Reviews
How better to make a movie on love, trust, and desire than by example? Yet Tropical Malady’s plunge into the jungle asks us to set aside our own narrative desire for the romance between the two young men to work out on its slow but sure naturalistic path.
Ultimately, Nolan’s film is a triumph of casting: fan-types have been clamoring for Christian Bale since American Psycho. Because really, what is Patrick Bateman if not the slightly crazier, NC-17 version of Batman: a fantastically endowed sociopath-playboy in thrall to his deep-seated obsessions?
The Star Wars brand name fills the screen then recedes into the cosmos, trailed by that famous crawl of backstory, while John Williams’s familiar score oversees the proceedings with the pomp of a graduation recessional.
Considering that politics and aesthetics are inseparable, it’s curious how difficult it can be to not read the one as an inherent reduction of the other rather than a potential expansion.
No one does pompous like Ridley Scott. Where a film of average self-importance might look down its nose at an audience from time to time, a Ridley Scott vehicle does so while conducting massed woodwinds and coordinating a rain of individually picked rose petals from the heavens.
Brothers is deserving of accolades for rethinking the genre but is, sadly, unlikely to garner anywhere near the same amount of fawning adulation as that which greets high-profile macho counterparts like Saving Private Ryan.
Would it be heretical to suggest that the early films of Yasujiro Ozu are richer than his canonical work? This isn’t to impugn the later films, of course: the mature Ozu is one of the unquestioned glories of the cinema.
What’s left is just lowlife burlesque aimed squarely at folks who lap up real-life tough-guy ‘toons like Bukowski and bird-flicking, posterized Johnny Cash, a straight whiskey, no chaser hard-living fantasy for big kids who think 50 Cent’s too black.
Writer-director Rebecca Miller’s The Ballad of Jack and Rose, is so gorgeously photographed, so thoughtfully performed, and so relentlessly sincere, you can almost overlook how truly awful it is.
To the growing cadre who’ve immersed themselves in the current landscape of lesser-known Japanese cinema, Kurosawa’s films remain as relevant and as highly anticipated as those of his internationally-praised contemporaries Takashi Miike and Takeshi Kitano.
James Munro’s Street Trash is a careening, runaway dump truck of gore, raunch, racial slurs, and slapstick whose narrative hinges on a liquor store owner’s scheme to drive away pesky homeless patrons by selling them a discounted case of fetid malt liquor.