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Review: Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
I don’t know that I’ve ever been more aware of a film’s budget than I was while watching Michael Bay’s “Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen”. For all of the hundreds of millions of dollars that went into the special effects, it seems that just as much money was spent trying to conceal them from us. All of that spectacle (and there’s nothing else) is hidden on the screen with disorienting camerawork, obnoxious flares of blinding light and just otherwise intrusive props set between us and precisely what we’d like to see. The actual transformations of the robots are what immediately come to mind. Of the dozens, perhaps hundreds of transformations that take place on screen, not once are we given a clear view of the process. For a movie literally called “Transformers”, it seems that very little effort was put into the title track.
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Review: Star Trek
J.J. Abrams' production of Star Trek is, as the studio has been telling us, 'not your father's Star Trek'. This is a slick, enjoyable, and surprisingly cool piece of entertainment and while I hold a special place in my heart for just about all forms of Star Trek (except perhaps Enterprise), it's an interpretation of the space adventure formula that the world wants right now. After Nemesis, the Next Generation movie bombed at the box office seven years ago, the future of Gene Roddenberry's brain-child appeared bleak. J.J. Abrams and his production crew have revived it. Star Trek is a wild and entertaining mix of action, self-referential humour and surprisingly good acting that should be enjoyed by old-school fans and newcomers alike.
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Go See A Classic: Pink Floyd The Wall
"Mother will she break my heart?" Bob Geldof and Eleanor David in Alan Parker's "Pink Floyd The Wall".
“All and all it was all just bricks in the wall”
So sings Roger Waters in the film based on Pink Floyd’s seminal album “The Wall”, a film about an alienated rock star who retreats deep inside himself and finds only emptiness. There is no room in Hollywood today for a movie like “Pink Floyd the Wall”, no room for such a metaphorical narrative, no room for a hero hidden behind his own face.
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Go See A Classic: Magnolia
There is so much gray in the world, so little black and white. It is the world we live in. We don’t have the clear cut heroes and villains of movies. What we have are merely people, broken and confused and burdened by death and regret. Things happen to us and they do not resolve themselves cleanly. The chaos of the world wears steadily on our humanity. Good people make irreversible mistakes. Secrets ferment between loved ones. Bonds break through mutual mistake or misunderstanding. Circumstances bring strangers together in ways that can end only in tragedy. But amidst all the madness of the world, amidst the sadness and the confusion and the chaos, sometimes two people find each other and, by chance, they connect. Sometimes this happens.
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Review: Watchmen
“Watchmen” is one of those rare films that comes along every so often and defies popular opinion. The last time I can recall it happening was a few years ago with “There Will be Blood”, though with that film I was quite a bit more certain of its genius. Rating “Watchmen” is completely superfluous. Four stars aren’t enough. One star is a few too many. I’ve no idea whether or not it is a great film, but I do know that I love it for the myriad opportunities for discussion it provides.
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Go See A Classic: Apocalypse Now
Few films have waded deeper into the swamp of the human psyche than Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now. Few films have gazed farther into the void. “Apocalypse Now” is widely regarded as one of the two or three greatest war films of all time, which is peculiar to me, as the film deals so sparingly with actual warfare. It takes place inside the Vietnam War. The film opens with an air raid on a Vietnamese village, manned by an Oscar winning supporting performance from the great Robert Duvall (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”), and then the story moves beyond warfare and into something more profound than helicopters and napalm.
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Review: Coraline
There’s something deeply sinister and oddly profound under the skin of “Coraline”, a gorgeous and unnerving fairy tail from “The Nightmare before Christmas” Director Henry Selick. I keep reading reviews in which critics warn parents that “Coraline” is too intense for small children. “This is nightmare fodder,” they say. I say forget them. Our society is developing an unhealthy notion that anything that isn’t upbeat and fluffy is “too intense for young children”.
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Go See A Classic: Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
“Dr. Strangelove” is the blackest of black comedies. It makes second place look like kind of a pinkish-beige. I’ve never seen a film cooler in its detachment, more nonchalant in its audacious inhumanity. Stanley Kubrick stared the eminent Cold War Paranoia in the face and delivered a stout, brass-knuckled hook below the belt.
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2009 Academy Awards: The GoSAM Ballots
This is the best time of year to be a film critic. It's time to predict the mind of the Academy. If we're right, we've got our thumb firmly planted on the pulse of accurate film criticism. If we're wrong, then the Academy made a mistake.It's always popular and always fun to "pick the winners", if you will, so Jon and Rollie will both give you our picks, and we'll see who bats higher come the 22nd. Last year Jon beat Rollie rather handily. It should be an exciting race.
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Review: Valkyrie
Bryan Singer's Valkyrie is based on a pretty remarkable true story. Claus von Stauffenberg, a Nazi military officer who lost an eye, one hand, and two fingers on his other hand, banded with a group of Nazi dissidents in an attempt to kill Adolf Hitler and overthrow the regime. They nearly did it, too — were it not for a giant oak boardroom table that shielded him from the blast, Hitler may have been an additional casualty of the bomb placed near him during a cabinet meeting. von Stauffenberg witnessed the blast and presumed that no one could have survived it, then returned to Berlin and started the wheels of a coup d'etat in motion.
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Review: Revolutionary Road
Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road is based on a book written in 1961 and is set in the mid-1950s, but expresses despair and sadness that resonate even stronger nearly fifty years later. It tells the story of a couple building their American Dream, all the while knowing that it is not really what they want. But what do they want? They don't really know that either. Mendes also directed American Beauty ten years ago, a film that covers similar territory, but Revolutionary Road takes an altogether more pessimistic look at life in the American suburbs.
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Review: Gran Torino
If I were to describe to you the plot of Gran Torino, it would sound like a cliche from beginning to end. On reflection, there's nothing really remarkable or original about the way that director/star Clint Eastwood presents this story of a misanthropic, racist old man opening his heart and allowing his better judgment to shine through. It might not be a subtle film, but I bought it because of Eastwood's performance, and the sparse and uncomplicated directorial style that has served his film-making career well in the last fifteen years. Million Dollar Baby it ain't, but Gran Torino provides us with at least a glimpse of how Eastwood can produce emotional satisfaction from potentially trite material.
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Go See A Classic: Vertigo
“One more thing I have
to do… and then I’ll be free of the past.”
-Det. John “Scottie”
He has largely been associated with the suspense genre, and indeed many of his films are just that. No one did suspense like Hitchcock. His timing, technique, and imagery all coexist perfectly within their respective films. What sets “Vertigo” apart from the likes of “Rear Window” and “Psycho” is that its suspense operates on a deeply emotional level. It is a psychological rat maze. It is the best film he made.
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Review: Seven Pounds
Often at this time of year, when the awards contenders reveal themselves, one or two pretenders appear. They so desperately wish to be in the running for the Golden Globes and Academy Awards that they overplay their hand. Seven Pounds, with its contrived story of redemption and grief, is essentially a vehicle for Will Smith to gain an Oscar nomination. His efforts are valiant, but it comes to nothing, because this movie shamelessly manipulates our sympathies. Emotional manipulation is fine — all movies do it to some extent. It is not fine when you are aware of how much you are being manipulated.
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Review: Doubt
“Doubt” exists in a vacuum. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as the film was adapted from the award winning stage production by John Patrick Shanley, but a film this secluded? The Catholic school in which this story unfolds is a microcosmic society. There is authority and there are those who abide by it and those who enforce it. On such a small scale, any disruption to this order can be devastating.
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Review: Milk
Most people are probably not aware of Harvey Milk and the
traces of his influence we see every day, all around us. Most people are probably not aware that he
was the most significant figure in the advancement of gay rights and that he
did more to stifle American prejudice against homosexuals than anyone in
history. He was the first to publically
call for all homosexuals to come out to their friends and family, so that the
gay community would not seem so alien to people. He took his refuge in
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Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
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Review: Frost/Nixon
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Review: The Spirit
Film Noir:
-noun
A motion picture with an often grim urban setting, photographed in somber tones and permeated by a feeling of disillusionment, pessimism, and despair.
Origin: 1955-1960; <F:lit., black film
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