(Some mild spoilers follow.) Like Neil Marshall’s The Crying Game, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is all about the penis. (Actually, come to think of it, so is Cronenberg’s adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly.) Or at least that’s how friends, co-workers, and the non-movie critic media characterize the film, especially since the said penis [...]
Setting: Express checkout lane, Safeway. Woman at register [eyeing my bottle of 2006 Coppola Pinot Noir]: Now, sir, are you buying that because you like drinking it, or just to taste it? Me: I’ve never had it. Woman: How do you pronounce that? Cop-PO-la? Me: Well, he pronounces it COP-pola, but back in Italy they [...]
Don’t knock it till you’ve actually seen it, they said. It’s really not that bad. Well, I’ve finally gone and seen High School Musical, and they’re right: it’s really not that bad, but that’s saying very little. The melodies are fairly catchy, but the lyrics are irredeemably awful, as if the writers put words like [...]
About 20 minutes into the annoying Boarding Gate, I was wishing Olivier Assayas had made something like Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim instead. The two films really aren’t all that dissimilar, working within the form and generally limited grammar of the crime / thriller genre. (Assayas did tell the audience, before the film started, that he [...]
I’ve never been particularly taken with concert films: they inevitably pale in comparison to the experience of being at a live venue, and the cinematography usually runs the gamut from queasy oblique shots to cameras zooming in and out while sitting on tripods. Teppei Kishida’s MONO: The Sky Remains The Same As Ever sidesteps the [...]
I’m a little puzzled about Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshô dayû). A much-anticipated viewing at Barb and Oscar’s left me cold, and I wonder if it’s a reflection of the high expectations that always attend Films That Are Supposed To Be Good For You. (Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante was one of those, but I should [...]
Paul W.S. Anderson’s Death Race is the kind of movie where people actually yell “OHHHHH SHIIIIIIIIIT!!!!!” or “FUUUUUCK MEEEEEEE!!!!!” seconds before they get slaughtered. Look: if your reaction to that one-sentence “review” is not along the lines of “OMG I’m so THERE,” as my friend Ver wisely replied after I wrote her this, then Death [...]
There isn’t a single boring moment in Abbas Kiarostami’s Five, but it’s difficult to convince people of this when the “protagonists” of the film are, in order of appearance, a piece of driftwood, the crashing surf and a railing, sunbathing dogs silhouetted against a glaringly bright sea, a platoon of ducks walking one way and [...]
A few hastily-scribbled notes (to J-Lu, on e-mail) on Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times, which I saw perhaps two years ago, and little of which I remember. The film could be seen as a kind of career retrospective, that is, the three segments clearly refer to Hou’s own cinematic arcs, in terms of style. An exercise, [...]
In Ten, Abbas Kiarostami provides the viewer with the most spartan of setups: one car, one woman, two camera angles, ten dialogues. We — by way of the lone camera mounted on the dashboard — follow a beautiful divorcee driving in a car. She picks up ten passengers, one after the other, in ten different [...]
Not much to say about Greg Mottola’s Superbad, which stars one of the funniest comic trios I’ve seen in a while, trying to lose their virginities before they go off to college. The casting is just perfect: Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the hapless “McLovin”, Jonah Hill (who looks like a young Chris Penn), and Michael Cera [...]
There’s nothing like a sci-fi film in space: the impossibility of giant tin cans floating in the void and the people stuck in them. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine is the latest addition to the genre. It’s a visually stunning film, first of all: spaceship interiors floodlit and bleached orange by the sun, golden shields rotating in [...]
Jaume Balagueró’s Fragile is a more than competent horror film with the requisite elements: a creaky children’s hospital with a boarded-up second floor, ailing children who see things, and the tough heroine with the fragile exterior. The said protagonist happens to be Calista Flockhart minus the short skirts, and she plays the replacement night nurse [...]
There’s no meat in Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later — well, there’s a lot of it, actually (chewed up, mangled by helicopter blade, torn to shreds by machine gun fire, incinerated by flame thrower) but the stripped-down narrative is strictly about getting people from Point A to Point B and wondering which member of [...]
Auraeus Solito’s Tuli is a disappointment coming after the heels of his brilliant debut Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros. But it’s a very good sophomore slump nonetheless: a town circumciser (played by Bembol Roco, who I haven’t seen on the big screen in ages), his daughter, and her best friend, and the relationship between the [...]
The Wily Filipino