mind that Cruise and Kidman were going through a divorce at the time, Tom still helped with the funding, probably feeling like he owed Amenabar one for letting him recreate Abra Los Ojas into the lackluster Vanilla Sky. The stirrings are creepy without being over-the-top, and the twist ending is plausible which makes re-watch palatable... though there's not quite enough character in the characters to see anything more than plot polishings when it's all said and done, Kidman does a fine job of providing an aura to the mother that's all but mostly absent from the script. We're never sure what makes her as she is and the history behind the family is as foggy as the island they can't seem to get away from. Oh man, another ten minutes of scenes just to flesh these characters out and we'd have a something of a Gothic masterpiece on our hands. So close!

This is a sort-of sequel to 'A Trip to the Moon', which was itself a reboot of an earlier 'Trip to the Moon' made back in 1898. Of course Melies returned to this idea. He did a number of different versions of every idea he ever had. He dabbled in practically everything. He was best at 2 things: magic acts (sensible seeing as how he started out as a magician and saw film as an extension of the act of illusions), and fantasies (a different kind of magic act). Here, instead of going to the moon, he follows Jules Verne's advice yet again and goes to the other great big ball in the sky: the sun! As is the case with this format, they have to explore their ideas and build stuff (to aid in plausibility, a touch of pseudo-science if you will), then there has to one comedic mishap after another, things must blow up, crash, or explode in a giant puff of smoke)... None of it is to be taken seriously of course. The entire thing is an epic set-piece aimed at striking wonder to the imagination. It kinda works, but you can't escape the feeling that Melies stretches his films out too long for the ideas at hand and that this one is simply "another version" of his best work. Can't blame him for trying. He'd be out-'businessed', so to speak, by Edison within a decade and the rest of the story you've probably already seen from Scorsese's 'Hugo'. One quick fact for 'Hugo' lovers: Melies never filmed on color sets. Shades of gray always look better in black and white! All sets were monochromatic and hand-tinted later.

Nobody would understand better what it's like to sort of skirt the line between 'manly' and 'puff' better than Stephen Daldry, who goes by 'gay' despite being happily married to a woman and father to a daughter. He's as gay as he is straight, and in reality, it's like this: he likes what he likes. This film seems an extension of that: the lead (Jamie Bell, in a wonderfully nuanced young adult performance), is just a boy with a lot of energy who finds he's better at channeling it via dance than boxing (as his father would prefer). He's widower father and older brother are striking against the coal mines that won't pay them enough wages and you see a struggle as they grasp to their identity of what it is to be male. (if you can't feed your family, you don't feel like much of a man, do you?). Julie Walters delivers a fine performance as the dance teacher that sees Billy's potential and helps him realize it. Moments that could have been stomach-churning manage to go by like rocks skipping a lake. Transformations don't exactly ring true, but you find yourself more relieved and besides, with what ends up at stake, who has time for such 'trivial' matters?

Le Prince had apparently been playing around with the idea of creating a motion camera for some time. This was done in a garden with his son, mother-in-law, brother-in-law, and another not-completely-identified lady. Sarah (the mother-in-law) died ten days after this was made. Le Prince would disappear two years later. His son would be dead a short time after that.

Artistically speaking, there's not much else to say about this other than, "I think it works, Mr. Le Prince!"

There's really no telling how many films were shot by Le Prince. Four exist here on IMDb. None of them are terribly impressive outside of historical context, but really? You're watching people walk around roughly 130 years ago. That alone is pretty impressive.