Donewaiting.com: Film
May 8, 2008 – 5:47 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
If there’s a problem with the Wachowskis’ kinda sorta live-action adaptation Speed Racer, it’s one of address—is this a movie for kids, or for grown-ups who grew up watching the early anime import in its late-sixties heyday (and/or its brief late nineties revival)?
It’s rated PG, and follows the basic structure of the cartoons perfectly (goofy melodrama and racing action for older kids, silly comedy relief involving Spritle and Chim Chim for younger kids).
But it’s also about two hours and fifteen minutes long, kind of heavy on the swearing and arty as all hell.
Will the same kids who enjoy a chimpanzee in osh koshes and think Emile Hirsch and Christina Ricci mashing their perfect lips together is gross appreciate scenes of wicked tycoons talking about manipulating the stockmarket while profiles of their faces float across the screen, or the 2001: A Space Odyssey-like moment where the hero goes so fast he, like, transcends visual information?
I don’t know. This is a film that’s easy to see audiences both loving and hating, depending on the individual sitting in the seats, and their own ages, experiences and preferences. (more…)
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May 2, 2008 – 6:26 am | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
As subjects for superhero summer movies go, Marvel Comic’s Iron Man seems made-to-order. He may lack the deep multimedia adaptation history of a Batman or Superman, and the sprawling cast of a Spider-Man or X-Men, but he’s essentially a giant toy that causes explosions.
So it’s easy to see what Hollywood sees in the character, but, somewhat surprisingly, it’s hard to resist the film that director Jon Favreau and his four-man screen-writing team have built around it. Iron Man stands atop the increasingly large heap of superhero movies; in fact, it may be the current king of that particular hill. (more…)
Posted in Film | 6 Comments »
April 18, 2008 – 12:07 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
Well it’s about time.
There was a moment when the late-90’s Hong Kong invasion looked like it was going to be a boon for American cinema, but when some of the greatest stars and most promising directors of the far east finally arrived and actually started working in Hollywood, they immediately started cranking out inferior works.
Jackie Chan managed to become a household name, but he managed to do so mostly through a string of buddy action comedies pairing him Western co-stars (or, as I like to think of them, minders) that delivered diminishing returns.
Jet Li tried to go a more bad-ass route, but the results were simply bad, and he ended up the taciturn villain or sexless, speechless hero in movies with blaring hip hop soundtracks.
It really shouldn’t have taken a decade for someone to figure out that instead of diluting Hong Kong heroes’skills and star power with something homegrown, they should maybe appear in the same movies together.
Which brings us to The Forbidden Kingdom, the first time Chan and Li have shared the screen and, more importantly for kung fu fans, fought each other. (more…)
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February 19, 2008 – 11:08 am | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
MP3: Put Some Sugar on It by Half Japanese, from the soundtrack
BUY DVD: Amazon.com
Documentary Kurt Cobain About a Son doesn’t contain any of the elements a viewer might reasonably expect from a documentary about Cobain.
The subject is never properly introduced or mentioned by name until the end. Footage and even photos of him are likewise mostly withheld until the very end. No one close to him, nor any experts or commentators who might provide any part of his story or its context, are called upon to opine.
The story of Cobain’s band Nirvana, i.e. the reason he’s famous and the fodder for projects like this at all, is glossed over. In fact, none of their music is played throughout the film’s 96 minutes, the soundtrack consisting instead of some of Cobain’s favorite bands and influences—Young Marble Giants, Queen, Creedance Clearwater Revival, Scratch Acid, The Butthole Surfers, and others—with the closest thing to a Nirvana song being David Bowie’s “The Man That Sold the World,” which Cobain and his bandmates covered in their MTV Unplugged performance.
There may be real world reasons for these conspicuous omissions—perhaps no one would talk to director A.J. Schnack, perhaps the rights for the use of the Nirvana catalogue were off-limits—reasons I don’t know, and don’t really care about. Whatever lead Schnack to make some of the unusual creative choices he made in constructing the film, the end product suggests this approach was ultimately the best one. In fact, when the film ends with a photo or two of Cobain’s face, and a pointless post-script telling us that Cobain committed suicide just a year after the end of the interviews, it seems like a mistake to include them at all.
If nothing one would expect in a Cobain documentary is present, what is? Schnack has access to over 25 hours of audio interviews that journalist Azerrad conducted one-on-one with Cobain for his 1993 book Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana.
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February 7, 2008 – 12:23 am | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
One of the most dramatic screenings at the Cannes film festival in 2006 was the new work by Portuguese director Pedro Costa (At least, that’s what I’ve read; I wasn’t there myself).
Reportedly, more than a few critics and audience members walked out, and weren’t shy about grumbling as they did. The film, Colossal Youth (Or Juventude em Marcha, “Youth on the March,” in its original Portuguese title), apparently divided the festival judges in addition to those at the screening.
And it’s not terribly hard to see why.
The two-and-a-half hour film is set in the claustrophobic kitchens and bedrooms of an apartment complex in the Lisbon slum of Fontainhas, home to many immigrants who came to Portugal from Cape Verde in Africa. It follows Ventura, a retired worker, as he visits a series of people, repeating the story of how his wife just left him, destroyed or stole all his possessions and stabbed him. Most of these might be his children—he seems to think some of them are, and some of them call him Papa.
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January 21, 2008 – 7:24 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
When I was a little kid, I used to think it was weird that we called black and white films “black and white.” See, they weren’t really black and white, I had reasoned, and it was actually fairly rare that anything within them would ever be totally black or totally white. Rather, they were a subtle rainbow of grays, so shouldn’t we call them “gray and gray” movies?
American History X director Tony Kaye’s incendiary abortion documentary Lake of Fire, the result of an epic 18-year creation process, is shot in 35 black and white, and the nature of the term has never been more appropriate. Whatever our views on abortion, too many of us tend to see the issue in black and white—certainly most of the people Kaye captures on film do—but in actuality, it’s anything but, a point Kaye drives home with nearly volcanic force by the end of this extraordinary work.
The length of time Kaye spent making it allows us to witness the issue, the activists and the shifting frontlines firsthand over the course of decades; he covers a March For Life event in 1992 at the dawn of the Clinton administration, and also the recent South Dakota statute that returned the state’s laws to a pre-Roe v. Wade status. He’s not just summing up the recent history of the abortion conflict in America, he’s seemingly filming it live as it unfolds.
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January 10, 2008 – 5:18 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
You know someone in the film business has really made it big when his credit as a producer alone is enough to sell a movie. That’s the case with The Orphanage, which comes, as the movie poster boasts “from producer Guillermo del Toro.”
Del Toro’s only one of the seven producers credited for working on the film, which is actually written by Sergio G. Sánchez and directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, but emphasizing his involvement isn’t simply empty marketing. The look and feel of The Orphanage, or the spookier sounding El Orfanato in the original Spanish, does feel heavily informed by del Toro’s work, particularly his little-seen 2001 film The Devil’s Backbone/El Espinazo del Diablo, which similarly dealt with Spanish speaking orphans and the supernatural.
Laura (Belén Rueda) was an orphan who grew up in a spooky old beachside orphanage. As a (rather shapely) adult and young mother, she and her doctor husband (Fernando Cayo) return to the now abandoned orphanage. They’re planning to reopen it as a school for sick children, like their adopted son Simón (Roger Príncep), who is HIV positive.
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December 31, 2007 – 10:12 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
1. Atonement Ian McEwan’s challenging British World War II romantic novel becomes an equally challenging film, thanks to director Joe Wright. The film boasts one of the most haunting single scenes of the year (the British retreat at Dunkirk), and the rest of it ain’t too shabby either
2. Before the Devil Knows Your Dead Phillip Seymour Hoffman had another hell of a year, turning in excellent performances in The Savages and Charlie Wilson’s War, but the best film to contain his presence was this neo-noir crime film by Sidney Lumet, in which Hoffman and brother Ethan Hawke’s jewel heist becomes the stuff of Greek tragedy.
3. Day Night Day Night A mysterious young woman prepares to engage in a suicide bomb attack in the streets of New York City, and we watch her and her handlers’ careful, methodical, practically ritualistic preparation for the act. Director Julia Loktev removes any and all clues as to the why of the attack, leaving us with no context, only the inherent drama that comes from finding oneself immersed in a ticking time bomb of a movie. Star Luisa Williams gives a commanding, if highly unsettling, performance as the bomber, getting very few lines, but every single frame of this powerful movie.
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December 23, 2007 – 6:44 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
Director Jason Reitman’s follow-up to Thank You For Smoking bears the self-consciously hip tone and highly affected aesthetic of an emerging talent’s debut film, of the sort straddling the line between trying-too-hard to be an instant cult classic and actually being an instant cult classic.
While the 30-year-old Reitman’s got at least one incredible movie under his belt already, Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody actually is an emerging talent making her debut here, so certainly a great deal of the cuteness may be hers to take credit for/accept blame for. From the high school notebook sketch font on the credits and titles to the Wes Anderson-like reliance on soundtrack, costume and set design for storytelling purposes, nearly every frame of Juno betrays a film that could have gone horribly, horribly wrong instead of going so pleasantly, pleasantly right.
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December 23, 2007 – 6:39 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
It’s been almost a decade since writer/director Tamara Jenkins’s semi-autobiographical coming of age comedy The Slums of Beverly Hills, and yet there’s no signs of rust or dust on her latest, a semi-semi-autobiographical melancholic comedy about one of the least funny topics imaginable—putting your demented, dying parent in a nursing home and then watching them die.
In a somewhat surreal opening in the incredibly surreal Sun City, Arizona, a brightly colored paradise for the aged and elderly, we meet Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco), who is beginning to lose his mind. When his equally elderly and sick live-in girlfriend dies and her family claims her house, Lenny finds himself without a home.
Enter his two adult children, Jon and Wendy Savage (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, respectively), whom Lenny abandoned as children and apparently abused to some unspecified degree. Both have grown accustomed to having nothing to do with their father and little to do with one another, but find themselves reunited and forced to care for him, despite having plenty of growing up to do themselves.
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December 20, 2007 – 2:29 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
Ian McEwan’s novel is not an easy one to adapt to film. Sure, it’s got lots of high drama, of the sorts that usually lend themselves to the medium—World war! Tragic death! Star-crossed lovers! Hot sex! Class conflict! Rape! Delirium!—and yes, it does have an unusually high pedigree, being both a very popular and very good novel.
It’s also got a pretty idiosyncratic narrative structure which keeps a reader on his or her toes, showing the same events from different perspectives, and including a twisty shift or two which, on film, can be incredibly jarring, because the medium requires the attention of your ears and eyes to a higher degree than prose. That is, a reader is in much more control of how what they’re experiencing is perceived, while a film-viewer is at the mercy of the film itself to a greater degree when it comes to the sight and sound of things.
And man, there’s a shift in here that might knock you right out of your seat, if not the film itself for a moment.
Director Joe Wright is up to the challenge of difficult-to-succeed-at-adaptations-of-novels, of course, coming off the thoroughly charming 2005 Pride & Prejudice, the top of the heap of adaptations of that perennially popular British novel.
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December 20, 2007 – 2:12 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
It was only a matter of time before Afghan writer Khaled Hosseini’s first novel was made into a film. The Oprah-touted, book club-beloved 2004 Kite Runner benefited from excellent timing, being released so relatively soon after the fall of the Taliban, and presenting story elements that most Americans were quick to appreciate and push, like the stark evil of the Taliban, America as land of opportunity and positive role model for Afghan people, and plenty of background on the day-to-day life of the country we still know so little about.
That it has so quickly become an awards-baiting film is perhaps just one more example of Hosseini’s luck with timing. His second book was just released this year, and we could probably use a nice big reminder that Afghanistan is full of real people facing some serious shit right about now, given the increasingly bad news coming from that front of the Global War on Terror, which, since 2003, seems like it’s merely been our other war instead of, you know, a priority of any kind.
Hosseini gets a writing credit on the film, though the screenplay is the work of David Benioff, who previously adapted The 25th Hour and the Illiad (turning it into the 2004 Brad Pitt vehicle Troy), and is responsible for the so-bad-it-must-be-seen-to-be-believed 2005 psychological thriller Stay. I haven’t read The Kite Runner myself, so I’m not sure how faithful it is to the book, but it seems like he kept in the most controversial element—the rape scenes that caused trouble for the boy actors and their families back in Afghanistan. The film is structured in a rather cliched form for a movie of this type, however.
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December 13, 2007 – 3:45 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
This is the sort of film in which I feel almost reluctant to review, because even mentioning the actual plot in any detail ruins one of the more effective surprises that the it offers—when the physical conflict that star Will Smith’s character will spend the bulk of the film fighting against is first introduced, it’s only after a nice, long build-up of tense foreshadowing, and has the power to summon quite a few gasps (at least from the audience in the preview screening I attended).
On the other hand, given the time and financial investment it takes to go to the movies these days, and the way films are marketed, is it even possible to go into a big budget holiday release like this without already knowing what it’s about, and having seen most of the pivotal scenes in the trailer and TV spots?
And even if it were possible to experience such films in an information vacuum these days, I Am Legend certainly isn’t going to be one of ‘em, given its long life. It’s based on a book by Richard Matheson that’s now over half a century old, and has previously been adapted for film twice, though neither used the original title (1964’s Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price, and 1971’s Omega Man starring Charlton Heston).
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December 13, 2007 – 3:43 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
Writer/director Noah Baumbach follows 2005’s tale of warring parents The Squid and the Whale with another dysfunctional family dramedy, this one focusing on more nebulous conflicts with more players but more vague stakes.
Lacking the central metaphor and the kids’-point-of-view (as well as early ‘80s setting) of his last film, Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding has a less clear throughline and fewer laughs that aren’t of the uncomfortable variety, putting a viewer on much shakier ground here.
Every character here is crazy, and by “crazy” I mean has some kind of behavioral issues or emotional problem they’re keeping secret, like, you know, pretty much every real person you know, but none of them fess up to or communicate these problems, nor does Baumbach telegraph them. Rather, they’re simply revealed in the announcements of life decisions or unpopular opinions, in sudden bursts of crying or screaming. It’s up to the audience to diagnose them, or at least put up with them.
This certainly makes for an immersive film-going experience—you’ll likely be just as irritated with and angry at the thoroughly unlikeable characters as they are with one another—but it doesn’t exactly make for a very fun one.
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December 3, 2007 – 8:37 am | Written by Doug Elliott
For the past five years the Sublime Frequencies label has taken the global music imprint to an entirely new level, releasing obscure audio and video from all corners of the world, focusing mainly on (but certainly not limited to) the folk and pop music of Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Headed by Hisham Mayet and Alan Bishop of longtime globe-trotting collective Sun City Girls, the label’s 2007 has been its biggest year yet, unleashing two wonderful vinyl-only African guitar records, a pair of South American compilations, a pair of “ethnic minority” music compilations from Asia, a collection of Thai pop songs and another of Thai psych, two collections of folk and pop from Myanmar, and a “Jihadi Techno” album out of Syria.
Tonight Mayat begins a new venture for his label, bringing two hour-long films he directed to show at Skylab. Palace of the Winds is an “entrancing look at the culture and music of the Saharawis from the Western Sahara and Mauritania”, while Musical Brotherhoods of the Trans-Saharan Highway chronicles a variety of Moroccan street music “live and unfiltered”. Tonight’s showing is the first date on Mayet’s December film tour. Rest of the dates and trailers after the break.
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Posted in Film, Music | 1 Comment »
