As I’m not in the habit of keeping the lid on a secret
movie ending that’s 45 years old, I suggest you stop reading now if you’ve
never seen and don’t know the ending of Planet
of the Apes. If you also don’t know what Rosebud is or that Holly Martens
faked his own death, then you need to go back to school. Also, Janet Leigh is
killed in the first 40 minutes of Psycho.
I mention these things because they are such well-known and deeply engrained
plot points of famous movies that it’s virtually impossible to have a
discussion about them while maintaining the secret.
A blog mostly dedicated to cinema (including both new and old film reviews; commentary; and as the URL suggests - movie lists, although it has been lacking in this area to be honest), but on occasion touching on other areas of personal interest to me.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Classic Movie Review From My Collection: Rear Window
I never fully realized before, but only just accepted it
on face value, that Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear
Window is one hell of a movie. The two or three times I’d seen it
previously I guess I sort of accepted its status as a classic great movie. This
time I absorbed it fully and saw in it how its technical prowess supports a
great story and ironic commentary on both marriage and on watching other
people’s lives unfold on a screen from a darkened movie house.
Voyeurism as a theme runs throughout much of Hitchcock’s
work, of course, but Rear Window is
the one time he’s thumbing his nose at the audience for being so interested in
the lives of others. The image that plays behind the opening titles is of the
shades going upon on L.B. Jeffries’ windows onto the back courtyard, like the
curtain rising on his personal theatrical stage or movie screen. Jeffries
(James Stewart) spends the next 100 minutes or so observing his neighbors or
thinking about their actions. But what begins as casual observing becomes
obsessive watching and a paranoia about possible dirty deeds committed by Lars
Thorwald (Raymond Burr) across the way. In the end Jeffries ceases to be a
passive audience member and becomes what no member of a movie audience can be:
an actor in the real life (to him) drama playing out.
Monday, September 9, 2013
Lee Daniels' The Butler Movie Review
It’s not so much that Lee
Daniels’ The Butler is a bad movie, but that it’s completely toothless.
Here’s a movie made by a black filmmaker whose audacious breakout was Precious, a film that doesn’t dare shy
away from the hard circumstances of being black in America, specifically of
being black and desperately poor in America. The brunt of the problem with the
story is in Danny Strong’s screenplay, which drew on a Washington Post article
about a black man who worked in the White House as a butler through eight
Presidential administrations for inspiration. Still, Daniels chose the material
to direct. And I’m not insisting that a black filmmaker must be consigned to
telling black stories or that when he does, they always have to be gritty, but
it seems to me there is some moral imperative to battle and to make audiences
feel uncomfortable. Unfortunately, The
Butler is so intent on being a moneymaker for the studio that it
compromises pretty much all of its values so it can appealing to a mass
audience.
Labels:
2013,
Alan Rickman,
based-on-article,
Cuba Gooding Jr.,
Danny Strong,
David Oyelowo,
drama,
Forest Whitaker,
James Marsden,
Jane Fonda,
John Cusack,
Lee Daniels,
Lenny Kravitz,
Liev Schreiber,
Oprah Winfrey,
review,
Robin Williams,
Terrence Howard,
Vanessa Redgrave
Friday, September 6, 2013
Closed Circuit Movie Review
Closed Circuit
is about as grim and pessimistic a view of governments and spy agencies as you’ll
get at the movies, but don’t be fooled by the adverts that tout its having the
same producers as Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy. That was a smart, taut, realistic, and pleasurable spy thriller. This
is a derivative of every other spy thriller with the exception of an ending
that doesn’t have us cheering star Eric Bana as the hero and champion of truth
and righteousness.
Monday, September 2, 2013
Short Cut Movie Review: Admission
A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.
Paul Weitz was very wise not to allow himself to get
pigeonholed into making more movies like his debut feature, American Pie, which he co-directed with
his brother. Audiences were lucky that American
Pie wound up in the hands of directors who were sensitive to character
issues. That film was notable for being outrageously hilarious while not losing
sight of the fact that the audience still needs to connect with the characters
on the screen. Weitz has continued to bring that human touch to all of the
films he directs, especially as he has moved away from outright comedy to stretch
himself with dramatic films.
Admission is
his latest, released earlier this year and now available on home video. Like About a Boy (probably the best film he’s
made), it is a drama, but with plenty of comedy born of the absurdities of
everyday life. It is funny because its stars, Paul Rudd and Tina Fey, can’t be
anything but hilarious in their delivery. Fey is a Princeton admissions officer
and Rudd is the founder and director of an alternative school. He’s identified
one of his graduating seniors as an exceptionally bright student who has
nevertheless failed to excel academically. He thinks the kid deserves a chance
to attend Princeton. Oh, and he believes Fey is the boy’s biological mother who
gave him up for adoption back in college.
Karen Croner’s screenplay, based on the novel by Jean
Hanff Korelitz, is part family comedy and part romantic comedy. But this isn’t
your average rom-com with pratfalls and cheap plot points recycled over and
over for the last 75 years. It mostly feels natural and honest. The film is
greatly aided by some fantastic supporting cast members including Lily Tomlin
as Fey’s hippie feminist mother; Michael Sheen as her feckless boyfriend; and Wallace
Shawn as the Dean of Admissions.
25 Years Ago This Month: September 1988
Of course you can see in the September releases that the big summer blockbusters have finished and the studios are trotting out the stuff they think will contend for awards (at least the first of them anyway). So that's how you end up with...
Michael Apted's adaptation of Dian Fossey's story, Gorillas in the Mist, starring Sigourney Weaver as the doomed zoologist murdered in her cabin in the mountains of Rwanda.
Richard Dreyfuss starred alongside Raul Julia and Sonia Braga in Moon Over Parador, a comedy about an actor hired to play the part of a dictator of fictional Latin American country Parador after the death of the actual dictator. Obviously made to resemble Augusto Pinochet, he ended up looking like a cross between the Chilean dictator and Gaddafi.
Michael Apted's adaptation of Dian Fossey's story, Gorillas in the Mist, starring Sigourney Weaver as the doomed zoologist murdered in her cabin in the mountains of Rwanda.
Richard Dreyfuss starred alongside Raul Julia and Sonia Braga in Moon Over Parador, a comedy about an actor hired to play the part of a dictator of fictional Latin American country Parador after the death of the actual dictator. Obviously made to resemble Augusto Pinochet, he ended up looking like a cross between the Chilean dictator and Gaddafi.
25 Years Ago This Month: Eight Men Out Movie Review
John Sayles’ Eight
Men Out, the story of the 1919 Chicago “Black Sox” scandal, is, on the one
hand, an odd outlier compared to the rest of his work, and on the other,
somewhat right in line with his plight of the working man sensibility. I’ve
always been a great admirer of Sayles’ films. I especially enjoy the fact that
he can make films illustrating the challenges of capitalism for laborers
without being preachy or overtly socialist. He’s the more toned down American
version of Ken Loach. In that respect, Eight
Men Out fits right in because his version of the story, which is based on
the book by Eliot Asinof, focuses more on the accused players as put-upon
contracted laborers in thrall to a greedy owner who exploits their talents for
financial gain. But amid his full body of work as writer and director it stands
out as one of only two films he adapted from source material. So while he’s
chosen to focus on the aspects that do appeal to him as a storyteller, the crux
of the film is that it’s a historical sports movie, standing very much apart
from his other work.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
How'd I Do? 93rd Academy Awards Nominations Edition
I got 36 out of 43 in the top eight categories. That's 83.7%. Getting 19/20 in the acting categories made up for the fact that I went on...
-
This film will open commercially in the United States on 22 April 2011. Immediately after being born, an infant child is tattooed ...
-
As I rewatched Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down for the first time I more than a decade, two other war Berchtesgaden more than a year late...
-
There are those moments when going to see a new movie in the cinema can allow you to be a witness to a sea change in filmmaking. When The...