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Monthly Archives September 2010

Stewart Hendler, “Sorority Row” (2009).

Loyal readers of this blog (all four of you) may have noticed the inordinate amount of crap filling this page in the recent week, not to mention the increasing frequency of posts. This is, in fact, a writing experiment in progress: an experiment in disciplining myself to squeeze out 150-200 words a day on some [...]

Posted 12 September 2010 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Lee Unkrich, “Toy Story 3″ (2010).

The thing about leaving your childhood behind for the world of adults is that you’re actually too young to fully appreciate that bittersweet period, good or bad. Toy Story 3 makes that leave-taking the emotional core of the film, and a fitting, almost moving conclusion to this three-part saga about plastic characters. But calling them [...]

Posted 11 September 2010 † Benito Vergara § notes ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , , ,

Christopher Nolan, “Inception” (2010).

By now the pleasures and contradictions of Inception have already been enumerated and dissected to exhaustion: that damn spinning top, floor plans of its dream architecture, the way Hans Zimmer’s trombone-heavy soundtrack is really “Je, ne regrette rien” slowed to a dreamlike sluggishness, how it violates screenwriting principles by unthinkably burdening it with exposition for [...]

Posted 10 September 2010 † Benito Vergara § notes ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Adam McKay, “The Other Guys” (2010).

The latest act of silliness from Adam McKay and Will Ferrell. There’s a plot here about corporate miscreants, but like their older work of minor genius, 2004′s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, the thin narrative only serves as the tissue that loosely connects a series of largely-improvised sketches. (The end credits are far more [...]

Posted 09 September 2010 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Corey Yuen, “D.O.A.: Dead Or Alive” (2006).

Now I remember where I last saw Eric Roberts as the villain, just before The Expendables: it was in Corey Yuen’s D.O.A.: Dead Or Alive, just three or four years before. But Roberts is hardly the reason to see this film (though he executes some improbable moves, obviously with the help of body doubles made [...]

Posted 08 September 2010 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

Vincenzo Natali, “Splice” (2009).

There are lots of ideas simmering in the brew of Splice’s intelligent and ambitious screenplay; the problem is that they don’t all quite come together in a coherent whole. But at least there’s an admirably tight focus, for there are basically only three characters in Vincenzo Natali’s technological horror film. Two of the parts of [...]

Posted 07 September 2010 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Daniel Stamm, “The Last Exorcism” (2010).

Here’s a horror film that would have worked, paradoxically, without the horror; it’s disturbing enough on its own. The Last Exorcism borrows from the now-venerable horror trope of the faux-documentary, like The Blair Witch Project, [REC], or Paranormal Activity (that’s a link to an old blog entry), but the shocks (at least in the beginning) [...]

Posted 06 September 2010 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Alexandre Aja, “Piranha” (2010).

It’s not particularly easy recommending Alexandre Aja’s Piranha – not because it’s beneath my readers’ discriminating tastes – but because it’s ultimately a waste of Aja’s directorial potential. Aja more or less ushered in the new wave of French horror with 2003’s almost-wordless High Tension (see a short blurb at the bottom of this entry [...]

Posted 05 September 2010 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Luca Guadagnino, “I Am Love” (2009).

A disappointment, but an interesting one. Guadagnino’s lush portrait (Io sono l’amore) of a woman imprisoned by bourgeois expectations has, in its evocation of other Italian cinematic families of wealth (the Finzi-Continis, for instance), ambitions toward the heft of similar domestic epics, but is let down by the hackneyed plot. The film begins with the [...]

Posted 04 September 2010 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

Sylvester Stallone, “The Expendables” (2010).

Sylvester Stallone’s miserable new film The Expandables has exactly one good idea in it: surely realizing that having “STALLONE” above the title simply wasn’t going to cut it, he added “STATHAM,” “AUSTIN,” “LI,” “LUNDGREN,” “COUTURE,” etc. — and “SCHWARZENEGGER” and “WILLIS,” for good measure, though the latter’s roles are about a minute each. Like that [...]

Posted 03 September 2010 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , ,

Phillip Noyce, “Salt” (2010).

A perfectly ordinary thriller with an extraordinary premise: cast one of the biggest actresses in the world in a role that could have been played by just about anyone — Matt Damon, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Jason Statham, take your pick — and then act as if you weren’t one of the biggest [...]

Posted 03 September 2010 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,