Tag: catch-up reviews

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Aja, Cameron, Hanks, Ophüls, Saladoff

Dan Seeger

Piranha (Alexandre Aja, 2010). It’s remarkable that a film that so overtly embraces its own willful trashiness can still be dour, flatfooted and boring as hell. Richard Dreyfuss’s early cameo as a scruffy boater who’s a victim of carnivorous fish is only the first overt reference to Steven Spielberg’s superlative Jaws. The entire plot about the vicious water-dwellers is essentially lifted from the earlier feature, with the family vacation crowds in a terrorized tourist tour replaced by ribald Spring Breakers, all the better to fill the screen with R-rated nudity. It’s gory, ridiculous and almost deliberately inept. It’s also no … Continue reading Aja, Cameron, Hanks, Ophüls, Saladoff

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Jason, Milestone, Minnelli, Scorsese, Shelton

Dan Seeger

Humpday (Lynn Shelton, 2009). While I don’t always give the background on my viewing choices, I will note that this finally made its way from out queue to our screen in preparation for watching Lynn Shelton’s excellent follow-up. I’m mostly sharing that to give myself a public chastisement. Humpday is pretty terrific, providing a surprisingly plausible narrative progression to an utterly implausible scenario. Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard play old college buddies whose reunion after several years apart winds up involving an odd pledge to make a man-on-man pornographic film together, in direct opposition to their heterosexual tendencies, for Seattle’s … Continue reading Jason, Milestone, Minnelli, Scorsese, Shelton

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Maysles brothers, Melville, Ophüls, Scherfig, Scott

Dan Seeger

The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949). This was the last film made by the great German director Max Ophüls during a brief dalliance with Hollywood, and it exhibits both his mastery of the form and the knack for scratching away at tremulous morality that probably sealed the failure of Stateside tenure. Based on the Elisabeth Sanxay Holding novel The Blank Wall (which later became source material for the Tilda Swinton vehicle The Deep End), the film relates the story of an everyday woman who attempts to cover up a murder that she suspects was perpetrated by her daughter against a … Continue reading Maysles brothers, Melville, Ophüls, Scherfig, Scott

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Brooks, Hansen-Løve, Noyce, Polanski, Teshigahara

Dan Seeger

The Quiet American (Phillip Noyce, 2002). Occasionally there will be a movie that adheres to a classic narrative structure that is also stolid, humorless and painfully dull that a small but vocal bundle of critics will tout as a dwindling example of cinematic material created for adults. I get that full-time critics were spending the end of 2002 gritting their teeth and covering their eyes while watching supposed comedies and franchise-killing sequels, but they still needed to grade on a helluva curve to find nice things to say about this dire adaptation of the Graham Greene novel. Michael Caine received … Continue reading Brooks, Hansen-Løve, Noyce, Polanski, Teshigahara

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Kosinski, McQueen, Melville, Reichardt, Young

Dan Seeger

Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010). “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man!” Is there another actor working today besides Jeff Bridges who could deliver a line like that and make it sound plausible? In the never-ending quest to mine every cinematic artifact from the past three to four decades and turn it into a sparkling new franchise, Disney delivers the sequel, almost three decades in the making, that almost no one waited anxiously to see. What’s more, someone apparently decided that the best way to honor the zippy innocence of the original digital groundbreaker was to heap a whole bunch … Continue reading Kosinski, McQueen, Melville, Reichardt, Young

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Campbell, Cukor, Curtiz, Gluck, von Donnersmarck

Dan Seeger

Adam’s Rib (George Cukor, 1949). Probably the apex of the onscreen collaborations between Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, largely because the storyline involving married attorneys facing off against one another in a high-profile trial allowed for the sort of warm, frightfully intelligent banter that served the duo best. For most of the film, the interplay is infectiously delightful, especially as presented by the sure lens of George Cukor, who demonstrates an unerring sense of timing, including knowing when to just lean back and let his stars cut back and forth across the frame. The screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson … Continue reading Campbell, Cukor, Curtiz, Gluck, von Donnersmarck

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Ford, Fukunaga, Green, Minnelli, Stahl

Dan Seeger

Designing Woman (Vincente Minnelli, 1957). This blithe, airy comedy about a mismatched couple is laced with some mild battle-of-the-sexes commentary. For the most part, though, it’s a procession of problematic friends and crooked boxing promoters. In other words, it’s the sort of romantic turmoil that only happens in the movies, and happened all the more frequently when the standard Hollywood product was made monumentally more colorful to compete with the hugely successful new medium of television. The film is directed with typical skill and panache by Vincent Minnelli, but the film works to the degree it does mostly from the … Continue reading Ford, Fukunaga, Green, Minnelli, Stahl

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Eastwood, Polanski, Rosenberg, Siodmak, Wyatt

Dan Seeger

Hereafter (Clint Eastwood, 2010). Clint Eastwood will often dismiss anyone trying to read too much subtext of grand personal artistic statement in his films. They’re just pictures to the steely-eyed director. Certainly this ponderous rumination of mortality holds no added passion or weight that might be expected from a guy entering into his eighties and, therefore, maybe a little interested in considering what might be out there beyond this mortal coil. Instead Eastwood plods through a notably facile script from Peter Morgan bringing together multiple story threads in ways that would strain credulity to breaking if they weren’t so completely … Continue reading Eastwood, Polanski, Rosenberg, Siodmak, Wyatt

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Clooney, Goldwyn, Kiarostami, Taylor, Vaughn

Dan Seeger

The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011). I think a strong, important movie can (and arguably should) be made about the continued racial-based social inequities imposed in the American South–really all over the country, but those below the Mason-Dixon line had a special skill for it–in the early nineteen-sixties as the power of the Civil Rights movement was beginning the much needed push back against the monied classes that wanted to maintain some diluted but still despicable variation on the slavery system abolished about a century earlier. The Help, for all its noble intentions, simply isn’t that movie. Even putting aside the … Continue reading Clooney, Goldwyn, Kiarostami, Taylor, Vaughn

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Greengrass, Nolfi, Scorsese, Van Dyke, Winer

Dan Seeger

George Harrison: Living in the Material World (Martin Scorsese, 2011). It’s very fun to watch Martin Scorsese in this later phase of his career in which he clearly feels empowered and has the accumulated goodwill and respect to make whatever damn movie he feels like at any given time. If that means he’s sometimes going to flip through his record collection and say, “Hey, what about this guy?,” so be it. This documentary on the Quiet Beatle isn’t hugely revelatory in any way, but it’s a nice, creative compendium of the life and art of someone whose undervalued membership in … Continue reading Greengrass, Nolfi, Scorsese, Van Dyke, Winer