Reviews
Too many Hollywood movies “loosely adapted” from Philip K. Dick stories (whether credited or not; Truman writer Andrew Niccol’s shameless swiping of Time Out of Joint comes to mind) water down the wigged-out, schizo futurist’s most radical ideas.
Kim Jee-woon is stuck. The emerging Korean auteur may have transcended the boundaries of his national cinema (his next film is supposedly an English-language thriller for Lions Gate), but for all the implacable velocity of his films, Kim remains stilted by his obsession with the peripheries of genre.
What should be mentioned first is the quiet. But when discussing Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives many will undoubtedly initially gravitate towards the monkey ghosts, the talking catfish, the materializing spirits.
Anton Chekhov once wrote, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” To this, the makers of Drive Angry would hasten to add that one must not have a character vow to drink a beer out of the skull of his vanquished enemy if he’s not actually going to do it.
Orphan was ugly but it also paid off all of its set-ups with gusto. Unknown seems to have been made under stricter supervision, and so isn’t comparably batshit; though, a few of the moments you cite are the ones where the director's sense of humor breaks through—quite literally in the apartment dust-up.
The first time a character utters the word “Baltimore” in Matthew Porterfield’s Putty Hill, it is as an explanation, or rather an excuse, for why a 24-year-old named Cory died of a heroin overdose.
Mechanically, Unknown, the new picture from Jaume Collet-Serra, isn’t all that different than midforties Hollywood cloak-and-dagger thrillers or later Cold War espionage actioners.
The movement that doesn’t want to be known as “mumblecore” has been maligned for its focus on privileged, white twentysomethings (though to this charge, I’d argue that most American films focus on privileged, white something-or-others).
Perhaps this emotionally piecemeal approach is meant to emphasize Mexico City as a place divided up, factionalized, of discrete interests constantly at odds with each other.
Poetry, a remarkable study of age, class, loneliness, responsibility, art, and the illusory nature of being, is not a film about the disease, nor, mercifully, is it a film that uses the disease as a device or even metaphor.
In Cedar Rapids, Miguel Arteta proves that he’s capable of finding humanity and subtext where other filmmakers see caricature and cliché.
Even more than Pedro Almodóvar, Todd Haynes, and other former enfants terribles of the queer filmmaking world, Gregg Araki seems caught in the double bind of maintaining outré street cred while simultaneously showcasing a more “mature” vision.
Before Im Sang-soo’s version premiered at Cannes last year, The Housemaid had already been remade four times by Kim himself, each version further twisting an already deformed tale of a ferocious femme fatale who enters a middle-class home and tears apart its nuclear family.
