Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc. is a convincing call to action, a well-argued op-ed, an act of urgent revelation. Like most documentaries in the era shaped by Michael Moore, it begins with its treatise and conclusions fully formed and fills in … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Nine
Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, 1978). Two years after the breakthrough success of Taxi Driver, which he scripted for Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader made his directorial debut with a film about struggling auto workers who battle their callous bosses, inept union heads and ultimately each other. As should probably be expected from Schrader, especially at this point in his career, the film is raw and potent, getting into the muscular, profane urgency of these men as they struggle to accept their lot in life, including the inherent betrayals of principle that come with any efforts at upward mobility, and the dangers … Continue reading Klores and Stevens, Schrader, Toback, Wyler, Zonca
We buy our tickets in an era in which remakes have given way to reboots, as good an indicator as any as to the degree to which major studios have planed away any remaining aspirations towards art in their respective business models. Instead creative efforts are tagged with the same term used to describe the latest outpost of a nationwide food chain, and possess a level of quality akin to mass-produced burgers. To find something operating well within that framework that also manages to be fresh, inventive, witty, smart and wildly entertaining is plainly stunning. Director J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Ten
Sometimes a movie year just breaks me. As I noted around this time last year, designating an end to a movie year is matter of choice instead of obedience to the calendar. I live in a place where a year’s official releases take some time to trickle into town, especially at this time of year, when smaller films are held back in the hope of capitalizing on interest generated by award nominations. I do my best to dutifully see everything I should to be, in my view, a responsible contributor to the public discourse about film excellence, using the Oscar … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — An Introduction
#47 — Bob Roberts (Tim Robbins, 1992) I wonder if Tim Robbins ever surveys the current political landscape, and starts pondering the possibilities for Bob Roberts II. Probably not, though he must stand agape before news reports of Tea Party … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Forty-Seven
Flash of Genius (Marc Abraham, 2008). Based on a New Yorker article, Marc Abraham’s directorial debut relates the story of Bob Kearns, a Detroit man whose invention of the intermittent windshield wiper was illegally appropriated by the big automakers. Dutifully tracing events from the early nineteen-sixties when Kearns drew his sizable family into the process of creating the device through the nineties when the court cases he pursued to get due credit finally reached their culmination, the film is serious, somber and sorely lacking in verve or any other enlivening spirit. It’s thankfully not overly pompous about its subject, but … Continue reading Abraham, Hiller, Lau and Mak, Lynch, Swanberg
You know how I’m like Penelope Cruz, Vera Farmiga, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Anna Kendrick? When it comes to the Oscar competition I’m a part of this year, no matter how hard I try and how strong of an effort I put up, I know I’m going to lose. As you may recall, every year I go head-to-head with my longtime friend and former movie review show colleague in a friendly competition to see who can best predict the nominees in the six biggest Oscar categories. And every year I lose, except in those couple of years in which we tie. … Continue reading The loser standing small beside the victory, that’s her destiny
This morning I watched Roger Federer win the Australian Open for the fourth time, his sixteenth Grand Slam title overall. And it made me think of the Oscars. Specifically, it made me think of a yearly wager I’ve been participating in for around twenty years. The radio show The Reel Thing began on 90FM-WWSP in the fall of 1990. It was a movie news and review program, and this time of the year a remarkable amount of time was devoted to the Academy Awards, including attempts on the part of both myself and my on-air colleague to predict the films, … Continue reading Predicting the Oscar Nominations, or How to Lose a Competition in Six Categories
Taken (Pierre Morel, 2009). An entirely unimaginative action film poured into the form of a parental nightmare turned revenge fantasy. Liam Neeson plays a retired CIA operative who calls upon his formidable combat skills when his teenage daughter is kidnapped by sex slave traders on a trip to France. It lurches from violence-saturated scene to violence-saturated scene with a little bit of empty seediness thrown in for variety. It’s hard to develop emotional investment in the characters when the actors shuffling through it and even the movie itself seem to have already given up on the notion of being anything … Continue reading Capra, Kubrick, Morel, Peli, Reed
Deliver Us From Evil (Amy Berg, 2006). Amy Berg’s challenging, often painful documentary tracks the damage done by a Catholic priest who was quietly shuttled to different churches in the same general region of California whenever accusations of sexual assault emerged, an occurrence that was tragically commonplace from the late nineteen-seventies through to the early nineties. With a methodical, thoughtful approach, Berg illustrates the ways in which the priest exploited the automatic trust his parishioners gave him, and, more damningly, the craven indifference the church leadership had to confronting the problem in any meaningful way. Berg’s portrait of the priest, … Continue reading Assayas, Berg, Cassavetes, Chressanthis, Derrickson
