Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004, USA, Michael Moore) AKA Burn Baby Burn
I could take up valuable time and space complaining about how Moore kinda punted this here attempt to eviscerate George II, but I’m more distressed by the way the media and critics have been piling on the man for being "unfair" to their beloved President. Critics on both the left and right are claiming that Moore has betrayed some sorta journalistic ethos in his single-minded, two-barreled assault on their Commander in Chief, which seems to me to completely miss the point of Moore’s entire cinematic career. Michael Moore is NOT a journalist. He’s an entertainer and a partisan with a very specific political agenda which he usually promotes very well. We should not expect Moore to present some sort of even-handed study of the Bush Presidency any more than we should expect a prosecutor to help a defense attorney acquit her client. Anybody who uses this as an excuse to heap criticism on Moore’s film is not doing a very good job of thinking through the whole Moore ouevre and filmmaking raison d’etre.
Anyways, my full length Apollo Guide review is here.
Score: 74/100
The Notebook (2004, USA, Nick Cassavettes)
Boy, did the trailers for this ever have me cringing in my seat as the lights went down. That it is merely only eminently forgettable and not completely execrable turned out to be one of the few pleasant surprises of the evening. Well, the film certainly is gorgeous, as are the two leads; Rachel MacAdams in particular looks like she’s going to have a long and varied career, based on her work here and in Mean Girls. Still, you can’t help but wonder if dear old papa Cassavettes isn’t looking on from the great beyond with some disdain at the direction his son’s career has taken. The Notebook is the kind of conventional film that John C. spent his whole career challenging with his provocative and intelligent studies of human behaviour. However, first with John Q and now The Notebook, Nick C. has begun indulging in the sort ofsentimental tear-jerking romanticism that he had once managed to mask so well with the unusual story of oddball characters in She’s So Lovely. Playing with age-old conflicts and themes, Cassavettes brings nothing new to the game, and seems satisfied to allow this cornball story to play itself out without providing it with any semblance of a personal stamp. As a result, despite the mildlly pleasant surprise that The Notebook wasn’t completely rancid, the film proves ultimately and unfortunately completely forgettable.
My full length Apollo Guide review is here.
Score: 65/100
Wherein bon vivant Ben Livant and I (Dan Jardine) speak our minds about movies, mostly.
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Deeper into the Vaults
Here are a couple more from the video files. As always, links to the longer Apollo Guide reviews when they are published.
Steven Soderbergh’s Schizopolis (1996, USA, Steven Soderbergh)
Apollo Score: 66/100 AKA sex, lies and scientology
Steven Soderbergh’s Schizopolis is the director’s return to the indie-minded roots that inspired his most interesting early works, such as the Palm d’Or winning sex, lies and videotape. Schizopolis is a curious film indeed. Developed in three distinct parts, Soderbergh’s film is at once an astute study of the banality of modern life and a banal student film wrapped around a series of inside jokes. The people in Soderbergh’s world are haplessly flailing around in search of some meaning in their lives, some falling under the spell of a secular self-help Scientology-like religion called Eventualism, while others engaging in extra-marital affairs. All, however, operate at the most superficial levels and find help in the most insubstantial ways. In a move that strangely parallels David Lynch’s film Lost Highway, which was released the same year, one character finds himself inhabiting his doppelganger’s life, and in the film’s final segment the narrative disintegrates bizarrely into a replay of several scenes, only this time the dialogue is in Japanese. Or Italian. Or French. All sans subtitles. While this all sounds mighty confusing (at times, it is) and self-conscious (oh yeah), the interesting thing is that Soderbergh does manage to say some intelligent things about the insipidness of communication in contemporary life. Throughout, the film strips away the veneer of daily conversation to reveal the banality of the standard encoded communication, which is a way of interacting that is a sad reflection of the tedium and vapidity of many people’s daily lives. Dialogue is not about conveying info or communicating ideas or feelings, but rather about assuaging ourselves and soothing things over with others. What we are also looking at here is Soderbergh’s attempt, in this most post-modernist of cult films, to cultivate a trendy nerd-hipness. Very aware of the attacks that the film will face for being an act of total self-indulgence, the writer/director also deflates his screen persona by offering up several scenes of Soderbergh pleasuring himself. However, despite littering these promising and interesting notions throughout his film, what Soderbergh is most keen about here is what he is least successful at. Soderbergh attempts to make the sort of inspired anarchic comedy that marked the work of one of his heroes, Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night) as well as the irreverent skits of the lads from Monty Python. His hop-and-skip editing, (over-)reliance on non sequitur absurdity, and spirited attacks on all things mundane and middle class each have their moments, but taken as a whole, the film fails to maintain the consistent absurd tone it is aiming for. Ironically, Soderbergh’s film, which is all about the way we debase and misuse language, mostly fails at its mighty attempts to manipulate the language of film. In fact, the film evolves into a relatively recognizable narrative and Soderberght’s final conclusions seem rather tame, despite some of the daring-do we witness up on the screen.
Score: 66/100
Frida (2002, USA, Julie Taymor) AKA The Lion Queen
One of the most troubling challenges to documenting a person’s life is how to distill that life, especially one as full as that of artist Frida Kahlo, down to a two hour film. Most bio-pics scrupulously document in chronological order every significant event and every important person in the individual’s life, which often results in a film that is by necessity superficial and inherently episodic. Also, these films are regularly littered with a cameo cast of guest stars a la TV fare like The Love Boat thereby lifting us out of the moment time and time again. It’s not unlike having a cannon go off by your ear every couple of scenes. If anyone can rise above these innate genre limitations, I’d hoped it would be Julie Taymor, but while she again displays her artistic talents in the realm of production design—this is a gorgeous piece of eye candy-- with Frida, Taymor is more often than not a victim of the same self-limiting choices that have scuttled many a biographical film before her. As per the aforementioned formula, Frida skips from point to point across the surface of the life of well-known and critically lauded early 20th century Mexican feminist painter Frida Kahlo in a mostly linear fashion. Frida is presented as a strong, intense woman, committed to her philandering husband as much as her revolutionary politics, facing terrible physical challenges with determination. Perhaps most importantly, it shows how these things shaped and inspired her art, which helps explain why her incredibly personal and deeply revealing work still touches people today. Hayek and Molina have a natural chemistry in the central roles, which helps us understand what brought Kahlo and Rivera together, and (mostly) held them together through some very difficult times. Unfortunately, the steady stream of big name movie stars in roles that could (and should) have been played by character actors proves an impediment. Both Ashley Judd, who plays the seductive Mexican Tina Modotti, and Geoffrey Rush, as Leon Trotsky, are unsuited to their roles, and as fine an actor as Ed Norton is, there is no need (beyond his personal relationship with the film’s star) for he to be sauntering through the film as Nelson Rockefeller, reminding us that we are watching yet another star-studded bio-film. What is disappointing about Frida is what it could have been. While this conventional bio-pic may please middle brow audiences, fans of Ms. Taymor are almost certain to realize that the film could have been so much more than this.
Score: 69/100
Here are a couple more from the video files. As always, links to the longer Apollo Guide reviews when they are published.
Steven Soderbergh’s Schizopolis (1996, USA, Steven Soderbergh)
Apollo Score: 66/100 AKA sex, lies and scientology
Steven Soderbergh’s Schizopolis is the director’s return to the indie-minded roots that inspired his most interesting early works, such as the Palm d’Or winning sex, lies and videotape. Schizopolis is a curious film indeed. Developed in three distinct parts, Soderbergh’s film is at once an astute study of the banality of modern life and a banal student film wrapped around a series of inside jokes. The people in Soderbergh’s world are haplessly flailing around in search of some meaning in their lives, some falling under the spell of a secular self-help Scientology-like religion called Eventualism, while others engaging in extra-marital affairs. All, however, operate at the most superficial levels and find help in the most insubstantial ways. In a move that strangely parallels David Lynch’s film Lost Highway, which was released the same year, one character finds himself inhabiting his doppelganger’s life, and in the film’s final segment the narrative disintegrates bizarrely into a replay of several scenes, only this time the dialogue is in Japanese. Or Italian. Or French. All sans subtitles. While this all sounds mighty confusing (at times, it is) and self-conscious (oh yeah), the interesting thing is that Soderbergh does manage to say some intelligent things about the insipidness of communication in contemporary life. Throughout, the film strips away the veneer of daily conversation to reveal the banality of the standard encoded communication, which is a way of interacting that is a sad reflection of the tedium and vapidity of many people’s daily lives. Dialogue is not about conveying info or communicating ideas or feelings, but rather about assuaging ourselves and soothing things over with others. What we are also looking at here is Soderbergh’s attempt, in this most post-modernist of cult films, to cultivate a trendy nerd-hipness. Very aware of the attacks that the film will face for being an act of total self-indulgence, the writer/director also deflates his screen persona by offering up several scenes of Soderbergh pleasuring himself. However, despite littering these promising and interesting notions throughout his film, what Soderbergh is most keen about here is what he is least successful at. Soderbergh attempts to make the sort of inspired anarchic comedy that marked the work of one of his heroes, Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night) as well as the irreverent skits of the lads from Monty Python. His hop-and-skip editing, (over-)reliance on non sequitur absurdity, and spirited attacks on all things mundane and middle class each have their moments, but taken as a whole, the film fails to maintain the consistent absurd tone it is aiming for. Ironically, Soderbergh’s film, which is all about the way we debase and misuse language, mostly fails at its mighty attempts to manipulate the language of film. In fact, the film evolves into a relatively recognizable narrative and Soderberght’s final conclusions seem rather tame, despite some of the daring-do we witness up on the screen.
Score: 66/100
Frida (2002, USA, Julie Taymor) AKA The Lion Queen
One of the most troubling challenges to documenting a person’s life is how to distill that life, especially one as full as that of artist Frida Kahlo, down to a two hour film. Most bio-pics scrupulously document in chronological order every significant event and every important person in the individual’s life, which often results in a film that is by necessity superficial and inherently episodic. Also, these films are regularly littered with a cameo cast of guest stars a la TV fare like The Love Boat thereby lifting us out of the moment time and time again. It’s not unlike having a cannon go off by your ear every couple of scenes. If anyone can rise above these innate genre limitations, I’d hoped it would be Julie Taymor, but while she again displays her artistic talents in the realm of production design—this is a gorgeous piece of eye candy-- with Frida, Taymor is more often than not a victim of the same self-limiting choices that have scuttled many a biographical film before her. As per the aforementioned formula, Frida skips from point to point across the surface of the life of well-known and critically lauded early 20th century Mexican feminist painter Frida Kahlo in a mostly linear fashion. Frida is presented as a strong, intense woman, committed to her philandering husband as much as her revolutionary politics, facing terrible physical challenges with determination. Perhaps most importantly, it shows how these things shaped and inspired her art, which helps explain why her incredibly personal and deeply revealing work still touches people today. Hayek and Molina have a natural chemistry in the central roles, which helps us understand what brought Kahlo and Rivera together, and (mostly) held them together through some very difficult times. Unfortunately, the steady stream of big name movie stars in roles that could (and should) have been played by character actors proves an impediment. Both Ashley Judd, who plays the seductive Mexican Tina Modotti, and Geoffrey Rush, as Leon Trotsky, are unsuited to their roles, and as fine an actor as Ed Norton is, there is no need (beyond his personal relationship with the film’s star) for he to be sauntering through the film as Nelson Rockefeller, reminding us that we are watching yet another star-studded bio-film. What is disappointing about Frida is what it could have been. While this conventional bio-pic may please middle brow audiences, fans of Ms. Taymor are almost certain to realize that the film could have been so much more than this.
Score: 69/100
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Into the Vaults
All righty, I ain’t dead, I’ve just been doing a lotta DVD reviewing for Apollo Guide. Here are a few of the titles I’ve tackled. When the full reviews are up at Apollo, I’ll post the appropriate links.
Death in Venice (1971, Italy, Luchino Visconti) AKA Ode on a Grecian God
Strangely beautiful film inspired by Thomas Mann’s highly-respected novel, itself loosely based on the life of the same Gustav Mahler whose exquisite 3rd and 5th symphonies grace the film’s soundtrack. Visconti’s self-conscious artistry emblematic of his later post-realism career’s interest in the complex relationship of art, the artist and his audience. The film centers on Gustav, the ageing protagonist, and his obsession with an androgynous teenaged Adonis, but the real star here is Visconti’s eye with the camera and ear for music. Combining talents with dp Pasquale de Santis, Luchino crafts a film of rare visual magnificence, that is an obvious precursor of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Like Visconti himself, Gustav is born into privilege, so the film rings with authenticity. This is, as they say in the thieving business, an inside job. Gustav’s aloof and disengaged attempts to retreat from the harsh realities of a world full of erosion and destruction and into the ideals that this beautiful young boy represents seem doomed to be met with disappointment. A film that is all about ideas and atmosphere, Visconti delivers the goods with seeming ease. Some of the symbolism is a tad pat (the sands of the hourglass) or cute (the backward-spewing black smoke of the steamer), and the performance of Bogarde as an ageing aesthete seems a little stilted and uncertain at times. Still, the film is a sumptuous visual feast, a well-told tale of a tortured artist’s Sturm und Drang.
Score: 80/100
I am Curious (Yellow) (1967, Sweden, Vilgot Sjoman) AKA Am I Blue?
There’s a dark irony to be found somewhere in the fact that I am Curious (Yellow) gained much of its reputation as a community standards-challenging pornographic film, but endures now mostly as a period piece for those who are interested in the chronology of the deterioration of the Hayes studio code that had guided cinematic depiction of sexuality for nearly four decades. However, removed from this intriguing historical context, I am Curious (Yellow) is not particularly riveting or shocking filmmaking. In fact, while there is plenty of full frontal nudity going on here, the movie is much more explicitly pedantic than erotic. The film’s most interesting achievement is the unusual melding of fictional and documentary elements. Sjoman wants to raise class consciousness in Sweden through filming a documentary on the subject, and in a nice bit of meta-filmmaking, while he is making the film, we are engaged in the activity of watching them make the film, until the lines between reality and fiction blur to indecipherability. Our perceptions are challenged, and the uncertainty of the reality of what we are observing is clearly part of Vilgot’s point as he asks us to consider the role that mass media manipulation plays in our understanding of the world. Despite these interesting achievements, I am Curious (Yellow) is not a particularly compelling film, as its self-awareness and proselytizing keep us at an ironical distance, and the full-frontal nudity that once made the film so notorious seems awfully tame by today’s standards. As a result, I suspect that I am Curious Yellow will remain largely, well, a curiosity.
Score: 68/100
American Gun (2002, USA, Alan Jacobs) AKA Jamie’s Gotta Gun
American Gun is a film that makes you feel kind of bad to criticize. It’s intentions are good, at least if you share the film’s wariness of guns, but the execution is so earnest as to be joyless, and so blunt as to be worthy of an After School television special. Rife with clichés, such as the main character, played by James Coburn in his last screen performance, suffering from a crisis of faith when a close family member is shot to death, and burdened by some truly cringe-inducing narrative devices, such as having same said character write letters to this dearly departed individual as he criss-crosses the country looking for all the people who ever owned the gun that did this dirty deed, American Gun is far too self-conscious and self-congratulatory to affect its audience at anything more than the purely political level. Director Jacobs also resorts to the dreadful gimmick of withholding key information in order to manufacture a "potent" climax, but for a film that hints at a Searchers or Taxi Driver-like interest in studying obsession, the final plot twist reveals Jacobs true intent. In the end, he wants to shock us, and drive home his agenda with all the subtlety of a Liberace concert. However, rather than illuminating the issues at play in the film, Jacob’s cheap ploy detracts from our ability to understand Coburn’s character and undermines the themes you’d think he’d want to be promoting.
Score: 53/100
All righty, I ain’t dead, I’ve just been doing a lotta DVD reviewing for Apollo Guide. Here are a few of the titles I’ve tackled. When the full reviews are up at Apollo, I’ll post the appropriate links.
Death in Venice (1971, Italy, Luchino Visconti) AKA Ode on a Grecian God
Strangely beautiful film inspired by Thomas Mann’s highly-respected novel, itself loosely based on the life of the same Gustav Mahler whose exquisite 3rd and 5th symphonies grace the film’s soundtrack. Visconti’s self-conscious artistry emblematic of his later post-realism career’s interest in the complex relationship of art, the artist and his audience. The film centers on Gustav, the ageing protagonist, and his obsession with an androgynous teenaged Adonis, but the real star here is Visconti’s eye with the camera and ear for music. Combining talents with dp Pasquale de Santis, Luchino crafts a film of rare visual magnificence, that is an obvious precursor of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Like Visconti himself, Gustav is born into privilege, so the film rings with authenticity. This is, as they say in the thieving business, an inside job. Gustav’s aloof and disengaged attempts to retreat from the harsh realities of a world full of erosion and destruction and into the ideals that this beautiful young boy represents seem doomed to be met with disappointment. A film that is all about ideas and atmosphere, Visconti delivers the goods with seeming ease. Some of the symbolism is a tad pat (the sands of the hourglass) or cute (the backward-spewing black smoke of the steamer), and the performance of Bogarde as an ageing aesthete seems a little stilted and uncertain at times. Still, the film is a sumptuous visual feast, a well-told tale of a tortured artist’s Sturm und Drang.
Score: 80/100
I am Curious (Yellow) (1967, Sweden, Vilgot Sjoman) AKA Am I Blue?
There’s a dark irony to be found somewhere in the fact that I am Curious (Yellow) gained much of its reputation as a community standards-challenging pornographic film, but endures now mostly as a period piece for those who are interested in the chronology of the deterioration of the Hayes studio code that had guided cinematic depiction of sexuality for nearly four decades. However, removed from this intriguing historical context, I am Curious (Yellow) is not particularly riveting or shocking filmmaking. In fact, while there is plenty of full frontal nudity going on here, the movie is much more explicitly pedantic than erotic. The film’s most interesting achievement is the unusual melding of fictional and documentary elements. Sjoman wants to raise class consciousness in Sweden through filming a documentary on the subject, and in a nice bit of meta-filmmaking, while he is making the film, we are engaged in the activity of watching them make the film, until the lines between reality and fiction blur to indecipherability. Our perceptions are challenged, and the uncertainty of the reality of what we are observing is clearly part of Vilgot’s point as he asks us to consider the role that mass media manipulation plays in our understanding of the world. Despite these interesting achievements, I am Curious (Yellow) is not a particularly compelling film, as its self-awareness and proselytizing keep us at an ironical distance, and the full-frontal nudity that once made the film so notorious seems awfully tame by today’s standards. As a result, I suspect that I am Curious Yellow will remain largely, well, a curiosity.
Score: 68/100
American Gun (2002, USA, Alan Jacobs) AKA Jamie’s Gotta Gun
American Gun is a film that makes you feel kind of bad to criticize. It’s intentions are good, at least if you share the film’s wariness of guns, but the execution is so earnest as to be joyless, and so blunt as to be worthy of an After School television special. Rife with clichés, such as the main character, played by James Coburn in his last screen performance, suffering from a crisis of faith when a close family member is shot to death, and burdened by some truly cringe-inducing narrative devices, such as having same said character write letters to this dearly departed individual as he criss-crosses the country looking for all the people who ever owned the gun that did this dirty deed, American Gun is far too self-conscious and self-congratulatory to affect its audience at anything more than the purely political level. Director Jacobs also resorts to the dreadful gimmick of withholding key information in order to manufacture a "potent" climax, but for a film that hints at a Searchers or Taxi Driver-like interest in studying obsession, the final plot twist reveals Jacobs true intent. In the end, he wants to shock us, and drive home his agenda with all the subtlety of a Liberace concert. However, rather than illuminating the issues at play in the film, Jacob’s cheap ploy detracts from our ability to understand Coburn’s character and undermines the themes you’d think he’d want to be promoting.
Score: 53/100
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)