MCN Weekend Reviews Archive for August, 2012
Wilmington on DVDs: A Separation
DVD PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW A SEPARATION (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin) (Four Stars) Iran: Asghar Farhadi, 2011 (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) Movies can open up a whole world for audiences, revealing even the most remote people and places. That’s especially true of movues like A Separation, last year’s much-praised, much-awarded foreign language Oscar-winner…
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Darling Companion; Headhunters; Down by Law… more
The movie has its flaws — an outlandishly implausible ending chiefly among them — but compared to most of the un-naturalistic, unfunny, unserious, totally phony and sometimes obnoxiously ageist and condescendingly smart-ass gloppy stuff that often passes for American movie comedy-drama these days (and that sometimes gets a pass from the same people who pile on movies like Darling Companion), it’s a movie that deserves some encouragement.
Read the full article » 1 Comment »Wilmington on DVDs: High Noon, 60th Anniversary Edition
High Noon became one of the most influential of all movie Westerns, exerting lasting effects even on films and filmmakers you wouldn’t expect it to, like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (four men, like the Miller gang, walking alone at the end, instead of one), Clint Eastwood‘s hip, dark High Plains Drifter (which might have been the last vengeful nightmare of a dying Will Kane) and Sergio Leone‘s operatic Once Upon a Time in the West.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Samsara
One of the tasks of art is to create beauty. (I’ll call it a sacred task, since I lived most of my life with an artist and treasure her memory, and it‘s what she would have said.) Another is to reveal the truth, or to give us both, together. I wouldn’t be so pretentious as to say that Samsara achieves all or any of these. But it tries. Honor to it then, and praise to all cinema that reveals a world to us — worlds upon worlds, the wheels of death and the Wheel of Life as well.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Premium Rush
It’s a smart movie that sometimes goes off the track. Writer-director David Koepp has scripted some of the biggest grossing action or adventure films ever, including “Jurassic Park” and the first “Spider-Man,” and he has a definite flair for rapid-fire clichés D.D.F. (done damned fast). His own directorial efforts haven’t been as good. But “Premium Rush” is probably the best of them.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Sparkle
I think we’re wrong when we say the story doesn’t matter in shows like this, because the audience just comes for the music. (People say the same kind of thing about action and horror movies, and they‘re wrong there, too.) The story does matter, always, and when we start getting more great musicals again — and I hope we will — it’ll be because all of the movie will click and not just a part of it.
Read the full article » 1 Comment »Wilmington on Movies: ParaNorman
I liked it a lot more than any of the “Paranormal Activity” movies — which I suppose isn’t saying much, because I dislike the “Paranormal Activity” series in toto. But ParaNorman activity, you know: that can be cool — as long as those undead guys don’t litter too many body parts on the sidewalks, when they‘re running away from the solid citizens.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Bourne Legacy
I miss Jason Bourne already — missed him, in fact, even before I saw “The Bourne Legacy”, fourth in the multi-million dollar grossing Bourne spy movie series, based on Robert Ludlum’s books.
Read the full article »Pride’s Friday 5, August 10, 2012
The late-night Alexa allure of Los Angeles light in “Celeste and Jesse Forever” and “Ruby Sparks”; Tracy Letts remembers where “Killer Joe” began in Evanston, Illinois; the total surveillance awareness of “The Bourne Legacy” and “Searching for Sugar Man,” which begins with a magnificent subject.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Campaign
Are politicians whores? Are movie comedies whorehouses? Are whores and poets and comedians the great unacknowleged legislators of mankind — and East Canarsie? Then why don’t they all get together and count votes more often?
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Shallow Grave
This seems a typical set-up for Boyle, whose propensity for cautionry break-the-bank films might well earn him the nickname “Get Rick Quick” Danny Boyle. But here’s where I stop the synopsis. Believe me, you don’t want me to go any further, and not out of skittishness or fear, but because you likely and sensibly don’t want to miss the deliciously macabre surprises and ingenious suspense set-pieces Boyle and Hodge keep detonating throughout the movie.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax
A long time ago, back in ’71, In a season of tumult and fear,
The good Dr. Seuss, with his pens sharp and loose, Wrote a book called “The Lorax,” we hear.
It was all about greed , about Oncelers and thneeds, About chopping down Truffula trees…
Wilmington on DVDs: Le Havre
That’s an awful lot of allusions or maybe-allusions and I probably don’t even have them all. (Thanks to Jim Hoberman and the Criterion booklet’s Michael Sicinski for some of them.) Le Havre, a great favorite at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, has a dimension of reality but it also exists in its own private world of cinephilia and Kaurismakiana. It’s simply not intended as a believably realistic film — and even its seeming realism (the straight-on slow camera style, the drab locations, the terse dialogue), is, in its way, yet another filmic allusion, this time to Italian neo-realism or to Robert Bresson.
Read the full article »Pride’s Friday 5: August 3, 2012
The uniformly hair-raising stories in the August American Cinematographer of digital capture of recent movies; the attractive production design of “Total Recall”; the glorious gloom of Terence Davies’ “Deep Blue Sea,” now on video; Joseph Kahn’s megameta nihilisploitation genre maelstrom, “Detention”; and the “City of Gods” point-of-view of video-on-demand release “Ajami.”
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Babymakers
I think it’s safe to say though that Jay Chandrasekhar will never win the Nobel Prize for Physics, or even for sperm preservation research, though he might well open up his own bank, if his customers have good shoes and a Farrellyesque sense of humor.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Total Recall
Another Philip K. Dick movie. Another terrific opportunity wasted. It bewilders me. Why are so many of the current makers of the super-action-movies so seemingly uninterested in writing good or clever dialogue or in devising original plots or in creating interesting characters?
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Marilyn Monroe
She was blonde and beautiful and often late. She grew up poor and unhappy. Her life changed. She became a starlet and a notorious nude calendar model and finally she became a movie star to the world, and the dream girl of many people, and many cultures. She played dumb in a lot of her pictures –but she was actually very smart and very talented and well-read and the friend or favorite star of major writers and artists, and even of one great French philosopher.
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