Voynar By Kim VoynarVoynar@moviecitynews.com
TIFF Review: Biutiful
When a great director has teamed repeatedly with a brilliant writer over the course of a career, one has to ponder how much the unique chemistry of two artistic minds working on a common canvas shapes the quality of the end result. Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s films Amores Perres, 21 Grams, and multiple-Oscar nominee Babel (which…
Read the full article »TIFF Dispatch Day One: Ups and Downs
I’m starting to feel settled and in the groove now that I’m getting acclimated to being back in Toronto. It was just about a year ago that I attended my first day of the fest going full force and then wound up being taken by ambulance to the hospital on Day Two, where I spent…
Read the full article »TIFF Review: Behind Blue Skies
Swedish film Behind Blue Skies very strongly reminded me of Holy Rollers, Kevin Asch‘s Jesse Eisenberg-starrer about a young, fresh-faced Hasidic Jew whose greed lures him into a scheme to transport ecstasy from Amsterdam into the US using other young Hasidics as mules. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, as I actually…
Read the full article »Voynaristic Review: Takers
Takers won’t win any awards or set a new watermark for spectactular heist films, but for what it is — a rather generic heist film with a mostly decent ensemble cast and one very good performance by Matt Dillon — it’s mostly harmless. If you’re a particularly passionate fan of any of the ensemble cast,…
Read the full article »Voynaristic Review: The Last Exorcism
Up until about the last eight or so minutes, I was really into The Last Exorcism. Then it all fell apart at the end, but in a way that was actually kind of interesting to dissect. Director Daniel Stamm, who previously made suicide mockumentary A Necessary Death, uses a similar style here, in an interesting…
Read the full article »Arthouse Redux: Claire Denis: A Little Restraint Goes a Long Way
There are filmmakers who use their medium purely to entertain, or to preach a particular message, or to guide their audience down the path of a particular story, tightly controlling and manipulating their audience’s reactions to what’s on the screen: milking the laughs, exagerrating the conflicts, torquing up both the actions and the reactions of…
Read the full article »Arthouse Redux: The Fine Art of Balancing Politics and Filmmaking
Since I brought up Walter Salles‘ and Daniela Thomas‘ Linha de Passe in last week’s Arthouse Redux column, I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss that film in greater depth while also revisiting their earlier film, Foreign Land. Salles is perhaps better known to American audiences for his solo directorial efforts with…
Read the full article »Arthouse Redux: How Very Verite of You
Filipino arthouse director Brillante Mendoza’s 2007 film Tirador (Slingshot) opened in NYC this weekend, but I’m still thinking of the film he made a year later, Serbis. In one of those instances of cinematic scheduling perversity, Tirador is releasing after Serbis, which debuted at Cannes in 2008 after Tirador played at Toronto in 2007. It…
Read the full article »Voynar Considers Binary Boffin Armond White—Him! Again!—As Canny Contrarian
Voynar Considers Binary Boffin Armond White—Him! Again!—As Canny Contrarian
Read the full article »Long Live the Film Festival
Film festivals are having a rough time of it lately. CineVegas is on hiatus this year, the specter of financial woes hung heavy over the recently concluded Palm Beach International Film Festival, and now Gen Art, after just concluding its New York festival a couple weeks ago, is shuttering completely after 16 years of art and parties….
Read the full article »Revisiting Synecdoche
SPOILER WARNING : This column is an analysis of Synecdoche, New York and contains heavy spoilers. I saw Charlie Kaufman‘s sublime film Synecdoche, New York for the third time at this year’s Ebertfest. I was interested to overhear the post-screening conversations outside the Virginia Theater after the screening, because I’ve always connected strongly to Kaufman’s work, and…
Read the full article »Why Kick-Ass Isn’t Reprehensible, Morally or Otherwise
Now that I’ve reviewed Kick-Ass, the movie, I thought I’d take a moment to write about the most controversial aspect of the film: Hit-Girl, the 11-year-old vigilante trained by her father to kill bad guys. The part of Hit-Girl, played rather brilliantly by the now-13-year-old Chloe Moretz, begs the question (yet again) of where the lines in…
Read the full article »Anime, Hot Chicks and Feminism
What’s so great about anime and manga? And isn’t most of it sexist and objectifying of women, anyhow? I am not an anime expert, but I do know about vile attitudes towards women, and in general, I find more in anime and manga that’s empowering towards women than vile. While it’s true that some anime…
Read the full article »Kevin Smith vs. Film Critics
By now you’ve probably heard about this whole Eric D. Snider, who Tweeted back thusly: “I don’t care what @thatkevinsmith thinks about movie reviews unless he paid to read them.” Let’s be clear here: attending free screenings is a privilege, not a First Amendment right, but it is a privilege that, generally speaking, benefits the…
Read the full article »From Rapunzel to Tangled? Disney’s Dicey Decision
Hot on the heels of Kathryn Bigelow‘s historic moment as the first female to win a Best Director Oscar for making a decidedly “guy” film comes word via the LA Times from Disney that they’ve changed the title of their upcoming animated adaptation of Rapunzel to Tangled. Apparently someone at the Mouse House did a little research into why The…
Read the full article »Thoughts on Oscar Night: Bigelow, Precious and a Screenplay Snub
Finally. History was made Sunday night when Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director. Surprisingly, there’s not been much posturing about whether Bigelow won the award because her work actually merited it above the work of the other nominees, or whether she won because it was “time” for a woman…
Read the full article »Male vs. Female? On Double Standards in Film Criticism
A comment on a post over on Glenn Kenny’s blog got me pondering: Do the mostly male, mostly heterosexual writers who dominate the business of reviewing films have two standards — one by which they review films aimed at women, and another by which they judge films aimed at men — and does such a double-standard…
Read the full article »The Care and Feeding of Your Indie Film on the Fest Circuit
When I was at the Oxford Film Festival last weekend, one of the things I was asked to do was moderate a panel called “Speed Pitch,” in which filmmakers had the opportunity to sign up to pitch their ideas (either the film they had in the fest, or other projects they have in the works)…
Read the full article »So Many Monkeys Jumping on the Bed
Published under 1,000 Monkeys. When people I interact with in my professional life learn that I have five children (and a grandchild, even!) they are often astonished. These days, the idea of someone having a large family is (at least outside of homeschooling or Amish circles) a bit out-of-fashion. I get asked a lot of…
Read the full article »Oscar, Schmoscar
I haven’t been able to get that excited about the Oscars this year. Probably it’s partly because I was pretty much out of the movie loop for five or so months dealing with illness, but partly, to be honest, it’s this whole idea of ten best picture nominees that has me feeling decidedly “meh” about…
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