Category Archives: Film

Film Review: I’m Keith Hernandez

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Each Autumn, as the MLB season season enters its stretch run towards the World Series, baseball fans and cable buffs alike are treated to an endless stream of old playoff reruns and classic baseball films. This year, budding filmmaker Rob Perri attempts to enter that singular forum with a bang as he unleashes I’m Keith Hernandez, an 18-minute masterpiece that cleverly mixes archival television footage (and a bit of racy film history) featuring the greatest defensive first-baseman ever, Keith Hernandez.

Think Heavy Metal Parking Lot meets TV Carnage at Shea Stadium, or one of those Sports Illustrated give-away videos mixed with channel 99. Complete with vintage 80’s editing techniques, a straight-faced, professional voice-over and a soundtrack of the times, I’m Keith Hernandez has the look and feel of an uplifting This Week In Baseball special from 1989. Perri uses this familiar format to paint a sensational, partly fictional account of Hernandez’ days as a drug-fueled, lady-slaying hit machine with the Cardinals and Mets. And then there’s the mustache.

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Film Review: Zoo

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In 2005, a man in Washington state died from internal bleeding due to injuries he sustained from having sex with a horse. You probably remember reading about it, as it’s the only news story you’ve encountered in the last few years in which a man was fucked to death by a horse.

Robinson Devor has made a documentary about the incident. Or, more accurately, he’s made a documentary about the deeper difficult, uncomfortable and, ultimately, important questions the incident inadvertently raised.

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Film Review: Shoot ‘Em Up

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Not since Snakes on a Plane has their been a movie title as literally descriptive as Shoot ‘Em Up, which is, in fact, a shoot ‘em up (Perhaps not coincidentally, the films share prodcuer Jeff Katz).

But it’s not just any shoot ’em up; this flick takes movies about men with guns shooting other men with guns to the next level, if not the next level beyond that level. It’s a rare minute of this film that goes by in which five to ten people don’t get violently shot to death. If you took all of the gun battles from all of John Woo’s old Hong Kong work, an obvious inspiration (particularly Woo’s Hard Boiled), subtracted all of the slo-mo bird flights and replaced those with even more gun battles, then you’d be pretty close to the contents of Shoot ‘Em Up.

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Film Review: 3:10 To Yuma

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Named for a particular train its characters are trying to catch, 3:10 To Yuma is a much more interesting and exciting film than its title might suggest. That’s because of who it is that is going to be riding the train, and why.

We can blame Elmore Leonard, who wrote the short story that the film’s based on, for that title. The setting is the Old West, the train is headed for a federal prison, and its passenger doesn’t want to be on it, but is given little choice in the matter. Legendary outlaw, stagecoach robber and killer Ben Wade, leader of a small army of followers, got uncharacteristically sloppy, and was captured. In order to get him out of town before his gang find out what happened and raze the place to free him, the lawmen must get Wade to the train and quickly and quietly as possible.

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Film Review: No End In Sight

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There are two essential components to the creation of a great documentary—finding the perfect subject, and then successfully communicating the inherent drama of that perfect subject to viewers.

With No End In Sight, first-time director Charles Ferguson has an important subject, perhaps the single most important subject of them all at the moment—America’s war with and continuing quixotic occupation of Iraq. For all its importance though, it’s hardly a novel topic, or anything you haven’t (hopefully) heard a thousand times before: The United States completely fucked up in Iraq, and the long list of mistakes made created far more problems for the U.S. and the Iraqi people than they solved, and both nations will continue to pay for those mistakes for as long as anyone can see.

While many of the complaints will be familiar, gathering them all together like this has a transformative effect on them; no longer are they isolated, but seem to lead one to another like dominoes. In hindsight, you can watch the administration turning victory into defeat, wining Iraq and the goodwill of the people, only to destroy the country’s infrastructure, and creating out of thin air an insurgency that we must then spend the next four years fighting.

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Film Review: Ten Canoes

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An airborne camera tracks along a pristine river lined with verdant trees, while a narrator begins, “Once upon a time,” and then laughs at his private joke. This isn’t going to be one of those kinds of stories, he tells us.

By “those kind” I suppose he means Western fairy tales, and while the story he tells doesn’t have a prince or princess or wicked witch, and while it lacks the touch of the Brothers Grimm or the stink of Disney, it’s not far off from a fairy tale either.

It is, after all, a story handed down from generation to generation, it just comes from a very different story-telling tradition than those that begin with the words “Once upon a time” and end with “and they all lived happily ever after.”

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Wednesdays with Lech Majewski at the Wex

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The Wexner Center kicks off a three-film retrospective of Polish-born filmmaker Lech Majewski’s works today with his 2004 The Garden of Earthly Delights.

It’s a good place to start, given the way it makes vivid use of the highly hyphenated Majewski’s command of multiple media, and the way one can inform the other. Probably best known for his contributions to 1996’s Basquiat, which he wrote and co-produced, Majewski is himself a painter, a poet, a novelist and composer.

Adapted from his own novel, Majewski’s Garden of Earthly Delights follows Claudine Spiteri’s terminally ill art historian and her odd and highly accommodating boyfriend Chris Nightingale as they move from England to Venice and embark on a peculiar and highly personal quest. The pair are both intelligent, attractive and a little over-angsty doctorate students who have found each other at the turn of the millennium.

He’s devoting himself to ship-building, applying art theories like that of the golden ratio to hull design, while she’s made a life’s study of the titular Heironymous Bosch painting. When it becomes clear she doesn’t have long to live, she has Chris film her interpretations of the painting, complete with meticulously reenacted details from it, which the pair perform themselves. It turns out that Chris is uniquely, if improbably, suited to the task, as he films absolutely everything. Even when she tells him she’s dying and he strokes her face to comfort her, he keeps his other hand on his handheld camera, focused on her face.
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Film Review: Balls of Fury

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Built almost entirely from ideas and jokes taken from other, similar recent comedies, even homaging and parodying the same source material as those films, the very best way to review Balls of Fury would probably be as some sort of elaborate math equation, with a long string of other titles connected by plus signs, minus originality, equals Balls of Fury.

As lazy and familiar as it all is, if there’s one genre that can get a way with lazy and familiar, it’s this sort of dumb comedy. Writer/director Ben Garant and writer/co-star Thomas Lennon, both of Reno 911! and The State fame (which explains all the cameos from those shows’ stars), are at least smart enough to pack the cast with gifted players and, more importantly, likeable presences.

We open during the 1988 Olympics, where pre-teen U.S. athlete Randy Daytona was embarrassingly defeated at ping pong by East German rival played by Lennon (leading to a neat Rocky IV-style U.S. vs. Communists scene). His ping pong career already over, he’s forced into semi-obscurity (like Will Ferrell and Jon Heder in Blades of Glory, or Ferrell in Talladega Nights).

Nineteen years later, he’s tubby and disheveled, and now played by Tony award-winning stage actor Dan Fogler. He’s working in a stage show at Reno, Nevada (Garant and Lennon must love the hell out of that place), when he’s approached by FBI agent George Lopez, who wants to use Randy to infiltrate a Triad archfiend Feng’s legendary ping pong tournament, which will gather the world’s greatest in one location for matches to the death (Like in Enter the Dragon, and the 4,000 movies inspired by it).

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Film Review: The Boss of it All

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This film is so perfect a comedy that the fact of its existence alone is something of a joke. It’s an office comedy written and directed by Lars von Trier, the Danish filmmaker responsible for some of the most soul-crushingly depressing films ever made (Dancer in the Dark, Dogville) and partially responsible for the Dogme 95 aesthetic movement.

Von Trier himself is keenly aware of the oddity of a director like himself making a movie like this, one that isn’t far removed from the British version of The Office in terms of its sense of awkward humor, production value and documentary-like verisimilitude.

The trailer tells von Trier’s filmography like a joke, building up to the revelation of this film’s genre as a punchline, and the film opens and is occasionally interrupted by narration from von Trier himself, talking about the audience’s expectations in a comedy.
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Trailer for Bob Dylan Film “I’m Not There”

Awhile ago we posted a clip of the weird as hell upcoming Bob Dylan film. Now we’ve got the trailer: