Film
Friday, November 20, 2009
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 11:44 AM
My colleague Benjamin Sutton should have a fuller review of this show up soon, but in the meantime here's a brief impression:
Though Tim Burton has a few comedies, or at least comedy-hybrids, on his director’s resume, his name doesn’t conjure thoughts of hilarity: instead, he is known as the Modern Master of the Macabre, the social misfit with an imagination toggling between the eerie and nightmarish. And so the highlights of the new MoMA lifetime retrospective, which features film screenings and several galleries of sketches, storyboards, video projects and movie artifacts, aren’t the pieces that conform to the familiar conception—in which the curators revel reductively—of the troubled artist eager to reject the suburban manicurerie of his youth, though die-hard fans (often with hair of unnatural hues) will appreciate the rarae aves: the
Vincent models behind glass, the Batman hoods, the commercials, music videos, early work for television, recent flash animation projects, and the career-spanning character sketches, so rich that they make one wish some of his live-action features (
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory especially) had been animated (by hand) instead. No, the most revealing works adorning the museum walls are the sketchbook pieces that reveal an intimate lighter side, particularly those in a series from the 80s that might have felt at home as single-panel cartoons in a magazine circulated only in the afterlife.
Continue reading »
Tags: tim burton, moma, never shoot a constipated poodle
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Posted
by Jesse Hassenger
on Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 8:56 AM
New Moon: The continuing adventures of Weirdface & Twitchy, and by "adventures" I mean moping in and around trees.
New Moon: Revenge of Twilight looks to sink to new depths of unintentional minimalism by sidelining the main vampire in Italy for most of the movie, providing what I assume will be an ineffective werewolf substitute. It's definitely a werewolf, though, rather than a more interesting wolf-man: in a flash, that muscley guy who almost got fired after the first movie morphs into a T-shirt-ready all-fours wolf, not some kind of badass hybrid. I will see this for the same reason I sometimes flip to the Disney Channel: because bad stuff that people between the ages of ten and eighteen enjoy is inherently more interesting to me than plain old regular bad movies and TV shows.
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Tags: Your Weekend at the Movies, Twilight, New Moon, Wolf T-Shirts, Nicolas Cage, Bad Lieutenant, Broken Embraces, Pedro Almodovar, The Blind Side, Planet 51, Animation, Red Cliff, John Woo, Face/Off
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Thursday, November 19, 2009
Posted
by Mark Asch
on Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 4:29 PM
So, Wes Anderson's
Fantastic Mr. Fox is a delightful dioramarama that gets the best out of its director's obsession with controlled play; perhaps due to its natural, sweet address to kids, his usual unresolved conflicts—chiefly, the problems of stepping out of a world of your own making and understanding the needs of others—feel less petulant than in his
prior film (and less precious than in another recent
film we could name).
It also features, as the background music in an early, pastoral scene, the song "Love", an Oscar-nominated number from Disney's 1973 film of Robin Hood, the movie your film editor watched more times than any other movie in the years before he watched The Princess Bride more than any other movie.
In Disney's Robin Hood, of course, Robin Hood and Maid Marian are loving foxes as well. Roald Dahl's Mr. Fox (the book was published in 1970) is himself a Robin Hood figure, a dashing, justified thief who, along with his gang of fellow-animals (badgers, rabbits, etc in both Disney and Dahl), risks life and limb to steal from comically greedy English landowners.
Is the song in question embedded after the jump? Oh gee I don't know better click on the jump and find out.
Continue reading »
Tags: Disney's Robin Hood, Disney Animation, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson, Robin Hood, Roald Dahl, Redistribution of Wealth
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Posted
by Jonny Diamond
on Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 2:21 PM
You know, we can't all be held accountable for the sins of our fathers. Omar Bin Laden agrees with me, and is just kind of bummed about his dad, Osama. The fourth son of the skinny old terrorist demagogue
[pictured, btw, second from the right in happier, pre-demagogue times] told the
New Statesmen, wistfully:
Although my father was stern and did not hesitate to use his cane, there were good times when he stopped his war plans and played with us.
Which is kind of like how my dad would sometimes stop watching Canadian football and tell me to get him a beer. Lil Bin Laden also revealed a possible career path, demonstrating a pretty shrewd sense of the current American political climate:
I would like to be in a position to promote peace. I believe that the United Nations would be ideal for me.
C U THERE! Also, he likes horses.
Tags: Omar Bin Laden, Osama Bin Laden, Fathers and sons, The United Nations, Terrorism, Afghanistan
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Posted
by Jonny Diamond
on Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 12:51 PM
Yes,
we know. Here is
some news about famous handsome person Robert Pattinson. He would appear naked. On film. When not asked whether that would include full frontal, Mr. Pattinson did not deny it. Which means he'd totally show peen. All of humanity to rejoice.
Tags: Robert Pattinson, Twilight, New Moon, Nudity, Screaming teenage girls, Naked, Butt nekkid
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Posted
by Simon Abrams
on Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 11:55 AM
Though the Film Society at Lincoln Center has done the general public the serve of screening the rarely exhibited Alberto Lattuada's
The Overcoat (1952) this afternoon and tonight, they're doing it during the wrong program. The Overcoat will screen as part of "
Life Lessons," the FSLC's more-than-comprehensive collection of Italian Neo-realist films, even though it is more like a traditional entry in the "Commedia all'Italiana" cycle of films.
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Tags: Get Your Reps, The Overcoat, Neo-realism, Commedia all'Italiana
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Friday, November 13, 2009
Posted
by Jesse Hassenger
on Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 4:03 PM
2012: I am so not even kidding when I tell you I am fucking pumped for this movie, like a bro before a beer-pong tournament. From what I've seen, it looks like the filmmakers made a list of notable monuments that had not yet been pitilessly destroyed in a movie, then destroyed them all on their supercomputers. Then they made a second list of monuments that had already been pitilessly destroyed in a movie, then destroyed them all again on their supercomputers, but in far worse and more elaborate ways, like having an aircraft carrier ride a tidal wave into the White House somehow, or having a tornado drop the Great Wall of China into a volcano (I'm just assuming that second thing happens in the movie, because I'm assuming the filmmakers also had a computer program running through every possible combination of monumental destruction and pitiless loss of CGI lives). Said filmmakers include director Roland Emmerich, master of the extremely stupid large-scale spectacle. One of his massive-disaster movies delivers the stupid, stupid goods (
Independence Day) while another mostly doesn't (the one where the cold chases people around a building). Although: the two-and-a-half-hour running time brings to mind my younger days, when I was totally pumped to find out the
Godzilla remake was going to be about two-and-a-half hours, because I assumed, erroneously as it turned out, that it would have ten minutes of plot and 130 or so of Godzilla smashing the ever-loving fuck out of the world. That, for the record, is the folly of Emmerich's
Godzilla, not that it doesn't have a dude in a suit: that its destruction is far less spectacular than a Godzilla-as-natural-disaster movie warrants. Looks like my incompetent German friend saved all of the goods for what I'm hoping will be a marathon of ridiculous apocalyptic crap that's nowhere near as actually-effective as, say,
War of the Worlds or
Cloverfield. You've had the best, Emmerich seems to be saying; now it's my turn (again).
Continue reading »
Tags: 2012, Roland Emmerich, Godzilla, Disaster Movies, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Pirate Radio, Women in Trouble, Uncertainty
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Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 2:15 PM
Imagine if Woody Allen had followed
Annie Hall with
Take the Money and Run! Emmanuel Mouret, unfortunately, now joins the list of comic directors—Wes Anderson, Christopher Guest—who succeeded poignant, mere-comedy transcending near-masterpieces with follow-ups that signal artistic regression. Coming on the heels of the sumptuous and heartbreaking
Shall We Kiss? (
Un Baiser s'il Vous Plaît), the hilarious and handsomely shot
Please Please Me! (
Fais-moi plaisir!) (which closes
BAM's New French Films series on Sunday) is a goofy, mostly physical comedy about a day and night in the life of a man (Mouret) desperately seeking, a la
Curb Your Enthusiasm’s fourth season, some girlfriend-sanctioned, extra-relationship relations.
Continue reading »
Tags: Please Please Me, Emanuel Mouret, Woody Allen, French Film
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Posted
by Benjamin Sutton
on Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 8:45 AM
The blockbuster exhibition of the winter (sorry
Urs Fischer), MoMA's
Tim Burton retrospective, opens in a little over a week (November 22). Just in case you were thinking of forgetting, the museum commissioned Burton to direct a cute promo for his show. It's a typically Burtonesque affair, with a steampunk Frankenstein monster-ish robot inflating balloons that look like they were designed by Niki de Saint Phalle. Check it out after the jump. (
Design:Related)
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Tags: Tim Burton, MoMA, nyc art, Museum of Modern Art, Urs Fischer, blockbuster exhibitions, Niki de Saint Phalle, commercials
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Thursday, November 12, 2009
Posted
by Mark Asch
on Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 1:32 PM
Jerry Lewis's cross-eyed, pained schtick tests (often testily) the limits of our sympathy for the loser underdog. His put-upon characters pull faces to demand our attention, force a decision as to whether they're pitiful or pathetic; if early Adam Sandler ever struck you as the declawed version of something, this is it. Writing about
Anthology's Directed by Jerry Lewis series, which begins tonight,
J. Hoberman drops some psychoanalytic science;
The Errand Boy, playing tomorrow night and next Wednesday night, is an allegory for the popular lowbrow comic's career, on the terms of his own insecure psyche.
This self-professed "idiot" plays Morty S. Tashman ("What's the S for?" "Scared. I'm frightened at a lot of things."), a gofer used as a patsy by the head of "Paramutual" Pictures, who wants an on-set mole. Paramutual is full of petty tyrants, slobbering sycophants, bellowing auteurs and death-scene divas, and bumbling Morty wrecks the Hollywood studio, gag by gag: unleashing a flurry of script pages in the typing pool; spraying a firehose of champagne all over a period-piece set; knocking down a domino row of suits of armors (then revealed to be filled with extras); singing off-key during a dubbing session, and tapdancing his way through the fourth wall in an elaborate crane shot.
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Tags: Get Your Reps, Jerry Lewis, The Errand Boy, Meta-movies, Lowbrow Comedy, Insecurity
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Posted
by Alexis Clements
on Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 10:47 AM
“The more perfect the machine, the less noise it makes.” This from
Luigi Russolo, one of the more prominent
Futurist composers and author of yet another one of the group’s important manifestos,
The Art of Noises.
One of Russolo’s primary innovations both for the Futurists and for noise enthusiasts since, was his creation of noise-intoners (pictured). These intoners were literally a series of machines that created a variety of mechanical sounds that Russolo composed for and used to perform live soundtracks for silent films being made by his cohorts in the Futurist movement. It’s this last purpose that was brought back to life last night during a screening of three films at Anthology Film Archives as part of Performa 09.
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Tags: Performa 09, Futurism, Luigi Russolo, Anthology Film Archives, nyc art, nyc film, ISSUE Project Room, silent film, Transformers, Futurist film
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Posted
by Cullen Gallagher
on Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 3:31 PM
Samuel Fuller's movies are equal parts street corner and gutter, a combination of two-inch-headline journalistic hullabaloo and pulp poetics. Andrew Sarris called him "an authentic American primitive," while Dana Polan described him as "the opposite of graceful; his style seems to suggest that in a world where grace provides little redemption, its utilization would be a kind of lie." This one-of-a-kind, immediately recognizable persona is on full display in Sony's seven disc box set
The Samuel Fuller Collection, which pulls together seven hard-to-find films that the cigar-chomping filmmaker was involved in, none of which were previously available on DVD.
Among the most coveted of Fuller's works featured here are The Crimson Kimono (1959) and Underworld U.S.A. (1961), two stories of crime and society told from opposite ends of the moral spectrum: one from the cops, and one from the crooks. In the tradition of 1930s Warner Bros. gangster pictures such as The Public Enemy (1931), Underworld U.S.A. is a street-punk picaresque, beginning with a teenage Tolly Devlin rolling drunks in alleys. After witnessing the murder of his father by four shadowy figures, he begins a life-long quest to uncover the identity of the murderers and exact revenge. However, it isn't until twenty years later that Devlin (now played by Cliff Robertson) gets his chance. Working for both the mobs and the cops, he ruthlessly plays both ends against the middle in a vigilante attempt at taking down organized crime.
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Tags: Priced to Own, DVD, Sam Fuller, The Crimson Kimono, Underworld USA, The Samuel Fuller Collection, Ballast, Lake Tahoe, Near Dark
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Posted
by Mark Asch
on Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 1:51 PM
Robert Ryan, in your film editor's opinion the greatest actor in the history of cinema, was born 100 years ago today, in Chicago. The
Chicago Reader is all over the occasion, offering the expected
rundown of his iconic performances (well, some of them, there were a lot), alongside
Reader film editor J.R. Jones's
feature about his life, which draws from a rather fascinating primary source. In the 50s, Ryan wrote a letter to his three children: "The time might come someday to one of you—or all of you—when you become curious about my early life. If that should ever happen, you will have this record to tell you." The
Reader has
the full letter; both it and Jones's article offer a rich history of Chicago life and politics in the early twentieth century, and paint a revealing picture of the eloquent, introspective, guarded actor. Which should come as no surprise, really.
Continue reading »
Tags: Robert Ryan, Chicago, Chicago Reader, The Wild Bunch, Caught, House of Bamboo, White Noise
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Posted
by Robert Tumas
on Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 12:02 PM
- The faculty of the Rogue Film School, lecturing students in Taking an Insane Method Actor with a Messiah Complex into the Dark Heart of the South American Jungle 101.
Werner Herzog has never been one to
back down from
a challenge, and for that matter, neither have the
young filmmakers who are his fans and idolaters. Previously, these disciples of cinematic truth could only dream about matching the achievements of their messiah of film, but thankfully, after years of listening to them speak in tongues and German accents, Werner Herzog has answered their prayers.
The Rogue Film School, in Los Angeles, is set to open sometime next year, and plans to teach participants, among other things, how to be Werner Herzog, as taught by Werner Herzog. If you've got 25 bucks, and are 18 years of age, you can apply to go there for a weekend seminar, and if you get in, then it will only cost you 1,450 more of those bucks. Although it is unclear just what one will learn there, under the direct tutelage of the 'Zog, the Rogue most certainly "will not teach anything technical related to film-making," and seems instead to center its mission on "poetry" and the "ecstasy of truth..." The site goes on to say:
Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.
Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.
Well, whatever happens, we can only hope that there will be a course on how to sport this badass 'stache and stare poignantly at the camera while doing so.
Tags: Werner Herzog, Rogue Film School
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Friday, November 6, 2009
Posted
by Benjamin Sutton
on Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 3:32 PM
According to
The Hollywood Reporter, Shoalin Island rapper Method Man—who last
made headlines when he was arrested for owing the IRS $33,000—is set to star in something called
The Mortician. There's very little information available regarding the film, but it's apparently a 3D movie being written and directed by Gareth Maxwell Roberts about growing up in the ghetto.
IMDb claims it will be a thriller shot in Louisiana slated for release in 2010, and did I mention it's going to be in 3D?
Given the most frequently recurring motifs in Meth's music and his various screen roles to date, I think we know what to expect from The Mortician: 3D bongs, 3D joints and 3D gunfights. I hope he really gets into the role and grows back the dreadlocks he wore at the beginning of his career. Also, the choppy fronts he's wearing in the image at right. Now that would be thrilling in 3D! (HipHopWired)
Tags: Method Man, 3D movies, hip-hop, rap, The Mortician
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Posted
by Jesse Hassenger
on Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 9:15 AM
Wow! Five different movies that I would totally go see at some point, all coming out in a single weekend. This obviously can't last all month; you should probably save one or two of these for New Moon weekend.
The Box: When I first heard that Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko and Southland Tales was adapting a Richard Matheson short story that had also been a Twilight Zone episode, it all seemed strangely simple. Why would Kelly, whose two movies have so entertainingly (if puzzlingly) overflowed with insane ideas, focus so intently on a story that can apparently be told in under an hour? According to the trailer, the answer is apparently that a simple short story provides a study handle from which to fly off. Kelly's version of the story, in which a financially strapped couple is given the option of pressing a button that will anonymously murder a strange for a payment of one million dollars, seems to go off in his customary crazy-ass directions, with a half-faced Frank Langella and lots of dead-eyed minions and a chilling Cameron Diaz attempt at a Southern accent (that said, she's an underrated actress). Obviously I am way on board. [Jesse, you will not be disappointed, which is to say good luck being this cogent about the movie after you've actually seen the damn thing. -Ed.]
Continue reading »
Tags: Your Weekend at the Movies, The Box, Richard Kelly, The Men Who Stare at Goats, George Clooney, Precious, Lee Daniels, The Fourth Kind, Milla Jovovich, A Christmas Carol
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Thursday, November 5, 2009
Posted
by Mark Asch
on Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 3:10 PM
Now, nobody hates white people more than I do (that I know of). But in his cover-story
pan of Precious this week, the
New York Press's Armond White makes nameless caucasian film critics and audience members into straw men in a way that's both problematic and inaccurate. Which is a shame, because he's also spot-on about why
Precious is a much worse movie than many reviewers seem willing to let on, and about the inadvertent condescension in their liberal-guilty reviews.
Here's some great selections from the barrage he unleashes on the movie:
Continue reading »
Tags: Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire, Lee Daniels, Tyler Perry, Oprah Winfrey, Armond White, White People, Film Criticism
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Posted
by Cullen Gallagher
on Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 1:05 PM
A drifter, a prostitute, a priest, a miner, and his deaf-mute daughter walk into a South American jungle. It sounds like the start of a joke, but it happens to be the set-up for Luis Buñuel's anti-colonialist adventure-satire
Death in the Garden (1956), just out on DVD from
Microcinema International. When Chark (Georges Marchal, of Buñuel's
Belle de Jour and
The Milky Way) stumbles through a town square past a firing squad, he finds himself in the midst of a revolution. Martial law has shut down the local mine, but its workers refuse to leave without a fight. With violence escalating and Chark and the miner Castin (Charles Vanel, of Clouzot's
Diabolique and
The Wages of Fear) wanted by the police, the disparate group takes to the jungle in hopes of escaping to Brazil.
Buñuel frequently uses stories of survival (or the lack thereof) as political commentary, and though his targets have spanned the gamut of social classes, his favorite victim by far is the bourgeoisie. Whether it is the party guests that can't even manage to sit down to dinner in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) or the manage to leave the living room in The Exterminating Angel (1962), Buñuel makes clear their lack of resourcefulness even within the limits of their own domain. If they can't survive in the deceptive comfort of their own homes, how could they possibly last out in the jungle, with no food, no guide, no map, and the military on their trail? Therein lies Buñuel's straight-faced humor: taking the adventure scenario absolutely seriously adds to the subversive undercurrents.
Continue reading »
Tags: Priced to Own, DVD, Luis Bunuel, Death in the Garden
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Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Posted
by Benjamin Sutton
on Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 4:42 PM
According to
Cinematical, a
Lloyd Dobler flash mob took to the streets of Manhattan yesterday to promote the release of the 20th anniversary DVD of
Say Antyhing—which, you may recall, played a crucial role in the development of
late-80s blockbuster cinema. That's them posing dramatically on the steps of the
Farley Post Office on Eighth Avenue, though you might have also spotted them looking for love in
Washington Square Park,
Rockefeller Center,
Times Square or
Union Square. I hope that when the 15th anniversary edition of
Kazaam finally comes out (two years and counting!) there's a similarly awesome guerrilla marketing campaign.
Tags: Say Anything, Flash mobs, Lloyd Dobler, John Cusack, 80s movies, guerrilla marketing, Kazaam
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