Reviews
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.
Jim Carrey movie at that). In the movies, the smart money is on the historical epic, where the remote past can be mythologized beyond recognition.
Had he disappeared for a while to return with Match Point, Woody Allen would well have deserved a wholehearted embrace. But he’s been here this whole time, hanging around like an aging fighter unaware of the embarrassing figure he cut, unheeding of the calls to stay down.
If there is certainly a moral onus hovering above its identification and observation of the mechanisms of global power, it cannot be reduced to mere partisanship and self-vindication. If anything, the film is exemplary for giving us no safe place to lay our righteous heads.
Just Friends had the misfortune of ostensibly belonging to one of the more reviewer-reviled comic subgenres; lacking any sort of critical caché, its likes are usually thrown to the interns, written off in 48 states by some stooge on AP wire, or dealt “safe” pans by grandstanding writers.
I value these moves greatly because a filmed version of Jane Austen featuring an attractive cast of fresh faces and reliable codgers propping up a hot young ingénue needn’t choose to do any of them to find an audience.
Good looking, smart, and responsible, George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck performs its modest mission well.
The baseness and comprehensibility of the human is inseparable from the often inhuman exercise of power, and it is the paradoxical, profoundly incomprehensible polarity of this truth which Sokurov’s deeply strange (I say it again) films address.
Dialogue is Baumbach’s forte, and there’s an economic and tonal quality to the language of fumbling interactions.
The tale is a tease, flirting first with one trajectory and then, growing bored with the implications, quickly skipping to the next, only to discard again, continue on to another. Because of its fickle nature, the tone feels discomfitingly random: distant and loose, as easily ironic as sincere.
The grubby, shaky-cam technique used in hot-topic features bearing the documentary tag these days betrays the ignorance of their makers—these folks may have important stories to tell, but that in no way frees them to indulge in substandard filmmaking.