Tag: catch-up reviews

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Howard and Williams, Kazan, Mamet, Penn, Weber

Dan Seeger

The Missouri Breaks (Arthur Penn, 1976). The film has Marlon Brando at the very beginning of his anything goes, deliberate insanity phase, and Jack Nicholson still wrapped in the energy of his wild genius phase (this film arrived in theaters almost exactly six months after One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and just a couple months after he won his first Oscar). It’s a revisionist western, a style and genre that Arthur Penn had done quite well with a few years earlier. All this makes it equal parts surprising and sad to report that the resulting film is drab. The … Continue reading Howard and Williams, Kazan, Mamet, Penn, Weber

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Apted, Ashby, Cammisa, Green, Soderbergh

Dan Seeger

Snow Angels (David Gordon Green, 2008). A grim, atmospheric drama about people living small, desolate lives and the way a family tragedy accentuates the levels of their dismay to such a point that bad choices begin to take over. Green handles the film with an elegant restraint that sometimes veers close to bloodlessness, but overall gives it a hard, tense sheen. Adapted from a novel, the film sometimes feels as though it’s missing out on the deeper psychological understanding that’s far easier to realize on the page than on the screen. It offers up nice actorly moments for Sam Rockwell … Continue reading Apted, Ashby, Cammisa, Green, Soderbergh

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Theatre goddess, film destroyer, New York girls are sure to enjoy her

Dan Seeger

The Women (Diane English, 2008). This remake of the 1939 George Cukor-directed comedy had been in development for so long that I swear we reported on it on the movie review radio show I co-hosted in college. That show ended in 1993. Watching the finished product, it’s easy to understand what inspired the reluctance. Similarly, the easiest explanation for the project finally coming to fruition is sheer attrition: Diane English must have simply outlasted the studio execs with sounder taste. As nice as it is to see the rarity of a movie filled with female characters, it would be nicer … Continue reading Theatre goddess, film destroyer, New York girls are sure to enjoy her

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A new-wave Hollywood where everybody’s good but not great

Dan Seeger

Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957). You probably don’t need me to tell you this is masterful. Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth is raw, muscular, urgent. Revisioning it to accommodate samurai doesn’t deepen or otherwise change the story in any dramatic way. It really just winds up being a different way to tell it, letting the natural power of the story emerge. (Sometimes this sort of thing can get tripped up by its own trickiness, even when well done like the version of Richard III starring and partially orchestrated by Ian McKellen.) Toshiro Mifune brings exactly the right intensity to the … Continue reading A new-wave Hollywood where everybody’s good but not great

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It’s just another movie, another song and dance

Dan Seeger

Swing Vote (Joshua Michael Stern, 2008). Stern builds his soft political satire around the notion of a contentious U.S. presidential election coming down to one vote, an entirely ambivalent, freshly unemployed middle-aged scamp. That role, as it must, goes to Kevin Costner, who tries to find a new side to the die he’s been casting periodically ever since Bull Durham. It doesn’t work, in part because he can’t quite get a handle on how this guy’s charm should be balanced against his more problematic behavior. It’s mostly due to the tepid script, though. The raw material is there to tackle … Continue reading It’s just another movie, another song and dance

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She walks to work but she’s still in a daze, she’s Rita Hayworth or Doris Day

Dan Seeger

Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, 2008). Colossally stupid. Based on a six-issue comic book series written by Mark Millar, the film revolves around a secret society of assassins with a knack for bending the laws of physics to their favor, most notably by sending bullets on curved trajectories with a flick of their wrist while firing a gun, as if they were bowling balls hurled down a well-oiled lane. If the filmmakers are going to disregard the basic principles of science so freely and frivolously, I suppose it’s silly to expect them to care a whit for things like logic and narrative … Continue reading She walks to work but she’s still in a daze, she’s Rita Hayworth or Doris Day

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She’s making movies on location, she don’t know what it means

Dan Seeger

Kung Fu Panda (Mark Osborne and John Stevenson, 2008). in the realm of computer animated features, there is Pixar and then there’s everyone else. Others have reaped box office success, but there’s an broad, enduring gap when it comes to artistry. Dreamworks Animation is arguably the outfit working most diligently to cross the divide. Kung Fu Panda doesn’t accomplish that, in part because the storytelling is as by-the-numbers as it gets, but it does boast a visual sense that is smoothly well-realized, generally engaging, and, at times, very striking. In particular, the sequences involving the elaborate prison created for the … Continue reading She’s making movies on location, she don’t know what it means

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Pivotal Film Selling Out Your Monkey

Dan Seeger

Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007). This Oscar winner for Best Documentary Feature catalogs and condemns the harsh treatment of prisoners in the Bush administration’s zealous “war on terror.” Gibney lays out the evidence of vicious abuse and clear-cut torture perpetrated by the American military at prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Just as importantly–arguably even more importantly–he examines the ways in which the highest leaders created, encourages and perpetuated the environment for these horrendous practices and then casually, heartlessly blamed the enlisted men when the worst of it came to light. Like Charles Ferguson’s No … Continue reading Pivotal Film Selling Out Your Monkey

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And our silver screen affair, it weighs less to me than air

Dan Seeger

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971). There are many who consider this film to be the quintessential Altman effort, and it’s not hard to see why. The hallmarks of Altman’s legend are all there: the overlapping dialogue, the moral ambivalence, the richly-conceived characters. Most importantly and impressively, the film is a thrilling example of the ways in which Altman pulls all these elements of his craft together to give the sense of a fully developed culture and society. The film is focused on the main characters, but the entire frame ripples with life. You feel as if you know … Continue reading And our silver screen affair, it weighs less to me than air

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Oh the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on

Dan Seeger

Trouble the Water (Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, 2008). It would be easy to make a documentary about the devastation Hurricane Katrina brought to New Orleans and the equally disastrous governmental response that is grounded in apoplectic anger, especially since indignation seems to be the default starting point for many current non-fiction filmmakers. Deal and Lessin create something more delicate, more nuanced, more complicated, and, because of these qualities, far more fascinating. The hook of the film’s first half is on-the-scene camcorder footage taken by Ninth Ward resident Kimberly Rivers Roberts as her neighborhood and then her home floods during … Continue reading Oh the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on