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Was it worth the colonial gentry in the New World getting themselves into a shootin’ match with the great British Empire all so that eventually we could have this wonderful dance routine to commemorate it? It’s a point worth considering, anyway. Read the rest of this entry »
I just finished watching a film by Hiroshi Teshigahara called Rikyu. I liked it a great deal. It’s about the last years of a tea master in late 16th c. Japan and how he came into conflict with the warlord that had held him in favor. Read the rest of this entry »
Cinema seems to have its own operant Logos — or is Providence a better term? I watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (Zerkalo) for the first time on day this week, and the next day I happened to watch Aleksandr Sokurov’s Mother and Son (Mat i syn). This happened purely by chance. Read the rest of this entry »
"A Girl. A Machine Gun. A Revenge." What more do you need to know?
At the moment, it feels like there’s an elephant sitting on my chest. This morning I started watching The Machine Girl, and by this afternoon I was convinced there’s something wrong with me. Read the rest of this entry »
Ignore, for the moment, that she’s 11. Kids-as-killers is nothing new, especially if you’ve heard of films like Village of the Damned, Haneke’s recent The White Ribbon, Battle Royale, The Bad Seed, or any number of examples of Japanese animation. A few years ago, I had the misfortune of watching a film called The Machine Girl, which was one of the goriest, most devoid-of-redeeming-value movie experiences I’ve ever had. Sure, it’s more common for teenagers to be agents of destruction than pre-teens, but not unheard-of, especially among the critical establishment whose job is to be more familiar with these things than the rest of us amateurs. While it’s worthwhile to debate whether or not it’s wrong to revel in the spectacle of a little girl dishing out gloriously exaggerated ultraviolence (which, in comparison to The Machine Girl, is the stuff of candy-colored Disney entertainment), the real reason that Hit Girl fails as a 21st century action heroine is far more basic. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve gone out on a limb once or twice to defend widely-panned films, and now it seems that the Razzies have laid down a gauntlet for me by naming Battlfield Earth the Worst Film of the Decade. Mind you, this movie came out in May of 2000. That means every single bad movie in the last ten years had the potential to be worse than it, and failed. No wonder Battlefield’s original screenwriter, J. D. Shapiro, feels a strange kind of pride that “out of all the sucky movies, mine is the suckiest.” Read the rest of this entry »
I finally got around to editing the Playtime staff’s list of its lists of the top ten films of the 2000s. Not everyone submitted a list, of course, but I was happy with the fact that so many of our contributors took the time to assemble lists at all. Thanks again, guys! Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll get more egalitarian in the future, my fellow Playtimers. I promise. At the moment, I’m just going to be egocentric and link my own recent articles for posterity’s sake. First up (and most recently) is the Playtime roundtable discussion of the 2010 Oscars, in which I spend an awful lot of time ranting about how awful The Cove was. (Here’s my original review as a primer.) Then there’s my review of Shutter Island, in which I have the temerity to say that Scorsese’s gone mediocre, just like so many of his vaunted forbears. So sad. I’m also proud to say that I edited my old friend Scott’s first published piece for Playtime, a look back at the worst 2009 had to offer. Very funny stuff.
His post is a week old, but Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a relatively brief appreciation of Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948) and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s 2002 remake. I haven’t seen the remake — my knowledge of Chinese cinema is still severely limited — but I have seen the original, and it is a great example of what I can only call a perfect film. 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?
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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- Hitman was a terrible movie, but the fights were pretty okay. ↩
"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 »
- Thanks, Kevin! ↩
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 »
I wrote this review back when Crank first came out in 2006 and posted it in my now-defunct blog over at Rotten Tomatoes. In anticipation of having to explain why I’m not looking forward to the upcoming sequel (those with vast quantities of aspirin at their immediate disposal can mark their calendars for April 17), I’m re-posting my initial thoughts for posterity. I am annotating this review with new footnotes, just to up its relevance quotient. Enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »
Reason.tv recently had a segment in which Clay Epstein, an industry vet, briefly shared his thoughts on the current state of the film industry, its possible future, and where people can find good movies.
Some of the stuff in this video won’t be news to anyone who’s been semi-following independent film for the last year. Last fall’s Filmmaker Magazine featured a fascinating roundtable on the challenges facing independent filmmaking and distribution. The article led off with a reference to an already infamous declaration by Mark Gill, known as the “sky is falling” speech. This is not a good time to be a down-and-out indie filmmaker. It wasn’t last summer, and it certainly isn’t now that a recession is officially in full swing. I won’t belabor any of the points made in those articles, but I hope you take the time to read through them. They’re illuminating, and offer a good-jumping off point for further Internet searches on those topics.
The piece in the video I found most intriguing was how Epstein places the onus of finding good film on the consumer. He does recommend that prospective filmmakers make films that are “friendly” to the general audience, while maintaining that it doesn’t compromise artistic integrity. But how does the average, non-film-buff audience member get to hear about such films? Epstein’s concept of the “proactive/reactive” viewer is fine and dandy, but I’ve had the discussion with many people that he says he had with his mother. Mrs. Epstein’s lament that there aren’t any more good movies, or at least movies for her demographic is common. But it’s been my experience that the very same people who are stupid enough to proclaim that there aren’t any good movies anymore (or movies that speak more directly to their interests) are the people that, no matter what you tell them, are not going to be proactive viewers. Read the rest of this entry »
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