August 27, 2008
Don Cheadle, heart sewn to his sleeve, is badly miscast in this war-on-terror thriller -- not for a moment did I believe that his gentle, soulful character had the stuff to function as a serial mass murderer, let alone gain the confidence of other cold-blooded killers. Nonetheless, this film is populated by radical jihadists who trust this American expatriate with the execution of the most elaborate paranoid fantasist's orange-alert wet dream of a terror attack on U.S. soil. Cheadle is a cool enough character that this wouldn't necessarily be a deal-breaker, but the transparency of his intentions renders the film's coy guessing games about his allegiance more or less redundant. Writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff's previous big-ticket screen credit is the screenplay for The Day After Tomorrow, and though his model for Traitor is obviously something like Syriana crossed with The Departed, what he's come up with here is about as subtle as a Roland Emmerich film. His script strives to be even-handed in its representation of terrorists, who are depicted as thoughtful and well-spoken enough that a disaffected, revenge-minded American could fall in with them, but the unremittingly pointed dialogue betrays the characters' two-dimensionality. (They're most credible when they're not talking.) Guy Pearce is quite good as the agent who suspects that Cheadle might not be the international sociopath the rest of the FBI has him pegged as, but the film isn't as clever as it needs to be to drive the cat-and-mouse storyline. By the time Cheadle's character makes the biggest chump move in the book -- visiting his ex-girlfriend in Chicago even though any terror plotter worth his C4 would know she's under surveillance -- Traitor has proven itself to be about as realistic as any given episode of 24, but not half as much fun. C
August 25, 2008
This loosely autobiographical quasi-coming-of-age tale from Garth Jennings, half of music-video production team Hammer & Tongs and the director of the unwieldy but fitfully amusing Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy feature, is crammed tight with every kid-pic cliché you can imagine. It starts with the unlikely friendship of imaginative loner Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) and village tough Lee Carter (Will Poulter), then quickly becomes one of those movies about the making of a bad movie -- the titular "Son of Rambow," which is inspired by a bootleg videotape of First Blood shot by Lee at the local cinema. While Will has been raised in a straight-laced religious sect that forbids TV and movies, Lee is almost his polar opposite - a rambunctious (though soft-hearted) bully given to petty larceny who nonetheless wields a primitive VHS camcorder in the hope of winning a filmmaking contest by leveraging the limited materials available to him.
Continue reading Son of Rambow (Garth Jennings, 2008).
August 21, 2008
Proving that there's more to action filmmaking than vigor and imagination, The Descent writer/director Neil Marshall wrangles innumerable genre mash-ups -- Escape From New York vs. 28 Days Later, Excalibur vs. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and, most spectacularly, Moulin Rouge Beyond Thunderdome -- and rides herd over a stable of seriocomic exploitation-film elements (including one shot where a cute bunny rabbit is blown to bloody smithereens and an early scene in which a nude bather responds to a home invasion by whipping out the shotgun stashed behind the tub) without once breaking into a full gallop. Rhona Mitra does her best to cross Kurt Russell and Milla Jovovich as tough-chick hero Eden Sinclair, but she's a little too dour and unflappable for her own good. When a long-dormant virus breaks out in London, Sinclair heads for quarantined Scotland, ravaged by plague and walled off from the rest of the U.K for 35 years. Craven government officials hope the notorious mad-scientist type holed up somewhere inside (Malcolm McDowell) has developed a cure. One of the villains (Craig Conway) looks like Keith Flint from The Prodigy, and the other is, well, Malcolm McDowell, and they're fine as far as they go, but the supporting characters are as thinly conceived as the protagonist. I was really rooting for this to take off during the big action set piece, scored with "Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but while you can always see what Marshall is going for, the material on screen never plays with the energy and audacity that you know he intended. Alas,the general feeling of been-there-done-that is overwhelming. C+
August 18, 2008
W., un film de Oliver Stone
If this trailer (for Oliver Stone's W.) were just a joke, it would be a great joke. We'll see what happens with the movie.
Music Video: Stars/"Bitches in Tokyo"
"This is what you're worried about: something called The New York Dolls."
Music Video: Vampire Weekend/"Oxford Comma"
It's probably too soon for the Wes Anderson homage videos, but whatever.
Criterion Collection, High-Definition Division
Speaking of Wes Anderson, The Criterion Collection has just announced details on its November (delayed from October) opening salvo of Blu-ray Disc releases, and it's a doozy. Bottle Rocket. Chungking Express. (Swoon.) The Third Man. The Man Who Fell to Earth. And The Last Emperor. Five solid selections from five great directors -- and two films (the one with Faye Wong and the one with Orson Welles) that I absolutely adore. I am so there.
If this trailer (for Oliver Stone's W.) were just a joke, it would be a great joke. We'll see what happens with the movie.
Music Video: Stars/"Bitches in Tokyo"
"This is what you're worried about: something called The New York Dolls."
Music Video: Vampire Weekend/"Oxford Comma"
It's probably too soon for the Wes Anderson homage videos, but whatever.
Criterion Collection, High-Definition Division
Speaking of Wes Anderson, The Criterion Collection has just announced details on its November (delayed from October) opening salvo of Blu-ray Disc releases, and it's a doozy. Bottle Rocket. Chungking Express. (Swoon.) The Third Man. The Man Who Fell to Earth. And The Last Emperor. Five solid selections from five great directors -- and two films (the one with Faye Wong and the one with Orson Welles) that I absolutely adore. I am so there.
August 14, 2008
A little more than halfway through Vicky Cristina Barcelona, three of the film's characters -- two women, one man -- are picnicking. As in much of the film, the photography has the rich golden hue of a languid summer day. The women are dressed in light flimsy material that seems like it might be whipped away if the wind turns. The images communicate in a nearly tactile mode; Javier Aguirresrobe's cinematography evokes the warming sensation of sunlight, and the actresses' bodies make you think of the feeling of a hot breeze brushing softly against skin. You can almost smell the grass. It's a lovely scene in an especially playful film crafted by a masterful filmmaker -- an old man's movie that invests in the spirit of reckless youth.
Continue reading Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008).
August 11, 2008
My review of Felon on Blu-ray Disc is online at filmfreakcentral.net:
If Jeffrey Lebowski had made a few wrong turns in life--if, let's say, he had brutally murdered some very bad men, as well as their families--he may have turned out not entirely unlike John Smith, the hulkingly mellow convict played by a moustachioed, goateed Val Kilmer in Felon. Judging from the wide berth the rest of the inmates give him, Smith is known as the silent-but-deadly type. Kilmer plays him from behind a whole bunch of prison tattoos with a steely glare, but also with a kind of openness that doesn't immediately compute. Although he's tagged as a sociopath, he's really just the opposite. He believes in justice, and he longs for the death sentence he feels his crimes deserve.
August 8, 2008
I'm not sure, honestly, what to make of Nanette Burstein's documentary American Teen, in which she heads out to Warsaw, Indiana, to chronicle a year in the life of seniors at a local high school, which is predominantly white, middle class, and apparently as bland as the day is long. I could complain about Burstein's decision to concentrate on easy stereotypes, but in context the film's title actually announces its homogenous intentions. Burstein's not particularly interested in class, politics, or culture. What she does instead is isolate certain types - the basketball player, the videogame nerd, the popular girl, the artsy outsider -- and then try to show the layers of experience that shape their behavior in unexpected ways.
Continue reading American Teen (2008).
August 1, 2008
My review of Untraceable on Blu-ray Disc is online at filmfreakcentral.net:
The makers of Untraceable never acknowledge their film's own ranking on the torture-as-entertainment scale. Instead, they're hell-bent on the idea that the online masses, guilty of exercising poor taste, are somehow complicit in the worst kinds of crimes that might be committed somewhere on the Internet by some sicko craving an audience. The hectoring is so relentless that Untraceable obviously means to send that message to its own audience--the sort of sick fucks who would pay to see this movie in the first place. (For whatever reason, moralizing filmmakers from Michael Haneke on down the line often fail to implicate themselves in that downward spiral they so disdain.) D
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About the Author
BRYANT FRAZER (email: bryant@deep-focus.com) is a journalist and film critic based in Sleepy Hollow, New York, home of the Headless Horseman. He's the editor-in-chief of Film & Video, an award-winning trade publication dedicated to filmmakers and filmmaking technology, and movie critic for the White Plains Times, an alternative newsweekly in White Plains, New York. His online movie-reviewing career began in 1985 — beat that, fellow Internet movie nerds — when he posted a (mostly positive, if memory serves) review of A Chorus Line to a local BBS (bulletin-board system) in his hometown of Pueblo, Colorado. He began reviewing on USENET newsgroups in 1994, with a single-screening missive filed from the Chicago FIlm Festival (regrettably, while he was watching Nightwatch, Chungking Express
was screening in the theater next door, which gives you some idea of
how little he really knew back in those days when he thought he knew
everything). After learning HTML to help launch Bookweb.org, one of the first book-oriented destinations online, he established Deep Focus as a Web archive for his reviews in 1995. The rest is history.
