Since we’re experiencing a relative heatwave in the Bay Area, I thought I’d write about something vaguely appropriate. Bill Viola’s video is set in a 5,000-square kilometer salt lake in the Sahara Desert that receives 100 millimeters of rain a year, according to Wikipedia. (Chott el-Djerid is also famous for something entirely cinematically different: it [...]
As you folks can probably tell, I’m working my way through the summer movie franchises — for it certainly feels like summer in the Bay Area right now — and Blade nicely satisfies my jones for action-fantasy, especially if gouts of blood are involved. (You could do worse, like with Resident Evil, or with any [...]
Oh to live in a world populated by endless Kylies, in all their pink and light blue splendor, blonde curls forever tossed by the wind, a bombshell calmly oblivious to the chaos blooming around her, duplicate upon duplicate, doubling and redoubling into infinity. Or it may be some sort of cursed recursion, a tangled loop [...]
I could go on and on about how beautiful the Polish brothers’ Northfork looks – the way light shines through feathers, the stark gray beauty of the Montana landscape, the loneliness of weather-beaten farmhouses and the vastness of the sky swallowing them up, the visual humor of six men in black suits and hats filling [...]
This second half of Jean-Francois Richert’s gangster epic is slightly more disjointed, but its arguments make for a richer film. Removed from the more straightforward narrative arc of Mesrine’s early career and his marriages (his first is skipped in the former film), Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 echoes the peripatetic nature of this thief’s occupation. The [...]
With his cheekbones, scarily gaunt features, and what seems like a perpetual sneer, Vincent Cassel has a face made for gangster movies. But there’s no denying his low-key charm as well (though I think my women friends would disagree with “low-key”) — witness the twinkle in his eye when, like a shark, he encircles his [...]
I’ve come to realize that Will Ferrell’s secret comic weapon is the dullness of his eyes. No, really, bear with me here: he’s mastered the art of the blank stare, a look that seems to suggest that something you said just isn’t quite sinking in. (Which is why his Saturday Night Live impressions of George [...]
In my completely voluntary trawl through Paul W. S. Anderson’s oeuvre — and I write “voluntary” to emphasize the fact that I wasn’t threatened with sharp implements to watch this — his 2004 goo-fest with the unwieldy and literal-minded title, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, actually stands as something of an achievement. Sure, it’s icky to [...]
Pointless, except for the one at the tip of the hatchet. Adam Green’s Hatchet — lauded, apparently, by Harry Knowles and MTV and genre film fests worldwide — was billed as “Old School American Horror,” which sounds a bit like a Chevy truck recall: “It’s not a remake, it’s not a sequel, and it’s not [...]
See what I wrote earlier about discontinuity? Resident Evil: Extinction, from 2007, ended with Alice discovering an entire warehouse full of superhuman Alices in test tubes and a vague plan, like the Brain does every night, to try to take over the world. Well, to wreak revenge on the nefarious Umbrella Corporation, anyway. Resident Evil: [...]
For all the Coen Brothers’ supposed cleverness and flash — and I mean it here in a pejorative sense — one almost forgets that they can be capable of tight, disciplined writing as well. The first five minutes of their debut film, Blood Simple, for instance, is a fantastic example of perfect narrative compression. (I [...]
Nasty and depraved fun, though the latter is almost wholly dependent on whether you watch this movie with like-minded individuals in advanced stages of alcohol-induced fuzziness. The other factor, of course, is whether you’re the sort who’d actually enjoy watching a film about a mad scientist, three hapless and expendable tourists and a rather unsettling [...]
If Casey Affleck’s 2010 documentary I’m Still Here isn’t some sort of hoax, then Joaquin Phoenix’s nuanced and complex star turn in James Gray’s romantic melodrama Two Lovers may really be his last role as an actor before he becomes a hip hop artist. (Judging from his MC skills in Two Lovers, he might not [...]
So where were we? Oh, yeah: Alice escapes from prison (naked, of course — it must be written in Milla Jovovich’s contract), and comes back out into a world now increasingly populated by zombies. (Or, more properly, “the infected.”) The virus, it seems, has now spread across the planet. So has accelerated desertification, apparently, which [...]
Right now I can’t think of a more oddly discontinuous film trilogy (now a quadrilogy / quartet, but I haven’t seen the latest one yet) than the sci-fi/horror/action Resident Evil series: characters appear and disappear, both locale and tone shift radically from movie to movie, the heroine seems to get inexplicable weapon and power upgrades [...]
The Wily Filipino