Conversation | Film

This is the Question of the Day posed by MaryAnn Johanson, the Flick Filosopher.  She’s been writing intelligent, witty commentary for as long as I’ve been reading film criticism on the Internet (since the mid-90s or so), and it saddens me that she’s feeling depressed about her job prospects.  I don’t want an Internet without MaryAnn Johanson.  If a major trade publication like Variety doesn’t see economic sense in paying a full-time critic, there’s an even slimmer chance that freelancer/blogger like Johanson, even with syndicated reviews, can get by entirely on writing about movies.  Her worries about the shrinking audience for film criticism may be justified, but I found another of her thought threads even more potent.   Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, I feel like I should apologize for posting this so soon after another Armond White post, but my whole shtick of being an unapologetic Armond White whore would go out the window if I apologized.  So I won’t.  Nyah-nyah-nyah.

White wrote an incredibly concise and compelling article on March 3rd about how the Oscars are irrelevant.  One of his primary points was that Kathryn Bigelow is already an important, vital filmmaker whether or not she wins an Oscar.  He points out that she’s already worked her way into the pop lexicon by making films like Point Break, which obviously have some staying power, because filmmakers like Edgar Wright are referencing them with comprehension more than a decade later.

His observation that Hurt Locker “has gotten her heroized as an exceptional American female filmmaker through way-late feminism. The Hurt Locker lets the liberal media have both its Iraq War statement and female tokenism.”  I’m not sure how this meme evolved, but I guess it’s inevitable, considering the way the Academy tends to award its Oscars.  The conceit that the Oscars are a form of tokenism — politically convenient tools of recognizing career work, or perhaps a way of setting milestones, regardless of the quality of the work — has been around for years.  For months, it was suggested that Bigelow was likely to win best director by virtue of the fact that it’s high time that the Oscar go to a woman.  It was further suggested that this would undermine the actual merit of her work.  There’s logic in that. Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t even know a Trigun movie was in the works until I saw it on Anime News Network last night, but now I’m really excited.  View the high quality trailer here.  It opens in Japan on April 24, 2010.  I haven’t seen a U.S. release date yet.  Hopefully by the end of the year, perhaps to coincide with Funimation’s Blu-Ray release later this year?  Please?

Someone has finally gone to the trouble to help us compile an official list of every moron who wants Armond White “banned” from the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer.  Here are some nonrepresentative samples from the comments of people who support the petition. Read the rest of this entry »

"I have an appointment to see Dr. Fleischmann at 3:45. My prescription ran out a week ago, and what started out as a rash has become an exoskeletal shell."

Stories like “The Ark in Space” emphasize how idiotic the BBC was for not sinking more money into what has become one of Britain’s flagship television programs.  Once again, Doctor Who boasts solid writing, sharp performances, interesting, economical production design, and really sorry monster effects.  Conceptually, the Wirrn are a classically creepy creepy-crawly race of alien baddies: giant insects who feast on human flesh for physical sustenance as well as mental absorption.  The setting is also classic sci-fi: a ship full of cryogenically frozen people, survivors of a cataclysm waiting to resettle their world after a long, long sleep… if only they aren’t killed by the alien invaders.  Modern viewers might balk at a scenario that seems to lean heavily on Ridley Scott’s Alien, before noting that “The Ark in Space” predates that film by several years, and the tropes that inform it had been around well before that. Read the rest of this entry »

io9 has a link to the trailer (posted on YouTube).  I didn’t even know a Tekken movie was in the works.  (Ignorance, after all, is my strong suit.)  It’s only natural that Meredith Woerner would invoke the recent, hidious Street Fighter movie in the headline, but the real question is: How could a fighting game adaptation get any better than Corey Yuen’s D.O.A. - Dead or Alive?  Seriously, now.  Since video game adaptations like this barely function as anything other than meager attempts at mainstream fanservice anyway, what could top the already over-the-top, luminous ludicrousness of a film where a bunch of megahotties team up to take down Eric Roberts?  The keys to success were Yuen’s sense of humor about the project (which was shared by most of the cast, although Devon Aoki looks like she’d get lost somewhere between the shower curtain and the shower basin if someone didn’t draw her a map) and his outstanding fight choreography, both of which laughed at the risible T&A quotient and reveled in it.  You rarely see a B-film so comfortable being what it is, and doing it well.  As I understand it, the choreographer for Tekken is Cyril Raffaelli, who coordinated the action for District B13, its sequel, and Hitman.¹  One can also hope that he learned a little something from Yuen while working as a stunt coordinator on the first two Transporter films.  I’ll certainly see Tekken eventually, if only because it’s fun to see how much gravitas Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa can wring out of cookie cutter cartoon villians.

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"I could reach out, meaning to touch your face, and crush your skull by mistake. You don't realize how incredibly breakable you are."

Via the Flick Filosopher, one astute movie watcher finally took the trouble to delineate exactly how OMYEDWARD and his pedowolf pals are guilty of domestic abuse. An excerpt after the break: Read the rest of this entry »

“All of us who are keen on the history of film — and, I’d guess, some sane people as well…”

A few years ago, a friend of mine in college introduced me to Stanley Kauffmann,¹ longtime critic for The New Republic.  Though I’ve read a review of his from time to time, I never really made him a part of my regular routine.  What a dope I am.  Very recently, I borrowed Regarding Film from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s library.  Reading it was a breeze.  The volume (Kaufffmann’s seventh of film criticism) features selections that were written from about 1993 to 2000.  Reviews of films and books, plus a few obituaries, a lecture, and some other ruminations fill the relatively slim book.  Kauffmann writes with an air of casual authority: every assertion he makes seems full of a modest, yet intimidating store of knowledge and experience.  He’s not afraid to say that he hasn’t seen films, something more familiar to those of us who read (and/or are) amateur Internet bloggers, so when he discusses the work of a filmmaker like Abbas Kiarostami, Kauffmann readily admits that he’s only seen a nonrepresentative handful of the director’s oeuvre.  Yet he writes so lucidly and passionately about those films that he’s every bit the professional critic, if not a particular expert on the subject of Iranian cinema.  This revelation was an interesting contrast to the editorial in the recent issue of Cineaste (which, coincidentally, featured an illuminating interview with Kiarostami’s vaunted contemporary, Mohsen Makhmalbaf), in which the editor-in-chief asserted the necessity of expertise.  I’m still on the fence about where to mark a division between elitism and old-fashioned expertise.  I like the fact that the Web is full of amateurs who write about cinema purely because they love movies, and they are driven to communicate their feelings, even though there is no paycheck in it, and certainly no guarantee of much readership.  That unguarded ardor doesn’t destroy good criticism, it fuels it, if people aren’t too lazy to seek out the worthwhile voices amidst the din.  Professionalism isn’t delineated by employment, but by the rigor of the intellect and the craft of writing.  In any case, Kauffmann is a professional, a critic for more than fifty years.  (Wow.) Read the rest of this entry »

This is freakin’ stupid.  A character that was in an assertively mediocre movie for about ten collective minutes before getting his head chopped off (and, mind you, his neck was severed in three separate places) is getting his own movie. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey!  It’s been several weeks since my last blog entry.  I’ve a lot to catch up on, and I probably won’t really be able to do all that I wish in that regard, but I did think it worth posting a link to a great article on the Moving Image Source Web site.  The article is titled “Talk About the Passions,” and in it author Joshua Land makes the case that two of the most controversial Jesus movies, The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ, have been given short shrift by critics who are too intent on positioning the films as emblems of a secular/religious, left/right American culture war rather than examining the films as sincere spiritual explorations by very distinct auteurs. Read the rest of this entry »