One thing about John Sayles: calling his films didactic or preachy seems like stating the obvious at this point, because that’s just kind of the way Sayles’ films are. From Matewan (1987) — a great film, but see it if only for the young Will Oldham — to Casa de Los Babys (2003), Sayles’ films [...]
No one blows shit up quite like Michael Bay. Roland Emmerich may flatten entire cities with tsunamis, and turn the earth’s crust into strips of taffy, but only Michael Bay has the gleeful abandon of a boy crashing his Matchboxes together. For a movie about robots who transform into different objects, each moving part inseparable [...]
In the very first fight sequence in Wilson Yip’s Ip Man (2008), the titular hero (played perfectly by Donnie Yen) faces off against a rival. Making the most minimal of gestures, the Wing Chun master Ip Man stands perfectly straight, his spine stiff and unbending, even during the spectacular drubbing he gives his opponent. In [...]
Ti West’s formal exercise in the babysitter-in-distress genre is, alas, little more than that, but it’s fascinatingly watchable in a kind of academic way. All the elements are in place: an oblivious college student (played by Levi’s model Jocelin Donahue), a one-time babysitting gig, a creaky mansion in the middle of nowhere, the house’s creepy [...]
Grace seems, at times, to be a cruel little film, but it’s probably one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in quite some time, its abysmal 4.5 rating on IMDB notwithstanding. The blurb (from USA Today, certainly more trustworthy than myself) compares Paul Solet’s film to “a Stephen King tale,” in contrast to a [...]
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 [...]
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: [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The Wily Filipino