Reviews
There’s no sober realist tract squeezed between the film’s ten show-stopping numbers set in “New York City” aka Culver City, CA, but It’s Always Fair Weather is deprecatingly funny and downbeat, and has a pensive melancholia which, if not entirely adult, is on the way there.
What evidence exists of artistry comes through in its atmosphere. The film is shot, more-or-less throughout, with a lens that leaves the image foggy on all four sides, with only an oval in the middle of the frame in crisp focus.
Alan Moore may be greatest victim of Hollywood’s comic book adaptation craze.
Taking as her focus a teenage girl’s sexuality and the unconsciously self-destructive tendencies concomitant during that early period of experimentation, Shortland—in a visually delirious style to match—explores a topic often untouched in film.
Accolades have been heaped on Park Chan-wook so fast and furious from Western film critics (including this one) that maybe it’s time to take a step back and provide room for further evaluation.
“Almost everything Jane Austen wrote, looked at from today’s perspective, is absurd,” says young Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), paraphrasing the literary critic Lionel Trilling with the blithe book-closed certainty of an amateur intellectual.
The title implies hairy-campy horror-fun and the film delivers it—nothing misleading about that. It’d take a right stickler to quibble over the fact that at no point in the movie do multiple werewolves ride any wheeled vehicle, and that when one of the gang does his ride lasts under a minute.
Innocent and unfathomably wronged, the suffering child is society’s favorite martyr, providing a cathexis for pity even more satisfying than the equally needy outpourings of concern for sensationally victimized adults.
The saying goes that everyone has at least one story worth telling. Frankly, that’s bullshit. Some stories—and some people’s lives, for that matter—are not worth unleashing on the rest of us.
Where, exactly, to slot everybody’s (ok, not everybody’s) favorite Austrian provocateur in the movies-as-politics continuum?
What to say in the face of Terrence Malick’s The New World? What to say indeed in the face of a film that has left me at turns wobbly-kneed and energetic, teary-eyed and grinning, melancholy, and ecstatic?
It’s a movie about Louis, an aged soldier of fortune (Michel Subor, resplendently craggy) whose body appears to be breaking down. He brokers himself an under-the-table heart transplant and then tries, at great expense, to reconnect with his estranged son, who may or may not be in Tahiti.
Scrambling inelegantly for the moral high ground, a number of fainthearted critics are using the recent horror doubleheader of Wolf Creek and Hostel to persuade their readers they still have souls, if not stomachs.
Like a lady-who-lunches toting her Takashi Murakami-designed Louis Vuitton bag, Marshall clearly believes that his appropriation of Japanese culture lends Memoirs of a Geisha a veneer of edgy authenticity where clearly none exists.