Reviews
It may seem cynical to interpret a film’s attempt at emotional involvement and narrative intensity—for an astonishingly long amount of screen time without the benefit of action scenes—as good business sense, but the setpiece mentality of the Bond series has always encouraged a compartmentalized appraisal of its virtues.
Like Godard, Rivette works like an analytical reverse engineer, picking apart the cinema and leaving its part strewn about.
It’s a survey of the current culture: big, sprawling, and endlessly frightening, told via the minutiae of everyday life, as it’s lived in one Nowheresville Colorado town.
The last time, you may recall, that Paul Weitz made a film whose title was prefixed with “American”—American Pie—the patriotic staple in question got famously fucked. So it’s a fair question: Does his newest offering similarly stick it to that still-potent idea of the American Dream?
Certainly one can’t recognize the film’s central movie-in-the-movie, a ridiculous indie melodrama called “Home for Purim,” as reflecting current Hollywood trends, yet the egos, desperations, and compromises that the crew goes through in For Your Consideration are instantly recognizable.
The late-October appearance of Running with Scissors on screens around the country may well be the most ominous and crass declaration that cinematic Fall ’06 has begun.
I made a solemn vow five minutes into watching Koko: A Talking Gorilla for the first time, which went something like: “Any time I am having a bad day or start to feel blue in the slightest, I will pop on this DVD to help me remember that life is a curious and wonderful gift.”
Kerrigan’s work is unrepentantly unpleasant, a formal and thematic assault on institutional depictions of mental illness.
Provocation, in case you hadn’t noticed, is the comedic instrument of the moment.
There’s something personal and intimate about Eastwood opening the film this way that stands in stark contrast to the crass awards pandering we’ve come to expect from most American filmmakers at this time of year.
The director cut his teeth as a still photographer, and his HD Cam-shot Climates feels appealingly, obsessively handmade; passages in our protagonist's dim hotel room seem as diaristic as Stephen Shore’s seventies road-trip photos.
A variety of sources, all reliable, informed me that Insiang is Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka’s masterpiece. Yet I emerged from the NYFF press screening completely baffled by this consensus.
In addition to displaying a rather glib, arch comic sense, maladroit filmmaking that latches store-bought arty obliqueness to lastnightsparty.com vacuity, and a string of clumsy historical parallels (celebrity=royalty or something), Coppola’s film is solipsistic, shrilly melodramatic, and stunningly barren of human observation.
Perhaps in an effort to be taken more seriously, Goldthwait tries to mix keen observational comedy with heartbreaking family melodrama, which results in a somewhat unholy alchemy.