Category Archives: Film

In 2005 I had the surreal pleasure of meeting one of rock music’s greatest enigmas, Roky Erickson, shortly after he performed for the first time in over a decade at the annual SXSW Festival in Austin. I thought this was simply a one-time deal — the city dusting off a local legend and carting the eccentric genius to the stage to play a bit of “Two-Headed Dog” for old-time’s sake. Little did I know about the trials and tribulations Erickson went through to arrive at this point again. I knew his back-story (an acid casualty sentenced to a maximum security state mental hospital, where shock treatment further fried his former self), but had no knowledge of the germ of a life he led after becoming ward to his mother Evelyn.

You’re Gonna Miss Me, a new documentary by Keven McAllester, is a rather poetic attempt to connect those dots. From Erickson’s heady beginnings inventing psychedelic music with the 13th Floor Elevators to his recent road to recovery sponsored by his youngest brother Sumner, and all the highs and low in between, the film explores his life from within the family drama that exists in the present. Who has the best intentions for Roky?
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Small wonder that Hollywood was interested in adapting Stardust into a film. In its native, prose medium, it represented a confluence of “hot” niches to try and exploit.

While not a graphic novel per se, Stardust was first published as a series of illustrated prose books in the size and shape of graphic novels, by graphic novel publisher Vertigo/DC Comics. Its writer, Neil Gaiman, is at this point equally famous as a prose writer (Coraline, Anansi Boys, American Gods) as a comics writer (The Sandman), and he’s long contributed to film fantasy (Having co-wrote 2005’s MirrorMask and wrote the English script for 1997’s Princess Mononoke).

Later published as a book-book, Stardust has a Harry Potter-esque pedigree of being an English fantasy novel about an English youth journeying to a magic world. Thus, it’s been thoroughly vetted by two rather picky built-in audiences, and it manages to hit on two current successful trends.
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Because Jackie Chan’s agent demanded it! Nine years after the original’s surprise success as a late summer release, and six years after the vastly improved sequel, Chan re-teams with fluent English sidekick Chris Tucker and director Brett Ratner for Rush Hour 3, one of the more uncalled for sequels of all time.

The pointlessness of the endeavor is perhaps most notable in the awkward attempts to evoke nostalgia for the previous films, with the pair reciting lines and breaking into dance sequences that result in a sense of vague familiarity rather than a burst of recognition (No crickets could be heard during the scenes at the preview screening I attended; I could only assume that it was because the crickets, like the otherwise generous audience, weren’t sure what they were looking at during these scenes and thus weren’t sure how to respond).
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If I were trying very hard to get a blurb from my review quoted in future advertisements for the film, I might say that Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s Sunshine does for science-fiction what their 28 Days Later did for the zombie movie. Or that it’s probably the best science-fiction movie in, I don’t know, forever. In both cases I’d be exaggerating, of course (I haven’t actually seen every single science-fiction movie ever made), but honestly, not by all that much.

As they Boyle and Garland did with 28 Days Later, the team takes a well-worn, dead end, nigh self-cannibalizing genre and elevate it to the level of elegant, poetic art film, seemingly reinventing it in the process. The bar for good sci-fi is exceedingly low, of course, since films that assign themselves to this genre generally don’t have much in the way of science in them, instead focusing on aliens, robots, spaceships and, occasionally, Vin Diesel. And those with plots similar to Sunshine‘s, movies where a group of scientists and explorers must embark on a plan so crazy it just might work to save the world like Armageddon or The Core, are generally soul-destroyingly bad.
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For two guys who pulled off what has to be one of the biggest pranks in Prague history, Czech film students Vit Klusak and Filim Remunda don’t seem like particularly funny or fun-loving people in their documentary Czech Dream, which chronicles their elaborate punking of their own people a few years back.

In a brief intro, the pair dryly recite a sort of thesis statement, as if they were reading from cue cards. Later, at a press conference given after the big reveal, they seem surprisingly earnest about the points they were seeking to make in the process of making a lot of everyday people look like jackasses.

Which isn’t to say the stunt itself isn’t hilarious, or that the film built around it isn’t as fascinating as it is funny, just that its creators, despite their puckishness, are hardly playing clowns here.
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It almost seems a shame to review Julia Loktev’s Day Night Day Night at all, since even the most cursory mention of the basic plot spoils something that the film withholds till almost the halfway point, draining away potential mystery and suspense, to replace it with tension.

It’s a critic’s conundrum particular to this particular movie, on account of the fact that the whole movie essentially consists simply of that basic plot, and the steps leading up to it.

But what are you going to do? No one sees movies without any idea of what they’re going to see (The Wexner Center’s own Secret Cinema program aside), and it’s not like you’ve much chance of finding yourself in the Wex’s theater without any idea of what you’re there to see anyway.
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I’m Not There features David Cross as Allen Ginsberg and Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan. If your mind isn’t already short circuiting, watch this clip:

[credz]

Satoshi Kon is one of a tiny handful of anime directors whose every new work is immediately accepted and embraced by Western audiences–enough so that we get to see them on the big screen, anyway. After 1998’s Perfect Blue wowed festival audiences, it and follow-ups Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfaters have all received wide-ish release.

Now comes Paprika, which previously showed at the Deep Focus film fest in Columbus, and now finally returns for a regular engagement. Like Kon’s first two movies, it’s an exploration of the perception of reality through various media and states of awareness, but Paprika has a sense of fun about it that is more in line with Tokyo Godfathers. It’s definitely his sunniest and most upbeat film to date, and blast from start to finish.

It’s also his best film. While his previous work seemed to be mostly anime-for-anime’s sake (That is, they could have just as easily been told in live action), Paprkia takes advantage of that which is unique to animation (the two-dimensional design not bound by realism, the way things move from frame to frame) and exploits it as both part of the story and part of the way that story is being told.
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Private Fears in Public Places, the international title for French film Coeurs, is based on a play, and it certainly feels like it.

Set in Paris during a very snowy winter, there’s precious little work done to immerse the audience in the setting, leading to a somewhat artificial, occasionally even claustrophobic feel. There’s a swooping intro to the city, a few overhead shots of characters walking through apartments, and falling snow laid over scene changes, but otherwise, you could just as easily be watching a play as a film.

There are six characters with significantly less than six degrees of separation between them. There’s Nicole (Laura Morante), who is looking for a three-room flat for her and her unemployed, drunken fiancée Dan (Lambert “The Merovingian” Wilson) to move into.
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